Tools for Thought

There’s no going back in time, but there are ways to learn from the past rather than live in it.

Every day we walk through a minefield of potential distractions, sometimes arriving on the other side unscathed, sometimes not. One digression leads to another, the cycle repeats, and hours later we wonder where the time went. It’s tempting to criticize ourselves for getting nothing none that day, and even if the criticism is somewhat accurate (it’s unlikely that nothing got done), the diagnosis itself is idle — which is to say, “So what?”

Figuring out the obvious moves nothing forward. On the other hand, recognizing the problem implies recognizing the solution. When I run into this situation, I ask myself to process questions:

• How did I get nothing done today?
• What will I do differently tomorrow?

Since a day’s accomplishments, or lack thereof, is the sum of many behaviors, neither of these questions can be addressed by a single answer — at least to have the level of precision necessary to make a substantial change.

Mental modeling

It’s not enough to know our worst practices in general. To make tomorrow a more accomplished day than today, we need to rewind the film strip to the precise moment where we got derailed.

For instance, I noticed that whenever I boot a computer and don’t seem to get straight to business, the problem usually starts at boot time. Since I can’t do anything on the laptop for two or three minutes, I start to zone out. What I would be doing if boot time wasn’t a factor is doing a daily review on the Palm Desktop, looking at each of my action lists.

Asking myself, “What would I do differently?”, it took about 10 seconds to realize that I needed to have my lists — especially my @Computer list — available before the computer was. So I started scanning my at least my @Computer list on my Palm Centro, so that by the time the hourglass on my laptop’s screen disappears, I can hit the ground running.

If I get a call before 9:30 am, it may take me 15 to 30 minutes to regroup after the call and get back to writing. So I’ve set my phone to turn on only after that time (an application called Phone Technician allows you to set your Palm smartphone’s connection times).

The basic idea is to mentally step through the day, looking for the forks in the road that compelled you to do X when you know in hindsight that you should have been doing Y. When was the precise moment what your attention shifted to the path of less resistance? What precisely was the distraction?

I believe the sequence of behaviors is critical, and that the earlier ones have the most leverage. If you can maintain a chain of focused activity in the first few hours, you create the momentum necessary to minimize the effects of distractions later on.

Sometimes the problems aren’t necessarily distractions, but behavioral patterns that yield predictably regrettable results. Having too many sugared foods or beverages in the morning leads to an energy crash in the afternoon. Driving past a great bookstore on the way home from work leads to the unbearable lightness of wallet. A change of environment or route may be in order.

After reviewing the dysfunctional day, mentally step through what a focused tomorrow would look like, moment to moment, from morning to evening. What better practices will you be implementing? Which behaviors will you avoid doing?

Always make tomorrow a better day.

Technorati Tags: Productivity

Last week I wrote about my recent experiences using the spaced repetition flashcard applications Mnemosyne. It’s now the only program I use for learning whatever material I want to maintain long term, but for almost a decade, my main tool for spaced repetition was SuperMemo for Palm OS, which was one of the first applications I used regularly on the Palm III.

I discussed the Palm version of SuperMemo briefly in the Mnemosyne post, but I wanted to cover it in more detail here, despite no longer using it regularly, for a few reasons.

• Many people find using a flashcard program on a PDA or smartphone more convenient or “natural” than a desktop app, natural in the sense of sharing the same portability of a physical deck of flashcards.
• The handheld version has a more streamlined interface than its desktop counterpart, making it an easier initiation into the spaced repetition paradigm.
• Portable versions may be more convenient for just-in-time learning on the street. For instance, if you’ve learned some basic French, but would like to retain whatever new phrases you come across on your trip to France, you can accrue a database of new expressions by entering them the moment you first encounter them.
• SuperMemo for Palm is now in a 2.0 version, and I wanted to see if there was any substantial improvement.

Spaced repetition

For those who haven’t read the Mnemosyne review, spaced repetition is an pattern of rote memorization where each item, or flashcard, is individually graded by the learner, then automatically scheduled for rehearsal based on an interval determined algorithmically, based on an exponential forgetting curve uncovered by memory research. Each card is set to be reviewed at the moment the curve would indicate that the learner will start to forget the item.

If a card is completely unlearned and graded “F,” it’s scheduled for review the next day. If a card is remembered easily and graded “A,” it might be scheduled to be seen again about a week later. The more times a card scores highly, the wider the interval of rehearsal, to the point where it might not by reviewed again for well over a year (decades would probably have to go by before I’d forget that “¿Cómo esta ustéd?” means “How are you?” in Spanish).

Since cards are scheduled for review on different days due to being individually graded, only a portion of any one database (deck) will be reviewed each day. On day three of memorizing the periodic table, for instance, you may only have to review 17 elements. This small load makes it compelling to continually add more material to SuperMemo each day, and suddenly the idea of learning two or three dozen new items or more each day is par for the course.

The Palm version

There are two ways to review databases in SuperMemo: as a drill and as a test. A drill is the mode where you review the entire deck and commit it to memory for the first time, answering each question/answer pair Right or Wrong. The drill continues until you answer all cards Right. You can run a drill for any database whenever you want.

