Collection habit infection, routines, and the value of creating space

OK, I admit it: I've internalized the GTD collection habit, and it's spilled into other parts of my life. For example, when I move about the house or office, I find myself naturally keeping an eye out for something that doesn't belong. A dirty glass [1], dish, or piece of paper - it all gets automatically picked up and carried to the proper place [2]. If it requires a quick out-of-the-way trip to do this, so be it (a physical example of the two minute rule). My good friend and artist Matt Mitchell [3] calls this the "camping mentality" - getting your actions down to efficient routines, with minimal waste, so that you can set up and break down quickly.

Interestingly, I find that once I'm operating on this relatively automatic level, I'm more open to enjoying these simple activities more deeply, which makes sense - the work is amenable to being done a little at a time, and training myself to habitually do these means less time/brain power needs to be spent on them.

At a higher level, I think this all has to do with the concept of "creating space," a meta-idea that continues to crop up during much of my self-defined "Masters in Personal Productivity," and seems to be required to allow growth and change. Some examples:

• Routines: As just described, routines make room for enjoyment, and for higher-level thinking [4].
  
• Listening: By making conversational space, we get to hear the other person, and help our relationship with her deepen.
  
• Clutter: I think it's hard for us to adopt new behaviors (especially around workflow) with reminders of old ones around. That's why I appreciate so much the value of starting out the GTD effort by clearing away old stuff [5] via collecting, processing, and organizing.
  
• Assumptions: When we come into new situations (meeting a new person, taking on a new task) we are often encumbered with assumptions about how it will proceed. If we can let some of those assumptions go we can open ourselves to experiencing things differently, and possibly better.
  
• Beliefs: I've found my beliefs often get in the way of hearing something that's different, or somebody whom I disagree with, which hampers communication and learning. The classic learning example is the "Zen master cup" story, such as found in Emptying Your Cup. Client myths around time management come under this topic too.
  
• Productivity habits: Many people need a system like GTD in their lives, but aren't ready to let go of old habits to make room for new (and more effective) ones. However, making changes like these are very hard [6].
  
• Body usage: In the Alexander Technique lessons I take, I'm learning to change how I perform some of the most basic activities humans do: sitting, standing, and walking. Because I've previously learned inefficient ways of doing these things, I've experienced pain (lower back, in my case), and re-learning how to do them in a more organized manner has resulted in tremendous improvements. However, this is really hard because to make space for new movement, I have to de-program old ones patterns, which go way back [7]. (Like GTD, it's not a silver bullet that can be done to me by someone else, which can make it a hard sell.)
  

How about you - any suggestions about how making space helps foster growth, or how to actually do it?


References

• [1] You may find the article Waitress as Organizational Guru useful in this regard.
  
• [2] This combines a number of habits from my post on What are the essential habits of GTD?, including APPROPRIATE_PLACEMENT, CONTROLLED_COLLECTION, and KEEPING_THINGS_CLEAR. Note: I'm still working on whittling the habits down.
  
• [3] One of his current projects (in addition to portraiture) is his 100 Faces of war (the site is Flash-only).
  
• [4] This reminds me of Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli, which encourages us to develop routines for things that occur regularly.
  
• [5] David Allen defines "stuff" in (at least) two ways: 1) "anything you have allowed into your ... world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step" and 2) as four categories of things that are OK being out in your workspace: Supplies, Reference material, Decoration, and Equipment.
  
• [6] You might find the article James and James: SNAP Habit Training helpful in altering habits. Quick summary:
  1. S: Start Strong - Launch the new habit decisively.
     
  2. N: No exceptions - Never make an exception to the new habit.
     
  3. A: Act when prompted - Act "on every emotional prompting," i.e. whenever you want to act on the new habit, be sure to do so!
     
  4. P: Practice! - Do it every day. Exercise the new habit every day.
  
  
• [7] Of course one advantage of being a beginner is that we come with built-in space. If we don't know how to do something (say, designing a workshop or coaching clients) we have less to unlearn. However, it can be scary, especially for adult learners used to being masters in one field, and switching to another!
  

Personal productivity, IBMs (not the company), and NUTs: Some surprises about the brain

In my research to make myself the premier personal productivity consultant in the northeast (hey - think wild success!) I've come across some very interesting ideas relating stress, aging, and unfinished tasks. What kicked this off was the article ABC News: '20/20' Busts 10 Body Myths, and this quote in particular:

"For one nagging unfinished task, it puts on about eight years on your life. So if you're 30, it makes you 38," said Roizen.

The connection to modern time management methodologies like GTD seemed clear: By getting control of those nagging tasks, we may actually be extending our life spans (in addition to the more commonly-discussed - and important - benefits of gaining relaxed control, maintaining focus, etc.)

