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Keeping Your Computer Cables Organized

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This is one of my favorite new products. Finally, someone got cord organization right. You don’t need anything complex. You just need something…like this.

It’s compact, just sits on your desk or table, and uses rubber grip things. And, it’s not ugly, which is what I like most about it.

Wait, there’s actually one thing I like even more about it: it was designed with a crowd-sourced approach. That’s the model utilized by quirky, where anybody can submit new product ideas. The top concepts are chosen (voted on by real people) and then refined by the community.

I love the creativity of this approach, and submit that that process is one of the reasons this product is so awesome.

The Wrong Level

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It seems to me that most of our approaches to productivity tend to orient our focus at the wrong level. We end up focusing on the runway level — next actions — and the 10,000 foot level — projects. This makes it hard to prioritize across areas of your life.

For example, if you come into work in the morning and say to yourself “what projects to I have going on?,” you might make some good progress that day. However, your thinking is necessarily narrow — it is focused on what projects already exist, and the focus is to get that loop closed when there might be broader things that are more deserving of your attention that day. Further, these broader things may not be anything captured on another existing list, like a next action list, because in a very real sense it is actually impossible to make any next action list “complete” (perhaps more on that later).

So how do you identify those broader things? I think by going to the 20,000 foot level, which is areas of responsibility. So instead of saying to yourself “what projects do I have on my plate” or “what actions do I have on my plate,” you instead say “what are my main responsibilities? Now, what are the most important things I can do today to advance the responsibilities that most need to be advanced at this time?”

In this way, you aren’t relying on any lists to ultimately show you what to do. Rather, you are relying on reflection. You might refer to your lists to make sure you are considering everything, but by putting the focus on reflecting on “what do I need to do now,” you allow new ideas to arise that are more in tune with current priorities. That is, you can adapt better, focusing on what is important now rather than on what was important two weeks ago, but you couldn’t do then so you put it on a list.

This is how I operated in college, without the assistance of any planning system (or even calendar–ironic, I know!). Every few days, I would simply say to myself “what is coming up in each of my classes?” Then I would identify what was most important, and get it done. The advantage there was that I had a pre-existing syllabus for each class; in the world of ordinary life, you are having to create much of your “syllabus” for your life as you go.

The irony is that, when a planning system inclines you to think mostly from the 10,000 foot level and runway, it can lead to lack of focus because there is simply so much to consider, with the result that you are worse off than not having any planning system at all.

But used right, a productivity system puts you way ahead. If, instead of using it to substitute for thinking (that is, instead of simply saying “what’s on my project lists and action lists; OK, I think I’ll do this), you use it as a support to keep some of the heavy lifting of remembering important ongoing things off your mind, it can be helpful. Then, what you do is operate from a stance of reflection at the 20,000 foot level of responsibilities, and refer to the lists to help fill out your options on what each area might needs, rather than relying on the lists as an exhaustive catalog of all your options.

Would Jesus Keep a To-Do List?

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I don’t think he would have (or did) because, knowing all things and being completely filled with the Spirit, he would not need any external reminders. It is literally impossible (both now, and when he was on earth) for Jesus to forget any obligation that he has. (And he does have obligations — that is, things he needs to get done — but they are only the arrangements he freely enters into, which are founded in the promises he has made in the Scriptures.)

But, I’ve never thought that “what would Jesus do” is necessarily the best question. It is a helpful question. But since we are not Jesus (for example, we are not omniscient), the more precise question is “what would Jesus have me do?”

And I think he would say this about to-do lists: “If you can keep all your commitments and get done what you are called to do without writing anything down, no problem. But if you have more to do than your memory is able to hold, one of the other reasons I’ve given you a mind is so that you can figure out a better way to keep track of everything than just keeping it in your head. So go, do what you need to do to remember what you need to remember in order to get done what you need to get done.”

Something like that.

