A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jun Loayza via Skype Video for the Viralogy blog, which is a kind of a "best blogs" social media aggregator. This was the first time I'd ever been interviewed on video, so I was all over the place with my responses. Jun, however, took out all those parts and produced a tightly edited video covering responses to these questions:
Before starting the blog, did you have the same philosophy of productivity and transparency?
How does your blog stand out from all of the other productivity blogs?
Do you have a system to your productivity?
What are some common misconceptions that people have about productivity and simplicity?
Tell me a bit about yourself outside of the blogging world
What makes you super passionate and excited?
What advice would you give to your 20 year old self?
He also helpfully distills my responses into, as he interprets them, in his blog post. You can check out the video interview at his site or view it below:
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.
This is week 3 of "rebooting" a habit that helps me maintain a certain level of productivity: getting up early. This is one of a series of habits that I am planning on starting, but am doing one at a time on the advice of The Power of Less.
Getting up early requires extra effort, particularly if you like to stay up late and sleep-in as much as I do. The life of a freelancer is very flexible (which I like) but this comes at a price: there's a tendency to lose touch with your friends and family. The primary reason I want to wake up early is to help me stay in sync with everyone else, an increasingly important requirement for me. A major side benefit, as my friend Robert points out, is that I also have a lot more time to goof off in the morning. While I might use a more marketable phrase like providing adequate time to marshal one's creative energies and ramp-up for a busy day, it is an accurate statement. I tend to lumber down the runway of productivity like an antique cargo plane, fueled only with the best of intentions. With a good tail wind at my back, a cup of coffee in my hand, and the Grace of God as my copilot, I somehow manage to lift my creaking body into a sky filled with possibility. If my energy holds I might actually get somewhere before falling back to earth. In short, the act of takeoff requires a lot of effort from me, and I need a commensurate amount of runway (e.g. time) to assure that I don't crumple back into the ground before achieving liftoff. Getting up early is an essential part of the formula, because it gives me the runway length I need for a productive day.
Anyway, here's the short list of what it takes for me to stay on track, roughly in order of dependence.
1. FIRST YOU GOTTA WANT IT ENOUGH TO REALLY DO IT
Motivation! The key to everything! My motivation is to maintain sync with my friends. Otherwise, I tend to cycle on a 28-hour day, which has me looping in and out of people's lives like a wraith. When I'm out of sync, I spend a lot of time in "vampire mode", sleeping during the day and working at night. Sometimes that's OK if you just want to get things done and don't care about or need people. Your motivations will probably be different.
When I first tried this, it was for the sheer novelty of the experience, but I learned a lot of things about the early morning that I got to like. This has given me extra motivation to get it going again.
2. YOU NEED TO DO THE PREPWORK BEFORE YOU GO TO SLEEP
Behind every successful action is a supporting action. In this case, I need a certain amount of sleep (8 hours) which means I need to make sure I'm asleep by a certain time...
...which means I need to be IN BED at that time, eyes shut. If I want to wake at 6AM, that means in bed at 10PM.
...which means I am READY TO GO TO SLEEP beforehand. That means I have already showered and brushed my teeth.
...which means I am MENTALLY WOUND DOWN. I need about an hour of deliberate non-thinking beforehand.
... which means I should be letting go of the details of the day at around 9PM.
I have a natural tendency to seek intellectual stimulation, which contributes to late nights. I like to look up things on the Internet. I get drawn into a line of inquiry or design experiment. I get sucked into a magazine article. I might be halfway through some project work. If I don't stop that mental activity by 9PM, I am not going to be asleep at 10PM. I have had to learn how to turn off my brain, which requires (somewhat ironically) some mental effort. I don't like to medicate myself, so enforcing the habit is an exercise in just saying no to myself; even though I'm not a Dad, I end up having to take care of my inner child.
There are four other factors that affect the success of my sleep schedule:
I have to stop working at 6PM at the latest, otherwise the winding-down process doesn't have enough time to work.