A test is the mode that uses spaced repetition. It runs through all cards in a database the first time to record your A through F grade for each item, then uses those grades to determine which subset of cards you’ll see again on which day. At the end of the test mode, any items graded C or lower get put into drill mode, so you can run those poorly remembered items until you can answer them all correctly by the end of the session.

SuperMemo’s main screen shows the list of databases you’ve added, with either an asterisk or double rectancle icon at the left margin of each database name. An double rectangle denotes a database that’s been committed for test mode, an asterisk denotes a database that hasn’t been. Until you “commit” a database, you can only run it as a drill. Once you commit it, you review its contents on a sequence and schedule determined by SuperMemo, not you. It may be a day or two before you’re exposed to the cards for the first time as a test, though you can and should drill them first.

Each database can be categorized so that you can have, for instance, a Bible study database with each book (Genesis, Luke, etc.) as their own modules, though the whole databases is still tested as a single unit. Mnemosyne, on the other hand, has no separate categories, and by default is configured to test all databases in the same session; so Tagalog, US history and oceanography get mixed into one sitting if you have those databases entered.

Though SuperMemo separates each database, it’s still recommended that you run them all anyway if any items in each database are scheduled. The app shows you how many items in each deck are scheduled to the right of the deck’s name.

Entering cards from the desktop

Entering new items infrequently as they’re encountered, like collecting French phrases in France, is fairly convenient on Palm devices with qwerty keyboards. For batch entry it’s far less tedious to create database from the desktop. SuperMemo uses a small Windows utility called smconv.exe, creating a desktop icon into which you drag and drop an appropriately formatted text or tab delimited file. This creates a .pdb file that gets integrated into SuperMemo, merging with an older version of the database if it exists. The various formatting options are too involved to get into here but you for a text file with straightforward Q/A pairs, an example would look like:

Q: What is the atomic number of titanium?
A: 22

Q: What is the atomic weight of titanium?
A: 47.867

Questions and answers are separated by a newline, and each pair is separated by a double newline. For a tab delimited file, the first and second columns constitute the questions and answers, and each row is a pair. Formatting for entering supplementary information, like phonetic spelling, is detailed here.

Is SuperMemo for Palm worth learning for learning?

If your source material is primarily text based, then the Palm version of SuperMemo is vastly superior to a flashcard system that doesn’t use spaced repetition. If you have the discipline to complete your review sessions daily, it’s possible to increase the number of items you commit to long-term memory well beyond what you would be able to do with a standard flashcard deck. You don’t waste time reviewing cards you already know well, and you get extra reinforcement on the cards you don’t.

But you do have to be willing to review the cards on SuperMemo’s schedule. You may be anxious to review certain cards in less than the number of days slated. Though counterintuitive, intellectually this makes sense: the cards that people want to review tend to be the ones they remember well; the ones they grade poorly are the ones queued earlier. If you’d rather review all of your cards in a session, you can use SuperMemo’s drill mode, but drills don’t affect the testing schedule. Any items skipped on a certain day get piled onto the next session, so try to maintain a daily regimen.

Alternately, you can use the freeware flashcard app Learn?!, which sequences but doesn’t schedule cards in a grade-dependent queue. You review all the cards in each sitting, and any card answered five times correctly gets dropped out of the deck. Learning to use Learn?! is easier at the beginning that SuperMemo, but it’s hard to memorize anywhere near the same volume of material without repetition spacing.

If your source material is audio or graphical, you’ll either need to use the Pocket PC or desktop version, or another app like Mnemosyne or OpenCards. Links to these are found in the Mnemosyne review.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Palm, Supermemo, PDA, mobile

I’m taking the day off from blogging to pop under the hood of Wordpress for a tune-up. In the meantime, please check out the guest post I wrote last week, Where Your Eyes Go Your Attention Flows, at Francis Wade’s excellent time management blog, 2Time-Sys.com.

Technorati Tags: Productivity

Making a list of next actions can be motivating, but then there’s the reality test. When it comes time to decide what to do next, every option on the list may look as unappealing as the others. While it’s unrealistic to assume that every task we need to do will be something we just can’t wait to do, it’s equally unrealistic that out of a dozen or more tasks, nothing on the list seems doable. There are a few systemic errors that people make that cause them to gradually become disengaged from their task management system.

The list isn’t reviewed regularly. In this case, it’s not the list that’s the problem, but the fact that the brain knows that the list won’t be examined on a just-in-time basis, forcing the brain to pick up the slack by holding onto the list in memory, defeating the purpose of writing the list down in the first place.

By regularly I mean whenever you’re in the physical context of the corresponding list — as opposed to reviewing the list mentally. When you’re at home, you don’t think about what to do next; you look at your @Home list. Looking at the appropriate list when it’s time to decide what to do next should be as automatic behavior as looking at a clock when wondering what time it is (notwithstanding those brave souls who’ve trained themselves to correctly guess the time).

The list isn’t sufficiently granular. This is where “next action” is actually a multiaction task, like “Purge book collection” instead of “Tag unneeded books.” Without first separating the books to purge from the books to keep, the tendency is to look at the book collection as a whole and resist following through on the purge. It would be more effective to put “Purge book collection” on project list — the list of successful outcomes — and track the more precise next action separately.

