A number of times in my speaking career I have had to pull something together at very short notice, either because another presenter dropped out, or because I was visiting an office where the local manager unexpectedly asked me to make a speech to all of the local staff. Here is a simple process to enable you to prepare a speech at very, very short notice (or presentation - its a presentation tip too)…

Getting Started on the Speech

Ideally you will need eight post it notes. If you haven’t got them, just grab a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Fold it in half again. And once more. Quickly, there’s no time to waste! Now, tear along the folds. Either way, you now have eight pieces of paper, and hopefully a pen. You’re ready to star(t).

Who is the Speech for…

Always begin with the audience. What do you know about them? What do they know about you? Write down a few bullet points on the first piece of paper. Who you are, in the context of how it is relevant to the audience.

What is the Speech for…

Does the audience or the person who invited you have an expectation of what you will talk about? Be sure to meet it, or cover it as best you can. Failing to do so will definitely cause angst.

Now think about what will be in the speech. Let your brain free wheel for a minute. Write each of your main ideas on one of the remaining pieces of paper. You don’t want more than seven. Research suggests that we can deal with 7 things in our head at once, plus or minus two. This isn’t the time to go stretching your cognitive abilities, so stick with 5-7 main ideas.

If you come up with more than seven, look through your earlier ideas, then find the weakest one and cross it out, replacing it with the better new one. It is a neat way to refine your speech.

Think back to what you were expected to cover and sanity check what you have written. That clock is still ticking, so…

When and Where

Check how long the speech should be. 7-15 minutes is a great length. It will seem substantial, but shouldn’t drag on. Check where you are. Can you link your speech in to the location? Perhaps based on a piece of local news you have read.

Now, to the when and where of each of your main points. Lay out the pieces of paper. They should fit one of three structures: topical, chronological or spatial. That will give you a natural order for them. In a topical structure you will see that some things must be covered before you touch on the other topics, or that some link together. In a chronological structure you probably want to start at the beginning and more forwards from there. In a spatial one there will also be a natural flow too. You now have your main points arranged in order.

How

Now you have the sequence, think about how you will make each point, and how you will bridge between each point. Jot down your proof points, or for a longer speech your sub-points, on the relevant piece of paper. At the end of the piece of paper for each point, make a note of your bridge to the next point. The bridges should help to create the story, and will make your points more memorable if done well. If you can’t think of a bridge, the next step may help…

Why is the Speech Relevant

Why are you giving the speech? Look back to your first piece of paper where you wrote about the audience. Why are you making the speech, and why are you the right person to give it? This should constitute your introduction. For example,

“As I have started and sold a number of high value companies, Dave has asked me to say a few words about how to create a valuable business, now that you have secured your funding.”

Well, you get the idea. It should establish your ethos (in Aristotle’s Rhetoric this is your expertise and knowledge).

Check back over the pieces of paper with your main points. The ‘why’ should tie them together. You might need to make a quick adjustment if it doesn’t. In the introduction to a longer speech you can also briefly run through the points you will cover in it, if not, just a summary in a couple of sentences. Remember:

“Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em again.”

You now have your introduction and your middle (main points). Finally, think about your conclusion. Ideally it should draw on your key points, without introducing any new ones. It should also provide some sort of call to action: a response or a commitment. You aren’t speaking just to generate warm air, you are there to make something happen. Make it so. Note it down.

Say it!

You now have your completed speech, and read through the points a few times. Congratulations. If you have time between now and speaking, then practice your speech. Nothing beats a rehearsal for finding problems (it also helps with memory). Practice on the taxi driver on the way if you have to, but speak it out loud. The physical process of ‘out loud’ rehearsal is much more effective than just running it through in your head. If you need slides and have time, try this:

• Slide 1 - Your speech title and name. 
• Slide 2 - x. One bullet point in the middle of one slide, with that one point in bullet form. But without the bullet.
• Last slide - Copy and paste slide 1. Save it. Done.

If you know of an image that will effectively support your point, it is to hand, then add it. Otherwise, you’re done. Who, What, When, Where, How and Why - a speech in 5 minutes.

Enjoy!

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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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“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

From Computerworld: iPhones trickle in the enterprise (emphasis mine).

It really does explain much of the error in corporate IT these days. Web 2.0 consumer services know this, and the next generation of users coming into business expect this: It is all about the user experience. I have used and deployed some awful tools in the past. I will never do so again. They can near bankrupt productivity, be it an information tool for getting things done or an expenses or payroll system.

