Sunday, on review, was a pretty productive day. It wasn't super intense, yet it was not slack. I got a bunch of things started, even finished a few. I didn't stress out over the projects yet to come or the tasks that I left unfinished for another day. This morning, I feel the anticipation of a new day, and with that some of the good feeling had started to slip away until I remembered the key principle from Getting Things Done: relax. This is the whole point of all those systems. David Allen's particular approach is to target that which causes the most stress in the lives of "busy people": the mountain of things that they're responsible for getting done.
I suspect that part of the appeal of GTD is that it has just enough insight presented in combination with a malleable set of working principles. They lend themselves to endless customization and adaptation, which appeals to self-empowered tinkerers and tool-builders. And why do we tinker? Because we believe that somewhere, somehow, there is the right tool that is shaped to fit me, the magic tool that converts the meager stores of ability I have into pure energy. So far, that ain't happened, and today I was starting to feel the old stress come back.
However, I've gained some new insight since last week through old friend Senia and new friend Ashish, and what they told me dovetails nicely.
First, Senia had tweeted about 5 main contributors to happiness which had caught my eye--they are as follows:
- sleep
- exercise
- nutrition
- incremental actions
- alone vs. social time balance
Senia is one of the smartest and most buoyantly awesome people I know, with degrees in Mathematics, Business, and Positive Psychology from all the right places, so I tend to take what she says at face value. I do, however, have the annoying habit of analyzing everything that piques my curiosity, so I ran the list through my personal experience filter anyway for about half a second until I remembered I had blogged about experiments in all these areas over the past few years and had found them to be true. Items #4 and #5, "incremental action" and "alone vs. social time balance", had been on my mind a lot in recent days, because I'm a bit stressed about all the things I want to get done versus having the human connections that inspire me. Knowing that these five things have been found to be top contributors to happiness puts me at ease. I relaxed, just a little bit.
A few days ago Ashish and I were having a good conversation about productivity and personal challenges. We were both have been looking at our lack of superhuman achievement as some kind of failing, even though we both know better. Ashish brought up a book he'd read called The Four Agreements that he said were things we already knew, but presented them in a way I might find interesting. We were in Barnes and Noble, so he hunted it down; The Four Agreements are as follows:
- Be Impeccable with your Word
- Don't Take Anything Personally
- Don't Make Assumptions
- Always Do Your Best
They are called agreements because they are made with yourself. The interesting spin that the book provides is to present the world as an illusion stemming from the set of beliefs ("agreements") we hold. The first agreement, "Be Impeccable with your Word", recognizes us that words have the power to shape belief, and when wielded poorly they have terrible consequences to ourselves and to others. The author, Don Miguel Ruiz, tells a story about a little girl with a beautiful voice who was bouncing up and down on her bed singing. Her mother, ordinarily a kind person but exhausted and stressed by a tough day at work, snapped harshly at her to stop her ugly singing. The little girl took this to heart, stricken, and from that day on believed her voice was horrible and ugly, and never sang again...I find this story incredibly sad. We constantly do this to ourselves too, by using negative language and subtly putting ourselves down...we call this "being realistic". I do this all the time, casting the same spell of limitation on myself over and over. I also liked Ruiz's take on "Always Do Your Best", which is such a tired old chestnut I couldn't possibly imagine what he could say on the subject, but he added an important qualifier: one should always do their best given the circumstances of the moment. If you are tired, your best is not going to be the same as it is when you are well-rested, so don't beat yourself up over it. But do do your best. This modification has subtle ramifications with regards to pursuing excellence, and I appreciated its subtlety as I relaxed a little more. The book reminded me a bit of The Alchemist and One Hundred Years of Solitude in its spiritual tone; curiously, both of these other books are by South American writers. Maybe I need to go there and see what's going on.
Between Western-researched approach to happiness and South American Toltec wisdom, I find that the net result is a sense of relaxation. I'm relaxed because I've gotten some outside affirmation that there's some things I can do to achieve a base level of happiness, and that there's a simple set of philosophical principles that are compatible with the way I prefer to see the world. And with relaxation comes a lowered threshold of energy-blocking inhibitions and doubt, which will allow (I am hoping) my productivity to flow. I'm thinking the combination of relaxation and expectation management might be the key to a kick-butt life.
