Debbie Downer and the Six Thinking Hats

I'm starting to promote myself as a productivity coach, and I had strange experience recently at a holiday party. While talking to a neighbor about full-time consulting, I noticed that all her comments were extremely negative, including such classics as "You can't make enough money doing that," "You'll have to put in too many hours," and "You won't find enough business." These were all spewed out in the space of about one minute. Bleh!

I had two reactions, and thankfully they helped to moderate this person's toxic effects on me (which I'm pretty certain she was unaware of - I believe she felt she was helping). The first reaction was a little internal chuckle as I remembered the Saturday Night Live character Debbie Downer, whose comments in conversations are always depressingly negative (e.g., "By the way, it's official...I can't have children.") And I had a live one!

My second reaction was to think of this person's response in terms of Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, which I've been working though lately. (There's a nice summary a the Mind Tools site.) I'm new to de Bono's ideas, but it sounded like my neighbor was using both her Red Hat (gut reaction and emotion - she thought it would be hard, and a bad idea), and her Black Hat (caution and negative aspects - this is dangerous, and won't work out). Interestingly, I found that simply identifying these perspectives was freeing, and helped to modulate my reaction to her. In other words, it gave me some needed perspective, something David Allen calls "the slipperiest and most valuable commodity."


I found a refreshing contrast in the book Getting started in consulting by Alan Weiss. He says that these kinds of responses are typical, but:

The problem is that if you educate yourself incorrectly at the outset, you're vulnerable to successfully meeting the exact wrong set of expectations. You will have brilliantly achieved a sorry state.

Also related: Adam Khan, in his book Self-help stuff that works, says "Sometimes you shouldn't listen," and gives examples of highly successful people who persevered in spite of early discouragement (he cites Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and George Washington). He suggests most people are trying to help by attempting to protect you from failure. However, he says failure is just another learning experience. This resonates with Allen's Principle 52: "The biggest successes come from the most failures" (from Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life).

Have you encountered any Debbie Downers (or Bob Bummers) lately?

A review of "Time management for dummies" from a GTD perspective

As part of my study of the field of personal productivity I'm reading (hopefully efficiently) as many books on the topic as I can, including ones on time management and organizing. I just finished Time management for dummies by Jeffrey J. Mayer, and (unlike some others) has enough good content for me to want to pass on.

(Note: I'm focusing on the time management portion of the book. The rest of it covers a broad range of topics including managing phone calls and correspondence, doing presentations, promoting yourself, travelling efficiently, and some now outdated technology tips. Check it out if you're interested; I found some useful tidbits in these sections.)


The "Master List," and processing inputs

In some ways, the best parts of the book are like a "mini" Getting Things Done (but missing some important points - described below). For example, to get started he has you go through all the papers on your desk, and sort them into three piles: keep, delegate, and recycle. You then process your keeper file, writing actions on a Master List, and either recycle or file each item as needed. He discourages you from interrupting the process to do anything; just note work on the Master List and continue. In the "get it out of your head" vein he says:

The habit of [writing thoughts on the Master List] is a very efficient way of remembering that you've got something to do. [It] frees you from having to try to remember what those things are. Now you can use your wonderful brain power for something that is considerably more important.

Sound familiar?

After processing the desk, he has you do the papers in the rest of your office, drawers, and briefcase. (He's big on doing sticky notes too.) Importantly, he has you write both personal and work items on the Master List.

Regarding filing, he has you use file folders (even for one sheet of paper), and to hand-write labels for speed. He encourages you to save all related project material in a corresponding file folder, and to refer to it when working on the project. To process reading matter he suggests creating a reading file, and to file only the relevant articles and stories, tearing out or copying as needed. To stay on top he suggests you spend time at the end of the day getting re-organized by processing mail, phone, and email messages, by adding actions to the Master List and/or filing appropriately.

He cautions that it takes time and effort to stay organized, but the results are worthwhile - staying on top of important work, feeling more in control, and increased satisfaction at the day's end.


