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October 31, 2005

New York New York

Heady time this weekend, catching up on culture. After a great seminar/work day with Vardon Capital in New York on Friday, Kathryn and I hooked up with our great friends Rick Kantor and Richard Levi and did the town - theater-wise, anyway. Saw American Ballet do Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room," caught the new musical "See What I Wanna See," then the Tony-winning "Light in the Piazza." On to "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" and ending with Blue Man Group at the Astor. Fun to see that aspect of New York - especially in October, where we even squeezed in a run through Central Park on a glorious sunny day yesterday. Love the Big Apple.

Walking the canyons...

Posted by David at 05:02 AM

October 28, 2005

A lovely bonsai stroll

After our wonderful RoadMap seminar in DC, Kathryn and I hung around the next morning and visited the incredible bonsai section of the National Arboretum. Stunning stuff... Worth a couple of hours, if you're ever there.

One bonsai whose training began in 1875, the other in 1945...

Posted by David at 01:04 PM | Comments (6)

October 27, 2005

Outcome thinking rocks!

Love it when we get this kind of feedback. Simple as it is, just training ourselves to think about what the outcomes we are working toward really are - really - is something that doesn't necessarily show up by itself... [This is from my insurance agent - great guy, runs the Carroll Insurance Group in Westlake, CA.]

David - As we have discussed in the past, so much of what you teach goes beyond productivity and GTD. Here's a true life example: Earlier this year, I was working on a new business launch with a team of people that were all new to me. We were discussing a critical aspect of the project that I thought we all understood. At the end of the meeting, almost as an after thought, I asked "So, how will we know that we've accomplished our goals? What will this look like when we're done?" They replied "Well, we'll know we're successful because we'll have X, Y, and Z in place". The only problem was, I thought that the project required A, B, and C. Turns out that, after two hours of conversation about the same project, we were operating under entirely different assumptions. It took us another hour, but everyone finally got on the same page. The point is, had I not asked this key DavidCo question, we would have had a major trainwreck that could have severely impacted the launch of the company. Thanks David! - Patrick Carroll

Posted by David at 07:23 PM | Comments (2)

October 25, 2005

Denver, Phoenix, Ojai, Atlanta, DC...

On a roll with travel and delivery, non-stop for quite a few days here.

Last week did two gigs in Denver. A half-day workshop for the Executive Forum, one of those locally-driven organization-membership enterprises that brings business talent to town with a venue for companies and government orgs to utilize for management development. Folks from the Dept. of Interior, Ball Aerospace (already a client of ours), etc. Then I did a talk and book-signing at the Tattered Cover, one of the country's most respected independent bookstores that regularly brings authors to town. It was arranged by the Dept. of the Interior from Washington, which started a program of these kinds of events for government employees and has expanded to their western region because they're so successful for them.

Then on to Phoenix, where I did a keynote presentation for 500+ small entrepreneurs in a niche industry, courtesy of my friend Joe Polish of Piranha Marketing.

Back home for 24 hours to check on my bonsai, my dog and three cats, and my MiniCooper (Kathryn managed to get my front two runflat tires replaced, which I had driven to bald in only 11,000 miles!) And a catch-up project meeting with our team building our Connect club, readying for a launch in the next few months.

Then back to the east coast - Atlanta - for an all-day IMS session yesterday, with folks from Coca Cola, SmithKline, Merck, Georgia Power, etc. Running to the airport last night to catch a plane and beat the hurricane up to DC, where I met up with Kathryn. This morning did a 1.5-hour broadcast from WETA (PBS) studio in Arlington for Linkage, Inc., as part of their Excellence in Leadership program. My topic was "The Keys of Execution - Successful Strategies Leaders Use to Get Things Done." We entertained a half hour of call-in Q&A, and I was struck (again) by, no matter how lofty the stated topic, how mundane and personal the interest actually is: "How do I deal with people I'm waiting on things from?"..."How long will it take me to integrate these personal best practices?"... etc. Have to hand it to Linkage, probably the premier forum for leadership and org development...they've been the first of their ilk I think to recognize the strategic focus and leadership qualities supported by GTD.