I woke up this Sunday morning feeling chock full of vim and vigor, but after checking email, showering, and feeding the cats I was struck by a wave of lethargy that robbed me of my initiative. Now, this wouldn't ordinarily be an issue, as I would heartily say that everyone is entitled to as many naps as they can squeeze in on a Sunday, but I also realized that this productivity stall was a recurring pattern during the rest of the week as well. Just as I start to formulate a plan of action, I'm struck by a kind of fuzzy-headed feeling and I lose my focus. Hours later, I regain mental focus while browsing some website on the Internet I've never seen before, dressed only in the bathrobe I had on in the morning.
I ticked off the usual suspects: eating bad, not working out, not drinking enough water, depression over lack of clear mission, etc. Yep, these are all possibilities, nothing that a bit of discipline and good habits can't fix. But since I've been over this ground before, I decided to consider alternative explanations and decided to self-monitor my stream of consciousness. When I am steeling myself to take action I listen to a monologue in my head that essentially tries to persuade me into action. These appear as fully-formed sentences, and my writing is essentially the process of writing it all down with a bit of on-the-fly restructuring. This is the means by which I focus my thoughts into a single line of reasoning, which then becomes the basis for a plan of action. The process of polishing up--when I have the patience--is to "listen" to what I wrote and correct words and phrases that are not in the spirit of my intent. But I digress...I wanted to find out where this foggy feeling is coming from, so I plopped myself into a convenient sunbeam and closed my eyes.
I found that I was feeling quite irritated with myself, and that there were several layers of irksomeness to deal with:
I felt physically restless. I can recognize this now as the "jittery energy" feeling that comes from not doing enough physical activity to tire out the muscles, one of the mysteries of the gym I had encountered when I started going a couple years ago. I've been a slacker for the last six months, though, being too pre-occupied with work and having fallen out of my daily routine.
The solution: I can go to sleep at a regular time every night. This is harder that it sounds, because my mind tends to race and seek new stimuli until it is exhausted.
A little more relaxed, I then started to formulate a plan for the day. I soon experienced the "fog of inaction" sensation that had so pissed me off this morning. I put a shape to the fog: I felt the need to write down my plan somewhere where I wouldn't forget it or lose it. Ah...my lack of trust in my memory is an anxiety that stems back to early childhood. I have come to believe that I can't remember any kind of arbitrary process, and subjects in school that required such memorization were much hated. This ruled out a lot of math, chemistry, history, and language courses. I'm not sure if I even have some kind of memory deficit, but at an early age I gave up on trying to remember arbitrary things and focus on learning principles. In fact, the way I look at the world is probably shaped by my anxiety about remembering things; I use principle as a knowledge compression scheme that allows me to re-synthesize from root concepts what I need to know. Freshman-level courses where reasoning is at the root of the process--Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Physics come to mind--worked well with my particular learning strategy. Anyway, I don't know if my lack of faith in my own memory is even justified, but I had told myself this story a long time ago and I have believed it. It is time to test that belief and replace it with a better one.
The solution: A simple list is enough to jog my memory, because my associative memory works just fine. Keeping the list handy, though, is the challenge that my anxiety about forgetting things keeps raising. I can try to create the optimal solution, but that is a form of procrastination in itself. It's probably easier to just accept forgetfulness as a part of the process, but that also bothers me because I'm a freelancer; forgetfulness is not a virtue. There are so many ways I can go with this that this problem deserves several blog posts, so for now I'm sticking with "use one list". I think I'll use the new bright green Moleskine Volant I bought yesterday.
The last issue was the desire for optimal execution. I almost didn't write this blog post because I didn't think I had the "optimal place to put it". I've been displeased with the organization of my website for some time, perceiving the need for several topical content streams, and this has prevented me from posting anything at all that didn't seem mandatory. I haven't even started because it is such a daunting endeavor technically. Additionally, the desire to have an optimal plan of attack becomes a preoccupation in itself, and it seems worthwhile because this theoretically will make things "easier". That may be true in very expensive and resource-intensive projects, but for personal projects at the scale I'm thinking? It's probably no more than a 10-20% penalty, and even that is probably wrong-thinking. I've already blown the time allotment anyway through excessive non-productive optimization-before-implementation, which is a fundamental sin. It's a lot easier to optimize once you have the complete process in place, when actual problems (as opposed to imagined "might be" problems) manifest.
