Reducing the white noise by scrutinizing your inputs

Cleaning up my Linked-In groups

From recent experience: I was looking through my Linked-In feeds and noted just how much junk I found in there. Maybe I'm not selective enough, I thought. An ideal moment to clean up some of the accumulated mess that provided too high a level of white noise in recent months. After all, while a bit of white noise in the background allows you to focus, too much white noise can drive you insane … or at least significantly influence your productivity levels. And that exercise got me thinking.

The noise that surrounds us

How much noise surrounds us? How much irrelevant yet present line input do we receive that does not contribute to our core roles and responsibilities? Groups in Linked-In that you joined a long time ago, are no longer relevant to you but still send you daily email updates? RSS feeds that create an ever increasing unread count, accompanied by a nagging badge? The news?

I really started scrutinising my inputs, which I ranked in one of four areas:

Areas of control

These are inputs that require my personal attention or input. Examples include projects I'm responsible for, email or any other type of communication which I need to react to, reports or reviews of such reports … pretty much all of the "stuff" I need to be actively involved in on either a personal or a professional level. You could link this to GTD's incompletion trigger list.

Areas of interest

This is stuff I like or care about, but is really non-essential in nature right now. In all honesty, this is where I go when I procrastinate. Just knowing what these areas are are sure-fire ways to identify those moments when I slide into procrastination. If I focus on these areas, they may actually become areas of control. Such as when your hobby becomes your full time profession …

Areas of concern

These are the inputs that impact me and that I should be aware of but which fall outside of my direct area of control or interest, meaning I need to be aware, but I cannot (yet) intervene or take a concrete action. Examples are management team decisions which are relevant for your work but don't impact you directly. Or think about delegated work that is still in progress. Or my wife informing me about what my mother-in-law said about me. These are potential stress areas and should be limited to the most essential.

All the rest

This is the stuff that comes in and should hit my spam filter but hasn't yet. Think news, or gossip around the water cooler. These are major distractions that do not further my master plan but take away my attention and cause additional, undue stress.

A new set of agreements with me

I agreed with myself the following:

any inputs that are in my areas of control get dealt with or put in OmniFocus when I process that specific bucket of stuff. I have the obligation to deal with this, even if it entails saying "no" to the related activities. This stuff gets the standard GTD treatment, as the input usually results in a concrete next action decision.

Any inputs in my areas of interest are reserved for leisure moments, such as when commuting on the train, at home after the chores are done. I take the time to listen to my - carefully selected - podcasts, I write blog posts such as this one, I read a book or an article, I watch the occasional TV show, I scan my Reeder feeds …

Inputs in my areas of concern get reviewed on a regular, but not too frequent a basis.

This could be daily, but will more often be weekly or in some cases even monthly or less frequent. Think of it as the daily overview you get from your spam software on which messages were blocked … a type of exception reporting. Or think about a weekly Linked-In digest.

Ideally I have a filter here which I trust to do the correct filtering and to only warn me if I have to urgently deal with something. At work, for example, my excellent (big hat tip) collaborator filters certain meeting minutes and warns me if we need to take an action or a position, i.e. if it enters into one of my areas of control.

All the rest of the inputs which my produce irrelevant stuff that contributes to the white noise just get killed, taken off line. I delete the RSS feed, I leave the Linked-In group, I avoid the build up of stuff before it even gets started.

Reducing the white noise

Because I'm 42 years old, I don't have the luxury to just waste time without focus or purpose. I've made the choice for significant white noise reduction. The resulting, reclaimed silence is deafening, but it has created a clarity which is awe-inspiring. All of a sudden, there is a lot more creative white space in my life.

I've culled all of my inputs to the essentials and no more. Hence, irrelevant Linked-In groups are gone. My non-critical RSS feeds are no more. I've killed TV time except for two shows and the occasional movie, all of which I pre-record and watch in my leisure time. I've even updated my spam definitions in both Spamsieve and Postini Services. I check personal email once a day and no more, and professional emails only three times a day, on set hours. You would not believe what areas of space and time have opened up.

Combating information overload

Note that I'm not promoting a structural lack of awareness. On the contrary, you should try to keep abreast of all information you deem relevant for you. However, in our always on, 24/7 information society, there is a real and significant risk of information overload.

