A Wandering Mind

I’ve blogged a bit over the life of this site about my use of a life-management framework called GTD and how profoundly it’s affected my life. Sometimes when I talk to people about it, a common response is “but why would I want to spend so much time keeping track of what I have to do instead of just doing it?”

The answer is that having everything in those magic lists gives you a kind of ultimate peace of mind that’s, well, hard to describe for those who haven’t experienced it. Now I know that makes it sounds like some kind of hippy-ish drug-induced trip; but really, the simple confidence of knowing all your responsibilities (“agreements” as David Allen, author of GTD calls them) will be there waiting for you when you come back is nothing short of priceless.

As I was reading my blogs today I found a great entry from fellow GTD’er and SQL community member Brent Ozar (blog | twitter). I think the passage below beautifully describes this “mind like water” (another David Allen phrase) state:

At around 5PM, when I’m not on the road, i leave my home office and my tasks behind.  I walk Ernie (our dog), get the house ready for Erika’s return from work, and leave the workday problems behind.  I’ll still check email from my ozone when we’re not doing anything, and I’ll respond to quick questions, but I won’t do work.

And I won’t care.

I won’t stress out about things I have coming tomorrow, won’t get worried about what a client’s server is doing, won’t work late trying to “get ahead” – because there’s no such thing.  As a knowledge worker, I’m going to be behind for the rest of my life.  The better I am at accomplishing stuff, the more work people will give me.  At 5PM, I have to change contexts because I won’t ever be caught up in my home life either.

via GTD: Why Things Have Been Quiet Around Here | Brent Ozar – Too Much Information.

Thanks for helping spread the word Brent. It’s always great to see others having the same experience and speaking eloquently about it to the world.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been neglecting that @home list of mine.

More often than I’d like, I get e-mails from various folks late in the evening (the record is about 11pm) somewhere along the line of: “This is really urgent and needs to be done EOD today.” Now, I have to assume that either one of two things is going on here:

1. Their End Of Day is different than mine. Not in the time zone sense (though I do occasionally deal with folks offshore), but just in the sense of they work hours beyond the normal workday.
2. They’re being clever and trying to be the first mail in my inbox the next morning.

Now in the case of #1, obviously they’re not readers of my blog. Otherwise, they’d see my prior post where I was pretty clear about my policy with regards to working after hours: high value and emergency work only. That’s not to say there have not been some cases where the work met one or both of those criteria; just merely that most of the time it doesn’t.

In the case of #2, for one I’d laugh because with the sheer volume of e-mail I get, no matter where you end up it’s most likely not at the top of anything. That, and even if you do somehow manage to be the first thing I read in the morning, that in no way affects where in the queue of actions you’ll end up. Guess they’re not subscribers to the GTD style of organization, huh?

Recently I was chatting with my sister-in-law, who happens to be a product owner at a rapidly growing startup company. We were talking about the nature of “flow” and how important it was for people to be able to focus on doing their work without being interrupted. Partway through the conversation she had a great quote (paraphrased roughly here):

Google has a great description for the role of managers: they should be sh*t umbrellas for their team. Their most important role is to protect their team from all the sh*t that comes flying at them so they can focus on doing their job: writing code. That’s my job in a nutshell and I take it very seriously.

The best reference I could find to that term is here, where GMail product manager Todd Jackson was quoted as saying “You can either be a sh*t funnel or a sh*t umbrella.” The article goes on to describe how a good manager protects their team from unnecessary garbage, in effect being an “umbrella” to the storm of things (requests, questions, stupid meetings) that rain down on their staff. But some managers take on more of the role of being a “funnel”, in that they simply filter and then pass on the things that come at their team.

I suppose one might say, “Well at least in the case of the funnel, the people aren’t directly exposed to the onslaught of sh*t.” That’s true, but I’d counter that depending upon how the manager passes on the stuff they deal with, the end result could be the same. If at once-weekly meetings everything that’s been triaged is laid out and assigned, that’s fine, and in fact I’d argue that’s really playing the umbrella role. But, on the other hand, if the manager simply sends everything off towards their team with the convenient “FW:” tag, well then what’s the point of the filter at all?

Personally at work I’d love to have some way of shielding my team from the daily barrage of (mostly) crap work that comes our way. I still believe the idea of a “handler” and holding designated office hours would provide immediate and noticeable relief. In effect, the handler becomes the umbrella, handling the collecting and triaging of incoming requests and only interrupting the rest of the team when absolutely necessary. Hopefully we can get some buy in from management on the idea, and time will prove our strategy to be one that greatly increases our ability to get work done.

So how do you shield your team from flying sh*t? Are you a funnel, an umbrella, or some combination thereof?

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.

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.

