IdeaLab 0624: Ice Cream, attitude, danger, and dishwashers

A continuation of the ever-enlightening IdeaLab series from the patented IdeaMatt My Big-Arse Text File.

• "Flight of six" ice cream: While walking with my daughter around town (it's summer here and I get to spend a lot of time parenting - very good stuff, but does cut back on work time [1]) we decided to enjoy some ice cream together [2]. Immediately two thoughts occurred to me. First, because here in the U.S. restaurant portions are ridiculously large [3], so a "regular" is two large scoops - must be 20 WeightWatchers points! This will make me fat and unhealthy. Second, I love trying many different flavors, rather than one huge helping of one flavor (variety, spice, life, etc.) So I hit on an idea: Why not have an option for a "flight of six" - instead of one large scoop, serve six small tastes of different flavors. So Katie and I headed out to try it - and our local ice cream cafe was happy to accommodate! Perfect. A nice presentation would be to serve it in a pretty glass scalloped dish with six separate scoops to keep the flavors from running together, something like six of these connected.
  
  
  After a bit of research, it turns out that this option is common with alcohol, including beer, scotch, and tequila. I found only one mention of an ice cream version: The Phantom Gourmet Guide to Boston's Best Restaurants 2008 mentions ice cream "shooters" at Smith & Wollensky (I've never been there). What do you think? What else would this apply to?
  
• 2x2: Dangerous vs. Exciting: In patented ASCII-Vision(TM):

  
                 Dangerous         Safe
              +-------------+----------------+
     Exciting | Sky Diving  | Roller Coaster |
              +-------------+----------------+
       Boring | Cell + Car  |   Dilbert      |
              +-------------+----------------+

  I'm not totally happy with the names. Thoughts?
  
• Attitude self-coaching: Here's something I like to do before important interactions or events (e.g., consulting, sales calls, or workshops): I write out the top two or three positive attitudes I want to bring to the occasion. For example, if I'm nervous about a call regarding a possible problem I might go in Curious, >GraciousTransitions: A Secret Ingredient To Getting Things Done?) and has helped me a lot.
  
• Productivity tips from my automated dishwasher: (With apologies to Jack Handey and the ever amazing Nicholas Bate):
  
  
  • Like filing, does one prioritize ease of storage (just putting the dishes, cup, and cutlery willy nilly) or ease of retrieval (sorting likes together)?
    
  • Clearing cleaned dishes (e.g., emptying the inbox) is a kind of a forced closed list: All the clean ones must be removed before putting new (dirty) items in. Implications for collection tools...?
    
  • Emptying should require minimal thinking, which means batching likes (see above). This relates to the power of structure: Once we're in "plate mode," doing plates as a batch requires far less thinking than handling individual items. Implications for working your tasks list?
  
  
• Less is more: A quote from one of my clients (they're always teaching me something):

  Having less stuff on your list is not necessary selling yourself short.

  
  
• Attracting life: While sitting in my kitchen I noticed something moving in the potted tree on our back deck. Surprise! It had attracted a Robin. So a nice test in life: Does what I'm doing attract life?
  
• Matter, energy, and information: Is life all about inputs and outputs [4]? If so, implications: we can control the inputs (what we invite into our lives: people, media diet, thoughts), the process (e.g., the efficient turning of inputs into outputs - my specialty), and the outputs (what is valuable for us to do). Stimulated by this passage from Nicholas Carr's [5] book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google:

  All living systems, from amoebas to nation-states, sustain themselves through the processing of matter, energy, and information. They take in materials from their surroundings, and they use energy to transform those materials into various useful substances, discarding the waste. This continuous turning of inputs into outputs is controlled through the collection, interpretation, and manipulation of information. The process of control itself has two thrusts. It involves measurement - the comparison of the current state of a system to its desired state. And it involves two-way communication - the transmission of instructions and the collection of feedback on results.

  
  

References

• [1] This figures into the estimate of time available in my daily planning regime (see A Daily Planning Experiment: Two Weeks Of Accountable Rigorous Action). Note: This approach really hit a nerve, and led to professional phone coaching and a new consulting service (site not updated yet).
  