This led me to check out the author's book YOU: The Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger by Michael F. Roizen, Mehmet Oz, which provided a bunch of fascinating ideas. Following are some of them, which I hope you find stimulating.

First, consider this question from a quiz at the book's start:

1. Which of the following ages you the least?

• a. Smoking one pack of cigarettes a day
  
• b. A HDL (good) cholesterol level of 29 mg/dl
  
• c. Consistently avoiding "cleaning grout" on your to-do list
  
• d. Eating steak twice a week

You might be surprised to learn the answer is d:

Eating steak twice a week makes you less than one year older compared to smoking a pack of cigarettes (eight years older), an inadequate healthy HDL cholesterol of 29 (about four years older), and the stress of avoiding a nagging task makes you eight years older.

They go on to differentiate between Important But Manageable events (IBMs), and Nagging Unfinished Tasks (NUTs), with the latter being what adds to the aging:

These Important But Manageable events do not cause us to age, because they are problems we can solve. Instead, illness comes mainly from events that constantly stress you, and do so for a prolonged period. For example, the nagging stress of sitting on a wobbly toilet seat and never fixing it will age you, if it is one of those things that just gnaws at you every time you use it.

A few other surprises:

• Myth or fact? You use only a portion of your brain. This one comes up regularly in New Age circles (remember - I went to massage school), with 10% being the typical amount cited that we actually use. The authors argue that you use all of your brain, but different parts for different times. (Otherwise, why would we have evolved such big ones?) See also Urban Legends: The Ten-Percent Myth.
  
• Depression is a chemical-related problem: Which means you can't will it away. (We have family members who suffer from it, and looking at the disease from physiological perspective is helpful.)
  
• Take aspirin to fight dementia and Alzheimer's disease: They recommend taking two baby aspirin a day if you're over 40, because it apparently helps keep arteries from being inflamed and blood from clotting, as well as increasing blood and oxygen flow to the brain. My wife is an RN in an Alzheimer's unit, so this definitely caught my attention. (Note: There are risks taking this much aspirin regularly, so do some research first.)

Finally, the book goes into a little detail on brain anatomy, which I won't cover it here, but the importance of the frontal lobes has come up other places, including Edward Hallowell's book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD. That book discusses how overloading the frontal lobes leaves no room for the creative work, which in turn causes mediocre performance and leads to becoming stressed out.

I first came across Hallowell's work in the excellent January 2005 Harvard Business Review article Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform. (It's subscription only, but you can find copies if you google it.) Some other points from the article:

• He says it's "a very real but unrecognized neurological phenomenon that I call attention deficit trait (ADT)".
  
• The core symptoms include distractability, inner frenzy, and impatience, which in turn lead to difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, and managing time. These can undermine the work "of even gifted executives." Sound familiar?
  
• You can use organizational techniques (!) to keep your frontal lobes in control, including:
  • break down large tasks
    
  • keep desk clear at all times (at least one part)
    
  • have "e-mail hours"
    
  • start the day working on a critical task
    
  • keep short lists (<= 5) - forces you to prioritize and complete your tasks
    
  • handle once, don't pile
    
  • discover and use your prime time (perform best)

Some work-arounds: Create a positive emotional environment (negative emotions shut down frontal lobes, which makes rely on more primitive behaviors, costing us our natural sophistication and creativity), or engage your frontal lobes in a simple task - e.g., writing a memo with little complex content (bypasses the limbic system).


In sum, I think these kinds of links between how our brains work and our goals of being productive and happy, help to explain why modern personal productivity systems have benefits at such deep and surprising levels. When I tell my story to clients, I talk about how getting and staying on top of all my commitments, communication, and information led to surprising higher-level payoffs, including losing 15 pounds, curing my insomnia, and making major progress on an old back problem. I joke that it was either a mid-life crisis, or a great system. I truly believe it's the latter.

Whose job is it? Mine!

In an earlier post (Great time management ideas from the world of improv wisdom) I shared some insights with respect to personal productivity from Patricia Ryan Madson's delightful little book Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up. Here's another thought from the book that really made an impact on me:

From her section "Act now," (one of her thirteen maxims [1]):

When I see something that needs to be done, I usually do it without debate. The improviser in me is trained to take action rather than muse over whose job it may be. It's always my job if I see it to do, and I'm able to do the task.

Put another way, Madsen says in the section "Take care of each other":

The old response "It's not my job" is never an acceptable excuse for the improviser. It's always my job, if the job needs doing and I am there to do it.

