February 23, 2006

Productivity down?

Andrew Whaley sent me this link today, from a current Yahoo/Reuters story about productivity issues. Interesting in that the data is self-assessment only. Probably indicative that the world is different in how frequently new data must be incorporated, and few people have changed their behaviors to map to it. I suppose it bodes well, Darwin-wise, for GTDers, who'll might actually wind up taking over the world. We're the ones for whom junk mail can be experienced as a psychological garden element.

Posted by David at 11:36 AM | Comments (4)

February 10, 2006

Cool tip from Belgium re: digital filing, if it fits you...

As I'm now using a digital labeler (Brother PT-18R) I think I'll experiment with Jan's suggestion. Interesting idea. Unfortunately Lotus Notes (where I have a lot of digial info) is not searchable (yet) with the "global" (not quite) search apps, so I'm a little handicapped, but this is a creative trick.

Dear Mr. Allen, In the past few months I have learned to work with the "Getting things done" method. It takes some time to get used to and I had to go back regularly to your book to keep myself in line. Acquiring the Outlook add-on has helped a lot. There is however one aspect that could be improved significantly. It has to do with reference-material. In your book you deal very much with paper-based reference material. It goes into folders and is stored (for example) in alphabetical order. I like the system, and it works. But more and more material comes to us now in digital form. You can print it of course, but you can also store it on your hard disk (again in folders). The essential problem remains: how do you find the specific document in this sea of printed and digital material? I believe that the recent development of search engines for the PC can provide an important extra to "Getting things done". Search engines like Copernic (my favorite) or Google Desktop will make an index of all files stored on your computer. They are very clever and will trawl through your files, emails, attachments to email etc. while your computer is idle for some time. And when you are looking for a particular document: just type in a word that is likely to appear and the search engine will do the work for you. It is super fast, you don't have to remember in which folder you have put the document, you don't have to make lists of reference words. The search engine will find it, and you can make your search very clever so you don’t end up with 40.000 hits. But what about written material that is not digitally available? The solution is very simple. In your book you insisted (and rightly so) that we put our documents in a clearly labeled folder. There are very quick labelers available that are linked to your computer. So, I make a new label (e.g. "Holiday in Barcelona"), print it, and copy-paste it in an Excel-file called "reference.xls". The folder and documents are stored in my alphabetical filing system with the exact label. When I want to find it back, I need not worry if the reference was on paper or digital: I just type the word "Holiday" or "Barcelona" into the search engine and it will find the digital document or it will find the words "Holiday in Barcelona" in my digital reference.xls file. If it's there, I know that it is paper-based and to be found in the filing system. It works, it's fast, I find all my things! That reduces worries and searching-time considerably. And all I have to do is type a few words, print the label and copy these words in one Excel-file. That takes me about 30 sec to do. I sure hope you can incorporate the value of search engines in "Getting things done". Yours sincerely, Jan Trommelmans, CEO, University College, Karel de Grote-Hogeschool, Antwerp

Posted by David at 10:27 AM | Comments (14)

January 10, 2006

Personal media and learning/training...

Read a couple of entries in Elliott Masie's newsletter (which is a great resource for tapping into current thinking/gear/techniques in the e-learning space, especially if you lean to the latest gizmo side in your interests).

First was his comment about Verizon's new VCast - being able to get broadcast quality video feeds on your phone. (Verizon Wireless is a new client of ours - I'll be keynoting for them in a couple of weeks.) Where will this take us?

Second, just his musing about how much potential there is for people's personal digital cameras to be used for quick capture and distribution of information for training, updating, and educational purposes in their organizations. Good question to ask: what short events or conversations would have usefulness to others, if captured and distributed via easy, small, at-hand digital tools?

Interesting over the years to watch how much technology which seemed to have great usefulness never caught on (videophones?), and which ones finally did, but many years after they "should" have (like answering machines and teleconferencing). Is it just the malaise of people's interest in being more productive? or a mismatch of the form factor with the subteties of what really does add value?