I have to eat dinner at 7PM at the latest, and not too much. Otherwise I will not sleep well due to stomach issues.
For the first week, I have to decline late night invitations to stay out with friends. Otherwise the habit will not set.
I have to also maintain the same hours on the weekends, to some extent.
3. THEN YOU NEED TO TRUMP THE PLEASURE OF THE MOMENT
Getting to sleep on time is half the battle. NOW IT'S TIME TO GET UP! If you aren't required to wake up early by an external force (like a job), then you will need a compelling reason to get moving. Otherwise, you'll just fall asleep again. Here are the things that I look forward to in the morning, which helps me get out of bed.
I have had friends to meet regularly at a local coffee shop for a few minutes before work. This works particularly well if they are new friends who you think might become really good friends. Just keep the interaction short if you have things to do later. It's kind of like waiting for the school bus in the morning, hanging out with your bus-stop buddies. It also helps that over time I got to know the people at my Starbucks, and they seem glad to see me and know my name. It took about a year because I'm an introvert by nature, but it was totally worth it.
I was curious enough to experiment with waking early just for the experience, for at least two weeks. Two weeks isn't bad, and it doesn't make you feel trapped by a habit you may be unsure about. That makes it easier to commit to, and if it sucks you can always stop.
I knew from my previous two-week sleep experiment that being up before everyone else was kind of neat. You see different people, and I find the early morning sun
quite agreeable.
I added a planning ritual to the beginning of the day, on a regular paper notebook (this is how the Emergent Task Planner was born, incidentally). I avoid email until I get my head clear, because it's too easy to get sucked into it.
4. BUT YOU HAVE TO GET OUT OF BED FIRST
I can remember several very productive mornings at Starbucks that sadly, took place in dreamland. I once cycled through this three whole times, each time dreaming I had looked at the alarm clock, jolted out of bed, showered, and gotten to the door before realizing I was actually still asleep.
There are three countermeasures that work for me, though I don't deploy them all at the same time:
I set multiple alarm clocks. Loud ones, from different sources, at varying positions and distances from your bed. If they don't have a standard position, your body won't be able to perfect the slam-and-snooze maneuver automatically. Don't overdo it, though; if they are too far away you just might learn to sleep right through them. To mix things up, I sometimes use my cell phone's alarms, set at 6AM and 607AM. The regular alarm clock is set at 6AM, and at 615AM my Voco Good Morning Sir Clock (yet another awesome present from my delightful sister) reminds me that I have important gentlemanly affairs to tend to. It's a little too quiet to serve as a primary alarm clock, but the quiet authority of Stephen Fry challenges me to be my best.
I force myself to immediately open my eyes, keeping them open for 30 100 seconds. This is the minimum-effort action I can take without having to shift my entire body, though it is surprisingly difficult. Once my eyes are open. For extra credit, I look toward the window and try to determine what the weather is. This sometimes requires additional body movement. If I keep my eyes open for long enough to look around the room, that seems to start the mental processes going. It's sometimes helpful to position interesting things within eye's glance the night before. Maybe something to do? Something to remember? And if I get tired of counting to 100 seconds, I can always just get up :-)
I drink 16oz of water before I go to sleep. The amount of water varies, but when I'm serious about waking up I drink enough of the stuff to ensure I have to go to the bathroom. I believe this is an old soldier's trick for waking up in time for their watch. A full bladder is plenty of reason to get up. If I drink TOO MUCH water, however, I end up getting up in the middle of the night, and that kind of defeats the purpose.
5. FOLLOW THROUGH WITH THE HABIT FOR TWO OR THREE WEEKS
Two weeks is about the minimum time it takes to establish a habit, though for this habit I have decided to go for three weeks. The extra week gave me time to confirm the theories I had regarding habit maintenance. Some rules of thumb:
I gave myself permission to screw up, so long as I could identify the root cause of the screw up. For example, staying up late with friends would cause me to get to sleep later, and sometimes wake up later. However, as my reason for waking up early is to stay in sync with my friends, it's hard to really consider this a failure (at least in a holistic sense).
