A Wandering Mind

His heart was pounding, racing at a pace that surely would make any competent doctor raise an immediate concern for the safety of his patient. Beads of sweat rolled slowly down his forehead, wiped away by a hurried swipe of a forearm, only to be replaced by fresh ones. He was hunched over his keyboard, fingers flicking over its surface in a frantic blur of activity. His eyes gleamed with fury; two dark spots whose glare was entirely focused on the screen before him.

It was anything but an elegant fight that they waged, the operator and his silicon-based opponent. They darted back and forth, each one probing the other for any sign of weakness. Even as one seemed to gain the upper hand, the other would counter with a move both swift and unexpected. It was a war of attrition waged by two stubborn parties: one driven by his need for dominance, the other because it did not know how to do anything but respond in kind.

Words and numbers trailed endlessly across the screen, a seemingly meaningless stream of nonsense, uttered by a mind bereft of all reason. Yet to the operator it all made perfect sense; perfect nonsense, that is. As his nemesis endlessly spewed chunks of data, his eyes sprinted back and forth, trying as best he could to collect and analyze it all. But try as he might, it seemed always that his enemy held the upper hand. Just as he gleaned a tiny bit of understanding, some small nugget of progress, a new wrinkle would appear, more confounding than the last.

As his frustration grew he felt his temples begin to throb; gently at first, but increasingly as time passed. It was as if his body was trying to tell him “Back off, you’re in dangerous territory.” But he was past all reason, so completely consumed he was with his task at hand. On and on he pushed, till the throbbing became outright agony. He flung open the drawer to his right, digging feverishly through its contents until a small bottle was found. Pawing it open, he quickly extracted two small white pills and swallowed them hurriedly, without water. They offered little hope of relief, but perhaps they would give him the edge he so desperately desired, no, needed.

So, I’ll give you three guesses around what the above narrative is about. A piece from my first attempt at an epic sci-fi perhaps (yes, that is very much on my someday list)?

I’ll give you a hint: been following the saga of Urban Meyer, the embattled yet highly acclaimed football coach of the Florida Gators? If you have, you know that he’s basically been told by his doctors that the very thing that makes him one of the most successful coaches in history may also cause him to prematurely leave this Earth: his singular focus and intensity.

When I first read this story, my immediate thought was “Wow, that could be describing me to a T, minus the arachnoid cyst pressuring his skull and all.” I am probably one of the more driven individuals you’ll ever meet; when my mind is set on solving some problem, it’s a nearly useless task to try and pull me away. Just ask my wife, she’ll be happy to oblige you with all sorts of evidence supporting that statement.

On the one hand, this trait is an asset: it lets me persevere when others would stop, long discouraged by setbacks and seemingly insurmountable challenges. It’s probably the major reason why I’ve been so successful in a field that, up until around three years ago, I knew nothing about. But there is a dark side to this unending focus. It manifests as the (not so at times) occasional splitting headache, the missed personal responsibility, the midnight awakenings when nothing short of a blow to the skull will seemingly quiet my mind.

Faced with the prospect of enduring this escalating chain of physical and emotional malaise, I’ve made the decision, much as Meyer did, to step back. No, I’m not taking a leave of absence, but I am engaging in a concerted effort to become more aware of my emotions and the physical manifestations thereof. Journaling, reminder alarms to “check in” with my state of mind, even asking others to notice when my symptoms begin to show themselves.

I love my work, but I love my family and my health above all else.

A Brief Recap

In part I of this two-part series we talked about the first form of what I call “Racing Brain Syndrome”, the “Stress Induced” variety. To briefly recite the main points:

• It is usually caused by underlying anxiety about some aspect of your life, be it work, home life, or just plain keeping stuff in your head about things you’ve committed to doing.
• This “stuff” can be either real or imagined (i.e. you’re going to get fired for writing a personal e-mail at work, once)
• It is best remedied by either:
  • writing things down and clarifying all the details of what you need to do to take care of whatever is bothering you (best for dealing with the former “real” source of anxiety)
  • practicing a little psychological technique called cognitive behavior therapy, which teaches you to examine and refute irrational thoughts using logical techniques.

Now we’ll talk about the second form of RBS, called “Excitement Based”.

It’s, well, due to excitement (duh)

Yeah, that does seem pretty obvious, doesn’t it?