Posted by David at 01:32 AM | Comments (4)

January 09, 2006

Fast filtering stuff

Simon Brown from Australia sent me this link to a good essay by Douglas Johnston on focus, appropriate to GTDish perspectives (and my previous post about Jason's example of prioritizing on the fly...)

Posted by David at 08:34 AM | Comments (5)

January 01, 2006

Great essay on procrastination

Jack Holt e-mailed me a link to Paul Graham's essay on procrastination. It's great, couldn't agree more. Thanks, Jack, and Paul.

Posted by David at 12:47 AM | Comments (7)

December 03, 2005

Paying attention to attention...

My attention to atttention deficit (AAD) factor got a boost this weekend, catching up on some reading and surfing on the topic. I finally got some time to re-read Clive Johnson's NY Times article on Life Hackers with some leisure. He had mentioned me and Getting Things Done, but I wanted to pay more attention to some of the research about attention he was referring to. He's got a nice blog entry with the full article and some interesting comments below it.

I also received an email from our friend Jeff Tidwell, who pointed me to an essay by Steve Pavlina which describes his personal productivity techniques for getting a college degree in record time. It's good stuff, actually. Reminded me of the value of three-month goals, which I used to teach more than I do now. It reinspired me to start working more with my own. I'd put 3-month goals at the 10,000-ft horizon, much like bigger projects would be. But there is a little bit of a different spin in thinking about "desired outcomes" than just thinking about the projects being completed. Brings in a little more of the "why" about the projects, which might instill more juice. Also Steve's piece reflects probably the only cure for the distraction syndromes so popular to decry these days - ruthless focus on where you're going. It does seem a little more Type A than most of us would be attracted to, but it does make quite a point.

Posted by David at 02:41 PM | Comments (4)

November 13, 2005

Good article in Fast Company re: simplicity

In the November Fast Company there's a good article by Linda Tischler - "The beauty of simplicity" - that highlights the eternal struggle in product design between ease of use and sophistication of features. The elegance of the simplicity of Google's home page vs the "integrated remote" controllers. It's the issue many people have around customizing GTD - how cool can I make and automate my system and still keep it simple enough to use when I don't feel like doing system? Lots of great ideas work in your head, but in your hands they die a sure death.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Comments (4)

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 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 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 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)

September 17, 2005

There is a priority code...

You're the first in my network to know. I've humbled myself to admit that there really is a priority code worth noting. (Oh my God - is David Allen really saying we should structure a priority?)

Woke up with the aha! a couple of days ago. It goes something like this:

What on the list, if completed, would positively affect the most things of importance in my world?

In other words...leverage. There are certain projects, certain actions, that if done would be like linchpin events - they'll cause a lot of other dominoes to fall.

I'll be writing more on that in other forums...

Posted by David at 02:42 PM | Comments (19)

August 25, 2005

Interesting little tip, if you're using a paper system...

Just got this from someone in our network. Great idea, if you're using any kind of a single-particle paper reminder system...

To help me remember to process paper coming across my desk, I had a red-ink stamp made up with the work "PROJECT" at the top and then below that the list of possible actions from Agenda to Waiting For. Now I can stamp the paper and write on it what the next action is, defer it to another date in my days of the month file, etc. Sometimes I put the stamp on a sticky note if I don't want to alter the document. You have done so much for me I just wanted to share. - Daniel DenBeste

Posted by David at 03:56 PM | Comments (3)

August 23, 2005

Good question... how would you answer it?

We just got this good question from an attorney in my network:

I have read Getting Things Done many times and am attending the Boston seminar. I have a question: Why is it so hard for human beings to get organized? Why do the techniques Mr. Allen recommends require so much effort and encounter such resistance from human nature? I'm not interested in this academically, but if there is some biological/psychological/historical aspect of human nature that makes it so difficult to organize, it might help us learn how to overcome them and get where we should be...

My answer:

Everyone is already organized to the degree they need to be, to have the world match up to their internal standards. And usually "having to get organized" refers only to things they don't care that much about. In other words, oil painters have their brushes organized, fishermen their tackleboxes, golfers their clubs. When your life as a whole and what you're doing with it takes on the same kind of gut-level identification with an experience you have to have, you'll probably overcome the resistance to creating and maintaining structure to keep it that way.

