A Wandering Mind

Ever had one of those tasks that just seems to sit endlessly on your to-do list? Every day you see it, waiting there, just screaming for some progress. But the end of the day comes, and there it still sits, without any update or progress to report. What is it about these kinds of tasks that makes them so unpleasant to start that they remain in perpetual limbo?

Well, among other things, according to the folks at PsyBlog this can be caused by our tendency to think at too abstract a level. Citing a study by Piers Steel at the University of Calgary, the referenced post does a great job of explaining the difference between abstract and concrete thinking. While I’m not going to go into detail about the study or its results (if you’re a former psychology nerd such as myself, you’re welcome to read it on your own), the basic finding was that by forcing people to think in a constructive, concrete manner, they were able to cut the average time to complete a seemingly meaningless task nearly in half (20.5 days down to 12.5 days on average). That’s an impressive result to anyone.

I found this to be true in my own experience, but was never quite able to verbalize it. I’d find that there were certain things on my list which would simply sit, incessantly staring back at me day after day. Whenever I tried to start working on them, I instantly lost motivation and inevitably moved on to something else. It was not until after I read this post that the light bulb finally went on: I wasn’t being concrete enough in my definition of the task at hand.

Here’s a good example: I might have a task called “Update documentation for product X.” Well, at first glance, you might call that a fairly specific item. But thinking further, I might begin to wonder “What exactly do I need to update about the documentation?” This invariably led to an even more detailed analysis, fostering questions such as “What screenshots do I need?” or “How can I prove out that my updates are correct?”

What I began to discover was that “fairly specific” task was in fact an entire project! All this time, my resistance had been due to what a project manager might diagnose as a failure to break work into small enough chunks to be easily tracked and defined. Once the task was broken down into chunks taking no more than a half hour or so, it suddenly became far easier to begin working on the item at hand.

When resources are tight, folks such as myself in the IT world are often asked to “do more with less”, to use a rather contrite phrase. With layoffs looming for many and already a reality for some, it goes without saying that in the coming year, so-called “knowledge workers” will be asked to stretch their capacity as far as humanly possible. So outside of working insane hours and sacrificing quality time with your family, how do we meet this goal and satisfy our clients?

Now, if you’re reading this blog, chances are you are already a productivity minded person, which puts you at an advantage above those around you. But beyond practicing our GTD skills of constant capture and ruthless review, an ability to single out and automate those routine, time-wasting tasks can prove equally as useful.

As a programmer / business analyst in my previous job (and even now as a product specialist / implementations manager), this mindset was constantly hammered into my way of thinking. There’s a saying that programmers are a lazy bunch, and I certainly won’t deny it; I will however argue that is a good thing. If you’re paying a programmer by the hour, would you rather they spend extra time re-inventing the wheel, or make efficient use of existing code? Similarly, if you’re working with a B.A., wouldn’t you appreciate it if they noticed some repeatable tasks you were paying staff to do that could be easily automated. Granted it’s not always quite that simple, since with automation often comes cost as well. It’s always a give-and-take situation, where the pros and cons must be carefully weighed. If it’s going to take 400 hours and $20,000 to automate a process that takes one person an hour a week to do, that’s probably not a good value.

But really, that’s not what I’m talking about here. The fact is, there are people paid lots of money with fancy initials like “P.M.P” after their name whose job it is to do analysis on larger business processes. No, what I’m suggesting is that you take a closer look at your own daily work, and see if there are any easy targets to be scripted or scheduled, so as to free up your time to take on higher value work. Here’s are three adjectives and phrases that describe good candidates for automation:

• Repeatable
  
  You perform the same task on a hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with very little change. It might be running a report and sending it to a client, doing some number crunching in an Excel sheet, or perhaps pouring over one of those dreadful “green bar” mainframe reports and pulling out some data.
• Rules Driven
  
  The task performed is based on hard business rules. For example, you open a report, and if a certain number is off by more than a given percentage, you have to send it to someone.
• Number Based
  
  Number crunching, by definition, is highly adaptable to automation. If you spend any amount of time manually punching in calculations or summary statistics, you could probably take care of all the work via something like macros (in MS Office, for example).

How far you go with this is totally up to you. I’m a pretty avid scripting geek, so I’ve been known to write VBScripts, AppleScripts, and even (for you hardcore geeks) bash scripts to do just about anything. Over the next week or so I’ll be looking for good resources on how to script / automate common tasks and tweeting them, so tune in! Here’s a few to get started:

• Recording And Customizing An Excel Macro – good for you Excel whiz kids.
• Beginners Guides: Understanding and Creating Batch Files – The do-it-all of Windows / DOS, batch files can be used to automate lots of simple tasks.

