Ideas on a project prioritisation system for public sector projects

Introduction

This is a rewrite of a post I published in November 2009 on another blog. I've reviewed and revised the text. While a number of ideas remain valid, I've made quite a number of changes.

Any project executed in a public sector environment has to face - by its very nature - a high level of scrutiny. Laws and regulations have been designed to ensure that the use of public means is as correctly executed as possible. The question that plagues many an administrator is whether he or she has invested time and effort in the right project. And while the decision remains complex, the following decision model aims at assisting the decision takers in a first project prioritisation.

By evaluating projects on the three axes of monetary impact, political feasibility and communicability, these projects can be prioritised in a way which answers legitimate questions on best use of means. These questions can, should and will be asked by the concerned representatives of the people, the politicians. The model which we propose below allows such a prioritisation.

Context

“Is this project the most relevant investment of my available resources, be these financial means, available people or my own limited time?” When prioritising a project financed by public means this is a legitimate question which a politician can, should and will ask of the public administration proposing a project. Whereas the question is legitimate, the answer requires an approach which is not always readily available to administrations.

The administration can answer this question from its own perspective, but runs the risk of missing one or more key elements which do not play a role in its own decision taking but are very important to the concerned representatives.

Method

The following three-dimensional model an administration can use to transparently present different projects or project options to representatives in order to develop a higher degree of buy-in.

The first dimension – estimated monetary impact

This dimension aims at providing a verifiable estimation of the monetary impact a project can have under different conditions. It must answer the question how much the project will actually save, gain or result in, either for the public administration or for the constituency (either citizens or companies).

This most traditional of measurements can be executed by means of different measurement systems, depending on the needs and nature of the project. For burden reduction projects for example, an analysis using a Standard Cost Model assessment of the situation before and after or the Regulatory Impact Assessment is most often used.

The second dimension – political feasibility

The second dimension assesses the feasibility of the project from a purely political point of view. "Can we obtain an adequate level of support to realise all the relevant goals of this project?" Even more importantly, "are there no indications of any resistance to the realisation of the project which can block it even before it gets started?"

This assessment requires a keen view on the current political reality or the expected political reality at the time of project approval and throughout the period of project execution. In order to correctly assess this, the administration will need the input and the support from the appropriate cabinet(s).

This need reconfirms the essential nature of regular communication and information flows between cabinets and the administrations.

The third dimension – Communicability

This dimension is for a politician the most important, and legitimately so. After all, visibility ensures continued political relevance, and visibility is often a function of how well a project can be communicated.

We often look down on politicians seeking the public eye, looking to "score" by going on TV. We actually forget that that is an essential part of the role of the politician. He or she needs to communicate to a wide audience and gauge the reaction of that audience to determine his or her position. I'm not naive in that I do know and realise that party pressure can influence voting behaviour, but I also believe this day and age, with social networks which enjoy a high degree of participation, provides the best possible situation for a politician to get almost real time feedback on his or her performance.

The purpose of this dimension is to evaluate the extent of the communicability of a certain project: how well can the purpose be communicated to a third party (citizen or company) and how large will the extent of political support be generated by this communication? Is it a viable news item? Will it be taken up by the news organisations, both written, spoken and/or tv?

Benefits

The proposed approach allows the public servants to be more proactive in their relationship with the politician(s) and member of the cabinet(s) as argued in a prior article (published on the original posting site, which I will repost later) on correctly treating politicians as stakeholders. It prepares the ground for decision for duly elected representatives without forcing a decision on them.

Independent business and the future of innovation

Following in the footsteps of our elders

Up until only a few generations ago, we used to be destined to follow into the footsteps of our elders. A son of a farmer was likely to become a farmer. If your mother had a small convenience store, you were apt to enter into that trade as well. Even now, a lot of lawyers are sons and daughters of lawyers. And if, like was the case for many of us, your parents worked for "the man", you grew up with an understanding that working for an employer was a good thing. Innovation was evolutionary. It was based on what we built on the shoulders of those who came before us. Because we knew those who came before us. There was an individual relationship.

