What do you really need to start?

How starting with just enough sometimes beats having it all.

Merlin Mann recommends Re-potting with Resources:

If, tomorrow morning, you had 60% of the time and resources you needed to start making anything you wanted, what would it be? And, what would you do first?

The reason I throw in that "60% of what you need," is that it’s just enough to make the question interesting and ambitious. Give someone no resources, and they have no imagination. Give them all the resources and they break ground on a Hooters in their garage. But, give someone most of the resources they need, and you have a delightful real-world challenge to the creative imagination.

Which led me to wonder: what other advantages accrue for someone who starts with only 60% of what they think they need?

Knowing less might allow better decisions.

In Blink and in subsequent talks, Malcolm Galdwell outlined how less information sometimes makes for better decisions. He tells the story of Cook County Hospital in Chicago, where doctors make more accurate diagnoses of chest pain using reduced information. They ignore lifestyle factors and family history, focusing instead on a few key measures such as blood pressure and ECG.

During a 2007 Hamline University talk, Gladwell was asked how to limit information only to the valuable. He replied:

[Advocates of] open-source [intelligence] would argue that limitation of any kind in an information-saturated environment is good. And it doesn't really matter what you limit; it simply matters that you limit. In other words, there are certain thresholds; once you're above the threshold, regardless of the quality of the information, the decision-maker’s judgment is disabled. They're just overwhelmed. And all you've got to do is get below the threshold, and you're better off. You're not perfect, but you're better off.

A great example of this is how insanely inaccurate CIA estimates of Soviet capabilities were prior to the fall of the Berlin wall. These guys were so far off-base, it was laughable. Now, how could that be? They had access to thousands and thousands of pages of data about the Soviet Union. The best, highest-quality stuff from our best intel. Well, the answer is that that itself was the problem. They just had too much access to information. The people who ended up making wiser judgments about the Soviet Union were journalists, people writing books, and academics . . .

This does not mean ignorance is best (or even bliss). Cook County’s chest pain metrics were derived from masses of data. But if too much information damages decision processes, consider starting with what you already have. Gathering more information may overload your ability to render judgments.

Time and resource constraints create focus.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen wrote about constraints upon action:

At 3:22 on Wednesday, how do you choose what to do? There are four criteria you can apply, in this order:

1. Context
2. Time available
3. Energy available
4. Priority

Note that "priority" comes last, while "context" comes first. In this model, context is defined by where you are (at home, in the office, out for errands) and what tools and resources you have available (phone, computer, etc.). Given this definition, Allen’s order of application emerges naturally. Even if a phone call is your number-one priority, you can’t make it on an airplane; the air marshals will wrestle you to the floor if you turn on your phone. It doesn’t matter if writing your novel is the most important thing in your life if you are too tired to type, much less think (although, arguably, you only need the former). This model essentially removes priority and focuses on possibility.

Big, complex, new, or merely creative projects often involve ambiguity about what can and should happen first. Time and resource constraints limit your options, removing ambiguity. Maybe you don’t have the camera to take the photos or footage you want to, but that doesn’t prevent you from scouting locations or researching technique (it also suggests actions: "Ask ___ about borrowing camera").

With fewer options, you can spend time and energy acting, rather than deciding what to do. And you will be further along when you finally do get everything you need.

Starting is Just Enough.

You will always need some resources. If you want to make a live-action movie, no amount of initiative can substitute for a camera. But I believe starting when you have just enough is more valuable than endlessly looking for (or worrying about) the resources to finish. Whether you have 60%, 2%, or 100% of the resources you need, you have a 0% chance of finishing what you never begin. Start the project you are excited about now, even if you don’t have everything you need. As you move from idea to action, you might just discover you are missing less of what you need than you thought.

Friday, October 30, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:52 AM | Contact

Counterintuition

Why we fall in love with--or just fall for--surprising ideas

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”
-Jim Thompson

Why are many business, success, and self-improvement books built on “counterintuitive” concepts?

Some examples:

• Gallup’s 1999 book First, Break All the Rules illustrates the failings of the “conventional wisdom” about performance management and employee retention.
• Books on productivity and work/life balance turn familiar arrangements on their heads; witness Ricardo Semler’s Seven Day Weekend and Timothy Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week.
• Julie Morgenstern’s Making Work Work was renamed Never Check E-mail in the Morning. Apparently, even that was insufficiently counterintuitive, so someone had to tell us the book was surprising by adding the subtitle “and other unexpected strategies for making your work life work.”
• Malcolm Gladwell challenged our sense of proportion in cause/effect relationships with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. More recent works in this subgenre include The Power of Less, The Power of Small, and The Power of Slow.