In some ways this form of RBS can almost be seen as a positive thing, in that it means you have some good positive feelings about your life. Think about it: if you were bored and depressed, would you be waking up at three in the morning with some fascinating new take on that problem at work? At the time you may find yourself more annoyed by your brain’s utter refusal to quiet down, but if properly harnessed, these midnight revelations can actually greatly add to your productivity and creativity.

The trick to properly capturing these sudden bursts is to do just that: capture them

“Huh?”, you may say. Well, think about it this way: the very reason why your mind is refusing to let you drift off is because it’s saying “Hey, I have this great idea, but if you go back to sleep, you’ll forget me and I’ll be lost forever!” In a way it’s almost a built in self defense mechanism, designed to keep your late night brainstorms from slipping through the cracks.

To convince your brain not to concern itself with retaining this newfound wisdom, I suggest you follow the same basic tenet of GTD we used to combat the stress-induced variety of RBS: get it out of your head, now. Write it in the notebook you keep by your bedside table (you do keep one there, right?), send yourself a quick e-mail on the CrackBerry (yes, I’ve been known to do that in the wee hours of the morning), even scribble it on a spare Kleenex or other handy medium if you must.

You might think this behavior will just exacerbate the issue, since it will likely make you more fully awake. While that’s true, I would suggest that until the thoughts rolling around in your brain are properly captured and accounted for, you’ll likely find yourself tossing and turning restlessly anyway. This way, you’ll at least get things recorded so that you’re not battling that inner voice, nagging you about unfinished business. Trust me, that’s a battle you’ll come out on the losing end of every time.

We’ve all had this happen to us at one time or another. You wake up in the middle of the night, thoughts rushing through your head at a mad pace. You try to take the zen-like approach of “letting them go”, but it’s hopeless. You toss and turn, but the harder you try to sleep, the more awake you are. This, friends, is what I call “Racing Brain Syndrome”.

There are two main forms of this nasty little bug, which we’ll call “Stress Induced” and “Excitement Based”. In this post, we’ll look at the first variety in more detail.

Stress Induced

As the name implies, this version is caused by an excess of built up stress that has yet to be dealt with. Common symptoms (not inclusive of the other variant of this syndrome) include racing pulse, pounding heartbeat, cold sweats, and possibly (in extreme cases) delusions of persecution or general paranoia.

Now stress, as you well know, can come from many sources, including the practice of keeping things in your head, nagging concerns over projects left un-planned, fear of upcoming regulatory audits (a favorite of us IT folks), and of course the ever present conflict between the Ego and the Id caused by an underlying need for affection, complicated by an Oedipus complex.

Whoops, I must apologize for that last one. This post has me reverting to my old psychobabble style of writing. Ignore that one, will you please?

When dealing with this variety of RBS, one’s best course of action is tri-fold:

1. Determine if the cause of the stress is a rational one. That is, are you feeling stressed because you’ve fallen off your good practice of keeping things out of your head, or are you suddenly having a sinking feeling that you’ve left your torrent bot up and running at work, and the folks from InfoSec are, at this very moment, hot on your trail? Ok, that’s an extreme example, but you get my drift.
2. If the former, your best bet is to take a few minutes and put some thoughts down on paper around what is bothering you. You don’t have to answer every question out there; just make sure every question is written down so you are confident it won’t get lost in the shuffle.
3. If the latter, you would be advised to fall back on a technique I used to teach to the children at the mental health clinic I worked at out of college, called (in it’s most complex form) Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. The basic idea is that you write down the thoughts that are causing you discomfort, such as “I’m afraid the ninjas from security are after me”, then examine them in a critical, analytical fashion. For instance, what evidence is there that you’re really about to be attacked in your sleep? Do you even have a torrent bot on your work computer? These techniques are usually used by patients with more severe mental health issues such as depression or anxiety disorder, but they serve RBS sufferers equally well.

On a sidenote, if you’re actually interested in a more clinical view of CBT, I’d heartily recommend the book The Feeling Good Handbook by a fellow named David Burns.

Next time we’ll examine the milder, and perhaps more pleasant variety of RBS, “Excitement Based”.

Recently I’ve started using the “Estimate” tag on RTM as a way to organize tasks by how long I think they will take. I’ve found it’s been a real help in deciding what to do at a given time, especially when I have short breaks in between meetings or larger tasks. After trying it out for a bit, I quickly decided that it was now a rule that all recorded next actions must have a time estimate attached to them.

