The Manager’s Schedule vs. the Maker’s Schedule

This is one of the most enlightening articles I’ve ever read on the subject of time management. It puts words to a dilemma that I think many people (including myself) have felt keenly, but haven’t quite been able to put our finger on. Here’s the core idea:

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

He then goes on to give some helpful thoughts toward a solution at the end — both in terms of enabling managers and makers to be in sync and in terms of helping those who need to (and want to!) function in the realms of both manager and maker.

(HT: Josh Sowin)

August 16, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 2 Comments 
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Getting Things Done to the Next Level

Below are the notes from a presentation I did a few years ago on my overall planning system. It also outlines some of the major kinks that GTD has (in my view, at least) and the ways I’ve sought to iron them out.

I do some things differently now and have simplified some things, but this has been my best attempt so far to outline a comprehensive, integrated approach to getting things done in a way that tries to minimize the kinks and rough spots in an “out of the box” GTD implementation.

Overview

I’m going to do three things: Give a really brief summary of GTD, identify some key things I’ve found to be lacking in it, and elaborate on how I think you build up the areas that are lacking into a total system.

Basic Principles of GTD

  1. Get everything off your head and into a trusted system that you review regularly.
  2. Make front-end decisions about the next action and intended outcomes for every input that you allow into your life.
  3. Organize reminders of projects and next actions in appropriate categories.
  4. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently.
  5. Trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (or not doing) at any time.

Things Lacking in GTD

  1. Weak on the higher altitudes—those above 10,000 feet.
  2. No valves and dams to keep you from overwhelming yourself with too many active projects. Most people I know who utilize GTD have 40, 60, or 100 projects. Nobody can execute that many at once, and it diffuses your efforts. You also get into the “ringing effect,” with projects bumping into each other, thus reducing efficiency.
  3. Insufficient detail given to how to handle time-sensitive and repeating tasks.
  4. It can feel like you are never done when you manage your life by pure next action lists with almost no due dates. I found that the next action list sometimes needs to be governed by “time zones.”
  5. The concept of “project plans” can really be built on.
  6. There is no corresponding type of plan for “operations,” which are just as important to our lives as projects.
  7. Consequently, there is no good place to put those “notes to self” like “eat less,” which are not so much beginning-and-end actions as they are standard operating principles.
  8. Insufficient attention is given to the need to be proactive. Why are these things on your list in the first place?
  9. When determining what to do next, my intuition tends to identify not just the next action I want to do, but the next ten. And it needs a place to document that in the next action lists themselves, so it doesn’t have to always “re-think” the determinations it made.
  10. This also happens with projects. When determining the next action on a project, I tend to think of ten next actions, not just one. I need a place to keep those. A more developed concept of project plans can really do something here.
  11. I don’t know what A-Z filing is. It seems to be the bad filing system I had before I even read David Allen.
  12. Little attention is given to how to best document ideas and insights you just want to keep for reference, but aren’t large enough to warrant a whole document.
  13. Tends to generate a lot of mosquito tasks. Mosquito tasks are killers. You need to know how to group them.

Building Upon GTD

Planning System Components

  1. Action and horizon lists
  2. Calendar
  3. Memos
  4. Contacts
  5. Filing system
  6. Journals

Beyond Projects: Creating Your Lists

The Six Lists

The six lists you need are:

  1. Next actions
  2. Projects
  3. Roles
  4. Goals
  5. Mission statement
  6. Someday/Maybe

Where do you create these lists? Each list is a different task folder in whatever software program you use (such as Outlook or OmniFocus).

Key principle: You implement the higher levels by breaking them down into the lower levels.