I told people I was starting this habit. The more people that know, the more they are likely to inquire about it, and keep you mentally on-the-hook for following through with your word. Some of them will even go along with you, as my friend Robert chose to do. He even started going to the gym! Awesome!
It took about 3 or 4 days before I was waking up just before the alarm clock. Frankly, I was surprised at how quickly my body adapted to the rhythm. The prepwork helped, I think.
After about a week, my body developed an affinity for staying to the schedule, and this built up a kind of sleep equity that I could "borrow against" for unusual circumstances. If I stayed up late with friends, for example, my body would still wake up early because it had been conditioned to do so. However, it would become important to adhere to the schedule the next day, otherwise I would start to slip back into a later waking cycle. I have actually been a recovery mode for the past three days, due to some ill-advised late weekend nights. However, because I have been identifying the root causes of the slippage, I know what I need to do to correct my mistakes.
During this third week, I am realizing that I need to apply the same rules to the weekend. When the weekend rolls around, I implicitly give myself permission to do anything I want, which means I stay up really late. After two days of this, my Monday and Tuesday is pretty much shot. This weekend I will try to relax the schedule a bit but still maintain a regular waking time. We'll see.
Next Habit
I'm either going to do the Gym or Drinking Water. Probably the Gym, as I've done this before, and I actually have discovered that the noon-time workout is a nice break from the early morning work I do writing and emailing people. Juggling TWO new habits will be a new experience in itself...we'll see how it goes.
A few days ago I posted the latest progress on the Day Grid Balancer forms, a line of inquiry that has attracted very high-quality commentary from you all. Special kudos go to John Ballantrae for using Tarot cards as a tool for design reflection. Instead of using the cards to "read me", he used them to reflect on the direction that the Day Grid Balancer might go. Despite what you might believe or not believe about the "psychic power" of Tarot Cards, the symbolism nevertheless does span a variety of human desires and anxieties; just by considering the interpretations of each drawn card, one can gain some insight by seeing how the symbolism might fit with the situation on your mind.
John posted his video tarot card reading for everyone to see, and in his 12-minute video he came up with several interesting insights. One that resonated was the sense of anxiety and frustration that is driving the development of the Day Balance Grid; he suggested that perhaps focusing on that would provide some new direction. It is very true that I have been feeling that I've not been keeping balanced, and that I was potentially forgetting important things. I had started to write up everything that was on my mind, which works fine when I'm doing it for other people. This time, though, I was stuck. The thought of seeing all those unfinished tasks and unfulfilled dreams was incredibly demotivating. Nevertheless, it had to be done.
When I went to re-watch John's video, the first three minutes suddenly stood out to me. He's doing nothing but shuffling his cards as he's explaining his approach to the reading. It's rather mesmerizing to see someone who is adept with cards shuffle and spread a deck, and several thoughts came to mind regarding the appeal of a card-based form factor:
There is something cool about manipulating a deck of cards so much that they become familiar friends. John's Tarot deck is obviously well-used, and he's quite familiar with how it handles.
Tarot cards use strong symbolic language that carry the power of self-reflection in them. The Rider-Waite Deck, with its illustrations of the various meanings of each card, is particularly fascinating to look at.
Physically, cards are very easy to group, sort, and flip through. This is a huge boon to organization, and you don't have to rewrite anything.
I also just happen to like cards. A few years ago I had made something called the Task Order Up! that included index card versions of task cards, though the system was originally conceived in the spirit of order checks and check rails used at fast food restaurants. This system assigned a card to each task, which you could then array in front of your desk so your coworkers could see what you had going on. You could also prioritize task cards by putting them all the way on the side. But really, the driving force behind the Task Order Up! was that I thought check rails are cool, and I built the process around that.
card stacks versus to-do lists
What I have so far is a deck of personalized task cards for everything I had going on. Instead of standardizing the look-and-feel of each card (as they are in the Task Order Up!), I am allowing them to have individuality. My thinking is that the cards will take on greater representative power the more I scribble and draw on them.