Defining next actions is an art, not a science. Some people would consider “Write article” a next action. I would never use “write” as a next action, since it congeals a number of preliminary tasks: reading a manual, calling someone for an interview, outlining the article, or drafting it. On the other hand, “Boot laptop” would be ridiculously minute. We’re looking for next actions that are sufficiently, not absolutely, granular. If you find that the project is still on your mind after defining a next action, reexamine the next action as you’ve defined it and see if it has an unidentified dependency.

The list contains legacy issues. One reason a next action might have been sitting on a list for weeks is that the reason for doing it no longer applies, or the context has changed. Circumstances can evolve so subtly that it can take an act of will to notice the drift. Maybe an increase in gas prices has made that road trip less appealing than it seemed a month ago. Maybe its becoming clearer that upgrading a piece of software that works perfectly fine is just creating activity for its own sake.

Once it becomes evident that the project or action is past its timing, don’t let it sit on your list. Save your project and action lists for genuine commitments that you’ll respect and honor. Just because you commit to something now doesn’t mean you’ll have reason to stay the course five minutes from now, especially given the rapid flow of information in most office environments.

The list contains considerations, not just commitments. If an action list contains things you’re still thinking about doing, you’ll start viewing the whole list as a menu of deliberations. The reason an action list contains more than one action is that it’s impossible to do more than one at the same time. But this list is for tasks you actually intend to do as soon as possible. Some people force this intentionality by limiting their list to two or three “most important” tasks, but this can lead to tracking “less important” tasks mentally. The best practice is to use your list to track everything, but to focus on the one thing you’ve picked from it at that moment.

There’s nothing wrong with deferring things or continuing to evaluate them, but designate their status appropriately so that the trusted system that you keep outside of your head is actually trustworthy. That might entail putting the item up for reexamination five weeks from now on your calendar or in your tickler file. Or it might mean putting it on a list called “Someday/Maybe,” “Incubate,” or “Pending” that you review weekly.

The list is overpopulated. Having 30 items on a list makes it difficult to conveniently scan through the entire list with complete attention. See if you can sense an upper limit of how many tasks you can look at without glazing over. If you find that you’re only looking at the first half of your list, then functionally that first half really is the list. This may involve deferring actions, delegating them, or reevaluating whether or not they need to be done at all. To have a an agile system, you need to be able to take things off of a list as rapidly as you put them on.

The written list competes with a mental list. For me, this was probably the most insidious bug in my list management. Even though my next actions were accurate and written down, my lifetime habit of thinking about what I need to “get done” each day instead of what I needed to do at that moment meant that I when I read the next action (the “do”), I was still thinking on a project level (”get done”). Since it’s only possible to do an action, not a project, I wasn’t taking the action list seriously.

Referring to “virtual” lists in your head is something you have to catch yourself in the act of doing, since our sense of what we need to get done each day is like a second skin. We need to make the choice to either operate from mental RAM or a trusted system, which means shedding that second skin. To keep a clear head, it’s better to err on the side of obsession at first and review you action list whenever you start to doubt that what you’re doing at the moment is the right choice. But this only works if your list is complete, not prioritized, in order to reaffirm that the actions you’re not doing are the ones you shouldn’t be doing.
GTD, Productivity

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Attention and focus are two words that are fairly synonymous in normal usage, but to my mind have slightly different connotations. I notice that I use “attention” quite a bit, while “focus” tends to be used in self-development blogs and literature more commonly.

I use attention to refer to anything and everything that happens to be on our minds at any given moment. Focus refers to the placement of attention. When people use focus, they’re usually talking about a singular phenomenon, but attention can by whole or partial, hence terms like “Attention Deficit Disorder” or “Continuous Partial Attention.”

The distinction may seem academic, but it has implications for how we succeed or fail to channel our energies. A person can only focus to the degree that nothing else has his or her attention.

But we can also deliberately focus on the things that have our attention. This is essentially what a mind sweep does. We consciously acknowledge and write down everything in our immediate sphere of attention rather than ignore it and allow things to hover as cognitive flotsam. Through focus, we pay attention to what has our attention.

The limits of being proactive

A staple of personal management council is the admonition to “be proactive.” The image of individuals as actors rather than responders is certainly more heroic. If the opposite of someone who focuses on output is someone who focuses on consumption, than the proactive emphasis is justified.

But we need to be response-able, collecting and making decision on every new input that enters our world. A new input can be obvious, like an inter-office memo in an in-basket, something subtle, like the sarcastic remark from a co-worker that hints at dissolving friendship, or something even more subtle, like an inchoate need for a career change or transition to self-employment.

Focusing on input requires escaping the busy trap. Capturing and making decisions on things that aren’t already written down and planned means taking a momentary “holiday” from constant activity, and making time to bring unprocessed agendas to the foreground. Just as managers spend most of their day assessing situations and telling other people what to do (rather than doing things themselves), self-management is the art of taking time out to assess situations in order to make clear decisions on what to do next, so that the rest of the time can be spent doing tasks without simultaneously reassessing them.