The Next Action List

  1. Have the GTD contexts, and also have two categories for time-sensitive tasks: “Action calendar” for tasks you don’t want to do until the day they come up, and “daily” for planning specific things you want to do that day. “Action Calendar” is where repeating tasks go, and “Daily” is where you can prioritize and sequence specific things you need to do today, tomorrow, etc. Put a “@” in front of these categories so they go to the top; do not use the “@” in front of the other contexts.
  2. The next action does not always have to be super granular. If the next thing you need to do on a project is work on it for 3 hours, just put that. Trying to put the literal first action will not accurately represent what you have to do, so you won’t trust your list.
  3. Use your calendar to govern your list when needed. Create time zones.
  4. Some next actions need to be large. If you need to give 4 hours to a project, don’t just list the first action on it, like “call Fred.” On the other hand, don’t transfer to your next action list all 20 actions you think will be involved in that 4 hours. Instead, create a next action that represents what you will truly be doing—“work on project x for 4 hours.” Then, for specific details on what actions you’ll be doing, keep those in the project plan, and work from that.
  5. Have a distinct category for mosquito tasks. For example, “Home Computer: Mosquito.”

The Projects List

  1. Create a category between someday/maybe and projects. Divide your projects list into “current” and “upcoming.” Move as many as you can into upcoming, keeping the number of active projects as small as possible. Complete them as fast as possible, and move projects up from upcoming in your weekly review. This is really just a “10,000 foot tickler.”
  2. Use project plans by listing all tasks that come to mind for the project right in the Outlook note field for the item. Organize the list in sequence. Keep additional data in there that you might forget about, such as status updates, rationale, ideas to process, contact info, whatever you need. The principle is: List steps, keep details, review, translate to NAs.
  3. Use project plans to incubate next actions that you can’t move on yet in the project.
  4. Have a “monitoring” category for projects others are doing that you need to keep a watch on and toss input into. So your project categories are: Current, Monitoring, and Upcoming.

The Roles List

  1. Understand the difference between projects and operations. Roles contain your operations.
  2. Don’t limit yourself to seven roles, as Covey recommends. That’s not realistic. Put all of them in there. Then, group them into 6 areas: Personal, family, household, financial, social, professional.
  3. Create an action plan for each role, just like you do for projects. In that action plan, list the responsibilities for the role, and any strategies, principles, or operating principles.

The Goals List

  1. Understand goals as initiatives for change. Keep operational goals out of here, such as “to jog three times a week.” (Put that into your role plan for “exercise.”)
  2. Understand goals as groups of projects.
  3. Use goal plans, like you do project plans. Further, use them to incubate projects that you can’t move on until other projects pertaining to the goal are accomplished first.

The Mission Statement

  1. Have an ultimate objective, which is the mission sentence.
  2. Include in the mission statement other components as needed, such as vision, leading principles, values, and so forth.

Someday/Maybe

  1. Categorize this list—don’t just have one catch-all. Categories can be thins like “Agenda Items to Maybe Discuss,” “Books to Read,” “Household Projects,” “Financial Projects,” “Skills to Learn,” “Movies to See,” “Next Time At…,” “Restaurants to Go To,” “Things to See and Do,” “Trips to Take,” etc.
  2. If you have a lot of items, it will be too much to review in a weekly review. So create another list that is just for items you want to review each week.

Key Principles

  1. Each higher level gets broken down into the lower levels.
  2. Keep dependencies in the plans for the outcome above. This way, each list is lean by only having what is current.

Being Proactive in the Weekly Review

  1. Don’t just mindlessly review and update and create actions for what is already on your lists. Ask why the items are there and whether they should be there at all.
  2. Pick 3-4 current projects that would make the biggest impact to things if you moved them forward. Schedule time to work on them.
  3. Review what you learned from the week before.
  4. Create a journal entry.
  5. Concept of big rocks.

Setting Up a Topical Filing System

  1. Have these major file categories: Pending, Projects, Operations, General Reference, Archive.
  2. Organize the project file by project name; I guess that here we have A-Z.
  3. Organize the operations file by department, and department by sub-functions. At home, organize your operation files by your roles.
  4. Organize general reference by major knowledge area. Always move from general to specific—don’t create a file called “California.” Create a file called “Travel: California.” Then it will be grouped with “Travel: New York,” and etc.