One issue I had come across in the use of my Emergent Task Planner was that I had so many outstanding tasks that it was getting hard to review them all. I am going to make this easier in the next design by reverting to the "right hand side for notes" layout; this will allow me to fold the "to-do" list backwards so I can transcribe it more easily into the next day's task list. However, even in this case I'm forced to retranscribe data, which is a design no-no in my productivity form philosophy. With index cards, I can keep a master list in the form of a hand-held card deck.
Previously, I have maintained a master list electronically. For example, I recently used Google Tasks with Google Calendar. Results were mixed; Google Tasks is a little simplistic at the moment. An even older system I have used was a text editor to-do list, but since this is a local file I can't share with other computers. However, web-based to-do lists have the requirement that I am connected to the Internet, which limits the places where I can access them.
The advantage of electronic media over paper, of course, is the ease of reordering data. However, electronic media suffers when it comes to direct manipulation of overlapping data; there is a lot of clicking and dragging of the mouse, which is slow and makes comparison of data sets cumbersome. Cards do not have this disadvantage, and their tactile qualities make manipulating them a pleasure. They naturally lend themselves to manipulation; when you're dealt a hand of cards, the first thing you do is order them according to your strategic intent. Cards can be grouped, stacked, stuck together, taped, glued, and shuffled. Cards are also more pictorial, more solid, and make soothing noises as you shuffle them. Cards also afford a far richer repertoire of physical manipulation than the mouse, which I think is more helpful when thinking (I don't have any kind of citation for that, unfortunately).
design and process
I sat down with a blank pack of index cards and wrote out everything that I could think of that I needed to do.
I am starting to develop a visual vocabulary for the different kinds of tasks. Some cards are reminder cards that I will come across when I want to keep something on my mind. The "WAAH I'M FAT" card, for example, reminds me that I want to do something about that. There are some cards that I've marked with a symbol that means this moves you toward completing a strategic goal, and there's another symbol that means this supports other things you are doing. Some cards just have the names of people and projects on them. Some of them are process cards that describe how to do the laundry, and assign point values to the card.
There are lots of ordering and prioritization possibilties with a deck of cards. I can extract cards to prioritize tasks, putting them on the top of the deck. I can also group cards with small clamps or paper clips, which gives me a sense of the magnitude of a multi-step project. I can sequence cards in the order they need to be done. I just started this on Sunday, but already I find it comforting to know that everything that's on my mind is in this deck; I've found myself just shuffling through it seeing what was in there. It is like a portable version of my pickle jar. And I haven't even scratched the surface of the gaming possibilities around a custom-designed deck of cards. Collectible Color Card Task Management Gaming, anyone? Balance your Day by trying to get a Three-Of-A-Kind or Straight Flush? Unique Cards, with Webkinz-style Card Tracking and Social Media Integration via 43Things? Oh, my goodness.
Right now, the process I'm using is very simple: I'm just writing down stuff on index cards as they come to mind. The designs are sparse, but are already functionally evolving into distinct uses. When a task is completed, I'll pull the card from the deck and retire it. There are all sorts of neat index card hacks out there that could help as well. There's a nifty index card board on Unclutterer, for example, and Levenger makes those sweet index card holders and docks. However, what I'm more interested in doing is making a deck of beautiful, personalized cards that can be manipulated in my hands. We'll see where this goes.
Last week I wrote about restarting habits one at a time, based on the insight that my previous attempt to restart them all at once wasn't working. Thus, I outlined a sequence of habits that I believe will be conducive to greater productivity; it's a framework for maintaining a working store of time and energy. The habits are:
Regular Sleep Schedule
Regular Gym (multiple habits here)
Drinking Water at Regular Intervals
Eating Regular Healthy Meals
Regular Home Chores
The common wisdom is that it takes about two weeks to form the foundation of a habit, assuming you are practicing it diligently. Armed with this belief, I have been working on reclaiming my early-morning routine. I have a tendency to be a night owl, which I had previously assumed was just the way I was. However, I've found in the past that the early morning routine has many benefits: not only do you stay in sync with other people, you also have more time to goof off and still get a lot of work done :-) Not to mention that I'm finding that the early morning is a magical time; I've grown to love the sun more in my old age, a change from my youthful preference for the stillness of the night.