At best, this distracts you and makes you less effective. You will reach your goals later. At worst, you get so depressed you cannot bear to get out of bed in the morning. You will never reach your goals at all. So, instead of worrying about the horrible loss of life in a conflict you've seen on TV, perhaps you need to look at what you and those around you can do about it.

Remember that this is the day and age of the internet, where both boundaries and gatekeepers are fewer and less defined. That can work against you, if you let it get out of control, such as with uncontrolled inputs which create stuff in your life, stuff that was not available to you even ten years ago. However, it may actually work to your advantage as well, such as when you engage in a concerted effort to right a wrong. Any wrong you deem to be within your area of control.

A longhand blog writing workflow on iPad and Mac

I adore writing longhand

I adore writing longhand. I'm not very good at it, and I don't do it often enough, but I adore writing longhand. I crave the feeling of a good weight pen or other writing utensil and the joy of passing that over a smooth page and make an impression. Granted, my handwriting looks like what would be left if a murder of crows dipped their collective feet in a bottle of ink and walked over the page, but still, I adore writing longhand.

Writing longhand liberates my thinking

It really does feel like I have a lot less brakes to my creativity when writing longhand than when faced with a keyboard and an empty document. Writing longhand is such an engrained habit, it is such a low resistance, unobtrusive habit that some of the content just flows. A keyboard often limits my flexibility.

I've tried other approaches. For a while, I was really into mind mapping. I got the applications (iThoughts HD is an excellent app if you are so inclined) but again I was confronted with that keyboard. Even with the excellent fast text entry, the inertia was still too big to get to an effective, always on method of capture.

So I came back to writing. In Moleskines, because you need to write with a certain style. And you really want a notebook with a philosophy and a great website. Thing is, you don't really always carry that around. I have other tools that really are with me all the time. Such as my iPad. But the iPad has a, albeit virtual, keyboard. And most of the writing apps don't really allow me to write in a good way, unless one really large word per line is what writing really should be all about.

Combining Notability with a Bamboo stylus

I had actually purchased Notability a while back, but never really gotten to use it. The interface is far from the stylish, no nonsense interfaces we Apple fanboys are used to. The app actually gives an appearance of utter confusion. Shallow as I am, I never gotten further than that. Until Mac Power Users episode 100, where a number of listeners referred to their workflows. An English gentleman referred to his use of Notability with the Bamboo stylus. As luck would have it, one of my gadget shopping sprees a few month back had yielded, yes, a Bamboo stylus.

I literally put 1 and 1 together and ended up with more than 2. Amazing. The application allows for a focused area in which you can write as tall or as large as you want, and it will still look like normal handwriting on the page, as the focused area also enlarges the actual paper. It is one of the first apps which allows for a worthwhile writing experience in my opinion.

A blogging workflow with longhand first drafts

So I've started writing my first drafts in longhand, on my iPad, in Notability with my Bamboo stylus. And it's been an excellent experience. This is pretty much how the entire process happens.

1. I capture ideas into OmniFocus. During daily review I cull and if the idea remains relevant in my head, I create a short entry into Notability, a document with the blog idea as a title. This one, for example, was called "On writing longhand". That tells me pretty much everything I need to know to start writing. If I don't remember a couple of days later, the idea gets killed anyway.
2. I usually write on the train, in the morning. My morning commute into Brussels takes me about 20 minutes by car, 45 minutes by train and 10 minutes on foot. The train is an excellent place to write longhand on my iPad. I just write. It's almost frictionless sentence capture around the idea the document is destined to capture. I choose to display a lined background in Notability and I write every other line. This makes editing much easier.
3. I usually correct in the evening, on the way back from work. Again I have a 45 minute window in which I can review the text. I use a red pen instead of a black one for first reviews, a blue one for second review.
4. Once I'm happy with the text as it is, I label it ready for "blog draft" and I export it as a PDF to Evernote. This way, the document gets copied on all my devices and whenever I have a couple of minutes free, I write a couple of sentences in my Multimarkdown Composer application on my Mac. I write in markdown and generate text files (.txt) which I then copy and paste into my SquareSpace 6 powered blog.

