(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:26 am)
SUMMARY: I did a dump of everything that’s on my mind, and then started to sort it out to figure out what’s really the management challenge I’m facing. A sudden epiphany why the word “shrine” keeps coming to mind in this context.This is the week that I’m feeling I have too many initiatives going on. This is on top of the clients that I have active. To figure out what needs to go in my management shrine, I’m going to just dump everything that’s on my mind into a list:
- Leo’s Logomark Research: Gotta schedule some time to do this, listen to the music, and then come up with some directions for the mark. Deliver, plot next.
- Chelsea’s Logo Vectorization: Look at the photos, bust out Freehand and create mark. Deliver, plot next. Project deadline is the 19th of January.
- Chelsea’s Content: Read the document, stuff into website template 001. Deliver, plot next. Project deadline is the 19th of January.
- Chelsea’s Office Photo Shoot
- Podcast recording from December 29: do edit and mixdown, then create podcast blog entry for iTunes to pick up.
- Record podcast answer to Federico’s question
- Al’s iPhone App Collaboration: Read his document. Write my document. Next meeting Thursday at 10AM.
- Check in with guy who requested ETT Flash App: See what’s up.
- Get Oil Changed / Car Inspection: Make a call, schedule sometime this week in the morning
- Schedule a Collective meeting
- Post New Services: List the three, describe them, put on new design site, grow it organically. BY FRIDAY.
- Mark’s ModX Integration: Check-in on Wednesday to see where we are, make ModX site.
- Agenceum Staff Meeting post
- Finish replying to blog mail (a few people submitted forms)
- Christian’s Hip-Hop Productivity CD review/reply
- Matt’s Site: Check-in soon, see where we are
- Geri: Confirm upcoming work session midweek, review progress.
- Buy bananas, dish detergent, protein, veggies
- Tweetup on Thursday Evening
- Run services by Gary C
- Schedule meeting with Mike
- Get some Studio time in
- Mary’s ETP Breakdown: Await progress!
- Jeff’s Personal Question Challenge: Await progress!
- Write a book: Go through archives and start pulling the good topics
- Shipping ETP orders internationally: Get the pipeline set up at local Mailboxes franchise, specifically the Saudi Arabian order.
- Wave™ with Colleen™
- Reorder cards for Angela
- Schedule Website Maintenance Lesson for Angela
That’s probably good for now. There’s other things on my mind creatively, but they can all wait.
What strikes me about this list is that there are multiple threads of continuity. First, there’s the people:
- Leo
- Chelsea
- Sid
- Al
- Mark
- Matt
- Geri
- Angela
- Mary
- Jeff
- Colleen
- Mike
- Gary
- Various email responses for blog
Then there’s broader social continuities:
- Tweetup
- Podcast
- Collective
- Studio time
Then there’s ongoing businesses:
- ETT Online
- My New Services
- Agenceum
- Physical Goods Business (Shipping ETP)
- Blogging
And the sundry chores:
- Grocery Shopping
- Car Maintenance
- Etc
Looking at the list, the ones that are giving me the most sense of urgency are the ones the are about PEOPLE, because I have made certain obligations to them. The ones that I am most itching about are the ongoing business activities. The other two categories, “sundry chores” and “broader social continuities” are less urgent: they can happen when they happen, though I feel some pressure to maintain momentum on them because they lead to opportunity and community.
The net result of all this? An admitted feeling of pressure that makes me uncomfortable so I act. One good thing is that I have a list I can work from. What I don’t like, though, is the feeling that I will never knock them completely off. There will ALWAYS be obligations, ALWAYS chores. If I can convert those endless obligations, however, into measure progress toward some goal, then I might be able to alleviate the sense of frustration. For example, with grocery shopping I have a side project involving the mastery of sauces and roasting meats. With laundry and car maintenance it’s more difficult to think of something to measure, but I’ll think of something.
Anyway, my management shrine needs to show all these things at once, in a form that is not only portable, but easily narrowed in focus. It also has to be lightweight in its data entry requirements, but not be tied to a computer or the Internet.