Great Apps to Check Out for Getting Things Done

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Apple has brought together a helpful collection of some of the best apps for getting things done:

What I use:

  • Keeping track of notes/ideas: Evernote
  • Capturing quick notes when Evernote feels too cumbersome: Apple Notes (native on the iPhone and iPad — super easy to use)
  • Calendar: iCal (native on the iPhone and iPad)
  • Action and project lists: OmniFocus or Things
  • Action lists, as a helpful supplement: Reminders (native on the iPhone and iPad)

And worth taking a closer look at:

  • Things (I used this for a time)
  • Remember the Milk
  • Do it (Tomorrow): Looks interesting
  • Calvetica Calendar: Looks intriguing
  • PlainText: Looks as simple as Apple’s Notes app, with the added benefit that you can actually organize things
  • MindNode: For mindmapping. Currently I use MindJet MindManager

The Pens You Should Get

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Having pens you actually like to use makes all of your work go better. And even though we do so much digitally now, there is still a place for pens because some notes are best captured by hand and, beyond that, there are all sorts of occasions throughout the day when we need to physically write.

One of my pet peeves is pens that are annoying to use. Some pens skip a lot, while other pens leak out too much ink. So a few years ago I bought a bunch of different kinds of pens and compared them to find a pen that I actually like to use.

Here’s what I recommend: Uni-ball Vision Elite Stick Micro Point Roller Ball Pens, 3 Black Ink Pens. (You can also get them in a 24-pack.)

If you have these, there is no need for any other pen. They are awesome.

For more on why pens matter, the single most important rule in choosing pens, and the qualities of a good pen, see my post on Recommended Pens.

Two Articles I Just Cited in My Book on Fitting Hard Thinking into Busy Schedules, Which I Highly Recommend

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And both of these are simply an application of what Drucker said in The Effective Executive:

“To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at [your] disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.”

The Essential Companion to Your To Do List: A To-Don't List

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Good words from Dan Pink.

Here’s a key paragraph:

“It is the discipline to discard what does not fit – to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort – that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.”

Now, one qualification. I’ve seen people do this wrong — incredibly, horribly, terribly wrong.

The point is not about merely subtracting things. Some people get on this bandwagon and start chopping away, thinking they are being disciplined. They aren’t.

You need to get rid of the right things.

Lack of discipline is not merely doing a lot of things. It’s doing a lot of things outside of your hedgehog concept — the intersection of what you’re passionate about, what you can do with excellence, and (for organizations) what drives your resource engine.

I’ve seen people cut out a lot of great things that were inside their organization’s hedgehog concept and which there was staffing for, and the organization suffered. These people just didn’t know what they were doing. They got a hold of an important management concept, but they didn’t understand it rightly, and so misused it — to the organization’s detriment.

It is valuable to have a lot of things going on — as long as they are inside your hedgehog concept. The key to discipline is to stop doing the things that are outside of the overlap of those three circles.

Enjoying the Growing: Addressing a Problem with Setting Goals

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This is a guest post by Loren Pinilis. Loren blogs on time stewardship at Life of a Steward.

One of the foundations of effectiveness is goals: setting them, reviewing them, and acting on them. This is Productivity 101.

But there’s a common problem with goals. They keep us so focused on our desired outcomes that the present passes us by. We move from milestone to milestone, waking up one day to realize that our lives have been joyless pursuits of what’s always over the horizon.

To be sure, Christians should live with an eternal perspective. Yet we glorify God by our attitudes in the present. “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,” goes the famous John Piper quote. That joy and satisfaction don’t happen when our days are consumed with chasing the carrot on the end of a stick.

How can we combine present satisfaction in God with ambitiously setting goals for our future?

There are a multitude of answers, such as the motivating drive we feel when we truly grasp his grace. But I want to mention one powerful and often overlooked way: finding joy in the act of growing.

God uses the journey for his purposes, not just the destination. This means that we’re not to be satisfied only when our outcomes have been reached. We are to take pleasure in the process of striving for our vision.