Then I met Kathryn and we went for a long walk in the damp chilly afternoon to see the DC icons she hadn't seen since she was ten - Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson Memorials. Plus the WW II, Vietnam, Korean War Memorials in between. Interesting to notice how the hallmarks that have been memorialized for our country were all around serious conflict. It makes sense. When you are in a situation where your values require you to take human life, it can certainly be a defining moment about what those values really are. It a rather dramatic version of what I often say: you only know what your values really are when someone steps on them. Just, wouldn't it be awesome if we created memorials from equally dramatic validations about our magnificence, without the catalyst of human suffering?

Looking forward to 200+ people in the DC RoadMap Wednesday. Checking the roster - we'll have key people from the FCC, Coast Guard, Red Cross, AARP, Federal Reserve, EPA, National Institutes of Health, FAA, etc. I've always loved the energy in our capitol - though Washington is not necessarily the hotbed of entrepreneurism, it certainly is the power nest of the gatekeepers, and (though it often seems to the contrary) a lot of smart people. It reminds me of the energy of a university town, on steroids.

Kathryn just told me that George Bush is having lunch next to our seminar room Wednesday in the hotel. This should be fun. "Hi George - what's the next action?"

Fall color on a chilly DC afternoon...

Posted by David at 05:08 PM | Comments (7)

October 22, 2005

Another Guardian piece

David McCandless, who writes a tech column for the Guardian, just published a piece on his experience with GTD. Seems we're heating up in the UK...

Posted by David at 02:14 PM | Comments (11)

October 19, 2005

Creativity, quickly executed

What a great phrase and productiviity affirmation, which I will steal (with appropriate attribution to Matt Perman, Director of Internet and Radio for desiringGod). Here's his e-mail, after taking the Minneapolis RoadMap seminar:

And thank you for the great work that you do. Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything have been paradigm-shaping books for me and several others I work with. It is so freeing to have a clear enough view of things that I can choose my work, rather than have it choose me. The GTD system has also taught our organization how to hold together our sometimes competing values of creativity and execution. In fact, the vision I now have for my department is: creativity, quickly executed.

Posted by David at 12:12 AM | Comments (2)

October 18, 2005

We're looking for a good trainer/coach in NE U.S.

We need to add another full time seminar presenter to our roster - someone based in the U.S. northeast corridor, preferably the NYC area. They have to have experience in training and presenting to groups and ideally also one-on-one with folks in a coaching capacity. Got to be familiar with GTD methodology and "walk the talk" as it were. Other requirements: excellent communications skills, comfortable with current desktop technologies, willing to travel extensively. My staff has asked that I say only email or resumes via mail will be considered. Responding to this blog is cool, but nothing here will be considered an application.

Pass the word if you know someone who might fit with us.

Send resumes/queries to:

JobApplicants@davidco.com
or
David Allen Company
PO Box 507
Oak View CA 93022

Posted by David at 12:59 AM | Comments (2)

October 17, 2005

Airport RAM...?

Great photo from Madrid airport, forwarded to me by Barb Nieman at P&G, who was in a workshop of mine with CRA in Wisconsin. (Thanks, Barb!)

Is this a plane to trust, or not...?

Posted by David at 09:27 AM | Comments (3)

October 16, 2005

NY Times Mag article today on Life Hackers

Clive Thompson interviewed me a few weeks ago, so I knew this article was coming out soon. Here 'tis. Fun stuff.

October 16, 2005

Meet the Life Hackers
By CLIVE THOMPSON

In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher, living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab, enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began, that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list - only to suffer an endless stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so constantly distracted that she would have accomplished only a fraction of what she set out to do. "Madness," she thought. "I'm trying to do 30 things at once."

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark's study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the high-tech workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all claimed that they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But they grudgingly admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see; if a cellphone call breaks through while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.

For a small cadre of computer engineers and academics, this realization has begun to raise an enticing possibility: perhaps we can find an ideal middle ground. If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, then maybe we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of their downsides. Is there such a thing as a perfect interruption?