Why do authors and publishers push the counterintuitive? Maybe, counter-intuitively, such ideas hold an intuitive appeal. Perhaps we automatically, instinctively give them more weight than their accuracy or significance merits.

Caught by Surprise

In Made To Stick, Dan and Chip Heath suggest that ideas tend to stick when they surprise us. They describe the physiological reaction to surprise--widening eyes, gaping mouth, cessation of speech and movement--and the apparent function of this reaction:

So surprise acts as a kind of emergency override when we confront something unexpected and our guessing machines fail. Things come to a halt, ongoing activities are interrupted, our attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised us.

The counterintuitive, of course, runs counter to our intuitions. This surprises, and surprise captures attention.

Memorably Counterintuitive

Once they grab our attention, counterintuitive ideas often find a handhold in our memories.

Barrett and Nyhof (2001, as cited in Upal, Gonce, Tweney, & Slone, 2007) conducted research on the recall of concepts contained in Native American folktales and in a story about an alien museum. The stories used included intuitive concepts (such as a being that was self-aware), counterintuitive concepts (such as an immortal being), and merely bizarre concepts (such as a 1000-lb. being). They found that recall was best for the counterintuitive, and worst for the intuitive.

In discussing other memory research and their own experiments, Upal et al. suggest that the ever-frugal brain assumes it can reconstruct or reacquire intuitive information using what is already known; since it would be more difficult to reconstruct counterintuitive information, the brain encodes a new memory instead. The counterintuitive stands out in our memories.

Need for Novelty

In Satisfaction, Dr. Gregory Berns explores neuroscience, cooking, Icelandic mythology, S&M, and 100-mile ultra-marathons (which might, themselves, be classified as S&M). He sought the source of satisfaction, and formed this theory:

If you believe that the world is unpredictable . . . then a straightforward way to counteract such unpredictability is to motivate humans to better their predictions. . . .

The drive to predict leads to a single outcome in a fundamentally unpredictable world--the need for novelty. I have come to understand novelty as the one thing that we all want.

One way to pin down novelty is through its relationship with information. Novel events, when they occur, contain a great deal of information that you don't already know.

I would expect counterintuitive ideas to be more novel, on average, than intuitive ideas. They promise new information, so we may feel driven to seek them.

Bored by Common Sense

Back in Made to Stick, the Heaths point out that we don’t pay attention to new information if we do not feel a corresponding gap in our knowledge. Per the Heaths:

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn't they? If I already intuitively "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it?

Counterintuitive information enjoys a clear advantage over common sense.

What does this mean?

There seem to be good reasons why counterintuition captures attention and remains memorable. Why should we care?

We are biased in favor of counterintuitive information because it is likely to contain new and novel information, not necessarily because that information is valuable, or even true. For example, both The Secret and Predictably Irrational dispute the conventional wisdom. The Secret does so with anecdotal stories, metaphysical assertions, and a misunderstanding of quantum physics. Predictably Irrational does so with extensive behavioral economics experiments by a social scientist at MIT.

Sometimes, a concept is counterintuitive because it contradicts reality. If we stay conscious of the power of surprise, maybe we can evaluate new ideas on merit, rather than unexpectedness.

Monday, October 26, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:34 AM | Contact

Software, Horses, and Clean Slates

Starting over--at least on paper--today

Leo Babauta’s Coding Simplicity: How to Avoid Feature Creep in Your Life begins with a description of feature creep, the tendency of software designers to add one feature after another, until a piece of software can become bloated and complicated. He recommends doing what Microsoft and Adobe won’t, and start over:

Step 1. Start from a blank slate.
I’m not saying you should abandon your home and cars and family and job and go live in a cave. I’m saying take out a fresh sheet of paper (or a blank text file ...) and re-image your life. From a blank canvas.

Imagine your life had nothing in it. We’re going to be bolder than Microsoft and Adobe and do what they need to do: abandon software that has become bloated over a decade or two of feature creep, and start our code from scratch.

Good idea.

Blank slates inspire me. Fresh, empty sketchbooks and notebooks, a new job, a new home, a new semester--all boost my enthusiasm. But thinking of the baggage and commitments in my life often keeps me from getting too wild in my goal-setting.

