How our failure to fail impedes our success

Sven is onto something

I just read this post by Sven Fechner. Sven, for those who do not know of him, is one of the most prolific and relevant bloggers on personal productivity. He also has a day job working for a large multinational. I admire this guy, because he achieves what most of us only have the ambition to do. Working a full time job and still blogging on a regular basis.

In his post, which is excellent in its entirety, he speaks with insight and humility about failure. I would like to quote the whole post, but this phrase resonated the most with me ...

it feels more credible now that the option of failure has become an actual result.

He touches on an aspect that I know to be true. Most of us have truly forgotten how to fail. Because we are afraid to fail. There is no longer any merit in failure. And this is different from how things used to be.

We can no longer recognize the merit in our failures

There used to be real merit in failure. While achieving the outcome was important for any project, the road to that outcome was important as well, perhaps even more important than the ultimate outcome. It was an integral part of learning, very much essential to it. And while failure still constitutes an important part of learning, public failure is no longer acceptable. It has become something to avoid.

Let me illustrate failure has become culturally unacceptable in Belgium. Fewer and fewer middle and high school students are receiving non passing grades. Even if they have not done the work and have not learned what there is to be learned, they are not necessarily being held back because it is considered to be bad for the self image of the child. Instead, rather than failing, they are being offered alternative educational choices. They end up failing and not even being aware of it. Or rather, they do not fail, but we change the intended outcome without allowing them to understand what they are not good at. The road is no longer relevant for them. It's just something they need to go through.

A pressure to perform

It does not change once these people get into the job market. The pressure to perform, to show results, to achieve outcomes, any outcomes on young people is enormous. The pressure to keep delivering outcomes on older people is even bigger, because there is the stress of being rendered irrelevant. In such environment, the acceptance of failure is low to non-existent.

We fail to provide an adequate proving ground for people. We fail to allow them to learn. We fail to allow them to actually learn to understand life. And that might just be our biggest failure.

The pressure to perform and to remain so is ever present. And what we fail to understand is that we deny ourselves the opportunity to learn. And denied the opportunity to learn, we will not get better at anything. We risk to get significantly worse.

Outcome creep

We need to actually to do the work, not avoid it be redefining our outcomes - outcome creep - along the way for no other reason than our inability to achieve them and our fear of looking bad. Not failing is easy, especially if your are not doing what you should have been doing.

This is why I salute Sven, who bears the mark of a true professional: someone who commits wholeheartedly even if failure is a possibility, because it is required, because it will teach us.

I'm an internal auditor. Looking for failures is my job. But I can tell you there is a real difference for me as an internal auditor between people who have truly tried and failed and those who never have. If you go in to a project or a challenge, understanding full well that it can go wrong, but committed to do the work, I consider you to be a professional, because you know the learning is for 99% in the journey, and only for 1% in the result. The learning is in the hard but objective assessment of what happened and how to improve it.

In development aid, we have a name for that. We call it capitalization.

However, if you go in just to get lauded for the results, without a willingness to learn anything about the process, about the work and yourself, you will remain merely an amateur.

Solving the problem

A correct application of GTD provides a starting point for solving this problem: whenever you approach a project, you need to look beyond the concrete actions at what the ultimate objective of the project is, even before you start working on it.

Defining clear and measureable outcomes will help you in being accountable as to the ultimate outcome and as to your learning in the process.

Let me rephrase that: be wary of projects without clearly defined outcomes that are measureable. Be wary of people who structurally avoid committing to them. Rather, go with professionals like Sven, who are willing to admit their failures. I'm sure he learned more than others not willing to admit their defeat in a project. I know I did every time I failed. And I learned a lot and continue to learn every day.

In closing - Acumen's Manifesto

The Acumen Fund recently published this Manifesto. I've taken the liberty to copy what I consider to be one of the most essential parts of it. It defines how they look at their mission, a mission close to my heart, as I work in development aid. Here it is:

It thrives on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. It’s having the ambition to learn at the edge, the wisdom to admit failure, and the courage to start again.

A journaling workflow for better GTD higher altitude focus

The challenge of journaling

For those of you who ever tried their hand at journaling, you probably found out it is hard, especially after a while. It takes time and it takes effort. It requires commitment. Not unlike blogging or any other writing activity. And like GTD, it's a wagon you can very easily fall off. So why bother?