Let’s say you have 100 employees. If a tool saves a member of the IT department an hour a week, but costs each member of staff just 60 seconds a week, you have lost productivity - and wasted time and money. What if you have 1,000 employees? Think about it.

If you spend a hour downloading, setting up and learning to use a new task management or GTD tool and it saves you a minute a week, it is going to take over a year to get a payback on it. I’m being kind here and assuming the tool stays the same for a year. How many times have you changed your personal productivity system in the last year, or spent time fiddling with new software?

I’m not saying avoid new technology, quite the opposite. If businesses are going to be productive and effective, then they must innovate with the Information technology they use, but it should be from the perspective of delivering productivity not technology. I see a new generation of workers who will bring change, and an older generation who are demanding it. There will be no mercy for IT departments or businesses that get in the way. Technology is meant to improve productivity, not get in the way of it.

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Today I can pick up a phone and call anyone I know, anywhere on the planet. Many of us have known no different all our lives. Mobile phones are so engrained into our social fabric that even those who can remember a time without them don’t. The time before them seems like a bygone era from the history books.

Over the next few years we will experience a similarly dramatic shift in the way we communicate. One aspect of that will be video (The Truly Mobile Office), the other is communications that cross modalities - Text that becomes speech, and speech that becomes text.

Spinvox delivers on a key aspect of the unified communications vision, today. It is a great productivity tool, at personal level and a business one. Its capabilities also open up lots of philosophical discussion, and there was certainly plenty of that in the session with Anne Marie, Ciaran, Ewan, Francine, James & James, Jay, Laura, Lloyd, Rob, Roger, Rachel, Sizemore, Terence, Toby and myself. An amazing set of perspectives from a diverse and insightful group, you can read more on the conversation here.

Voice was the ultimate disposable medium. Conversations are spoken and lost, aside from the occasional podcast, voicemail exchange or a video. A voice conversation is an amazingly rich form of communication, compared to something like e-mail or a blog. The tone of voice, intonation and real-time interaction engages our brain and connect us. They are the reason that the Dunbar number is so high - while apes pick nits out of each others hair to form social bonds, we chatter. Not all chatter is meant to be disposable, but to make something permanent, we had to write it down.

The technology to record every single conversation we have exists. Cheap digital audio equipment and an explosion in the size of hard drives make it affordable and possible. But what would we do with it all? Today you can’t Google your way through the world’s podcasts, you’d have to listen to them to find out if it contained what you want. Certainly you could tag every conversation recording, but all that digital editing and tagging wouldn’t leave much time for a social life. As a side note, I wonder how it would change what we do and say if every word was recorded, not just by you, but by everyone in the conversation?

Unlocking the power of the spoken word isn’t about recording it, valuable as that is. Not only can we not search those recordings, but we also loose one of the great benefits of reading: speed. We read faster that we can talk or write. Not much of a defence against the torrent of information we have to consume these days, but a useful one never the less.

We can also read in places and at moments where we couldn’t listen. Reading an SMS message in a meeting is relatively unobtrusive, compared to answering a call or listening to a voicemail - not that that seems to stop some people doing that.

Spinvox takes voice messages and makes them textual, and that is what makes it a powerful. You can create a searchable archive of text, including jotting voice notes (which are a key piece of my GTD workflow) - no excuse for loosing thoughts. You can read a voicemail message rather than having to listen to it - faster and less obtrusive. Yes, you might loose the expression of the voice - tone, pitch, volume, pauses - but you experience the spoken vocabulary still. We speak in a different way than we write, and that survives the conversion. Powerful stuff.

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Happenstances are a problem, because they are useful, but they come from being inefficient. Many a workday breakthrough comes from a chance encounter by the coffee machine, or from an overheard then interrupted conversation. These aren’t, in themselves, a productive activity. You’d be worried about me if I spend the whole day hanging around by the coffee machine, waiting for a chance conversation. At least I hope you would!

These things are lost when someone works alone or away from the office, which is one of the reasons I have been looking at how social media can recreate these chance work encounters. They are also lost if we are 100% focussed on the to do list.

So, once you start down the path of creating randomness, where do you stop? Productivity seems to be about good planning, as any GTD practitioner knows. Neat lists and clear goals. Order. Predictability. Logic. These are the things of productivity. So, what are Chaos, Randomness, Irrationality? Why… They are the things of creativity.

In all of our systems and processes, we need to leave the space to be creative. Knowledge workers produce thoughts; in the olden days, so I have learned, this was called being creativite. And it is good.

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Not everyone is feeling on top of the world though. Apparently the UK has a crisis of management, with a lack of people with the skills to motivate and manage staff. It probably isn’t a surprise that one of the most popular posts here is “How to deal with being overwhelmed at work.” - perhaps a little of Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start” might be an antidote: Guy Kawasaki - The Art of the Start

Alltop reminds me of a great technique for dealing with overwhelm: The at-a-glance tool. Alltop gives an at-a-glance view of the best sites on a particular topic. That overwhelmed feeling comes more from what you don’t know, than what you do. The feeling that not everything is on the the RADAR at once, that more is lurking on page 2, 3, 4, … An at-a-glance tool lets you know you’ve got it all in sight.

GTD is also an excellent at-a-glance tool. Yes, there are multiple to do lists (it is a good thing to have buckets), but it collects everything that needs doing into one place. That gives a single view of what needs doing and the confidence that it is a complete view.

If you haven’t got that view already, start by taking a blank sheet of paper and writing down everything that needs doing. Keep going until everything you can think of is down there. Don’t be afraid. It is the first step to getting back on track, and it is going to be manageable.

Second, check out Scott Young’s excellent post, “20 tips to survive when you’ve overloaded your schedule” - regular readers will spot familiar themes in this summary with my comments:

Stop the leaks:

• Work Your Calendar - block out time to cover your projects, to keep the excess out.
• Say No - don’t take more onto the to do list. Be firm.
• Use Your Network - get help and support, turn your network inside out.

‘Create’ more time:

• Get Up Earlier and Eliminate Time Sinks - Kill the TV, gaming and surfing. You snooze you loose.
• First Things First - always a winning strategy for productivity. Deal with the large rocks, watch out for the frogs.
• Exercise - If your workload is mental, make sure there is physical work to balance it.

Lighten the load:

• Lower Quality Thresholds - Think 80/20 or “good enough is good enough”. This isn’t the time to be a perfectionist. Next
• Explain the Situation - share the burden, although don’t fall into complaining.
• Triage and Defer - Don’t treat what will live without treatment and don’t treat the things that will die. If something isn’t going to make it, fast fail it, rather than wasting more time. If things can be deferred, defer them straight away.

Create a trusted system, like Getting Things Done, so that you can stay on top of things. Your attention is your scarcest resource, use it wisely so that you don’t go into attention bankruptcy. Control where you direct your attention, you control how you spend your time, and you will get the things done that need doing.

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In the early days of web there was little control over how things ended up on a web page. HTML - hypertext mark up language - allowed some basic control, like adding titles and marking text bold, but basically things ended up all over the place. Hold on to that thought, because I’ll come back to it.

CSS contains wonderful things called containers (or DIVs). DIVs keep things together. You can also put these containers inside of other containers. Now, you can get into a real mess with this, or it can be a beautiful thing. That leads me neatly on to David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

I better explain. One of the central concepts of GTD is the idea of contexts. For a GTD practitioner, every task has a context. I always interpreted this to be the place where that task could be done - @computer, @home, @phone, and so on. Sorted tasks this way makes a lot of sense. It is a very logical and productive way to file tasks, which means you know what to do when you are in a particular place. You can also see where you need to put in some time, because things need doing in that context (there is a long list), but there is more.

Contexts have another distinction, one which is less obvious for today’s knowledge worker, but one that is equally important. When GTD was written, those physical contexts related to roles that were being carried out: I am being a worker (@office), I am being a parent (@home), and so on. Implicit in the physical context was a specific role.

Today’s blended lifestyles blur those distinctions, especially for homeworkers. Location no longer defines our roles. This is compounded by increasingly ‘multi-role’ or ‘multi-skill’ jobs that many of us have. We are awash with context-blur.

The fact is we need contexts, and clear roles. The containers that are so important in CSS, to keep things in the right place, are important in life too. Contexts, roles, containers. Call them what you will. They create the focus that we need to be productive. Our perceptual systems need focus. In fact, attention is the thing that makes them workable.

Avoid switching contexts too frequently. Computer architects will tell you that context switching (switching rapidly between tasks) is bad for a computer - it slows the machine down and makes it in efficient. It does the same for your brain.

When you are working, stick your head in a bucket (notice how relieved you are to have made sense of that title). Put it yourself in one context and keep it there for a preset time. Be okay with it being there. Don’t feel guilty about the other contexts - you are doing what you are doing. You’ll get to the rest of it later, trust your system to get you there.

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
- Abraham Maslow

Above all else, act. And act now. Fretting is the most unproductive of all human endeavours.

“I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.”
- Florence Nightingale

Finally, David Allen makes another key point about contexts: There should be as many as you need, and no more. When you define your roles and contexts, pick the right number. Too few or too many can cause us to flounder.