I am not alone. In The Referendum (hat tip: Social Science Statistics Blog), Tim Kreider writes about how small initial differences in decision, over time, become magnified: once you settle down and have kids (for example) you more or less commit twenty years to the enterprise. This leads to comparisons and “what-if” thinking:

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.

Kreider also describes the high stakes that drive these comparisons:

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.”

This is a form of path dependence, which Wikipedia describes as how “the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past.”

Given these constraints, will an imagined blank slate merely result in pie-in-the-sky thinking, or worse, rumination and comparison?

John Gruber’s recent post about FileMaker’s Bento suggests a way out:

FileMaker--the product, not the company--is old and big and cross-platform and there are tons of professionals who depend upon it. Bento isn’t a replacement for FileMaker; it’s a do-over alternative. FileMaker’s forte is in approachable visual database software. Bento is their answer to the question, “What would we do if we were starting over from scratch for the Mac today?”

Combine this example with Kreider’s “Referendum.” FileMaker didn’t ruminate and say (metaphorically), “What if I had stayed single and started that band?” Rather, it said, “If I take what I’m known for and good at, but start over using what I know now and my current resources, how would I do it?” Rather than treating their baggage as liabilities, it focuses on the current reality as an opportunity.

Gruber’s example reminds me of The Power of Impossible Thinking’s passage on horses in the age of the automobile:

[Horses are] often the preferred mode of ranch and farm work or police patrols through city streets and parks where motor vehicles might be too loud or dangerous. Horses also have nostalgic or emotional appeal, as seen in the horse-drawn carriages at royal wedding or the horse that rode with boots reversed in its stirrups during the funeral of President John F. Kennedy.

In the U.S.-led war in the rugged and hostile terrain of Afghanistan in 2002, U.S. special forces soldiers and Afghan allies took to horseback to move at night along perilous mountain trails. From their saddles, they used hand-held computers to help direct the precision-guided munitions of their air force to their targets on the ground. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it "the first cavalry charge of the 21st century.”

The automobile replaced and surpassed the horse without erasing the horse from human endeavor. Similarly, FileMaker’s older, bigger product--the eponymous application FileMaker--still exists. Bento wasn’t a one-way shift from old code to new.

If you do want to try to re-imagine your life from the ground up, keep in mind that you need not jettison all baggage at once. Many changes are, in fact, not between mutually-exclusive states. Just because your vision includes a shiny black Model T does not mean it’s time to burn the stables and serve horse stew.

Friday, October 23, 2009 Posted by Max at 4:21 PM | Contact

Putting the "Done" in "Getting Things Done"

The importance of defining outcomes

David Allen’s Getting Things Done affected my thinking about time- and attention-management in a profound way. His ideas and quotes show up in virtually every essay on this site. But how, exactly, does one go about, you know, actually getting things done? In an interview for Cutting Edge magazine, Allen gave a concise explanation:

You define what "done" means and you decide what "doing" looks like.

That seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? If it is so commonsensical, why do I (and, I gather, others) spend little time actually thinking about what "done" means for any given project? Why am I more apt to just start things (or, more often, think about wanting to start them while not starting them) than to take 30 seconds to define my outcome?

For some goals (cooking stir-fry, or filling the gas tank of my car), the purpose is relatively obvious. While there might be some value in thinking through the deeper issues imbedded in these tasks (Is this stir-fry what I really want to eat tonight? Am I doing enough to conserve fuel?), I see my goal clearly. For some of the bigger games in life--charting a process at work, organizing my home office, planning a trip to visit friends, writing a presentation--defining what "done" means makes a bigger difference.

If we find ourselves ducking this commonsense step towards completing projects, it might be because it seems like common sense. As the Brothers Heath wrote in Made To Stick:

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn't they? If I already intuitively "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what sounds like common sense often isn't . . .

And that seems to be the case here; I feel I intuitively get David’s point about defining "done." Which may, the Heaths suggest, prevent me from taking it seriously.

Whether this rule seems intuitively correct or not, do we have evidence that it’s true? As it happens, I find support for Allen’s assertion both in the management sciences literature and in project management circles.

First, Young Han Chun and Hal G. Rainey (2005) present "Goal Ambiguity and Organizational Performance in U.S. Federal Agencies," one of their studies on goal clarity. They used a survey of a population of governmental agency employees to measure organizational, evaluative, and priority goal ambiguity (in essence, how clearly people understand the goals, how clearly people understand the progress measures, and how clearly people understand the priorities among multiple goals).

