Mind like sushi?
Posted by Jered | Filed under Choice, GTD, Podcast
Image via Wikipedia
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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Tags: Cooking, David Allen, GTD, sushi, sushi rolling
Andre Kibbe on “What’s the Next Distraction?”
Posted by Michael | Filed under GTD, Site
In terms of GTD, David Allen reminds us to always ask ourselves, “What’s the next action?” In a smart play on words, Andre Kibbe asks over on his Tools for Thought blog, “What’s the next distraction?”
Most of us make To Do lists that really aren’t so much about doing things, as they are lists of stuff without definition or context. We feel better knowing that we put everything on a big To Do list, but if my experience is any indication, I think many of us get “deer in the headlights” after we realize just how much “stuff” we have and no idea how to get it all done. In a 2003 interview by Management Consulting News, David Allen, states:
…what most people call a to-do list is incomplete and unclear, which is highly unattractive. Everything on your list is either attracting or repelling you psychologically. There is no neutral response: it’s either, oh boy, when can I mark that off or, get out of my face. If there are still a lot of decisions you need to make about items on your list, your brain glances at the list and says, I don’t have the energy to do all that thinking, go away.
Even if we can get out of the headlights and across the road, we’re still left wondering what to do next. This is a crucial moment of decision about whether to move forward (decide on next action) or stagnate / procrastinate / panic / etc. In his post, Andre Kibbe suggests that a common form of procrastination is what he calls “serial digression,” and he offers us the following example to illustrate his point:
Many To Do items that people write down are multiaction tasks, like “Set up Dell,” as opposed to a genuine next action like “Read Dell Quick Start Guide.” The aim of a next action is to keep your attention on the most immediate physical task instead of the outcome. A To Do like the one in the example is overloaded, conflating what needs to be accomplished with what needs to be done. Any project, no matter how large or complex, can be parsed into at least one next action that’s simple to do. Not everyone can get into Harvard, but anyone can download the admission form.
Put another way, David Allen remarks in the MCNews interview that, “You don’t usually see specific actions on to-do lists because most people haven’t forced themselves to sit down and finish their thinking about what has their attention. They collect items in their in-basket or think they have made a list, but there is another level of thinking that is required to move forward.”
What we’re left with are what Andre Kibbe defines as “Next Distractions” noting that, “Procrastination is more than not doing priority tasks; it’s doing non-priority tasks.” In terms of what Kibbe calls “Crutch Activities,” he argues that, “No task exists in isolation. A key consideration of any activity is not what the activity is, but what it leads to.”
So, whenever we go to check our RSS readers just before starting a project, fire-up our browser to find something on Wikipedia, or even write that next blog post (ahem…), be sure to remember the suggestions and quick tips that Andre Kibbe offers in his post. And watch out for the deer.
Tags: David Allen, GTD, productivity, To Do
The Simplicity Habit Podcast Episode 3
Posted by Michael | Filed under Featured, Podcast
Show Notes
For the week of April 27, 2008
We received our first listener email seeking some advice, so we decided to make it the topic of the entire episode. We offer some advice on approaches to productivity, keeping the focus on defining projects, rather than getting lost in the tasks. For the more visual among you, we suggest finding the biggest whiteboard you can, grabbing a few colored pens, and mindmapping your projects to literally get the bigger picture.
We’re going to try a new format, featuring weekly quick bites of productivity from the Simplicity Habit apple; just enough to get you ready for the main show now every other week.
People Mentioned
Gary Vaynerchuk - How to cut through the Noise? Great video on managing all the noise, from email, and Facebook, to Pownce, Twitter, and all the rest.
Merlin Mann - Merlin Mann on Time and Attention (Getting Things Done) Terrific video of a talk Merlin Mann gave at a Google TechTalks event.
Products Mentioned
Mindjet MindManager - Commercial application developed by Mindjet Corporation. Available for Windows and Mac.
FreeMind - Free alternative to MindManager. Java-based and open source. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Enjoy!
Tags: David Allen, Gary Vaynerchuk, Getting Things Done, Merlin Mann, mindmapping, Podcast
Gin, TV and Productivity
Posted by Jered | Filed under Choice
I have never been to a “cool” tech conference, like SXSW or Web 2.0 Expo. After watching Clay Shirky’s presentation (transcript) today, it really makes me wish that I could go.
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.
