A Wandering Mind

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.

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.

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.

“Once you have defined all your work, you can trust that your lists of things to do are complete. And your context, time, and energy available still allow you the option of more than one thing to do.” -David Allen, Author of Getting Things Done.

B.G.T.D (Before Getting Things Done)

I have never been an “organized” person by the classic definition.

As a child my mother had to constantly prod me into cleaning my room, often requiring assistance to achieve even a modicum of organization.  Despite our best efforts, my toys would quickly become scattered about the room, and all too often calls requesting help finding a favorite item would be heard throughout the house.

My lack of structure, however, extended far beyond the physical realm.  I’ve always been a procrastinator by trait; in college I almost always wrote papers in the wee hours of the morning before stumbling into class to turn them in.  In my first job out of college (as a caseworker for a children’s mental health unit), I quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responsibilities thrown my way.  Ultimately, I left rather than flounder in my work.

I’ve tried various kinds of organizational systems over the course of my life, the most notable of which was probably the 7 Habits of Steven Covey.  I never stuck with anything for longer than six months, mostly because it never felt like the system really made any difference.  I always felt like things were being missed.

What Changed

In my first job in technology (in a joint developer / production support position), I found myself in a similar situation as before.  There was a near constant barrage of e-mails, phone calls, and drop-by advice seekers, constantly interrupting my flow.  I found it extremely difficult to keep track of all the various open loops and responsibilities, and nearly missed critical deliverables several times.

To be honest, I don’t remember how I got my hands on David Allen’s book Getting Things Done.  What I do remember is the way what I read immediately resonated with me.  Here was a system whose foundation was simple: write everything down, and refer to your lists unmercifully.  It was an incredible experience to suddenly understand the source of my angst had been not the environment around me, but my inability to trust my mind to recall all my responsibilities.

Now I would never claim that I’m perfect after adopting GTD.  We’re all human, and prone to fall off the wagon on occasion.  GTD is not a magic bullet, and in my mind one still needs elements such as motivation to be successful.  What it has given me, however, is a newfound calm and peace of mind; for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m fully aware of everything I need to do, and I can relax in that knowledge.  The job is no different: distractions are a constant and unavoidable part of my day.  But now, I feel confident in the ability to shift from task to task, without fear of anything slipping through the cracks.  To say it’s a profound change would not be an exaggeration in any way, shape, or form.