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For a birthday present a few years ago, my wife got me a gift certificate for a sushi making class. It was incredible, firstly because I love sushi and secondly because it was incredibly insightful in the realm of productivity.

David Allen has an axiom “Mind Like Water” to show how you should react to changes and inputs. Throw a pebble into a still lake and the ripples will be appropriate for the size and weight, throw in a boulder, again, the water responds to the stimulus.

How are sushi and GTD alike, you ask?

When an Itamae, sushi chef, is preparing a Norimake, a traditional sushi roll, his goal is uniformity through out the larger roll. Each piece, when cut, should look exactly like every other piece from that roll.

This is how any productivity system should work. Every project or speed bump, no matter it’s size or intensity, should be uniformly treated. It should be treated the same as every other project. If you have some cucumber in every piece of sushi, and by cucumber you mean effective project planning, it shouldn’t change if it is a huge gnarly project or a little spicy tuna roll, er, small personal project.

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Rescue Time allows you to rate each activity you do on a scale from -2 to +2, setting how productive each task is. Surfing wikipedia is a -2 in my book, checking my email (as little as I might) is a +2. Rescue Time records only the “active” application, meaning if you have multiple applications open, it will not add time for each application open, only the one you are working on.

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This productivity tallying is shown off in pretty charts and graphs allow you to see over time what you are spending wasting time on. But this comes with a price.

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Having Rescue Time installed at work and at home really makes giving each Web site I visit a score difficult. The scores are needed in order to show your Efficiency and Productivity quotients. But the time it takes to classify, tag and score each Web site I visit, could be enormous.

So does Rescue Time define the term craphack?

Yes and no, if you plan on living and dying by Rescue Time, you are most certainly going to become tied up in the management, but if you use it as a background tool, checking in occasionally, noticing how much time you have spent on digg or wikipedia, it may be a refresh to get back to work.

Clay gave a great talk about how we, as a society, manage to drink or lull ourselves into a group stupor, gin, during / after the Industrial Revolution, television now. Using some “back of the envelope calculations”, Clay says that the collective brain time we waste in watching the ads on any given weekend could create a new Wikipedia every weekend.

This collective brain power is quite an amazing thing to think about. With the launch of collaborative and social tools, we can now connect and combine our collective knowledge.

The same can be said for becoming productive.

When you start working with a personal productivity system, the same stupor can fill your spare time. Finding a way to fill the newly reclaimed time can be difficult. You can’t be productive 100% of the time. As much as we want to continually produce, downtime is needed in every system.

Finding a hobby or activity to fill your time can then create another project that can be worked on, and while it may not take the same kind of push to complete that cranking widgets or a normal day’s work does, it will allow you to continue your productivity practices when you are not working on “work”.

David Allen said in a Tech Talk he gave at Google, that there is really no distinction between Work (with a capital W) and work, the rest of the tasks that need to be done your life. They are all things that need to be done, whether they are changing light bulbs at home or completing a quarterly report for the boss.

During this week, think about how you want to reclaim those extra brain cycles by disconnecting from the TV and work, and find something to “work” on this upcoming weekend.

Starting a few weeks ago, I implemented a few of the 4 Hour Work Week principles, namely a reduction in the number of times I check my email and feeds. For my email I have added a “vacation response” that reads:

Sincerely,
Jered

Radio Silence

I have also found it incredibly useful to turn off distractions, namely IM, web browsers and feed readers. Going “radio silent” is something that I have been practicing for my entire working career. Changing up routines, shutting down everything that can be a vector of distraction are easy ways to increase focus, especially on a grey Monday.

Reply All

It is my opinion that two of the largest programming “bugs” are as follows:

1. One hour default meeting times in Outlook
2. The inclusion of a “reply all” feature in any email program

I hate digging through my email, particularly when it is filled with back and forth conversation that I either should have never been involved in, or a coworker uses the “reply all” feature. I found a fabulous website: ThanksNo.com. It has a gentle reminder about how you include people in bulk emails and CC’s.

