A Wandering Mind

While I am not a fan of Microsoft Auto Update due to a little piece of, ahem, semi-spyware it installs, for those who are less technically inclined it still gives you an easy and safe way to ensure your computer is kept up to date. This is extremely important as Microsoft releases updates monthly (more frequently these days) which help prevent hackers and other malcontents from taking advantage of your computer’s generosity.

Degree of Difficulty: 1 (Grandma)

Note: All tips published will have a difficulty rating of 1 (Grandma could do it), 2 (Normal User), 3 (Power User), and 4 (Geeks only).

To access the screen shown above, click on Start, then select Control Panel, and Automatic Updates. Then, select the button titled “Automatic”. You can then choose when you want Windows to download and update your system. Hint: pick a time in the early hours of the morning, when you can leave your computer running overnight. Wednesday at 3:00AM is a good time, as Microsoft routinely releases patches on the second Tuesday of the month.

Most of the time, the update process should be completely transparent to you, and your computer should be ready for you to check your e-mail with the morning coffee. Occasionally however, you may run into an update that requires you to accept a user agreement, or requires a restart of your PC. If this is the case, you’ll see some kind of on-screen notification, usually in the form of one of those little bubbles in the bottom right corner.

Today was my first day back from work after nearly a week off.  Surprisingly, I had only around 300 e-mails to process in my inbox; I usually receive that amount each day, not counting automated alerts and the like.  After reviewing everything and making sure all my lists were up to date, I began working on what was the most important, urgent matter at the time.

By about 9:30AM, several fires had appeared on the horizon.  Each demanded much attention from my team, and it quickly became obvious that my day would not be very productive, at least from the perspective of crossing off a lot of items.

In the past situations such as this would cause my blood pressure to rise almost instantly.  Not because of any physical danger (“When Servers Attack” anyone?), but because subconsciously, I immediately began worrying about what I was not doing.  That is, if I was spending all my effort to correct some immediate problem, what was getting implicitly pushed off?

So what happened today?  Certainly at first, I felt a slight twinge and a brief rise in my pulse.  But after taking a breath and calmly reviewing everything in my “Next Actions” list, I was able to definitely know that I was indeed directing my time appropriately.  The feeling was one I am certainly not used to!

This state of being was possible only because of the following pre-existing conditions:

1. I have been incredibly good in terms of making sure that each and every possible “open loop” is in my trusted system, no matter how small or how insignificant it may seem.
2. I have developed the habit that whenever one of those “it needs to be done now” (usually stated by whomever reports the problem) type of problems hits my plate, I do the following:
   1. Use soothing words and a little empathic listening to get the person to remain calm.
   2. Ask pointed questions about the true severity of the issue. How many, what’s the workaround, etc.
   3. Take note of all the information for future reference. Moleskins are great for this.
   4. Politely let the person know that I am going to review the problem with my team and get back to them when more information is available, and as soon as time permits.
   5. If I believe the problem is truly urgent, I’ll immediately decide on a next action and put it in my list. Otherwise, I’ll throw some reminder into my “in bin” for later perusal.
3. I review my lists with near religious regularity, constantly reminding myself to not lose sight of the larger picture.

All of these combine to enable me to do my daily work with agility and perspective, such that at any given point, I feel very confident that I am doing exactly what  I should be.

The most difficult part?  Maintaining an even keel and and objective frame of reference in the face of perpetual problems.  That is a skill that I am still very much honing, and one that can only be developed through daily practice and a strong sense of your emotions.

How do you maintain a broad view of your responsibilities, while still responding to the fires that fall on you unexpectedly?

For my inaugural “Information Security Made Easy” post, I’ll give a quick and simple tip.  While perhaps more of a convenience and usability tweak than a true security tip, it nonetheless will help keep excess garbage from being downloaded and displayed on your computer, which is always a good thing.

Degree Of Difficulty: 1 (Grandma)
Note: All tips published will have a difficulty rating of 1 (Grandma could do it), 2 (Normal User), 3 (Power User), and 4 (Geeks only).

You know those incredibly annoying rollover ads common on websites these days?  Sure you do.  They’re the ones where if your mouse happens to move over a tiny corner, it explodes in flashy glory over your entire screen.  The only way to get rid of it is to click a tiny “x” in the corner of the screen, which sometimes seems to move about randomly, taunting you.