One of the really nice features of RTM is its flexible search system. For example, let’s say I had about 20 minutes to spare, and wanted to see if there was any low hanging fruit available. I simply type in “timeEstime:’<20min’ and voila, a list of tasks that I could easily get out of the way. I’ve found it to be quite a useful trick when faced with 15 – 30 minutes of useful time on my hands. It doesn’t happen that often, but I’ve found that it definately has decreased the number of simple one-off tasks malingering on my lists.

So what do you think? Are time estimates worth their effort, and helpful in planning your daily work? Or do you find them inaccurate and a waste of time, especially for small, low-level tasks?

So you might remember a previous post where I lamented my lack of a “Someday” list. Well, since then, things seem to have swung around to the opposite extreme. I’ve now got a healthy selection of projects-in-waiting, both for work and personal. Partly it’s been because I’ve been better at cleansing my action and project lists on a weekly basis; anything that has laid static for more than a few weeks gets archived and tagged “Someday”. But I’d say with confidence that the growth is largely attributable to a shear lack of time.

Ever since the birth of my son Taylor, things at home have been, well, busy to say the least. It’s been a struggle just to keep up with the day to day work, such as keeping the house clean, the laundry done, and the trash empty. With such little time and energy left over for personal projects, strict adherence to priorities and ruthless cutting of scope has been the rule of thumb. So much for things like learning Perl (though I’m sneaking this in at the gym on the treadmill), building a new Snort server, or even non-geeky work like painting the exterior windows on the house.

Work, while slightly less crazy, has been quite a whirlwind as well. After some purging of wartime troop levels, the remaining force has been tasked with a “lights on” mantra. That’s all fine and good, except you’d be ludicrous to call what we do “keeping the lights on”. Software still needs to be updated, security maintained, systems administered. Yes, some of the excess fluff has been removed: no more long troubleshooting of user issues (is it replicated on a clean system? If not, guess what, you get to re-image your computer) or extra out-of-scope work. But still, there is no shortage of necessary tasks to be had. Combine that with taking on a new product and expanding my role to include some levels of data-guru, and you’ve got a packed agenda.

On the one hand, it is more than a little frustrating to see the mounting list of “not yets” and “maybe somedays”. But at least I can be secure that everything is safely tucked away, waiting for the day when changing diapers isn’t an hourly occurence, or treading water at work less the norm.

Lately things have been a little crazy at work. Between a fair amount of vacations (some planned, some not) and a never ending stream of project work, my days have been pretty much filled to capacity. I’m a guy who prides himself on being efficient and squeezing the most out of my time, but damn, the difficulty of getting everything done has risen to a new level.

One of the most challenging aspects has been the sheer volume of requests that come in, requiring some form of response / work. Mind you, it’s not that I am stressing out because I can’t find the time to do the work; no, it’s become stressful just taking the time to explain to people that I can’t do the work! My management is excellent at backing us when we tell our business that a given request / project needs to wait or will take an extended period of time, but that doesn’t avoid the necessity of managing a constant stream of incoming and outgoing communications.

What I’d really like to do is put up an auto-responder that would sound something like this:

“Hello, thank you for e-mailing me. Please be aware that due to a sizeable project load, I will not have sufficient time to take on any additional ad-hoc requests for the next month. If your e-mail is regarding an urgent matter that cannot wait (Severity 1 / 1.5 critical outages), please call my extension to discuss. If your e-mail is regarding an existing project, don’t worry, I will respond to you in the next 24 hours. Otherwise, please be aware that it may be an extended period of time before I respond. Thank you for your understanding.”

A little extreme? Yes, I’ll admit that. But seriously, I can’t begin to think how much more productive I would be if I could eliminate this needless “Hi So and So, thanks but I won’t be able to do that for at least a month.”

Given that a proposal to my boss to implement this would likely be met with hysterical laughter (followed by one of those glowering, “Are you serious” looks), here’s some possible alternatives I’m considering, as a kind of stop gap measure if you will:

1. E-mail (Outlook, GMail, all of the above) is closed, not minimized, except for a once per hour check to process incoming items. Every hour my inbox needs to be cleared and all e-mails either placed in the “Needs Reply” folder, the “Reference” folder, or logged as an to-do in Remember The Milk. Truth be told I’m just not doing well at ignoring checking e-mail with Outlook only minimized, despite turning off those annoying pop-up notices.
2. Dedicate a period of the day to responding to e-mails, outside of which only critical issues would be answered. I’m thinking 1.5 hours in the afternoon would be sufficient.
3. Put up an auto-responder for any e-mails marked urgent with the following:”Hello, thank you for e-mail me. Because your e-mail was marked as urgent, you are receiving this automated response to inform you that I only check e-mail approximately once every hour, and respond to the majority of e-mails once daily at (insert chosen time here). If you are reporting a critical (Severity 1 / 1.5) issue, or feel you need a response before the time noted above, please call me directly at extension xxxx, or call my team line at xxxx. Thank you.”