And that's pretty much it.

More efficiency? No thanks

I'm certain there are more efficient ways of doing this, but this rather "slow" approach works really well for me. It really forces me to take the time and review what I've written, ideally a couple of times. I'm a rather impatient writer and forcing myself through this elaborate process aims at improving both the quality and the relevance of my writing.

Let me know if it works.

Lengthening your concentration span→

An excellent article by Harj Taggar, one of the partners at y combinator, on his decision to avoid automatic email checking. I especially like his:

"The least obvious consequence has been the lengthening of my concentration span, even when I’m at my desk with easy access to my email."

Impressive.

via Lifehacker

Your inbox is not your to do list

Watching a number of colleagues and friends deal with email recently, I found out that a lot of people still use their inbox as a kind of to-do list. Whenever an email comes in, they take it as yet another task.

There are a couple of problems with this. Most have been described at length in several posts, such as the Inbox Zero articles by Merlin Mann at 43Folders. You may want to read some of his excellent articles, which align with most of the ideas in David Allen's GTD methodology.

What really gets to me in using your inbox as a to do list is that you actually allow others to determine what is the most important thing you will be doing. That comes down to giving control over your activities to other people.

In essence, using your inbox as a to do list comes down to saying yes to everything that anyone cares to send to you. Even if you just consider it, you are still considering it at not the time of your choosing, but the time they impose on you.

And that, to me, is just too much control in other people's hands.

Rethinking my GTD contexts in OmniFocus

The big idea

I have been rethinking my contexts based on a blog post I recently read and cannot, for the life of me, find back. The basic idea is to have two lists. The list of things to do today and the list of things to do. Each day, you transfer items from the second to the first list, and you work that list. If the tasks on the list are done, you're done for the day.
So, whereas my context before were a proper implementation of David Allen's GTD methodology, and quite complex, and actually never really used as they should have been, now they are simply lists of things to do today in a broad context, or things to do someday in a broad context. To date, it has really increased my output, because I am no longer focusing on the GTD process but rather on the content. Let me take you through this in more detail.

My original take on contexts

There's a great book on using OmniFocus with GTD on the Mac. The author is Couros Dini, and the book's title is TITLE. You can find it here. I organized my OmniFocus implementation pretty much as prescribed in the book, and it worked reasonably well for a while. I tweaked it and it worked even better. But, big but, I had to remember to check my OmniFocus perspectives when in a certain environment (which I define as a set of available contexts).
For example, when I was at work I had several contexts available to me. I had certain tools available, I was at a location and I had access to certain people. So my perspectives showed all the contexts available in that specific situation. My iphone set-up worked flawlessly: I was informed when I was in a certain context based on geo-location data. But, the system turned out to be too complex. I was spending a lot of time correctly linking tasks to contexts and projects to make sure that I was informed of the task, but ... I was not working the task.

Adapting the contexts

So based on a blog post which I can't remember the author of, I switched my approach. Rather than being confronted with tasks depending on context and start and due dates, I killed all my contexts and replaced them with the following very simple ones:

• Today @work: all the tasks I want to accomplish today at work
• Today @home: all the tasks I want to accomplish today at home
• This week @work: the list of tasks I aim to accomplish this week at work, which feed into the today list based on my consciuous decision during my daily review
• This week @home: idem for the @ work list, but then about tasks I aim to accomplish at home
• This month @work and This month @home: two lists which feeds into my this week list.
• Someday/Maybe @work and Someday/Maybe @home: two lists which feed into my this month or this week lists.

I lose some of the technical capabilities of the geo-location, however, as geo-location triggering is linked to the context, I have defined both Today @work and Today @home context with geo-location triggers. So for all that really matters, I still have the triggers. If I want to do certain activities elsewhere, I can create additional Today-contexts but this far I have refrained from doing that to keep this system simple and flat.