Well, fear not, there is an easy and effective way to be rid of these once and for all, using the excellent Firefox add-on “AdBlock Plus”.  It installs in minutes, and instantly will block a high percentage of these ads without any user input.

Should you still find something being shown that you wish to block, you simply have to right click on the image, and select “Adblock Image”.

One of my favorite sites to browse, Sports Illustrated, was downright loaded with these kind of annoyances.  Now that I’m using AdBlock, I’m able to browse freely with no interruptions.

Adblock Plus is available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865.

Most people would agree that one of the principle benefits of GTD is the ability to see anything and everything on your plate at a given time.  Once you have mastered the fundamentals of clearing your brain and deciding on next actions, your lists should be fairly comprehensive and all encompassing.  This fact, in and of itself, gives GTD a lot of its cathartic power, in that you can see all your open loops in one place and have a good context to choose what to work on.

But what if I don’t want to do it?

Pop quiz: what is the next step after you have 1) Collected, 2)Processed, 3)Organized, and 4)Reviewed? It’s Do of course!

So naturally, you look at all your next actions, and automatically one jumps out at you and says “Pick me!  I’m fun and easy”.  Emotionally, you want to listen to that little voice, so you start working.  Before you know it, the task is done, and you go back to your list.  Immediately, another item jumps off the page, practically screaming “I’m next!  Me!”  And so on.

At the end of the day, you probably have checked off a good number of things off your lists.  You probably feel good and think to yourself, “Look at all I’ve accomplished today!  This GTD stuff isn’t so hard.”

Here’s the problem: you know all those tasks you’ve been doing all day?  While some of them probably legitimately needed to be done, most probably fell into what Steven Covey calls the “Un-important / Not-Urgent” category.  In other words, while they may have given you an emotional “good feeling” and felt good while being done, they probably did not do much to advance your larger goals and move critical projects along.

But the server is calling my name…

I’ll use myself as a prime example.  This morning, after I made sure my task lists were all up to date, I had a choice between the following:

1. Restore backup of my linux home media server, from before I managed to completely corrupt it with various packages I didn’t really need (the topic of another post perhaps).
2. Finish packing for the holiday trip my wife and I are taking, scheduled to leave this evening.
3. Empty the cat litter.
4. Bring in new cat litter from the trunk of the car.

So looking at this list, and with the knowledge that I am a consummate geek, which one do you think appealed the most to me?  Hint: if you said “Empty the cat litter”, you obviously don’t understand the phrase “consummate geek”, and need to consult Wikipedia or another credible source.

Naturally, it’s number one, “Restore the backup…”.  I ended up spending around three hours struggling with correcting miscellaneous configuration and system settings.  In the end, while I was successful, I felt that I had not accomplished much of anything, and felt stressed and anxious about completing the remainder of my items for the day.  In retrospect, if I’d just taken care of items 2, 3, and 4 first, then moved on to my geekery, I probably would feel a lot better, and would have still had time to fix up my system before our departure.

So the next time you find yourself caving in to that little voice telling you “Pick this one, it’ll be fun!”, stop and think for a moment.  Is this really what I need to be doing right now?  What will happen if I don’t do “X”?  Is this one of those “Non Urgent / Not-Important” tasks?  Trust me, you’ll be thanking yourself later.  And that fun-to-do task the little voice was nagging you about?  It will be even more fun later.

Here are some sobering quotes to consider:

• “As the global financial crisis continues, we expect criminals to take advantage of the panic and fear among consumers worldwide and increase their targeted phishing attacks in the coming months.”
• “Phishing attacks spiked significantly following the announcements of various bank failures in late September. While there was no strong trend towards using any one specific bank or failure, overall increases in phishing activity in the days following each major announcement were recorded.”
• “Acquisition of innocent machines via email and Web-based infections continued in Q3 at about the same pace measured in Q2, with over 5,000 new zombies created every hour.” Note: a “zombie” is a computer which has been infected by viruses or other bad programs, which allows hackers to remotely manipulate or control the machine and use it for their own purposes. A Very Bad Thing to say the least.

Source: http://www.securecomputing.com/pdf/SCC-InternetThrtRprt-Oct08.pdf

There is an enormous amount of malicious content out on the web, just waiting to be installed on an unaware user’s computer. In the best case scenario, you may only see some annoying pop up ads for sites touting items such as Viagra knock-offs or pornography. In many cases, however, the result may be far less obvious, but far more nefarious.