Posted by David at 07:09 PM | Comments (12)

August 11, 2005

Wallet stories...

Love anecdotes like this one (plus pic) I got today from the CEO of Communication Resources, Inc., Randy Coy. (They publish stuff for church leaders.)

David, I saw your "evening module" wallet on your blog and knew I wanted it. But for $99 did I need it? On to the maybe/someday list it went. And then one day during a review, I figured if I could order it in 2 minutes, I'm going to go for it. Let me tell you - when I opened that outer box I knew I hadn't bought a wallet notetaker. I had just bought an experience. Like a fine bottle of wine, uncorking the bottle and pouring into into the perfect glass is about half the fun for me. The heavy embossed outer box...oh man... I new there was a a goody inside! Then, oh my gosh: black tissue paper. A notecard from David helping to "experience" the notebook. A laugh as I read to my wife, yep, even user instructions "tear off paper and place in inbasket.." Extra supplies... a wallet with leather I knew from experience would age perfectly (as you promised it would.) Fortunately, I had mind like water from the morning review so I spent the next guilt-free hour playing with my wallet and showing it to my kids ("Yea, Dad that's a really cool...uh.... what did you call it?" It is an evening module!) A final side benefit: I attacked the last bastion of "junk bunkers" - my wallet (which had become quite the George Costanza wallet). I'm not postive yet, but I think my new evening module can be my all day module too. I've found a better place for the not often used items (like my glove compartment for the library and triple AAA card after putting the relevant #'s in my PDA). Anyway... thanks for building the wallet. And a special thank you for creating the experience to enjoy.

PS Yea, I know its creepy, but I was compelled to send you a picture of my new wallet taking its place among some of my favorite GTD "gear".

Posted by David at 09:45 AM | Comments (5)

July 27, 2005

TSOYM

TSOYM - an acronym made up and shared with me as his key learning from today by the father of my client, the CEO of a very high-flying new company in St. Louis, today. "Dad," probably in his late '60's, sat in on the workshop I did with his son and staff (refresher of GTD for many of them who had previously received our Workflow Coaching, plus some neat info re: the DiSC personality profile), and as we were leaving a lovely dinner tonight in Clayton, Tom said: "What I got was TSOYM. I can remember shortcuts like that best. It stands for 'Trusted System Outside Your Mind.'"

Out of the mouths of babes... and dads.

Posted by David at 08:21 PM | Comments (3)

July 18, 2005

Is studying wasted time a waste of time?

There's a Christian Science Monitor article out today - "Busy, not Burdened" addressing the issue from recent studies about unproductive work. A lot of the same-old stuff, but as I was interviewed about it today by Seattle NPR station (available audio on line), when they asked my take on the surveys showing how much wasted time there was, my question is - "so what's new?"

Was there a time in the history of the planet when people wasted less percentage of their time?" Maybe so, but I'll be willing to bet these days the new productive world we live in allows us to be unproductive in things like studying wasted time!

Hey, waste a little time - your thoughts?

Posted by David at 02:59 PM | Comments (5)

July 06, 2005

Relieving an itch or creative closure?

Read an interesting couple of pages sent to me by a GTDer in our network from Leon Salzman's Treatment of the Obsessive Personality about obsessive researchers vs those who seek information out of their love of the topic. The former collects and catalogs data to try to unsuccessfully relieve an eternal itch to reach perfection, which is never achieved. The latter "is motivated more by the pleasure in his adventures than by the decrease in anxiety."

Interesting similarity with the juxtaposition of getting organized from a compulsive (and unproductive) framework vs. creating structure for the freedom it produces.

[Thanks to a friend in our network, Bob Beverley (Associate Director of the Northeast Counseling Center of Pleasantville, NY), who has sent me some great stuff - "superb articles or gems hidden in long books," his self-described (and accurate so far) contributions to my reading.]

Posted by David at 08:49 PM | Comments (2)

June 22, 2005

Spread too thin at the top?

