With spring here (although it doesn’t feel like it yet in MN!), I’m looking forward to grilling again.
For those out there who like to grill, here is my all-time favorite book on grilling: Weber’s Big Book of Grilling. It is filled with great grilling recipes to try out, along with all sorts of tips and sage advice on how to grill with excellence.
Eric Ries has a great article on how to build companies that matter, based on a model that he calls the lean startup.
The way for the lean startup approach has been paved by recent technological innovations such as web 2.0 and has been made even more relevant by the current economic crisis.
Here’s the intro:
We’re living in a time of renewed possibility for startups. Major trends – from the pain of the economic crisis to the disruption of web 2.0 – are breaking the old models and paving the way for a new breed of company. I call it the Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup is a disciplined approach to building companies that matter. It’s designed to dramatically reduce the risk associated with bringing a new product to market by building the company from the ground up for rapid iteration and learning. It requires dramatically less capital than older models, and can find profitability sooner. Most importantly, it breaks down the artificial dichotomy between pursuing the company’s vision and creating profitable value. Instead, it harnesses the power of the market in support of the company’s long-term mission.
Tim O’Reilly has recently been advocating that as an industry we focus on building stuff that matters. In response, I want to try and present a way of building startups that can realize that dream. In particular, he as articulated three principles:
(1) Work on something that matters to you more than money, (2) Create more value than you capture, and (3) Take the long view.
Ries then goes on to present an approach for startups that builds on those principles.
Here is a quick list of some of the main tools I use:
At some point I will provide more detail on each of these and how I use them, but a straight list is hopefully a good place to start in the meantime.
Note that this list is just the electronic side of things (with the exception of my moleskine notebook for a capture tool), and I’m probably leaving several things out. I also have recommendations for the physical side — what type of stapler to get, what type of physical in box, and so forth.
Note that most of the above software is for the Mac. When I was on Windows, I used Outlook for email, calendar, contacts, and task management — and was relatively happy with it because I customized things very heavily (for details, see the David Allen Company whitepaper on Customizing Microsoft Outlook for GTD).
(Thanks to one of my readers for suggesting this post!)
The Washington Post has a Q&A with David Allen where he answers readers questions.
How do you keep track of your books to read?
If you do GTD and have a “books to read” list, do you consider that to be a type of project list, a type of next action list, or some other type of list?
That’s the mantra at IDEO, which they apply not only to the design of their products, but also to their organization itself.
Now, before getting into that, a quick aside. This principle, that “enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects,” is quite profound. It is based on the reality that we are finite, and is in fact one of the key lessons of human history.
For example, it shows us why central planning doesn’t work as an economic system. Or, better, the failure of central planning as an economic system manifests the truth of this principle (which we can now use to discourage new attempts at increased central planning, BTW!).
The mass collaboration of the internet is also powered, in part, by this principle of enlightened trial and error — in this case, the enlightened trial and error of essentially millions of people collaborating (directly and indirectly) on a massive scale because of technology.
For example, the team at OmniGroup created the task management application OmniFocus. But they encourage user feedback and even gather data on how their program is used. They are continually building out and improving the program on the basis of how people actually use it and on the basis of what the users identify as potentially being most important to them.
That is only one small example of how many things, even though ultimately developed by a company, are now developed “in collaboration with” large groups of real people. There are also many other forms of mass collaboration that are now happening (on this see the excellent book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything).
We are just on the cusp of some very powerful changes that will come about from this new way of working and thinking, made possibly by the web (and now, especially, web 2.0 functionality).
So this principle is very, very significant and has very wide application.
But back to IDEO.
IDEO shows that of the many areas where this principle is relevant, an easily overlooked but quite fascinating application is to the arena of organizational strategy and design.
Here is what we read about IDEO in What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management:
IDEO’s mantra is that “enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects,” a philosophy it applies not just to the design of its products but also to itself, its organization, and how it conducts business.
It has built an experimenting, do-what-it-takes culture. IDEO had made a good living by designing products for the high technology industry. But during the technology crash of 2001, it needed to reinvent itself, and it did. The company began designing products for consumer goods companies like Procter & Gamble. And it even got into the business of designing experiences, which helped it garner business figuring out how to design hospital emergency rooms, for instance, to make things less confusing and fearful for patients.
Here’s the application:
So, instead of sitting in meetings and spending time preparing fancy PowerPoint presentaitons, develop your strategy adaptively, by using your company’s best thinking at the time, learning from experience, and then trying again, using what you have learned.