I’m not going to solve this today, but I recalled that GTD has something called “contexts”, so I googled it and the first thing that came up with this interesting breakdown of GTD contexts. I could organize contexts from each of the lists, and end up with dozens of @contexts. There’s one for each person, for example. However, I think I want more than just context; I want continuity too. In other words, I want the to-dos that happen in each context to flow smoothly from one to the next and have a sense of purpose. There is probably a way to engineer that, perhaps by always tying the action item to the finished result. I also want to have a sure-fire excellence-producing methodology to accompany each action. In other words:
- I can think of plenty of things I “have to do”, but they are only loosely tied to an overall sense of direction (i.e. goals)
- I need to “wrap” each “have to do” with continuity, desired end game and best practice to really nail it down.
- I need to then sequence the effort for each “have to do” as to when and where it’s done.
Number 2 is what jumps out at me right now, and it is probably why the word shrine keeps coming to me: number two is about the spirit that drives each to-do. Number 3 is more about technique and method. There are plenty of methods to pick from, but when they are performed without spirit then don’t deliver lasting fulfillment. As I am responsible for delivering my own sense of fulfillment given the path I’m on, I better get this “spirit” down.
13 Comments
I like the way you think about categories. I have found that using GTD methodology with http://www.GTDAgenda.com has helped me enormously. Almost everything I think of to do ends up as a part of a project. The top level categories in GTDAgenda are Goal, Project, Task, and then there are Next Actions (which are the one next task under each Project). Really, I am not doing a commercial… I am just pointing out how I think.
Putting most tasks into a “project” (defined as any thing I want to accomplish that involves more than one “to do”) helps me to think bigger than a simple to do list.
I have tried cycling through my categories to accomplish my work. I go through all my @Calls, then do all my @Emails, then do all my @Errands, etc. etc. It has worked quite well for me.
Of course, important tasks with deadlines show up with my daily task list so I do get them done on time.
David, I appreciate your sharing your thoughts on time management publicly. I have benefited greatly from your thinking process and your forms.
Dave you amaze me with your insights. You are the King of Introspection, and you turn it into good stuff (not idle navel-gazing). I am following this current series of posts closely. Thanks for your brilliant blog.
Tom: Thanks for sharing your category strategy! How do you physically log your category tasks? Software?
Pat: Thank you for kinging me the King of Introspection…I never thought of it as a domain before that could be profitably harvested! You’ve made my day :-)
Dave, I have recently migrated from using Microsoft Outlook Tasks to using an online service called GTDAgenda. For a small cost, it allows up to 50 categories. Microsoft Outlook allows unlimited categories for free but takes some work to set it up.
GTDAgenda is easier to set up and quite user friendly.
Looking at the Evomend reference: Maybe I misunderstood something about Allen’s system, but it seems to me that it is a mistake to state broadly that individual people are contexts. This is particularly true for a consultant—clients are not contexts, they are more like projects. The point of a context is to provide focus out of which you can select action items. You quickly narrow down your list of reasonable action items by filtering by context. “I am currently in the office, what can I do?”, or at home, or making phone calls, etc. Not every person will be a context. I don’t live in the same state as my mother, so @Mom doesn’t make a lot of sense. It is better to put things I need to talk to Mom about on the @phone list.
With clients, there will be a number of things you do for the client without the client being present. Those items go in such contexts as @office, @computer, @errands, etc. If your client is Bob and Bob requires face-to-face design reviews, for example, then you might have an appropriate “with Bob” context for action items specific to those meetings. But most of your Bob-related items will not likely go into that context unless you are something like a personal coach, or an assistant.
Clear as mud? Simply: a context is a state, condition, or location about which it makes sense to ask: “Given my current situation, what action items can I pursue at this moment?”
GTD is worth the read. Go for the original, not the new “Making It All Work.” The original was succinct and pragmatic.
The 2 big takeaways for me with GTD were the ideas of next-actions, and of contexts. I think there are other useful aspects of the system (single-pile aggregation and processing comes in a close third), but those were the 2 things I found to be revolutionary.
