The big insight is that I’ve not taken responsibility for my adult existence, and instead have been rather more indulgent of my childhood impulses that I’ve realized. And while I’m not a parent, I can perhaps repurpose the mentality to create my own “sense of mission” toward myself: create stability, security, and sanctuary. It’s also good practice for being a parent someday.

This fits with a lot of things I’ve been thinking about, lately. I think Dave may be discovering an unexpected result of his time tracking and task management. And it’s an effect that his Printable CEO series of self-reporting tools seem to augment. And, as is often the case, I have a note to myself on an index card about it.

(Scan and more blather after the cut.)

That is, when you start tracking your actions, you inevitably become more conscious of how you are living your finite and irreplaceable life.

It’s usually not comfortable information.

Like Dave says, when you’re living alone and working from home, you can stay up late and act irresponsibly, because your adult self isn’t watching. It’s all good, as long as you meet deadline, right? Who’s going to tell your inner adult supervision what’s going on, it’s too busy worrying about the work stuff to take control of the life stuff.

Good productivity tools can give your adult self regular report cards, and if you care about how your (mortal, fleeting) time is spent, reading those report cards can come as a real shock. It surely did to me.

It’s like simultaneously being the reprobate child and the outraged parent when, all of a sudden, a pile of bad grades, truancy notices, and tardy slips are found in the shoebox under the bed. You have to face up to what you’ve been up to, and you have to take responsibility for it.

That’s when you start to notice things.

There is a cost to slacking off for the afternoon and whacking the spacebar on MetaFilter like a demented pigeon in a Skinner box, instead of cleaning the bedroom or kitchen, or processing your inbox.

There is a cost to leaving the dishes in the sink. (Sometimes, a literal cost; ever order pizza because the pans to cook dinner were buried under a pile of dishes? Am I giving away something I shouldn’t, here?)

Many Getting Things Done folks find themselves feeling like they’re “growing up,” once they’ve been tracking their to-do lists and performing the weekly review for a while. You can’t help but see what it is you’ve been checking off, and what you haven’t been.

GTD gives you both a “front end” view of what you think is important (a whole project list full of the things in your life you have decided must be dealt with), and the back end (what have I actually accomplished this week)?

And tools like the Emergent Task Timer enhance that effect, on the back end. It gives a good focus on where your time has gone, where GTD gives you a focus on what you’ve accomplished. These are complementary benefits.

(Sometimes, it’s more like being punched in the gut, depending on how much I’ve actually gotten done.)

As an experiment, I’ve taken to dropping my completed Printable CEO sheets into a tickler file, for a week ahead, so that I can see how I did last week. Every Tuesday morning, I see the last couple of tuesdays, and I get to see how I spent my work time.

Man, does that bit of self-knowledge intrude on whether or not I decide to check my RSS feeds. (He wrote, guiltily glancing at the clock.) And that’s a good thing.

I’m disgustingly infatuated with Dave Seah’s Information Graphics. Stop me before I build a little shrine and start camping out on his lawn.

[EDIT] Oops.

Dave Seah is not Dave Shea.

Which I had just read.

Don’t think of your tongue.

Go check it out.

Changing how I store the Someday/Maybe list has made it more useful, and helped fix the blockage that kept inactive projects on my active desktop. Since this was one of the major problems with my own GTD setup that I recently diagnosed and solved, a few words on the subject seem worthwhile.

What I did

Since I do the index card/coin-envelope thing, you can see a version of my particular Someday/Maybe implementation here; it’s a display on the wall. Not the wall shown, but the same idea, similar layout; I see it and add notes to it pretty much every day.

The lessons learned from what worked versus what didn’t work should be moderately easy to translate to the Kinkless OO system or textfiles, Emacs Planner Mode, PyGTD, or whatever you happen to use.

What didn’t work:

I stored S/M items out of the way, in a file box, and relied on my virtuous nature to pull it out and review it periodically.

(Relying on my better nature to do a chore is generally a bad idea.)

This fell apart. Putting a card in the file box was, in the words of the Google Group, “exiling it to Siberia.” And so I hesitated. What should have been a simple way to say “not now, but later” to projects that I just couldn’t attend to at the moment ended up being the equivalent of throwing them away.

What did work:

I turned the S/M list into ambient information, somewhere not necessarily easy to manipulate, but at least easy to see out of the corner of my eye. In other words, it’s on the wall.

