About muscle memory and luck

Admiration and jealousy

We admire people who appear to be able to perform certain feats as if with no considerable effort. And where there is admiration, there is often jealousy. We tend to get jealous of people whose life is apparently without effort.

We look at these people, and we compare their baseline competenties to our own. We feel we are similar, and often even better than they are. We are more intelligent, we have more strength, we have more talent ... yet they have, and we have not. It is not fair.

It is not about fairness

The point is that fairness has little to do with it. Because what we often fail to see is what went before. The entire evolution these people went through. The countless hours of effort, of failure, of doing it again, and again, and again. The hardship of the apprentice.The difference between them and us is often that they have done the work.

The fact that there are so few of them is not by definition an issue of scarcity of opportunity. It is more a witness to the fact that few of us have it in us to actually do the effort. We crave the results but are afraid of the pain.

Almost everyone you admire has done the work

Ascribing Picasso's success as just luck is a failure to understand the entire evolution of Picasso as a painter. Einstein did not just happen to discover the theory of relativity. It was not just something someone had left lying around.

We fail to recognize the effort that went before. Before a dancer can intuitively dance a piece, and put his or her heart into it, it takes weeks, months and years of diligent practice, in front of a mirror, with only few people seeing it. It takes getting up at ungodly hours of the morning, working, sweating, for little to no direct payback.

It's about the journey

Which brings us to another point. Few of these "gifted" people do it for the payback. Just as stated in this excellent IBM Linux commercial of 2003, which still sends shivers down my spine, "there is not much glory in poetry, only achievement." And that goes for pretty much anything. These people do it for the achievement, out of love for the game, or love for the journey.

GTD has never been about the shortcut

Which brings us to GTD. I truly believe GTD is more about diligent practice, about the creation of muscle memory of dealing with the myriad of things that get thrown our way, with stuff, in order to make it look easy. GTD is a system, and approach, which allows us to lead a better life.

But whether you use GTD or not, you should never forget that there are no shortcuts. Not really. There are practices which help you instill a commitment to a certain activity with no direct or visible payback. But there are no shortcuts.

Getting good at life

You want to get good at your life? Practice and perform at the same time. You do know what that is called, right? I believe it is called living.

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.

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 - 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

How many possible worlds can you see?

I’ve been thinking about the entire subsection of GTD which relates to better definition of outcomes and ultimately better results. The storytelling and delegation post can be considered as a couple of ideas aiming to solve a subset of that entire issue, which can pretty much be summarized as follows: “How do I make sure that I define my projects, even single action projects, in such a way that I myself or those I delegate to are most likely to succeed?”

The easy solution

There is an easy solution to this ... make your outcome definition as weak as possible so you can check off the project action as done or achieved without lying to yourself. Of course, this is how you shoot yourself in the foot over the long term. If you continually undermine your own outcomes, your achievements will not amount to much. Then you can blame the methodology for not supporting you, and it won’t be on you. I’m starting from the assumption that you, dear reader, are not that kind of person. Although sometimes we all are.

The difficult solution

Defining your outcomes, what you want to achieve, is very much about having a clear view on what the outcomes can be, and what you believe the outcome should ultimately be. Fully understanding what the outcomes can be requires you to be able to see multiple future worlds. And therein lies the rub.

The quality of outcomes

When conducting brainstorming exercises, the number of ideas the group is asked to generate is often a multiple of the actual number of ideas used. There’s a reason for this: if you ask a group of people for their best five ideas, they are likely to give you their first five ideas or at most the best of their first ten ideas. This is why we often ask people to generate 50 our more ideas.

Our self-imposed educational limitations

The reason is simple: we tend to settle for less, as a group and as individuals. The same goes for outcomes. When we define them, we tend to look for one relevant outcome, and not the breath nor width of options available to us.

By the way, I strongly believe that our current educational system is limiting our children in their ability to see enough worlds out there. The insistence on keeping them occupied as well as the truly ancient way of educating people to conform to standards of performance which are only useful in a production, not a knowledge worker context, is robbing our children of their inate natural flexibility of seeing multiple possible outcomes. But that’s another post.