Enjoyed another seat-mate chat recently with the CEO of a relatively new software company in southern California. They make and install an application that helps large vendors to retailers intelligently forecast out for just-in-time deliveries that will meet the stores' demands. He had sold a previous company for good money, yet was inspired to play the game again with another software opportunity that came his way. Doing OK, apparently.

To my question about what gets in the way of his own productivity, he answered, "I let myself have too many priorities. I'm focused on eight or ten things, and I know that it's distracting me from doing what I need to be doing about the two or three that are really mission-critical."

Ah, one of the toughest things at the top - the good idea to stop doing, the bright bauble to ignore. Or, of course, how much smarter can I work or how much more can I organize, hire, delegate, and manage so that I can go for them all (and afford it)?

I think ignoring the bright bauble is the hardest of them all.

Posted by David at 03:43 PM | Comments (7)

June 09, 2005

Journaling

Just received this e-mail in response to my latest newsletter commentary (re: expressing vs holding thoughts):

You're right on, as anyone who journals regularly can tell you. I often begin my day by dumping whatever is in my mind on to paper, and as you say, it's often just a germ. What it uncovers, so often, is a fleshed-out creative idea that I could have never achieved if the germ had been left to ruminate in my mind. Journaling is difficult to begin - and even more difficult to explain the benefits to someone who has never done it. I think your commentary captures it's power in a nutshell. I suppose similar results could be achieved by bouncing ideas off the right partner. But nothing replaces the pen and pad, especially since they're almost always available. - Sherry McKinley

I've been journaling off and on for the last twenty years, but have become more rigorous with it in the last eighteen months. Especially since I've gotten back into fountain pens, and discovered the absolute best in journaling notebook gear in London at Smysthon of Bond Street (they now have a store on 57th in NYC too). They have leather-covered notebooks with ultra high-grade thin paper for terrific ink writing.

Something about great looking/feeling gear to create the motivation to just get started...

Posted by David at 01:32 AM | Comments (13)

June 07, 2005

How about an @blog list?

As many of you know, there's a big potential set of sub-categories for "Someday/Maybe": Places to go on vacation. Restaurants to try in Boston. Things to do next time I'm in Frankfurt. Weekend trips to take from where I live. Things to do with my kids when they're older. Etc. Etc.

Apropos of this venue, how about "Things I might want to blog about"? That's a Category in my Memos section of my Palm. (This blog is an option that's been on there a while - "Keeping blog list on my Palm"...!)

Posted by David at 10:38 AM | Comments (19)

June 06, 2005

Activewords eliminates thinkstation drag

I've mentioned it before, because it's such a great tool, but it's worth mentioning regularly - ActiveWords.com is one of those once-you're-using-you-can't-do-without apps. I had always wanted a macro writer that sat on top of all my Windows applications, and Buzz and company created it. They got the technology down about how to read keystrokes a nanosecond ahead of the operating system, so you can just type whatever keystrokes you program to do almost whatever you want, in terms of opening specific docs, launching apps, navigating to Web sites, inserting text, date-stamping, etc.

Buzz Bruggeman (Activewords founder) and I have had an ongoing conversation about why anyone in their right mind would not want to use something like this. But, alas, I find even people on my staff who are just unaware of speed keys, much less something that would turbocharge that function. I think it is akin to the syndrome of GTD adoption - it's the most productive who are the most interested. They're the ones who are most sensitive to drag on the system, and inspired by its elimination. In terms of macros, it's those who are most invested in the computer as a think-station (and that's not everyone yet, by a long shot) who'd be most interested in reducing process attention.

But then, after spending a half day again with my buddy Buzz, I had to kick myself for not utilizing half the power of the tool... duhh...

Buzz holds forth on his baby ActiveWords

Posted by David at 09:48 AM | Comments (13)

May 30, 2005

What lurks below the runway?

Here's a very interesting insight about procrastination shared with me by one of the brightest clients I've dealt with, Cole Bitting (founding partner - Flagstone Securities). He's referring to the horizons of focus (runway = actions, 10,000 = projects, 30,000 = goals, 40,000 = vision, etc.) we refer to in GTD.