Bear in mind the cognitive rule of thumb for things that we can hold in our working memory: 7 +/- 2. Less is fine, but if you have over 9, think about trimming.

Contexts serve to bracket what you can’t do now, and what you can do. If you are in the office, you can’t do @home things, and if you are at home, you can’t do @office things. The advantage of filing tasks into contexts is that you know what you need to do when you get there.

And when things go off track?

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”
G. K. Chesterton

So do your best to stay on track, but enjoy the adventure if you go a little astray…

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My memory has improved since I started using GTD to keep my head clear. If you are using GTD, you’re not using your memory for trivia anymore, so it must be storing important things! That is a good reason to get better at using it and understanding how memory works will do that. Did you know you can improve your memory?

It is OK to forget

It is actually good that we don’t remember everything. Exceptional memory can be a problem. Imagine if you recalled everything, all at once, all of the time. It would be completely distracting, making it hard to focus on the moment or to step back and look at the bigger picture. You would be overwhelmed by memories.

You see, it is actually OK that we forget some things. The important thing is that we can recall the things that we do need to recall. That is all we need to achieve with our memory.

You might have heard that there are three types of memory. An immediate, sensory memory, which is very fleeting. A short term memory, which deals in seconds or tens of seconds. It remembers things just long enough for you to dial that phone number, or to do the next action. Finally, there is long term memory.

When things make it to long term memory, we can pretty much remember them for life - with a bit of practice. That is the magic place for remembering things.

Remember, it is all part of the process

The process of remembering things is clearly key. It turns out that there are three parts to this as well.

Firstly, there is what is termed encoding. It sounds a bit technical, but it is basically the process by which your brain sorts and processes things, and links them to other memories, ready to put them inside your brain. This is the second piece, storing things. Then the third piece, of course, is actually remembering it or recalling.

There are different ways of getting things back from memory. There is recognition, the way that we recognise someone’s face when we see it. It is quite easy isn’t it? It is intuitive, because we are better at it. That is what is so easy about multiple choice questions. We only have to recognise the answers, rather than recalling them.

Recalling is the important bit for your productivity. That is when you have to go inside your brain and find the piece of information you want, digging it out. The discrepancy between recognition and recall tells us that there is more stuck in our head than we can normal get out.

Getting better at remembering (recall)

There are two things we can do to improve the situation. The first is to work on putting things into our head, the encoding. The trick here is to work at it. The short cut to success is hard work, right?

If I give you a phone number, you will probably have forgotten it in a few seconds. However, if you start to think about the number more deeply, to engage with it, it enhances the encoding process and helps get into your long term memory. Is the phone number like somebody else’s? Are there patterns in the number? What are they? Any rhymes or rhythm?

Break the number down into chunks and see if you can visualise those chunks in your mind. Make the image vivid and colourful, perhaps use animals or objects related to things about the number to make the shape of the digits (there is a great trick for this in an old post about memory on litemind). Think deeply about the number and try and make some logical sense of it.

Getting the information linked to things we already know, and thinking about it at different levels, improves recollection. If you are trying to remember information from a textbook, write the information out in your own words. This puts the information through more of your brain, engaging at a higher level than just reciting it.

You’ll remember I said there are three parts to memory function. We can’t do much about the middle bit, storage, our brain just does that. However, the last bit we can also perform some magic on: recalling.

Get to the right place to remember

Godden and Baddeley (1975) performed an experiement which used two groups of people. One half stayed on the beach (sounds good to me), the other half went 15 foot underwater.

Both groups had to memorize information. The groups then split again, with half the people from underwater going to the beach, and half of the beach people going underwater. Who remembered things the best? It was the people who were in the same place they were before. Recalling the information in the place they learnt it was more important than the effect of being underwater. Now, before you rush off to try and revise for your next exam in the actual exam hall, we can approach this another way.

It is a state of mind

One of the tricks about recall, and this is a wonderful technical word, is ‘salient cues’. It essential means that if there is something relevant to a memory, based on how we encoded it, it will help cue (or trigger) that memory.

If you are stuck trying to recall something, rather than focussing on that thing, think about where you were when you learnt it or any related facts you are able to bring to mind. Anything at all related, even what you were concious of when you learnt it. What was the emotion? Was there a particular smell or location? Were there any other things you can bring to mind?

