A Wandering Mind

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.

*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?

With the market trending as it has lately, I’m sure that many companies are feeling pressure to cut costs and make more efficient use of resources. Being in IT puts us in a position squarely targeted in this kind of a situation; after all, technology units are often basically glorified cost centers.

Given the gloomy outlook for the coming months, I thought it might be appropriate to post some thoughts on how we (as GTD’ers, especially in IT) can add as much value to our services as possible. Think of this as an expanded framework for determining what you should be spending your time doing, now that resources are likely to be tighter than ever.

One thing about the tightening budget strings is that it brings things like evaluating priority and value of work into clear focus. Now more than ever, it is important to approach your daily work with a rational, methodical, and clear-headed approach, as opposed to simply giving in to whatever is yelling at you the loudest. Needless fat must be trimmed in order to ensure that we are providing the maximum of value, with a minimum of cost.

In my job previous to the current one, I worked on a development team that followed a model of total baseline operation. That is, the only “cost” associated with our efforts was that of the set staffing; there was no “discretionary” bump in resources when the list of projects grew too long. As a result, we needed to adopt a method of carefully choosing how our time was spent, to ensure that we were providing as much value to the business as possible.

Each project submitted for possible work had to be justified in four key areas:

1. Reduction of risk – perhaps the project would allow for closer scrutiny of certain high-risk areas of operation, such as large dollar transactions, or fix a bug that had the potential to cost thousands in errors.
2. Direct cost savings – by automating a process, it would eliminate the need to hire additional staff to cover an increase in volume or additional services offered. Note: while we didn’t like to think of it this way, the opposite was also true, in that some of our projects likely got people laid off.
3. Client service – the project might fulfill the request of an important client or set of clients. Or, it might allow the company to provide services not yet offered, thus enhancing our appeal.
4. Reduction of system load – because a great deal of the processing work for my company takes place on legacy mainframe systems, increased system load can almost directly equate with increased expenditures (more MIPS = more $$).

If a project didn’t meet merit based on the above four-tiered evaluation, it was unceremoniously dropped from our list of work. We had to be brutually efficient at this triage; with no cost for our efforts, the projects poured in. Even today, I still consider it one of the best frameworks for evaluating potential projects.

So the next time you’re trying to decide how to spend your time, look at your project list with a critical eye, and consider what value it truly adds for your clients.