A few thoughts on capture

The productivity methodology I teach stresses the value capturing everything that's on your mind - commitments, concerns, ideas, etc. - and processing them frequently to harvest the corresponding actions. I wanted to share a few capture quickies I thought you'd appreciate.

Tap into your "smartest self"

One way to look at capture is that it leverages when you do think of something, not when you think you should be creating. Our brains have wonderful abilities to associate ideas in novel ways, put unlikely things together, and come up with surprising abstractions, but they don't do so on demand or on a fixed "creativity schedule."

Thus, having a capture tool readily at hand (e.g., a notepad or voice recorder - see What's the best tool for ubiquitous capture?) capitalizes on when you're being smartest. Of course you have to have a system to reliably store and retrieve these thoughts, either as appropriate reminders for future action, or as an "idea bank" for future withdrawals (see Pickle jars, text files, and creative idea capture).


On insomnia: I give my one-on-one clients a Super Spy Night Pen for capture at night - not only is it a fun novelty, but I've found doing a mini brain dump really helps if thoughts are keeping you from getting to sleep. (And yes, it's geeky, but hey - what do you expect from a former NASA engineer? A pencil?)


Be the fastest gun in the west

It's crucial that idea capture be very fast and take as little effort as possible, so that you can get back to the task at hand. Otherwise distraction happens. I use a very efficient (if a bit geeky) text-based system (more at My Big-Arse Text File - a Poor Man's Wiki+Blog+PIM), but there are many other tools available, including GyroQ, which Eric Mack enjoys.


Finally

As I tell my workshop participants:

Capture your thoughts or they will capture you.

In other words, who's in control - you or your thinking?


How about you - any favorite "capture and release" tips or tricks? Let me know!

Some thoughts on "Eat that frog!" by Brian Tracy

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I just finishing very quickly going over Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy, which has been in my candidates library for a while. It came to the front of my list as a result of some questions that came during discussion in a recent workshop.

I won't go into detail on the book - you can find a nice summary the main points at Amit Chakradeo's blog, and more extensive notes (including Tracy's rules) here. Instead I'll look at it from the perspective of how it compares as a system for self-management. I'll first pull out what I thought the best anti-procrastination ideas were, then address how it fits in with my view of personal productivity.

Best ideas

The ideas that had the most impact for me were:

• Identify and work on your MIT (Most Important Task) first (see Gina's post Control your workday for more).
• Apply Lakein's Question to each action choice (i.e., the daily review).
• Determine your prime time, and schedule time blocks accordingly (see Laura Stack's article Understanding Your Personal Energy Cycle for some detail).
• Schedule regular large time blocks for action work (see Julie Morgenstern's article Taking Control of Your Days with a Time Map).
• Impose artificial deadlines, and schedule particularly nasty tasks on calendar.
• Break big tasks down (like Lakein's "swiss cheese" method - from How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, and David Allen's famous "What's the next action?" question).
• Plan out projects, and prepare adequately (related: Allen's Natural Planning Model - 2/3 of the way down in Matt Vance's book summary).
• Sharpen the saw (see Steve Pavlina's article).
• Use positive self talk (see the idea of learned optimism, which I talk a bit about in Handling worries: keep a list, schedule them, and have a worry place).
• Learn to say "no!"

(You may also enjoy my article Use the STING method to stop procrastinating.)

As a personal productivity system

In spite of such a great list, I have some issues with the book as a complete system. Tracy starts out with some solid points that initially had me nodding my head:

There is never enough time to do everything you have to do. You are literally swamped with work and personal responsibilities, projects, stacks of magazines to read, and piles of books you intend to get to one of these days as soon as you get caught up.

You can get control of your time and your life only by changing the way you think, work, and deal with the never ending river of responsibilities that flows over you each day. You can get control of your tasks and activities only to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few activities that can really make a difference in your life.

Given my influences, it won't come as a surprise when I ask whether procrastination is really the problem most people should focus on first - for those of us who don't have a system to address the overflow of commitments, communications, and information flooding our lives, focusing on tips like those above is premature. The proverb Learn to walk before you run comes to mind.

Specifically, I found the book makes some significant assumptions and omissions:

• It completely skips something that's a huge block to effective focus: The mind's reduced ability to focus if not empty.
• It doesn't address the crucial need for centralized action reminders.
• It omits dealing with power of stuff to distract, and the large waste of time searching for information can cause.
• Similarly, the book doesn't account for the power of lower-level things to grab attention, precluding thought at important higher levels. Put another way, it's hard to determine higher-level goals/objectives when drowning; ditto for "determining key result areas," and "leveraging special talents."
• Regarding skipping "lower value tasks," I like the perspective that there are really only two kinds of tasks: ones you're committed to doing, and other. Importantly, all of the former are higher value tasks, for some aspect of your life. And as Allen points out, skipping tasks that are lower value now can create a crisis.
• The book is all about choosing action, but you can't apply choose well without having a complete action choice inventory (AKA "next actions" in GTD).
• Finally, prioritization needs to be more flexible than the traditional ABC scheme, given the pace and demands of modern life.

That said, I have a lot of respect for Tracy, who is full of great ideas. For example, one of my favorites (which my readers enjoyed - see this post) is from Time Power, which he calls his Guaranteed Formula For Getting Rich:

Invest as much in your mind each year as you do in your car." "The average driver spends $600 per month on his car... In the first year of practicing this formula, you income will increase 25 percent to 50 percent, or more, and your entire career will take off.

