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To do lists and gemmelsmerch

Back in the time (way, way back), your average prehistoric Joe had only a few things on their to-do list:

• Don’t get eaten.
• Find food.
• Find mate.
• Bring mate food.

The eons rolled by, lions were replaced by governments, hyenas by lawyers, and smelly animal skins by grey flannel suits and ties. Your average Twentieth Century Joe’s to do list looked like this:

• Don’t get fired.
• Get promoted.
• Find mate.
• Bring mate food, shelter in the suburbs and keep up with the Jones’.

… And a few more items. Longer list, but still manageable.

Welcome to the Twenty First Century.

Grab a cart, let’s go shopping! Ten choices have been replaced by a ten thousand, 3 channels with 500 and plan on spending next week assembling your furniture, reconfiguring your phone service online, and possibly performing brain surgery on yourself. Welcome to the To Do List World, where you have a list a mile long, as does your mate, your overscheduled offspring and probably your pets.

In the To Do List World, a previously weak force in the cosmos suddenly has the power of a black hole over your life: the gemmelsmerch attraction. This force, related to interaction of tachyons and muons, is the power of other items on your near infinite To Do list to whine, plead, beg and grovel for attention, thus ensuring you never get anything done and off your list.

Gemmelsmerch was discovered and named not by an Astrophysicist or a patent office clerk, but by a psychiatrist treating attention deficit disorders, Edward Hallowell.

You must beware gemmelsmerch at all times! It may be in the form of the millionth update to WinXP that begs to be installed Right Now, the beeping of your voicemail signal on your phone or that damn IKEA furniture to put together. Resist. Do not give in.

Here’s a few ways to fight the dark force:

• Make to do lists you can do. Regardless of how many things in total are on your list, at any given time, make on paper, in an application or on a whiteboard a Current List. This is a SHORT list of tasks that for whatever reason are at the front of the line. Now here’s the trick: refuse to think about any other task until everything on your Current List is done, dead or delegated. No exceptions allowed.
• Don’t make it a mental Current List. A mental list is worth the paper it’s written on. All you are doing is strengthening the gemmelsmerch when you make mental lists. Listen to David Allen on this.
• Hiding under the bed is not an option. Our prehistoric ancestors found that cowering in fear in the back of the cave more often than not kept them from being eaten, but caves are few and far between now. Face up to gemmelsmerch and confront it.
• 80/20 your lists. About 80 percent of what you want will come from just 20 percent of what you do, so do those items first, be they on your Current List, or to do list or wherever they are. I know it seems against common sense; but it’s true.

Follow these pointers, stay aware of gemmelsmerch and treat it with the same respect you give gravity, and you’ll find yourself happier.

technorati tags: To Do Lists GTD Getting Things Done gemmelsmerch
del.icio.us tags:  To Do Lists GTD Getting Things Done gemmelsmerch
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Slim kicks some corporate butt

If Escape for Cubicle Nation has not gotten on your radar scope, take a moment to check out Pamala Slim's excellent blog on all things wrong with the corporate cubicle culture and many things good about going into business for yourself.

Her Open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs across the corporate world is just too right on the mark not to read right now.

links for 2006-06-07

• Beat procrastination with the 10 minute rule - Lifehacker
  An excellent tactic for beating back procrastination.
  (tags: GTD productivity procrastination)
• Attention- Juggling in the High-Tech Office - New York Times
  Interesting article about the high cost of switching attention: "When people switch gears and move from one process to another, our brains require some amount of time to begin thinking about something else. Forget the amount of time you actually spend bro
  (tags: business Productivity workplace)
• AJ's Blog - Free Two Minute Timer
  GTD rule #12: If you can do a task in less then 2 minutes, just do it and be done. Here's a free windows timer to help you do just that.
  (tags: GTD productivity tools)
• Social bookmarking tool for bloggers
  Great tool - and lives as a bookmarklet in FF or IE, not on some unreliable web service
  (tags: Blogging social tools Web2.0)
• Joe Friend: Microsoft Office Word : Ten things I wish everyone knew about Word
  ten nice productivity tricks in Word 2007
  (tags: Office12, Word2007)

Dealing with Microsoft Attention Pickpockets, part 1

Poking round my 80/20 charged RSS FeedDemon reader this morning, I read a solution to an attention pickpocket that has been with me so long, I’d stopped realizing I was being robbed each and every day. What’s more, this particular thief has been at it for a decade, stealing a bit of attention here, a little more there, from me and every Microsoft Windows user on the entire planet.

