ToDoOrElse.com

What works when trying to change your life?

Want to know how to load the dice in your favor when you attempt to change your life?  DayTimers had Opinion Research Corporation do a fairly large study in December. The study covered in part what techniques did the people who had kept their previously made New Year's Resolutions use. The results were surprising:

When asked what helped them to be successful in keeping their New Year's resolutions, most respondents used a number of internal motivators, external support, and external aids to help them succeed. These included:

Internal Motivators

• 86% noted determination to make it, even when it got hard
• 76% made a commitment for the long haul
• 76% accepted setbacks and got back on track
• 71% found that visualization was an aid to success
• 59% rewarded themselves for success

External Support

• 57% told other people
• 39% asked for help and didn't do it alone
• 27% were accountable to others, i.e. friend, coach, dietician, therapist, support group

External Aides

• 44% set up reminders
• 40% created a step-by-step plan
• 38% wrote it down

What these numbers tell me is:

• Internal motivational techniques pay off better than external motivational techniques,
• You need to be both stubbornly determined (or if you prefer determinedly stubborn) and prepared to forgive yourself for failure,
• Being accountable to others doesn't work if you are not accountable to yourself.

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.

 

A disturbing report.

A Reuters story picked up by Wired last month documents something very disturbing: as our lives have grown more connected, more technologically advanced, we are getting less done.

According to the study quoted, in 1994 we got about 3/4s of our work done in a workday. Last year, that was down to 2/3s and heading south rapidly. Meanwhile, we are spending more and more hours at work in front of our computers. Ten plus years ago, 82 percent of the people polled felt that they at least got half their daily planned work done; that’s now down to 51 percent.

What’s going on here?

I’d submit there’s actually a couple of different things going on:

• First, the more connected you are, the more interrupted and interrupt-driven you become. It gets harder and harder to focus and concentrate on getting one thing done at a time.
• Second, the balance point between consuming information and producing it has shifted so far over to the consuming side we have hardly any “processing cycles” left to work with. Consuming information is not the same as thinking, and the distinction is getting lost in the tsunami of info we are trying to cope with.
• Third, we keep trying to put out the fire with gasoline. We add more and more connections, information, technology – from Skype to RSS feeds to iPods, in an attempt to somehow catch up.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a programmer and writer by trade, a totally connected, technology driven kind of guy. Nobody is gone to take away my iPod! But there has to be an alternative to living like a rat in a high tech cage other than living in a cave.

I think part of that answer needs to be new kinds of software/web site/hardware that confronts this problem head on. But I also think we need more and better mental tools for dealing with an info-environment that is changing faster than we can adapt to.

The question is, besides Getting Things Done, where are those mental tools? No answers here and now, but I hope to broaden this blog a bit in the coming weeks and months to delve into this. And I welcome any and all suggestions you have!

Technorati Tags: GTD, micro-ISV, Information Overload
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Q & A re MasterList Professional

Yesterday, I got an email from John with questions so good about MasterList Professional, I thought it worthwhile to share them here.
------------
Hi Bob,

I have been evaluating ML Pro for about a week.  I like what you have done
here - it looks very good.

I am new to GTD, but have a background with Covey's methods and Tony Robbins programs.  I have just started to read David Allen's book. 

I have a few questions that I have not seen addressed. 

1.  I see from your forums that you originally planned on an update in Jan 06 but it appears that this has been delayed quite a bit.  What are your intentions and commitment to upgrading and maintaining the product?  I am certainly interested in using it but I don't want to go through the effort of integrating it into my workflow if it won't stay current.

Fair Question! My plans to update did get put on hold just after the first of the year due to a major illness in the family. That situation has resolved now. My new plan is to start doing small updates instead about every 10 days.

First update will be later today – this will be a tiny update, with only one new feature – MasterList Professional no longer has pictures of African animals here and there. They left because I finally realized that as a micro-ISV developer, my tastes should not be foisted on my customers.

So what happened to the major update features I’ve been promising for so long? Like true checklists, faster data entry, a more understandable Outlook integration? I will be adding all of these features, but one by one, sticking to a every 10 days or so update plan.

While it’s a pain as a customer to keep having to update an application, I think that given how MasterList Professional auto-updates work it will be a very small pain, well worth the steady stream of improvements in the product.

2.  I see how it integrates with Outlook - nice.  How do I use the two effectively together?  Should I perform all of my task and scheduling from MLP or split it up some how?

Tough question. If you are not using Outlook to manage tasks now, I think you will get more value out of doing it all in MasterList Professional. If on the other hand, you have many tasks you currently manage in Outlook, I would integrate them.

Finally, if you have many tasks in Outlook that are unmanaged, I would import them into MasterList Professional, manage them there, and only integrate Current tasks back to Outlook where they might be more convenient to complete.

3.  If I have a large task, say architect a new application with many sub-tasks, how should this be managed in MLP?  As a project (architect app) with tasks (architect app sub-tasks)?

Currently, I would do this as a project, with tasks. Further, you can use Keywords to group tasks by context, person responsible, essential vs. non-essential, etc. Persistable checklists of subtasks for a task is high on the list to be addressed, so expect this to change in the coming weeks.

4. I am having a little difficulty in understanding the gestalt of your application.  I believe I understand the parts but it is not obvious to me how to put it all together in a coherent system. Will learning GTD make your application's organizational system clear?

I’d like to think so! Managing tasks is one of the hardest things people have to do. Here’s the “Big Idea” behind MasterList Professional and it owes a lot to the Getting Things Done philosophy:

-You need one place where you can store, assess, track and marshal for execution all the professional and personal tasks in your life. I hope to make MasterList Professional that place for you.

-Externalizing all the “to do”s in your head clears your mind of them so you can better think, plan, create and execute.

-Every task has a cost in at least time, a level of importance and a degree of difficulty. If you don’t know what something costs, how do you know if you can afford it? Or if it’s a bargain?

-The more value you get from your time, the more successful you will be in life, however you define “success”.

Regards,
John

 

Technorati Tags: micro-ISV, MasterList Professional

Update 1.14 to MasterList Professional is out.

The next time you start your copy of MasterList Professional, you should see there's an update available. Version 1.14 fixes a slew of bugs that made MLP less stable and usable than it should be.

While I had planned since the first of the year to do a major update to MLP, those plans changed as did many plans in my extended family at the beginning of this year, due to a serious illness in the family. That situation has come to a sad conclusion, and it's time to get MasterList Professional back on track with incremental updates about every 10 days.

Please keep those suggestions and bug reports coming in to http://safarihelp.com.

Technorati Tags: micro-ISV, MasterList Professional

GTD 2006.27: A 40 hour week

I know this is going to rub a lot of you the wrong way, but I come to the considered conclusion that a 40 hour work week, with explicit, limited, bouts of longer hours is more productive overall than the typical 60-70 hour work week.

Last year, I averaged about a 60 hour week, every week. This year, I've gotten that down to a 50 hour week, but I'm more productive. I need to push through and finish a couple of commitments, but I really expect to get down to a 40 hour week by the end of this month, and be still more productive.

It comes down to productivity. Workers can maintain productivity more or less indefinitely at 40 hours per five-day workweek. When working longer hours, productivity begins to decline. Somewhere between four days and two months, the gains from additional hours of work are negated by the decline in hourly productivity. In extreme cases (within a day or two, as soon as workers stop getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night), the degradation can be abrupt. - From an article by Evan Robinson, at International Game Developers Association site.

For me, there are two components of this productivity increase:

• Improved problem solving. I've noticed that my solutions - either when coding, writing or working with people, have markedly improved since my 40 hour a week or bust push started. This is true productivity: improving the outcome without increasing (and often decreasing) the time needed to produce the outcome.
• Fewer mistakes coding. 100 lines of crap is still a hundred lines of crap. The better I code, the fewer bugs I create for myself down the road, the more productive I am overall.

So, today's Getting Things Done tip is to at least do a bit of research on why a 40 hour week is more productive, and perhaps, start thinking about how to make that happen in your own life.

Technorati Tags: GTD, micro-ISV, MasterList Professional

6 metaways of Getting Things Done

(Posted first at http://mymicroisv.com)

Starting a micro-ISV and putting bread on the table and having a life of some sort is definitely a tall order.

Over on the Joel on Software Business of Software forum today, someone actually suggested doing “polyphasic sleep” where you go 24/7 everyday, keeping to a schedule of naps that net out to about 2.5 hours of sleep a day as a way to make it all work.

2.5 hours of sleep a day, every day? Sounds like something out of the movie A Clockwork Orange.

I can just see the Execduhives running around the halls of certain companies excitedly gibbering to each other over this one, and I admit given my workload it sounds tempting as hell. But. Do. Not. Do. It. Seriously.

As an alternative, here’s my 6 metaways of Getting Things Done both for my clients, my editors and my micro-ISV. These are the biggies. Call them lifehacks if you prefer.

• Like with Like. Clump the things you do. Errands with Errands, Marketing with Marketing, Tech Support with Tech Support and so on. It takes you a hell of a lot longer to switch types of tasks than you PC, so group what you can group and flow from discrete task to discrete task.
• Time Shift. Be it shopping at the store or returning email or watching TV or just about anything else, you can pick up significant yardage by doing it on your schedule and not when everyone else is.
• Move your body, focus your mind. Unless you happen to be an AI on the Internet, that means treating your body as something more than a pudgy container for your overworked brain. Moving your body – commonly called exercise – focuses your mind. The biggest timesaver in the world is thinking better. It is not coincidence that David Allen of Getting Things Done fame comes from a martial arts background. Twenty years ago for me it was taekwondo and aerobics; starting 6 weeks ago it's kickboxing and strength conditioning, and my productivity is twice that of two months ago.
• Get your To Do List out of your head. Now, I use the software I wrote and sell (MasterList Professional) to do this, but there are plenty of other good desktop and web based and plain old paper-based ways of doing the same thing. Simply put, you have got to get your To Do List out of your mind and out of your way so you can think and work.
• 1440 is the Law, get over it. You have 1,440 minutes a day and that’s it. What you get out of that time most depends on how you spend it, so start treating the commitments you make, the deadlines you agree to and the way you do things like you were paying cold hard cash for each and every thing, because you are. That means, you are not going to get everything done everyday, or perhaps most days. What matters is did you get the more valuable things done or not?
• Persevere. I’m not the smartest guy in room, and I’m definitely not the best programmer in the world. But I’m the most persevering son of a bitch on this planet and I do not give in or give up. Nor should you. So don’t waste time trying to do everything all the time, every time, because there’s no way that is going to happen. On the other hand, if you preserve, if you keep coming at what you need to get done, there’s no way you can’t succeed.

Make no mistake: doing your day job, starting your micro-ISV and not ending up estranged or just plain strange makes the product development and marketing stuff look easy, but it is doable, I just know it is!

It's about Time (management)

Any time you can read 17 successful people in diverse range of occupations who are willing to share their top time management advice in brief form for free, do it!

Fast Company has done just that at this post here: It's About Time. (No registration needed.)

Old Dog, New Tricks.

The past month or so I've been gearing up for a major online makeover to coincide with the release of my book, and a new version of MasterList Professional, and the start of a new micro-ISV site.

This will be the third or forth time I've gone in for the total online makeover; each time, I find that the art of building a good web site has changed fundamentally since the last time. First there were frames, then their were tables and JavaScript and now CSS and XHTML is the way to go.

So, off to the Web I went to learn the new tricks web page design.

My poor weary head! It's bad enough trying to keep track of all the changes going on in Windows programming, now I've got to load my aching head with divs, and floats and absolutes and ems and more, and then all sorts of hacks and kludges to workaround all the weird bugs in all the various versions of IE, Netscape, and yes, even FireFox.

The problem with trying to learn a new technical topic via the Web is that you get dumped into this bubbling pot of everything anyone ever said about that subject. There's no continuity, no progression: there's lumps of what look like good info that have gone bad as time and the Web move on.

What I should have done, and didn't, was go over to squidoo.com and use that as my starting point: I just visited http://www.squidoo.com/cssdesign/ and saw 80% of the info I finally figured out I should know about after a good 8 hours of surfing. On. One. Page. Even though I've raved here and elsewhere about squidoo.com's value in exactly this situation, this old dog had forgotten that new trick. Groan.

Fortuantely, in my pecking and poking around the Web I did finally find A List Apart, Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign, and then Dan Cederholm's SimpleBits, and there's is a ton of great design professionals out there making this stuff interesting.

And I did get lucky by buying Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design. This is one of the best technical books I've read in years. In a light readable way, Dan goes through exactly how to solve with CSS the common things that make building a web site such a pain: What size should text be, how to make great menus, getting the elements of the page to appear where you want them to, organizing the page and more.

The moral of this story? (Besides buy Dan's book; it's a gem.) The next time your the old dog needing to learn a new trick, see what you can learn via squidoo.com first.

(Technorati tags: Micro-ISV)

Brand your Blog.

A little branding tip from Laura at Six Apart: instead of the generic TypePad logo, extend your micro-ISV's brand by creating and using a favicon.ico.

A favicon.ico is a 16 by 16 pixel .gif formatted image, easily created on Windows in a graphics program, or with IrfanView or created online with FavIcon from Pics.

Once you've created your micro-ISV's favicon.ico, upload it to your Home directory at TypePad and people will see it in their browsers from then on, both in the address bar and in the tab (FireFox).

Three quick other things to mention about this: they make your site stand out in bookmarks, a variation of this trick might work with other blogging engines, and you should use the same favicon.ico for your micro-ISV's main web site.

(Technorati tags: Micro-ISV)