Keeping Journals

  1. Put small ideas you want to keep, but aren’t big enough for a full document, and things you want to make record of  in journals.
  2. Have a journal for each topic and operational area that interests you.

Carrying out the Daily Workflow Processes

  1. Capture everything. Use a running journal. Process it like your in basket. Also keep paper pads and pens everywhere, and a pen in your wallet (for when your running journal isn’t with you). If your cell phone has a voice notes feature, use it to capture ideas quickly when you can’t write (like while driving), and process it like your in box.
  2. Plan daily.

Handling Ideas

Handle based on horizon it pertains to:

  1. Action (create next action, and make sure it really is an NA)
  2. Project or project support (create project, file, add to project plan as status update, task, etc.)
  3. Operations support (create operation, file, journal, add to support document)
  4. Reference (file, journal)

Summary of Updates

  1. Horizons. Set up the 10,000 – 50,000 foot levels.
  2. Dams. Build a dam in your project list to keep from overwhelming yourself. Divide the projects list into current and upcoming.
  3. Date-sensitive tasks. Set up an efficient way to handle day-specific tasks by creating a distinct context for them.
  4. Repeating tasks. Create a repeating task/tickler category in your next action list.
  5. Next action governors. Use your calendar to manage your next action lists when necessary.
  6. Operations plans. Become equipped to handle not just actions that can be completed, but operating principles that can’t be. Create action plans for your roles.
  7. Proactivity. Be proactive about what you do. Don’t prioritize your schedule; schedule your priorities. In the weekly review, pick 3-5 key projects to focus on that week and schedule time for them.
  8. Filing. Don’t simply have general reference. Have specialized reference divisions of: pending, projects, and operations. General reference is for everything else—just stuff of general interest. Don’t file A-Z, but by category. In operations, by department (at work) or role (at home). In general reference, by major topic.
  9. Journals. Use journals to keep track of short but significant thoughts. Have a journal for each major subject that thoughts occur to you on, and a regular life journal for events and general things.
  10. Set up certain recurring tasks to keep your system in motion. General examples are daily tasks to process in, process notes, process email. Area-specific ones might be pay bills, process financial data, review website, etc.
  11. Project plans. Implement project plans in the note field for the task in Outlook. When you seek to think of a next action on your project, and you think of five next actions rather than just one, use the project plan to list the other four, so that they aren’t cluttering up your next action list.

Appendix: Principles on Work

  1. People create work. For example, even if you go on vacation in order to do no work, the maid still needs to come to make the bed, take out the trash, and clean the room each day.
  2. Work creates work.  Doing one task often triggers, leads to, uncovers, or requires another. And then another…
  3. Work takes work to manage.
  4. Greater efficiency does not necessarily mean less work, but rather usually means that more work will be attempted—which is greater in volume than the slice of time saved by the efficiency. This has been the case with increased energy efficiency through the twentieth century, and it is no different with increased time efficiency.
  5. The larger the number of dependencies among your tasks and in your life, the less lean you are and the more complicated your life is. Seek to minimize dependencies.
  6. You will never reach the end of your lists.
August 4, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 13 Comments 
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Seth Godin on Productivity

At the Seth Godin Live event in DC (about two weeks ago now), I asked Seth: “There are so many things to do that clamor for our attention and make it hard to focus on what we really want to do. How do we keep these things from setting the agenda and instead carve out the time to do work that matters?”

His answer was great. To slightly paraphrase, he said:

The issue is not “How do I find time to work on projects?” Rather, a Linchpin says, “I create projects that matter. How do I then carve out the time to work on the stuff they think is my real job?”

That is great advice. You’ll notice that this is simply another variation on the fundamental principle of time management: put first things first.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that if you just get “all this other stuff” out of the way, then you’ll have the time and energy to focus on the most important (and thus, usually, most challenging) things you have to do. It does not work that way.