To use the popular example of a fitness goal: We don’t just visualize our desired weight loss. We go beyond simply congratulating ourselves when we step on the scale and see how far we’ve come. Instead, we take it a level further and actually enjoy the process of dieting and exercising.

The first-time author can appreciate the frustration felt as they pound out that manuscript. A novice teacher can find joy in the awkward experience of losing a class’s interest. Leaders can rejoice in being challenged as their team struggles to deal with unplanned difficulties.

We may have lofty ambitions to reach radical heights, yet his providence has placed us where we are for a reason. We don’t want our focus on the future to turn into a subtle rebellion or a questioning of God’s wisdom.

The process of working towards our goals can be a tool that God uses to mold us into the image of Christ. We may want to lose weight; he wants to teach us patience. We may want to expand our ministry; he wants to show us our selfish pride.

His loving hands are guiding us – even testing and trying us — this whole time. Even though we’d like to “arrive,” what a joy it is to have the father leading us.

With our sovereign God in control, we can give thanks for — and find joy in — the growing as much as the growth.

Beware of Performance Load

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Being competent is a good thing, but you need to be aware of one danger: “If not controlled, work will flow to the competent man until he submerges” (Charles Boyle). So if you aren’t deliberate about it, your competence can actually be your undoing.

This is the issue of performance load. Here’s how Josh Kaufman explains it in The Personal MBA:

Being busy is better than being bored, but it’s possible to be too busy for your own good.

Performance load is a concept that explains what happens when you have too many things to do. Above a certain point, the more tasks a person has to do, the more their performance on all of those tasks decreases.

Imagine juggling bowling pins. If you’re skilled, you may be able to juggle three or four without making a mistake. The more pins that must be juggled at once, the more likely you are to make a mistake and drop them all.

If you want to be productive, you must set limits. Juggling hundreds of active tasks across scores of projects is not sustainable: you’re risking failure, subpar work, and burnout. Remember Parkinson’s Law: if you don’t set a limit on your available time, your work will expand to fill it all.

Part of setting limits means “preserving unscheduled time to respond to new inputs.” This is necessary to handle the unexpected. And this means we must recognize that downtime is not wasteful. Kaufman goes on:

The default mind-set of many modern businesses is that “downtime” is inefficient and wasteful — workers should be busy all the time. Unfortunately, this philosophy ignores the necessity of handling unexpected events, which always occur. Everyone only has so many hours in a day, and if your agenda is constantly booked solid, it’ll always be difficult to keep up with new and unexpected demands on your time and energy.

Schedule yourself (in terms of appointments and projects) at no more than 80% capacity. Leave time to handle the unexpected. And to enable yourself to do this, realize that, counterintuitively, people (and systems — this is true of highways, airports, and all sorts of things) become less efficient when operating at full capacity, not more, and that downtime can actually increase productivity. If you keep these things in mind, you can help prevent your competence from being your undoing.

How I Set Up My Work Files (Brief)

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Having posted the screen shot of the top-level file categories for my personal files division yesterday, below are the top level categories for my work files.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’d like to go into more detail about the logic behind the structure and how to set up good file categories and an overall system that doesn’t bug you, but I figure it is better to post something brief and incomplete now and then also do a full version down the road, rather than just do nothing in the interim.

You’ll notice that while my personal file division was organized by area of responsibility, my work files are organized by department. Then, within the department files the sub-files are by area of responsibility for the department.

“Executive Management” means things pertaining to the overall leadership of the organization; it made the most sense to treat that as a department in itself. “Talent” means “HR,” because I think it’s better to look at people as people rather than resources. “BBC,” “BCS,” and “CDG” are related organizations that we work closely with; for simplicity it made sense just to treat those as departments as well.

One last thing on filing for now: It is possible to create a system that doesn’t bug you. I think it was about 5 years or so that I developed the approach I am using, and it hasn’t bugged me since. The actual act of filing is not always fun and I try to keep that to a minimum; but I never find myself having to think hard about where to put anything, discontent with the structure, or unable to find anything quickly.

Here’s the screen shot for my work files: