This may be random. For once, I am speechless. Or at least wordless. You know me. That doesn’t happen. Ever. I might go quiet, but that is different from not having something to say. Perhaps it is all the different threads in my head?

There are big Redcatco projects in the wings, new blogs to feed, articles to write and a fair collection of other things to be done too. Is it all making sense, or is it random, like stones on a forest floor.

Do you ever get too many things in your head at once? Perhaps it’s just me, although given the popularity of How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work, I’m not so sure.

When we get overloaded things start to look random. All the gaps get filled, and the patterns that gave us a sense of order start to disappear. Randomness is a curious thing. I’m not talking about the mathematical science of it, but rather its effect on the brain.

There’s a nice review of Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” here, which is a great read on the subject. Essentially we try and predict randomness. Its in our nature. Our brains see patterns everywhere, that’s how they work. The only way we can know if a pattern is valid is from its success in predicting future events. However, we rarely wait that long.

Some things that look random are actually patterns. I was trying to get a close up shot of a bee (in relation to “Do your employees dance“), when I realised that often life is only random until you study it carefully.

Getting the picture was either going to involve waiting at a flower and hoping to luck-out, or knowing where the bee was going to go next, and getting there first. After a quick trial, it was clear the former method was going to involve significantly more time than I had planned to spend. I needed to be able to predict the bee’s movements to get to the flower first. That or hope for a matrix-like moment of speed and dexterity.

After watching the bee a while, I came to the conclusion that they were pretty random critters. So much for my pattern-making brain. But then I got a little closer in, and followed one of the more industrious looking fellows. I was just starting get a feel for what he was up to, then ‘whoosh’, he was gone. Ok, on to the next. As I got closer and started to see the world from a bee’s-eye view (minus ultraviolet sight capabilities), I suddenly spotted the pattern. Click.

This bee progressed around in a very orderly spiral, until the lavender flower was cleaned out, then hopped on to the next. The randomness? Well, the bee could see which flowers had accessible pollen and simply ignored those that didn’t.

Have you ever watched someone and thought ‘why on earth did they do that?’ – it may well have been for a very logical reason, part of a well ordered pattern. Until you understand the motives and assumptions athe person is working with their actions will seem random.

Patterns actually make us productive. At least, productive people seem to follow patterns (as a tangential piece in The Economist indicates: “Every move you make“). It might be cause and effect, or simply a correlation, but patterns do bring a sense of order, and a sense of order helps to get more done.

So, how to get order and efficiency out of business overload? Take a leaf out of the computing book. I was writing up a webcast for BusinessTechFeed on Data Center Efficiency, which included a section on virtualization. A very useful technology for making more efficient use of computing resources. Virtualization lets you move from lots of under-utilized machines to one efficient, highly utilized one. The machine runs separate instances that each behave as a fully fledged computer.

Taking the virtualization concept across to productivity, rather than looking at your life as a whole (which is a good thing to do by the way, so don’t stop!), spend a while dividing it down into chunks. What are your different roles and responsibilities? Are there distinct areas to your life? Try writing down a set of objectives for each area, if that is something you haven’t done before. Now try slicing your time into segments for each of these areas. When you are working in one segment, don’t let the others invade it, unless it really is an emergency.

After a few days the technique should result in a fresh level of clarity and efficiency. When everything is thrown together, it feels random and things are hard to make sense of. Separating out the different things helps you to see patterns and order more clearly, and reconnect with their purpose. Remember those stones on the forrest floor. Let me put a few of them off into a different pile. Does the picture make more sense now?

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Sounds like Steve, over at Micro Persuasion is having excellent fun with his iPhone and Flikr for GTD. Bunk suggests getting a pen and paper. Bunk, where’s the geek in you? That’s far too efficient and environmentally friendly! All of this did trigger some interesting and useful thoughts though, I promise.

iPods and GTD

I’ve been using my iPod as a universal capture device (see here), but I miss being able to capture things visually as well as in audio. The iPhone hits the UK shortly, so may be I’ll be able to join Steve’s experiment in due course. Whatever workflow you create for getting things done, it does need to be efficient, but also functional for your style and needs. The challenges for me are that I work across multiple locations and countries, and other people need access to my system. I am attracted by the idea of web-based systems, but connectivity in the UK isn’t ubiquitous enough to depend on them yet.