Mary Czerwinski first confronted this question while working, oddly enough, in outer space. She is one of the world's leading experts in interruption science, and she was hired in 1989 by Lockheed to help NASA design the information systems for the International Space Station. NASA had a problem: how do you deliver an interruption to a busy astronaut? On the space station, astronauts must attend to dozens of experiments while also monitoring the station's warning systems for potentially fatal mechanical errors. NASA wanted to ensure that its warnings were perfectly tuned to the human attention span: if a warning was too distracting, it could throw off the astronauts and cause them to mess up million-dollar experiments. But if the warnings were too subtle and unobtrusive, they might go unnoticed, which would be even worse. The NASA engineers needed something that would split the difference.

Czerwinski noticed that all the information the astronauts received came to them as plain text and numbers. She began experimenting with different types of interruptions and found that it was the style of delivery that was crucial. Hit an astronaut with a textual interruption, and he was likely to ignore it, because it would simply fade into the text-filled screens he was already staring at. Blast a horn and he would definitely notice it - but at the cost of jangling his nerves. Czerwinski proposed a third way: a visual graphic, like a pentagram whose sides changed color based on the type of problem at hand, a solution different enough from the screens of text to break through the clutter.

The science of interruptions began more than 100 years ago, with the emergence of telegraph operators - the first high-stress, time-sensitive information-technology jobs. Psychologists discovered that if someone spoke to a telegraph operator while he was keying a message, the operator was more likely to make errors; his cognition was scrambled by mentally "switching channels." Later, psychologists determined that whenever workers needed to focus on a job that required the monitoring of data, presentation was all-important. Using this knowledge, cockpits for fighter pilots were meticulously planned so that each dial and meter could be read at a glance.

Still, such issues seemed remote from the lives of everyday workers - even information workers - simply because everyday work did not require parsing screenfuls of information. In the 90's, this began to change, and change quickly. As they became ubiquitous in the workplace, computers, which had until then been little more than glorified word-processors and calculators, began to experience a rapid increase in speed and power. "Multitasking" was born; instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user could work on several different ones simultaneously. Corporations seized on this as a way to squeeze more productivity out of each worker, and technology companies like Microsoft obliged them by transforming the computer into a hub for every conceivable office task, and laying on the available information with a trowel. The Internet accelerated this trend even further, since it turned the computer from a sealed box into our primary tool for communication. As a result, office denizens now stare at computer screens of mind-boggling complexity, as they juggle messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and Web browsers all at once. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots.

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. "Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles," Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.

It is this middle path that Czerwinski and her generation of computer scientists are now trying to divine. When I first met her in the corridors of Microsoft, she struck me as a strange person to be studying the art of focusing, because she seemed almost attention-deficit disordered herself: a 44-year-old with a pageboy haircut and the electric body language of a teenager. "I'm such a spaz," she said, as we went bounding down the hallways to the cafeteria for a "bio-break." When she ushered me into her office, it was a perfect Exhibit A of the go-go computer-driven life: she had not one but three enormous computer screens, festooned with perhaps 30 open windows - a bunch of e-mail messages, several instant messages and dozens of Web pages. Czerwinski says she regards 20 solid minutes of uninterrupted work as a major triumph; often she'll stay in her office for hours after work, crunching data, since that's the only time her outside distractions wane.

In 1997, Microsoft recruited Czerwinski to join Microsoft Research Labs, a special division of the firm where she and other eggheads would be allowed to conduct basic research into how computers affect human behavior. Czerwinski discovered that the computer industry was still strangely ignorant of how people really used their computers. Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?

To figure this out, she took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

When Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, working separately, looked at the desks of the people they were studying, they each noticed the same thing: Post-it notes. Workers would scrawl hieroglyphic reminders of the tasks they were supposed to be working on ("Test PB patch DAN's PC - Waiting for AL," was one that Mark found). Then they would place them directly in their fields of vision, often in a halo around the edge of their computer screens. The Post-it notes were, in essence, a jury-rigged memory device, intended to rescue users from those moments of mental wandering.

For Mark and Czerwinski, these piecemeal efforts at coping pointed to ways that our high-tech tools could be engineered to be less distracting. When Czerwinski walked around the Microsoft campus, she noticed that many people had attached two or three monitors to their computers. They placed their applications on different screens - the e-mail far off on the right side, a Web browser on the left and their main work project right in the middle - so that each application was "glanceable." When the ding on their e-mail program went off, they could quickly peek over at their in-boxes to see what had arrived.

The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a military cockpit.