And I believe this applies to life in general. Here's a small example that I learned when my wife and I were doing a year-long course in massage therapy [2]: As a class we were discussing how to keep our school clean (it was a small place, with no budget for cleaning staff), and our teacher suggested that, when finishing washing our hands (and you do a lot of hand-washing in massage school) why don't we just take two seconds and wipe up sink for the next person? It's a great idea, and I find myself still doing this, even in our beautiful new Computer Science building, which has some wonderful full-time people helping keep it clean. It makes me feel good about the next guy, gives me a tiny little sense of reversing entropy, and helps the cleaning staff just a bit. Plus, it might motivate others to keep the bathrooms clean.

At a higher level, this concept really hit home because, as I continue my new career in personal productivity consulting (and move further out of my comfort zone), the urge comes up to question what I'm doing, and to compare myself to more established practitioners (read experienced, successful, etc.) As a result I sometimes question why I'm doing this, and why me in particular. But Madsen's idea made me realize it's my job to do it because I'm the one who discovered the job that needs doing, I'm excited about doing it, and I can. (And besides, I think I'm good at it!) In other words, I've been pulled into it, and that's enough.

So when the doubts and fears come up, I try to do what Madsen suggests: "Keep on acting, even while wondering if it's the right thing to do." Or as Susan Jeffers says in her great book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway:

The fear will never go away as long as i continue to grow. [so] The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it.

What jobs do you see that need doing, either at work, or in your life?


References

• [1] Here are Madsen's thirteen maxims (for more info - buy the book!):
  
  
  
  • The First Maxim: Say Yes
    
  • The Second Maxim: Don't Prepare
    
  • The Third Maxim: Just Show Up
    
  • The Fourth Maxim: Start Anywhere
    
  • The Fifth Maxim: Be Average
    
  • The Sixth Maxim: Pay Attention
    
  • The Seventh Maxim: Face the Facts
    
  • The Eighth Maxim: Stay on Course
    
  • The Ninth Maxim: Wake Up to the Gifts
    
  • The Tenth Maxim: Make Mistakes, Please
    
  • The Eleventh Maxim: Act Now
    
  • The Twelfth Maxim: Take Care of Each Other
    
  • The Thirteenth Maxim: Enjoy the Ride
    
  
  
• [2] It's now called The Stillpoint Program, and it was 1000 hours of challenge, fun, and surprise. This was in the early 90's and we needed a change from our regular jobs (nursing and programming), and we thought it would be good for us personally, and as partners. After graduating we started a practice in Holyoke, MA, which started thriving after a while (not counting the 2am phone calls asking for the other kind of "massage"!) We ended up leaving the practice and going on to other work for various reasons (we felt more at home in Amherst, the work can be very tiring). One great things about the experience was my appreciation for how much we humans need healthy touch, esp. in a digital age. Of course my six year old daughter loves getting massages before bed-time, and it really helps her get to sleep when she's frightened or worked up.
  

A few thoughts on vacations & GTD, used time management books, a few productivity tips, and heroes - both super *and* real

I'm on vacation this week, so I wanted to do a relatively light post. Following are a few thoughts that have been bouncing around.


What's the GTD definition of "vacation?"

The first thought is about the meaning of vacation for GTD practitioners. Let's start with this definition, but try to get more specific:

planned time spent not working

Well, since we use the five workflow phases to define how we think about work (Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Do), can we translate them into "not working?"

My thought is that we stop doing all phases except for the capture part of "Collect." For example, when I'm trying to relax, I don't want to be thinking about my calendar or action lists at all, and I won't be processing my tickler file (if I maintain one). (However, I did pre-process it before leaving.) But to maintain my focus on relaxation (a studied "UNfocus"?) I want to keep a clear mind, which means continuing to capture any thoughts, ideas, and concerns that come up, so that I can proceed to forget about them. Len Merson calls it "the pleasure to forget" in his book The Instant Productivity Toolkit, which is a nice way of putting it. (I discussed the book in my previous post.)

In fact, another way of looking at vacation is as a time to reap the benefits of a clear mind, by allowing it to be as fully disengaged from the work/life world as possible. (Naturally, one benefit of practicing GTD is that we get this benefit all the time, to on degree or another.)

Another thought is that vacations provide us a structured, but safe and limited opportunity to practice decision-making ("the hard part of knowledge work," I've heard it put). Instead of the "heavier" topics that we encounter during the normal workday, we get to address simpler ones like whether to go to the beach, take a bike ride, read a book, etc. (This is analogous to considering poker as a safe framework for trying out risk.)

A few related GTD/Vacation posts are: GTD at DisneyWorld, GTD on vacation?, and the free davidco article Managing work on vacation (which you unfortunately have to buy to read).