Remarks and ideas

Surely I could achieve this using the start and due dates. But the point is that changing a context for a task then becomes an automatic process, where I want this to be a consciuous decision. I'm in control of my time, not my task list. I am still working the list, but it is a list of my chosing, and the level of frustration I create by loading too many tasks onto that list is my own conscious decision, not dictated by a system.

iOS & Mac - frictionless workflow with ubiquitous tools

I used to own an Android

Actually, I owned two. My first one was a HTC Magic, which I rooted after a week to see what I could do with it. These were the times of unlocked and unencrypted boot loaders, with Android operating systems being improved in the wild. I really enjoyed tinkering with it. My second Android was a HTC Desire. It looked great, and it was performance wise quite an improvement over the Magic. I never rooted it. I don’t know why, but the effort of rooting and maintaining my phone was prohibitive when compared to the value I derived from it. I loved to tinker, but my tinkering did not really bring me closer to real workflow improvements.

Remigrating to a Mac

And then I migrated back to a Mac, an 2010 iMac. I had worked on Macs before, all through my student days, in the early 1990’s. However, once entering the workforce I had to move to Windows. And while I held on for a little while, I even had a 1996 Powerbook, I soon migrated to Windows for home use as well. It was just easier that way. As an auditor, most of my work was done in Word and Excel anyway, and they were just easier to use on a Windows machine.

But returning to that Mac after more than 10 years really was like coming home to an old friend. The interface, while it had of course changed quite dramatically, was still very familiar. After an initial couple of days of hesitation, I quickly adapted to that very user centric and even user aware interface and felt more and more frustrated with my Windows machine.

Acquiring iOS devices and apps

I acquired my first iOS device with my original iPad on day one of the Belgian launch. And I started acquiring apps. For testing purposes, but at a relatively low per application price I soon built quite a library. Some of my most prized possessions in my app library were and still are the Omni Group set of applications for iOS. I soon acquired an iPhone 4 and a couple of months later my employer provided us with iPad 2’s. And my apps, most of which were both iPhone and iPad capable, just migrated with me.

The thing with the apps is that the best of them are just as customizable as required to optimize them for your own workflow, but not more. Not all choices are possible or even wanted. Quite a difference from Android. By limiting my app configuration choices but by making sure the apps all work according to the same usage principles, and leveraging first dropbox and now iCloud as a data exchange platform between devices and even apps, the apps and the device become ubiquitous. I no longer am aware of the tool I am using, because the tool is not the central point, my content is. And I can access and continue working on my content without breaking my stride. It just works.

The ubiquitous devices - iOS and Mac

This truly became apparent to me when I changed employers and had to give back my iPad 2. I had some fear that my workflow would be hampered on my original iPad. It wasn’t. Not at all. The couple of additional tenths of a second I need to wait longer for a webpage to render or for a process to finish is irrelevant to my workflow, and I honestly don’t even notice anymore.

Bizarre as it may seem, Apple succeeded in both binding me to their products and make me totally machine agnostic at the same time. I really don’t care what machine of mine I work on for most of my tasks, as long as it runs iOS or OSX, I’ll be fine. It may take a couple of minutes to restore my key software and apps from the app store, but I will have them available. My data is in the cloud, either on dropbox, iCloud or even some info on Google documents, but I can get that back.

The machine is no longer central to the equation. My content and my access to my content is. All the rest is really irrelevant. And that’s amazing, since the last truly ubiquitous tool for producing content was, in effect, pen and paper.

My blogging workflow (or, do I need another writing app?)

Workflows are about optimizing your personal process

Developing workflows have the advantage of allowing you to optimize your work process. This will allow you to become more efficient in the future. The disadvantage then is that you need to invest the time now. And workflows take some time to develop. While personal workflows are inherently personal, there are lessons to be learned from other people’s workflows. That’s why I like podcasts like Mac Power Users which take the time to take you through workflows of uber-nerds.

The origins of my writing workflow

I write quite a lot. Professionally, I write quite a lot of reports and audit work papers. I wrote a lot of proposals as well, in the past when I was working as a consultant. My professional writing has to be concise and to the point. It needs to be as efficient as possible in conveying a message as my target audience, the audit committee, has a limited time to listen to me and read our work. Personally, I’m a blogger. As a blogger, I want to be as efficient and effective in communicating the messages I want to bring as well, out of respect for my audience.

Why do I describe my workflow?

