Really Testing Time-Management Strategies

Scientific evidence for the effectiveness of time-management training.

In the Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger writes (hat tip: Debra Lund):

I asked a half-dozen executive coaches to help me pick the most widely used time-management systems--not just software tools or high-tech to-do lists, but behavioral-change techniques that help people get organized, clarify thinking and increase output. Then, I tried out for a week each of the three methods they mentioned most often--including one that involved a ticking plastic tomato.

She examines the Pomodoro technique (the tomato), Getting Things Done, and FranklinCovey’s Focus program. What caught my attention was the article’s webpage title: “Testing Time-Management Strategies.” Shellenbarger acknowledges a week is not enough time to fully test out any of these strategies. Outside of proprietary claims of effectiveness, what evidence is there that such methodologies work? What testing has been done by third parties to measure their effects?

Research Support

Enter Wendelien Van Eerde’s study, Procrastination at Work and Time-management Training. From the abstract:

The author examined the impact of time management training on self-reported procrastination. In an intervention study, 37 employees attended a 1 ½ day time management training seminar. A control group of employees (n = 14) who were awaiting training also participated in the study to control for expectancy effects. One month after undergoing time management training, trainees reported a significant decrease in avoidance behavior and worry and an increase in their ability to manage time. The results suggest that time management training is helpful in lessening worry and procrastination at work.

According to Van Eerde, the training “consisted of the topics typical of time-management training”: analyzing a work log; sharing problems; learning to prioritize (a version of the urgent-versus-important Time Matrix makes an appearance); making one-year, one-month, and one-day plans; and learning to handle interruptions.

How close does this track to typical time-management trainings? Van Eerde doesn’t name the specific commercial training in his study, but the time matrix, long-term and daily planning, and a short section on handling interruptions and procrastination all appear in the Focus curriculum. Ergo, I would expect to find similar results from Focus.

Participants completed questionnaires before and after training. Both sets of questionnaires included scales measuring time-management, worrying, avoidance reactions (procrastination), emotional stability, and training motivation. Also included was a short questionnaire on orderliness to be filled out by a peer who knew the participant well enough to evaluate their work style; this served to validate participants’ measurement of their behavior.

As mentioned in the abstract above, Van Eerde found that trainees reported an increase in time-management and decrease in worrying and procrastination relative to the control group. Van Eerde concedes that the results can’t completely rule out some alternative explanations--for instance, that the time-management training merely increases subjects’ awareness of their time-management behaviors. Still, based on subjects’ perceptions, he suggests that the time-management training might alleviate worrying and procrastination.

Limitations

Van Eerde writes, “In the current study, I examined the effectiveness of commercial time-management training.” I would submit that the study focuses on a commercial time-management training, not all or even (necessarily) most. When the GTD Times Team linked to the WSJ article mentioned above, they wrote, “[T]here are quite a few differences in each of the 3 (GTD is actually not time-management and much different than what the other 2 approaches are intended to do) . . .” Time-management is a broad field, and GTD and Focus are very different, and certainly are not the only two methodologies. Van Eerde's results may not generalize to all time-management trainings.

The researcher’s characterization of procrastination also offers a challenge. More than once in the paper, he notes that procrastination is not always “dysfunctional,” pointing to researchers who suggest procrastination sometimes serves as a performance-enhancement or stress-management strategy. As Timothy Pychyl wrote (and I previously blogged), “Procrastination, like these other forms of self-regulatory failure, is negative. It’s really that simple.” The conflation of strategic delay with procrastination raises doubts, although it does not necessarily discredit the rest of the findings.

Finally, it is worth noting that Van Eerde concludes that subjects’ perceptions of their procrastination and time-management improved. The peer checklist (used to validate participants’ responses) was only administered once, so there is no before-and-after comparison of peer evaluations. We cannot tell, then, whether any external measure of time-management behavior or procrastination would show improvement.

Bottom Line

Scientific data on the efficacy of commercial time-management training remains hard to come by. While this rare example is not exhaustive, its subject matter resembles one major methodology (Focus), and so it can be taken as a starting point to validation. As the author notes, more research is required; in particular, studies measuring before-and-after productivity from an external, third-party (if not objective) perspective would go much further in establishing the benefits that Shellenbarger ascribe to Focus.