I’m talking about being forced – hell, encouraged – to have a messy, distracting desktop when we all know that a messy physical desk steals attention, diminishes productivity and generally makes it harder to get things done. But, because some nameless UI designer 20 years ago decided it was just fine to have a cluttered desktop we’ve all been stuck with this productivity drag.

I’ve watch people who run Fortune 1000 companies, stern-faced executives who would fire on the spot any employee who worked in a pigpen of a cubicle, hunt and poke through an entire screen of attention-draining clutter every time they wanted to do something – anything – on their pc.

I – like you – accepted this state of affairs as some sort of physical law - that there had to be icons on my pc’s desktop, each a tiny little attention leech, pulling me off purpose every minute of every workday. And I – like you –deleted the crap my laptop’s manufacturer put on the desktop, and dug around to get rid of the Internet Explorer icon. But as much as I wanted a clean desktop to go along with my clean desk, I could never get rid of that damned Recycle Bin, and so it was joined by this current file and that current file until my desktop was buried with icons.

Every so often I – like you – revolt and dump everything off the desktop into a folder. Ah! A breath of fresh air. But then the insidious process would start all over again, lead by that damn Recycle Bin icon. Over and over and over, from one pc to the next.

No more.

Thanks to that post at AJ’s blog (Desktop Zen – Reducing Visual Clutter on your Desktop), I was able to completely clear my desktop. No more Microsoft-sponsored attention pickpockets on my desktop, no more attention surcharge on every thing that matters to me, no more kowtowing to some idiot artiste UI designer idea of productivity.

My desktop is as clear as the view from a beautiful tropical isle; my productivity and focus have soared; Lord, I can see again, praise be!

Here’s How:

1. Create two folders in My Documents - __Downloads and __Working and move your files off your desktop and into these folders. The underscores sort these folders to the top and underscore that these folders are working areas not storage. As you work, save to __Working and download to __Downloads and process these files to where they should go by day’s end.
2. Move application shortcuts off your desktop – they don’t belong there. Think about that. How many doorknobs do you need to use a door effectively? One. How many shortcuts do you need to access an application? One – if it’s in the right place. You can put shortcuts on three different parts of your start menu, or on the Quick Launch toolbar. See AJ’s post for details if you need them.
   
3. Now the secret sauce:
   create a Desktop toolbar. Briefly, right click the taskbar and select Toolbars>>Desktop. Shrink the Desktop toolbar down and click the chevron “>>” to see the Recycle Bin, My Documents, and several other useful system icons. Want more visibility for your Desktop toolbar until you get used to it? Drag it to the top of your desktop.
   
4. Right Click your desktop, go to “Arrange Icons By” and de-select “Show Desktop Items”. That’s it: your desktop is clear.

Life is beautiful again.

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Multitasking causes Overwork, not long hours.

Doc Hallowell over at CrazyBusy has a short summary of a study on a thousand Americans about the whys and wherefores of being overworked done by the Families and Work Institute, and being in a state of perpetual overwork, I practically broke my fingers this morning going there in the hopes of some relief.

The study done in 2004 confirms the obvious: about 1/3 of us are chronically overworked, and being overworked leads to mistakes, pisses us off and screws up our health. No surprises there, but it never hurts to see the numbers.

What was more interesting to me was the difference the study found between being in Overwork Hell and working long hours. They are not the same thing.

Because many people focus mainly on time worked as the major predictor of being overworked, they overlook other aspects of the way we work that our analyses show are, in fact, more significant predictors of being overworked than hours worked.

Particularly important is what we call lack of “focus”—or more precisely, the inability to focus on one’s work because of constant interruptions and distractions as well as excessive multi-tasking required to keep up with all that has to be done on the job.

The real culprit behind that hellish feeling of being ground into bloody pulp by all the work demanding our attention isn’t the hours we spend – it’s the way we multitask till our brains are ready to explode trying to cope with it all.

Put another way, we’re trying to keep afloat bailing the lifeboat with a leaky Styrofoam cup called Multitasking.

So maybe the key out of Overwork hell is asking the question: if we can’t multitask our way out of here, what way of working will work? Something to ponder.

 

links for 2006-06-03

• Windows Vista videos in a very slick presentation
  Developers take note! 5 minutes on this page will reset what you think an interface should be. Must viewing for any developer who is ho-hum re Vista
  (tags: vista Windows)

links for 2006-06-02

• 500 Hour Test of Tomorrow's Windows "Vista" | Tom's Hardware
  The definitive Windows Vista Beta 2 review.
  (tags: vista microsoft)

Applying 80/20 to Outlook 2007

This post covers an experiment in reducing the time I spend on email by 80%.