The interesting thing is that some people that choose to ‘adapt’ the educational structures for their own purposes, such as Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerberg, have succeeded in keeping that capacity for broad visioning alive. It’s a trait sorely lacking in a lot of so-called business and other leaders today.

What we lose if we don’t define better outcomes

If our outcomes are limited by our daring to be creative, our lives are limited by the quality of those outcomes. So, we really owe it to ourselves to provide our projects with high quality outcomes which take in account that the environment and the context in which we try to achieve these outcomes may change.

How to

Alright, but what can we do to enhance our outcomes? I’ve made a shortlist of a couple of key ideas which will get you started:

1. Look further than first outcomes: when defining a project, look at other possible outcomes of your actions and how they will count to furthering the achievement of your project.
2. Quantify some kind of metrics around your larger project outcomes: what do you consider good enough? You should not necessarily go for 100% perfection, but you need to know when you can count on your results enough to further the achievement of your broader goals.
3. Self-evaluate regularly: regular self-evaluation will help you in checking where you are in terms of the achievement of your goals. I like journaling for this purpose, but there are many other approaches that are as good or better. See what works for you, but stick with it.
4. Close out your projects when your outcomes are within the brackets you defined: sometimes we tend to continue on in a project even when we have achieved what we needed to achieve. This is often the case if we fear shipping our results. Committing to closing a project when we have achieved what needed to be done, when it is good enough, is another element which really helps me.

If you try to do at least these things in a consistent manner for your larger projects, I’m certain you will see a marked improvement in your results. Good luck.

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.

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?

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.

A great email decision

One of my best decisions in a long time: I’ve ditched my email client at work in exchange for a regular, planned access through our email web client. Turns out that I actually spend a lot less time in my email browser window than I did in my email client.

To be more concrete, while I spent on average 1 hour per day in my Lotus Notes email client, I now spend about 20 minutes per day in my domino browser account. The end result is that I spend on opening and answering mail about 3 times less, with the same effectiveness.

End result: a lot less distraction and a great deal of work that actually gets done.

Are folders gates to procrastination?

Following Sven’s advice

I just did what I should have done a long time ago: I followed Sven Fechner’s advise. His “Simplicity is Bliss” blog is a wonderful resource for common sense productivity tips and other great Mac inspired ideas.

But, back to my point. Mr. Fechner suggested that a simple folder structure in mailbox structures, using just an archive folder and working with very targetted tags is a good approach. Thinking this through, I agreed, and started to eliminate my folders on both my professional Lotus Notes mailbox and my home gmail account … and I started to notice something smelly.

Lift rock, see dirt and vermin

Eliminating the folders, and actually checking their content before I transferred everything to an archive mailbox, I felt how you feel when you lift a rock in your garden that has been there for ages, and I see the pale white insects crawling from under it. There was a lot of dirt and semi-dead insects under my folders.

What folders do

Folders remove information from your immediate field of view. If you don’t have any good tracking systems which take less time to use than it would take to just keep everything in an indeterminate pile of “stuff” (David Allen interpretation here), putting things in folders amounts to putting stuff on top of stuff and hoping you’ll somehow, magically, be reminded of what you needed to do.

At best, you will be touching that stuff multiple times before you decide what your next action is. At worst, there are a couple of ticking time bombs out there that can explode at any second. I can just imagine a muffled thump coming out of my computer, and some dust. That’s what it should be, I feel.

By removing “things” from your point of view, I feel I am encouraged to procrastinate. I do not need to deal with that now. And if I forget, I do not need to deal with that later either. Unless I have to because it has become too important to deal with.

Why did I ever use folders to begin with?

It gave me a sense of “control”. Reference filing became an excuse for putting things away in piles with flags on top of it. However, “stuff” remains stuff, even if you plant a flag on it and call it something. GTD again makes sense. Don’t try to touch it twice, identify and define next action, delegate, file for reference, file for later or destroy/shred. The moment you stop doing this or postpone it until later, you will get in trouble.

The dreaded to-file folder

My mouth literally dropped open when I found, hidden in the recesses of my personal gmail folder structure, a folder “to file” with more than 50 emails in it. This was quite confrontational, as I was sure I had all my GTD ducks in a row. Yet apparently, in a bout of desperation, I must have parked a number of actionable emails here for later treatment and had promptly forgotten about them. Suddenly, it made sense why certain friends had “forgotten” to get back to me. They had, it was me who had not gotten back to them. The shame!