Tags: clay shirky, David Allen, hobby, video, web 2.0, work
GTD + 4HWW = Productivity Perfection
Posted by Jered | Filed under 4HWW, Featured, GTD
Michael and I had a funny conversation about a David Allen / Timothy Ferriss Celebrity Productivity Deathmatch. Allen has the wisdom and years of martial arts training, while Ferriss has the youthful stamina and the secrets to putting on massive amounts of muscle quickly, but I wouldn’t care to wager on the physical fight. I want to talk about their systems duke-ing it out.
I have read both David Allen’s Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done
By keeping lists of the next physical actions for each project, one is able to have a complete picture of what needs to be done. By sorting these actions into contexts, one can always find an action to do in the appropriate settings.
Getting items from an inbox to these lists and projects is broken down into whether the action can be done immediately, deferred to a “tickler file”, or added to a project. This process is developed into a quick and efficient one, allowing data to be quickly added to the lists.
Regular review and renegotiation of commitments are critical to the Getting Things Done system and should be done weekly.
Synopsis: Writing things down, keeps them off your mind.
4 Hour Work Week
Retirement, in the traditional sense, is a lie and life should be spent in a series of “mini retirements,” using self employment and outsourcing to reduce the amount of time and energy expended in generating wealth to support the “mini retirements.”
A low information diet and ruthless application of the Pareto principle (the 80/20 principle) are required to reduce the inputs in one’s life, because with their application it is easier to get more work done when one has to.
Synopsis: The application of the Pareto principle and outsourcing to everything will free up time, letting you take mini retirements.
The Challenge
Getting these two seemingly disparate systems to play well together.
Thoughts
I think that GTD and 4HWW are completely compatible. Getting Things Done is the strategic and tactical while the 4 Hour Work Week is the undercurrent or theming of the process.
Creating a stress free life is attainable by the application of getting thoughts out of your head an on to paper, into a trusted system, which can include outsourcing, and then relaxing on a “mini-retirement.” This flies in the face of most management principles that go along the lines: “When someone is able to relax, give them more work, they can obviously handle it.”
The catch is, you aren’t working less, you are working more efficiently and why shouldn’t you benefit from that?
Tim Ferriss’ goal is have the reader be self employed and while that is a tempting idea, it is not always possible, that doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t take a “mini-retirement” every once in a while. Save up the leave, work out teleworking with your boss, it is possible to attaint the 4 Hour Work Week ethos without having to be self-employed (thusly responsible for your own health insurance, etc.).
Being stress free on your “mini-retirements” is going to be important, no one wants to be stressed when they are supposed to be relaxing, sailing around the world, etc. That is where the “Someday / Maybe” list comes in handy, writing down future “mini-retirements” or keeping a list of postcards that need to be sent.
Ferriss’ reducing input in one’s life is very similar to David Allen’s reducing the inboxes and in-buckets. Going on a media diet for a week or two can be very liberating, reducing one more source of stress. Everyone has stressed out a little bit out the TiVo getting full or missing your most favorite TV show. The way that the two methods are very intertwined is the concept of “mind like water”. A David Allen catchphrase which is the 4HWW realization. Take all of the things that normally make your day rocky, like dealing with angry clients, or fulfilling orders, and outsource them. This allows you to deal with the real issues through the application of the Pareto principle, which should make your life much easier over all.
Why shouldn’t people who are “Getting Things Done” also be able to enjoy a “4 Hour Work Week”? Followers of GTD generally know where all of their projects are, what they have to do next and where the rest of their commitments lie. If a knowledge worker is using GTD (that is the prime category for people who use GTD), most their work will focus around a computer and a phone. Both of those devices are portable and as long as there is a solid cellular network in your “mini-retirement” destination, it would be possible to do work should the need arise. And while I don’t advocate taking work on a vacation, much less a “mini-retirement”, the idea is not to let the fact that some of us can not escape the 9 to 5 from letting us experience Ferriss’ vision.
With keeping “mini-retirements” as a goal, application of the Pareto principle and reducing the number of inputs one has, Ferriss creates a great set of frameworks for the average person to work in. Allen’s Getting Things Done provides a tactical approach with strategic thinking to keep those frameworks in mind. All in all, I would say Getting Things Done and the 4 Hour Work Week are two compatible philosophies / systems.
Tags: 4 Hour Work Week, 4HWW, David Allen, Getting Things Done, GTD, Tim Ferriss