And let's be clear, working for "the man" really used to be good. There was an implicit understanding that if you did your best and tried hard, your employer would take care of you too. There was reciprocity in the relationship. However, it mainly put the employer in the position of the parent an the employee in the position of the child.

The onset of employee puberty

While there were always those who were seeking independence from these structures, their numbers have increased since the onset of the 2008 crisis, which for all intents and purposes is still going on today. The crisis really appears to have pushed a whole group of people into developing their own small businesses.

Contrary to times past, the recent ruptures of the employee-employer relationship were most often not on the best of terms. It played out like a typical puberty scenario. Note I'm not taking positions here. But puberty is often a situation in which there is a total breakdown of any form of civilized communication with both parties feeling the hurt but neither of them having the maturity to do something about it.

There is a total rejection of the corporate world and its functioning by those stepping out and starting their own small businesses, showing the world they can manage on their own. And there is a lot of achievement in that. I have a huge admiration for people daring to go that path. It often involves facing a lot of fears and uncertainty. So I applaud that with all my heart.

BUT, eventually, going that path also involves the realization and recognition that no matter how much you may despise the corporate world, there are parts of it that make sense. As Umair Haque has pointed out, the corporate world is very good at solving large scale problems.

The advantages of smaller businesses in present day innovation

What small businesses bring to the table is their flexibility as well as their ability to propose their own unique view on a problem. Bringing in a networked structure of small businesses to look at a problem that has daunted corporate structures may actually lead to solutions that are unthinkable within that corporate structure, because the flexibility just is not available.

But certain results will never be achievable by small businesses alone, as much as certain solutions can never be found by large corporate structures. The key question that remains is how to capitalize on that understanding.

I believe that more and more independent, small businesses need to find each other. The flexible combination and recombination of independent structures into ad hoc solutions to problems the market has been struggling with retains both the quality of the independent expert and the combined force of the whole … provided it can be managed well. This would use a number of advantages of the corporate model without sacrificing the small business advantage.

The key to individual value creation will be good project management

In the industrial era, corporations developed to realize economies of scale. In the post-industrial era, this was copied to services. This led to our ability to produce a lot of the same things any times. What we need now is a way to create very specific, individual value to the customer. We are no longer trying to solve just a problem. We are now in the business of trying to solve "his" or "her" problem. That's an entirely different challenge, which can only be answered by the unique combination of specific expertise and the insight to combine this expertise to the point of successful project completion.

There lies, in my opinion, a significant opportunity. The bringing together is achievable by the tools and networks we're all linked into. The real in-project coordination, supporting these experts into timely delivery of a quality project within a budget, will be where the near future challenge lies. It makes me realize we have far too few project managers.

Answering that challenge will be a focus area for the near future. It's an issue in education, in product and services sales, even in development aid. And it is the prime area of innovation for the years to come.

The good news? We likely already have all the pieces of the puzzle. We just need to learn how to put them together.

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.

Cooperative competition on the internet

"Competing with the best of the best"

A couple of weeks ago, in Hypercritical episode 79 to be exact, Marco Arment, Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin replaced John Siracusa and exchanged ideas on a broad range of topics. Needless to say, it was less focused than Hypercritical usually is.

However, great minds to come together, and this podcast was no exception. Towards the middle of the episode, Arment stated that:

"You end up competing with the best of the best"

Arment was making the point that the internet is a powerful medium used by highly competent people to show their abilities. He explained how that challenged him to continue to improve the quality of his writing.

Are you willing to make mistakes?

It's a great time for anyone willing to make mistakes and be assisted by the world to learn from these mistakes. If you care to open up to input from others out there, and if you can take direct but often highly constructive criticism, you will learn more than you care to imagine.

As well as access to most of the tools used by those you admire, you will also get access to these people themselves. There are significantly fewer gatekeepers on the internet than there are in the real world. A lot of the people you admire were initially bootstrapped by people they admire. So quite a few of them are willing to pay it forward and coach you or at least give you a couple of minutes of their time to share their ideas about your work and how they would approach your challenges. They will often have been there and made those same mistakes, so theirs are invaluable lessons.

So, that blogger you admire so much: likely to be accessible. That programmer or designer: they may just have some time to help you solve the riddle that has been haunting you for so long. Because what goes for you also goes for them. Had they not gained access to people they admired, they may never have gotten where they are.