Building the habit of spontaneous capture

If your mind is on something that you’re not doing, write down the thing you’re not doing. Don’t allow the time it takes to stop what you’re doing be an excuse to avoid taking time to capture what you’re not doing. The latter might be more important, or not; but there’s no way to evaluate the new thought objectively at the moment you’re otherwise engaged. Dump it out of your mind, throw it in your in-basket, then go back to what you were doing before, but now without the crosstalk of alternately recognizing and ignoring something new. Collecting distractions is a more reliable way to increase focus than an act of will.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

For the last two weeks I’ve been using Mnemosyne as my primary spaced repetition flashcard system. As such, I don’t want to present myself as an expert on the app, but I’ve become familiar enough with it at this point that it’s become integral to my learning.

Spaced repetition is an optimized approach to rote memorization. Sometimes it goes under names like spaced retrieval, repetition spacing, repetition scheduling, expanding rehearsal, and so on. The method consists of using physical or digital flashcards to test the state of each item’s retention. The user grades each card A through F, or 5 through 1, depending on the system. Then the card is scheduled for its next rehearsal on an interval that follows an empirically determined “forgetting curve.”

Memory research has shown that humans forget exponentially, and that it’s possible to more or less predict how well someone will score on the recall of a particular item based on the amount of time that’s gone by after the last perfect score. Armed with this knowledge, spaced repetition systems aim to rehearse the information at the moment just before the learner is predicted to start forgetting it. In most implementations, a card is repeated when the learner is expected to recall the card with 90% accuracy.

Students typically rehearse every card in a deck with each session when using conventional flashcards. In space repetition, the entire deck is run through once for scoring purposes. The following day, only a fraction of the cards are rehearsed: the ones most poorly scored. Cards with C or 3 scores might be seen in 2 or 3 days, but not before. The cards with A or 5 scores will not be seen for 6 or 7 days. The intervals for reviews of the same card will expand or contract based on how it’s card with each iteration. In other words, the system determines the which cards are reviewed and when, not the user.

SuperMemo

By far the most famous and infamous application for spaced repetition is Piotr Wozniak’s SuperMemo. I’ve been using SuperMemo in one form or another since 1998, mainly the Palm OS version. The desktop version is feature-packed, but I prefer the simplicity and portability of the Palm version, despite some serious limitations. Since the current desktop version, Supermemo 2006, will set you back $45.00, you might want see if the older SuperMemo 98 freeware does what you need.

SuperMemo claims to enable the user to “learn to up 10-50 times faster.” While the claim may or may not be backed up by empirical evidence, I do know from my own experience that SuperMemo does enable me to learn a hell of a lot more material than I would be able to otherwise. This isn’t some slick repackaging of a mnemonics course that claims to bestow a photographic memory.

As noted, only a fraction of the entire body of material is scheduled for rehearsal on any particular day. Out of 134 cards, you might have 18 scheduled that day, which could be completed in a few minutes. So the natural impulse is to add more material into the system for a fuller study session. Before long, you start taking the idea of learning and retaining 30 new items a day for granted.

The biggest advantages of the desktop version are the ability to add sound and images, support for HTML, and what Wozniak calls “incremental reading.” Sound and image support are clearly needed for many subjects, like language learning, anatomy, geography and art history. SuperMemo’s HTML support enables the user to import whole web pages and preserve their rich formatting. The Palm version is limited to text. If you have a Pocket PC or Windows Mobile phone, the Pocket PC version of SuperMemo does support sound, image and HTML.

Incremental reading is something that never really worked for me, though I think that’s a failure on my part. With incremental reading, the user imports whole web pages for scheduling, just like individual flashcards. On the first exposure, the user either reads the entire article or some of it, marking the read portion, which gets scheduled for later repetition. The user has the option of blocking out irrelevant passages to prevent them from being repeated.

With subsequent readings, the user theoretically selects smaller, more essential passages for repetition (remember: subsequent repetitions are staggered further and further out into the future), and blocks out more nonessential material. So articles get atomized into smaller and smaller chucks to the point of becoming flashcards. According to Wozniak, this approach allows a person to learn and retain any number of articles.

For people in highly specialized professions, like engineering, I can see the benefit of queueing dozens of articles and papers to stay current, but for me, it was more trouble than it was worth, but I think I may be misunderstanding part of the process on some level. I may reapply myself to the technique in the future.

The biggest problem that I and others have had with SuperMemo in general is the user interface. While new features have been added at an impressive rate, the interface, like the SuperMemo website, seems to be stuck in 1995 (the app is written in Delphi, which should tell programmers something). Nothing is as intuitive as is should be, and it’s difficult to use any feature without referring to the Help pages. The sheer volume of documentation made available should be a sign that the application’s usability has a significant improvement opportunity.

Mnemosyne

Recently, a wave of open source apps has emerged that use the same or similar spaced repetition algorithms as SuperMemo. While SuperMemo’s code is closed and proprietary, Wozniak has never hesitated to publish his algorithms.

My first departure from SuperMemo was OpenCards, a spaced repetition extension for OpenOffice Impress. I never really had a problem with OpenCards, aside from the overhead of OpenOffice’s bloated code, but I would have preferred to have a simpler data entry procedure than creating slides for flashcards.

After reading a number of “Mnemosyne FTW!” comments in response to Lifehacker’s article on the excellent Wired artcle about Wozniak and SuperMemo, I decided to give Mnemosyne (named after the Greek goddess of memory) a try. The first time I created a database in Mnemosyne, I was hooked — it was exactly what I was looking for. It has dead simple Q & A entry fields, supports basic HTML markup, supports sound and images, and has a beautifully zen interface that doesn’t overwhelm the user with analytics.

