ToDoOrElse.com

Slam job

Anyone reading this blog knows I'm a strong advocate of David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, so this morning when my iGoogle home page turned up a new piece in Wired about Allen and GTD, I was eager to read it.

And read it I did. First came the shock - Allen had been a herion addict and a psychiatric patient?!? - Then with growing anger: seething, boiling anger, rage and outrage.

Wired had done a slam job on Allen.

Here's how to write a slam job boys and girls, but if you really want to see a master at work, read the profile by Gary Wolf.

First, hook in the readers who are interested in who you are profiling targetting with a run down of the person's success: 600,000 copies in print, many software apps, web sites, blogs and communities that share what the person advocates.

Now carefully start working in little slings and darts, like: "Some of them come to seminars like this. Allen himself is unsure if it helps."

Next, Be sure under the guise of describing what the victim advocates you trash what they advocate by distorting it, for example, by saying GTD is about 3 rules and this axiom:

Humans have a problem with stuff. Allen defines stuff as anything we want or need to do. A tax form has the same status as a marriage proposal; a book to write is no different than a grocery list. It's all stuff.

Keep tossing in those little snide darts;

• "Allen has almost nothing to say on these topics..."
• "Where earlier gurus tried to help their followers make their deep personal commitments explicit and easily accessible to memory, Allen is selling a kind of technology-enabled forgetting...."
• "His techniques allow him the pleasure of having, much of the time, nothing on his mind."

Now that you've loosened up your audience, it's time to get down to the hard work of demolishing the man's reputation:

The only thing Allen was allowed to have in his possession at Napa State Hospital was a spoon. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was pretty accurate," he says of the time he spent as a mental patient, "and Napa was one of the good hospitals."

That ought to grab their attention! Let's see, what else should we say about a man who makes a large part of his living advising corporate clients? I know!

Bookbinder and Allen became close. Bookbinder taught him karate, and soon Allen was using heroin, too. He left his marriage, abandoned his academic training, and eventually found himself out on the street, practically penniless, "crucified psychically," as he would later put it, "absolutely at the bottom physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually." Worried about the radical change in his behavior, some of Allen's friends had him committed in 1971. At the mental hospital, Allen received stark lessons in simulated obedience. He learned to hide his psychiatric medication under his tongue instead of refusing it or spitting it out, and he studied what the medical staff seemed to want of him, so that they would pronounce him cured.

And if that doesn't do the job, Wolf next gleefully spelling out Allen's connection to one Sri John-Roger, New Age cult figure, concluding, "Allen was, and still is, a minister in the church."

And on and on in a similar vein.

This is a despicable slam job, Wolf, too well done to be anything but intentional. You've done a great job of taking the facts and quotes Allen freely gave you and creating clever links between them and various cons and cult leaders, of taking what Allen believes in private and using it to hang him in public - a co-mingling that to my knowledge Allen has never, ever done.

Anyone interested in GTD reading this piece and this piece alone would conclude Allen's a new age con artist/addict/nut case and run miles to avoid him.

Yet the truth is quite a bit different, isn't it? How many Fortune 500's are ongoing clients of David Allen? Why did his book sell 600,000? Why are there so many people from CEOs to stock clerks and everything in between who say GTD has been a practical, useful way to be more effective and has not one bit of the cultness you try to rub off on it?

This is a slam job, nothing more. Wolf should be fired.

Putting email on a leash, the battle continues

Email continues to be what I hate the most about online life – and the one app I can't do without. If you're looking for a dirt simple workflow to clear out your dreaded Inbox, have a look at "Clearing Your Inbox with Minimal Pain" by Narendra Rocherolle over at Web Worker Daily.

I like how Narendra has found and documented a simple way to really process email, not just shuffle it around. If you've not yet found the right process for clearing your Email collection point (Inbox) every day, this is a post you should read.

Keeping up with the world of books

A friend of mine remarked this weekend that while he didn't have time read all the good business books that come out each month, so he's glad his company provides through a business book summary service the gist of what's new and notable. While I've never been willing to pay the $150 a year some of these companies want for their summaries, I recently found a great free alternative: WikiSummaries.