Another lesson from the internet

It's bizarre to conclude that whereas in the "real" world people will close the door on new talent storming on, the internet environment appears to foster people who not only keep the door open, but throw the rope down and help you climb up the wall you're facing.

By what means?

Solely reaching out through your blog is not very likely to result in reactions … there's a lot of blogs out there and only 24 hours in a day. But you never know, the best of the best have gotten where they are by checking out the competition, often before the competition knows they are in competition.

I'm not the best placed person to speak about SEO, so I can't give any meaningful feedback on that. My best guess is that in a world where everything is SEO optimized, SEO is no longer a true differentiator.

What does work, in my personal experience, is sharing your blog posts on a relevant topical social network such as Linked-In. Within Linked-In, topical groups allow you to find and converse with people with experience in or ideas about topics you are interested in and blogging about. These can be very diverse, as long as they are business related.

Competitive collaboration and exchange

What I've witnessed within these groups is what I refer to as competitive collaboration and exchange. People who in real life would likely never connect, even for simple reasons like not very be willing to talk to the competition, find each other and exchange very openly within the confines of such a topical group.

Linked-In promotes this, with their top 5 influencer of the week list which is visible within each group.

These platforms are a low threshold access to key expertise and ideas in very specific professional fields. It makes sense to participate in this exchange and even offer some questions of your own.

So dare to go out and learn.

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.

Cargo Cult management

A famous Feynman story

I first encountered the term "cargo cult" in the late 1980's when reading one of Richard Feynman's books, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" on his quite interesting life. He actually used it in a commencement address at CalTech in 1974. In short, he refers to a practice of dogmatically executing a set of activities in order to obtain a certain result but without the underlying essentials being present. The links above will give you more information on the excellent way Mr. Feynman made the point. For that I defer to him as one of science's great storytellers.

A lot of management is "cargo cult" management

The reason I'm bringing this up is that only last weekend, I was talking to some friends about the false expectations that exist about management in the minds of many people, and the dangers that entails. I contend that a lot of management is really "cargo cult" management. Let me explain my point.

We put someone, a "high potential" manager, in a certain position, with a management role and with the "mission" to manage, but without a clear context nor the access to the necessary tools, systems or even decision power about these to truly and actively manage his function, his processes, his team ...

The word "management" and the associated degree of the "MBA", the manager par excellence so to speak, is supposed to automagically result in better functioning and better outcomes. And interestingly, in the first few months after the entry of a new manager, functioning may actually improve. It took me a while to figure out that the most likely cause of this is probably "management by announcement", where the anticipation of and the first reaction to the new manager will lead people to believe that something may actually change. They adapt their functioning for a limited time, in anticipation of what they hope this new manager will bring is fundamentally different from the one that came before ... but the fairy-dust wears off after a while.

Failure of management is often due to failure of leadership

What is left is yet another "high potential" who failed to live up to the high expectations. There's a reason for those failures, and often the high potential is not the only one at fault. For a manager to manage, he needs a management system, a set of agreed upon, communicated underlying systems and procedures. These rules need to be clearly understood by the collaborators and consistently applied across the area or department the manager is responsible for. Ideally, these rules are the operational translation of a vision.

Now, let's contrast that to the reality that this new manager often finds himself walking into an environment where no such clarity exists. Real management first requires a thorough overhaul of systems and structures ... and exactly that overhaul is one of the last things a new manager will actually attempt to do. And the question is, should he be the basis of that overhaul.

Good, but especially relevant management has an essential prerequisite: good governance. A clear vision on where the organization is going with no lack of clarity on how to achieve that vision (operationalization) and who will do what (roles and responsibilities) to achieve that vision. In order to know what not to do, first you need to be very clear and succinct about what to do. So, if you want real management, you first need to create an environment in which it can actually take root. And the talent to create that environment is called leadership. A leader is someone who can develop and communicate a vision, its avenues and its constraints. A leader inspires people to find their way to that goal. Making sure the people get there in the most effective, efficient and economic fashion is the role of the manager.