The relevance of journaling

Journaling is a wonderful practice if you want to get to know yourself. By taking the time to understand what drives you, you may discover you are not what everyone else ever told you you were. If you get to that very realization, by the way, you are already further in your quest for self-understanding than most people will ever get. Knowing that you don't know "you" is a very sobering realization. It should also put you on the road to finding a trustworthy way of meeting yourself.

Now, and that's the good part, you are the only "you" around, and thus you are ideally placed to determine what "you" are about. No one else can get to know you better than you. Pretty much because you are going to be the one who will be spending the most time with you. And that's quite a lot of you's in a single paragraph.

A whole new you

In order to get to know yourself, you need to take the time to listen to yourself. To listen to yourself, you could try meditation. Again, not an easy practice. Journaling is another excellent way to get to know yourself. And you may actually surprise you. Isn't it wonderful that there is someone so close to you you now can get to know?

But remember I said journaling was not easy? There are ways to make it easier.

Day One as the first step

For me, the first step was to start using good journaling software. Now, in a pitch, a text editor will do, but I really like the Day One application. It provides you with multiple ways of getting your information into the system.

Now, most of what you will read below is thanks to the following excellent post by Sven Fechner (SimplicityBliss) in which he refers to this post by Rob Trew. Bear with me while I explain how I use what they built:

My journaling set-up

Let me take you through my setup. I use Day One in combination with two “customizations”. The first is about getting what I have done that day into the Day One application. As my GTD system is built on OmniFocus, I needed a way to get completed OmniFocus tasks into Day One. Combining Hazel, Day One's CLI (Command Line Interface) and Rob Trew's excellent shell script which loads an overview of my done Omnifocus tasks into Day One. Read Sven's blog post and Rob's detailed explaination on how to set it up.

My journaling workflow

Now, based on this script, I get a markdown formatted entry in Day One for every done task I checked off in OmniFocus during the day. And every evening, usually on the train back home, I go through this list of completed tasks and I add some information on the relevance and my personal appreciation of the task. This is very important: it is not about the task, but about how I felt about it. To be complex about it, it's meta reflection time. And a train ride is often the best moment for meta reflection. But the workflow does not end there.

Each evening, or sometimes early the next morning, I launch a textexpander snippet in Day One. The snippet is based on this Lifehack article by Paul Sloane. The article provides you with a set of five questions to ask yourself each day. What I do is I try to go through these questions and answer them totally honestly. Honest answers to these questions allow you to get to know your deep drivers.

The relevance of journaling for GTD: better understanding of 50K and 40K levels through better understanding yourself

What really pays is to revisit what you have written during your weekly review. It may take some time, but it allows you to get to a point where you really better understand yourself and why you do the things you do. Understanding your own motivation to me is an important road into defining what really matters to you, and refocusing yourself.

And after all, if GTD has any value, it should not only make us more effective, but it should help us achieve what is truly close to us.

Improving your 'next action' and 'project' descriptions

As GTD-ers, we are intimately aware of the challenge posed in consistently formulating well defined next actions and project descriptions. Making sure a next action is actually actionable or writing a project definition you still understand two days after, when you are processing your inbox, requires diligence and attention.

Like most of us, I presume,I find myself falling into the trap of non-executable next actions or not adequately defined projects over and over again. Luckily, by no real creative work of my own, using what Merlin Mann wrote on 43Folders combined with a text expansion snippet based on the work of Chris Holscher, I found a way to "force" me to consider the quality of the inputs in my action lists. Here goes ...

Project and action verbs according to Merlin Mann and GTD

Merlin Mann's post I link to below is the key starting point. In this excellent blog post over on his 43Folders blog, he describes the difference between project verbs and action verbs. It is of course based on canonical GTD, but it is highly accessible.

It's a great explanation and a very usable list of verbs I found myself coming back to again and again ... and again and again and again.

For experienced GTD-ers, the tool switch issue inherent in needing to look away from an activity to consult a blog article is apparent.

It costs time and effort that is better spent elsewhere. Every time I wanted to create a good next action or a well defined project, I went back to the blog post just to consult the list. Yes, I had it captured in my reference files (for which I use Evernote). But still I failed to either learn the list by heart or create some kind of mnemotechnic technique to remember ... And this is where the magic of text expansion comes in.