This created an unexpected benefit: because this list is a display of books I want to read, movies I want to see, languages I’d like to learn, art prints I’d want to buy and have framed, and so on, it rapidly becomes a kind of representational display. Much like having your CD collection in a stand where people can admire it.

This is, of course, a double-edged sword; you’re putting your (lack of?) tastes up for display. But the advantage of the cards is that only the top item is visible, so you can keep the Kurosawa Critereon Box Set on top of “DVDs To Buy” and bury “Kung Fu Samauri vs. Gojira XXVI” somewhere below.

But the point is that you end up paying more attention to it than you would a filebox. And it acts as a nice trigger for other people to suggest movies and books you might like. Provided anyone ever visits you, that is. :)

Applying the Lesson

I’m well aware that most people use the computer for their GTD implementation, so the suggestions here aren’t going to directly apply. But the underlying lessons will: Don’t hide your Someday/Maybe list. Make it visible, make it something you’ll want to tinker with, something you’ll keep updated.

Agile Software guru Alastair Cockburn calls this sort of display an “information radiator.” It keeps the stuff that you’re familiar with fresh in your mind, without being intrusive.

So, how can you take a computer list and make it into an information radiator? Some ideas:

• Print your Someday-Maybe list and keep it posted up on the wall of your office or cube.

• Have an applescript interpret the OO file as plain text, and pipe it to your desktop via GeekTool.

(Note that both of these suggestions suffer from the fact that your list will become invisible rapidly if you don’t keep updating and changing it.)

• Use a perl script to take your list, interpret it as an RSS feed, and host it locally. Bookmark it in Safari. Then make it the source of your RSS Visualizer screen saver under 10.4 Tiger.

• Hook up an LCD projector and project the RSS Visualizer onto the wall of your office. Also, burn a few hundred dollar bills while you’re at it, and stock up on projector bulbs.

• Have an applescript auto-print your Someday-Maybe list to cards and envelopes, and use that to build a hanging display. Also, please take pictures and send me the applescript when you’re done, because I want one. :) Sacrifice of first-born child negotiable.

Other suggestions welcome.

This is, after all, what I started this blog to talk about. And then I got sidetracked. :)

Anyhow, for now, check out my new photoset on Flickr, and I will blog here on the subject once regular posting resumes, which will likely be around early October.

[A friend]’s GTD-based system involved Outlook, Excel spreadsheets, a wiki, a web-based to-do application, a Palm synced with both Outlook and Palm Desktop, some Perl scripts to import and export CSV and tab-delimited data files to and from various applications, a DIY Planner Day-Timer and a rather thick set of Hipster PDA cards using most of my templates. I won‚Äôt get into the details: suffice it to say that the system was detailed in 17 steps, was about three pages long, required carrying a large bag filled with his tools, and done daily. I must say, as I read his email, I could certainly admire his technical abilities and ‚Äìin certain cases‚Äì his ingenuity. His Perl scripts used a number of CPAN libraries to retrieve and post information from his private wiki and prep it for his Palm, and his next stages were to involve Plucker in the mix using some Python scripts and then use pilot-link libraries to import to-do‚Äôs and memos into his Palm. Ringo is a part-time CGI programmer, and quite the smart cookie.

Too smart, I think. It seems like all the really smart people (and notably the ones with technical abilities) overcomplicate matters, and make the productivity process far too difficult and inefficient.

I’ve noticed some people are sharing their planning mantras. Here’s mine: simplify.

Well, it does seem that a characteristic trait of people who are creating systems for themselves to live in, is that we all have difficulty concentrating on simple things. A large part of what GTD does for me is to remind me that once the really complicated and interesting part of a job is done, it isn’t complete until I’ve done the rest of it.

The other, often unremarked part is to add a bit of complexity to something that I would otherwise have difficulty concentrating on.

It’s possible that many people create these huge, overcomplicated systems as a way of keeping our distractable, hyperactive brains mesmerized by enough shiny things that want to play with the big, messy, sprockety machine that we happily run our lives with. It’s like playing a game.

This strikes most people as somewhat eccentric, not to say pathological, but it works well… up to the point where you cross an invisible threshold, and begin to spend all your time playing with your system instead of accomplishing any work.

Any number of people have commented on this tendancy already, so I won’t belabor it, except to note that it can be terribly difficult to notice when this happens, because fiddling with your system feels very much like working. If you are anything like me, your system is entirely offline and involves standing up and moving envelopes, folders, and little bits of paper around, and that feels, to the body, a lot more like work than sitting at the computer and twiddling a mouse does.

So, I suppose that I agree with Douglas, with a caveat. And my mantra would be, “Simplify, but not too much.” Or else I’ll likely lose interest.

Basically, I want this stuff but I want to stick metal bits to it.

I’m cool with raw material, so long as it’s reasonably inexpensive and not difficult to work with.

Cheers.

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone. ~Mark Twain, Christmas greeting, 1890

Merlin has managed to read my mind again. I’m not posting to point that out, though; if you’re reading this, you know where to find 43 Folders, after all.

No, my deal is that I really really sympathize with commenter Brad, who is like me in that he hates the damn telephone.

This is getting to be a problem.

Actions in my queue that begin with the word call may as well end there, were I to be truthful to myself about my true intentions (a rare phenomenon that happens approximately once per year and has been sighted cohabiting with Elvis). They are dead cards. Pariahs. The other cards tremble and quail, creeping quietly away from the “call” card, so as not to be contaminated with its psychic taint.

Bereft of friends and support, the “call” cards turn bad, and drift delinquent around my worktable, playing hooky, sometimes (I suspect) mugging the younger cards for their lunch money. Some grizzled veterans have been in and out of the Someday/Maybe lockup so often that it doesn’t seem worth it to go through the motions, and they end up on the edge of the table, where they glare balefully at me, their graphite-smudged edges fuzzy from handling.

It really doesn’t help that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool nocturne, whose brain only really begins to wake up at somewhere around nine in the evening (or, as I call it, noon). So I do all the stuff that you might reasonably expect to do in preparation for a call the night before; jot notes on the back of the “call” card, gather everything together that might be covered and clip it to the card, grab the cell phone and place it suggestively on the pile of actions that really desperately need a phone call.

And the next day, I put the calls off until… oh. Hm. Let’s say, after another cup of coffee, I lie to myself, convincingly. After all, I did just try to clean my ears with a toothbrush, clearly I am not in my right mind. Let me cram more stimulants into my already confused and overcrowded brain so that I can feel even more anxious at the thought of making twelve stressful and overdue phone calls. That seems like a good idea. Twelve cups of coffee later, I have forgotten the phone calls because I am busy trying to pluck my eyeballs off the ceiling, and in any case I wouldn’t be any good on the phone at that point, because the coffee has reduced my ability to communicate to the level of a sugar-crazed crack poodle.

And then something happens, one of those middle of the day things that usually has to be taken care of right there. Like a malfunctioning hydraulic something or other, with a name and part number that sounds distressingly like one of those Pentagon inventory items whose sole purpose is to keep some congressional district or other employed. Except, your plumber informs you when you comment on this, that this particular something is no longer made on this side of the planet, and is only found in the tool hordes of Alaskan midget plumber tribes, which means that the something would, in fact, be quite a lot cheaper were it really a gold-plated Pentagon extravagancy.

You’ll be needing two of them, he adds.

And by the time that’s been taken care of, it’s after six in the afternoon and there’s no point in trying to call anyone, is there?

Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

So. The point of this sad, sordid story, besides giving my insomniac brain something to think about besides the fact that I’m about four days overdue for a good review, which I would do were I not afraid to look at all the incredibly overdue things that are sitting on my worktable downstairs, is… well, a call for help.

(Yes, yes, I know. Obviously. A laugh riot, you are.)

I need a good way to handle call actions that doesn’t automatically induce a gut wrenching cringe from the moment I write it down. How do I do that? Because humor aside, this is a real problem, and telling myself to suck it up and just do it is not doing a heck of a lot.

Assume that calling the moment I think of the action isn’t possible; I do that whenever the time zone allows.

What can I do? Anyone?

Bueller?

My concern is that there’s a big difference between buying new running shoes and actually hitting the road every morning. Big difference. One is really fun and relaxing while the other requires a lot of hard work, diligence, and sacrifice.

[...]

No tool can save you from your own crap behavior, so as you approach these great new apps—and I hope you’ll at least check them out if you haven’t—please try to do it with a bit of perspective about how or why the old tools were not working for you. Consider the patterns that you can observe about how you do your best work and which tasks have benefitted from a certain tool or approach in the past.

And, finally, as you start to choose one new, dedicated tool to improve your productivity, be circumspect about the amount of pure “dicking around” time that you spend. Yes: learn the tool well and understand its functions and limitations, but avoid the temptation to blow a week moving “your system” into the Next Shiny Product until you really understand how you’ll be better off having used it. Don’t fiddle endlessly, just because it’s fun. That’s not running; that’s just playing with your shoes.