What’s next

I ended up with a significant pile of email to deal with. The professional email was under control, lucky for me. I’m rather picky about correct GTD application in that part of my life. However, I went through the personal email literally one at a time, just as David Allen prescribes. I rebooted my personal GTD approach, and I had to.

I marked all those emails as unread and then only opened one email at a time, not looking at the list of remaining emails. I decided on concrete next actions or used MailTags as triggers for a tickler file entry. And I did this email, per email, per email …

Simplicity

Simplicity, and peace of mind, is also being able to look around you and not see boxes or closets in which a skeleton may hide. No more folders unless it’s reference filing, no more putting away stuff and never seeing it again. No more stuff.

Working on a (creative) task versus working in a context (UPDATED)

For those not familiar with GTD, David Allen’s highly successful personal productivity approach, get this book (please note this is my affiliate link, you can of course log onto Amazon yourself), and read the first three chapters. It’s worth it, if only for the different way you’ll be looking at your work and your life.
GTD refers to contexts, areas or situations in which you execute certain work. Context are one of three elements that help determine what you can best do next. The methodology suggests to try and remain in a context as long as possible to work optimally.

Why contexts matter

The idea of contexts is based on money concept of our modern production oriented society: working in a production line, executing a comparable task over and over again. The reason for this is simple, and still applies today: changes in tooling, sets of tools used in the execution of a task, cost time. This is non-productive time since you are not actually producing during the time allotted for the tool change. To optimize the production time, you minimize the need for tooling changes as well as the time required to change the tool. To put it simply, if you’re at your desk behind the computer in your word processor, stay there as long as possible.

The production belt or production chain is the ultimate tooling change optimization: you never change the tools, but the product, solution or whatever you’re working on in its different stages of completion moves through a set of tools.

Tool changes and sequential execution

Often contexts are related to tools or their modern day equivalents. Certain activities can only be executed in a certain environment, or requiring a certain tool, system, software or person only available at a certain place.

Imagine I’m working on a project. I have a task list with a certain sequence and dependencies. I first need to write this paper, then have it read by that person, then present it to that meeting, then have it signed of by that person … If I sequentially run through those activities, I will likely execute a good project. But, I will have a lot of non-productive time and idle time as well. After all, there’s a lot of tool set changes involved and a lot of waiting as well. I have to give the reviewer the time to review, I need to prepare the presentation, I need to see someone for his or her signature. Not really very productive at all.

In all of this, I’ve lost a lot of time. If I have more than one project, it pays to remain in a context to execute as many as possible the tasks I need to perform in that context prior to jumping to the next context. For example, it seems wise to first write all the papers you need to write prior to starting the development of your presentations. The tool switch cost from writing app to presentation app is minimized.

why contexts don’t always make sense

But this doesn’t always make sense. Certainly not in creative work.

Think about the following situation and its associated cost. I’m working on a project which requires me to write both a report and a supporting presentation. I’m also working on another, unrelated project with another presentation due. Which of the following would cost me most?

The tool switch or the mind switch? A mind switch requires me to abandon a train of thought in favor of another, while a tool switch requires me to abandon a set of tools in favor of another. I’m convinced that in certain cases the productivity impact of the mind switch is more significant than the productivity impact of the tool switch.

An illustration of the difference between mind and tool

Let me clarify: imagine you are asked to write a number of proposals. Part of this may be retrieving proposal templates or prior written proposals from a repository. The context here may be for example “online - proposal database” and for this activity a tool change is not appropriate. You get out of the proposal database what you need for the different proposals.

Once you have the templates, you start developing and writing. An important “meta-context” for me is mind mapping, but this is a meta context in that it often requires me to go through multiple tool switches during the activity. I do the mind mapping in Mindnode Pro, but I will frequently be switching back and forth between my browser, my notes (which I keep in text files in Dropbox) and the mindmapping software. For me, the frequent tool switches I make are actually part of the creative work. I can do this because the tools all together form the creative analysis and development context for me.