At work I’m fairly religious about such tenets as proper scope definition and change management in running my projects. Without this level of control, things would quickly spin out of hand and projects would never be completed in a timely fashion. Flip through any project management guide (the ubiquitous PMP Handbook comes to mind) and you’ll find pages of information on managing scope creep and keeping stakeholders in check.

But what about personal projects? In many cases, projects are more loosely defined, and lack specific objectives and milestones. The end result is that work gets added or priorities shifted mid-stream, which inevitably causes delays in completion, frustration, and an ever increasing pile of uncompleted projects. Not an ideal place to be!

Here’s a good example. One of the recent additions to the projects list is to build a website for my son, where we can showcase pictures, stories, and movies of his growth. Now at first, this seemed a pretty easy task, given that the steps might look like the following:

• Select a hosting provider and setup account
• Design simple iWeb template
• Upload pictures to Picasa
• Upload video to YouTube
• Add content to pages, initial list to include:
  • Birth
  • The First Week
  • Pictures and Video
• Send notification to immediate family

Easy enough, yeah? Well, being my geeky self, while carrying out these actions I decided to add some interesting learning opportunities to the mix:

• Instead of hosting, use a dynamic DNS service and host the web site on my VM server at home. It is cheaper and since this site is not financially bound (i.e. if it goes down I won’t loose money), high availability is not a requirement.
• Install WordPress as the CMS for the site, to allow for RSS feeds.
• Find and install custom plugins allowing for photo gallery and embedded video functionality.

Getting a bit more complicated, aren’t we! Well, being the enterprising sort, I thought I might want to add even more complexity, so I considered these as well:

• Setting up a VM to act as a gateway between my home network and the Internet, so as to allow the Internet exposed VMs to be on a separate network subnet from the rest of my internal LAN.
• Setup of an IDS such as Snort to monitor traffic on this DMZ.
• Setup of a custom VPN solution using OpenVPN so as to allow grandparents and other close relatives the ability to see additional content over a secure link.

Now, unless you are one hard-core geek (and not a parent of a new baby), you are probably going “What is this guy thinking?!” And you’d be right; while one could argue that the first set of “enhancements” adds some value to the overall project goals (a simple, easy to update, followable web presence), I think you’d be hard pressed to argue the same for that second list.

True, separating Internet and non-Internet facing network zones is a standard best practice, and a solution such as Snort would probably show all sorts of useful data. But really, what is the chance that a) a hacker is going to take the time to scan my network when it’s not widely advertised, b) there is some undisclosed vulnerability in WordPress or PHP, c) once gaining non-root access to the web server the hacker proceeds to succesfully brute force my strong, random 40 character password? Yeah, not likely I think. Definitely not worth the considerable effort for those last three tasks.

Given that my time is going to be rather short for the forseeable future, it appears I’m going to have to curb my knack for adding needless complication to personal initiatives. Just like with real projects, when time is short and resources tight, it’s more important than ever to ensure the work you do is adding real, tangible value to your projects.

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?

Today I caught myself getting rather ticked off after spending around 2.5 hours trying to script out changes to around 25 SQL Server stored procedures. To explain in a non-geeky (if that’s possible coming from me) way, I had to comment out a common line in all 25 procs that needed to be disabled in order to use the proc in my test system. (OK, that failed only slightly in the non-geeky department.)

I’ll be the first to admit that once I get focused on solving an issue, it pretty much consumes my attention, to the point of near obsessiveness. This was no exception, with me getting more and more worked up as attempts to automate this change (rather than cracking the code open on all twenty plus one at a time) failed. Finally I threw up my hands in disgust and walked away, having undoubtedly raised my blood pressure a notch or two in the process.

A short time later, it occurred to me that most of what I was trying to accomplish was completely outside of the work necessary to accomplish my pre-stated goals for this project. In effect, I was trying to change twenty plus bits of code, when this particular effort required just one change. Yep, you heard me, just one. So why even make the attempt to automate the process?

I suppose it’s mostly because I’m a lazy coder by nature; if chances are better than 50-50 that I’ll need to repeat some action in the future, I’ll probably at least take a stab at scripting or otherwise automating the process. Plus, in this case, it presented a worthy challenge, which is always more than enough to entice me into jumping in over my head. I’m a sucker for challenge, almost to the point of it being a character flaw.

In hindsight, perhaps if I’d stopped at the onset and thought things out in a rational, methodical manner, I would have saved myself not only a brooding headache, but almost two hours of time as well. Two hours. Think of all the things you could get done in two hours time.

Next time, I’m going to follow my own advice, and make sure I properly define what my work is going to be, lay out all the time and effort needed, and only then consider adding scope to my plate. Sure, automation is a wonderful thing, but only when used with discretion. Spending two hours to avoid doing something that ultimately took around 10 minutes to accomplish manually just isn’t worth it.

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.