Instead, make working on the most important things — which Seth would define as emotional labor in projects that are worth doing and that you deeply care about — your primary work. Then, fit the other things in when you can.

One last thing: It’s not that the “other things” are always trivial or unimportant. Many of them (though not all) do need to be done. But the thing is that if you do them first, you’ll rarely get to the most important things. On the other hand, if you do the most important things first, you’ll find that you have the time you need left over for the other things.

August 3, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 2 Comments 
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For Those in the Washington, DC Area

For those who live in the DC area, I will be speaking this Saturday morning on productivity and the gospel for the Redeemer Roundtable, hosted by Redeemer Church of Arlington (a church plant of Covenant Life). I will do two messages, with each followed by Q&A. If there are any readers that want to stop by, it would be great to see you!

Here are the details:

The Redeemer Roundtable, hosted by Redeemer Church of Arlington, engages frontline Christian leaders in various areas of industry to discuss what it means to think through issues such as money, business and politics in a way that is Biblically faithful and contextually appropriate.

This month Matt Perman will be joining us to talk about productivity in light of our callings as Christians. Matt writes a popular blog on productivity called What’s Best Next. Matt is a seminar speaker at this year’s Desiring God National Conference and has spoken at The Gospel Coalition’s National Conference. He is also the Sr. Director for Strategy at DesiringGod in Minneapolis, MN.

Location: Arlington Temple UMC (1835 N Nash St., Rosslyn, VA 22209)
Date: July 24, 2010
Time: 9:00 – 11:00am (bagels and coffee at 8:30am)

You can RSVP to johannah [at] redeemerarlington.com

July 20, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 1 Comment 
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Managing Email with an Assistant

More good thinking from Michael Hyatt, this time on an approach to managing email with an assistant that really looks promising.

What’s helpful here is that Hyatt first discusses what didn’t work, and then outlines the process that they finally settled on.

July 2, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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Scheduling Time in the Alone Zone

Good words from Michael Hyatt.

July 1, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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How Not to Fall Behind by an Hour a Day

Some good observations from David Allen in Making It All Work:

Working your process takes time. As I described in chapter 6 on clarifying, it usually requires an hour a day just to stay current with the typical volume of information.

That’s a highly productive expenditure of time, during which you’ll be thinking, making decisions, completing short actions, routing data, communicating, and defining and organizing new work. But it’s not the kind of activity you can do while you’re working on longer tasks or in meetings.

Though many executives find it useful to leave the first hour or so of the morning open for it, processing time is something that you may not find easy to block out. Some people have a stable enough work environment to allow for clearing the decks first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, but you may simply have to clean up your in-basket “between the lines” — whenever you can as you move through your day.

The critical factor is to be aware that it will take time. If you allow yourself to be booked in meetings through an entire day, you will fall at least an hour behind in your processing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as you realize that you will have to “pay the Piper [that is, John Piper -- just kidding!]” sometime soon. Many, however, don’t seem to realize or accept this reality and then operate in a constant state of frustration over having to make up the lost time. That’s like complaining that taking a shower eats into your day!

People who get accustomed to the true amount of time and energy required for these procedures begin to incorporate it into the stride of their life and work, instead of railing against it.

July 1, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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The Difference Between Responsibilities and Tasks

Leave the Office Earlier explains this well:

There is a difference between a responsibility and a task. For example, “participate in team decisions” is a responsibility; “attend team meetings” is a task. “Communicate with customers” is a responsibility; “write monthly ezine is a task.” “Obtain market visibility” is a responsibility; “write article for trade journals” is a task. “Develop media relationships” is a responsibility; “create press releases” is a task.

The distinction hinges on the question, “Why do I do this?” The responsibility is high level, and the task is specific. One responsibility may carry five (or more) associated tasks. If you can eliminate one responsibility through clarification, you may eliminate several tasks. You carry out tasks to fulfill responsibilities.