In essence, my context is no longer a unique context of one tool, one activity or one environment, but rather a set of complementary tools which together allow me to work towards a certain result.

UPDATE - A number of better GTD experts than me pointed out that there is no explicit mention of remaining in a context for as long as you can. I stand corrected, they are right. However, switching context too frequently often carries too high a tool switching cost, unless you have all your tools arranged in order to optimize efficient and effective use. Therefore, while it may not be explicitly mentioned, I do feel remaining in context is an important aspect to the entire productivity concept.

Why work programs work

The short of it

Audit work programs work because they require you to think about what you are going to do before you do it. They take away the stress of worrying how you should approach a certain audit issue for 90% of the time, because you have thought about it before your audit team was on the ground, facing the problem.

The practice of writing good audit workprograms is disappearing

I scout the internet for new audit workprograms quite often. My first traditional port of call is Auditnet. They provide a good selection and I understand their premium program is very good. Still, with constrained budgets there are other acquisitions which get priority, so I look around.

I don’t necessarily look for work programs I need right now, I like to have the feeling that somewhere in my dropbox library is an audit work program for most of my standard audit needs.

The problem is that even though the internet is growing, I feel I am getting less and less relevant audit work programs in my google search results. Perhaps the art of writing good audit work programs is disappearing?

Defining an audit work program

An audit work program to me has always been a detailed description of the audit procedures to be executed to adequately cover a certain aspect to be audited. It is a step-by-step overview of instructions which allow for even a person with limited training to execute specific steps in an audit.

Audit work programs are not written for stupid people, although the first time you see one, you may think they are. Rather, they embody some of David Allen’s key GTD principles … by getting your tasks out of your head and on paper (or whatever medium) you reduce part of the stress. In order to get to that point, you need to make the investment of developing audit work programs. But what’s the real added value?

The relevance of the audit work program

Internal auditors can encounter significant stress. There is a limited timeframe to execute the audit. Requested documents are not always ready on time. Unexpected findings come up and need to be dealt with. Auditees are stressed and react negatively to the auditor. And now I’m only describing daily audit situations. At times like that, it’s good to know that a lot of what you need to be doing is well explained in a structured and executable set of instructions. If you don’t need to think about how you need to do what you do, you can spend more time understanding what is going on based on the information you gather.

Beating procrastination

There’s another advantage. Auditors are (like) people. Like everyone else, we can succumb to procrastination, to postponing what needs to be done and chasing the interesting finding. On occasion, we can even chase our own tails. But then the work is not getting done.

The point of the audit work program is to describe the work to be executed in such manageable chunks that the threshold to execution diminishes to the point where the resistance to doing the work is low enough to push us forward. Again, we are protecting ourselves from our own procrastination. And we ensure we do our job: providing the audit committee and the board with information on due diligent behavior of our auditees.

Happiness through workprograms

It may seem a bit bizarre, but in my professional life there are few situations I’ve been consistently more happy than when developing and executing a good work program. It holds you with your nose to the ground and close to the work. It requires some deep thinking on how you can most effectively and efficiently execute an audit step. It helps you focus on the facts and the figures, not the narrative surrounding them. It helps you to see clearly.

Of course I had my epic project proposal wins when I worked as a consultant. Of course being involved in a green field brainstorming and suddenly seeing the way to a solution is a kick. And taking a group of people through a discovery process really gets the blood flowing.

But for professional satisfaction … nothing beats a good, well developed audit work program. When I’m in the middle of development or execution, it always brings a smile to my face. Because I know that whatever comes out of the audit, our work does not go where our minds have not gone before.

Managing my "Instapaper not yet read" guilt with ReadNow

"I could have read this months ago"

Last July I sent a promising mac.appstorm article to my Instapaper queue. Its title? “ReadNow: Native Instapaper and Read it Later Management” I just recently read it … and after having read it, I acted on it immediately. But I could have acted on it at least five months ago.