I had a thought about your altitude metaphor. There is the below ground (below runway??) view. I find getting to that level on of the most valuable. This view comes from examining Tasks where the next step is clearly thought through, but I still avoid like the plague. For these tasks, I have to go below ground. Personally, I will usually shut off all stimuli (unusual for me), close my eyes and dwell on feelings and associations, not thoughts. These impressions are slippery, but once cornered, usually fess up a rich vein of 50,000 + 40,000 + 30,000 foot stuff. Objectifying these vague feelings and impressions is compellingly valuable. One example that I'll give is that I had an old BMW 325i convertible, with cracked rear window plastic. I knew exact who to call, where to take the car, how much the repair would cost, and had the money to afford the repair, but I would not make the appointment. All I had to do was call the number on the task. But I didn't. In fact, when that item was inevitably the top item on my list, I'd jump to the bottom and work my way higher. Avoidance. Which begs the 'why?' question - a question itself which is often avoided or without reasoned answer (the 'uh - I dunno' answer - like the one I get from my kids all the time). To me, finding crystal clear Next Actions that provoke such avoidance is the most valuable part of GTD that I have to-date discovered. In fact, I could imagine that this line of thought could add a lot of scope to the vertical dimension of your GTD construct.

Another perspective on procrastination, where we tend to avoid things that don't have enought meaning, OR have too much meaning. As mentioned in a previous blog, it reminds me of the terrific exposition of the topic by Steven Pressfield in The War of Art - that resistance will be in proportion to the proximity of expressing who you really are.

Posted by David at 08:55 AM | Comments (6)

May 18, 2005

Meetings, meetings, everywhere...

...and not a stop to think.

Been running into a lot of this lately: serious meeting overwhelm. Lots of reasons for this, but I heard a new one that I hadn't really been aware of before. Had dinner last week with Dr. Scott Lemaire, a thoracic surgeon with St. Luke's Hospital in Houston and associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine. Scott's one of those folks who "just happened to pick up" GTD in a bookstore, and since has become a convert. As we were talking about the too-many-meetings disease, especially in healthcare, he said: "you have to go to meetings just to protect your resources!" If you're not there, they may take your budget, reallocate your staff, take your space... who knows!? Dreadful thought. Not sure there's a good answer to that one, except bringing lots of work to do while you're sitting there guarding the fort.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potetial, that word would be: "meetings." - Dave Barry

Posted by David at 10:37 PM | Comments (2)

May 03, 2005

Lazy man's language builder...

Got a lovely email this morning from Tony Hiller, a Wachovia exec in Florida, including a great little tip:

Recently started to print out from Dictionary.com words I wanted to add to my vocabulary. I would then put the print out in my "tickler file" and let it roll around in there until I felt I had a pretty good grasp on the meaning of the new word. The lazy man's way to expand vocabulary? It works for me.

I'm going to start doing that. I actually use Merriam-Webster's Collegiate on my laptop, so I have access to it when I'm unhooked. Great little program for dictionary and thesaurus on the run.

And my great source of new words is always reading my monthly Atlantic, which always has about half a dozen juicy ones (you know, the ones you think you know, but when you think about it, you don't really know, what they mean!)

Thanks, Tony!

Posted by David at 08:36 AM | Comments (4)

April 30, 2005

A creeping demon...

Sat next to a Raytheon senior executive on the plane last night from Boston to L.A., and in the course of nice seat-mate chatting, I asked him what he thought was the main thing that got in the way of his productivity. He didn't have to think very long before he said, "organizational processes." Too many forms, too many boxes on the forms, too many rules and regulations for filling out the forms. Brought to mind the over-structuring of the automation of GTD, attempted by some technogeeks. "Wow! This structure really works! Let me create a structure so I now don't have to think at all!" It's another version of the "convert syndrome." Someone experiences something that creates a positive experience, and they reify that into a structure as the source instead of the conduit.

Posted by David at 10:50 AM | Comments (5)

April 24, 2005

"Reply to All:" ... Duhhhh.....

