A Wandering Mind

Andy over at The Cranking Widgets Blog has a good post on why it’s not the system of GTD that fails us, but our own lack of commitment and follow through.

One of my side hobbies is photography.  It’s a nice creative outlet, has a side benefit of recording important events, and (most importantly) gives me an excuse to get the latest gadgets.  That being said, one of the most common lines among photography teachers is “A great camera does not a great photographer make.”  All you have to do is look at some of the great work done by groups like Kids With Cameras (a fantastic charity, by the way) to see that amazing pictures are more about the artist than the equipment.

Similarly, in the GTD realm, I think it’s very easy to get caught up in all the neato gadgets and gizmos, and lose some of the core principles.  You can have all the Moleskines, fancy pens, and slick Web 2.0 interfaces you want, but if you aren’t dumping your brain on a regular basis, deciding upon next action steps, and completing them, all your pretty toys won’t be doing much good.

Like Andy, I’ll openly admit that when things slip through the cracks in my world, it’s usually because I got lazy and skipped one of those mandatory reviews, or wasn’t disciplined about writing things down.  Let’s face it: GTD is hard.  It takes a lot of time and effort to stay loyal to your system, and like all humans, we’re prone to falling into ruts from time to time.  I’m not the first one to come to this realization, and I’m sure I won’t be the last one.

So you’ve admitted that you’ve fallen off the wagon… now what?  How do we best get back up and right the ship?

First, we need to return to the fundamentals.  In my quest to improve my golf game, I constantly have to watch for the little things in my swing: 1) keep your head down, 2) don’t redistribute your weight too much, 3) swing through the ball.  If I start topping balls out of nowhere, it’s usually one of the above.  In the same light, if I start to miss things and feel my stress level creeping up, I can usually trace it to my lack of getting my loops out of my brain, deciding on concrete actions to take on all of them, and methodically picking what to do with my time.

Secondly, make your struggle public.  Last week I talked about my fight with priority and choosing what to do in the moment, and promised to post daily evidence of my conscious effort to improve on my Twitter feed.  By making everyone aware of your goals, and asking them to hold you accountable, you give yourself extra motivation to stay the course and succeed.  This concept is not anything new and revolutionary in the world of goal setting, but it’s a solid tip that has often worked for me.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tweet my status.. I’m already behind today.

When I do my weekly review, I’ve made it a habit to mark items as “priority 2″ in Remember The Milk that I’d like to get done in the next week.  This puts a nice blue mark next to them in my lists, so they stand out from the crowd.  In the beginning, it gave me a sense of direction going into the week.

Here’s the problem: I don’t see any reasonable correlation between the assigned “priority” of an item, and whether or not it get’s done in a timely manner.  Priorities shift so rapidly in my life that items never stay in the same category for very long.  This morning’s “priority one” could become this afternoon’s “maybe tomorrow” in the blink of an eye if a fire pops up.  As a result, what I see is things marked as “high priority” piling up, which makes me feel like I’m getting buried even more.  It’s a vicious cycle to be sure.

Perhaps that’s why according to the “true” principles of GTD, priority is really something that gets decided on a moment-by-moment basis.  When faced with a block of time, and no clear indication of how to spend it, GTD suggests examining the following criteria:

1. Context (where are you and what do you have access to)
2. Time Available (5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours)
3. Energy Available (high, medium, low)
4. Priority (dictated or decided, see my previous post)

Think of the following situation: you have fifteen minutes in between meetings, and are exhausted after a long night up with the spouse talking about some things in your personal life.  You’re sitting outside the conference room of your next meeting, but have your laptop with you.  You can choose between a)starting to work on diagnosing a rather nasty technical issue, b) paying a bill or two online, both of which are due in a week, or b)responding to three e-mails (one of which was marked urgent by the sender) which have been sitting since this morning, and are simple one-and-done questions.   Which is the more productive choice?  I won’t answer the question; you decide based on the list above.