Note that what I am about to describe is specific to Mac. However, I am quite convinced this is easily replicable on a Windows machine as well. I am just not familiar with Windows software.

Something borrowed ...

I borrowed the Textexpander snippet Chris Holscher described in this post and adapted it for my purposes ... I now have two Textexpander snippets which I invoke with either ';pr' or ';nxa' to indicate my intent to Textexpander to formulate either a project or a next action. You can find screenshots of both snippets below, but the basic idea is this:

I use the text expansion software to offer me a dropdown list of next action or project verbs as well as a fill-in form to document the rest of the next action or the project description. My text expansion software shows me a dialog box where I can select the project or next action verb (depending on the snippet invoked, of course).

I consistently use this when I am generating my next actions or projects. I can pretty much generate them anywhere, as I will describe below, but the idea is that I only allow myself to input in my 'to do'-list (in my case, my Omnifocus inbox) using this approach where available.

Mac specific basic entry and extra credit

Now, I usually invoke this Textexpander snippet when I am in the quick entry dialog of Omnifocus, which is a very easy way to work. That's just basic operation.

For extra credit, when I am writing in a text editor(for Windows people: Word is not a text editor), I will invoke the snippet in the editor and after I have defined the project or the next action, I will move it to Omnifocus using Popclip and the Omnifocus Popclip extension.

How relevant is this?

Now, if you look at it from a distance it is only a snippet invoked from a text expansion software. However, if you consistently apply this approach when entering new next actions or new project descriptions, you force yourself into a constrained situation in terms of input requirements and you find that you actively start thinking about what it actually is that you will be tasking yourself to do in the future. It eliminates unclear next actions and unclear projects to a significant extent.

May I suggest you try it?

Next action snippet

Project formulation snippet

Tools I use – Drafts for simultanuous input capture

My simultanuous capture use case

As the head of a small internal audit shop, I deal with a lot of inputs. These can be operational, such as notes of interviews or testing remarks. They can also be administrative in nature, such as meeting notes or notes I take during training. All in all, quite a few different inputs.

How I used to manage these inputs

Pen and paper. Really, I've always liked the feel of a pen on a piece of paper. For some purposes, such as writing longer articles, I still pretend to do just that, with my bamboo stylus. If you are interested in that workflow, read this article.

However, turnaround on other inputs became too long. I wrote, then I wrote the notes on my computer ... because in a small audit shop, you don't have the luxury of handing your notes off to a secretary. You do it yourself.

The intermediate scenario

There are a lot of text editors out there, both on Mac ans iOS. I tried quite a few of them, but they never were truly ubiquitous like pen and paper can be. I was too involved in the tool to be fully engaged in the content I was trying to capture. That, of course, is a problem.

What I needed was a tool that allowed me to capture without thinking about layout and other aspects, and with an easy way to export to any of my other tools.

I ended up with a combination of a language and a tool.

My solution: Drafts and Markdown

Agile Tortoise has developed an iOS app called Drafts. It has become my go-to application on my iOS devices for taking notes on anything and everything I'm hearing and thinking about. Let me illustrate:

Last week, I was attending an IIA course in Brussels (the IIA, for non auditors, is the Institute for Internal Auditors, a brother- and sisterhood of internal auditors. We even have jokes.) on auditing project management. The course was taught by two excellent teachers. As always, I was working at a couple of levels. I was listening and taking notes on the content of the course. I was at the same time listening and taking notes on the impact of what was said on an audit we are currently executing ... and I was on occasion thinking about to do's which had nothing to do with the class.

Now, let's take a couple of steps backwards. There I am sitting, thinking about multiple things at the same time. I believe I'm not an outlier. Thinking multiple thoughts, following multiple threads in our heads at the same time is rather human.

However, I used to let a good deal of this thinking go to waste. I thought good, sometimes even great thoughts, I tried to remember to remember them ... and I lost them. When I started noting stuff down on paper, I lost the papers. When I started using Moleskines, I was afraid to write in them, because of the cost and because of the nice-ness, and when I started using iOS tools I could not combine and note taking on a training or an interview with note taking on other thoughts and putting to do's on my to do list.