Love the study just quoted by Red Herring et al about the UK researchers finding your IQ drops when you're distracted by e-mail (and more than it drops when you're stoned on grass!)

Does it really mean we're dumber when we respond to communication? Hardly. I think it's just reflective of the almost universal problem most people have in dealing with input and interruptions - with no real personal system they can trust (which includes consistent processsing behaviors, by the way), people feel compelled to engage with the input as it shows up. But because they can't really deal with it, they just add another loose bolt inside their engine.

GTD may not make you smarter; but it sure may let you keep more of the smarts you have.

We must try to keep the mind in tranquility. For just as the eye which constantly shifts its gaze, now turning to the right or to the left, now incessantly peering up or down, cannot see distinctly what lies before it, but the sight must be fixed firmly on the object in view if one would make his vision of it clear; so too man's mind when distracted by his countless worldly cares cannot focus itself distinctly on the truth. - St. Basil the Great

Posted by David at 02:41 PM | Comments (4)

April 21, 2005

My kingdom for a simple voice recorder

OK, call me retro. Where is the simple voice recorder I had years ago that had one record and playback button, was simple and easy to use on the run while you were driving, etc.? They've feature-crept those things so much now, the best I could find (as the new Palm doesn't have record function) was the Olympus VN 120 for about $30. But, I'm sorry, who on earth needs three digital folders and 100 files on this? Anybody out there found anything on the market you're actually using that's as good as the good ole days?

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity. - Tolstoi

Posted by David at 03:40 PM | Comments (29)

February 03, 2005

Fabulous book on anti-procrastination

Just finished a great book on dealing with the evil god called Resistance - avoiding doing the things that are really the most meaningful to us.  The War of Art. Sent to me by my friend Joe Polish at Piranha Marketing. I highly recommend. Careful, though, you may (if you're like me) feel like someone just read your beads. By the guy who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance - Steven Pressfield.

Posted by David at 04:25 AM | Comments (3)

January 31, 2005

Web-based habit changers?

What I really meant by my last entry was any kind of coaching/reminder/inspirational processes that were Web-based, not so much action management (though I appreciate the thoughts and feedback on that, too). Like, ever had something that you could plug in that actually got you to do something more regularly, consistently, completely.... and that you stuck with it?

Posted by David at 09:01 AM | Comments (12)

January 28, 2005

Information, not action...

Interesting thing - that our Outlook Add-In is being now site-licensed to a very strategically-focused division at Microsoft. Interesting in the same way that when Mitch Kapor contacted me to get in touch - he'd read my book, and what was interesting to him was that he hadn't caught the "next action" thing, with all his stuff over all those years. Actually, it's fascinating to me that all the gazillions of $$$ have been spent in the software world, just finding slicker ways to input, rearrange, and access data - not how to manage action. That's still to come...

Posted by David at 02:33 AM | Comments (5)

June 30, 2004

Fun feedback

I love pithy testimonials like this one I got this morning:

"I read the Atlantic article.  I set up the tickler file.  It's as if I have been root-bound, and am now re-potted."

Posted by David at 10:43 AM | Comments (1)

June 21, 2004

MindManager - very cool

I've been working with a new version of MindManager Pro for the last couple of weeks, and it's really cool. A couple of sharp consultants and resellers of MindManager were in my London seminar a few weeks ago (Nik Tipler and Nikk Duffill of gyronix), and they gave me a copy, along with showing me some interesting stuff they're doing vis-a-vis a GTD add-on to MindManager. They've got a new version of that add-on coming out shortly, too.



Stay tuned. I've tried mind-mapping software before, but things have improved a bit since I was really into it, and after a long plane ride learning some of the speed keys, I've been using it to do some really creative stuff with a bit of complex thinking...

Posted by David at 10:43 AM | Comments (13)

May 19, 2004

A real culture-change initiative

Do you have a "culture of intentionality"? Great question. Just in a conversation with a client (major insurance company) who considers creating a "culture of intentionality" one of his three major objectives in order to achieve an almost 100% increase in sales for his organization. His observation was that, in more than twenty years of high-performance sales management, our Getting Things Done methods are the best (actually, the only) way to systematically address that issue. I think that's a nice way to frame the issue of creating a culture that assumes positive constructive activity toward where you want to go is simply the only way to operate...