In a similar overture, I have created PleaseDontReplyAll.com. While the site was patterned after ThanksNo.com, it is targeted at a very specific behavior that is particularly bad in my work environment.

In determining value in my day I have used two criteria, based on Buddhist philosophies: Have I decreased my suffering? Have I decreased the suffering of others?

Donald at Life Optimizer has written a great post about how he maintains balance, which I also interpret as a way to measure success. Using the four facets of prosperity, borrowed from C. Peter Wagner in his book The Church in the Workplace: 

• Material prosperity
• Spiritual prosperity
• Physical prosperity
• Social prosperity

These things are over arching, not necessarily relating to a task list, but these things, I think, are very important to a work/life balance. Completing work- or home-related tasks would most often fall into the Material category.

Finding or practicing some form of religion, I have found, has been very balancing. While I am not the best practitioner, aiming to do something related to my religion allows me time to focus on myself, outside of work, a task that should be done daily.

Physical prosperity means doing something physical, everyday. As a recent New York Times article (unfortunately, registration required) highlighted, your health cannot be under estimated, especially if you are knowledge worker. I think knowledge workers have a tendency to undervalue their health for more time in front of the monitor.

Keeping up with the relationships in one’s life is important, human beings are social creatures. Donald says he tries to contact one of his contacts every day, which I think is admirable. In the age of Facebook pokes, instant and text messaging, it should be easy to check in on a friend every day (Not the same friend, a different one). 

So the next time someone asks you what you “did” today, or “how you measure success”, think about these four gems acting as a guide post. It may lead to a balance and productive life.

The issue is in the balance. I don’t check myspace, I have it send me an email if have a new friend added or a direct message. The same can be said of facebook. As for the rest, they are essentially casual:
Twitter: great when i remember, 
Voicemails: come in via email,
Instant messages: only if absolutely necessary,
RSS feeds: 3 times a day,
Mail: Twice daily,
Calendar checking: 3 times a day.
List checking: constantly.
So really I only have one open loop and everything get thrown into that bucket (OmniFocus, for those interested).

I was not happy with my own response, and I have been thinking about the “open loops” particularly in regards to all of the new social news / media, like Facebook and Twitter. After listening to Clay Shirky’s presentation Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and listening to This Week in Tech: 138, I have figured out how to deal with the “open loops” of social networking.

Take in what you want and can, but don’t worry about the rest. It is impossible to keep up with everything, so don’t try.

It is difficult to come to terms with this concept. We, a people, are somewhat driven to complete, to have the fullest picture, to catchup on things we have committed to following. I found this to true when I was subscribed to 600+ RSS feeds, I find it true subscribed to 30 RSS feeds.

The funny thing is, people will leave hundreds of unread messages in their inbox, but pull their hair out when they aren’t completely caught up on their RSS feeds, blogs, or tweets1. Learning to let go, to not be attached to drinking from the firehose, can be a liberating experience.

Unfortunately, this process of filtering isn’t easy. I contend that, in part, we are asking ourselves the wrong question. Most of us begin our search for simplicity by asking ourselves “Which lifehacks are right for me?” and quickly find ourselves drowning in the flood that quickly ensues.

Enter Barry Schwartz’s idea of “the paradox of choice” (video).

(As an aside, this is exactly why my Partner doesn’t take me shopping. I spend 15 minutes deciding on which trash bags to purchase…)

While growing up, I was troubled by the question of what I wanted to do with my life. Along the way, my Parents told me that it’s often easier to decide what I DON”T want to do, and in so doing, to narrow the field of options to something more manageable. This process also requires a deep understanding about myself, something that I am still figuring out.

In turn, couldn’t this same practice apply to filtering truly useful lifehacks from the sea of craphacks? What simple techniques and questions can we ask ourselves to systematically narrow the field of lifehack options based on what we know about ourselves?