Tom: Thanks for the GTDAgenda heads-up! Will check it out.
Scott: You’re quite possibly right; I didn’t check the official use of nomenclature.
Perhaps I need to cultivate the use of specific areas for specific tasks, but currently the only two context I have are “@internet” and “@off-internet”. I’ve nearly gotten my working context completely portable: My two computers have the same working files synched to each other via DropBox, and they have the same applications. My email is completely based on Google Apps for Domains, so I can access it anywhere. And although I hope from coffee shop to coffee shop and multiple locations within my own house, I pretty much have the same environment. The only one that is a little special is doing podcasts, and I have all the gear at the studio, but since the podcast requires having Sid around as well, it tends to be an @person “context”.
So the situation for me is more shaped by the needs, proximity, and reachability of the various people I’m talking to. However, I’m starting to think that I need to designate certain areas for certain classes of task, and then force myself to make the rounds. But this is not a habit I have. This is probably why Autofocus immediately appealed to me…the methodology for generating momentum is self-contained and highly portable, which works well with my own highly-portable work environment.
But I don’t know…I keep thinking I might bemissing something obvious, so if you see it do feel free to point it out. I reviewed GTD some time ago and did a few passes at it; my takeaways were that “relax” was the big point of the GTD system, but the mechanisms in it were not compelling enough to hold me in thrall. DA’s insights, though, are quite sharp.
@internet and @off-internet strikes me as the existential statement of our times:) Although you might be able to glean a few extra contexts that will help you batch things. Looking through your brain dump, these came to mind: @email, @phone, @errands, @sketchbook. Although, personally I don’t use the phone, and I don’t batch emails like I should. Sigh.
Autofocus is indeed an interesting approach. I played with it briefly after you posted about it, and have to say I appreciate its simplicity. However, I do think it could benefit from contexts and from a notion of differentiation of larger tasks from next-actions. To Forster’s credit, he does have something of a notion of contexts by advocating the use of different notebooks for different locations.
Scott: Oh, I see…the contexts are supposed to help with batching. I do tend to do that, but haven’t done it explicitly, so gathering things under specifically under a context seems like an extra step.
I’ll have to look at it again now. It’s been long enough now that re-reading GTD may bring new insights.
I don’t know if it’s really even possible to batch emails, because emails aren’t a task so much as they are drivers of other tasks. And it’s depressing when we make email the taskmaster of all we do.
@David: thanks for mentioning my post over at Evomend!
@David, Scott: you’re both right in saying that not every person actually should be considered a “context”.
I was only describing types, giving the following caveat with respect to all such types: “If you tend to have a lot of these, read Merlin Mann’s advice on slashing contexts; it reminds me of the software development danger that Bertrand Meyer called Taxomania […], the excessive desire of building classification trees for the only purpose of classifying.”
To me, a “context” requires that you can actually *be* in it, regularly. If you can’t, drop it from your list of context candidates.
I’ve been ignoring this headline for a couple days now, because it just didn’t seem that interesting to me. But this article was really cool! I like the insight that it’s not the to-dos themselves that are uninspiring, it’s the lack of _purpose_ for the to-dos. I hadn’t thought of that before.
But I just re-read (and this time liked, and started implementing) GTD, so if I haven’t thought of that before, it’s likely that GTD doesn’t have the answer you need. It might have good ideas, but you’ll need to modify them. So I think that thinking of the contexts differently than David Allen did is OK.
That being the case, are you actually trying for contexts? I think you’re trying to group your to-dos by _purpose_. “These are the things that I want to do because it will make Chelsea happy” “These are the things I want to do because it will improve my quality of life at home”, etc
What I wonder is if you want a ritual rather than a grouping. Before you begin a task, take 60 seconds to review: 30 seconds on why you wanted to do this task in the first place, and 30 seconds on what benefits will accrue if you accomplish it. Or something like that. Make it as simple or arcane as you’d like.
Now I’m off to read the other two, where you’ve probably solved the problem and all of this is irrelevant. :)
Amanda
Rolf: Thanks for the “you have to physically be IN it” test for context candidates! That’s very clear.
