December 04, 2008

Striking the balance between defining and doing

Today I had a tele-coaching call that reminded me of what David Allen calls the Threefold Nature of Work. My client recently worked with me for a day-and-a-half setting up his GTD system and practicing the moves of processing and organizing his work and life. In this follow-up call he revealed that one of his biggest difficulties was that, now that he had a trusted system up and running, he felt somewhat obsessed with constantly updating and tweaking the lists. He also felt a bit of a compulsion to instantly processing into the system any new idea, notes or paper he came across in his day, often at the expense of not working on higher priority work that needed to get done.

While this may seem like somewhat extreme behavior, I've seen shades of this syndrome occur with many clients. It's almost as if, now that they have this trusted place to manage their agreements, they need to be hyper vigilant about getting new agreements in and keeping the lists pristine. This can become debilitating and can result in a feeling of being a slave to ones list - always in it and never getting any of it done. I think that in some cases this happens at the early stages of taking on the GTD practices. With time, most people learn to self-regulate and recalibrate their practices so that they can have the proper balance between defining their work, doing predefined work, and allowing appropriate energy and time for all of the ad hoc surprises that need attention.

I acknowledge that this case is probably the exception to the rule - as most of the time, the real difficulty for most clients is that they aren't giving enough time and energy to processing their in boxes. But if any of what I've written above rings a bell for you, here are some shifts in practice that might help you bring balance back to your practice:

Separate the Processing from the Collecting Allow yourself plenty of leeway during your day to just collect a note about the thought or idea you've got your attention on, throw it in your in box, and save the processing for later. In other words, jot down the rough thought and sometime later define exactly what it means to you, what you're really going to do about it, and where your going to organize it.

Save the Detailed Refining of the Lists for the Weekly Review If you find that every day you are constantly going back and tweaking a lot of details on your action lists you may be in micro-manager mode. Save that for the your Weekly Review and let yourself do all of that fine-tuning then. That way, in between Weekly Reviews you can have more freedom to DO the things on the list and REACT appropriately to all of the new inputs coming at you.

Set Aside Processing Time If you find yourself compulsively processing your in box throughout the day even when your gut tells you that there's a higher priority aching to be done, try committing to a set window of time once a day just for processing. That will allow for more doing time on your important priorities and potentially on those ad-hoc surprises that need your attention.

Observe Your Own Patterns We all have patterns of behavior that we continue despite our better intentions. If compulsive email processing is a problem for you, create a daily self-observation exercise: Twice a day, stop what you're doing for two minutes, and reflect for a moment about the following questions: When today have I defaulted to processing my in boxes when there may have been something more pressing or important that needed my attention? What payoff did I get from this? What was the impact on me? On those I work with? Doing this for several weeks is likely to reveal some new patterns and insights about your own motivations and behaviors that you may have been previously blind to.

I'm curious if this post struck a chord out there. Please let me know. I'm eager to learn more about this subject.

Posted by mdolan at 04:15 PM | Comments (13)

April 30, 2008

Taking some time to orient our new Dolan to this world

This is one of Maxwell's first photo-shoots. Spittin' image of me isn't he!? I'll be taking off a couple of months from blogging to take care of Maxwell.

Here's a bit that I wrote in the dizziness of the early hours of my wife's labor (and forgot to publish at the time):

Talk about open loops. The past few hours, as we work through these early contractions and watch them get more regular and frequent, has been like an open loop fest. Any uncollected (and many previously unconscious) things I've had my attention on have been bubbling up like bubbles in a champaign glass. Noticing my own psyche spin with excitement and wonder and nervousness as I cycle through my own anticipation and support AnneLise through her own journey and Max's transition to this world.

Can't wait to hold him in my hands.

Michael

Posted by mdolan at 09:14 PM | Comments (7)

January 31, 2008

Become More Attracted to Your Weekly Review

For those of you who haven't seen David Allen live and in-person, I highly recommend checking him out in action at one of his wonderful GTD The RoadMap seminars. Here's the current schedule.

In GTD The RoadMap, David does a masterful job of elucidating the power and ease that becomes available when one has both perspective on and control over all of one's commitments. All control and no perspective? You're stuck in the realm of the Micro-Manager. All Perspective and no control? You're a Crazy-Maker with grandios visions and no grip on how to really make them happen.

In GTD The RoadMap, David also shares some great perspective on how to get your own practice of GTD to "stick." His main point here is that in order to see how to implement and maintain GTD and feel compelled enough to stick with it, you must identify enough with the resulting experience that you can't help making it happen and keeping it going.

That got me thinking. How can we take that wisdom and apply it in a real, actionable way to improving our own hit-rate on doing our weekly review, the essential and often neglected practice of GTD?

How better to identify with the resulting experience of a weekly review than to actually do one and then immediately turn your attention to carefully observing your own specific experience of having just completed it. What I mean by this is to literally spend a few minutes checking in with yourself and answering the following questions:

- How do I feel about myself and my work now that I've completed this weekly review?

- How does my body feel now that all of my commitments are updated and current? Am I tired? Awake? Calm? Invigorated?

- What is now possible that may not have been possible before I completed this weekly review?

You might even write your observations down over the the course of several weekly reviews and then look back to see what patterns you find. I believe that doing this self-observation over the course of several months will improve your consistency in actually doing and completing weekly reviews. It's a simple, quick exercise to engage yourself in fully identifying with one of the core practices of GTD.

Some other ideas I've seen work wonders for instilling and supporting the weekly review habit include:

- Invite the support of your friends and colleagues to do your weekly reviews together. We've seen this work well at several of our client companies, and we even do it in our own company.

- If your schedule is always changing or you travel a lot, making a repeating calendar appointment a lost cause, include as part of each weekly review a step in which you plot out and commit to the dates and times for your next two or three weekly reviews.

- If distractions are difficult to overcome, temporarily move your weekly review to a private space or conference room where you can be undisturbed.

What about you? What has worked for you regarding strengthening the muscle of the weekly review habit?

Posted by mdolan at 05:57 PM | Comments (2)