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’m reflecting back on this week and on this year, being another year older. What have I learnt?

My big take away for the moment is this: A change of context is the quickest way to change your thinking. Do you remember me loosing my car recently (shaken, not stirred)? I had a different replacement vehicle for a few weeks. And I mean completely different. A fraction of the size and power and a very different driving experience. The strangest thing is that it completely changed the way I thought about things. It altered my perspective, and if you drove it and experienced its (non-)braking capabilities, you’d know why. I’m back with my own car now, but my attitude to driving and my habits have changed.

Effecting personal change can be tough, especially if it involves creating good new habits or trying to break bad old ones. Be it habits of doing or of thinking, sometimes, if you want to change, the easiest thing to do is to start by changing your point of view. A different point of view creates a fresh perspective. That different perspective shifts your thinking, and destabilizes old habits by creating fresh new thought patterns. When using ThinkingRock, I have found that when I get stuck breaking down or planning projects, printing out the project reports and going somewhere else with a paper and pen helps me get unstuck. I now even have a specific thinking and planning place, just going there gets my planning and mission juices going. Keeping a context seems to be a good way to support (good) new habits.

Changing the context can completely break a habit or a stuck thought. Addicted to the Internet? Change context. Go to a place that has no Internet for a week or two. Less extreme, try changing where you spend your time or even just changing the colour of a room. It can be a fantastically effective way to loosen your mind up enough to make those big planned changes. From now on, if I am struggling to make a change, I’ll start by changing something else! Do something different, to create a change.

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Following on from the discussion about planned abandonment, there was an interesting post over on Ron Martoia’s velocityculture blog, where he talked about hunting elephants rather than mice, with the follow on comment by Ron:

“…focused on and how do you align time, energy, creativity and any other resource to the accomplishing of that mission. Mice are details, mission is elephant.”

Which got me thinking. It is true that if you spend all of your time chasing mice, you’ll never catch an elephant, but it isn’t that simple with goals and tasks. Achieving long term goals requires ‘running up and down the ladder’ from minute-by-minute tasks at the bottom, to long term goals and life mission at the top of the ladder. Running up and down the ladder means making sure that each wrung is connected with the ones above and below. That way our minute-by-minute doing is connected with our long term vision, and if you run it back up, the long term vision should be connected to what you do minute-by-minute – even if they are very far apart. What we actually do with our time tells us something about what we want to do with our life.

Everyone knows that the only way to eat an elephant is one meal at a time – or to eat it in mouse-sized pieces. Actually, I hope you don’t try to eat a real elephant or mouse, but breaking large objectives down into manageable chunks is a very effective way of achieving them. Setting some goals on the way to a long term aim helps keep track and gives feedback on progress made, or points out any lack of progress.

Now, to really mess the metaphor up: if I am chasing a mouse, I need to make sure it is part of the elephant I am after. If it isn’t, I should stop chasing it as it is probably a butterfly (see Watch out for the frogs). If the task (the mouse!) is part of an elephant, I can picture the elephant and approach the mouse with a better understanding of what it is part of. OK, enough animals, back to the ladder – if I put a foot on the first rung, I must be clear which ladder I am climbing and what is at the top of the ladder – is it up against the right wall (to use a Covey illustration from the 7 Habits)? ThinkingRock is a great piece of software that makes this process very easy, since you can create hierachies of projects, which drill right down to tasks (more on that in a later post). In the mean-time, I hope you have the greatest of success in running up down your ladders, with the right mice and elephants!

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I’ve been quiet for a few days, as I have had an enforced pause. An international flight ran into problems, and I ended up with 8 hours of the night stranded in an empty airport, away from connectivity and most of my belongings.

Pauses are powerful things. Time to reflect. To think. Time to realise. To resolve. Much is being made of ‘going slow’ these days, with sites like slow leadership expounding the reasons for going slow (great site!).

My wife plays netball, and as we were talking about this, she told me about the ‘three second rule’ in that game. When you receive the ball, you have to pass it within three seconds. That sounds like a rush, a hurry. However, as players are coached, they are taught to use ALL of that three seconds before passing. New players almost always end up passing the ball too quickly, they don’t get the most of the pause. They still act, you have to move the ball on, but take the three seconds first. Stop and think, before passing.

Could we use the three second rule in life? A forced gap between action and reaction. An enforced time to think, before we act. A pause between the demand and the doing. For some little tasks, it is easy to end up spending more time thinking about it than doing it. That isn’t efficient. However, it is all to easy to get caught up doing the wrong things. A pause for thought to say “is this the right thing to do right now?” can be a valuable check. We do have to do – after those three seconds, the player has to act, – to move quickly. But getting things done quickly doesn’t come from doing them in a rush. One of the fun things about ThinkingRock is that it enforces that pause and creates some structured reflection, if it is used correctly. Very useful.

Whatever you are doing, happy pausing!

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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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