It took a while to finetune my writing workflow. I’ve been testing a lot of applications on different devices and I’ve managed to find a couple of solutions to the challenges of writing as focused as possible. Additionally, it forces me to formally close the testing phase which saw me making a lot of tool changes and spend a lot of time and money getting and testing apps. By describing my current set-up I aim to answer the question “Do I need another tool or have a reached a maturity in my set-up.” The answer actually surprised me.

Steps in my workflow

My workflow consists of five discrete steps which each have a reason and a set of tools to support the execution. I don’t always follow these steps, but I noted that the quality of my writing and the level of synthesis without losing content is more optimal if I apply each of the steps.

Stap 1 - Idea capture I often get glimpses of ideas. When creativity strikes, I try to capture it. I always carry around a small notebook and a pen. I just write down what I think about and add as much or as little detail as I think I need. It allows me to put ideas out of my head, where they are likely to get lost.

Step 2 - Mindmapping the article When I have the time to write, on the train, during the weekend, at night, I set down with one of my tools, select an idea and start brainstorming the content of the article the idea for which I captured in my notebook. I don’t always do this, but I find that article writing takes more time if I don’t, because mindmapping my content generation around an idea gives me the freedom to go really broad in my ideas, without the linear requirements imposed by word processors or outlining tools. I export the mindmap in OPML where possible, which allows me to transfer the structure to my outlining tool.

Step 3 - Outlining the article Once I’ve developed the ideas and the basic structure in the mindmap, I export through OPML to my outlining tool. The outlining tool brings the unstructured idea generation to a structured environment and allows me to assess the narrative in the structure. Am I making all the points I want to make … and does the story make sense? Using an outlining tool to review these aspects really makes sense for me. Knowing this tool and this process is available also allows me to go all out in the mindmapping. I don’t need to hold back as I know I will be outlining anyway. Outlining is pruning of the content. And I find myself often noting down items I came up with during the mindmapping as possible future ideas for articles. However, if they don’t make sense during the outlining phase, they get pruned, relentlessly. At the end, I export the outline as a txt file to my writing tool of choice.

Step 4 - Writing the article Given the preparatory work that I’ve already done, this step should be easy. But it isn’t. Even with the bones of the article skeleton in place and optimized, and all the ideas as cute little ducks in a row, this is still a lot of hard work. When narrative structure is in place, you still need to tell the story. Hans and Grethel would be a very short story if only the outline mattered. Fleshing out the bones is a lot of hard work, and still the most work of all the steps. Once the text is done, I go back and format it using Markdown. It’s not a complex language and it allows me to edit on multiple platforms.

Step 5 - Article quality control After having written and formatted the article, I go back one more time before I post it on the blog. However, I usually wait a while, ideally a day, but often more likely an hour or two, before I go back and reread it for essential issues, such as spelling and use of the correct words and turns of phrases. I read it from two perspectives. First, I need to know the article makes sense. Second, I look for optimization and correct links.

Step 6 - Posting the article to the blog For this, I use the tools SquareSpace gives me. I post in Markdown which is then by Squarespace transferred to clean html for the blog. Basically, I just copy-paste the markdown in the squarespace editor, although on occasion I will use SquareSpace’s tools available on iPad and iPhone.

Tools, apps and file formats

For each of the steps described above, I use a specific set of tools which depend on the device I’m on. I intermittently use a Mac (home and portable), and iPad or an iPhone (IOS device, also when travelling) or Windows PC (work). The available tools allow me to do most of my work on each of these platforms, with limited to no hand-off issues if I switch devices. Pulling it all together are two folders on my dropbox, one containing my mindmaps, the other containing Markdown saved as txt.

My blogging devices, apps and file formats

Answering the question

I honestly dare not go back into my app store archive and check which I have or haven’t purchased. What I know is that when I ‘discover’ yet another app which I want to look at, more often than not it’s the “INSTALL” dialog box that appears instead of the price button. A good indication I purchased a predecessor of the current incarnation of that tool somewhere in the past.

The thing is, I probably don’t need them. Most of the most relevant tools I have and use are nvAlt (free, but pay Brett Terpstra some money, because this is a txt editing powerhouse) and Plaintext (free, but you can pay €1.59 to have the banners removed). Notesy is an alternative, and you need iThoughts as a mindmapping tool on your IOS device, but I really don’t need another writing tool.