They found:

[I]n relation to managerial effectiveness, work quality, customer service, and productivity, goal clarity is good. Higher levels of directive and evaluative goal ambiguity related to lower levels on the four performance variables, and higher priority goal ambiguity related to lower managerial effectiveness. In government organizations with lower goal ambiguity and hence higher goal clarity, survey respondents gave more positive responses on the performance-related questions. This supports prescriptions from a variety of sources that leaders and others in organizations should invest in goal clarification.

In other words, a lack of clarity about the nature of the goal, or about progress towards the goal, had (according to the survey respondents) a relationship with work quality and productivity (among other things). "Doing" will suffer, unless you know what "done" looks like and how to measure "done-ness."

The latter point--how we measure our progress towards "done," isn’t explicitly addressed in Allen’s formula, but is a part of project management. An expert in that field, Glen B. Alleman, recently posted this quote in his excellent Herding Cats blog:

Without a clear and concise description of "done," in units of measure meaningful to the buyer, measured in small enough increments to make corrections to your direction along the way, you will only recognize it when you run out of time and money.

Alleman’s definition of "done" appears to mirror Allen’s, but with the addition of meaningful units of measure. I think his notion is more broadly applicable--where he says, "buyer," read "boss" if you have steady employment and don’t have to sell a given project or product; or "spouse" if you are doing a project for your husband or wife; or "self" if you are doing something for its (or your) own sake.

What would a meaningful unit of measure be? In another post (lambasting "Project Management 2.0"--a favorite sport on Alleman’s blog), Alleman suggests, "dollars saved, risks reduced, value increased." Choose measures that makes sense for your goal.

Want to get things done? Figure out what your "done" is, and how you’ll measure it (just how done is done?). Then set about doing.

Monday, October 19, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:54 AM | Contact

Stale Tasks

Why to-do lists lose freshness, and what to do about it

What good is stale bread? Well, you can make toast. Or make bread pudding. Or feed the birds (maybe feed them the bread pudding). But past a certain point, even that isn’t an option (no crouton recipe can save moldy bread).

Everything has a shelf life, including tasks on a to-do list. I find that the longer a task languishes on my lists, the less likely it will get done. Introspection works imperfectly at best, so I looked beyond my recollections (and dodgy metaphors) to find insights on the nature of stale tasks.

1. Tasks as Cues, Rather Than To-Dos

According to a pilot study of task management by Victoria Bellotti and colleagues (Bellotti et al., 2004), a minimalist structure limits a task’s shelf life:

To-dos are made expending minimal effort, so most of them do not describe the task, they typically are only elaborated enough to provide a salient cue. For example one to-do was some text on a pad of paper; ‘Joe the attorney.’ The explanation was, "A reminder to send him mail. I think I was supposed to ask him about this [...] lawsuit. I can’t remember." Interestingly, to-do text is often not grammatical as in, "Send Mother’s Day" or even "Beth blah blah". The cue is so minimal that it is only effective for a limited period of time while the task stays in memory.

Writing in this style imposes an expiration date: as soon as we forget what the original cue stood for, the task goes bad.

2. You’ve moved on. The task hasn’t.

Some stale tasks represent reminders of matters no longer relevant, suggests David Allen (being interviewed by Merlin Mann):

[T]he outcome is not meaningful enough to you. Meaning, you keep telling yourself to do something, but frankly it's past its timing. You know, my first question to people who are avoiding something is [to] say, "Look, excuse me, have you really re-thought that? Is that something you really want to do?" Because it could be that your inner process has already moved past that thing.

I see two ways a task can be "past its timing." A task might have a literal deadline which passed unnoticed--easy enough to correct once we realize it. Other tasks are no longer meaningful for internal reasons. They seemed like great ideas, but our goals changed or enthusiasm waned.

3. That which is repeatedly seen--isn’t.

Human beings are less apt to notice some stimuli after repeated exposure. This phenomenon, habituation, makes stale tasks harder to deal with than fresh-baked ones. A definition from About.com: Psychology reads:

Habituation is a decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations. For example, a novel sound in your environment, such as a new ring tone, may initially draw your attention or even become distracting. After you become accustomed to this sound, you pay less attention to the noise and your response to the sound will diminish. This diminished response is habituation.

