Task Cards vs Cognitive Load vs Balance

Excellent discussion on using index cards has been taking place on the recent index card post. Katrina Messenger even created a whole blog post about finding balance, with a followup article about living in balance. Katrina's articles poignantly lay out all the problems that plague creative thinkers who lack the bandwidth or willpower to get it all done. This triggered some new thoughts about the broader context of task management, which lead to three observations:

• We focus on tasks because they produce results and invite immediate action (we don't like being stuck). What's interesting is that tasks are a form of communication. You know the saying: "Deeds speak louder than words." Through tasks, we are engaging with other people who are depending on those tasks, or merely expecting them. Ideally those people also matter to us, but when they don't tasks become a chore. While we tend to think that tasks are about us, a good amount of the time tasks are really about other people. How well you do a task, how fast, whether you meet that deadline...all these attributes of task-doing communicate something about you to them. At the same time, we're communicating something to ourselves at the same time; the subtext of perfectionism, of responsibility, and of social value within a community. Yikes!

• Balance is the sense that you are doing what you need to be do to live a good life, however you might define that. When this sense is sustainable and secure, a feeling of well-being results. A relative few tasks are about producing enjoyment, once you've carved out a bit of time and energy to do it. A lot of tasks are devoted to carving out that bubble of security to make it possible. The wriggle room is in how you define a task in the first place, and what parameters you place on their fulfillment to discern "success".

• Cognitive Load is, in my layman's understanding, our brains ability to process information from both internal sources (our desires and memories) and external sources (our senses telling us what is going on). This is a limited resource at any given time, so learning how your brain reacts to certain stimuli is a good thing so you can manage it. I once had a partial insight related to this when I once compared myself to a go-kart with a certain set of performance parameters. Time management is a subset of this; really we want to manage our cognitive load such that our available time is productive.

These are different approaches to the task management question, and it may appeal to a different kind of productivista. It invites comparison. For example, David Allen's GTD system is explicitly engineered to process the elements of productivity in a methodical manner. It reminds me of a computer programming concept called Model View Controller (MVC), what's referred to as a software design pattern in the field. Roughly speaking, the MVC approach is to divide a program's code into three functional areas of responsibility: a "model" that organizes data within computer memory, a "view" that displays that data on the screen, and a "controller" that waits for "input events" (i.e. clicking a button on the screen) and interprets them as commands that update the model or change the view. This is a cycle repeats over and over again. The beauty of MVC is that you don't mix the function of manipulating with the function of showing, thus avoiding a certain amount of error-inducing confusion; if you've ever tried cleaning up a pile of magazines at home and got stuck reading them instead, that's the kind of functional mix-up I'm talking about.

Anyway, if you replace the word "task" for "data" in that description, you have a pretty accurate description of the GTD methodology. Where GTD gets interesting for many people is in the way that the model and view aspects are handled; this is perhaps why programmers get so excited about it. For example, how do you model the tasks and display them in such a way that the controller can be as elegant as possible? Answer(s): With a new Todo List application! Or with a tickler file! Or with index card bleachers! You get the idea.

Stretching the metaphor further, GTD puts you in the role of the "computer". You are running the efficient GTD program, which is a kind of productivity operating system. So long as the human computer is reliable, GTD works. And that is also its greatest weakness, if you can call the need to be self-reliant and dependable a weakness. The Model-View-Controller programming pattern is effective when it comes to creating functional interactive software, but it doesn't guarantee that the software will be pleasant to use. It's just a pattern, and it has no soul of its own. That's where Design comes in, structuring the elements of productivity in a way that naturally flows with our actual underlying desires and proclivities, at the same time elevating our expectations and abilities.

Secondly, from just a functional perspective, a great number of us are not very good at running a process consistently. The GTD system quickly destructs when not tended to in a task-by-task, weekly-reviewed manner. If you are not doing your weekly review, you're dead in the water, and you lose the wonderful feeling of knowing exactly what you need to do. The GTD system is not at fault...it works great by design! It's easy to point the finger back at ourselves and say it's our fault, but perhaps we should have designed our productivity system to work analogously to computers in real-world situations, with unreliable connections, stormy weather, and intermittent service availability. We're human. Dan Gilbert's book Stumbling On Happiness reminds us that our mental hardware is, in many ways, broken and unreliable when judged by the standards of computing machinery. However, it's those same quirks of our mental processing that makes magic possible. Productivity is, to some degree, an illusion that we create for ourselves. Some of us are so good at it that we create impossible illusions, and the trick there is to keep from falling for them. Perfectionists, I'm talking about us.