• [2] A decision I make pretty carefully - eating well and keeping the weight off is a challenge in our current lifestyle (not everyone has this choice, I realize). See What GTD And Weight Watchers Have In Common.
  
• [3] Esp. compared to (sane) European standards. See Less is More and Survey: Restaurants dishing out extra-large portions.
  
• [4] A favorite topic of mine. See When Inputs Exceed Your Workflow System's Capacity and The Productivity I/O Sweet Spot, Or Why Balance Is A Bad Thing.
  
• [5] You might enjoy his article Is Google Making Us Stupid?
  

The productivity I/O sweet spot, or Why balance is a bad thing

In my one of my conversations with Chris Crouch we talked about how hard we should be working for sustainable productivity. As I summarized in my interview with him (scroll to the section Personal workload capacity), Chris questioned the conventional (?) wisdom of working at or near our maximum. I took it as a smart way to be productive but not burn ourselves out. This is controversial: We are expected (by ourselves and others) to work harder - put in more hours, sacrifice time with loved ones, all to accomplish "more, better, faster." As Laura Stack [1] says in Leave the Office Earlier, most professionals have a backlog of 200 or more hours of uncompleted work. Whew!

As you may have read [2], I've been playing with the idea of how our inputs (things we've invited into our lives requiring our attention) balance with our outputs (conversion of intputs into work we do).

I love how Nicholas Carr frames it in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google:

All living systems, from amoebas to nation-states, sustain themselves through the processing of matter, energy, and information. They take in materials from their surroundings, and they use energy to transform those materials into various useful substances, discarding the waste. This continuous turning of inputs into outputs is controlled through the collection, interpretation, and manipulation of information.

Cool.

After a bit of thinking I came up with a little surprise. Consider your rate of inputs ("I") vs. rate of outputs ("O"). We have these possibilities:

1. I >> O (far more coming in that going out)
   
2. I > O (a bit more coming in "")
   
3. I ~= O (approximately equal)
   
4. I < O (a little less coming in "")
   
5. I << O (far fewer incoming than outgoing)

Questions: Which is your most common state? and Which do you think is ideal? At first blush 3 or 4 seems best. But let's name each one and do a brief analysis:

1. Drowning and desperate. This is that "utterly out of control" feeling, the sense that you'll never, ever be able to catch up. This is the source of big backlogs of email and paper. Work is falling through the cracks, and you have a reputation of "Better follow up in person or it probably won't get done." Grievously unsustainable
   
2. Sinking (maybe slowly, maybe fast). This is the sense of "I just can't quite keep up," and leads to an overall anxiety about work. Your inboxes are increasing, with occasional "binge" emptying happening. Unsustainable
   
3. Steady state, but brittle. You're just able to keep up if it's "a good day," but the slightest lag in work means you start falling behind - a day or two, say. And vacation or a trip? You'd better block out a good chunk of time blocked out to pay your "vacation tax." Brittle (one of the 10 GTD "holes" I identified)
   
4. Smooth sailing. You've got some amount of buffer built in to your life. You can afford a few days of letting things pile up, and emptying is not usually a problem. Sustainable
   
5. Couch potato/proactive monster. You have plenty of buffer. You can take off a week or two, say, and catch up with no sweat. Coasting
   

Thoughts? I'm sure you can come up with better names, but clearly #5 is most interesting. I see two extremes. First ("couch potato") is the unchallenged case. Not much going on, possibly bored. The other end ("proactive monster") is (you guessed it) The 80/20 Principle applied. It's "kill your TV" and don't read the news (bustin' it 4HWW-style). You have no problem picking up the phone and talking to almost anyone you want, and finding time to read and write is not what's holding you back. You're a Hedgehog [3], and things are aligned in your life.

Living #5 goes against common wisdom of "working hard, very hard" being a top three success factor, and I want it. Naughty? Likely. Final questions: What do you think? Is this even possible in modern work, or as an employee/cubical dweller?

References

• [1] See A Conversation With Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro.
  
• [2] See When Inputs Exceed Your Workflow System's Capacity.
  