Monday, November 30, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:48 AM | Contact

Perfecting Procrastination

Perfectionism spurs performance AND paralysis.

When “procrastination” appears in psychology or time-management blogs, the word “perfectionism” is rarely far behind. And for good reason--perfectionism appears to be one root of procrastination. Even when it is not causing procrastination, perfectionism can still be costly; perfection takes time, as economics blogger Brian Hollar recently pointed out.

But is perfectionism always problematic? Conventional wisdom would suggest that high standards can pay off. Consider Apple; whether you love or hate their products, I think it’s hard to separate the perfectionism of founder Steve Jobs from the design and innovation standards of Apple (or from Apple’s financial success).

Can we reconcile a desire to achieve great things with the notion that perfectionism exacts too great a toll? Maybe we don’t have to.

Three Flavors of Perfectionism

Timothy Pychyl wrote last year about different flavors of perfectionism. He described three types of perfectionism identified by Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett:

Self-oriented perfectionists: Adhere to strict standards while maintaining strong motivation to attain perfection and avoid failure; engage in stringent self-evaluation.

Other-oriented perfectionists: set unrealistic standards for significant others (e.g., partners, children, co-workers) coupled with a stringent evaluation of others' performances.

Socially-prescribed perfectionists: believe that others hold unrealistic expectations for their behavior (and that they can't live up to this); experience external pressure to be perfect, believe others evaluate them critically.

Pychyl offers these descriptions in the service of describing research by Jeffrey Kilbert, Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, and Motoko Saito. They found:

Self-oriented Perfectionists
". . . self-oriented perfectionists are those who derive a sense of pleasure from their labors and efforts, which in turn enhances their self-esteem and motivation to succeed and eventually helps them to develop a sense of control over their environment. Self-oriented perfectionists may then use their pleasure in their accomplishments as encouragement to continue and even improve their work" (p. 154).

Socially-prescribed perfectionists
"In contrast, socially prescribed perfectionists may be compared to neurotic perfectionists [a term originally coined by Hamachek] in that they do not derive pleasure from their labors and efforts and tend to view their work as inadequate or inferior. Furthermore, they report experiencing external pressure and or coercion to accomplish tasks. Therefore, the maladaptive symptoms of the socially prescribed perfectionist emerge not from an internally felt desire to be their best, but more from a fear of failure and/or a desire to avoid embarrassment, shame and guilt" (p. 154).

It should be mentioned that these two types are not mutually exclusive; in examining the relationship of procrastination to perfectionism, the authors contrast subjects who are low in both forms, high in self-oriented only, high in socially-prescribed only, and those who are high in both forms (or “generally perfectionist”).

Pychyl reports Kilbert et al.’s findings: socially-prescribed perfectionists tended to procrastinate more than self-oriented perfectionists or general perfectionists. Interestingly, they also found that non-perfectionists procrastinated more than self-oriented perfectionists. So perfectionism--when it is self-oriented--appears to fight procrastination.

Ramifications for Procrastination Interventions

If perfectionism always leads to procrastination, then strategies to lower perfectionism (like “Lower your standards” or “Focus on the work, rather than the quality of the end product”) may be useful as-is. However, the results above show that procrastination is lower among people with self-oriented perfectionism. Purported procrastination-busters which address perfectionism as a monolithic (and uniformly “bad”) issue might successfully lower the perfectionism of a self-oriented perfectionist, but also kill their drive and interest in what they are doing. Be wary about anti-procrastination techniques that don’t account for the different styles of perfectionism. And, obviously, do not attempt to treat your own perceived perfectionism if it isn’t leading to procrastination, stress, or other negative outcomes.

I also imagine there are intrapersonal domain differences; one person may be a self-oriented perfectionist in one area of life, but a socially-prescribed perfectionist in another (and perhaps not a perfectionist at all in a third). As a student in college, I held myself to higher standards in psychology classes than in history classes. When I worked for a FranklinCovey retail store, I spent hours (on and off the clock) learning the ins and outs of their day planners and educational materials (and those of competitors). But I maintained a barely-adequate knowledge of the store’s extensive pen collections, and was well below par on the tote-bags, computer cases, and purses. I was a hard-working go-getter studying psychology and time-management, but was lazier and prone to procrastinate learning about history or fashionable leather goods.