I think these observations on tasks as communication, cognitive load, and balance are nascent building blocks for a different kind of pattern. There are a different set of constraints, which requires a different set of operating principles. It might be a pattern that is designed to be opportunistically yet sporadically productive, like a kind of weird flowering desert plant. The various Printable CEO forms, now that I think about it, draw on this idea already. Making it more overt in the new forms in development may be fruitful.

24 More Boxes

Yesterday I'd started doodling boxes on a piece of paper, idly wondering if I could somehow structure the coming days of toil into a set of 24 boxes. This represented, in hindsight, a desire to put some structure on my expectations and somehow guarantee a productive use of time. There's something pleasing about a grid of boxes. It's orderly! It's contained! It makes everything look clean and clear! Of course, it's also a pipe dream to believe that it could actually work, but on the other hand I'm a firm believer that the appearance of order plays a part in creating the motivation to keep going.

designing balance

Today's doodling expands on the theme of breaking up the day into boxes. Underlying the itch to structure the day is something new to my productivity form designing escapades: the desire to build balance into the task management. That presumes that there exists an algorithm for balance in the first place, and admittedly this has always been an area where I've suffered. However, in yesterday's post I decided that starting with four billable hours a day would be a good start; this is both sustainable and realistic in my freelancing experience, especially when considering all the additional non-billable stuff that I have to do.

I'm not going to get this form done today, but a few ideas have popped up:

1. There are many work-life balance systems in existence, each purporting to break down the formula to happiness into a number of essential categories. I don't happen to use any of them--which maybe explains a lot--but the idea of hour bins is very appealing from a tracking perspective. It's compact, visually countable, and looks orderly. I'd have to build in some way of enforcing the time element for it to be a workable system, though. In some ways this approach resembles the Emergent Task Timer, but the emphasis of that tool is to discover where your time has gone in the face of hectic days. The use of bins, which could be asymmetrically sized, encourages balance. Likewise the Concrete Goals Tracker is similar in that it encourages certain essential activities, but it's not designed to encourage balance. If anything it rewards point grubbing behavior, which doesn't exactly encourage balance.

2. There are tasks that need to get done every day, which is one of missions fulfilled by the Emergent Task Planner. One minor inconvenience is the need to re-transcribe tasks that didn't get done, so I'm toying with the idea of some kind of overlay system. I actually don't mind re-transcribing tasks because it helps one be mindful of them; the act of writing is an act of mental refocusing, in other words. Still, it might be useful in some way to create sets of tasks and uses them as task lenses on any given day. This was a concept that I'd played with before for an ad agency, but it didn't really go anywhere.

3. I also like the idea of using asymmetric grids to visually convey the "otherness" of some time blocks. You can see a hint of this idea in the lower left corner of the picture. It reminds me of board games, which suggests a sense of progression from block to block. A reduction of the game board concept to an ideogram-style representation could be interesting, motivational, and highly compact.

This is the first form I'm creating that addresses balance, to my recollection. A larger issue is how all the various Printable CEO forms work with each other; how does this new balance form figure in with that? The short answer is that there is no "system" in the first place; each PCEO form tool is designed to meet a specific need. While there are ways that two or three forms could be used together, there is no unifying design philosophy at work to eliminate tedious data retranscription. This is where software may be the solution.

In the meantime, designing to encourage balance introduces a new concept in the PCEO universe, and I'm curious to see where it goes.

Disentangling Expectations

I was just re-reading Monday's post, and feel that I'm starting to wander. I've got to regroup; here's the main issues on my table:

• To be more productive I emphasize instantaneous feedback in my work, and have been selecting work and social situations that provide this as much as possible.
• There are so many interesting opportunities for me that I am finding it rather daunting to develop them all. To be pragmatic, I have felt I have needed to lower my expectations of how many I can do at a time. This feels crappy.
• Intellectually I know that slow-and-steady development will yield, over time, the sense of advancement I want and introduce undreamed-of opportunities; I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. However, I tend to be impatient and the resulting mental stubbornness results in procrastination.
• Current status: mental gridlock. I'm not getting anything done that I want.
• Current theory: perhaps I need to focus on both mindfulness and the limits of my current abilities; in short, learn to drive what I've got instead of waiting for me to finish building that better race car.