Enter Drafts

Drafts is a note taking tool which allows me to send notes to multiple applications on my iOS device. Its export facilities are amazing, and growing with every release. Luckily, you can reduce the number of export possibilities visible, to configure the app to work just as you like it. If you look at the screenshot below, you will see I can 'share', export to Twitter or app.net, put something in my agenda, write an SMS, write a formatted email ... and this is a curated list, adapted to my specific needs.

Drafts' most important export functions to me are however, its possibility to append text to a running file on dropbox called Journal.txt and its export facility to Omnifocus, my task management software. Let's visit my use case again:

I'm in the course, listening to what is being told by the lecturer. I follow the slide presentation on the handouts. I started my note taking session by entering the Textexpander Touch shortcuts for date and time, so the running file I'll be exporting to on dropbox has a record of when I started entering information. Whenever I feel I have finished a thought, I send the text to the file in dropbox it's appended from. Journal.txt, which resides in my Dropbox Drafts folder, which resides under the App folder, holds a record of all the thoughts I feel I still need to put somewhere. They are 'stuff', but 'stuff' in the GTD manner of speaking, which is already somewhere where I will visit it later.

All of a sudden, I think of something I need to discuss with my team. I enter the thought and send it to Omnifocus. In 2 seconds the quick entry box is filled with the idea I wrote down in Drafts, with the second and third line of my entry filling in the notes section. This sits in my Omnifocus inbox, waiting for me to process it.

Then, based on what the lecturer said, I suddenly think of a test to add to the workprogram we are developing. I start writing out the thought in Drafts, I use Draft's extended iOS keyboard to put (Workprogram) between brackets, and send it to the Journal.txt document. I could have sent it to another application I have installed, such as Byword, but that would open Byword and I don't have the time to write a full set of workprogram instructions right now.

Using Markdown

Drafts supports Markdown, providing you with one of the best extended iOS keyboards I've seen for this purpose. This allows me to write formatted documents as well, for example if I want to write an email with some formatting. It also allows me to send texts with basic markdown formats to the journal.txt file from where I can go and find it to work on it in Sublime Text.

Conclusion

If capturing multiple inputs at the same time is your challenge, and you are interested in working with plain text applications or are capable of working in Markdown, Drafts is the best solution available to you today.

Drafts export options

Tools I use - Reeder for RSS based information capture

A lot of the information I deal with, either for my day job or for my teaching or blogging, I get from different web published sources, be it blogs or websites. As I really don't have the time to visit each of these sites every single day, I make use of the RSS feeds where these sites provide them. I gather all that information in a so-called RSS reader.

What is Reeder?

Well, Reeder is my preferred multi-platform (iOS and OS X) RSS feed reader. The tool syncs with my Google Reader account to bring me all the information in a well designed format when I want it, or as long as I am within reach of a good 3G/4G or trusted WIFI network.
There are other RSS readers with a good reputation, both on iOS and OS X, but Reeder has an aesthetic that I have to date failed to find in other RSS readers. It provides a truly pleasant scanning/reading experience.

How I use Reeder

Those of you who have read my post on Instapaper know that I do not read in my RSS reader. I actually use it to scan through the articles. In my scanning, I follow a basic GTD approach:

• An article I don't particularly care about gets passed. As I don't do anything with it, Reeder marks it as read and will remove it from my reading queue.
• An article I must read or do something with for my day job gets send to Evernote and tagged as 'review'. This way, it ends up in a workflow I will write about later.
• An article I want to read, but with no direct urgency, gets send to Instapaper, where I follow the process I described in this post.
• In exceptional cases where I want someone to take direct action on an article, I will forward it through mail, but this happens seldom. I avoid it because this implies a delegated task, which I would rather manage through OmniFocus. Reeder does not allow for OmniFocus sharing as Instapaper or, with some effort, Evernote does.

Of course, as GTD adepts may be quick and correct to point out, I do not comply with the basic premise of GTD that I should touch every piece of stuff only once. I actually 'process' it twice, both in capture and in review. Well, it's not a perfect world. This is the best I can get my process now.

Which platforms can you find Reeder on?