One strategy for fighting procrastination, then, may be to focus on areas where one has high standards for their own sake. When possible, avoid areas where you feel critical and judged; favor areas in which you feel good about reaching for high personal standards. Eschew perfection when it makes you depressed and anxious; pursue perfection when it engages and challenges you.

Friday, November 27, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:08 AM | Contact

Review: FCMobileLife Goals for iPhone and iPod Touch

Goal-setting with a “touch” of FranklinCovey magic.

FCMobileLIfe Goals for iPhone (version 1.1, $4.99) is a product of the SCO Group and FranklinCovey. After Tasks, it is the second FCMobileLife iPhone port. The original suite (also including Schedule, Team, and Post) runs on the Windows Mobile and BlackBerry platforms. That suite is subscription-only and starts at $29.95/year, so $4.99 for Goals as a permanent app is a relative bargain. Ostensibly, these apps recreate the FranklinCovey productivity methodology in a mobile web context.

Look and Feel

Goals presents a slick, black interface, with FranklinCovey’s distinctive compass logo visible in the background. While Tasks uses bold colors for prioritizing, the palette here is subdued: White text and white-and-blue progress bars. If a due date passes, the goal or step turns red (Esperanto for “Overdue” in productivity apps). The interface feels consistent with other iPhone apps--smooth, glassy-looking elements, swiping a finger to scroll lists, etc.

Functionality

In contrast to some goal-tracking iPhone applications (such as Touch Goals), Goals isn’t merely a progress or habit tracker. It focuses on the actions or sub-goals that move the user forward.

Users can name a goal, set due dates, add notes, attach photos or voice memos, categorize goals, and create intermediate steps. Intermediate steps have their own due dates and appear below (or can be collapsed back into) overall goals. Steps, sadly, cannot be categorized, nor can they be accessed elsewhere (no syncing with Outlook, web apps, or even Tasks). Steps and goals can be tracked either as a percentage (the default) or a numeric score (out of a target total). Annoyingly, while the app starts with 0% complete, after switching to a target score the minimum is 1 out of x.

The percent-completion of a goal is tied by default to completion of intermediate steps; if you have ten steps and complete one, the overall progress jumps 10%. Of course, if you goal is measured in pounds, dollars, or other external measures, step completions won’t correspond perfectly with goal completion. Luckily, manually changing the percent complete (or changing from percentage to numerical) decouples the completion score from the intermediate steps.

Goal-Setting Philosophy (or: “FranklinCoveyness”)

FranklinCovey’s day planners and time-management seminars include goal-setting content. The first space on their paper goal-tracking form is labeled “Value/Mission/Role (why?).” FranklinCovey teaches that tying goals to deeply-held values or relationships increases the likelihood of completion and the value of the results. The “Why?” question is so important that it appears before the goal itself on the form; it is therefore curious that it doesn’t appear at all in this app (though FranklinCovey diehards can always use the Notes feature for this purpose).

My Experience

In order to fairly review this application for Higher Process, I decided to use it to plan and track an actual goal. I chose my goals for establishing this site. (In the words of Merlin Mann, “The only way to make my work more recursive would require moving my desk into an Escher drawing. Over and over. While Philip Glass plays.”)

I entitled my goal “Establish Higher Process”; some of my intermediate steps are visible in the screenshot above. I managed to complete the goal a day early, despite several frustrating bugs and shortcomings I encountered:

• The app is crash-prone, crashing an average of once per day during my use.
• Closing a goal saves the state of that goal, but closing an intermediate step saves nothing (so creating several steps in a row is dangerous, given the crash rate). It is not intuitive that closing a goal saves but closing a step doesn’t.
• Scrolling is less smooth when there are more than twenty intermediate steps among all goals.
• When defining more than a four or five steps on a new goal, the application became sluggish.
• The Goals icon on the Home Screen does not rebadge with the number of due or overdue steps. The Tasks application does do this (at least, after it is opened).