Management should complement leadership

It reminds me of the description the late Stephen Covey had about the difference between leadership and management. A manager supports execution by the team, while the leader points the way. Lack of clear vision and direction just leads to teams running around in circles, without a clue as to where they are headed. Management cannot really influence that without requiring the manager to overstep his boundaries.

And management should not replace leadership. It should complement it.

Way more world than you (1:28:42)→

Merlin Mann hits gold

At 1:28:42 in the 83rd episode of Back to Work on the 5by5 network , Merlin Mann hits gold:

"If you allow the world to decide how you feel, you are fundamentally screwed. Because you're never going to win. That's not a fair fight. There is way more world than you."

If you can't win, perhaps you shouldn't play at that game

Think about this for a second. There is almost no way you will ever be able to win or even just draw if you allow other people (the world) to determine what you feel, especially what you feel and how you think about yourself. So perhaps you should not play at that game. However, often that's easier said than done.

Sense of self required

If you have no clear sense of "self", no real set of clearly determined goals that are relevant to you as well as a method, a way to work towards the completion of these goals and the development of others, you will become very reactive. In being reactive, you will allow others to influence the way you feel about you. That's your self-image.

As an example: Are you determined by what appears in your inbox, or do you determined whether you check your inbox and what you will or will not do with it? How does that influence how you feel about how "accomplished" you are? How well you are on top of your tasks?

GTD as a tool(set)

So, how does GTD come into all of this?
GTD is, to me, a specific set of activities which allow you to determine what you are about, allow you to translate that vision in a strategy, link this strategy to objectives and execute on a daily basis towards these objectives in an organized manner with minimal/optimal tool set changes. That's 50.000 ft to runway for the in-crowd.

In other words, your proper application of GTD should result in a better sense of self which in turn should protect you from the onslaughts of the world's (very temporary) onslaught on you. Very temporary because if you really believe that other people think about you that much, other than your loved ones, you need to think again.

And after all, isn't that one of the things that "Mind Like Water" in GTD parlance is all about?

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

Project versus outcome management

There is a hidden assumption among project owners, the ones that engage project managers to manage their projects, that any project they engage with will automatically succeed. The default position for project outcomes is, in their minds, success. Why else would they engage their time or means in that project?

The problem is that they fail to distinguish between project management and outcome management. In short, you can pretty much manage projects, but it's very difficult to manage outcomes. However, the project owner assumes that when the competent project manager comes on board, very thing will be fine.

Here's my take on where they make their mistake and why it is damaging.

Project management

We have pretty much figured out how to properly manage a project or a program of multiple projects. There are agood project management methodologies available which, when properly applied, will lead to a well managed project.

This is not to say that any project if supported by a good project manager and a good project management methodology will be a breeze. It won't. But it will be manageable and under control or at least out of control in a controlled manner.

For example, If the project owners are not aware of the key issues in the project, their investment in project management and the related reporting will need to be increased or improved to enhance transparancy. But that is a controllable issue. Even if the project management issues may not have originated internally, the management of the project can be managed internally or at least within the confines of the space or organization the project is being managed in.

So, the project can be managed provided competent people are combined with a relevant approach. That however does not garantee the envisioned outcome. Here's why.

Outcome management

The outcome is of course the result the project owner is aiming for. This is why they started or engaged with the project in the first place. They aim for a specific situation which is different from the initial situation. Note that the outcomes are (most often) not the deliverables. These deliverables are being produced by the project. They are the output of the project, an output which will assist in achieving the outcomes you were aiming for. However, they combine with other, often external factors to lead to a certain situation which is different from the initial situation you started from. So let's examine what can result?

• The best case is the situation where the outcome is what you were aiming for or better;
• However, realistically you may miss that outcome even if your best effort and the deliverables were there in a timely fashion.

The results combine with unexpected and often not manageable events which in turn determine with the final outcome of the project will be.

Are outcomes manageable?

In my experience outcomes are at best partially manageable, and will require a significant investment of time and effort with no guaranteed results. As an example:

Imagine your project deals with cost reductions in government operations. The results of your analysis are impeccable. However, because of the economic crisis the last thing government wants to do is to fire people. On the contrary, government feels they have a social responsibility, and starts to increase hires. Now imagine another project that, in conjunction with yours, had been working on automation to fill in reductions of workforce. In this scenario, it's unlikely that project will be taken to fruition.