[backstory] About a week ago, I started tracking with a kitchen timer how much of my time/attention was being spent on online stuff. The results were miserable. I was spending most of each day checking email, forums, Digg and RSS feeds, and getting damn little else done.

At the same time in my never-ending battle to be productive enough so I don’t have to work for a living, I was reading Richard Koch’s Living the 80/20 Way. Here was a guy enjoying life, making money, with four books out and a productivity theory still standing after 7 years.

I decided to 80/20 my RSS feeds. The amount of time I feel I need to spend on RSS feeds dramatically dropped. By about 80%, I’d reckon. What would my life be like if I could do the same to the 800 pound gorilla, email? How much more could I get done with this monkey off my back? And was there anything in Outlook 2007 that could help? [/backstory]

Fear, hope, the Fire Hose and Email

Before I could fix the problem, I felt I needed to understand why the problem existed; why was I checking email dozens and dozens of times a day, squandering most of my ability to discern, to make decisions, to pay attention, on email? I didn’t used to be this way; otherwise I’d be living out of a cardboard box in an alley somewhere. What’s changed?

• Fear. Since 9/11, fear is big business, and a big part of your life if you live in the U.S.. Is Al Qaeda going to blow up Washington or New York? Is some nut going to anthrax San Francisco? What’s the Threat Level? There’s nothing like fear to get your attention – hence I get email alerts from CBS, CNN, the Washington Post and a local TV station. Just to be sure. To be safe. Maybe.
• Hope. Maybe someone has sent me a nice email about the book. Maybe I’ve got several more MasterList Professional registrations to process. Maybe I got that big interview for the next book. Hope springs eternal or about every 15 minutes.
  
• The Fire Hose. – I have to keep drinking from the fire hose of technical (programming and such) information each and every day because the knowledge I have is turning into "obsoledge" faster and faster. Must keep up, so I read more and more, email included.
  

For all these reasons, I whack the Outlook tab in the taskbar 30 times a day.

Time for change

So here are the changes to email processing I’ve made. Only the last one is Outlook 2007 specific.

Red Alert – After spending a few hours fruitlessly looking on the web, at Google Gadgets and Microsoft Sidebar Gadgets I decided to create this myself. What I’ve done is created an Outlook Email Rule that if I get an email from BreakingNews@MAIL.CNN.COM or CBS.com with “terrorist attack” in the subject, Outlook should display a New Item Alert and play this sound. Now I can put to rest the nagging fear in the back of my mind that the other shoe has dropped and I’d better check email one more time.

Applying 80/20 to Outlook Folders. A while back, I talked about using Google to tame Outlook by dumping everything into a Reference folder unless it was an active project, and how to create Outlook Favorites for just your active projects. Guess what? Now my active projects are getting to be so many, I need to go another step:

Limit Outlook Favorites to just the following favorites folder shortcuts:

• 20% The Few - These emails are the most important few that provide 80% of the value of all email in.
• 80% The Many - This is everything else I can safely ignore.
  
• Reply/Task EOD (by end of day) – These are emails of whatever importance I need to reply to, or work on, but they will either take longer than two minutes, or I need to think about them. This folder gets emptied before the workday is done.
  
• Reply/Task EOW (by end of week) – These are emails which will can be safely left to the last day of my workweek.
  
• Slushpile – Things to enjoy reading at the end of the workweek when I’m braindead anyway.
  
• Current News – This is the folder all those non-life-threatening “News Alerts” go to now, now that I created a rule for each sender as they hit my Inbox. If I have time and inclination, I’ll have a look.
  
• Reference – Everything else (receipts and such).
• Qurb and the Inbox – For convenience's sake.

What about all the folders I had shortcuts to? Use the Shortcuts bar for them, and switch to it when I need to move a bunch of email received that day to a project folder.

Tag and Bag – Outlook 2007 supports assigning multiple color tags to emails – and Search Folders can be set to automatically show emails with specific flags. So for example the 20% and 80% folders above are actually Search Folders set to "Bag" any email I tag with a Control-F2 for 20% The Few or a Control-F8 for 80%. The Many.

The result? – Too early to tell. I’m spending less time checking email today, how well do I do a week from now? Time will tell (and so will I!). Nor is the the only way I can make Outlook 2007 more effective - I need to work with it's newfound support for creating Tasks. But after a decade of category and flag functions that never meshed well enough to be useful, this is not your old Outlook.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Outlook 2007
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