To judge the quality of these community-created, freely editable book summaries, I checked out the WikiSummary of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. While it lacked the flair and human interest stories of the original, the WikiSummary definitely explained what The World is Flat was all about, chapter by chapter, idea by idea.

Presently there are 111 summaries at WikiSummaries, most dealing with business, politics and current affairs. Definitely a good way to save some money and time next time you're in the mood to bookshop.

GTD SOP#2 – 48 minutes

[This is part of a series covering the Getting Things Done Standard Operating Procedures I use to manage my goals, priorities and workload. I thought I'd share these because they've made and continue to make a huge difference in my productivity, and I hope they will for you too!]

 

Timer… and WatchDog

What: An easy to read digital timer for blocking my days into 48 minutes of working time followed by 12 minutes of slack time.

Use: When blogging, writing, programming or anything requiring serious thought; to put a limit on how long I read posts, RSS feeds, surf the net and process email.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007Q6NI0/102-9962585-8260124

How:  Two ways: I block significant (revenue related) work into 48 minute concentrated bursts followed by 12 minute slack times to check email, reload coffee, etc. I can string together five or so blocks and still stay in the flow – the 12 minutes is long enough to attend to life, short enough not to break my concentration. Secondly, when on the net the timer goes on so I don't lose all the productivity I gain (see this post at Web Worker Daily – they nailed it)!

Why:

Life is a marathon, not a sprint and this way I can go nine rounds with my daily workload without turning my brain cells into grey goo by the end of the day and without being tied hand and foot to the clock – I don't give a damn whether I start task x at precisely 10 am – it's the results that matter. Being in the flow let's me be at my most creative with the least amount of stress.

As I get closer to my 50th birthday, my memory is simply not as good as it was 20 years ago. More importantly, I have about five times more to do, read, process, code and write than I did then.

Notes:

The timer is such I have present it to two intervals – 48 minutes on the top, 12 on the bottom half of the display. I can flip a switch in the back to go back and forth. The big display makes it easy to read. I think this big display timer is made for sparring rounds such as in Tae Kwon Do – which sounds just like my day!

So do you have a Standard Operating Procedure for alternating between focused work and taking a breather? If so, what? If not, would you be more productive with such an SOP?

 

A very cool productivity tool- Direct Access

Any software application that makes my computer life easier and my efforts more productive gets my attention as fast as cold beer on a boiling hot day and Nagarsoft's Direct Access is exactly such a tool. Once you install this Vista-friendly utility (30 day free trial, $39.95 USD), you start making your life easier by clicking the New Command button and -

Creating autotext. Everything from how you sign your emails and forum posts to blocks of text you use frequently in emails ("Thank you for your order of MasterList Professional" becomes ord plus the F12 key)

Launching applications. You can jump in and out of applications you need just by typing the abbreviation you create – or let Direct Access create for you! See below. This really speeds up the workflow.

Shortcut Websites. Now I can launch Firefox, start my favorite forum site I check a dozen times a day in a second. I just type "biz" anywhere – the desktop, in word, wherever – see the little flag Direct Access puts up to let me know it recognized "biz" as a keyword, click F12 to confirm and Firefox opens the Joel On Software Business of Software forum for me faster than I can.

Once you get the idea of the program, you wonder why this is not build into Windows in the first place – and the easiest way to get how Direct Access works is to spend five minutes with the screen cast – that's all the explanation you'll need. What's more, Direct Access is not a tool only programmers could love, like AutoHotKey and does not tie my system into knots like ActiveWords – two applications I've tried but uninstalled that promised but failed – at least for me – to deliver.

The only quibble I've found so far with Direct Access is that the Command Wizard – which automatically creates a whole set of Direct Access commands for the apps I have on my PC is buried at the end of the New Command dialog. Definitely use it.

I have some ideas re how to use Direct Access I want to talk over with the founder of Nagarsoft, Andrea Nagar, but already Direct Access is changing how I work for the better. Highly recommended.

Six ways not to go Crazybusy

Most of the time I feel I’m just this side of crashing and burning in this Web 2.0, Future Shocked, too much to do, too many decisions world. If you feel the same, it’s time to confront this and start getting a handle on it.