Habituation, then, renders even well-written, still-current tasks less arresting as time goes on. It becomes harder to respond to any particular task after the fifth, tenth, or fiftieth time you see it on your list. The oldest (stalest) to-do might be the hardest to see.

Cutting Down on Stale Tasks

How can we clean out the mental pantry and stock up on fresher tasks?

Write better tasks.
Write tasks using concrete language--verbs, nouns, and content. Rather than "Beth blah blah" or even "Talk to Beth," write, "Talk to Beth about ____."

Be mindful of dates.
Set deadlines when needed. If a work or school assignment is due on April 30th, don’t write "Submit Report," write "Submit Report by April 30th." If you use a tool that records when tasks are created, sort them by age to see if any old ones need rethinking.

Review lists weekly.
David Allen recommends doing Weekly Reviews of all of tasks and projects. Block out time each week--maybe Friday afternoon or Sunday evening--to review your lists. Examine each item individually and consciously to fight habituation. Ensure that each to-do remains meaningful.

Set aside time to deal with stale tasks.
Give yourself permission to take a low-priority day once in a while to knock a few out. And if you find you are taking too much time thinking about your stale tasks, just drop everything and go finish one.

Or, don’t deal--just delete.
One solution to stale food is to throw it away. When a task starts hardening, let go. Also, one way to keep food fresh is not to keep too much around--an overstocked kitchen creates waste. Cut out tasks that don’t belong; be mindful of taking on new ones.

And, like food, if a task grows green fur, toss it out ASAP.

Friday, October 16, 2009 Posted by Max at 10:16 AM | Contact

21 days, 3%, and other self-help myths

Evaluating the evidence behind common self-improvement truisms

Focus: Achieving Your Highest Priorities, FranklinCovey's flagship time-management seminar, asks seminar-goers to make several commitments in a "21-day experiment"--to plan their day each of the next 21 days, for instance.

When I took the seminar in the fall of 2005, our facilitator explained: "Why 21 days? Because that's how long it takes to form a new habit." I can’t find this in the abridged audio of Focus, but a quick Google search confirmed others also remember this statement. FranklinCovey co-founder Stephen R. Covey and FC blogger Stephanie Vozza both repeat the 21-day story on the web.

Unfortunately, it isn’t true. Jeremy Dean wrote a great summary of recent findings on habit formation by Phillipa Lally and colleagues (Lally et al., 2009):

Although the average was 66 days, there was marked variation in how long habits took to form, anywhere from 18 days up to 254 days in the habits examined in this study. As you'd imagine, drinking a daily glass of water became automatic very quickly but doing 50 sit-ups before breakfast required more dedication. . . .

What this study reveals is that when we want to develop a relatively simple habit like eating a piece of fruit each day or taking a 10 minute walk, it could take us over two months of daily repetitions before the behaviour becomes a habit. And, while this research suggests that skipping single days isn't detrimental in the long-term, it's those early repetitions that give us the greatest boost in automaticity.

Dean blames Maxwell Maltz for the 21-day myth. According to Maltz, amputees take 21 days on average to adjust to their condition; he argues that the pattern applied broadly. But as Dean says, "Unless you're in the habit of sawing off your own arm, this is not particularly relevant."

This is also a problem for other common self-help tropes. Take goal-setting: Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and Tony Robbins have each said that only 3% of Americans set written goals, and that goal-setters outperform others. The original study behind the 21-day story was interpreted too broadly, but the study behind this 3% stat never happened, according to a 2007 Fast Company column:

The story, as told by consultants, goes like this: In 1953, researchers surveyed Yale's graduating seniors to determine how many of them had specific, written goals for their future. The answer: 3%. Twenty years later, researchers polled the surviving members of the Class of 1953 -- and found that the 3% with goals had accumulated more personal financial wealth than the other 97% of the class combined!

It's a consultant's dream anecdote: a vivid Ivy League success story that documents the cause-and-effect relationship between goals and personal success. It's powerful! It's compelling! It's also completely untrue . . .

Research Associate Beverly Waters reports that a recent outbreak of articles citing the study in publications as diverse as Dental Economics and Success magazines prompted her to undertake an exhaustive search of Yale alumni archives -- where she found no evidence that such a study had ever been conducted. Says Waters, "We are quite confident that the 'study' did not take place. We suspect it is a myth."