The comment discussion is worth looking through, as usual, with a lot of stories and examples of this king of failing. In the discussion, though, it seems people are conflating more than one issue in comments: I call these three issues wanking, rituals, and metawork (or “friction”).

Wanking is spending all your time playing with the shiny things that you know will get you into the prime time… as soon as you get it just right so you can finish. I’m at least as guilty as anyone else of this. The real bitch is, it’s difficult to distinguish from the other two from your own perspective, i.e. when your head is up your ass. It’s a particularly seductive form of procrastination.

Rituals serve to get your head into the right space to work. If you’ll forgive me blathering, think of your brain as being like a holograph: to get what you want out of it, you have to reproduce the conditions under which you originally stuffed it in. In a regular holograph, those conditions involve the right light. In your brain, it’s a lot of things, such as location, chemistry (caffeine, sugar, nicotine, or anything else you habitually dose yourself with), music, time of day, and a set of calming rituals. Think of this as the boot cycle. Or the stretches you always do before running. They’re part of the job. Do them. Or, in the case of nicotine, slowly retrain yourself. I speak from experience on that regard.

Metawork, or friction, is whatever amount of work has to be done in order to track and maintain your work. For GTD addicts, this is list maintenance, reviews (which count as a ritual, too, maybe?), processing your inbox, project planning, etc. (Passing thought… the amount of friction versus the amount of work you get out of it determines how well the tools you ore using do for you. And trying to determine that ratio is a seductive exercise that will eat all your work time before you notice it, because it’s wanking disguised as metawork.)

It’s a sad and guilty secret that I have spent more time over the last month dicking around with designing a better way to sort and track cards with less friction, than I have actually working. I have lots of excuses, of course. I wrenched hell out of my wrist (it’s doing better, thank you everyone who wished me well), I’m moving my office, my whole life has been disrupted, blah blah blah.

The excuses don’t matter. In the end, they’re just reasons why I failed to accomplish the goals I’d set for myself. And the point of the exercise is not to fail. It isn’t to spend energy making myself feel better about failing.

So, now I plan to use this blog and flickr to document the rituals I’m developing, slowly, painfully, to do the hard work of getting out there and running every day. And, also, to document the metawork necessary to get it all done. All while slowly recovering from repetitive strain injury. It’s going to be a rocky road, but the only way I can get it all done is to do it in public, where I’m accountable.

Bear with me.

I said it was a long overdue review.

In other, exciting news, yesterday I went to Office Depot and bought moving boxes. In a stroke of luck, they were marked “buy one [package of 6] get two free,” and thus we have a bunch of still-folded boxes in the hallway. And I’m paying the registration fee on Delicious Library tonight, after testing its barcode-reading via webcam function. Which works beautifully (screenshot). It is, simply stated, iTunes for physical media, complete with sort and search, plus some moderate lending and tracking functions.

These two things have something to do with each other. See, my fianc√©e and I are going to move at some point, but we don’t know exactly when. The last time we moved, something like 50-75% of the pain was boxing and sorting books and CD’s. And worse, later, you end up not knowing what the hell is in those boxes, so when you really need that one reference book or art book for a pattern to scan, you end up pulling all the boxes out of wherever they are and digging through them all.

And if you’re anything like me, that means that you pore through a bunch of books you haven’t seen in ages, and then it’s getting dark and what were you doing in the first place, anyway? Oh, right. That book. Well, it isn’t in this box, maybe in that other one over there…? And so on.

Thus, an experiment. I’m breaking out all these boxes, and I’m going to label them in a very general, but legible way. Then, as I put books, CD’s, etc. in them, I’m importing them into Delicious Library. Which, later, in theory, will let me search my books on the computer, and will inform me which box the books are in. It also syncs my library to the iPod, something that I think is of dubious utility.

I can see potential pitfalls to this, and ways it could become a pain in the ass. If books don’t get put back where they belong, for example. But when we move, I do plan to invest in some real bookshelves (or build my own), and so when we unpack, the books can get re-labeled and sorted as they’re put away.

It’s already a big job, and I see no real harm in giving a little extra effort a shot. I’ll let you know how it works.

Of course, this software would be so much cooler if I could add other peoples’ libraries to my search capacity. So, for example, if I search for “Stephenson” and see that I don’t have a copy of Zodiac, but Loki does, well, I could… um, hop a trans-pacific flight to Australia to borrow it. :) Well, maybe not, but you see my point, given friends that don’t live on the opposite ends of the world.

I really need to work on that.