In late 2003, the technology writer Danny O'Brien decided he was fed up with not getting enough done at work. So he sat down and made a list of 70 of the most "sickeningly overprolific" people he knew, most of whom were software engineers of one kind or another. O'Brien wrote a questionnaire asking them to explain how, precisely, they managed such awesome output. Over the next few weeks they e-mailed their replies, and one night O'Brien sat down at his dining-room table to look for clues. He was hoping that the self-described geeks all shared some common tricks.

He was correct. But their suggestions were surprisingly low-tech. None of them used complex technology to manage their to-do lists: no Palm Pilots, no day-planner software. Instead, they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it. Some of O'Brien's correspondents said they opened up a single document in a word-processing program and used it as an extra brain, dumping in everything they needed to remember - addresses, to-do lists, birthdays - and then just searched through that file when they needed a piece of information. Others used e-mail - mailing themselves a reminder of every task, reasoning that their in-boxes were the one thing they were certain to look at all day long.

In essence, the geeks were approaching their frazzled high-tech lives as engineering problems - and they were not waiting for solutions to emerge from on high, from Microsoft or computer firms. Instead they ginned up a multitude of small-bore fixes to reduce the complexities of life, one at a time, in a rather Martha Stewart-esque fashion.

Many of O'Brien's correspondents, it turned out, were also devotees of "Getting Things Done," a system developed by David Allen, a personal-productivity guru who consults with Fortune 500 corporations and whose seminars fill Silicon Valley auditoriums with anxious worker bees. At the core of Allen's system is the very concept of memory that Mark and Czerwinski hit upon: unless the task you're doing is visible right in front of you, you will half-forget about it when you get distracted, and it will nag at you from your subconscious. Thus, as soon as you are interrupted, Allen says, you need either to quickly deal with the interruption or - if it's going to take longer than two minutes - to faithfully add the new task to your constantly updated to-do list. Once the interruption is over, you immediately check your to-do list and go back to whatever is at the top.

"David Allen essentially offers a program that you can run like software in your head and follow automatically," O'Brien explains. "If this happens, then do this . You behave like a robot, which of course really appeals to geeks."

O'Brien summed up his research in a speech called "Life Hacks," which he delivered in February 2004 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Five hundred conference-goers tried to cram into his session, desperate for tips on managing info chaos. When O'Brien repeated the talk the next year, it was mobbed again. By the summer of 2005, the "life hacks" meme had turned into a full-fledged grass-roots movement. Dozens of "life hacking" Web sites now exist, where followers of the movement trade suggestions on how to reduce chaos. The ideas are often quite clever: O'Brien wrote for himself a program that, whenever he's surfing the Web, pops up a message every 10 minutes demanding to know whether he's procrastinating. It turns out that a certain amount of life-hacking is simply cultivating a monklike ability to say no.

"In fairness, I think we bring some of this on ourselves," says Merlin Mann, the founder of the popular life-hacking site 43folders.com . "We'd rather die than be bored for a few minutes, so we just surround ourselves with distractions. We've got 20,000 digital photos instead of 10 we treasure. We have more TV Tivo'd than we'll ever see." In the last year, Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging "buddy list" so only close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him only once an hour. ("Unless you're working in a Korean missile silo, you don't need to check e-mail every two minutes," he argues.)

Mann's most famous hack emerged when he decided to ditch his Palm Pilot and embrace a much simpler organizing style. He bought a deck of 3-by-5-inch index cards, clipped them together with a binder clip and dubbed it "The Hipster P.D.A." - an ultra-low-fi organizer, running on the oldest memory technology around: paper.

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.

Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are "co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.

So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.

One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.

Horvitz booted the system up to show me how it works. He pointed to a series of bubbles on his screen, each representing one way the machine observes Horvitz's behavior. For example, it measures how long he's been typing or reading e-mail messages; it notices how long he spends in one program before shifting to another. Even more creepily, Horvitz told me, the A.I. program will - a little like HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" - eavesdrop on him with a microphone and spy on him using a Webcam, to try and determine how busy he is, and whether he has company in his office. Sure enough, at one point I peeked into the corner of Horvitz's computer screen and there was a little red indicator glowing.

"It's listening to us," Horvitz said with a grin. "The microphone's on."