Posted by David at 07:51 AM | Comments (1)

May 17, 2004

Validating the simplicity

Nice posting today from a GTD users group site that's probably better coming from someone other than me...

An observation -- much of this site seems to be devoted to finding all sorts of different methodologies/software/etc to implement the GTD program, and again--just an observation--much of this has little or nothing to do with the GTD system. I've read both of David Allen's books, and I've just returned from Boston where I attended his 2-day seminar entitled, appropriately enough: "Getting Things Done.' Highly informative, and well worth the expense. Attendees included Fortune 500 executives, various CEOs, Harvard Business School Profs and students, and a host of others who simply wanted to learn the GTD system.

One of the main things I learned is that David juggles an incredibly busy schedule, is on the road approximately 200 days per year, and manages everything he has to do with his Palm using the plain vanilla software, along with the PV Palm desktop. Lesson learned: if he can do it, so can I.

In reviewing much of what's on this site, I think a great many of us have been playing with different software--and then that becomes the game, rather than GTD.  A few days ago, we had a thread dealing with Time Design.  David spoke about it.  it's wonderful stuff--but all it really is is a fancy list keeper, and the question is "Do you need a fancy list keeper?"  If you like the toy, by all means.  But as David defines it, it's a mid- tech solution to the GTD problem, and if you may need something more high tech than that--and high-tech doesn't mean more complex.  David's message is easy to understand: "simplify." I realized that I didn't need all the fancy bells and whistles to get things done-- and in fact, they were becoming obstacles in the path, actually slowing me down. I'll spend the next few days processing my notes from the seminar, and in a week, I should have my office humming the way I want to. If you haven't read David's first book, "Getting Things Done," I'd recommend doing so--and taking its lessons to heart. The payoff is not merely getting things done, but more time for the really important things in life--like fishing and family.

best,

Dr. Eric A. Silver

Posted by David at 11:46 AM | Comments (5)

April 13, 2004

Coaching to 40,000 feet

It was quite inspiring to do workflow coaching for a 37-yr-old CEO last weekend, here in southern California, who had not only already read Gettting Things Done, but had dictated more than two pages of type-written notes of questions and comments about relevant-to-him pieces. Before we even started, he had mind-sweeped half an in-basket of notes, had a Brother labeler all set and ready, so we hit the road running with the coaching. It took about two hours to complete the collection phase, then about eight more hours to process it all, in the meantime getting him set up in Outlook for his action and project lists. He tossed his Blackberry ("Crackberry" as he called it!), agreeing with my recommendation that e-mail should be processed most efficiently for most people from at least a laptop, and he ordered a Palm to distribute his Outlook lists into for portability. (Though there are exceptions, this is usually the best configuration for most people in an Outlook environment). By the afternoon of day two, we had created a 20,000-ft checklist of his key areas of responsibility and focus, with attendant projects created, and were evaluating the two top goals of his life, ensuring we had projects and actions for those. Then we went to a local driving range and hit balls for an hour!  My idea of a productive two days....

Posted by David at 10:41 AM | Comments (5)

April 04, 2004

Why no research on "time management"?

Thought I'd share an email I got tonight, and my response. Would be interested to hear anyone else's potential replies.... DA

Mr. Allen:

I am a fan of your books and approach to time management and organization. But I have been struck by one fact, why isn't there any academic research into time management and organization?  Is it because it is so simple? If so, why do so many intelligent, accomplished adults struggle so much with time management?  I am dumbfounded why there isn't any academic-based research to confirm your approach or others...or am I missing a large body of work that is out there?  Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

AA

Arif,

You know, that's a good question. My immediate intuitive response is: because "time management" is the inaccurate definition of the problem. You can't manage time. The best question is, What do we mean by "time management?" The answer to that could give you the reason it hasn't been addressed, and where to go for your answer.