Entering cards

The general process is like other spaced repetition apps. You add a question in the question field and the answer in the answer field. You can format questions in the usual question phrasing “What is the symbol for copper?”, synonym pairs (”Copper” for the question, “Cu” for the answer), or what’s formally known a cloze deletion — a fancy way of saying fill-in-the-blank (”The symbol for copper is [ ]“). Unlike Supermemo, you grade the item for the first time on initial entry. If you grade it 0 or 1, you’ll see it in a review session as soon as you finish entering cards. Cards graded higher are seen later. You might not see a card again for over a year if you score perfectly on it several times.

It’s possible to review cards in reverse order by checking the “Add vice versa too” box when the card is entered or edited, but Mnemosyne will only show the reverse order after the forward order is learned first.

One aspect of SuperMemo I prefer to Mnemosyne is the ability to assign categories within subjects. For instance, you can have “Nervous System” and “Skeletal System” as categories of a database called Anatomy. With Mnemosyne, categories and subjects/databases are synonymous. You have to run through all of your anatomy cards without distinction. You can review an individual category, but by default Mnemosyne runs all databases in one session.

Other features

Mnemosyne supports Unicode and LaTeX, so it’s possible to add foreign scripts and mathematical formulas as flashcards. For Linux, you’ll need divpng in addition to LaTeX. Windows users can just use MiKTeX. I haven’t tested the image or sound features yet since I haven’t needed them, but next month I’m going to be learning Mandarin Chinese, so my plan is to import clips from the new Michel Thomas CD set for the language.

The Statistics reports are pretty bare bones compared to SuperMemo, but I prefer it that way. You can see how many cards are scheduled for each of the next seven days, see the percentage distribution for answers scored in grades 0 through 5, and see the number of total cards you have in each category.

Importing cards

Like SuperMemo, a user community for exchanging databases helps relieve the need to create new sets of cards from scratch. The number of databases is fairly slim at the moment, but I expect it to grow rapidly as more people discover the program.

You can also import databases from text files where each line in the file is a question/answer pair separated by a tab. You can do the same in a spreadsheet saved as a tab-delimited file. SuperMemo 2006 text-only cards can be imported, and Palm SuperMemo databases (with proper conversion through a Python utility) can be imported as well.

Is it worth it?

Critics of flashcards of every type rightly point out that there’s more to learning that memorizing; understanding is essential. There’s no arguing with that point, since things like assigned reading for a humanities class cannot be reduced to mere data.

More importantly, in order for the learner to have material to memorize, he or she has to create that material, which requires the skill of reading source material and astutely extracting the critical information from it; then correctly formatting it into question and answer pairs that are easy to digest. Proper question/answer formatting for equivocally presented material takes discipline and practice. I’d recommend reading Wozniak’s 20 Rules of Formatting Knowledge from the SuperMemo website for a better understanding of how to parse material for good flashcards.

Since Mnemosyne is free, there’s no downside to trying it, but if you use flashcards at all, this program or some other spaced repetition app like it are a quantum leap beyond conventional rote memorization. Even though I have a license for SuperMemo 2004, the first version to support incremental reading, I’m going to continue using Mnemosyne as my default. But who knows? Maybe I’ll give SuperMemo’s incremental reading another try.

Technorati Tags: Technology

Failure is usually approached with one of two ways. It’s either not an option, or it’s permitted from time to time as the price of learning.

In the first approach, no one really believes that a person can avoid making mistakes, but the idea is that adopting infallibility as a working mental set raises the bar, and at least reduces errors that might otherwise be made with lower standards.

The second approach reflects the humanist ideal of trying your best. Examples abound of famous people making embarrassing mistakes, only to go on to great achievements. We all have setbacks, so there’s no point in dwelling on them. Mistakes should be treated as learning experiences.

I think the latter approach is more realistic, but not radical enough.

Shifting from a mindset of failure to failure rate

A more reliable path to reaching a goal is to assume failure, or rather, to assume a failure rate. If it’s obvious that mistakes are inevitable, they need to be factored into the planning process so that the number of efforts and the length of time necessary to achieve the goal can be reassessed accordingly.

Consider a man who sees a beautiful woman and considers asking her for a date. He has second thoughts, wondering what he has to offer that could possibly interest a woman so wonderful. Another man treats approaching women as a numbers game. He assumes that most women he asks will turn him down so his natural reaction is to approach more woman to account for longer odds. Which man is more likely to have a date by the end of the day?

Not long ago I hit a slump in my writing. I keep a long list of article ideas in reserve, so if I ever run into a situation where I can’t think of anything new to write, I just refer to the list. Only this time there was a problem: everything on the list was either an idea I had outgrown, lost interest in, or require access to resources that would have taken more time to summon than was practical.

After falling into despair for a couple of hours, I stopped and ran through alternative definitions of the problem (an APC). Among them was one that resonated: I didn’t have enough ideas. Which is to say that even though I had “a lot” of ideas, I fell into the trap of conflating a lot with enough.

Then I remembered one of my favorite quotes from George Bernard Shaw: “When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn’t want to be a failure, so I did ten times the work.”