Talking to yourself

Personal productivity is about our ability to communicate with ourselves. This might sound odd, but think it through for a moment. Task lists, reminders and diaries are all ways that we send messages to ourselves. In order to do that well, it is important to understand your communication style, just as with it is in communicating with others. There three main styles:

• Auditory:linear - tend to love lists and to work sequentially. Like to hear things.
• Visual:spacial - think in pictures and in a non-linear way. Like to see things.
• Kinesthetic:tactile - a rarer style. Like to feel, or experience, things.

What type are you?

You will probably do best with a capture device that fits your style. Visual people will love Steve’s camera method. Auditory people may prefer the voice memo method, or a written list. Kinesthetic folks, I’ll still thinking on what the ideal system for you might be. I suspect a pen and pad would work well. Let me know!

Discover which communication style works best for you and use that to communicate with yourself and see how it boosts your productivity. If you are enthusiastic about your organizational system, you are more likely to use it and much more likely to get results from it.

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The much hyped UK launch of the iPhone took place today in London, where it was announced that 02 would be the operator of choice. The event was well covered by TechCrunch. O2 password protect their press releases on their website (uh duh!), but most of the press and analysts have posted their views. Not much news, still no 3G and a fairly heftly tarrif from O2, as covered in the Guardian yesterday. At the launch, Mr Jobs said that 3G support would have reduced the battery life, due to additional power requirements. The tariffs do feature unlimited GPRS usage and the WiFi gives access when you find a HotSpot – not so easy in London these days.

There will undoubtedly be stories about people hacking the UK iPhones to work on other networks, but as at least one user has found out, this might not be a good idea unless you want a no-phone.

The iPhone has huge promise as a communication s device. The iPod can be integrated with GTD, the iPhone and iTouch have the potential to take this to another level, making it a great productivity tool. I am sure that Apple will add more features as time goes on, the recently discovered iTouch system mode implies there are extra capabilities. It would be great to have a universal capture device that had a voice recorder, camera and email all in one. After the fuss in the US, lots of people will be waiting to see if there will be a price drop – the current pricing means the first year of owning an iPhone will set you back over one thousand pounds. That makes a pretty tough ROI for me, which will defend against the “but it is soon cool, buy it” urge.

Update: The Guardian has posted an article on the launch. It looks like Internet access will be via The Cloud’s Hot Spots. Will the iPhone make it as a GTD PDA?

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My personal mission to increase productivity, by decreasing the number of gadgets I use, took a sideways step recently. Since I started listening to podcasts, lectures and audio books, my iPod nano has become a fairly central part of my life. Now my new companion has even started listening to me, resulting in an even deeper relationship. We are spending lots of time together. I don’t think my family has noticed this new interloper yet, but I am sure it is only a matter of time.

The MicroMemo for iPod is a tiny device that plugs into the iPod Nano, providing a microphone, an audio input, and an extra button. Despite the fact that the nano has more processing power and memory than the first supercomputer I used, it definitely lacks a decent ‘input’ capability. The MicroMemo fixes that by turning the iPod into a universal audio capture device. Plug it in, and the iPod jumps to a recording screen. From then on, the iPod is ready to capture every spoken thought at the click of a button.

Getting Things Done and a number of other productivity philosophies promote the idea of recording and collecting all of ones ideas in single place. This is a great hack for improving organisation and creativity. Having a capture device creates a means to seize fleeting thoughts and ideas, before they are lost to the next random incoming call, email or conversation. Never loose another valuable thought or miss a ‘I must do that’ again. May be you will, but now there will be one less excuse for doing so.

Capturing thoughts and ideas rewards and encourages creative thinking. Rather than losing thoughts, you can capture them. Now your mind is free to move on to the next thought, knowing that you can act on the last one later. This is a positive cycle that rewards creative behaviour, because those creative thoughts get turned into action, rather than lost. Of course, you now need a ‘processing’ step to deal with all these new memos. The MicroMemo makes this easy, by syncing to iTunes. The next time I plug in to top up on pod-casts and music, the memos appear in their very own playlist, ready to be played back and acted on.

The MicroMemo isn’t just for short memos. You can record hours of dictation too. This blog post started off as a voice memo on the iPod. If you do use it for dictation, there is the small matter of transcription to deal with. Unless you are an accomplished touch typist, dictation can be a time consuming chore. However, help is at hand, thanks to the outsource your life principle of the 4 hour work week, and a handy blog post by the ever developing Matt. There are some very affordable on-line transcription services (Matt’s post covers some these services and his experiences with them). Isn’t life good?