So how does this relate to my original question?  Well, in my case, re-reading about how GTD teaches us to best use these fleeting moments helped me to realize that my use of the “priority” function in my system was causing more confusion than it was clarifying and ordering my actions.  From now on, here is what I intend to do at my weekly reviews:

1. Ensure that all my lists are current.  All my open loops are recorded, and all projects are present and accounted for.
2. Any item which has a specific and (relatively) inflexible date by which it must be completed is assigned a due date.  For example, I have to get my taxes mailed before May 15th, or else ol’ Uncle Sam will come knocking.
3. Any next action that is currently on my next actions list, and has been there for more than three weeks without moving, will be moved to the “someday” list (more on this in an upcoming post).

In addition, at least three times per day, I’m going to stop, and evaluate how I’m spending my time, based on the above four criteria.  Going even further, I am going to write this down, and post it to my Twitter feed for all to see.  I’ll use this shorthand for ease of posting: “c:” for context, “t:” for time available (high, medium, low), “e:” for energy (high, medium, low), and “p:” for priority (high, medium, low).

As my readers, I ask that you hold me accountable for this statement!

My co-worker Vikas (or VK as we like to call him) said something quite funny today that struck a chord with me.  As we were walking out I jokingly chided him for not responding to an e-mail from our development group regarding an upcoming release.  His response: “Of course I didn’t remember.  My brain has a session cache expiration of 20 minutes!”

*Note: for those of you on the less geeky end of the spectrum, a “session cache” is essentially a stored picture of various things you’ve entered into a particular web site.  It’s how GMail knows you’re already logged in, for instance.  The “expiration time” sets how long this information is kept in memory on the web server before being purged.

His remark, though meant in jest, actually made quite a good point.  Human memory is nothing if not volatile and unreliable.  All you need do is browse the pages of Wikipedia or Blogger to find some good references.  In fact, I would say that this is one of, if not the, fundamental principle behind GTD: don’t trust your brain, it will inevitably let you down.

I always make it a point to get everything out of my brain and into my lists as quickly as possible.  If I don’t have access to my tool of choice (Remember The Milk), I’ll usually write myself an e-mail via the Crackberry.  Once I process through all the items in my inbox, the task will get added to the relevant list in RTM.  I do also use my trusty notebook when in meetings, using a variant of John Kendrick’s excellent system to record all the action items or questions that come out of my sessions.  I’m not perfect, and I do slip up from time to time.  But it’s still a far better alternative than trusting the vast amount of information coming in to that pile of gray matter between my ears.

In my work I’m constantly bombarded with reports of problems.  Given that a high percentage of these come in with an urgent tag attached, I decided some time ago that I needed to come up with a systematic approach to determining their true priority.  After all, I’m only one man, and if I treated everyone’s problems as raging fires, I’d never get anything done.  What I’ve come up with is the following three-pronged approach:

Clarify the scope

In my experience (and I’m sure that I’m not alone), problems tend to be described by end users in global terms: “the system is down”, “we cannot login”, etc. But in reality, the problem may be much smaller. I once had a user e-mail me directly (another no-no) stating “System X is down, I cannot login. Please fix immediately.” When I called the user and asked about whether others in his group were experiencing the same problem, he replied “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t ask.” When prodded to ask further, it was discovered that the problem was limited only to this one user, making it a far lower priority than the original message would have indicated.

What is the impact?

Ok, so you’ve established that there’s a problem, and you know it’s affecting an entire department. But what does the existence of the problem mean for business? Are operations at standstill? Are people being forced to sit at their computers and twiddle their thumbs? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, are people’s widgets not looking as pretty as they should be? I’ve found it helpful to evaluate technology problems in the context of how the functionality of a system is affected. There’s a huge difference between losing a minor feature of a program versus losing the core business requirements.

Is there a workaround?

In today’s world, technology is often about the automation of manual processes. If the automation fails, users can often revert to the (albeit slower, more painful) older methods of completing their work. If the problem has no workaround, however, you obviously have a bigger issue to contend with. Keep in mind though, workarounds are only as good as the user’s ability to carry them out. If your automated trading system goes down at 3:50PM, and no one remembers how to enter trades on the old green screen terminals, you might as well not have those terminals in the first place.