June 30, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 1 Comment 
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Questions on Time Management

Here are some good questions from Shopping for Time: How to Do It All and Not Be Overwhelmed:

June 29, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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The Power of Full Engagement

If you have a tendency to work too much (or not enough!), I highly recommend The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. I’ve been dipping into it a bit and, while parts of it can seem like too much of a step-by-step program (for lack of a better term) at times, it has a lot of helpful insight.

Here are a few quotes:

“Managing time efficiently is no guarantee that we will bring sufficient energy to whatever we are doing” (4).

“The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have every trained” (8).

“Sadly, the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than as an integral aspect of sustained performance” (12).

Maximum performance comes by “alternating periods of activity with periods of rest” (28).

“Nearly every elite athlete we have worked with over the years has come to us with performance problems that could be traced to an imbalance between the expenditure and the recovery of energy. They were either overtraining or undertraining in one or more dimensions — physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. Both overtraining and undertraining have performance consequences that include persistent injuries and sickness, anxiety, negativey and anger, difficulty concentrating, and loss of pasion. We achieved our breakthroughs with athletes by helping them to more skillfully manage energy — pushing themselves to systematically increase capacity in whatever dimension it was insufficient, but also to build in regular recovery as part of their training regimens. Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. When we expend energy, we draw down our reservoir. When we recover energy, we fill it back up. Too much energy expenditure without sufficient recovery eventually leads to burnout and breakdown. (Overuse it and lose it.) Too much recovery without sufficient stress leads to atrophy and weakness. (Use it or lose it.)” (29)

“To the degree that leaders and managers build cultures around continuous work…performance is necessarily compromised over time. Cultures that encourage people to seek intermittent renewal not only inspire greater commitment, but also more productivity” (30).

“You can always find reasons to work. There will always be one more thing to do, but when people don’t take time out, they stop being productive” (35).

“When we operate at a high enough intensity for long enough, we progressively lose the capacity to shift to another gear” (39).

By advocating that we don’t overwork, however, they aren’t arguing that we coast. Rather, the periods of activity should often push us beyond our limits. The key is that you also have to punctuate these times with sufficient periods of rest and recovery. Here’s a good overall summary of that point, which is one of the key points of the book:

“When we first suggested to Roger B. that he lacked sufficient capacity in part because he hadn’t exposed himself to sufficient stress, he was incredulous. ‘My life is more stressful than ever,’ he insisted. ‘I’m getting less help from my boss, and I’ve got more people to supervise, fewer resources and more competition. If what you’re saying is right, how come I’m not getting stronger?’ Many of our clients initially raise the same question.

“The answer, we tell them, is that the key to expanding capacity is both to push beyond one’s ordinary limits and to regularly seek recover, which is when growth actually occurs [this is just like with weight training, or running, or swimming, and so forth]. There was no area of Roger’s life in which he was doing both. At the physical and spiritual level, he wasn’t spending enough energy to build capacity. Because he was undertraining those muscles, they continued to atrophy.

“In the other two dimensions — mental and emotional — Roger was overtraining, subjecting himself to excessive stress without sufficient intermittent recovery. The result was that he felt overwhelmed. His solution was simply to keep pushing. What he needed was time to detoxify and change channels in order to periodically renew mentally and emotionally. Roger was pushing himself too hard in some dimensions and not hard enough in others. The ultimate consequence was the same: diminished capacity in the face of rising demand.

June 28, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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The Beatles and Multitasking

This is a good post by Matt Blick.

June 24, 2010 | Filed Under Multi-tasking | 1 Comment 
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An Attempt to Improve Things

It’s a bit annoying to me that Things doesn’t have a place to put your longer-term goals and any big rocks you define for the week. The result is that your actions (and projects) lack the overall context that really provides your orientation (within an overall gospel-centered and biblical framework — without that, a to-do list becomes law).