I’ve used a pen and pad as my main capture device in the past. It works well, and I am sure that I will continue to do so, but voice memos do have a number of unique strengths. Voice memos put the ‘stuff’ that is captured ‘out of sight’. That means less clutter and distractions, reducing the noise from ideas coming back at you off of the page or piles of post it notes. Capturing verbally is also faster that writing and can be done on the move. You speak at around 200 words per minute but write at about 30, and that’s if you aren’t trying to use a pen and paper one-handed as you are running for a train. It is also useful to have an audio capture tool to hand during interesting talks – do ask permission before you record. You can also record your own speeches and presentations – a great way to reflect and improve your communication skills.

See Also: iPhone hits the UK and Information at Your Finger Tips

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I can’t remember where I heard it, it was a long time ago, but someone talked to me about WINning – WIN – What’s Important right Now. Picking the most important thing to do right now, and focusing on it, 100%.

It is a little like Covey’s First Things First habit. The challenge, of course, is working out what is important right now! Prioritisation can be a tricky thing. Getting Things Done doesn’t really major on prioritisation, to me it is more focussed on getting everything that needs to be done, done. I probably need to look at that aspect of GTD again though, unless someone out there has a view! Covey has the four quadrants:

• Urgent, Important
• Urgent, Not Important
• Not Urgent, Important
• Not Urgent, Not Important

Some people use the ABC123 system to prioritize tasks, popularized by Alan Lakein. Which got me thinking: Perhaps there is a hierarchy of tasks, just like Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs? Are there tasks that trump any others? As it turns out, there seems to be some balance between a simple ‘do the most important thing right now’ and a ‘boxing’ or category-based approach.

Take business as an example. There are different needs that have to be met, think about concepts like revenue, costs, investment and efficiency. If one is tackled and the others are neglected, the business will fail. Take these same ideas and then apply them to general life:

• does this activity free up time? (efficiency)
• does this increase my earning potential? (investment – skills development/resource creation)
• does this activity generate income? (‘revenue’)
• does this reduce my outgoings? (‘costs’)

All of these needs should be served in a truly productive life. How about writing four lists this weekend, then picking the highest impact, winning item, off of each list and getting it done this week?

You might find some extra inspiration in the Zen Habit’s automate your income post and the Habitual Habits post.

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I’ve just realised that I am a recovered addict! Over the last year I have managed to cure myself of my addiction to new gadgets. When I started my quest for productivity, I saw gadgets and tools as the answer, so it feels ironic that I have been lead away from them, I am a technologist after all!

Gadgets can and do help, but not if they are over done. People who know me from my former years will remember that I definitely over did them! The problem with taking on new gadgets every month is that you never get productive with them; it also means that they never become a comfortable part of your routine.

A new found focus on ‘a few good things’ has changed all of that. Using fewer tools means that you get to know the tools you have well and get good at using them. The interesting thing is that I have also settled on far simpler tools. Picking a few good things means that you focus on gadgets that endure, rather than gadgets that impress.

My favourite productivity gadget these days is both an unusual and a common one. It is highly popular, but not for the reasons I use it. It is my trusty Apple iPod nano 4GB, recently acquired via ebay. Mine is very unfashionably green as you can see!

How does it help my productivity? Well, it is:

• My readable, long-term diary (via iCal syncing)
• My address book and contacts list (via Apple Address Book)
• My digital reference (via Notes)
• My teacher (via PodCasts)
• And my to do list (via trusty iCal again)

These are all lesser known, less used, functions of the iPod, but ones it is very functional for. I keep it on me at all times, as it is exceptionally small and light, at about a tenth of the size and weight of the smallest PDA I have ever owned. In fact, it is so small that I hardly know it is there and I don’t need to carry as charger for it as the battery life is incredible. It doesn’t let me down on long trips, unlike my Windows Mobile PDA, and doesn’t clutter my bags with leads and chargers.

In addition to all of that, with additional effort, it can store text notes, you can even fit the whole Bible on it! It also lets me keep up with the world and learn when I am on the move, as I use iTunes to sync the latest podcasts onto it.

Thank you Apple for my best ever PDA. Apparently you can listen to music on it too, that sounds good!

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I’m absolutely buzzing today; I’ve started using ThinkingRock Version 2 on my mac. Having an effective tool to track what needs doing is critical to living successfully; ThinkingRock is that tool for me – see: a good tool is hard to find and get laddered with ThinkingRock.

For those new to ThinkingRock, you might want to wait a little bit, until the full release, so that you have the help files and full functionality. Windows users will also have to wait a little bit longer for the 2.0 release; I do love the fact that ThinkingRock works on both Mac and PC, I use it on my mac at home and PC for work.