*Warning: this post contains references to dripping motor oil, shredding tires, and that oh-so-sexy smell of raw gasoline exiting tailpipes. In other words, get ready for a little car-p0rn0, GTD-style.

I was 17 when I bought my first real car: a 1987 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS. It was a beast of a vehicle, with a throaty (yet slightly underpowered) 305 cubic inch V8, twin Flowmaster exhausts, and of course, that great feature of 80′s muscle cars, T-Tops. Shortly after buying it, I discovered it was one of only 6,000 produced models known as the Aerocoupe. With a gently sloping rear window in the same style as the NASCAR racer of the same make and model, this made the car a semi collector item.

To say that I have many fond memories of that car would be a rather bland understatement of fact. I spent hours upon hours under that car, getting to know every bolt and screw in intimate detail. On Saturdays I would take friends out for a cruise to the local DQ, T-Tops off, the warm summer air doing its best to ruin the girls’ precise hairdos. Truthfully, I’d be lying if I said that only one adolescent fling took place in its back seat.

The car certainly had its share of flaws, including 1) a tendency to burn about a quart of oil for every tank of gas, 2) floorboards that were close to Flintstone style before an aluminum-clad intervention, and 3) those glorious T-Tops that leaked like a sieve when rain struck. But despite that, the car always had a certain, guttural romantic appeal to it. I suppose there’s just something about the throaty roar of Detroit iron that is irreplaceable in the mind of a teenager.

After around four years of ownership, I bought a Toyota pickup to serve as my “winter” car, since, needless to say, “Risky Business” (as the car came to be called) was near useless in snow. Shortly thereafter, at the behest of my parents (and my better judgment, financially speaking), I sold the car to a local mechanic, who promised to take good care of it. I can still hear that gentle, yet masculine thrum-thrum-thrum of the exhaust as that car drove off.

Ever since, I haven’t quite been able to let go of my desire for round two of mechanical challenge. But it always seems like other, more pressing priorities always took precedence. Get a job, have a family; certainly all very worthy tasks. But in the back of my head, the desire to feel that gut-tingling sensation of American-born acceleration just never went away. It lingered, clawing its way into my consciousness from time to time, mostly whenever I hear the familiar sound of a big block spewing half burned carbon through strait pipes.

Now what in the world, you may ask, does this little rambling story have to do with GTD? Well, you may recall that in my post GTD – 1 Year Later, I mentioned that one of my week spots was the blatant lack of a Someday / Maybe list. Well, it is a deficiency no longer. Behold my inaugural “Someday/Maybe” list:

So, anyone know of any 1987 Monte Carlo SS Aerocoupe’s for sale?

Lately I’ve been spending time working on the third floor of my house, preparing it to be the ultimate productivity / GTD / geek lair. Well, at least as much of an “ultimate” room as current economic conditions allow. Anyway, like any good GTD practitioner, I’ve been doing some good brainstorming around how to make this space as GTD friendly as possible, and thought I’d share some of the highlights.

1. A clearly accessible inbox
   
   
   While I mostly use e-mail as my collection point, the need for the occasional use of paper as a reminder still remains. Now I’m not a fan of fancy, gold-plated desk accessories, so instead I found a great little wire-metal set at the local IKEA. Eight bucks and I have a great three-tray collection point. I’m thinking one tray for things to read, one for general collection, and one for… TBD I suppose, suggestions welcome.
2. A functional way to archive materials, sans paper
   
   My @Reference folder is far and away the largest in my Outlook mailbox, as well it should be. But for those things like statements, receipts, magazine articles, etc, I’m thinking a nice, fast, feed-style scanner will do the trick. While I’m considering the Fujitsu ScanSnap, but its lackluster support of Linux may end that idea. I’m hoping to find a way to make indexed, search able PDFs from documents, so that I can easily find things based on search phrases like “December 2007 IRA Statement”. But that will be the subject of another post.
3. A large white-board like surface
   
   While I probably can’t afford the real thing, I’ve read about using tileboard as a good (and cheap) replacement. Nothing beats it for broad, brainstorm-style thinking and planning, or loud reminders of some home task left undone.

That’s about it for the practical, now what about the impractical? Think about what you would want if money were no hindrance whatsoever. Maybe along the lines of the ultimate GTD dashboard? Picture a huge, 60+ inch LCD, touch screen display, permanently showing your Remember The Milk (or other suitable GTD tool) homepage. Now you really have no excuse not to know what needs to be done.

And why not see how the man himself does it?

So what’s your dream GTD office like?