What do you think? Still too extreme?

When I first started up this blog, I had a fairly clear vision of where I wanted to go with it. Having browsed the musings of established GTD bloggers like Merlin Mann of 43folders.com and Andrew Mason of Did I Get Things Done, I wanted to follow in their mold of becoming an established voice in the field. But then along the way, it seemed that I hit a wall. You see, one of my goals has always been to have some useful, original content to post; trouble is, GTD is such a hot topic these days that original thought or advice is rather hard to come by.

Now granted I could talk about how to set up your “trusted system”, or how to maintain discipline with starting tasks, etc. But the truth is, someone has probably already written about it, and with far better clarity and experience than I could claim to have. I’ve been at this game for just under two years now; hardly enough time to call myself a guru of any kind. So what’s a disenchanted productivity geek to do?

In short, I’ve decided to take the blog in a bit of a new direction. Instead of trying to write some authoritative pieces on how you should integrate the concepts of GTD into your life, I’m going to keep it rather simple, and just talk about me. Now before you ask, this is not going to turn into some ego-maniacal diatribe on why Josh Is God or some such nonsense. No, instead, I’m just going to write as what I am: a guy coming from a world of disorganization and ADD-exacerbated messiness, trying his damndest to learn how to keep everything together (or at least keep appearances of such, but don’t tell my boss).

From now on, it’s going to be a more journalistic approach. I.e. “I read this really interesting post the other day, here’s how I’ve tried to incorporate it, here’s why it worked / didn’t work.” I’ll be happy to tell you all about my struggles and triumphs, and maybe even those of others I meet or talk to. But from now one, the one thing I’ll try not to do is tell you how to do things. If you ask (comments still encouraged), I’ll be happy to give an opinion, but outside of that, the advice column is closed.

Beyond that, I’m also going to try and expand a bit on the non-GTD topics that are holding my interest. I think a while ago I wrote a pretty decent introduction to a series on e-mail encryption… maybe it’s time to pick that up again, eh?

Here’s to a little diversity and change in focus. Hopefully it will be just the thing to help break out of a bit of writer’s block and get this blog up and running again.

Yes, it’s been a while since I last posted. Truth be told, I’ve a) been really busy, both at work and at home, b) been in a bit of a creative funk, c) fallen of the GTD wagon. There, I said it. “Hi there everyone. My name is Josh and I keep stuff in my head.”

Thinking back over the last few weeks, I can see a couple places where I’ve fallen short in my practices:

• Processing Inbox To Zero: I’ve been doing quite a lot of what Merlin Mann calls “Emergency Scanning” lately. Usually my rule is that once I touch my inbox, everything has to be processed. Instead, I’ve been flipping through items, making sure there weren’t any brewing fires, then only processing everything every other day or so. Alas, as a wise man (probably) once said, “A nuisance today is a fire tomorrow.”
• Reviewing Religously: I don’t think I need to espouse the necessity of reviewing what’s on your plate early and often. For the past two weeks or so, however, it’s been a pretty constant fire-fight, with the latest really being the most urgent. It’s a draining place to be in, and I hope soon that the firestorms will die down and I can get back to being a bit more proactive.
• The Weekly Review: Already one of my week spots, and I’m afraid I’ve completely skipped over this in favor of the same emergency “quick-scan” mentality. I’ve been so focused on one or two projects that outside of those two, I haven’t really cared what else got pushed off.

So, like a golf player whose swing has gone awry, I’m returning to the fundamentals to break out of the slump. Here’s a few self-imposed rules:

1. Every day must end with an empty, processed inbox. NO EXCEPTION
2. Any e-mail that arrived prior to 3:00PM must either be answered, delegated, or responded to with a “I don’t know at the moment but I’ll get back to you” note and subsequent logging of action.
3. Sunday nights from 8-9PM are set aside for weekly review. My wife has already been recruited to enforce this policy, on penalty of, well, horrible things (the mind of a pregnant woman is a dangerous thing).

Oh, and I plan on posting to Twitter and this blog over the next week to log my progress getting back in the saddle. Truth be told I do very much miss the “mind-like-water” feeling that always accompanied knowing exactly what’s on my plate at any given time.

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.