I've been trying it so far and my income has dropped (OK, I went 1/2 time at programming, so give it time), but I'm still game. Cheers!

Depressurize your email with a 24 hour response time

A while back I wrote What's your maximum response time?, in which I questioned why some people don't respond in a timely manner to emails, even if it's to say "no" or "don't write me again" [1]. Due to my GTD practice I'm more sensitive to this in others and especially myself, and I've been pretty consistently sticking to a personal maximum response time of 24 hours. (24 hours is reasonable for most of my transactions; YMMV.)

However, this has yielded an unexpected benefit of giving me some mental "breathing room." Specifically, before I instituted the 24 hour policy I felt an internal pressure to respond to emails as soon as possible, regardless of urgency. This turned out to be significantly more frequently than the recommended 24-48 hour processing and organizing David Allen recommends. This caused tension, and drew me away from working my actions list.

Now, because I know I'll get to them within a day, I'm much more comfortable letting messages sit a bit, and getting other work done. This in turn has removed some of the emotional zing from messages, and has generally freed up attention for reviewing and doing.

In all, pretty neat!


References

• [1] My delayed response record was recently broken: someone I met at a social event replied to my "It was nice meeting you" email four months later. Interestingly, this person became one of my consulting clients in the recent Scholarly Productivity Coaching Pilot at UMass/Amherst.
  

A question for readers: Digital voice recorder for transcription?

Dan Gillmor is famous for his quote My readers know more than I do. I'd like to tap into my very smart bunch of subscribers and ask if you've any recommendations for digital voice recorders. For my birthday (44!) my family is buying me one for my use in capturing reading (see my post How to read a lot of books in a short time for the back story), so your thoughts would be very welcome! (I'm leaning towards the Olympus DS-2 or the Olympus WS-300M.)

P.S. Thanks to my well-wishers regarding my workshop. The second half today went great. Lots of questions, excitement about my tools "hall of fame" (low-, mid-, and high-tech examples), plus talk of files, the tickler, and managing reading. The applause was an unexpected treat! I'm running it again next week at another campus... Coming up: The Unofficial GTD Coaching Alliance!

A few thoughts and insights from my "stuff" workshop

Yesterday I put on part one of my two-part six hour workshop How Do I Deal with All this Stuff!?: A simple system for taking control of work and life. For me, preparing and presenting these workshops has a ton of value, not just (hopefully) for my participants, but to me as a student of personal productivity. (As I wrote earlier, if you want to learn, teach!) They're also a lot of fun!

I wanted to share a few observations from yesterday I thought you'd enjoy.


Brain dump topics

Here are a few of the fascinating topics that came up during the brain dump exercise:

• enzyme research project (experimental research)
  
• school volunteer calls (20 of them)
  
• bottling schedule (olive oil business)
  
• tag sale
  
• gift visit reports (development office)
  
• box of inherited photos (parent passing away)
  
• Disney trip (school band)
  
• grad school application

Activities using index cards

OK I admit it - I love using cards and activities in my workshops. If I'm talking for more than eight minutes, I figure it's too much. (No PowerPoint for me!) Here are two exercises that went over quite well:

1) I created a set of 22 "diagram cards," which were central to a "build the workflow diagram" exercise. I had people form groups of around 8 people, and build up (with my guidance) the processing and organizing diagram. I like doing this much better than simply showing the thing and talking for 15 minutes. It gives participants a chance to stand up, move around, have fun, and get some tactile experience. (Note: I created these using StarOffice, and printed them on my awesome Canon PIXMA iP3000, found via this discussion.)

2) Relevant quotes and statistics can enhance points during workshops, but instead of reading them aloud (boring for everyone) I have folks break into groups of three, and give them each a randomly-selected card from a batch of stimulating ones. I then have them read each one in the small group, discuss them, and pick the "best" one to share with the larger group. This worked great because it gave them choice, got them thinking, and let them show their smarts. Here are a few that I included:

• A key to excellence is being able to recover quickly.
  
• It's not always the actual work that is the hardest part of a job and success - It's the decisions, compromises and choices that need to be made.
  
• Who can focus on life goals while totally preoccupied by the chaos at work? No one. However, once you've gained control of your working life, you can easily find the time, energy, and focus to seriously pursue your dreams. And that is the essential ingredient in restoring a positive balance between your work and your life.
  
• Keep your desk clear and free of clutter. The primary purpose of your desktop is to work on one and only one project at a time.

A great summary of modern life's challenges

Finally, here's how one of the participants described the overall challenge of modern work:

I can think of example of where I get bogged down. For example, I need to write SOP for the office (and that is a federal requirement and a pretty important thing to get done) but the phone is ringing with questions, staff are constantly needing assistance and new initiatives keep coming in that have to be squeezed into the same time frame. Then I act like a chicken with its head cut off running from one thing to another and never really feeling like I accomplish anything at the end of the day (especially making any progress on the SOPs).

Currently my desk is full of little piles, each one with a little different twist, but each one requiring some quiet time to think through. Quiet time is difficult to come by in my environment. If I go off to some other space, then I am not here to field the questions. And so it goes.

Philosophically I want to be known as a responsive and available "service" for the community, but I think I have to lower my standards about that somehow.

I found this to be a great summary, and it really addresses why I'm doing this work - to help people with these challenges. Of course it helps having such a great bunch of people attending!