Not that hard evidence like that has ever stopped a consultant. From his Solana Beach, California office, consultant Brian Tracy responded to Waters's findings: "Heard this story originally from Zig Ziglar. If it's not true it should be."

A motivational speaker or author trying to validate a technique faces a challenge: the literature of the social sciences is vast, dense, and not focused on personal achievement. Far from providing pat advice for success, the results of most research (in my experience) are complex, probabilistic, and heavily qualified.

In First Things First, Covey writes, "In the field of personal development, one of the few things that can be empirically validated is that individuals and organizations that set goals accomplish more." I do not know if he was thinking of the Yale study, but he has a point: few things can be empirically validated, so evidence is valuable. The finger-pointing (more extensive in the full article) about the Yale study illustrates how these "stats" spread: once one guru cites it, others assume its veracity and cite it themselves.

I don't believe this invalidates goal-setting, or the entire Focus seminar (obviously). But a self-improvement "truism" should be, you know, true. The background matters. So does the application. Some principles generalize from one situation to another. Maltz's amputee observations do not.

In the face of any advice or principle, consider the underlying evidence. Is there any? Is it accessible? Does it actually apply to you? When developing a habit, the difference between 21 and 66 days is not a month and change; it is failure versus success. Accepting the 21-day myth means trying to live up to a standard which never applied.

UPDATE (2:30 PM, Feb 12, 2010): FranklinCovey's retail spinoff, FranklinCovey Products, recently invoked the 21-day myth in a February 4 post on their community blog, in which they vaguely assert, "Studies have shown it takes 21 days to develop a habit..."

Monday, October 12, 2009 Posted by Max at 10:16 AM | Contact

About My Planner

Being an Essay on What My Planner is Not and What Higher Process Won’t Be About.

In Higher Process, I intend to explore the intersection of time-management strategies and social science (with the acknowledgement that I am sparsely qualified to do so). I expect to wander around in related topics, but one thing I hope to avoid is extensive navel-gazing essays on what I do and how I do it.

That said, I feel a need to explain what I do about this "time-management stuff." What follows is a public declaration of principles and intentions around my planner, in three acts. You could call it a manifesto. I prefer that you don’t. It will be one of the few times my planner makes more than brief cameo here (see section II, below).

I. My Planner is Not How I "Get It All Done"

The difference between the way I use my FranklinCovey planner and the way (I gather) many others do is not so much a matter of technique or even goals. The difference is what I want from the tool--my mindset.

I believe my planner is not a way to get it all done, nor even a way to get more done, although this appears to be a common effect. It is (dumb cliché or not) a way to get the right things done.

My planner is a tool to focus on priorities and manage the rest. It helps me manage the things that are necessary, but not connected to my goals. It reminds me of the boring, nonobvious, nonhabitual, and/or difficult things in my life that are nonetheless important to my health and well-being. Through it, I manage and minimize everything but my highest priorities.

This philosophy appears only subtly in FranklinCovey’s planner training, but is integral to 4 Disciplines of Execution. 4D implores leaders to focus on one, two, or three "wildly important goals," and workers to choose one to three actions each week to move the scoreboard. FranklinCovey makes a distinction between the goals and the "Day Job"—the tremendous day-to-day workload required to keep afloat.

The planner is how I manage and minimize the Day Job so I can focus on the goals. It’s not about doing more, but rather doing less: spending less time managing the mundane, thus freeing up resources for the critical, the spontaneous, and the awesome.

II. My Planner is Not a Fetish Object

My planner is not productivity pr0n. I use it to record, organize, and extract information and reminders; I don’t work on it as a way to avoid my work. It keeps track of things I’m crap at tracking, and reminds me of things I’m crap at remembering. It’s a tool, not a toy. I don’t want it to become "productivity pr0n" for anybody else, either, so I won’t be doing a photographic planner tour, or discussing ad nauseum the intricacies and subtleties of my "system".

It continues to evolve, but only in the real sense of "evolution": slowly. I am not constantly experimenting with new accessories and new formats and new ways of using it. I don’t spend countless dollars checking out new pens and fancy notebooks and new junk to put in the planner (or whole new formats to replace it). I’ve been that guy. I’m over it.

And while we’re at it, my planner is not a flag. It will not make me a Luddite, sneering at smartphone users. I don’t pick fights with DayTimer users about whose paper and leather binders are better (ours are). It doesn’t mean I don’t like Getting Things Done or its practitioners (frankly, I will write more about GTD than FranklinCovey). To the extent that my planner signals anything, the signal says, "I care about this stuff."