Why are used time management books so common?

As I continue my self-defined Masters in Personal Productivity, I've been keeping an eye out for related books, esp. time management classics. Lo and behold, I continue to find many of them at tag sales, tents sales, and thrift shops. For example, here are a few I've recently picked up:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
  
• The Effective Executive
  
• First Things First
  
• How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life
  
• Time Management from the Inside Out
  
• The Time Trap
  
• Time Management for Dummies

So what is it that makes these books so readily available? My first thoughts were:

• these days managing ourselves (AKA "time management") is more of a problem than ever
  
• the problem is possible to address in many different ways
  
• many of the ways don't work
  

My wife had a more optimistic interpretation: People read the books, they work, and they don't feel the need to keep them! Naturally, as a new consultant in this business I wonder if the more modern techniques like GTD just plain work better...


What really gets you excited? For me, superheros! (surprisingly)

A number of sites and books talk about how to decide what you should do with your life, including Steve Pavlina, Fred Gratzon, Dick Richards, Po Bronson, and local author Margaret Lobenstine. In my case I stumbled upon my new area thanks to David Allen's book Getting Things Done, but it's a question I continue to tangle with.

However, one approach I've been trying out lately is to simply listen to what gets me really excited. I wrote What to do when an excited person person is waving something at you because I wanted to recognize this in others, but I'd like to encourage you to hear that little voice in yourself when it speaks. For example, we were at a town fair a while back and someone was encouraging me to try one of those bungee rides in which you strap in, bounce a while, and have fun. I was wrestling with whether or not to go, but I just wasn't interested. (The problem was that I thought I should be excited about it.) I felt much better when I realized I didn't care to do it.

Luckily, all is not lost: Here's something I thought was very cool: Wired magazine had a blurb on Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co, which I thought was extremely cool. Read more at Bruce Wayne Is on the Mailing List, and Mr. Chips Is in the Back Room.

(A small confession: I consider my business clothing my superhero costume. Why? First, the act of putting it on helps me transform myself mentally into the knowledgeable, comfortable, and personable expert and presenter. Also, it gives me special powers, including profound humility, extreme likability, and superhuman confidence. I admit it helps that it's made of reinforced Kevlar, and has a custom utility belt - contents secret!)


Productivity tip: WebDrive

Tech tip: I use remote Linux servers for backups, and SSH to communicate securely between them and my Windows machine. While free tools like WinSCP are great, I had a big usability improvement by switching over to an OS tool that lets me mount remote hosts as local drives via SSH. The two I looked at were SftpDrive and WebDrive. Briefly, I found both to be solid programs, though I ended up using WebDrive because SftpDrive wasn't available for Windows 2000 at the time (they've updated it since). Both are highly recommended. (Disclaimer: The kind folks at these companies gave me free evaluation copies, for which I'm grateful.)

Note: Works great with the free synchronization tool SyncToy.


Productivity tip: Firefox smart keywords

As a Firefox user I've found their Smart Keywords feature to be a serious time-saver. Briefly, these are bookmarks with place-holder characters that allow creating a shortcut pattern that expands into a full URL. For example, I type "am productivity" to look up Amazon books on productivity. Here are some example keywords I've set up that have been useful for writing and research:

Name	Keyword	Location
Search Amazon Books	am	http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=br_ss_hs/104-8085125-4087950?field-keywords=%s&platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above
Amazon.com Wishlist	awl	http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/IZZMVJXF5IQO/104-8085125-4087950?reveal=unpurchased&filter=all&sort=priority&layout=compact&x=10&y=14
Google Blog Search	bs	http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=%s&hl=en
Answers lookup (dictionary)	di	http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=%s&gwp=8
Google Blog Search - my blog	im	http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=%s+blogurl:http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Local Library Title Search	jl	http://wmars.cwmars.org/search~S4/t?SEARCH=%s
Wikipedia Search	wp	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

You can read more about them at What are Smart Keywords? and Smart keywords explained.


Finally, a great movie: An Inconvenient Truth

My wife and I saw An Inconvenient Truth last night, which I thought was an excellent movie, both from the standpoint of his presentation (a topic I care about because I'm now paid to do them), and the crucially important topic of global warming.

Al Gore was definitely preaching to the choir in our area (lots of hybrids on the road, CSAs, state-wide environmental leadership, etc,) but the theater was still full, even though the movie's been out for a while. I strongly recommend everyone see it - it destroys the arguments against global warming being real. Their site is www.climatecrisis.net.

As a result, Gore's now one of my heroes, along with Amy Goodman, James Randi, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Michael Moore, Jon Stewart, and many others. If you run into him, please pass along my thanks!