Among all its features, I found the progress bars the most useful; if you try the app, I recommend frequently leaving it open to keep the scoreboard in view. For the last two weeks of my use, I opened the app right before going to bed. In the morning, when I first unlocked my phone, I saw a progress report on my goals (a great bit of motivation).

Conclusion

If you enjoy the style and functionality of FCMobileLife Tasks, Goals makes a fair companion even without integration. However, the crashing and unresponsiveness tried my patience. The look and feel, stability, and “FranklinCoveyness” of the methodology all need improvement. Overall, I do not recommend this edition, but it has potential; version 1.5 or 2.0 may become something special.

Monday, November 23, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:29 AM | Contact

If I ask you a question will it change your behavior?

How answering questions influences our choices.

Daniel R. Hawes asks, Will You Read This Post? It’s not a rhetorical question. Or, well, it is. But it's also his opening example:

Asking questions changes behavior. In the psychology literature, this phenomenon is often referred to as "mere measurement effect". Vikki Morrison, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern, demonstrated the effect in 1993, when she showed that simply asking questions about people's intentions to buy a car, or a personal computer led to increased purchasing rates for these items. . . .

[I]n 2008 a study conducted among Canadian blood donors, investigated whether the mere measurement effect could be exploited as a cheap and efficient intervention to increase blood donations. The study recruited a sample of 4672 registered blood donors, aged 18 to 70, and asked 2900 of these donors to anonymously respond to a questionnaire regarding (amongst a number of additional control measures) their intentions of giving blood within the next 6 months. Six months after the survey assignment, and another six months after that, the researchers assessed whether the survey had an effect on the groups' blood donation behavior. It did.

Comparing both groups, the cohort that had answered the questionnaire showed a higher registration rate as well as an increased share of successful donations. After 6 months the surveyed group showed 8.6% higher registration, and after 12 months registration was still 6.4% increased.

Hawes mentions the research implications of the mere measurement effect, and discusses a few nagging questions about the interpretation of the results. Still, I immediately saw applications in more mundane realms.

E-mail

While writing a descriptive subject line is E-mail 101, framing a descriptive subject line as a question may be even better for enticing recipients to read, respond, and/or act. Some examples:

• Replace “Report Update,” with “Will you send me the report by Thursday?”
• Rather than “Dinner Sunday” ask “Will you have dinner with us on Sunday?”
• Instead of sending “Training Opportunity” to a list, ask recipients “Will you take charge of your future today?”

As Hawes points out, this phenomenon is open to misuse. My last (cheesiest) example suggests how: spammers and scammers (a Venn diagram with extraordinary overlap) can use it to reel in suckers. More white-hat advertising applications exist, however; people often sign up to receive offers from online businesses, and they would be fair game. Outside of sales, try it with coworkers, classmates, fellow volunteers, family members, or anyone else of whom you make e-mail requests.

Task Reminders

If you use a reminder tool--a day planner, a program such as Outlook, or a tickler file--chances are that you sometimes pay insufficient attention to the reminders. If your system is going stale, consider writing some reminders as questions. Examples redux:

• In my day planner, I write “DUE: [description of deliverable]” on the page for any given due date. If these aren’t catching my attention early enough, I could replace “DUE: Cable Bill,” with, “Did you pay the cable bill?”
• If a report is due on a certain date, and you use a digital tool to track tasks, try naming the reminder “Did you finish the XYZ Report?” rather than just “XYZ Report.” Reminders in Outlook are one of the most numbed-out parts of my productive life, so even the change of format would probably help.

I don’t recommend writing everything in the form of the question--you’re not on Jeopardy!, after all. I suspect overuse would diminish this trick’s potency. But practically any task could be written as a question. If you want a particular task to catch your attention when it resurfaces, try tasking in the form of a question.

Some Limitations

I suspect that awareness of the technique mediates its effectiveness. If you know I am attempting to manipulate you to read and answer my e-mail by posing a question in the subject line, you will be on guard. This is another reason not to write all reminders in the form of a question; rather, do so with a few key ones to mix things up. Reminders of more distant due dates (that therefore will not resurface for a while) might make good candidates.