Building and experimenting, mistake-forgiving, adaptive culture provides a competitive advantage that lasts, because that sort of environment is much more difficult to copy than some dogmatic strategy. Under almost all circumstances, fast learners are going to outperform even the most brilliant strategists who can’t adapt.
Michael Gilbert had a helpful article last spring in Nonprofit Online News called Playing it Safe is a Trap: Five Syndromes in Online Marketing.
That’s a great title, and I’d say the concept applies to much of work and life — not just nonprofits and online marketing.
His five points in the article are:
Here are a few helpful excerpts:
When it comes to communicating with their current and prospective stakeholders online, nonprofits will often choose the path that feels the safest to them. They do this in regard to their methods, their metrics, their language, their content, and their management practices. I argue that such a choice is anything but safe and indeed is responsible for some of the most serious and common mistakes that a nonprofit can make.
….
Ultimately, we seek to control things that needn’t be controlled, in our desire to avoid the uncertainties that come with the kind of communication practices that truly light a fire in people. Indeed, we are simply afraid to light that fire because at some point it will no longer be in our control. We set up time consuming approval processes, elaborate branding requirements, and many other mechanisms to ensure that the communication of our staff and our stakeholders all remains firmly managed. Even our notion of “viral marketing” tends to involve setting things up to encourage our stakeholders to do exactly what we tell them to do.
This is not the place to describe the alternatives to these fear avoidance tactics. (Indeed, I sometimes feel like all our other work is about such alternatives.) But it’s important to note that the alternative isn’t just random risk taking. That’s a straw man that we set up to justify our actions. The overarching alternative is simply to practice letting go, a bit at a time. The more we allow anxiety and fear to guide our decisions, the more power we give them and the harder it is to break free. Breaking these five patterns is a good place to start.
Why can it be such a challenge to manage time? In her book Time Management from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern points out that it comes from the way we view time.
Most people think of time as intangible. In the journey from chaos to order, it is often easier to organize space than time, because space is something you can actually see. Time, on the other hand, is completely invisible. You can’t see it or hold it in your hands. It’s not something that piles up or that you can physically move around. (p. 9)
When you are organizing a closet, for example, you can see how much stuff you are dealing with, and therefore whether it will all fit. But when it comes to time, it is hard to conceptualize since time is invisible. Yet as long as your time remains elusive and hard to conceptualize, “you will have difficulty managing your days.”
So what is the solution?
Change your perception of time and develop a more tangible view of it. You need to learn to see time in more visual, measurable terms.
But how do we do this? We recognize the analogy between organizing time and organizing space.
Just as a closet is a limited space into which you must fit a certain number of objects, a schedule is a limited space into which you must fit a certain number of tasks. Your days are not infinite and endless. When you think of it this way, time is not so intangible and elusive. In fact, each day is simply a container, a storage unit that has a definite capacity you can reach.
Once you understand that time has boundaries, you begin to look at your to-dos much differently. Tasks are the objects that you must fit into your space. Each one has a size, and arranging them in your day becomes a mathematical equation. As you evaluate what you need to do, you begin to calculate the size of each task and whether you can fit it into the space.
When you start seeing time as having borders, just as space does, you will become much more realistic about what you can accomplish, and much more motivated to master various time-management tools and techniques to help you make the most of your time. (p. 11)
If time management feels like a continual challenge, it can be easy to think that this must simply be the way things are for you. Even those who are pretty good at time management often run into snags and challenges that create drag, and it can be tempting to think that this also is the way that some things just have to be.
But the good news is that there is hope. I think the main reason good time management can feel elusive is because we simply haven’t sat back to identify the causes of time management ineffectiveness.
When you bring clear definition to what causes your time management challenges, you can actually see a way forward in addressing them.
Julie Morgenstern, in her book Time Management from the Inside Out, helps us here by providing a “three-level diagnostic” that helps you zero in on the causes of your time management problems.
The Value of Identifying What’s Holding You Back
Here is how she introduces her diagnostic:
When people struggle to manage their time, they very often jump to the conclusion that they are internally flawed somehow, that they are born incompetent in this area of life. Or they throw their hands up in resignation, convinced that “out of control” is just how life is supposed to be in the modern world. Both of these perceptions are totally inaccurate and self-defeating.