Version 2 is at the ‘gamma’ stage right now, which the ThinkingRock folks describe as still having some bugs and some functionality to be polished, but otherwise stable and safe to use. Version 2 is a quantum leap forwards, now you can:

• Attach files to items
  • I use this to add scanned documents or diagrams – enabling me to be much more paperless and location independent in my working.
• Create recurrent tasks
  • This was a bit of a hole in the Getting Things Done system for me; This new functionality completely closes that hole for me. I’ll have no excuse for forgetting to put the rubbish out, or book that haircut!
• Sort by ‘created’ time
  • For me, taking into account the age of a task is a key part of monitoring productivity and ensuring that items and projects don’t hang around forever (see: dealing with the do its that just don’t get done). While I would have liked something based on last modified time, being able to sort by creation date works just as well, if you spawn a new task whenever you refactor something.
• Add more detailed task attributes
  • For the hardcore to do list geeks, this is a great one: you can now record the energy and time required for a task, as well as setting a priority. If you are feeling bright, you can quickly find a high energy task to do; If you are feeling a bit low you can jump to an easy win. Very neat and unique piece of functionality.
• Speed up actions review with a radically improved actions review screen
  • I had been hoping for some improvements here, but not expected any. I’m blown away by this one, it will save me a great deal of time during my weekly reviews. You can now effectively create custom review screens, so that you can pull up the relevant set of tasks in a single click. Settings are now remembered when the application next runs.

There are also some good work flow improvements, both for processing thoughts and for the automatic sequencing of task lists in projects and subprojects. Also some new house keeping, including a decent archiving facility – just in time, as my file was getting huge.

It has been well worth the wait for Version 2 – solid job Avente!!!

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I have been playing with an exciting new tool today – the bLADE wiki. In the last few years Wikis have been revolutionizing knowledge management for me, but I hadn’t been able to find a wiki for PocketPC with the ability to synchronise with the desktop, until now. A big thank you to aedjp for pointing it out to me!

Just in case you have missed the wiki revolution so far: A wiki is a simple, but powerful, way to capture information in a web page format and create hyperlinks between different pages. No HTML or coding knowledge required. Wikipedia is probably the best known example of a wiki these days, but wikis go much further back that that. Wikis can be public (like wikipedia), private (within a company or team) or personal (used by just one person).

I am a big fan of wikis in the work place. They are a great way to create and share knowledge. All known information can be gathered in one place and related information items can be linked and categorized. This leads to some amazing knowledge discovery and productivity enhancements. I have also found a personal wiki to be the perfect place for collecting lots of the very useful, but non-actionable, information that I gather day to day. My personal wiki is a key part of my GTD trusted system.

I have been using TiddlyWiki, which has meant that my personal wiki has been stuck on my desktop or memory stick. The bLADE personal wiki has just changed that, as it works on the PocketPC (or Windows Mobile device) and Windows on the desktop, with the ability to sync between them.

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The big problem with getting good at building to do lists, is that you end up with long lists of things to be done! The list just seems to keep on growing and growing. There are lots of reasons that can happen and lots of ways to deal with it. Recently I had noticed a few things were lingering on my list and causing it to bulk up. I decided to try a new tactic and learnt some interesting things on the way, in studying those lingering tasks and why they end up there.

I’ve been moving to using ThinkingRock, from Outlook, and was trying to complete my outlook to do list. Yes, two to do lists in two different applications. Not big. Not Clever. Definitely not Getting Things Done. Regardless, one of the things that Outlook does let you do is to sort tasks by last modified time. I set outlook to sort the list that way and started paying attention to the oldest things on the list. If I rewrote a task, the last modified time changed and it bounced off of the bottom. FIFO – first in, first out – task management. I started to notice some specific things with those ‘hard to shift’ tasks which had been lingering and built some strategies to deal with them.

1. The Un-actionable Thin Mist – A Task So Vague…

Some items that were just too fluffy to actually be done: “make office look nice”, “look at competitors”. Badly written to dos.

Tactic: Rewrite to focus them and make them specific, e.g. “file piles of paper to office cabinet”, “write a SWAT on the top 4 competitors” and so on. In outlook, I pasted the original to do into the notes section for reference. In ThinkingRock, I just broke the item down into projects or sub-projects.

2. The Monster Task – A Task So Huge…

To do’s that are half a lifetime of work. When you see something like “read war and peace” on a to do list, you know it isn’t going to get done in the next 30 minutes. So many things get trapped on a to do list because they are simply too big to digest in one go, they are projects.