In his original post, Hawes also points out (in the case of the blood donor survey), the mere asking of the question didn’t create the rise in donor rates; answering it did. So someone will have to answer the question (at least to him-, her-, or yourself). Still, the mere asking of the question may be enough to incite engagement with the message or task and lead to that answering. As Chip and Dan Heath point out in Made to Stick, leading a message with a question or a mystery entices the recipient to attention. And in today’s information-overloaded world, attention may be all your request needs.

Friday, November 20, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:40 AM | Contact

Connect to your future (and your work)

How procrastinators overestimate their future selves and underestimate their future tasks.

<Think about something you are procrastinating. Will you "feel like doing that later"? Do you "thrive under pressure"? These excuses seem common to me, and I certainly used to use them frequently (not that I’ve stopped procrastinating; I just make up better excuses now). Research suggests that these excuses represent disconnects between our current selves and future selves, and between us and our work.

Paging the Better-Later Myth

Last year, Dr. Timothy Pychyl blogged about his experience-sampling research. Pychyl asked participants to carry pagers; for one to two week, participants were randomly paged and instructed to note what they were doing, what they were putting off doing, and how they felt about it. This provided an in-the-moment snapshot of participants’ actions, thoughts, and feelings:

As expected, on Monday when participants were avoiding some task(s) in preference to others, we found that they typically said things like, "I'll feel more like doing that tomorrow" or "Not today. I work better under pressure." We rationalize the dissonance between our behaviors (not doing) and our expectations of ourselves (I should be doing this now). Later in the week few, if any, participants spontaneously said things like "I feel like doing that [avoided task] today" or "I'm glad I waited until tonight, because I work better like this."

This evidence contrasts strongly with common procrastination excuses. Indeed, the pressure of a deadline sometimes helps me muster focus and will, but--at least subjectively--I do better work with less stress when I am working ahead.

Back to the Future Self

Dr. Pychyl’s subjects seem to expect their future selves to be better at doing what they themselves are unwilling or unable to do. They take the easy way out now, but they effectively prescribe hard work and focus for their future selves. This sounds like the human tendency to give others advice that we ourselves can’t or won’t follow; in this case, the "other" is the self in the future. Psychologist Daniel R. Hawes recently blogged about research on this very analogy:

As Princeton University's Emily Pronin, Christopher Olivola and Kathleen Kennedy demonstrate in a recent series of experiments, there is compelling reason to believe that the reason for this type of behavior is a lacking sense of continuity for our current (choosing) self and our future (consequence bearing) self. I.e. we view our current-self very differently from our future-self, and end up making decisions for current-self and future-self as if they were different entities altogether. Indeed, so their hypothesis goes, we make decisions regarding our future-self comparably to how we decide on behalf of others.

They tested participants in several domains: willingness to ingest a disgusting liquid as part of a science experiment, decisions to receive e-mail from a charity, and (a behavioral economics favorite) willingness to defer receiving a small monetary reward now for a larger one reward in the future. They found that students made the comfortable choice for themselves in the present, but were perfectly willing to have their future selves delay gratification. In addition, they chose similar high roads for third parties.

More details on their findings are available in Hawes’s post and the original research, but the bottom line is simple: when we make decisions on behalf of our future selves, we are as detached as if we were dealing with a third party.

And what happens when the future self actually gets to work?

When we put off action, we also disconnect from the real nature of our work. Let me return to Pychyl’s post:

On Monday, the dreaded, avoided task was perceived as very stressful, difficult, and unpleasant. On Thursday (or make that in the wee hours of Friday morning), once they had actually engaged in the task they had avoided all week, their perceptions changed. The ratings of task stressfulness, difficulty and unpleasantness decreased significantly.

What did we learn? Once we start a task, it's rarely as bad as we think.

How can we reconnect with our future selves and our work?

Pronin, Olivola, and Kennedy conclude that, "[W]iser decisions could be afforded by the simple reminder that the future self will share many of the same feelings, needs, and concerns as the present self or even by a simple nudge to step outside oneself and make the decision from a non-emotional perspective."

Also, when in doubt, Pychyl advises, "Just get started." He notes that procrastination arises from complex causes and the treatments vary with the individual’s unique makeup and the severity of their problems. For improving results with workaday, run-of-the-mill procrastination, though, he says just getting started can help. I concur; rarely have I written a paper or worked on a project (academic or professional) that was as stressful to work on as it was to think about working on.