III. My Planner is Not the "One Best Way"

Do I believe I need to have a written copy of my mission statement with me continuously? Or that having a Prioritized Daily Task List and several completed Goal Planning Forms will make me more productive? Or that keeping my contacts and definitions of my various roles makes me a better friend, co-worker, acquaintance, or person? Or that taking notes about events, conversations, and the various minutias of due dates and bill payments can save my ass?

Maybe, but it has little to do with why I use my planner as canonically as I do. The reason I use my planner is simpler, and more powerful:

I use my planner because it gets me excited about getting this stuff right.

For whatever reason, my unique mix of personal history, habits, and taste make me and it a good pairing. And far more important, I think, than finding the "one best" productivity tool is to have something that helps at least a little, and that I feel enthusiastic enough about to use consistently, day in and day out.

Friday, October 9, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:57 AM | Contact

In or out, pick one and commit

Avoiding the high cost of keeping options open

Is it more effective to keep options open, or close the door on alternatives?

In the fourth of 5 Insights from a Change of Place, David Seah says shut it tight:

When a door closes, close it for good. Apply your energy to opening new doors.

The door is a metaphor for a past opportunity that didn't play out, but didn't die. There are dozens of such doors in my life: the idea of being a game developer, an interactive designer, a company builder, an online consultant, and so on. . . . I realized that I was expending a lot of energy monitoring these doors, and realized that if I close a door for good, I don't have to think about it.

Seah is not alone. In the Predictably Irrational chapter "Keeping Doors Open," behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes an experiment that suggest people prefer to keep options open, even at the cost of opportunity and real income.

Participants played a computer game involving three virtual doors and an allotment of one-hundred clicks. Subjects could click on a door to enter a room; each subsequent click earned them a small amount of money. Each room offered a unique range of random payouts, and leaving one for another cost an additional click. In the basic condition, subjects quickly formed an intuition about which room offered the best payouts, and stayed there.

In subsequent conditions, neglected doors shrank, vanishing altogether after being skipped for twelve clicks. Rather than staying with better payouts, subjects lost earnings by clicking on less-profitable doors to keep them open. Even in a condition with financial penalty for moving from room to room, they persisted.

"The truth is that they could have made more money by picking a room—any room—and merely staying there for the whole experiment! (think about that in terms of your life or career)," writes Ariely. He offers parallels in real-world choices (romantic partners, consumer products, college majors) and the costs involved in delaying commitment.

If we want to reclaim the resources spent holding doors open, how can we get better at closing them? Here are four ideas:

1. Recognize the consequences of not deciding.

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,"
-"Free Will," by Rush
That choice carries consequences. If you won’t decide among digital cameras (one of Ariely’s examples), you will miss weeks (months?) of photos of your family. In many cases, picking an option (even a second-rate option) produces better results than doing nothing. Ariely recommends that we weigh the costs of doing nothing whenever we struggle to choose.

2. Find an open door to be excited about.

This idea comes from SHED, Julie Morgenstern’s recent contribution to the growing glut of books on decluttering (oh, irony!). Julie encourages readers to "name their theme" before sorting out what to toss:

Stop thinking about your immediate options (or lack thereof) and concentrate instead on the bigger picture. Instead of worrying about the specifics of your next step, I’d like you to come up with a theme, a vision, for your future. What is a theme in the context of SHED? A broad goal or feeling; an overarching simple expression of the adventure you’d like to be on.

Morgenstern’s approach to cutting clutter is not just about rolling one’s sleeves up and tossing everything out. By identifying a theme, we create criteria to help decide which items, commitments, habits, or projects to keep (or toss).

After reading SHED, I found it helpful to choose a theme before processing and purging a home-office full of junk. Apply this principle to the doors you face: if you can become excited about pursuing one thing, it should be easier to drop other things.

3. Create a Someday/Maybe list.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen describes the Someday/Maybe list as a list of "things you're not sure you want to commit to," such as learning Spanish or climbing a mountain. The Someday/Maybe list collects reminders of creative or potentially valuable things without committing to them.

This is not a way to close doors, but offers an alternative. I think someday/maybe lists circumvent our distaste for eliminating options, because saying "maybe someday" means we can come back to it later—even though it is off of our minds for the moment.