So I spent the next 10 minutes drafting 17 article ideas to add to the 32 “reserve” one that had been sitting on a list for weeks. Now when I’m stuck for an idea, I sit and do a round of zero-base brainstorming, writing at least 10 new article ideas without referring to a previous list.

Failure to define an acceptable failure rate in advance leads to crippling perfectionism. The failure rate will vary from person to person, and from project to project, based on available skills, resources and the return on effort. For me, a 90% failure rate for coining article ideas is totally acceptable, but a 90% failure rate for articles would be totally unacceptable. If I’m reasonably satisfied with 80% of my blog posts, I consider the remaining 20% a learning tax. By assuming a margin of bad posts in advance, I don’t surprise myself when I’m not happy with all of my output, so disappointment doesn’t turn into proud self-flagellation.

For Edison, a 99.99% failure rate was acceptable for discovering a practical filament for the light bulb, since the return on effort would be boundless. Once the exploration was reduced to a single variable, running through substitutions was a simple a numbers game.

Deterministic and stochastic control

When someone turns on a light by flipping a switch, she has deterministic control over its activation. The odds are theoretically 100% that the light will come on. When she drives to work in the morning, she has stochastic control over whether or not she’ll arrive on time. “Stochastic” refers to the measure of randomness in the system. Traffic and weather conditions are more complex variables than the integrity of a filament. Nevertheless, the driver still has a reasonable degree of influence of whether or not she arrives on time by simply leaving earlier.

Luck is always a factor in poker. But the difference between a novice and a championship poker player is that the latter has studied the odds of failure for each scenario, and developed strategies, responses and guidelines for dealing with them. Building a base of sufficient information allows a person to act without complete information.

Many goals are comprised of complex variables, so we often have to compensate by doing more homework to find the variables with the most leverage. When planning a complex project (anything from starting a blog to finishing grad school), consider the worst case scenario. What factors would contribute to the project’s failure? What would put it behind schedule? List these factors, then for each of them determine how they might be eliminated or mitigated.

Technorati Tags: Thinking Operations, Personal Development

A few weeks ago I wrote about my raw experiences with a used Alphasmart 3000 (AS3K) I picked up for a song on eBay. In theory, the AS3K is an ideal writing instrument: essentially a paperless typewriter with no network access or media player of any kind. It’s just under two pounds, has an LCD embedded directly in the casing of the keyboard, and uses 3 AA batteries to yield a 700 hour battery life. It’s not uncommon for writers to go for a year without changing batteries.

In the same article, I hinted at some dissatisfaction with it. Some writers continue to use the 3000, and would replace it with the same discontinued model if anything happened to theirs. The newer models don’t solve any problems they had with the 3000. The main problem for me is that I hated the heavy action of the keyboard. I would describe my typing more as banging, and my vain hope that further use would break the keys in was vain indeed.

Then there were a couple of smaller problems. The LCD is fairly narrow, displaying four lines of text, which can get a little claustrophobic. For some writers this is a dealbreaker. For me it was a “narrowly” acceptable constraint. The translucent bondi-blue chassis that was fashionable industrial design in the late Nineties has a Fisher-Price factor that made me slightly self-conscious about using it in public.

Then there was the AS3K’s infrared file transfer. Files can be transferred wirelessly via IR to a PC, but not to a PDA or smartphone. I wanted to be able to beam my writing directly to my Palm Centro, where I could email it for downloading to my laptop.

Upgrading to the Neo

After deliberating between Alphasmart’s current models, I opted for the Neo 2. The two main contenders were the Neo and the Dana. The Dana is based on an earlier version of the Palm OS, and as such runs any Palm application that’s compatible with black-and-white Palm devices — still thousands of titles. There’s even a wireless version of the Dana. The older browser does a poor job of handling today’s graphics-intensive websites, but the Dana is a good choice for anyone with managing email as a priority. The Dana’s higher-resolution screen enables it to run WYSIWYG word processing apps, whereas all other Alphasmarts use unformatted text.

I chose the Neo over the Dana because:

• The Dana’s screen contrast is noticeably softer. While the Neo’s display lacks the Dana’s backlight, its contrast is sharp enough to be readable in virtually all environments I would consider writing in
• The Dana has a 30 hour battery life. That’s impressive by laptop standards, but the Neo’s 700 hour battery life is the difference between not having to think about the battery at all, and monitoring it during the week
• The Neo’s simplicity. Having no internet access or other software to run means no crutch activities at hand to avoid writing
• The Dana’s deprecated Palm OS 4.1. While the back catalogue of compatible Palm applications won’t vanish for at least a year, newer releases are unlikely to run on the Dana

What’s the point?

Many writer’s don’t see the point of buying an over-$200 keyboard exclusively for word processing when they could buy a laptop with dozens of additional features for under twice the price.

Writing on a Neo is more like writing on a legal pad than on a laptop. When it’s the only tool you have available, it never occurs to you that you could be doing something else, reinforcing my believe that constraints are more reliable than self-discipline.

Often when I’m in the middle of a sentence when writing on the Neo, I’ll reflexively pause at a point where I lack a certain piece of knowledge I think I need to continue. On a laptop, I’ll switch to the browser and do a quick lookup before continuing. On the Neo that’s not an option, so I have to either restructure the sentence to bypass the need for the fact, or write a note to look it up after finishing the draft and add it retroactively.