Where the book lost me

Where I think Mayer's book starts losing cohesiveness is when he introduces using daily planners. In order to integrate with calendars, Mayer tosses out the great idea of a Master List, and has you plan your days and weeks in detail by scheduling tasks "when you think you can get to them," then crossing them off the master and eventually throwing it away. New items go directly into the planner on specific days. He then admits this is problematic because (as Allen points out) life seems to have a way of ignoring even the best plans. As a result, you have to copy tasks that aren't completed to the next best time you think you can get to them.

For me, the book makes its final plunge at the end of Chapter 4 where he summarizes all the problems with paper planners and suggests you start using Act, a contact management program which carries action items forward each day if they're not done. (Note: I haven't substantiated this, but an Amazon review complains that Mayer is employed by the ACT software people.)


Comparison to GTD, and summary

In a way, Mayer's transition from Master List to planner, then from planner to software makes sense, given his perspective of needing to schedule every task on a specific day. What I like about David Allen's system is that he has analyzed the problem with "hard" scheduling (interruptions can't be predicted, which leads to being less agile than desired), and instead splits actions into two very different types, with two correspondingly different artifacts for tracking them:

• Things that must be done on or by a certain date (tracked using a calendar), and
  
• Things that should be done as soon as possible (tracked on action lists)

From this insight, one can almost see the reasoning David Allen might have taken if he read Mayer's book:

"OK, we need to keep time-specific and other actions separate, so use the calendar for the former, and action lists for the latter. This solves the problem of having to carry forward non-time-specific actions when they aren't done. But the action list is too cumbersome, and it's hard to pick out things to do when I'm in different places with different resources available. So why don't we categorize items according to where they can be done - home, computer, phone, etc? And we should probably separate out delegated items, because we need to track them specially, so let's have a list of items that we're waiting for. Cool!"

And so on.

This is fun, but I don't want this little Gedankenexperiment to minimize Allen's contribution. Not only did he crystallize the basic GTD concepts, but he went way beyond actions to consider the role they play in larger projects, identified the five phases of workflow (seen in this pdf - Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do), and created a straightforward method for doing the Process and Organize steps (found in this pdf). Clear and brilliant!

Finally, I do not want to disparage Mr. Mayer's work. As I said, I think there are some good ideas here, plus other sections that I found useful. And many people praise his work (his site is here). However, after having drunk the GTD Kool-Aid, I now come to every time management book with my perspective having been permanently altered, in a way I think is much clearer.

Where the rubber meets the road

In LAX-ORD: air; ORD-CLE: car, Jason Womack describes choosing to drive all night from Chicago to Cleveland after his flight was canceled, to arrive just in time to deliver a morning presentation.

The principle at play here wasn't apparent to me at first. Certainly it's hard not to be impressed by Jason's willingness to go the extra mile (over 300 of them, actually) for his client. However, at a deeper level was his GTD-style decision making, in which he made a conscious choice, based on the situation, priorities, and time available, and was agile enough make it quickly, then take action. In other words, he chose to undertake something relatively extreme (drive many miles, overnight, without sleep, to arrive just in time to deliver), and he did this explicitly, knowing the risks and potential benefits. I also admire his attitude ("shift happens"), and that his principles are so clear (e.g., "I keep my agreements," and "People can count on me").

With respect to David Allen's work, this story reminds me of a quote I recently came across: Time management is not a technique. It is a way of relating to the world. (Apologies - I couldn't find the origin.) Jason's behavior helps me realize that a core principle of GTD is about making clear and informed choices, based on the context. After all, how we spend our time (of which we all have a limited amount) determines our impact in the world, which means every single choice - day in and day out - is where our commitments are realized. In Jason's case, it was literally "where the rubber meets the road." Good show!

What's in a name - GTD project naming conventions

While coaching my wife in David Allen's Getting Things Done (her request - I swear!), I was asked what project naming convention to use, and I decided I hadn't given this enough thought. My first response was "start with a verb," but I realized I was thinking more of actions, rather than projects. I'm pretty clear that actions should start with a verb, but projects?