• [3] From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't:

  Hedgehog Concept: When you align three intersecting circles that represent three pivotal questions: What can we be the best in the world at? What is the economic denominator that best drives our economic engine? And What are our core people deeply passionate about?

  
  

Reader request: Feed the IdeaMatt!

Sorry for the delayed posting these last few weeks. I've been working on v1.2 of my workshop for an up-coming on-site series, and it's dimmed the lights (a term a favorite client came up with) on other projects.

(Sidebar: Why dimming the lights can be bad: While I recommend against this practice I've been drawn into it, and it stinks. Not only because it's stressful, but because the promise of "simultaneous progress on multiple projects" falls apart. Yes there's a dozen small - 5-15 minute - tasks on my list, and each one would not take much effort, but drat it's hard make them go when overshadowed by a big difficult project with a near term deadline. Makes one think of urgent/important, eh? And of course: Teaching this doesn't mean I'm perfect at practicing it myself. No mistake, I'm good at it, but "practice what you preach" is always good advice for me. How about you - do you dim the lights? What's the impact? And how do you avoid it?)

OK, so we interrupt the usual broadcast etc. to bring you a special request:

Send me good stuff!

I love to receive timely and relevant articles and news relating to productivity, and it helps my development of ideas here on this blog. Why am I asking you? Because you're a terrific resource: 1) you know what I like, 2) you're out there reading the best productivity sites (don't deny it - I attract what Pamela Slim called my "smartie productivity geeks" (paraphrasing here - sorry, Pam!), 3) you know I'll read and integrate it into my Big-Arse Text File, and 4) I'm lazy. And hey - If you want to help people you gotta' know what they want, right? :-)

Are you up for it? Email your goodies to brain@matthewcornell.org. Samples of things I loved getting:

• Anything from the Harvard Business Review
  
• The power of a note
  
• How to dig out from the information avalanche
  
• What would you do with an extra day?
  

Variation: Feel free to snail-mail things - contact information here.

So please: Feed the IdeaMatt! No job too big or small! We aim to please; your aim helps! (Further sidebar: I'm continuing to develop the idea of living an experimental lifestyle, and I'll be treating this request as such. Like my A Daily Planning Experiment, these results are fun to write about, they often influence my worldview, and sometimes inform my consulting practice - the daily plan is now a fundamental recommendation, for example. [sound of lab book opening...] Cheers!)

IdeaLab 0604: Giving, horse mouths, allergic cars, and a 2x2 matrix grab-bag

(Note: Coming soon, a thought-provoking interview of Scott Ginsberg - a variation on my interview series. Stay tuned!)

• Life's more interesting at the boundaries: That's why getting out of the comfort zone can be so rewarding. For example, gifts: The once with the greatest possible impact (read surprise + delight) require being on the "I love it!"/"Hmmm. Interesting" boundary. Giving a good one requires knowing the recipient well, plus taking a chance. But there's a risk! It might spectacularly fall flat.
  
  
• What do we always have to give?: Compassion, love, attention, quality listening, a positive attitude, inspiration, support (for being courageous/making change). Others? My friend Samantha Bennett says "Our identity and our ability to choose." Wow.
  
  
• Some accidental mashups of folk wisdom:
  
  
  • Don't bite a gift horse in the mouth.
    
  • "This package been pampered with" (from my seven year old daughter :-)
    
  • Too many griddles on the skillet.
    
  • A bird in the hand gathers no moss
    
  
  
  
• Is it all about prioritizing and reminding?: I think first about this from Nicholas Bate, and was reminded when reading Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness:

  Because frequent interruptions are expected we noticed that some of our subjects use special artifacts that help them to PRIORITIZE and MAINTAIN [ed: my emphasis] their attention over their working spheres. These artifacts function like containers in that they hold information about central working spheres. The information included in the artifact plays the role of a REMINDER and, as pointed out by Miyata and Norman [8], it both SIGNALS the working sphere to be attended to and DESCRIBES with some detail what has to be remembered. The artifact is often updated across the day with results when work within a sphere has to be postponed.