It is no simple matter for a computer to recognize a user's "busy state," as it turns out, because everyone is busy in his own way. One programmer who works for Horvitz is busiest when he's silent and typing for extended periods, since that means he's furiously coding. But for a manager or executive, sitting quietly might actually be an indication of time being wasted; managers are more likely to be busy when they are talking or if PowerPoint is running.

In the early days of training Horvitz's A.I., you must clarify when you're most and least interruptible, so the machine can begin to pick up your personal patterns. But after a few days, the fun begins - because the machine takes over and, using what you've taught it, tries to predict your future behavior. Horvitz clicked an onscreen icon for "Paul," an employee working on a laptop in a meeting room down the hall. A little chart popped up. Paul, the A.I. program reported, was currently in between tasks - but it predicted that he would begin checking his e-mail within five minutes. Thus, Horvitz explained, right now would be a great time to e-mail him; you'd be likely to get a quick reply. If you wanted to pay him a visit, the program also predicted that - based on his previous patterns - Paul would be back in his office in 30 minutes.

With these sorts of artificial smarts, computer designers could re-engineer our e-mail programs, our messaging and even our phones so that each tool would work like a personal butler - tiptoeing around us when things are hectic and barging in only when our crises have passed. Horvitz's early prototypes offer an impressive glimpse of what's possible. An e-mail program he produced seven years ago, code-named Priorities, analyzes the content of your incoming e-mail messages and ranks them based on the urgency of the message and your relationship with the sender, then weighs that against how busy you are. Superurgent mail is delivered right away; everything else waits in a queue until you're no longer busy. When Czerwinski first tried the program, it gave her as much as three hours of solid work time before nagging her with a message. The software also determined, to the surprise of at least one Microsoft employee, that e-mail missives from Bill Gates were not necessarily urgent, since Gates tends to write long, discursive notes for employees to meditate on.

This raises a possibility both amusing and disturbing: perhaps if we gave artificial brains more control over our schedules, interruptions would actually decline - because A.I. doesn't panic. We humans are Pavlovian; even though we know we're just pumping ourselves full of stress, we can't help frantically checking our e-mail the instant the bell goes ding . But a machine can resist that temptation, because it thinks in statistics. It knows that only an extremely rare message is so important that we must read it right now.

So will Microsoft bring these calming technologies to our real-world computers? " Could Microsoft do it?" asks David Gelernter, a Yale professor and longtime critic of today's computers. "Yeah. But I don't know if they're motivated by the lust for simplicity that you'd need. They're more interested in piling more and more toys on you."

The near-term answer to the question will come when Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, is released in the fall of 2006. Though Czerwinski and Horvitz are reluctant to speculate on which of their innovations will be included in the new system, Horvitz said that the system will "likely" incorporate some way of detecting how busy you are. But he admitted that "a bunch of features may not be shipping with Vista." He says he believes that Microsoft will eventually tame the interruption-driven workplace, even if it takes a while. "I have viewed the task as a 'moon mission' that I believe that Microsoft can pull off," he says.

By a sizable margin, life hackers are devotees not of Microsoft but of Apple, the company's only real rival in the creation of operating systems - and a company that has often seemed to intuit the need for software that reduces the complexity of the desktop. When Apple launched its latest operating system, Tiger, earlier this year, it introduced a feature called Dashboard - a collection of glanceable programs, each of which performs one simple function, like displaying the weather. Tiger also includes a single-key tool that zooms all open windows into a bingo-card-like grid, uncovering any "lost" ones. A superpowered search application speeds up the laborious task of hunting down a missing file. Microsoft is now playing catch-up; Vista promises many of the same tweaks, although it will most likely add a few new ones as well, including, possibly, a 3-D mode for seeing all the windows you have open.

Apple's computers have long been designed specifically to soothe the confusions of the technologically ignorant. For years, that meant producing computer systems that seemed simpler than the ones Microsoft produced, but were less powerful. When computers moved relatively slowly and the Internet was little used, raw productivity - shoving the most data at the user - mattered most, and Microsoft triumphed in the marketplace. But for many users, simplicity now trumps power. Linda Stone, the software executive who has worked alongside the C.E.O.'s of both Microsoft and Apple, argues that we have shifted eras in computing. Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the technology that can hold the world at bay.