Photo by Mattox.

Monday, November 16, 2009 Posted by Max at 10:22 AM | Contact

Procrastination, by any other name . . .

Evaluating so-called "solutions" for so-called "procrastination."

In September of this year, I read Psychology Today’s Escape Artists, which inspired me to start writing an essay about anti-procrastination techniques. I set it aside to work on a different essay, but I later returned to finish. In November.

Jokes about delay are de rigueur in articles on procrastination, but I mention this because of what didn’t happen during the delay: I didn’t procrastinate.

From the aforementioned “Escape Artists” article:

Psychologists define procrastination as a gap between intention and action. Chronic procrastinators like Robert Capp feel bad about their decisions to delay--which helps distinguish procrastination from laziness. Laziness involves a lack of desire; with procrastination, the desire to start that project is there, but it consistently loses out to our appetite for delay. And this is no ordinary delay. Procrastination is considered a needless, often irrational delay of some important task in favor of a less important, but seemingly more rewarding, task.

My long-suffering essay on procrastination began with too many sources and not much clarity about my ideas. After struggling with early drafts, I shelved it in favor of an easier essay. The delay was rational--a strategic use of limited time. It caused no negative feelings, nor consequences; I simply wrote and posted on other subjects in the meantime. In fact, the delay brought positive consequences: I eventually returned with a clearer direction, and an (admittedly recursive) example: this story about the essay.

As Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl wrote, “All procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination.” He recently blogged about the conflation of delay and procrastination, pointing to published research on so-called “active procrastination”:

Procrastination, as defined in the psychological literature, is a problem with self-regulation. . . .

Other examples of self-regulatory failure include problem drinking, compulsive gambling or shopping, and over-eating. Can you imagine putting the adverb “active” in front of these words to describe some positive aspect of this behavior? I don’t think so.

Procrastination, like these other forms of self-regulatory failure, is negative. It’s really that simple. As summarized in the most recent meta-analysis of the literature, procrastination is the voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay (Steel, 2007).

The confusion between procrastination and delay may be new to the psychological literature, but it also appears in time-management advice. Consider philosopher John Perry’s cheekily clever “Structured Procrastination”:

Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. . . . [T]he procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

. . .

. . . Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it.

Is this a solution to procrastination? Does it even address procrastination?

• Throughout his essay, Perry seems to fudge on whether the things at the top of the list are truly important (in which case procrastination is still happening), or merely items that seem to be important (meaning they aren’t important, so this isn’t procrastination).
• The delays are a reasoned and measured part of an overall prioritization scheme--far from irrational.
• Negative feelings about procrastination are absent. Perry seems comfortable with his system, even when such delays cause broken commitments.

What do you call rational procrastination without consequences or negative feelings? I don’t know, but I know what Dr. Pychyl wouldn’t call it: Procrastination.

Even assuming behavior described by Perry is procrastination, I wonder if the absence of negative feelings is an effect of the technique. He says “structured procrastination” earned him a reputation for productivity, and still completes some tasks. This might take the edge off of whatever actual procrastination he does. While feeling better is a fine goal, it isn’t a solution to the problem of procrastination. A solution would change behavior, not prevent one from feeling badly about bad behavior . A pain killer might make a gangrenous toe feel better for a while, but the consequences are ultimately the same as, well, procrastinating treatment for gangrene.

This points to two criteria for evaluating “cures” or “solutions” for procrastination:

1. Does the technique actually address true procrastination, per se?
2. Does the technique actually solve procrastination problems, or merely cover up their effects?

Any procrastination solution that don’t address the true nature of procrastination might never get around to delivering results.

Friday, November 13, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:16 AM | Contact

4 Questions for Managing Information

Identifying what to keep, where to put it, and how you’ll get it back.

Reading A Perfect Mess, Abrahamson and Freedman’s paean to the benefits of disorganization, pushed me to think about when organizing schemes add value and when they don’t (an expression about arranging deck chairs on the Titanic springs to mind). More than any area, it caused me to reflect on how I manage information. How does one decide what information to keep and how to keep it? How much organization (if any) is optimal?