Well, this is what I really like. There is an Reeder iPad application, a dedicated Reeder iPhone/iPod Touch application, and an OS X application. I can pretty much scan through my feeds whenever I have a couple of minutes of downtime, or during morning breakfast when I leave early and no one else is awake yet.

What are disadvantages and how do I deal with them?

Now, Reeder is a great but not a perfect application. I currently have two gripes about it:

• The first one is a big one. I cannot directly add feeds in the iOS app. For this, I have a different Google Reader client call Mr. Reader. I have this app on my iOS devices for no other reason. Why not switch to Mr. Reader completely? Well, aesthetics mostly.
• The second one is a truly nerdish one: as I don't trust Google for the full 100% never to suddenly kill Google Reader, I have set up a separate RSS aggregation solution called Fever. While not as fast or as complete as Google Reader, it works for my purposes of having a back-up solution available. Sadly, only my Reeder iPhone client works with Fever. Neither the iPad nor the OS X application support Fever.

In conclusion

Reeder is an excellent application that provides me with access to my RSS feeds when I want it. It allows me to perform good capture of that inflow of information into my workflows.

Reeder's main screen, with all my RSS feeds

A view of my unread articles stack for this evening

Reeder's sharing interface. I've configured it to show only those services I use or am experimenting with

Tools I use - Instapaper as a GTD capture and review bucket

I’ve been a long term user of Instapaper, especially of Marco Arment’s excellent iOS app. I understand there is even an Android application available. Let me illustrate how I use it in my workflow.

Gathering inputs

I have a rather long commute to work. It takes me about 15 minutes by car and then another 45 minutes by train, followed by a 10 minute walk. What is great about it is that the two times 45 minutes by train per day give me the time to write and read. As the 3G availability on the train is bad to non-existent, I usually read what is in my reading queue. Enter Instapaper.

My Google Reader and Fever client (Reeder, subject for another review) allows me to easily send articles to be read to Instapaper (i.e. the capture phase). I do this for articles I would like to read, instead of articles I need to read, which I put into Evernote (yet another review). Instapaper is my true ‘to read sometime’ review bucket. Before I started to commute by train I never got around to review this bucket, now I am fairly up to speed.

Up to date at all times, with minimal effort

Instapaper’s geolocation support allows for easy synchronisation when I am close to a friendly wifi source, so I really don’t have to worry about synchronisation. My articles are with me at all times, on my iOS device (usually my iPad).

From bucket to to-do list in one simple step

So, I’m on the train, with my synchronized articles which I want to read. I go through them one by one. Instapaper has a choice of fonts and lay-outs, some of which are optimized for the iPad’s retina display, if you care about that. It’s kinda nice you have this level of customization available to you, on the other hand, as with many tools, too many buttons and features may actually distract. Marco Arment has erred on the side of caution here ... but still I am sometimes distracted into tweaking my Instapaper set-up.

Going through my articles, I apply a simple GTD algorithm: it’s either a next action which I can do here and now (using the 2 minute rule), a next action which needs to land into my task list, a task to be delegated or a document to be thrashed. Let’s go over how Instapaper supports each of these choices:

1. Next action now: this is not necessarily directly supported in Instapaper, but iOS makes it easy to switch between an article and any other application. Instapaper allows me to copy the full text which I can then easily paste into any text editor I want to use.
2. Next action later: Instapaper allows for very easy export to Omnifocus or Evernote. As I use both tools, I’ve usually worked with export to Omnifocus. One (small) gripe is that this function only exports the URL, and not the text in its entirety. I’ve recently adapted my workflow and for those situations in which I need direct access to the document, I send the task through Evernote with a ‘review’ tag attached to it. This in combination with a script on my iMac at home makes sure it gets processed and send to Omnifocus with a link to Evernote.
3. Delegation: As Instapaper allows for email full text, I can easily send an article with some comments to a collaborator or a client and have them work on it. Of course, good delegation practices apply.
4. Thrash document: Of course, documents that I’ve read and that have no further direct value can either be deleted or archived into the Instapaper archive queue.

In conclusion

Instapaper is my one and only “want to read” bucket. Given the functionality of the tool and its many export functions, it is an excellent bucket application. It integrates well in my workflow.

Instapaper article interface

Instapaper's update location menu, highlighting its geofencing usage

Instapaper's 'share' interface