So I’m toying with the adaptation pictured below, which lets me do this. You have to use the program a bit differently from intended, but it feels better to me (at least initially).

Note that to make this work, you don’t explicitly tie actions to projects. I put the actions I need to take in the “areas” section, and just manually create another one when needed to keep a project going forward. If a project needs more detailed planning, that goes in project support, not Things (which I’ve found cluttering).

Here’s a screen shot of this layout:

Things

June 22, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 5 Comments 
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A Thought on Things

I’ve started using Things a bit (along with OmniFocus — I’ll explain how I use each at some point if this keeps up).

I like the interface of Things a lot and there is a simplicity to it that is really appealing. I find that Things works great for quick and simple tasks. I also find that it works great for repeating tasks. I find it complicated, however, to use it to organize tasks in to projects and keep track of anything that is longer-term and sustained.

So one thought — and I don’t know yet if this will work — is to use Things for repeating tasks and quick hit stuff, and then keep track of longer-term outcomes somewhere else.

For those out there who use Things: How do you use it?

June 22, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 2 Comments 
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Have 2 Lists

This is good advice, from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality:

When it comes to organizing your action steps of the day — and how your energy will be allocated — create two lists: one for urgent items and another for important ones. Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete against the urgent items that can consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve different periods of time to focus on each.

June 21, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 1 Comment 
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Plan Your Week!

No matter what type of planning approach you use — GTD, something else, or nothing — it is not going to work if you don’t sit down and identify your most important priorities for the week.

You don’t have to go in to a lot of detail. All you need to do is reflect and ask a few questions:

  1. What needs to be done this week?
  2. What do I want to do this week?

That’s really about all it takes. You might have some lists (goals, projects, and roles) that can help you identify the core things, or you might not. Either way, you just need to ask those two questions and then write down the 4-7 priorities that come to mind.

There’s more you can do, but that’s the main thing.

June 20, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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Handling Books to Read in GTD

I’ve mentioned here before that GTD needs to be tweaked a bit. I don’t think these tweaks are contrary to the approach itself, but they are modifications of “out of the box” GTD.

One way that I came to see the need to tweak GTD came from handling books to read. Basically, I could not find a good way to handle books to read within the standard GTD approach. For example, is a book a project? It takes more than one step to read a book, so technically it is. But it just doesn’t fit well to put books on your project list. Further, I will often have 5 or more books going at once and a few dozen more that I want to get to soon — and so putting the books I am reading on my project list would really start to get unwieldy.

Another issue with putting books you are reading on your project list is that — for me, at least — it creates pressure to read them at strange times. For example, if you just have one undifferentiated project list, then when you start work at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and look at your project list, one of the first things you’ll see is “Read Atlas Shrugged” or “Read Basic Economics” or “Read Switch.” But that’s not my reading time, and so I don’t want to see those then. Having books on your project list just gets in the way and creates a form of cognitive dissonance that interferes with your focus when you are in a different time zone — you want to identify the most important projects to work on in your current zone (in this case, work), and yet you keep seeing certain things that aren’t relevant to that time frame.

Someone could say “but you’re supposed to work from your next action list, not project list.” That is standard GTD orthodoxy, but I find that I have to refer to my project list so frequently in order to keep my next action list accurate that this doesn’t really solve the problem. Beyond that, I’ve never really found it helpful to put “read such and such” on any next action list. It just doesn’t work for me. But what other kind of list is there? There is Someday/Maybe, but the books I’m reading are current tasks, not someday or maybe tasks. In standard GTD, there really isn’t really a decent place to keep a simple list of the books you are reading right now.

Now, maybe such a list isn’t necessary. But the point of GTD is that it is supposed to be an approach for keeping track of everything you have to do. So if you can’t find a decent way to integrate something as basic as books you are reading into the GTD approach, it is an indication that there is a bigger issue going on here and that the approach needs to be tweaked.