There is probably some anxiety about not messing up somewhere in here too, which is another deep-seated childhood fear. The reluctance is just an instinctual reaction, like learning to shy away from something that hurts you. As an adult, however, I know "messing up" is quite recoverable, and it's even a sign of character if you're the entrepreneurial type.
The solution: MESS UP A LOT, and trust that the reassessment phase that follows swiftly will orient myself in the right direction. From experience, I know this is the case.
At the very least, I got a blog post out of this morning's crankiness. Now to fire up the new Moleskine! :-)
There are a couple of esoteric versions of the Concrete Goals Tracker that are specifically designed for sales people and networking efforts. I never really understood the point of cold networking, and I don't really like to push myself on people, but when I have to I do have a particular process in mind. These two forms are designed to enforce that process from both the top-down and the bottom-up.
Top-Down: Network Catch-o-Matic
The Network Catch-o-Matic (NCM) is the top-down tool for making connections and networking toward a lasting relationship. You start by making sure you are at least getting in front of as many people as you can in a week (here I am choosing 50 people, which is kind of arbitrary) for meaningful face time. The goal: some kind of collaboration. There are several steps one needs to go through to build up that relationship, and the NCM recognizes that there are fewer people passing through each subsequent stage. For more information about how it works, read the origin Makin' Rain post.
Bottom-Up: Sales Habits
The Sales edition of the Concrete Goals Tracker is something I don't think I released before, but it is based on the same principles of show people what you have and make impressions as a driving force. If people can't see what you're doing, and don't have a way to remember to have a conversation with you, then your chances of landing a sale are pretty dim. The additional wrinkle in sales, IMHO, is to be able to tell when a prospect becomes interested, what piqued that interest, and for what reason. If you don't keep these in mind, then your sales effort is scattered and essentially random.
The rationale behind this form design is more thoroughly explained in the original Concrete Goals Tracker articles.
DOWNLOAD THE 2009 FORMS
» Download The Network Catch-o-Matic
» filename: PCEO-NCM01-NetworkCatcher.pdf
» Download Concrete Goals Tracker: Sales Edition
» filename: PCEO-CGT01-Sales.pdf
Managing and Scheduling Multiple Projects
After a year break, I'm re-introducing the Resource Time Tracking (RTT) forms I first tried out in 2006. At the time, I was trying to figure out a better way of visualizing future time to a number of different simultaneous projects.
This is a two-part form, consisting of a task scheduler and a task quantizer. The Task Scheduler is basically a calendar that shows what deliverables are due on what days of the week in addition to when production time is allocated. The Task Quantizer is a kind of worksheet to allow you to determine what those deliverables are in the first place, and how long it will take to to them. The Quantizer forces you to measure in standardized blocks of time, which comes in handy when it comes to fitting them into the Scheduler's time grid.
The 2009 update is unchanged from the original 2006-2007 form, other than some updates to contact information and of course the year.
Download 2009 Resource Time Tracking Forms
For more information about the use of the Resource Time Tracking forms, check out the original post. Enjoy!
Plan your day as it happens
The Emergent Task Planner (or ETP) is a Daily Planning Sheet that provides several means for visualizing the time you have available so you can get some work done. Unlike other planning sheets which merely block out time and leaves you to hope for the best, the ETP borrows some of the task planning methodology from the Task Progress Tracker to reinforce one idea: it's hard to get anything done on purpose when there are so many distractions. The ETP provides space for noting down the unexpected.
The 2009 edition is available now in two versions: the old "free" version with the Time Scheduling on the right side, and as a special treat I'm providing a variation of the 2007-2008 Preprinted Edition design.
Download 2009 Emergent Task Planner Printable Forms
For information about the Emergent Task Planner, the original post describes each design feature in greater detail.
Limited Availability!
If you'd like to order from the limited run of pre-printed pads on high-quality paper, I've still got 40 pads left. After I sell-through these pads, I'll consider doing another print run and opening some kind of persistent e-commerce storefront.