Quite often the fact that I “needed” to look up was gratuitous anyway, and each time I have to add information afterward, I learn more clearly that I need to do my research more rigorously on the front end. My goal is to reach the point where I can complete a draft entirely offline, with printouts as my only reference. I never had trouble avoiding “just-in-time learning” in the early Nineties, before the age of ubiquitous internet access, when I did all of my drafting in longhand.

Due to the Neo’s instant-on and its lack of a cumbersome clamshell form factor, I can take advantage of windows of time that I would never consider with a laptop. A couple of days ago I parked in front of a restaurant where I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner. While I was still in the car, she called to tell me she would be 10 to 20 minutes late, so I immediately took out the Neo and proceeded to write for the next 30 minutes before she showed up, typing right in the driver’s seat. No walking to a nearby café for a table, no time lost to operating system boot-up.

Interestingly, when I do write with the Neo in a café, I no longer feel the need to drown out the establishment’s loud music with headphones and iTunes. I think I do this on laptops (a) because I can and (b) because I need one distraction from the laptop to sublimate the impulse to jump online or indulge in another distraction. It’s as though by using the laptop at least as a jukebox, I’m getting my money’s worth.

Human factors

Oh, and then there’s the keyboard. For many writers, the fluid action of a well balanced pen or well designed keyboard has an almost erotic satisfaction. Far from avoiding writing, I’ll often create work for myself just to have an excuse to type on the Neo. Unlike the Alphasmart 3000, which seems like resistance training for typists, the keys on the Neo have the best travel of any keyboard I’ve worked on since the TRS-80 Model 100, and have that wonderful light click I love to hear while typing.

The Neo also features a 50% larger display than the AS3K. The font sizes are adjustable so that it’s possible to see anywhere from two to six lines at a time. The AS3K’s fixed font size renders a constant four lines. This means that in most cases, I’m able to view enough of a paragraph to see it as a compositional element. Some writers find that this is still too small; they need a whole page view for an effective sense of perspective. Most writers find that an Alphasmart is excellent for writing, but unacceptable for editing. Editing is difficult on the Neo, but not impossible. Since the Neo supports direct printing, I’ll often print out my drafts and edit on paper.

One of the biggest advantages of writing with a Neo is what’s often considered a disadvantage: the lack of a backlight. You’re not staring into a light source. The Neo’s LCD is more like that of a pocket calculator than a laptop, so it’s possible to look into it for hours without getting eye strain. I can imagine some low-light situations where the Neo’s display would be a liability, like taking notes during a PowerPoint presentation, but since it never occurs to me to write in the dark, the lack of a backlight is a nonissue.

So what’s not to like?

The Neo is solidly constructed (I’ve dropped mine twice without incident), but the molding process needs better quality control. When I receive my Neo, the unit would rock when I typed due to a slightly raised corner. Looking up the issue in a forum, I discovered that rocking Neos are not rare. Many users have attached small adhesive pads underneath one of the Neo’s feet.

I followed the recommendation of one intrepid user who bent the entire keyboard into proper alignment. Though many forum commenters were aghast, it sounded more reasonable than sending it back for what would possibly be another problematic keyboard. So I bent the Neo, and it fixed the rocking problem in five minutes.

All Alphasmart keyboards are designed for and sold to the educational market. The fact that writers rhapsodize about them doesn’t seem to influence their design. My biggest gripe is the lack of any outliner. Alphasmart’s cathedral model of software development keeps the hacker community from extending the Neo’s functionality.

Years ago, an applet (or “SmartApplet”) called Inspiration Outliner was developed for the AS3K, but Alphasmart stopped including it after discovering how little it was used. Their demographics came from elementary school students, not writers, and though I’m not a teacher, it would seem that outlining isn’t taught as universally as it was when I was a kid. That’s too bad, since digital outliners are nowhere near as rigid as paper outlines. The ability to reorganize line items on the fly makes them great brainstorming tools, and consequently they’re frequently called thought processors. Chalk up one for the Dana — you’re not off my radar entirely.

The lack memory card support is another annoyance. The legacy IR transfer is poorly implemented in my opinion, right down to the awkwardly angled alignment of the transmitter. The Dana, on the other hand, makes it easy to stick in an SD card and sneakernet your files over to your PC without the hassle of USB cables. Chalk up two for the Dana.

Conclusion

Despite the absolute simplicity of the Neo, I’m still in a learning curve. I have to recover the ability I once had to write without an ocean of information at my fingertips, which means I have to be more disciplined at the research and outlining phases. I also need to be more on the lookout for windows of time that were impractical with a laptop — sometimes I recognize them, sometimes I don’t. After I finish a couple of writing deadlines this month, I’m going to spend a week writing on the Neo exclusively and report back.

GTD is often discussed as time management, but the two approaches have fundamental differences. Time management consists of making summary judgements on goals considered to be high priorities, and commits to them over lower priorities in the name of good triage. Calendars are used to block out time for tasks that may or may not contain time dependencies, and arbitrary deadlines are used as often as ones committed to by and with others.