  
  
  
• Energy doesn't scale: In consulting and business, if you have to put more energy into something to generate income each time, it's not going to allow scalable growth. The opposite is products (information, software, atoms, etc): Yes there's a large up-front expenditure of energy, but it pays off after that with very low (or now) additional work on your part. (From my very good friend Liza's Power of One Blog: The Secret of Scalable Business.)
  
  
• Two questions to ask when inviting something into your life: "Does it change the way I think, or make me smile?" Or maybe: "Does this help me professionally (do my job) or personally (give joy)?" Stimulated partly by VII Pillars Of Productivity:

  A basic principle of information economics is that information has no economic value if it doesn't change a decision.

  
  
  
• Make cars allergic to people: My daughter and I came up with this when reflecting on the insanity of allowing these dangerous machines (fast, heavy, relatively uncontrolled, polluting) near where people walk. The idea is to mandate all autos come with a human proximity sensor governor. when. This would force cars to slow down (or completely stop!) when around people. Wouldn't this incentive drive people to take routes that avoid high pedestrian areas? Imagine!
  
  
• The 2x2 matrix: In Value-Based Fees Alan Weiss says "I can prove anything on a double-axis chart." This little tool [1] is lots of fun, though, and can lead to insights. A few examples follow (cell names are definitely beta).
  
  
• 2x2: Thought About vs. Decided:
  • No thought, No decision: Stuck?
    
  • No thought, Decision: Loose cannon?
    
  • Thought, No decision: Procrastinating sufferer?
    
  • Thought, Decision: Wow!
  
  
  
• 2x2: Style vs. Talent:
  • No style, No talent: Stuck?
    
  • No style, Talent: Competent?
    
  • Style, No talent: Flamboyant?
    
  • Style, Talent: wow!
  
  
  
• 2x2...blog?: From What If You......started a blog on a very tiny topic? How about a 2x2matrix blog? I'd be pretty surprised if someone hasn't done one yet... I'd be fun, though.
  
  
• 2x2...?: What are your favorites?
  
  
• "Crusty jugglers": From a hilariously odd scene in Hot Fuzz. A video
  Ohrwurm (eyewurm?) for me. (Related: Check out Mathematician Has Popular Equation Stuck In Head All Day.)
  
  
• So now you want to know me!: Here's a networking test: Are you thinking of re-connecting with someone who you didn't take the time to get to know in the past, but whom you realize could now be of use to you? Bad news: It's pretty much irreversible with these folks. Good news: Change the way you look at people in your life now. Importantly: Practice palm upnetworking.
  
  
• When does incremental processing not make sense?: That is, when is it better to let work collect and do it as a batch? Examples of when incremental wins: Small tasks that, individually are simple and fast to enter. For example, entering business receipts, processing business cards, shredding papers, daily checkbook balancing (if possible). Thoughts?
  
  
• Why you never heard "I lost three hours surfing my microwave": One problem with modern work: A general purpose desktop computer is too general for humans to maintain focus. Because this one machine makes so much is possible, we get distracted and drawn in. Similar: TV. Unlike years ago when one artifact did pretty much one thing. Books are different of course - worlds unto themselves. Libraries are an interesting example. Bad if you're trying to work on one things ("yum! soooo many nice books..."), but great if you're open to happy accidents as a side effect of the shelving algorithm. Compare this to a mixer/blender. Biggest choices: grind, frazzle, explode... ?
  
  
• How to use your IM status message for productivity: The default iChat choices for status include the expected ones like "Available," "Away," and "Out to lunch." I tried changing mine to match the workflow phases I teach - Gathering, Emptying, Planning, and Acting, and I found it helped me be clearer about what I'm doing in the moment. It also helped me stay focused when temptations arrived. What about adding non-productive ones like "wasting time" or "multitasking?" You could use Twitter the same way too. Related: A GTD WorkFlow Tool: The Five Stages On A Business Card Cube.
  
  

References

• [1] Apparently I'm not alone in my love for these things. Check out: 2x2 matrix illuminates strategies and An Infamous 2X2 Matrix. There's even a book of ~50 great ones from business: The Power of the 2 x 2 Matrix: Using 2x2 Thinking to Solve Business Problems and Make Better Decisions.