Ubuntu 8.10 is finally out, and Keir Thomas over at Lifehacker posted a nice article about initial impressions.  Myself, I’ll probably stick with 8.04 for now, since I’ve finally got it tweaked such that everything works.  But it’ll be fun to play around with it in a VM to see what it’s like.

How about you?  Are you planning on upgrading?

MS08-067: The Worms are Loose

For anyone who hasn’t yet heard, last week Microsoft released a critical security bulletin regarding a serious vulnerability in the Server service, affecting nearly every version of Windows. Just today, Sans ISC reported that there is a worm loose in the wild that appears to be exploiting this nasty problem. If you haven’t already patched your personal computers and your servers, do so now.

Cross Site Request Forgery

You know how nice it is that whenever you head back to Amazon.com, it already knows who you are? This is because of a neat feature in web browsers called “Cookies”, which are basically little bits of information that web sites place on your computer. From that point on, every time you visit that site, the cookie is sent along with all the other information your computer uploads to the site, such as what web page you are requesting to view. This allows the site to recognize who you are without requesting you log in. Nice, right?

Well, it turns out that this same feature will allow hackers to essentially back-door a request to your favorite sites, and perform any available action using your cached credentials.  Steve Gibson over at Security Now does a nice job explaining the more technical aspects of the problem in episode #166, which aired around two weeks ago, so I’ll leave the details to the experts.  Suffice it to say, if Steve says this is a big deal (and he does), you need to pay attention.

Basically speaking, the ways to avoid this are two-fold.  First, Gibson recommends actively logging out of any web sites that you aren’t actively using.  This would include things like Amazon, E-Bay, and especially sites such as banks or brokers.  If you happen to see one of those little “remember me” checkboxes when logging in, leave it blank!  This will prevent the problem from occuring in the first place.  But because we are all human, and tend to forget to do such things from time to time (present company most definitely included), there’s also a plug-in available for Firefox, called CSRF Protector, which stands for “Cross Site Request Forgery”.  It all but transparently blocks this kind of exploit from occurring, so it comes highly recommended.

Where I admit I have a problem

Hi folks.  My name is Josh, and I’m a TV addict.

Sunday football notwithstanding (and even that needs a little tempering now and then), I usually watched 3-4 hours of TV a day in college.  With over two hundred channels of digital picture and Dolby 6.1 sound, there was always something on that I thought I would like.  Between endless loops of Sports Center (which by the way could be the greatest time waster ever), Rachel Ray (I do thank her for teaching me how to cook as a single college guy), and Law & Order, I was never at a loss for any on-screen entertainment.  Looking back on it, I shudder thinking how much I could have accomplished had it not been for that glowing tube of distraction.

Now that I’ve cut off everything but standard cable (meaning I only get national networks and a few odd stragglers like Bravo), the field is a lot narrower.  But still, there’s lots of stuff on, especially come the weekends.  After all, it’s college football season, baseball season just ended (go Phils!), and the NFL is in full swing.  So I still find myself surfing the endless array of sports being shown.  That, and with my favorite Bravo show Top Chef ready to start its new season, I’ll soon have even more fodder at my disposal.  So what’s a guy to do?

Enter MythTv

For those of you who aren’t aware, MythTV is an open-source project that is designed to replace the likes of Windows Media Center.  It allows for you to watch, pause, and record live TV, using a Linux based computer as the recording device.  It’s certainly not that easy to set up, but I’ve found it to be a nice challenge and quite a good system once it’s configured.  I’ll leave the setup instructions for another post though.

So, you might ask, how on Earth could a DVR system possibly help with productivity?  Simply put, my new rule of TV is that I can only watch items that I’ve recorded previously, and any items older than a week are deleted, regardless of whether or not they’ve been viewed.  The idea behind this is that it should eliminate that mindless “browsing” style of TV-watching that I’ve picked up over the years.  I find that this is the main time-wasting practice, as opposed to A and I watching our favorite shows.

This new rule goes into effect immediately!  There will be a few exceptions (no, I did not watch the Phils win the Series after the fact, nor would I want to watch the Super Bowl on a delay), but overall I’m hoping this will drastically reduce my needless TV time, when I could instead be clearing items off that ever-growing “to-do” list of mine.  I’ll report in on how it works!