Once you learn the skill of diagnosing time-management problems [emphasis mine], you will stop wasting time and energy beating yourself up or working yourself to exhaustion. You will simply run the problem through the following three-level diagnostic, accurately zero in on the cause, and get to work on the proper solution. Swift, clear, accurate. Now, that’s a time saver! (p. 19)
The Three-Level Diagnostic for Time Management Challenges
Morgenstern explains that there are actually three possible causes to our time management problems. Sometimes, of course, more than one are at play. But having these categories in mind helps us diagnose the cause so that we can actually see hope for a solution.
The three levels are (pp. 20 – 21):
By knowing these three levels, we can then know better where any inefficiencies are coming from and thus how to effectively address them.
Technical Errors
Morgenstern writes:
These are easily resolved mechanical mistakes. You need a skill or a technique you don’t have… Once you understand these errors, you simply make the appropriate adjustments to your approach and you’re all set. Problem solved.
Technical mistakes are not always so easy to resolve — I think that there are a few involved right in the basic GTD methodology which I’ve been trying to resolve for years, and the path to identifying solutions was challenging.
But most of the time it is easy to make a few tweaks to our mechanical errors or inefficiencies. Often, the case is simply that we don’t know the process for managing a certain type of task or input most effectively. Once we learn that, the problem is solved. That is one of the things that this blog exists to help out with. And even the technical snags where solutions don’t come easy at least have the hope that there is a solution out there to be figured out.
External Realities
External realities are “environmental factors that are actually beyond your control. You didn’t create them, and they put a limit on how organized you can be.”
It is nice to realize that some challenges, indeed, originate from outside of us! When it comes to external factors, we need to first stop blaming ourselves and then find a way to mitigate them through tactical system approaches and strategic mindsets (like “first things first,” and so forth) as effectively as we can.
Psychological Obstacles
Psychological obstacles are
hidden, internal forces that prevent you from achieving the life you desire. If you have conquered all of your technical errors and external realities and are still feeling out of control, it’s likely that you have a psychological force working against you.
In other words, sometimes we are our own worst enemies! But there is still hope here: “When you realize what’s causing certain self-sabotaging habits, you can begin to break free of their control.”
Applying the Three Levels
Applying this diagnostic is simple. “Each time you look at one of your time-management problems, as yourself, ‘Is my problem technical or external or psychological?'” You can then begin to address it based on the actual cause and come up with an appropriate solution.
Since it’s often a “combination of forces that create time management problems,” note that you need to “consider all three levels of errors and obstacles when diagnosing what is going wrong.” If you don’t do this, we might end up with a partial fix — for example, “you will remove the external reality that’s preventing you from accomplishing certain tasks but the psychological obstacles will remain.”
In sum, when you encounter obstacles in your time management — both persistent and occassional — don’t just accept it or immediately jump to a solution. First, identify the cause — is it technical, external, or psychological (or a combination)? Then, half the work of creating an effective solution will have been done, and the rest of the path will often illuminate itself.
One key GTD principle is that if you have a thought that you want to act on, but which you can’t act on right away, you write it down. You then process it later along with the rest of the stuff in your inbox (or capture tool).
I am a big believer in that principle. And I also see that it has a slight down side: the more ideas you write down, the more time you have to spend processing them — thus taking time away from literally doing things (or just doing nothing).
As a result, sometimes I try to have a very tight filter over what I actually write down when it comes to actionable ideas. But this also has a trade-off: some of those ideas don’t come back, and if they are good, that means they won’t happen.
Maybe in some way or another the best of them end up coming back (though it is interesting that David Allen observed once that “if you have to have the same thought twice, that’s inefficient”).
However, I think that there are at least six such ideas that probably won’t. For over the weekend I had about six really good (in my opinion!) ideas for blog posts which, in my desire to save time and not overwhelm myself with input, I didn’t write down. (Plus, I was also outside — although that’s no excuse, because I am now using Jott for iPhone as my capture tool.)
Now, they are gone — I cannot remember them at all. The one thing I do remember about them is that they pertained to current, ad hoc observations on certain things — examples of productivity problems and how to deal with them, and so forth. Their ad hoc nature is probably one of the main reasons that I can’t remember what they are anymore. There is one other thing I remember about them, I guess — I found them interesting (though maybe I forgot them becasuse you wouldn’t have!).
Regardless, here we see an immediate, real-life example of the pros and cons of writing things down (or not)!