Amanda: That’s an interesting idea, to create a ritual around it. I’ve been seeking it, certainly, but I am pretty awful at following rituals. The main challenge may be just getting me out of my own darned head. The “morning routine” was my attempt to keep a ritual, but it’s fallen by the wayside because it’s not conducive to doing the “hard” stuff.
Perhaps having a meditation ritual, a clearing of the mind, is what to do. Let me make up one right now…
1. Scan the Cloud of Noise
2. Write down the clearest signal onto an Index Card.
3. Close eyes, and let the noise melt away except for the chosen signal.
4. Isolate the immediate next action through imagination. Take it as far as you can to completion.
5. Allow the body to move.
6. Recenter on the index card periodically to note progress.
FWIW My mashup of PCEO, GTD and Flylady help me separate and balance my work-life. We went back to paper (for the most part).
For “home” stuff (ad-hoc) I use the “Satisfying Things I Wanna Do this Week Dammit”. I prepare it on Sunday. On the day areas I write my theme for each day and add at least 1 thing I want to do that day for myself (at home usually). I use the “Other Stuff” section for that running list of honey-do items and personal items. (2) For daily home stuff (recurring actions), I use my Flylady daily checklist with three sections (Morning Routine, Getting Home/After work and Evening/Before Bed Routine. It’s a printout I made of tasks that I keep in a page protector and check off using a dry erase marker. I wipe it clean every morning.
For work (ad-hoc tasks) I use the Emergent Task Planner. I set aside 2 & 8 for Daily and Fritter/Personal tracking. The other numbers up to #9 are for things I either planned on getting done or I did that day. Numbers 10+ are my running to-do list that I copy over EVERY work day. It’s my incentive to get off my butt and do those little items. I track my time on the grid with little circle numbers and vertical arrows to indicate what I was working on. It helps me answer the question what did I do that day and also prevents me from frittering away the entire day. For larger tasks at work – aka Projects in GTD system – I use the Resource Task Quantizer form and sketch out the steps/tasks I need to do for that project. I only put one of these projects on my Daily ETP by it’s name. I try to work one project at a time so I get it done.
Finally for scheduling, I use a Flylady calendar (paper – reinforcement) which is more convenient for all us to read including the kids. We also have a shared Google calendar that we use to annotate appts/event/tax due dates/etc on. This is our one exception to going back to paper because you can’t schedule a doctor appt after 5pm (or before 9am).
I have tried a few task tracking systems both online and local computer based. Yet I have found that something about the act of physically writing it down, especially every day, makes it stick and something I cannot conveniently forget or ignore. I also found that trying to mix a work ‘context’ list with a ‘home’ list just doesn’t work. As it is I carry around the TWD form with me so I can check off items at work if an opportunity arises.
I just showed two of my coworkers who also have small children at home your forms and how I use them. I gave them copies of all the forms I use and explained briefly how to use them and sent them an email with links – they are more overwhelmed than I am at work. I hope it works for them.
All very helpful comments as I try to make GTD fit my needs better. I struggle with noticing importance when I get categorized. Never have been able to use the yellow pages because their categories baffle me.
David’s forms come closest to the way my mind works, and then I write by categories in my Planner Pad.
I have tried many different categories before settling on these:
Projects / Next / Waiting / Uh-Oh / @Biz / @phone-email / @car-home
I can keep the “sometime” lists on the master list.
Seems to me that it is important to have the master list separate from the weekly planner pages. I am testing the 5-Day Daily Grid Balancer draft 1, and the Autofocus method.
Still experimenting with the Concrete and Emergent Task forms. Those may be where the weight of importance is factored in, but I am really liking the bubbles on the STIWTDTW-Dammit form.
Paper helps. Rewriting is useful to me too.
Thanks for tool-fest and for thinking aloud. The creative-technical mind is a tough thing to train.
Oh, software wise: Things is great. I can brainstorm to my phone when I am untethered. The In-box allows free entry, and then you categorize later, or just recheck often. When I use this and my paper planner, I know where I am more often than not.