Crazybusy is a term coined by Dr. Edward Hallowell, a New England psychiatrist, who believes many of us are suffering from environmentally induced attention deficit disorder, brought on by technology and activity overload. His book, Crazybusy, is required reading if you want to avoid being run digitally ragged.

If you don’t have time (yet) to read it, here’s the gist of what he recommends from a very good Businesweek.com story by Anne Tergesen:

• Set aside time to work before you check your e-mail or snail mail or voice mail, before you allow the world to intrude on your fresh and focused state of mind.
  
• Do not allow the world to have access to you 24/7. Turn off your BlackBerry and cell phone. Stretch or have a five-minute conversation. When you sit down again, you'll be focused.
  
• Prioritizing is crucial. If you don't, you'll find yourself spread so thin you'll only be able to see your good friends on the first Tuesday in February.
  
• Give yourself permission to end relationships and projects that drain you.
  
• Do what you're good at and delegate the rest. This is important, because when we do what we're good at, the work can take on the quality of play.
  
• Keep in mind that some of our best thoughts come when we're doing nothing. Downtime is a forgotten art.

Tags: Crazybusy

David Allen is working on a new book

There was a broad hint of this in last week’s GTD Connect conference call, but it’s confirmed now by no less a source than Time magazine: David Allen is working on a new book:

To spread his productivity gospel, David Allen is writing a third book on how to get things in order.

There’s nothing yet showing on Amazon – knowing what I know having written two books, I will bet sometime in time for Christmas 2007, but not much before.

I’ve noticed that David’s thinking about GTD and how it gets done has been evolving as of late: Recently, David posted on GTD Connect that there’s nothing at all wrong with having a daily To Do list - as long as you’re prepared to update it during the course of the day as things change.

That’s a change from his assessment of to do lists in the past – and welcome news to me since I sell MasterList Professional that makes managing your Current list of to do’s dirt easy.

This Time article also has five tips from David on implementing GTD that you probabably know already if you practice GTD, but it never hurts to review!

Tags: David+Allen, GTD

GTD SOP #1: My Little Red Pad

[This is the first of a series covering the Getting Things Done Standard Operating Procedures I use to manage my goals, priorities and workload. I thought I’d share these because they’ve made and continue to make a huge difference in my productivity, and I hope they will for you too!]

The Little Red Pad.

What: A small, distinctive pad with 3 x 5 card inserts.
Use: Every single task not immediately done (tasks needing less than about 2 minutes) gets written here first.
Source: http://levenger.com
How?:

My Little Red Pad is a USB Key for my brain – everything, and I mean everything, I need to do in the future workwise gets written here first. Doing so means I can not worry about whether I remember something to do or not.

Why?:

As I get closer to my 50th birthday, my memory is simply not as good as it was 20 years ago. More importantly, I have about five times more to do, read, process, code and write than I did then.

Paradoxically, I remember more things since I started using this pad which I attribute to a)the act of writing down each task, not simply trying to remember it. b)being less stressed about remembering tasks.

Notes:

• At the end of a day, I reenter and elaborate tasks from my red pad into the Windows application I use (and wrote and sell, by the way), MasterList Professional. So each day starts with a new card in my red pad.
• During the day, my red pad goes with me – between pc’s, to the club, at my side while eating lunch etc.
• I no longer carry it 24/7: Not having my pad is one of the major ways I know I’m not at work, and that is a larger concern to me than capturing non-work things I need to do around the house (my partner Tina makes sure that’s covered! )

So do you have a Standard Operating Procedure for capturing 100% of your work tasks? If so, what? If not, how do you survive? 

 

 

Tags: SOP

SOP beats CYA every time

Remember the last time you were asked by your boss, spouse, friend or coworker to do X, only to have that to do vanish from your brain until the split second you’re confronted? Maybe you maturely admitted your mistake – and looked like an idiot. Or maybe you did some sort of song and dance, chuck and jive CYA routine that fooled no one. Whatever – it was not your shining moment.

That task took a wrong turn going in one ear, got stuck in some part of your brain that doesn’t work unless you are under Extreme Emotional Pressure, and right out the other ear, didn’t it?

There’s a simple – shockingly simple – solution, and Susan Sabo at her latest post on LifeHack.org nailed it: have a Standard Operating Procedure for every routine task.

The concept that makes SOPs most powerful is that you ‘automate’ things that you can so that you have energy and focus for that which you cannot automate – planning, decision making, and communicating.

You already have dozens of SOPs, otherwise you’d be helpless. Don’t think so? How about how you bathe, how you get to work, how get dressed? You learned all those things, created a SOP for each of them and internalized that SOP years ago.

Now, in this increasingly online, globalized, future-shocked world, it’s high time you set out to create SOPs that weren't covered back in grade school. Like how you deal with email. With Voicemail. With faxes. With computer files. With web sites you want to find again. With making sure you don’t forget a task.

Consciously creating a SOP is easy:

1. What Hurts most? What did you last forget? An voicemail, a email, a task – start with what springs to mind.
2. Write down what you are going to do to never do that again. Maybe it’s always having a paper pad by every phone. Or printing each and every email’s first page that is a non-trivial task. Or having a bookmark folder in FireFox that you religiously clear as your pre-Weekly Review. Whatever works foy you, in whatever detail you need. Imagine you are writing up the instructions for a robot you want to program – you are.
3. Rinse, lather and repeat. Keep that written SOP where you need it and follow the instructions until you know it by heart. Then file it – Congratulations! You’ve just converted your next CYA into an SOP.

Flash card productivity for Power Users

For me, the breaking point was how to quickly move from one tab to another in IE7. I learned early on how to do this in FireFox, the first major browser to support tabs: Control-Page Up, Control-Page Down. Easy. My fingers automatically jumped to those keys while in IE7 – no luck.

That was the straw – the dismaying shock, the turning in my stomach, the feeling that bad things had developed while my attention was elsewhere – came later. When I realized my fingers no longer knew the easiest, quickest way to operate all the programs I spend all my days in. Somewhere between this major upgrade and that new feature I'd become, gasp!, a newbie.

In my misguided obsession find ever new ways of being productive, I'd forgotten the cornerstone and wellspring of all computer productivity: the keyboard shortcuts. Knowing dozens and dozens of keystroke shortcuts has always separated the Power User Men from the timid newbie girly boys since the days WordStar was cutting edge office productivity software. Now, I needed to play catch up, bigtime, if I wanted to regain my former computing proficiency. But How?

After pondering this over several portions of adult beverage, my thoughts meandered back to my high school days when I aced four advanced placement classes in two years by using up boxes and boxes of flashcards. You remember flashcards – On one side, Capital of Kansas? On the other, Topeka. Why not apply the same proven technology to all those beckoning keyboard shortcuts? Yes!

So here's what I did:

Step 1: Roundup the usual suspects. A few minutes in Google yield good keyboard shortcut .pdfs for Microsoft's Word, Internet Explorer7, Visual Basic/Visual Studio 2005; Firefox and yes, Google. Why .pdfs? Because I wanted to save and print these collections of shortcuts off so I could cherry pick the commands I use most often, but don't know.

Step 2: Check High School locker for old flashcards. Well, I do remember leaving a box of them there. Finding flashcards today turned out to be surprisingly difficult – I finally found this vendor via Amazon and ordered two boxes. Why paper? Writing facts helps get them into your brain. Also, I wanted a technology delivery system robust enough to use in all the odd free moments of my life and holding a laptop in your lap while in the restroom is too weird even for me.

Step 3: Start Writing and working the Cards. I found a good post on this at this blog; here are the points that applied to my use:

• One simple question, one unambiguous answer. Not "How do I adjust type size up or down in Firefox?" but "Firefox: increase type size?" (Ctrl + <mouse wheel).
• Keep your cards with you. You can't review them if you don't have them.
• Review your cards at least 3 times a day. Repetition pays.
• Don't think you've learned a card until you can get the answer after you've had a night's sleep (You want to make sure that new fact gets from short term memory to long term memory).

So that's it: I now have a starter stack of flash card commands I'm squeezing into my middle age brain. I'll report back here in a few weeks on how this experiment to bootstrap myself back into the ranks of power users is going.