It's relatively easy for me to rattle off what I'm strongest in:

• absorbing information to distill principles
• discovering connections between ideas
• isolating and categorizing contextual states of understanding
• presenting insights in visual or written form
• listening to and leading people to their own understanding
• systemizing what I've discovered and learned
• coming up with novel approaches to teach what I've systemized

This is different from knowing whether I'm "good" at it or not; that means knowing what kind of competitive arena I want to race in. The few that come to mind are graphic design, creative consulting, interactive design, and perhaps systems analysis. However, none of these by themselves create that sense of excitement that I crave. Perhaps what excites me most of all is just the opportunity to learn about things and figure out how to best apply what I learned toward the challenge.

This is a niche category, which means that the metrics are not so clear cut. I need to look at the reasoning behind the goals more closely:

• The racing metaphor I've been using in the past few days would be great if my personal goal was "to be a great race car driver", because there are simple metrics I can think of to guide myself by: "run the lowest lap time", "be the first to finish the race", "perform consistently". It's a little more difficult if I said, "I want to be a great designer", because the metrics are more indirect: "get hired by the top design firms" and "get critical acclaim and recognition from the industry and the media" come to mind. Nevertheless, in both situations the simple metrics belie the intoxicating complexity of differing strategy and tactics that can be designed to reach them. With solid principles, experienced mentors, and great diagnostic tools, the process of learning is fairly clear-cut once you have them in place. I'll tentatively say the reason behind this type of goal is to pick an area to compete in. Follow the rules, maybe even come up with some new strategies.

• I have been largely preoccupied with identity over the past two years. I believed that if I knew who I was, then my mission would be clear. What I don't like about the focus on identity: it makes me more self-conscious, and I think I could use a lot less of that. I'm tired of it. It would be nice to just get lost in something else and still be productive. Nevertheless, I have an intense desire to find my place and my calling. The reason I'm looking for my place is because everything I've tried so far (design, programming, management, consulting) has left me unsatisfied, and I have not figured out how to create that niche category that will ensure survival and success.

• Then there is the joy in the experience itself. Professions like farming come to mind. I've never worked on a farm, but I can imagine that the long days that go into growing a crop from seed to harvest require great measures mindfulness and focus. The fundamentals are pretty basic, I would guess, but I would imagine that successful farmers have learned to adapt to the earth and sky, learned to see deeply into their crops and predict the impact of the weather on yield, flavor, and profit. Although it takes a lot of time to grow a crop, I imagine that the activity of farming itself is rich with sensory input. There's the sun and the rain, the smells of fertilizer and rich earth, the physicality of the labor, and the satisfaction of holding what you've grown. The nature of the work takes the self out of the equation, because your attention is on the world and how it responds to your ministrations; it's interactive. For people who love this--printers who just love the way ink smells, painters who are thrilled by the sight of new tubes of pigment, farmers who love corn--this is a kind of bliss that I have yet to experience.

Scope of Competition, Meaning, and Sensuality of the Experience. Perhaps these are the three areas I need to define. But my hour is up; more tomorrow.

Realistically High Expectations, Part I

Last week I made the connection between how I "drive" myself poorly with how unskilled drivers run terrible laps at the local Go Kart track. My expectation was that the vehicle--myself--is infinitely fast, instantaneous in response, and indestructible, so I mash the pedals and jerk the steering wheel expecting to excel at what I do just because I'm doing it aggressively. So I hit the barriers on the curves, skid out, am ultimately disappointed with my performance because I've not learned to recognize the limits of the vehicle. However, I know that a skilled driver can exact a thrilling experience with the same cart and track, because he/she knows how to drive to the limit: they've studied the dynamics of the track and know the parameters of the cart; their performance appears unworldly to us noobs. Our expectations, as drivers both of go-karts and our own lives, are out of whack with reality.

So how did our unrealistic expectations come to exist? I blame the instant-fix mentality that pervades our daily lives, catering to our appetite for gratification now. I suppose it's not really our fault, as instant gratification is wired into our primitive brains; the idea that things can and should be powerful and easy has been a long-standing technological trend. We love the idea of wielding magic wands, guns, and iPhones; we just need genies in bottles, infinite rounds of ammunition, and server-side programming to complete the fantasy. In the case of the iPhone and thousands of other amazing products, that fantasy is our reality.

The Industrial Revolution taught us that hard work can yield to the efficiencies of mechanical mass-production, and in the subsequent shift to the consumer-driven economy we've been conditioned by advertising that we should benefit from this. The emphasis has shifted to granting us incredible powers over our lives, so long as we constrain our actions to that which technology and commerce has been able monetize. And advertising reinforces this message of push-button, wipe-on wipe-off ease. We have a plentiful supply of magic bullets supplied to us by hucksters, and we're all too willing to believe that we're capable of directing our fire with competence.