Yet the truth is that even Apple might not be up to the task of building the ultimately serene computer. After all, even the geekiest life hackers find they need to trick out their Apples with duct-tape-like solutions; and even that sometimes isn't enough. Some experts argue that the basic design of the computer needs to change: so long as computers deliver information primarily through a monitor, they have an inherent bottleneck - forcing us to squeeze the ocean of our lives through a thin straw. David Rose, the Cambridge designer, suspects that computers need to break away from the screen, delivering information through glanceable sources in the world around us, the way wall clocks tell us the time in an instant. For computers to become truly less interruptive, they might have to cease looking like computers. Until then, those Post-it notes on our monitors are probably here to stay.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by David at 04:38 PM | Comments (4)

October 14, 2005

Can knowledge workers deduct espresso expenses?

I just read a blurb from The Week that tax officials in the Netherlands have ruled that witches are entitled to tax-deduct the cost of their broomsticks. Seems, then, that I should be able to itemize my various brain stimulants, right?

Posted by David at 10:11 AM | Comments (7)

October 13, 2005

GTD and pop culture

One of the folks in our network (Bill Barnes) was kind enough to pass this on:

I wondered if you had seen Unshelved's take on Getting Things Done. We feature a different book every Sunday in our new "Unshelved Book Club" feature, and since my wife and I had just finished GTD (and started enjoying the benefits thereof) it was a natural. Please pass my best on to David, who's making the world a better place.

http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx?strip=20050925

I've heard from several readers who were turned on to GTD from this strip, so I'm glad we're able to help.

Enjoy,
Bill

OK, so this has got to be some sort of milestone in somebody's log...

Posted by David at 10:46 AM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2005

How do you get a day off your mind?

Whew. Good and bad news about my life now is that often I have days that spin almost more creative opportunities and potential open loops than I feel capable of handling. (The better you get, the better you'd better get!)

Today a good example. Spent eight hours in San Francisco today with Mitch Kapor and the Chandler group (combined as the Open Source Applications Foundation), who are dedicated to creating a personal information management application that will be accessible as a foundation for lots of collaboratively creative iterations and plug-ins, as well as a simple but appropriately sophisticated model for people to manage personally and interactively some basic knowledge-worker stuff.

Mitch created (in addition to Lotus 1-2-3) Agenda, one of the first and only products of substance that began to grapple with taming software sophistication to support how we really think. Serendipitously, I was an early beta tester of Agenda, because I was doing an early version of GTD training inside Lotus in the 80's. Mitch and some of his key people have now done GTD seminars, and he's professed buy-in to it's principles as necessary to incorporate in the long term, for personal management.

So he brought me up to spend a day giving my input into their thinking and design process. They're doing good stuff, and I've no doubt that we're still only at the formative stages of real integration of software with the best practices of productive thinking. Nice for me personally to have someone of Mitch's stature to recognize the potential for the interface of GTD with something that is attempting to support such a broad audience.

Then I took BART over to Berkeley to have dinner with Jerry Michalski, the guy who turned me on to The Brain and who was also (along with Mitch) in my San Jose RoadMap seminar. Jerry's got a handle on what he's labeled as the "relationship economy," and we had a fun dinner comparing notes about such things, including where I'm trying to guide the David Allen Company within all its contexts these days. Jerry had a couple of great suggestions I hadn't really thought of before, that could be key anchor points for some things we'll be creating. Jerry's involved in some ad hoc but extremely creative and interesting projects. I suggest you stay in touch with this guy's thinking. I will.

As I sat decompressing in the bar of the Four Seasons here in SFO tonight, mind-mapping thoughts on a napkin about today and the so-what's and therefore's and maybe-if's, galvanized with the heady conversations all day long,I'm thinking: I need two days of processing for one day of engagement!

Posted by David at 11:18 PM | Comments (4)

New stuff in the Info management space

I spent a little time in the last twenty four hours with two different software company demos. Yesterday I was walked through a demo of the "Personal Information Network" by Ashwani Sirohi, a co-founder of Trimergent Corp. It's basically a way to tag files and URL's (and some MS-based objects like calendar entries) anywhere, group them together and share them with people or teams, who can then access that grouping in a customized portal-like manner. Interesting idea, they have a web-based demo.