I do not pretend to be any kind of true expert in the world of computer security. What I am is someone who is highly security conscious (some would say bordering on paranoia), who would like to help those who are less technically savvy to reduce their risk of being a victim of cyber-crime.  With computers  becoming more and more a part of our daily lives, keeping your computer safe is every bit as important as locking your doors at night.

This post is the first in a new weekly series I’ll call “Information Security Made Easy”. Every Tuesday or thereabouts, I’ll be posting tips or short how-to articles containing steps that normal users can take to better defend themselves against this new breed of crime. Every post will have a difficulty rating, ranging from “Grandma” to “Geek”, indicating how hard the recommended action is. In many cases, the tips I’ll be writing about may make your ability to freely browse the internet a little more difficult; if that’s the case, I’ll tell you so, frankly and clearly. Only you can decide if the trade-off is worthwhile.

If anyone has tips they think are worthwhile, please feel free to e-mail me at josh at awanderingmind dot com.  On that note, here’s your first tip: use a dedicated e-mail address whenever signing up for a website or entering your information.  That should help prevent your normal address from being bombarded with spam.

In Which Our Hero Selects His Weapon In The Battle Against Chaos

In many ways, the principles of GTD are rather tool-agnostic.  You can write down your tasks and dump your memory into any one of many different repositories, both physical and electronic.  That being said, it is helpful to have some kind of framework available with which you can evaluate all the various options out there.

In my experience, a GTD system works best when it meets the following criteria:

The system is readily available to you at all times

Your chosen repository will do you little good if you are not able to easily refer to it at all times. Whose to say, for instance, that you won’t suddenly get inspiration on a new project while out running (it happened to me today, as a matter of fact)?

Ease of use

Similar to the above, but not necessarily the same. You could probably find a Web 2.0 app that was available on both your iPhone and online (therefore meeting the above criteria), but was still an absolute boor to use. If it’s not easy to query, edit, and analyze what’s in your system, you will surely shy away from using it, rendering it worthless.

Tagging or other means of categorizing items

Without the ability to easily filter and sort your lists based on contexts or other tags, the task of deciding what to do at any given moment becomes harder. For instance, if you are on the train headed home after work, and you only have access to your phone (and no internet), you should be able to quickly see a list of all the tasks in the “@phone” context.  It also makes it very easy to check off your “next action” and “waiting for” items across multiple projects.

Tracking of completed items

It is an accepted fact in the world of psychology that positive reinforcement is very powerful in changing behavior patterns. As you continue in your efforts to ingrain the principles of GTD into your daily life, being able to see all that you’ve accomplished can be a very powerful motivator to continue down your chosen path. I’ve found it amazingly satisfying to look back at the past week on a Friday and see just how much I’ve been able to do.

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I believe all three of these could be accomplished with any number of tools, be it a web app like Remember The Milk (a subtle endorsement for my weapon of choice) or a simple paper based notebook. To me, that’s the point of the framework: it’s platform independent. Hopefully you will find it useful in your quest to find the right tools for implementing GTD.

Speaking of which, if you already have a framework, what is it? How do you evaluate all the various options available to us?

I’ve read plenty of accounts of how GTD has made a tremendous impact on people’s professional lives. Increased effectiveness, higher productivity, reduced stress, maybe even quicker promotions (if my boss is reading, you may take that as you will ). I myself have seen a dramatic improvement in my performance on the job. But what about outside of work?

For the longest time, my wife often remarked about how little I followed the principles of GTD when it came to my personal life. After thinking about it, I had to admit: she was right. It took some good reflection and thought to figure out why this was happening, but in the end I came up with the following reasons why it seemed harder to implement GTD in my life outside of work:

1. My wife / friends / family couldn’t or wouldn’t fire me.
   Call it taking advantage of others’ generosity if you will, but it’s true. My relationships with the people in my life were established enough that they had just come to accept my forgetful, absent-minded ways as part of my personality.  Was it fair of me to have this attitude? Absolutely not, but subconsciously, it took a lot of soul-searching and re-affirming of my values and goals as a husband, a son, and a friend to get over it.
2. By the time I got home from work, I never felt like doing anything.
   The key phrase here is that I never felt like doing anything. That is to say, I didn’t feel like I was in the mood to take out the garbage, call the heating company, or work on putting flooring down on the second floor of our house. In David Burn’s excellent book The Feeling Good Handbook, he identifies this pattern of thinking as the classic “putting the cart before the horse” mentality. In effect, what I’m saying is “Unless I feel like doing something, I’m not going to do it.” If you think about it, this is a very unrealistic perspective to have, as there are very few things in life that you will always feel like doing! Instead, Burns suggests that you simply follow that wonderful Nike slogan and “Just do it.” With action comes motivation, and with motivation comes more action.  I had to become aware of this and change my thought pattern to break out of this rut.
3. I thought that I shouldn’t need some fancy system to keep track of my personal life.
   Let’s be honest here. When we make an agreement with ourselves to adopt the principles of GTD, we are implicitly admitting that our current skill set is in some way not sufficient to keep up. It was one thing for me to come to terms with this in my professional life, where I’m being constantly bombarded with information. But to agree that I needed this “helping hand” to be a better husband brought up all sorts of rather negative connotations in my head. If nothing else, I feared it would make my relationships with others less genuine, less spontaneous. But after contemplating my hesitations further, I decided that rather than see it as a mark of deficiency, I would view my use of GTD as evidence of my commitment to and care for my relationships with those around me.

I’m still far from perfect, and my habits at home have a lot of room for improvement.  But already, I’ve seen improvement in my life’s personal side.  I feel less overwhelmed when I get home, and find it easier to move projects along now that they are more clearly defined and broken into manageable steps.  Ultimately, the very thing that I was afraid would make my interactions more plastic and disingenuous is having the opposite effect; by freeing up my mind from trying to remember all the open loops, I’m able to really focus on those around me and live in the moment like never before.

How have you implemented GTD in your personal life, as opposed to work?  Do you follow the same principles and rules, or do you find yourself slipping?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in comments, and I’ll post the same question to my Twitter feed.

“What is it now?”

One of the biggest sources of distractions for me at work is the so-called “walk up”.  We work in an open environment: no walls, cubicles, offices, or other impediments.  On the one hand, it is tremendously liberating, in that it breads a culture of cooperation and agility unlike any other company I’ve worked for.  However, the downside is that it is extremely difficult to avoid people walking up to you at the most inconvenient of times.  Over time, I’ve developed the following strategies to mitigate this incessant problem.

30 now or 30 later

One of the first things I’ll say to someone who walks up to my desk is “Stop!  Before we go any further, you should know that I have a 30 second limit for walk-ins.  However, I’d be happy to set aside a half hour if you’ll set something up on my calendar.  So, you have a choice to make: thirty seconds now, or thirty minutes later.”  The idea is simple: you can interrupt me now, but you’ll pay because your time is limited.  Over time, more and more people just give up and schedule meetings in advance (which leads to a calendar full of somewhat useless meetings, but that’s a topic for another day).

Make it obvious you’re not to be disturbed

The Cranking Widgets Blog published some excellent ways to get those pesky walk ups to just, well, walk away.  Of those they listed, my favorite include:

1. Wear Headphones – Noise-canceling ones are essential to blocking out the constant chatter.  Combined with some jazz or other relaxing music from Pandora, these greatly enhance my ability to focus on the task at hand.
2. Hang a Sign – My favorites have included “Work In Progress – Do Not Disturb” and “Emergencies Only – Disturbers Will Be Prosecuted”.  While I don’t have a cubicle or office wall to place these on, I find putting them nicely on the outside corner of my desk does the trick.
3. Say “I’m Busy” – This could be as simple as a small but firm gesture towards the aforementioned sign.  Occasionally, however, a less subtle approach is needed.  You don’t need to be rude or abrupt; I usually say something along the lines of “Sorry, but I’m really busy at the moment, and unless this is a real emergency, can you please just schedule some time on my calendar?”

Book a meeting with yourself

To the above three excellent suggestions I’ll add a fourth, which comes from project management guru Scott Berkun: book yourself a conference room.  I usually reserve this for times when I require the singular focus that comes only with isolation.  If abused, it could not only anger your management due to your frequent absence, but also those who are trying to actually use those conference rooms for legitimate meetings.