David

Posted by David at 07:33 AM | Comments (8)

March 31, 2004

Good key to defining "projects"

An executive I coached a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a great way to help understand  what we mean by a "project". As we approached the end of our two-day session, and I was assisting him in creating the all-important "Projects" list (the key control piece for the weekly review and stess-free productivity) he, like many people, had a bit of trouble getting his mind around what I call a "project". For some reason our working definition as "any outcome you're committed to finish within the next twelve months that will take more than one action step to get there", didn't do it for him. However, as we began to go through his action folders and I was asking him, "So, what's that action about?  Toward what end?" he began to grok it. Then, he said, "Oh, it's like what I usually have on my 3-month action plans...." and he gave me some specifics - hire senior person, get marketing plan in place, etc. Right. Good way to frame it. So if any of you've not kept your Projects list updated, or haven't even yet created one, maybe that will help... (and most people have between 30 and 100 such "projects"). More on the value of Projects and their definition in my article on the Web site....

Posted by David at 07:41 AM | Comments (4)

March 25, 2004

Process as a strategic process

Seems to be in the air. E-mail today I got from Scott Moehering, a major GTDer at Nationwide Insurance: "I have become increasingly aware that while context and time available certainly come first, energy available plays a major role in Processing. I can't seem to Process when I'm tired. I seem to subconsciously know that I don't have the energy to do that tiny bit of thinking, so I resist it like the plague. I can now see how much cumulative energy it takes to Process, and why I have resisted it for years. Just knowing that helps me. Too tense or tired to process? Exercise or wait until the morning, but come back to it later. I am learning I will burn through it faster, and, more importantly, not build negative associations around 'Processing'."

Posted by David at 12:41 PM

(A very short) essay on the power of positive processing

Mosquitoes ruin safaris.

Posted by David at 01:21 AM | Comments (10)

March 24, 2004

Working a decision-support checklist

I just spent two days doing our workflow coaching process with the CEO of a company that owns and runs several for-profit colleges. Several hours of those two days were simply holding a focus for him to make decisions about stuff in his piles that had accumulated around him. I have seen the decision logjam often, especially with particularly sophisticated people in fast-growth situations, wearing a lot of hats and keeping many plates concomitantly spinning in the air.

As we were processing the fifteen foot-high piles we had spent a couple of hours collecting, this fellow kept coming across things he had looked at many times before, but because of the complexity of the issue and his lack of experience with it, he was hung up in his mind deciding what to do.  He expressed his frustration with not knowing what to do about it and when I asked, "How could you find out?" he would say, "I have no idea."  Basically at an impasse.  As it became evident that this was fairly common occurrence in his stacks, he said "David, I need some help in terms of what to ask myself about these things so I can get past the log jam." (Obviously "What's the next action?" wasn't sufficient).

So we created a little checklist that he wrote and kept right on his desk as we were processing.  Question No. 1: What IS this?  He found that answering that out loud helped a bunch, and he would go into some detail. "This is a memo from a staff person about a certain situation that was not handled appropriately etc. etc."  Then the next question that he wrote on the checklist was, (2) What is the purpose of this?  In other words, why is this on my desk?  He would then talk that out loud.  "This is here because they sent it to me because of this, that, or the other." At that point it became a lot easier to address the third question, which is, of course, so (3) What's the next action about this?

I was surprised how many times he actually pulled out the checklist and used it to unstick something. (He added to the checklist as the first thing: Stop! Take some time. Take a breath!) Over several hours I watched him train himself in this thinking process.This guy is no dummy, being the owner and chairman of a very successful organization  This guy is one of the brightest around, but it was often his inability to know how exactly and perfectly to deal with some issue with which he was not familiar that had him hung up.  It was particularly acute in his case because he has to be handling areas of responsibility that he was unfamiliar with.  His organization and enterprise has doubled in size in the last two years and there were several senior management positions on his executive team that he has not been able to fill with people yet, so he was chief marketing officer as well as controller as well as all the jobs and functions of being the Chairman and CEO, with lots of new growth opportunities in front of him. I got to experience again for myself how the simple thinking process of GTD has profound implications in the real world for some of the already most productive people around...

Posted by David at 05:01 AM | Comments (6)