Lack of diligence sabotages my Instapaper use

That situation illustrates one of the main issues I’m having with the excellent Instapaper app and Instapaper service Marco Arment has designed. Let’s be clear, my issue is not about Instapaper at all. The solution is excellent and scratches a serious itch I have. The problem is that Instapaper for me has turned into yet another bucket which, if not regularly emptied of its contents, starts festering and getting on my nerves. The usefulness of Instapaper, combined with my lack of diligence in emptying it on a regular basis (i.e. reading the contents or at least scanning through them and retaining or discarding them) results in a subconscious resistance to its use. There is a significant risk that I substitute Instapaper with sent to mail, where the articles just start clogging up my mailbox. That pressure on my mailbox will result in an ever more decreasing likelihood that I will empty my Instapaper queue, … and that’s where my system breaks down.

What I really needed

Absurd as it may sound, I needed a solution such as Reeder, but for my Instapaper queue. I need a solution which will allow me to read my Instapaper queue, ideally offline, when I am at home with a couple of minutes to spare or on a train with an article written and some time left before disembarking with an open MacBook on my lap.

Again, Marco's iPad and iPhone solutions are excellent, but they do not allow me to crunch the articles at the same speed I normally go through my RSS feeds. And in essence, my Instapaper queue is filled with Reeder articles I wanted to save for later reading.

ReadNow

Enter ReadNow. I downloaded the app to both my iMac and my MacBook Air the moment I knew of its existence. And I see my reading list shrinking. Opening ReadNow and scanning through the articles, easily reading, then filing or discarding an article has resulted in a significant reduction of my open to read list in Instapaper. When behind the screen of a Mac, ReadNow has become my preferred means of accessing and going through my Instapaper queue. It has significantly augmented the added value Instapaper has for me, and has resulted in a tangible reduction of the fear of putting interesting information in a bucket out of sight, out of mind. ReadNow has provided me with a low resistance way of accessing that information, and is an interesting and to me essential addition to the Instapaper apps I have available on both iPhone and iPad.

Simplifying risk models

A brief history

The relevance of using risk models as the basis for risk management was disputed in the beginning of this century. It actually remains disputed as an approach by a number of authors. In the early ‘00’s, leading risk management advisory companies did not see the reason to use models. They felt it impeded organizations from assessing the entirety of their risks. In the late 1990’s, Arthur Andersen was the first company to start structuring risk models as a basis for the structural implementation of enterprise risk management. Some of their risk models remain as risk models you can for example find in Protiviti’s Knowledge Leader.

The wider adoption of risk models

Risk models really came to the fore towards the end of the ’00s, when experiments in implementing enterprise risk management or ERM systems showed a significant flaw in the prior reasoning: people did not share a mutual understanding of the term ‘risk’ and even failed to agree on a common definition for the most traditional of risks.

A solution wasthe development of risk models: industry specific structured overviews of potential risks which could occur in companies active in a certain industry, with a clear definition of what the risk means in agreed upon terms. Agreed upon terms would be adapted to company specific terms, in order to limit the risk of misunderstanding and thus mistreatment of a specific risk.

The challenge of today’s risk models

In our quest to increase the transparency and the unified interpretation of risk models, I fear we may have overcomplicated them. Overcomplicating a risk model – or any model for that matter – lowers the adoption rates by users. Therefore, while the move towards a more complex set of risk models was necessary to develop enough detail in the risk models, we now need to make the reverse move. This move should not be towards no risk models, but towards a list, an overview of possible risks.

The added value of risk management

Because what is the actual added value of risk management? It is the optimization of our response to priority, identifiable risks if and when they occur. Risk management should NOT be a central pillar of a management system. It adds to better risk response, and can be added to ways in which an organization is run, but should not be the central element.

In essence, even if no management exists, this would not preclude risk management systems to exist across an entity or a group of entities.

Let me explain: we see the demise of certain (types of) corporations, especially, but not only in the services sector. These are being replaced by decentral, distributed networks of independent contractors which come together on a project-by-project basis. Perhaps more than ever, these decentralized networks need risk management, but they inherently do not have a management structure to, well, structure their risk management.

The trigger list in Getting Things Done

So, how do you manage risk in a distributed, decentralized environment, or in any type of environment for that matter, in an as cost-effective way as possible? You develop a risk trigger list.

Actually, this idea is not new. I borrow the central idea from David Allen, who in his excellent book called Getting Things Done refers to an incompletion trigger list as an essential tool for the brain dump, in essence a way of clearing any issues in your head and getting them on paper, for further processing.