The solution is to recognize that a list like “Books to Read” is operational support. Reading is one type of thing that you do, and usually you have a specific time when you default to it (for example, after the kids are in bed). Hence, books that you are reading shouldn’t go on your main project list. Instead, “Books to Read” is a type of specialized project list (or, we could call it an operational list) that you pull out during your reading time when it’s time to decide what to read next. That way, it doesn’t clutter your main project list, but you still have a place to keep in mind all the books you are reading now and the books you want to most consider reading next.

Now, you don’t even have to have this as a physical list. Simply putting the books you are currently reading in a stack together serves the purpose well (and then another stack for what you want to read next). But if you want to get more sophisticated and create reading projects (as Al Mohler recommends), you now have a place for that.

The key to making all of this work, however, is having a defined time when you generally read. The existence of this list is not going to trigger the action to read (and it shouldn’t — if you read the biographies of high-impact people like George Washington and other individuals in history, you’ll see that they managed their lives more from a default schedule and routine rather than lists). Rather, the list is support material for your reading time. The trigger to read is that you’ve determined a time when you generally read. The list just helps you organize and prioritize so you can make the best use of your time.

Which leads to the whole idea of managing everything we have to do through the concept of time zones rather than action lists as they are traditionally conceived of in GTD (you know, the “@calls” and “@computer” and “@errands” action lists that have never completely felt right, since we always have a phone and computer and etc. with us). But that is for another time.

June 18, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 4 Comments 
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Why (and How) to Use a Feed Reader

This is a guest post by Mike Anderson of The Resurgence.

Here are five reasons to use a feed reader (such as Google Reader) to keep up with blogs:

1. You never miss a blog post from your favorite sites
Once you subscribe to a feed, your feed reader will make sure that you see every new post from that feed. Whether you want to read your websites once a week, once a day, or every ten minutes, any unread items will be saved for you.

2. You can scan a ton of articles quickly
When using a feed reader, you can quickly filter through the articles that you don’t want to read. When surfing the web, you have to shuffle through different interfaces, type in web addresses, and surf bookmarks. This takes a ton of time. It’s much better to have the content you want delivered to you than to have to go find it every time you get online.

3. Melting-pot learning
One of the great side-effects of using a feed reader is that you begin to learn about various memes in a melting-pot fashion, where ideas flavor each other. You’ll learn new ideas over time, and understand the relationships between them.

4. You can save articles for later
Feed readers allow you to save articles to read for later. In Google Reader, you can put a star next to items you like and come back later to read them in full. You can also tag articles and search for them later.

5. You can always be up to date with the Resurgence
I am so excited to see theResurgence.com have an impact by training missional leaders. I want more people to sign up for the feed so that they don’t miss anything here. We’re bringing in numerous experts from different backgrounds to help form a Christ-centered vision for our lives, and I don’t want any of you to miss out on that.

So those are five reasons to use a feed reader to keep up with blogs. This leads naturally to the question of how to use a feed reader. Mike also has a video that shows this in very simple terms, using Google Reader:

May 3, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 5 Comments 
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The Case for Slack

From the Harvard Business Review article “The Case for Slack: Building ‘Incubation Time’ into Your Week”:

Slack is anathema to most manufacturing processes, but it’s indispensable for creativity. How can you build in the incubation time required for breakthrough strategies and ideas?

Start by changing your mental model of production, suggests Michael Connor, manufacturing director of Meridian Consulting in Boston. When most people think of production, they imagine discrete inputs (say, leather and rubber), some kind of transformation (cutting and sewing), and, finally, outputs (shoes). By and large, such processes are linear, explicit, and ultimately predictable: we can touch, analyze, and improve them by eliminating time or other resources. In this model, time is money, and less is more: the less time the process takes, the more money you make.