Then last night flew up to San Francisco and was taken to dinner by Deva Hazariki and Brad Meador, the guys who are heading up ClearContext, an Outlook add-in that does some neat sorting and sifting of the inbox so you can navigate around it more efficiently in the weird-time windows during the day. They apparently have a bunch of GTD fans and even GTD Add-In users who find ClearContext a useful tool. I'm not a big supporter of building a lot of power in the in-box itself that might have people keep stuff there, but I did recognize how nice it would be have e-mail sorted on the fly with the algorithms they've built in.

It's always amazing to me how the universe begins to glide things toward me, as soon as I tune my mental filters in that direction. Though GTD has more to do with an active thinking and decision-making process than passive data sorting, the latter is becoming more of interest to me than it has in the past.

Both connections came from reommendations from my buddy Buzz Bruggeman, who is of course the ultimate cool info-management leprechaun...

Posted by David at 07:39 AM | Comments (3)

October 09, 2005

I'm a card-carrying nostalgic foodie

Just got my new membership card to Slow Food, the international movement that was catalyzed by a McDonald's being opened at Rome's Spanish Steps.

I'm using a quote from the founder in my RoadMap seminar:

To be slow means that you govern the rhythms of your life. You are in control of deciding how fast you have to go. Today, you might want to go fast, so you do. Tomorrow, however, you might want to go slow, so you can. That is the difference.It is useless to force the rhythms of life. If I live with the anxiety to go fast, I will not live well. My addiction to speed will make me sick. The art of living is about learning how to give time to each and every thing. If I have sacrificed my life to speed, then that is impossible. Ultimately, 'slow' means to take the time to reflect. It means to take the time to think. With calm, you arrive everywhere. - Carlo Petrini

Posted by David at 10:44 AM | Comments (2)

October 08, 2005

Responses to Personal Brain blog

Nice to have both Jerry Michalski and Harlan Hugh respond recently to my post on Personal Brain back in August. Jerry, who turned me on to the software, replies to most of the responses; and Harlan, the founder and CEO of TheBrain Technologies, has a nice post as well.

I'm still exploring the use Personal Brain, have turned a couple of my network on to it (they hate me for it, it can be so cool...) One very interesting use I've made was to create a separate Brain file for capturing random memories of my life - an incredibly healthy core dump...

Posted by David at 08:44 AM | Comments (2)

October 07, 2005

GTD as important shelfware

Someone sent me a copy of a column from The Bookseller in the UK in which Graham Edmonds (author of Bullshitter's Bingo)lists the Top Ten books for a Bullshitter's Bookshelf - books on the shelf to merely make the owner look good - though hardly read or understood. Getting Things Done is one of them - "to give the impression of efficiency." I'm in the company of Seven Habits..., How to Win Friends..., One-Minute Manager, Emotional Intelligence. Quirky validation of making it to the big time, I guess!

"The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second duty is no one yet has found out." - Oscar Wilde

Posted by David at 12:00 PM | Comments (5)

October 06, 2005

Nice description of the our RoadMap focus

Got a nice e-mail from Mike Flanagan, VP at Intrepid Learning Solutions, a long-time GTDer and informal coach to us in the e-learning space, regarding the dual emphasis needed for control and clarity I've been attempting to frame with my new seminar.

RoadMap emphasizes the need to balance process with perspective. When you're getting started with GTD, it's easy to be all process all the time--mastering all of your tasks but perhaps losing sight of the big picture. The result is that you become a runway level whirlwind, but you never really take off. By making vertical engagement part of the process, the RoadMap model helps provide the clarity and creativity that can get lost in the next action shuffle.

Thanks, Mike. I'm going to incorporate that "process with perspective" phrase into the GTD lexicon!

Posted by David at 08:45 PM

October 05, 2005

Eulogy for a good friend, one of our staff

Jesus Becerra Flores, who has done all of our Spanish translations for years and last year became a full-time workflow coach with us, passed on a couple of days ago, his body having contracted an uncommon lymphoma that progressed very rapidly.