Tactic: Break them down. Rewrite as a few smaller tasks, or in ThinkingRock press the button to promote it to a project and create new tasks under it. Read the book a chapter at a time. Boom. It is off the bottom of the list, and more likely to have progress made on it.

3. The Hidden Dependency – The Task Isn’t The Next Action…

Task are sometimes stuck because of a hidden dependency. It requires a resource to enable it to happen, or a new skill. Perhaps it needs a specific person, or requires being at a physical location, or requires a piece of information or knowledge.

Tactic: Replace the to do with an action that gets that resource, and/or put the to do into your diary on the date that you will have the resource. GTD’s contexts are a great system for tracking location based dependencies, by having separate lists for tasks that are location dependent.

4. The Frog – A Task So Ugly You Don’t Want To Kiss It…

Sometimes I look at the task and think, “I really don’t want to do that.” I’m sure you don’t ever do that, but just in case it ever happens to you… Eat that frog!

Tactic: Make the frog tasty and easier to eat, combine the undesirable with something nice “sweep the path while listening to favourite new album on iPod”, or whatever works for you.

5. Its information! Not A Task At All!

This sounds silly, but I still find a few of these get onto the list, you know, “George is a dog”. Am I going to do something about it? If not, then file it somewhere with all the other information and get it off of the to do list.

Tactic: File it somewhere, or work out what the actual action is.

6. It is not Worth it.

Give it up. Sometimes it is a question of saying “Will this make a lasting difference?” and realising it won’t.
Tactic: Practice Planned Abandonment.

Sometimes I found combinations of all of these tactics most effective. “Process and pay the 20 bills in the in tray” is changed to 4 lots of “process and pay 5 bills while listening to new favourite album”.

There are probably a few others, let me know in the comments. Sometimes I just making sure I prod the oldest item on my to do list and get it done or using some of these tactics has drastically reduced the size of my to do list.

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In a previous post (Chasing mice and eating elephants) I mentioned that ThinkingRock is great for running up and down the ladder from tasks to goals and mission. I thought it was time that I showed how, especially for those who haven’t used the program yet (I did mention that it is free at the moment, didn’t I? – you can get it right here).

ThinkingRock lets you create projects and tasks, a la Getting Things Done. These can then be grouped into folders or have sub-folders underneath them. This makes it great for keeping track of objectives and building goals or projects underneath, that work towards them. If you are an emergent planner, like me, you can easily drag projects around and combine goals or regroup projects as the plan crystalizes in your mind. Perhaps a screenshot is worth 100 words:

It has a familiar tree structure, like a filesystem, but underneath it is tracking tasks and can create to do lists. Another great thing about ThinkingRock (just about visible here on the right) is that it has the ability to capture a statement of purpose and vision for each project, as well as noting related ideas (brainstorming) and adding other organizational notes. If only the top level projects folder had a space to write in your personal vision mission!

The same could be achieved on paper, but where’s the technology in that? Actually, ThinkingRock does have some great printing capabilities. However, I find that shuffling things around and combining or splitting goals as they become clearer is more easily achieved electronically. That said, I have printed everything out, then scribbled and then entered the changes into ThinkingRock, when I have been doing ‘off-line’ thinking. Task lists can also be printed in PocketMod format, which means everything is then to hand on paper, no batteries required. With the printing capabilities, you have the power to print out your goals and put them somewhere you can see (and connected with) them everyday. For some inspiration and insight into how powerful that can be, read the stories of people who put their goals up on the mirror and then read them everyday.

As you can tell, I very much appreciate ThinkingRock. I now use it both at home and at work and it has given me a big productivity boost and keeps me on mission. Highly recommended.

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I am a great fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. Even though I don’t really strictly use it myself I highly recommend it. One of the challenges of being a creative thinker (or a classic procrastinator!) is that you can end up with a huge to do list that becomes very hard to keep track of. The best method is simply not to put things on the to do list that you aren’t going to get to, or to delete off the low-priority, low-impact items straight away.

Failing that, you will need a good tool to take care of all those ‘to do’ things and projects you have collected. Thinking Rock is just such a tool: ThinkingRock. It is java based, so it works on a number of platforms (although I really WISH it was available for PocketPC / Windows Mobile). It has great export options that let you print and import to other programs. The structured workflow it forces enables you to capture everything, then work through the process of fleshing things out. Fantastic! It even lets you prioritise projects and tasks if you get a little creative with it. Highly recommended and I am sure I will write more about it.

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