First, regarding actions, starting them all with verbs makes sense: Next actions should be named to reflect doing (as he says, projects can't be done, only actions), and verbs (for me, at least) provide a subtle psychological pressure to take action. Put another way, they're commands from my planning self (the part that makes decisions up-front) to my acting self (the part that needs concrete direction, and is easily side-tracked with things that are too big or too vague).

So how about naming projects? Given Allen's perspective on clarifying outcomes, we'd expect him to phrase them in terms of the desired outcome. Interestingly, in the section of the book where he provides a partial projects list (page 37), out of a few dozen examples, only three do not start with verbs ("August vacation", "Staff off-site retreat", and "R&D joint-venture video project"). Here are a few other perspectives:

• From the Belly of the Beasts: Getting Things Done: the Roadmap: Projects should be written in the form of completed goals. E.g., it's not "make a plan for", it's "implement".
  
• Status report on implementing the 'Getting things done' process: Project Outcome: As Allen suggests, I'm using active verbs and outcomes as the Project Names, e.g. 'Write & Publish Novel'.
  
• Issues with defining projects - top end: Frank Buck says: I phrase the project as a statement of what the project will look like when it's completed. I find it helps me see more clearly when a project is "done" and there is still work to do.
  
• Breaking it down: If you’re looking at your list and all you see is nouns, you probably have projects. Actions use verbs.

While I like the idea of a project name reflecting the desired outcome (it goes back to one of Allen's two big questions [1]), I have an issue with verbs in project names: I like the names in my project list to match their corresponding project folder labels as closely as possible, for easiest retrieval. Putting "I know how to speak conversational Spanish" is a great affirmation, but would make a lousy label. I'd probably use something like (brace yourself) "Spanish project" or "Spanish class."

I'd love her your thoughts - How do you name projects?


Update: I should have include a post to this nice piece by David Allen on projects: Defining “Projects” – a Key to GTD. It used to be a tip, but it's gone. However, Jason posted a copy of it on the thread How do you manage Projects?.


[1] I talk a little about them in Some David Allen "twos" - two reasons we procrastinate, and two kinds of problems.

"Interesting, but not useful," or Does it pass the scribble test?

As I get older, and after having adopted Getting Things Done to help keep my life sane, I find that I'm getting a little more conscious of how I spend my time, both at work (I've always been fairly focused there) and in life. Maybe it's the relentless ticking of the clock, but I'm getting more rigorous in addressing something my five year old daughter recently said: "Daddy, that's interesting, but not useful" (pronounced "in-stirring", and an amazing thought!)

To that end I've been re-evaluating the inputs I allow into my life, including my Bloglines feeds, the conversations I have, the books I read, and, generally, how I choose spend my time. Are they interesting? By definition they all provide something of value to me - information, stimulation, distraction, calming, etc. But are they all useful?

To help solve this problem I've come up with what I call the "scribble test"

Does reading, listening, talking, etc. cause me to break out my Ubiquitous Capture Tool and scribble like mad?

If so, you've got a live one! This came to me while listening to How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius. After a few minutes it was like automatic writing at a séance!

Like any test of this kind, it has limitations, based on what your reading goals are, but in my study of personal productivity, it's one way to decide whether a book's worth my time. (This is important due to the sheer number of books on the topic - Amazon gives me 217,182 hits for "organized.")

Do you have any metrics for evaluating your inputs?


References/Notes

• In Actually getting things done ... I mentioned the 50 page rule for books, and my 20 minute variation for movies. I'm still applying this brutally, though it's tough with movies - even bad ones draw me in.
  
• I like Kevin Kelly's comment (from Cool Tool: Arthur Ganson Presents a Few Machines):

  "Cool and useless. That's my definition of art."

  Ha!
  
• In On saying yes - 3 possibilities ... I mentioned five questions about accepting things into your life, taken from Marilyn Paul's book It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys:
  • Does it give me energy?
    
  • Am I excited about doing it?
    
  • Does it bring me joy?
    
  • Does it connect me to the people I care most about?
    
  • Does it help me manifest my most valued goals?