Redirecting Expectations

I've been noticing over the past couple of years just how impatient I am, and I had adjusted my productivity strategy to include more instantaneous feedback to help maintain motivation and interest in longer-term tasks I treated my lack of patience as character flaw inherent to me, and figured it was easier to just work around it. "I'm not great at being mindful and being focused", I told myself.

I thought I had an intellectual understanding of what that was, but in reality I didn't; I confused the results of mindfulness and focus with knowing what it was. My attempts to be mindful consisted of removing distractions, simplifying and shortening task lists, and telling myself that it was OK to do so. I attempted to work within what I thought I could muster, and to some extent it did work in that I felt better because I'd lowered my standards. But this is not elevated consciousness; it's working within what I thought I could do. And although this has led to an increased sense of well-being, lowering my standards is a cop-out no matter how I spin it. If I'm not making the changes I desire, I am really just coping with my lack of fulfillment, telling myself that it doesn't matter as much as I thought. On the race track, this is the equivalent of driving very conservatively and slowly, making sure that I do not exceed the safe speed and stay within the boundaries. As a result, I can finish the lap instead of wiping out, and I'm alive to tell the tale. Don't get me wrong...finishing anything is awesome. It just isn't as awesome as going fast and looking good while doing it. I don't think anyone who has a dream really wants to settle for doing things half-way, except in a world where expectations are kept low. Bah!

I want to be able to set my expectations high.

I assumed that maybe my goals were unrealistic, and scaled them back. But perhaps that view is too simplistic. A more satisfying model of productivity would incorporate realistic expectations with constant feedback as the high-performing vehicle that we want to be. To deny this desire is to just lie to ourselves. The secret to getting there is to consider what it takes to become a master driver, the mind that guides the actions that extract the pleasure in performance. The limits exist, but perhaps I can make better use of them. So I am redefining mindfulness to mean responding well to the sensory inputs related to whatever task is at hand. And I am redefining focus to being able to consistently detect the conditions of the environment such that I can anticipate what needs to be done. These are skills that I know can be trained in an environment where the number of sensory inputs are high and tangibly-effective process is available; there is no helping it. It comes down, I suspect, to the ability to perceive the inputs in the first place, and then having the guts to push them to see how the next set of inputs will change.

I suspect a lot of our productivity challenges are related to the difficulty in learning how to see.

More tomorrow.

Being Kart and Driver

In yesterday's post about Go Karts and Management, I made the observation that there's a difference between the "fun" image of go-karts and the "racing" version. If your goal is to win a go-kart race, you quickly need to come to terms with the actual limits of the vehicle, not the fantasy of having instantaneous responsiveness from an indestructible super kart.

In this era of video games, wizards, "smart" appliances and pre-packaged, highly-polished experiences, we've all been spoiled into thinking that things should be easy. We expect that we get instantaneous results. And we oftentimes apply these same expectations to ourselves and the people we work with. As a freelancer, I've applied these expectations to myself, and have tried optimizing myself out with various hacks and process tricks to eke out a few more minutes on the hour of productivity. I am the vehicle, in other words, and I'm just coming to the conclusion that there are certain performance limits that I have to deal with. It's the way I happened to be put together, and trying to rice myself out to achieve a hypothetical world-beating awesomeness has a point of diminishing returns. So instead of focusing on fixing the vehicle, I should learn how to drive. Real driving, not Playstation. It's dirty, tiring, and not very glamorous, but I sense that I need to return to these value. You've heard this a million times before: it's not the car, it's the driver. When it comes to being personally productive, we need to recognize that we are both. When it comes to managing others, learning how to drive a project means knowing your people and knowing the road ahead. Everyone is built differently, with different strengths and limits. This flies in the face of the "everyone is equal" logic, and it flies in the face of the desire to shape workers into super-beings. Sure, there are people like that, but for the rest of us it's gratifying to know that we can all achieve a performance maximum if we just know how to be driven within the limits of our adaptability. One bonus we have over cars is that we can train ourselves to perform better with time, adequate resistance and repetition.

My Printable CEO work has straddled the line between vehicle and driver. The Concrete Goals Tracker, for example, has focused on the execution of existing strengths and compensating for weaknesses. The Emergent Task Timer is the equivalent of a human productivity dyno, measuring peak productivity over time. I haven't to date focused on creating tools specifically to isolate aspects of the vehicle (our personal strengths) or driving techniqe (workflow and process creation), as there are plenty of sources (e.g. Positive Psychology for personal, GTD for process). But now I'm starting to see where the overall system is going. There is a history of endeavor underlying all of this stuff that beckons!