permission to experiment
Once I accepted that focusing on one habit at a time was OK, I decided to also not beat myself up when I wandered from my ideal sleep pattern: 8 hours of sleep a night, up at 6AM so I could be at Starbucks at 7AM. Every time I didn't get to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep, I would still try to wake up at 6AM and note how successful (or not) I was; it was enough that I was really mindful of it regardless of actual outcome. This had the unexpected side benefit of provided me with a collection of excuses that I could analyze for patterns. For example, I became aware of some common-sense rules I hadn't been following:
don't eat too late, and don't eat acidic foods.
make sure the bedding is comfortable.
don't read in bed...this leads to more thoughts and more wakefulness.
be showered and ready for bed an hour before "eye shut" deadline, so I have time to settle down.
don't use the damn computer in bed. Leads to more surfing and thoughts.
When I didn't go to sleep by 10PM, this had an impact on the success of the next day. This feedback helped reinforce the habit, especially since I could identify the cause and effect relationships.
surprising regularity
After about a week and a half, I found that my body had started waking up at 6AM even when I went to sleep later than I should have. This indicates to me that there is some wiggle room in the pattern; so long as I'm mostly getting to sleep at the right time, there is enough "momentum" in the body's imprint that it starts to maintain itself. Cool!
Toward the end of the second week, I'm also noticing more the benefits of waking up early in the form of increased socialization, because I have more time during the day to meet people.
I'm also "pre-testing" the next few habits I'd like to develop, such as the morning planning ritual and going back to the gym, but am deliberately NOT trying to practice them as habits. In the past I would have been tempted to start both these habits at the same time as I was establishing my sleeping pattern once it started to take root. That would have been too early, I think. It's possible that one huge advantage of One Habit At A Time is that the successful day is achieved more easily: I either got up early, or I didn't. The diagnostic evaluation is really simple, and still satisfying. If I had been also trying to get back to the gym and the planning habits, a successful day would have required three inter-related evaluations, which is tougher to cleanly diagnose. Not only that, statistically the odds that you will pull off a 100% successful day are correspondingly grimmer because there are more ways to fail. You could beat the odds, of course, but it requires greater fortitude and energy...if you have the time, why make things harder? I'm trying to make this easier for myself, after all.
front-end and back-end mindfulness
The habit forming experience reminds me of a concept in software development: for every "front-end result" there is a successful "back-end supporting action". In terms of software development, the "front end" is the visible part of a piece of software. It's the user interface. It's the functional benefit. It's the result you like when you press the button that says DO THIS NOW. The "back end" is all the stuff you don't see that makes the magic possible: the algorithms, databases, graphic assets, libraries, glue code, and other stuff that people who use the front end couldn't care less about. And so it was with waking up early.
By analogy, waking up early is my desired change. It's the shiny part of establishing a new habit. When I wake up early, without drama and muttered curses, I immediately reap the reward that I've been seeking! However, as I found out with the supporting habits, I had to do a lot of boring things to make it possible. For example, going to sleep early feels like a punishment because I can't indulge my whim to keep going until I drop from exhaustion. And NOT READING in bed? That sucks too, as reading in bed is one of my great pleasures. However, the whole reason that I'm doing this habit thing is because I'm chasing that work-life balance, and I am testing the theory that having some tuned systems and habits in place will lead to me getting more done. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I've had to learn to relax about not doing everything I want, a necessary focusing of energy. My boring "back end" actions are making the front end change possible, a necessary re-engineering of long-standing practice. I may decide later that waking up early is not all it's cracked up to be, but for now my working hypothesis is that it is a Good Thing.
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About Dave
I'm an investigative designer, and I write about design, development, and productivity tools.