A thought, however, often results from a nonlinear, subterranean, or even random process. Inputs, outputs, and the nature of the transformation can vary wildly each time. In this model, ideas are money, and more is more. Cutting time from the processes can diminish the quality of ideas. Research bears this out: time pressure, either perceived or actual, increases the rate but not necessarily the quality of performance.

Building on this research, Teresa M. Amabile … studied people working on well-defined projects in which the company needed a creative solution. She found that the higher the individual’s perceived time pressure on a given day, the fewer the reported instances of a new idea or creative insight on that day and the following day as well.

Here’s the point in one sentence: “Even in a lean-production world, workers need a certain amount of ‘down time’ to generate breakthrough ideas.”

May 3, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment 
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Time Leveraging vs. Time Management

Here are a few notes I took a while ago from the Harvard Business Review book Taking Control of Your Time on the concept of time leveraging versus time management:

Two key concepts: Time leveraging and time management. Time leveraging is allocating time to the things that give the greatest return. Time management is about discipline and execution—making sure you aren’t wasting your time and that you are following your plan.

You have to have a vision of how you want to spend your time. This vision has to have a clear view of priorities.

Leveraging time is a strategy of using time in an intelligent way to pursue your most important goals. Managing time is the day-to-day process you use to leverage the time—the scheduling, to-do lists, delegating, and other systems. Without the strategy, time management won’t necessarily help you achieve your goals.

Leverage: Taking the smallest action that will yield the largest result.

Goal is first effectiveness, not efficiency.

April 28, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 1 Comment 
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5 Ways to Keep the Urgent from Crowding Out the Important

Here.

April 23, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 1 Comment 
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Priority Matrix for the iPad

I was just pointed to the iPad app Priority Matrix [opens in iTunes], which allows you to visually organize tasks into the four quadrants of urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and not important and not urgent.

I was pleasantly surprised by the program. I like being able to see tasks visually separated in this way, and the program is very easy to use. I see some potential here for possibly keeping my daily list, since the OmniFocus interface has not yet been adapted to the iPad.

Here’s a video showing how it works:

April 8, 2010 | Filed Under Productivity | 5 Comments 
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The More You Multitask, the Worse You Get at It

From an article I’ve been reading on leadership and solitude:

That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

March 5, 2010 | Filed Under Multi-tasking | 5 Comments 
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Remember: Everything that Crosses Your Email (and Desk) Falls into One of Three Categories

The three categories are:

  1. Trash
  2. Fileables
  3. Action items

Every email or piece of paper is either an action item (to be done or delegated), information, or trash.

February 23, 2010 | Filed Under Workflow | Leave a Comment 
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Turn it into a Question

Here’s another approach to problem solving: When you have a problem, turn it into a question. Write it down on a document or sheet of paper, and then think through it on paper. Define the problem first, and probe it deeply. Ask “what is the problem?” and then “what else could be the problem?” Then do the same to identify causes, and then solutions.

February 18, 2010 | Filed Under Problem Solving | 1 Comment 
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The Concept of the Breakout

When it comes to solving complex problems where we don’t seem to be making any headway, an approach called “the breakout” can be helpful. I came across this in a Harvard Business Review article a few years ago.

Here’s the summary of the concept: “By bringing the brain to the height of activity and then suddenly moving it into a passive, relaxed state, it’s possible to stimulate much higher neurological performance than would otherwise be the case. Over time, subjects who learn to do this as a matter of course perform at consistently higher levels.”

And here are the key steps:

  1. Struggle mightily with the thorny problem.
  2. Walk away from the problem at the top of the curve (when you stop feeling productive and start feeling stressed) and do something utterly different that produces the relaxation response.
  3. The actual breakout–sudden insight comes. A sense of well-being and relaxation brings an unexpected insight or higher level of performance.
  4. Return to the new normal state within which the sense of self-confidence continues.
February 18, 2010 | Filed Under Problem Solving | Leave a Comment 
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