Try ‘walking backwards’ through time. Remember how you lost your keys; you mentally retraced your steps and then you suddenly remembered where you put them. It works. Look for associations, anything related to the memory. If you learnt it when you were 15 feet under water, go back under water! In fact, if you learnt something after a little alcohol, you’ll remember it better after a little alcohol. The reverse is also true, but you’ve probably figured that out already,

You see, we can greatly improve our memory, just by working at the way we put things into it, and the way we fetch things from it. No there’s something to remember.

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Take thirty seconds to watch the video now…Hopefully you are suitably entertained and informed.

So, what does that have to do with being productive? Simple: If you want to be productive and effective, you need to understand a little about how you see the world. Or rather, understand a little about how you don’t see the world.

Sensation - the information that comes from our senses - hearing, seeing and touching - is very fleeting. We can’t take it all in once, there is just far too much input. Even though about two thirds of our brain is given over to visual processing and related tasks, much of the sensory information from our eyes is already pre-processed and summarised before it gets there. Even then, there is still too much. This is where attention comes in.

As you discovered in that video clip, we direct our attention and limit what we see, and what we don’t. Attention is important. Attention is also directional. That means we have to pay attention, as best we can, and choose what we pay attention too.

Sometimes attention is directed automatically. For example, driving home in that little daydream that is the daily commute, when something out of the ordinary happens, your brain alerts and attracts your attention. You aren’t always that lucky though. Much of what we do with attention is either consciously controlled, or it is learnt. That means we have to work at it.

To get things done requires focus - directing attention to the task at hand. That focus needs to be on one thing at a time. Despite the illusions that speed and gadgets may bring, we don’t multi task well when it comes to taking things in. We just don’t seem to be built that way. Only by directing our senses to one thing at a time, can we take in the depth of detail we need to get things done well. If we don’t, we miss things.

One last thing on perception. Perception is constructed. We make sense of the waves of information coming at us from our senses by referring back to things we already know. What we ’see’ is often more about what we ‘expect’ to see. Researchers have even found that they can change who we are talking to in a face to face conversation, and we don’t notice (see: Simons and Daniel (1998) and also Change Blindness)!

Think about it. I draw a square, with a triangle on top. I then add four more squares inside of the big square, and one rectangle at the bottom. Draw it out. What do you see? A house? That’s ridiculous! It is a bunch of lines. However, our brain knows, from past experience, that my drawing represents a house. It is able to add in the missing pieces.

When we are having conversations, making observations, and working things out, it is worth remembering that our brains busy filling in the blanks. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong. How often do you take a bunch of lines and see a house? How often do you count the passes and miss the bear?

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David Allen’s Getting Things Done has resonated with many a knowledge worker as a methodology for becoming more productive. That has lead to it washing, wave-like, through much of the technology fraternity. There is a growing swarm of tools and applications out there that will bring GTD to your desktop of choice: wiki versions like GTDTiddlyWiki and webserver-based approaches like Tracks. For the Mac there is iGTD, Kinkless GTD (if you use OmniOutliner), as well as many others. There are cross platform tools too, like ThinkingRock. For Windows, you can make a workable implementation with Microsoft Outlook, for which the David Allen Company also sells a plugin to help. So much technology! Before you get side tracked by the technology, I suggest mastering the methodology.

Many GTDers do end up spending more time obsessing about the tools than they do about the methods. Trust me when I tell you, from painful experience, that isn’t going to make you more productive. I’d suggest focussing on these steps:

1. Really read the book. Yes, there are many useful summaries out there, but they are no substitute for reading Allen’s actual book. If you have read it once, then it is worth reading again. Like many things in life, it makes much more sense the second time around.
2. Start simple. Don’t go mad on software, gadgets or setting up dozens of contexts, until you have grasped the underlying principles and mastered the methods of GTD.
3. Write things down and put things in their place. Get over the hump by getting things out of your head and putting them into their place. Once everything is together and organised, you will save hours of scrapping around trying to find ’stuff’. It is worth the investment of time. Enjoy never missing a commitment because it was on a scrap of paper that got dispersed to the edge of the known universe. See: Never Loose Another Thought Again!
4. Manage at the level of projects, as well as tasks. Moving up from just a list of things to do, to working at the level of projects, looking at outcomes, is a big step. Understanding why you are doing what you do enables you to do better.

Of late there has been a little controversy about Allen, sparked by an article in Wired. I don’t think that takes away from the benefits of the underlying principles that many have found so useful.

So, as David Allen says, “dive in”. Try not to overthink or over-optimise GTD. Write that projects list and keep those to do lists up to date. Create your intray and ensure that once you touch something, it doesn’t go back in there. Make decisions: Delete it, do it, delegate it, diarise it, file it. You will get things done!

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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 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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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’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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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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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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