The trigger list is a very powerful tool: it is small enough (David Allen’s trigger list covers at most 2 modest pages) to be used on a regular basis and yet complete enough so all elements you may have forgotten can be dealt with.

The Risk trigger list

In order to enhance adoption of risk management as a tool, in order to make it usable on a regular basis and complete enough to deal with most risks one could forget, I would suggest to develop a risk trigger list per project, process, organization or even industry. This trigger list, which should not be more than 2 pages long, contains trigger words, words that will result in a comprehensive listing of most of the relevant risks which can occur in that process, project, organization or industry.

You may be surprised. At least per industry, I believe at least 50% of the risks will be the same across organizations. The list will partly be generic, and partly specific to the organization, the process or the project. Developing a risk trigger list should be one of the first responsibilities in any new process or project.

The relevance

By simplifying the comprehensive risk models we’ve developed in the past 10 years and condensing them into risk trigger lists, we may reach the critical threshold to wider adoption of risk management principles, which will in turn lead to better managed processes, projects, organizations and industries.

Better capture, processing and next action organization

I’ve been using mind mapping in combination with with OmniFocus for better capture, processing and next action execution. Let me tell you a bit on how I got there.

My brain is chaos

Sometimes, I have chaos for a brain. I’m not kidding. In the past, this has led to those well known and recognized moments of quiet, significant desperation and the feeling of impeding doom and trepidation as deadlines approached. I hope at least some of you have on occasion felt the sudden realization hit that you completely forgot about one crucial aspect which will be discussed by your boss, peers or colleagues that very same day. That one element that you needed to contribute, and forgot about.

Now, that’s the kind of situation I really wanted to avoid. So I did all the required reading. I started with the 7 Habits. Interesting, but I missed the bullet list telling me what to do. What can I say, I’m an operationally minded guy. I read Getting Things Done, even became a paying member of GTD Connect, and reaped some of the benefits, although I really didn’t use it enough. I filled Moleskine after Moleskine, and still things slipped through the cracks.

The breakthrough

Then I discovered mind mapping. And started to understand some of the power of a tool like OmniFocus.

The capture list - visual thinking applied

Now, I’m a very visual thinker. I think in images. Mind mapping has always helped me to formulate thoughts and ideas. I use it even to blog. Most of my blog posts, even this one, have been at least partly mind mapped before I start to write. Developing my capture list in a mind map was a revelation. Note I call this a capture list, not a next action list. My capture list is about exactly that: capturing.

What I do in this mind map is true brain dumping. The free format works for me. Free thinking about stuff I need to do or deal with, or even not but that is still on my mind. I feed it with notes I have taken when I was not in the opportunity to work on the mind map directly during the day. These notes are in my trusted Moleskines. Hey, I spent the money on them, better use them. So if it doesn’t go directly on the mind map, it goes in the Mokeskine.

Oh, by the way, I use the GTD completion checklist as an important weekly backstop to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s an excellent tool, and this way it does not get in my way.

OPML as a transition to OmniFocus

After I have done the capture phase, and I try to do this at least every three days (equivalent of twice a week), I open the entire mind map, which I have saved in OPML format, on my Mac. This is still a bit labor intensive but it does the trick on making me focus on processing, I highlight the words/characters of the topic of the mind map, usually at the end of the branch since I find the basis for my capture activity there.

Using services, I can then easily export this to OmniFocus’ inbox or even in a specific context or a folder. Now, and this is an important bit, using the services, I need to rewrite the OmniFocus entry. This is processing as I decide at that moment what I aim to do with this entry. I have the freedom to decide at that point whether I want to file this away for later or even discard it. It is an approach that focuses me on my decisions to define next actions on stuff, as David Allen calls it.

Tools

In terms of tools, I already mentioned OmniFocus. A great tool, I just wish there was a way to work with it in Windows as my most important client uses that platform rather than OS X. The mindmapping I do, I do in Mindnode Pro on Mac and iThoughts HD on my iPad. I save the mind map in OPML on my Dropbox account so I can retrieve the latest version from whatever device I am working on.

There you go. I just wanted to share what works for me.