Jesus was one of the most sophisticated, intelligent, sensitive, and caring people I've ever met. His Spanish translations of me and GTD material were the best - understanding the stuff from the core so that he could best communicate it in its own way in his mother tongue... just the best. We could share a glance across the stage while he was doing simultaneous translation that spoke volumes of what we understood about what we were doing together.

Jesus held a Light that always provided an important stake in the ground and reference point for us, he was a delightful and totally welcome participant in everything we did as a company. May his spirit continue into the next chapter with grace and abundance and all our blessings, for all he did for us and for just who he was and is...

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." - Albus Dumbledore (J.K. Rowling)

Our dear friend and colleague Jesus Becerra...on to bigger and brighter things.

Posted by David at 07:57 PM | Comments (6)

October 04, 2005

Lunch with Jim Fallows

Had a lovely lunch with Jim Fallows today in DC, after which he took me on a tour of the DC offices of the Atlantic. Soon to be the HQ for the whole magazine. Bit of a change, the venerable intelligent rag moving from Emersonian Boston to one of the Watergate buildings (owned by current Atlantic owner David Bradley). Fun to find out that there are several highly-placed GTD champions on the magazine, and to hang again a while with Jim, a lazy-geek-engaged soul brother, very involved in what's happening at certain horizons in ways I really admire. Jim and his wife Deb are moving to China next spring - going to report for Atlantic and the NY Times from a place that Jim says he needs to spend some time in, just because it's the thing to do now. Cool. We should be getting some great stories and important world-view perspectives from the smart straight story teller Jim is...

BTW, Jim wrote a nice column in the NY Times October 2, talking about Mac Micro and Brainstorm, amongst other things.

Posted by David at 10:54 PM | Comments (6)

Monster and the government

Just gave the keynote on productivity to a couple hundred people at the annual conference Monster puts on for their government clients here in DC. Was preceded by opening remarks from Doug Klinger, President of Monster North America, in which he noted major trends that were affecting hiring. Interesting to hear that more jobs have come on line recently than anytime in the last five years, which means it's a good time to be looking for a job, and expecting more from it.

Great audience, seemed to resonate (as most folks do, these days) to the strategic value of personal process improvement. And wow, it's still summer in the city here in the east...

Posted by David at 08:37 AM

October 03, 2005

Wisconsin north woods for a day

Was an invited guest at the annual offsite conducted by CRA, Inc. - a great group of folks who are consulting and coaching into the world of corporate communications. They're big GTD fans, and wanted me to share a bit of my stuff with their network of forty clients that are meeting at this beautiful retreat center in northwest Wisconsin. It's a place called Minnesuing Acres, owned by the Carlson family and now being used as an executive retreat center as well. Alan Nelson (CRA founder) and his partners are helping shape a whole new strategic function - how to communicate within and influence a corporate culture to facilitate change. Great stuff, good folks.

I'll be off tonight back to DC for work with Monster.com Tuesday, but it was a creative and fun twelve hours (try playing pitch and putt golf in total darkness at 11pm with flourescent golf balls!)

Fall color in perfect form, this afternoon...

Posted by David at 11:31 AM | Comments (3)

October 02, 2005

GTD and the Mac

Many folks do have the impression that we're Windows-heavy, non-Mac. Have to say that in 1983 I decided to learn DOS instead of getting an advanced degree, which I think was still a good call. But it kept me from having to become bi-digi-lingual, and I've always been a bit jealous of people who could cruise both worlds with aplomb. So, now, Robert Peake, our new and fabulous CTO, is of that calibre. He's written a nice piece on GTD and the Mac. Check it out.

Posted by David at 09:07 PM | Comments (11)

October 01, 2005

According to the Guardian...

New article on me/GTD just out in the Guardian. It was apparently the cover story in the newly launched "Business Sense," the Guardian's monthly guide to new technology and thinking for small to medium-sized businesses.

The reporter, Ben Hammersley, a delightfully charming chap who did the London RoadMap seminar with us (wearing his classy black bowler the whole time), said that he had come across my book and one weekend while his wife was away on a trip, he just read Part II and "followed directions." Everything wound up in a huge pile in his living room, which he cranked through, and when his wife came home she was amazed by how many things had gotten done around the house. Ben said he was basically in stun mode for a few days, but well worth it!

Posted by David at 11:58 AM | Comments (3)