So what to do?

In the course of any project, it's essential to have good, regular and transparant communication not only about the project and its results, but also about the impacts risks in the adjacency of the project will have on the required outcomes. While it may not save the project, it will put every stakeholder on the right page as soon as possible.

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.

About saying "no"

Background

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast by Brett Terpstra, Systematic on the 5by5 network with Merlin Mann as a guest. The high intensity, high velocity discussion was, as usual, excellent. My interest peaked during their discussion of the difficulty of saying "no". As I see it, there are a couple of possible reasons you may not say "no", or rather, say "yes" to everything.

Not saying "no" because you are afraid

This has been written and talked about a lot, so I'll just go over the gist of those ideas:

A lot of people are afraid of saying "no" to other people or to opportunities to do certain things. They don't want to disappoint, they don't want to irritate or even anger. The problem there, of course, is that the more you try to satisfy the other person by never saying "no" to them, the less you will have room to say "yes" to things you care about yourself. By saying "yes" to everything that passes your way, you live all lives but yours. And you may well be fine with that. But it's a slippery slope. If you said "yes" yesterday, you're more likely to just give in tomorrow as well. You've done it before, you don't want to be the contrarian, and what better is there to do? And before you know it, you're 70 years old, you look back on your life and think: "What the ** just happened?"

An important defense against this just saying yes to everything is to have a good idea what you are all about and what you want to achieve. What makes you tick? But again, there is an assumption here. You need to know who you are.

However, what if you don't know what you're about? What if you don't know what you want? What if you say yes because you are afraid that saying "no" may exclude you from that one essential opportunity that will allow you to discover yourself?

First, in my limited experience, life does not tend to work that way. Stuff you are likely to encounter, you will eventually encounter. This is less about some grander scheme and more about the fact that we live in a small world and the number of life experiences tends to be both more limited and at the same time a lot more intense than we believe them to be. But that's another blog post.

Second, how do you know it's an essential opportunity if you don't know what you are all about? So stop worrying about that. Because, again, in my limited experience, you seldom find yourself by looking through other people's eyes. You will more likely and quickly discover what you are about by honestly looking out of your own eyes at yourself.

Is the solution knowing what you're all about?

Well, it's certainly part of the solution. If you know what you want to achieve, what you are about and what makes you tick, saying "no" to opportunities which do not align with that vision of yourself becomes a lot easier. After all the direct opportunity cost is not doing something that brings you a step further on your path of 10.000 miles.

BUT, there is a big but here, which I've not seen too much written about: your vision of yourself may not be challenging yourself enough. You may be too entrenched in your comfort zone.

Just think about this for a minute: it's cosy. It's safe, or at least it appears to be. It's known and comforting. There are no real difficult challenges there. You may have decided that it's okay to settle. To accept that this is what it is. That you are fine to operate from that specific, well known perspective. But it may just be that you've settled for less than you are capable off. So, the question is: is that really what you want to look back on when you're 70 years old?

A case in point

I recently got a call from a former colleague and old friend. She had a bit of a challenge: she was offered an excellent but risky opportunity. Now, she could stay in the situation she was, which was a safe situation which played to her known strenghts and was squarely inside her comfort zone, or she could risk changing course and going with another opportunity. Lots of risk involved, less security, but more excitement and learning opportunity.

The fact she even called me to tell her that told me enough about what she wanted to do. She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to jump into the unknown of a new job opportunity. It's close to her competencies, but outside of her comfort zone from many perspectives. It is, in other words, the ideal place to learn. I did not give her an answer. I told her to listen to what she was telling herself to do, and be wary, but not afraid of the risks involved. After all, even your comfort zone is prone to risks. You're just so used to them you may not even see them anymore.

In conclusion

If you know what you want to achieve, and saying "no" comes very easy to you, it's entirely possible you're on the right track and everything is going well in your life. Congratulations to you.

However, It's also very possible you are too deep inside your comfort zone and are missing significant opportunities to learn. If there is no difficulty in your decision taking, dare to question whether you are still at the edge of your development curve.

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.