4. Practice by closing doors that can be reopened.

Remember that many decisions are reversible—even vasectomies can be reversed 50% of the time. Some opportunities knock more than once; most decisions don’t require a contract or a radical lifestyle change. Practice making those reversible choices. Notice how rarely your inner process directs you back to discarded options. Over time, as you get better at closing doors in general, it should become easier to close even doors that lock behind you.

Monday, October 5, 2009 Posted by Max at 10:04 AM | Contact

If I can do it, anyone can!

Self-selection and overgeneralization in self-help

What is the most common bit of evidence offered in support of self-improvement systems?

If you spend any time in the self-improvement section of a bookstore--or can remember the title from thirty-two words ago--your guess may be the same as mine: the system’s author says, "Hey, this worked for me." Flip through your favorite (or least favorite) self-help books, and see if you can find some variation of it. Why is this so common? Probably because changing human behavior is hard; offering oneself as an example lends credibility and offers hope.

Here are two cases:

• Hyrum Smith, writing in the introduction to 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management, claimed that his company’s success proved that living the material in the book worked.
• Dave Ramsey, in Financial Peace Revisited, recounted how his family was broke, but then paid off their debts and moved into prosperity by using the same advice he doles out to readers (and listeners of his syndicated talk show).

This is fine. I prefer to read work by authors who eat their own dog food (metaphorically, I hope). But should they claim (or can we infer) that their results are typical?

Take Julie Morgenstern, writing in Organizing from the Inside Out:

Organizing is a skill. In fact, it's a remarkably simple skill that anyone can learn. How do I know? Because I was once a notoriously disorganized person myself. In fact, everyone who "knew me when" is amazed at the irony of how I make my living today. A few summers ago, I went to my twenty-fifth summer camp reunion. Naturally, we all got caught up on what everyone was doing with their lives, I spoke with pride about my work. Since professional organizing is such an unusual field, all of my old friends found the concept absolutely fascinating. One brave soul--dear, sweet Martin G.--put his arm around me, discreetly pulled me off to the side, and whispered politely, "Uh, Julie . . . I don't remember you ever being particularly organized.

I chose Morgenstern’s intro for two reasons. First, I am skeptical about the existence of twenty-fifth summer camp reunions. Second, she claims that anyone can master this skill. Can we make that leap?

Social scientists sometimes face a sampling problem known as self-selection--a situation in which participants volunteer to join a group or a study, leading to a biased sample. The unique traits that lead individuals to volunteer might include (or relate to) traits being studied. That trait skews the results.

Self-improvement books are not scientific studies (obviously), but the principle applies. A book on a planning, organizing, or goal-setting technique is presumably more likely to be written by an individual who found the technique useful. If the author is case zero in the book’s sample, the pool begins biased towards people who will find the same technique useful. Additional examples, in the form of clients or acquaintances, are similarly self-selecting (unless the author rolls with some sort of Self-Help Gestapo). "The strategy helped the author!" does not equal "The strategy will help the population at large!" We can infer only that self-improvement strategies are useful for authors of self-improvement books. Which comes as a shock, I’m sure.

Of course, we distrust advice without examples; the example of the author provides one data point, at least. One instance is sufficient to prove something possible, after all, whether it is a black swan or a 25-year summer-camp reunion. The existence of one Chris Gardner--a man who famously went from homelessness to prosperity--proves that a poor person can rise above poverty, for instance.

The core problem is over-generalization. Gardner possessed a sharp intellect. Given the same situation (homelessness, single fatherhood, a competitive opportunity at a brokerage), not everyone would match Gardner’s accomplishment. The individual’s context matters, too. Consider a common time-management strategy: delegation. The effectiveness of delegation depends upon the circumstances of the individual, as one anti-self-help essayist points out. A grocery store clerk won’t, on average, command the same resources as a CEO.

Does this mean all self-improvement books are just summer-camp-reunion fables? Maybe--but If we assume some offer value, here are three suggestions to reckon with their sample biases:

1. Don’t assume that it will work just because it worked for the author. This only proves that the system works for the author.
2. Don’t feel guilty for failing to succeed if a given strategy doesn’t work for you. Individual differences--in characteristics or context--make a difference.
3. Be skeptical if the author’s only concrete examples come from their own life. Any book with one example suffers an extremely biased sample--maybe they are the only person whose wiring and circumstances work with their strategy.

That works for me, but your mileage may vary.

Friday, October 2, 2009 Posted by Max at 10:00 AM | Contact