In GTD, everything in a person’s field of attention is collected and processed into a reminder system, primarily using a list manager rather than a calendar. The calendar is reserved for externally committed schedules, like meetings or draft submissions, and tasks that don’t fall into this “hard landscape” scheme are kept off the calendar to reserve as much slack as possible for unplanned activities, which are as inevitable as planned ones.

Closed Loops

But the main difference between GTD and time management, or other task management paradigms in general, is that the former is a closed system. GTD tracks everything that’s considered to be worth thinking about on some level, or acted upon. Commitments are placed in lists for projects and next actions. Items for ongoing consideration that aren’t actual commitments are either listed in a category designated for periodic reevaluation, like “Someday/Maybe,” or deferred using a calendar or tickler file. It’s a closed system by virtue of the guideline that if something is likely to be thought of again and claim attention, it gets tracked; otherwise it doesn’t.

Having a closed system that tracks everything relieves the mind of the compulsion to track anything. Once everything is in the system, and the brain knows that every single thing that’s worthy of attention is offloaded to that system, the resulting sense of clarity and focus is astounding, whether or not someone opts for quasi-religious descriptions like “mind like water.”

A consciousness free of static is a plateaux that requires constant care and feeding. It means writing down anything the moment it seems likely that it will come to mind in the future. It means putting incoming paperwork directly into an in-basket rather than the edge of the desk; or handling it immediately if it takes less than two minutes; or filing it if knowing where and how to file it is obvious; or throwing it away.

It means making written decisions on what to do with each email, each thought or verbal agreement written down, each memo, etc. — the first time it’s processed, so that when it’s time to do something in a given context, it’s a matter of choosing which action to do rather than thinking about it.

It means establishing the discipline of reviewing the reminder system regularly, to the point where the behavior is automatic enough for the brain to trust that it doesn’t need to hold on to anything. Thinking about what to do at a computer instead of referring to an @Computer list will cause the mind to revert to using itself for remembering and reminding, which is fairly low-level thinking. Just as mathematicians use calculators to handle arithmetic and use their minds to think about mathematics, external tools — lists, calendars and files — are better suited for remembering what tasks need to be tracked, so that those using the tools can use their minds for engaging with the task they’ve chosen.

In response to my last post, one reader, Tommy, took issue with a couple of points I raised. I’ll let my response to his stand for the most part, but in re-reading one of his objections I realized that some of the wording of my original post was misleading. I wrote “Why put an action on your list or calendar if you’re not going to do it?”, to which Tommy asked, “how can you at the point of thinking about something know if you’ll do this in the future or not? Can you see into the future?”

What I should have written in the original was: Why put it down on an action list if you know you’re not committed to taking action on it? By “you’re not going to do it” I meant “you’re not confident that you’ll get to it.” The reason I’m being pedantic about this is that it has serious implications for how I believe we should relate to our lists. For lack of a better term, I’ll call this list integrity.

Suppose someone organizes his lists by context. Suppose further that he carries a notebook wherever he goes, using it mainly as a capture tool. A some point he decides to write a novel, so he puts “Draft novel outline” on your @Anywhere list, when in fact he does all of his creative writing at the computer.

Technically, the recorded context is legitimate, since he really could draft his outline on paper. Theoretically, the notebook might even be a more appropriate context, since he can work anywhere, anytime. But if he knows deep down that he’s more willing and likely to write at a computer, he’ll gloss over the item what he looks at his @Anywhere list. It would be more strategic for him to put it on his @Computer list. The more writing tasks he puts on his @Anywhere list that he would rather do at the computer, the less responsive he becomes to that list. His conceptual categories don’t match his behavioral realities.

Categorizing Committed and Uncommitted Actions

Whenever I do a weekly review, I invariably put things on my lists that in hindsight were unrealistic. Last week I intended to review a book that I had mixed feelings about, and couldn’t come to an internal consensus on it. The moment I recognized my ambivalence, I moved the review from Projects to Someday/Maybe for it to incubate (I wasn’t being paid, so no editors were harmed by my laziness). I reevaluate my commitments all the time. When I see something on an action list that elicits a lack of resolution, I’ll do one of the following:

• Decide that the action was either folly or past its timing, and remove it from the list
• Recognize that the action is unclear in some way, and debug it (e.g. not granular enough, poorly worded, wrong context, has an unarticulated dependency, etc.)
• Hand it off to someone more qualified (e.g. a tax advisor)
• Move it to my Someday/Maybe list

Just as putting non-actionable items on an action list makes the whole list less actionable, a similar phenonenon happens by putting uncommitted actions with genuine action items: it reduces the integrity of the list. Reserve your action lists for things you intend to take action on as soon as possible. “As soon as possible” might end up being three weeks from now. After all, we can’t do everything at once, nor we can’t see into the future. But if you sense that you’re resisting the action, it’s time to reevaluate, eliminate or renegotiate it.

Someday/Maybe

Everything I’ve said above is useless without a Someday/Maybe list that you take as seriously as your other lists. Someday/Maybe tends to be underutilized, since many people think of it as a procrastination list, but you can’t procrastinate on something you’ve decided not to take action on. But if you put something on an action list, then resist following through on it, that’s procrastination. If you suspect you’ll think about something again if you eliminate it from your system, use Someday/Maybe to track it and keep it out of your head.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, GTD