What to Keep

Upal, Gonce, Tweney, and Stone (2007) outlined how we might prioritize which experiences to encode in memory:

When confronted with a novel object/situation, an agent with limited cognitive resources has to weigh the potential savings that may be obtained by remembering the new situation/object and recalling it when needed against the costs of having to generate that information using its existing world model. If the cost of producing a piece of information using an agent’s existing knowledge about the world is less than the cost of remembering and recalling it, then that piece of information should get lower priority for memorizing. On the other hand, if it is computationally harder to generate the information using one’s existing knowledge than to remember and recall it, then that piece of information should get preferential access to memory resources.

Memorizing all new, potentially-valuable information does not scale well in my life. Still, this model suggests a question to ask of any new information: How hard would it be to reacquire this if I didn’t keep it?

Websites can be edited, deleted, or moved behind pay walls; libraries lose or sell books; storage media decay. Despite this, most information remains accessible. Given trends I’ve observed in my education and professional life, I find that things I can find one day tend to, on average, be equally or more accessible later.

As a Gearfire post about end-of-semester cleanup says about notes, handouts, and syllabi, "Keep only the things that are very well put together and which you can never easily find again."

Storage

Whatever media or structure you prefer for your information, ask, How quickly and easily can I store incoming information?

In Getting Things Done, David Allen suggests filing--including the time to grab and label a new file folder--should take under sixty seconds. He says, "In the ‘battle zone’ of real life, if it's not easy, fast, and fun to file, you'll stack instead of organizing." If making filing "fun" sounds challenging, Lynne Snead and Joyce Wycoff set an even higher bar in To Do, Doing, Done!: "In order for any desk-organization system to work, it must be as simple as throwing stuff on your desk."

If adding and sorting incoming information needs to be so quick and easy, why spend time filing or organizing at all?

Retrieval

We organize to ensure we can get information back when we need it. So ask yourself, How will I find stored information again?

Allen recommends a single, complete alphabetical system with everything in it; in the worst case, information can only be in any of a few possible places (The warranty for your mobile phone will probably be under P for Phone or W for Warranties).

FranklinCovey recommends keeping dated, numbered notes in their day planners; by placing quick keyword summaries in monthly indices, planner users create a way to get back to this information relatively quickly.

For electronic information, human-mediated filing has become somewhat less important. Merlin Mann, in his Productive Talk podcast, said that his Gmail account eliminated much of his filing; virtually everything goes into one archive, which can be searched electronically. My current e-mail system is much the same. Further, my netbook sports very little structure in the documents or media folders; Windows Search performs the heavy lifting.

Context

A final consideration that affects questions of both storage and retrieval: Where and when will you need this information?

Someone who receives large volumes of paper-based input but is rarely at their desk might need to invest in a scanner to digitize documents so they are accessible from the road. On the other hand, if someone is in their personal workspace 98% of the times they need to reference information, scanning and processing images of physical items adds time and hassle.

In seminars and books, FranklinCovey consultants recommend leaving strategic reminders where they need to be seen. For example, if a note taken on November 17th will be useful for a December 20th meeting, place a note saying "(See Notes 11/17)" next to the appointment on the 20th. Electronic tools make such opportunistic retrieval cues even easier.

How do you handle information?

These four questions aren’t the last word on effective information management, but answering them will provide ideas about how to manage new information, or about how to fine-tune an existing system.

Monday, November 9, 2009 Posted by Max at 10:14 AM | Contact

Clearing Sentimental Clutter

Breaking up is hard to do. Even with inanimate objects.

Books about eliminating clutter abound. Whole television shows are devoted to the subject--Clean Sweep, Hoarders, and a forthcoming show starring decluttering superstar Peter Walsh. Having eliminated about 75% of the stuff I had five years ago (both in a series of moves and deliberate organizing kicks), I understand the appeal.

One of my biggest hang-ups in my twenties was sentimental clutter. This included the merely sentimental--souvenirs, memorabilia, photos, reminders, personal correspondence. I also was a magnet for incidental sentimental clutter, which included unprocessed documents, leftover materials from projects (finished or not), and supplies for stale hobbies. Such items begin as theoretically useful. Over time, they change meaning--becoming reminders of a younger, more ambitious (and less focused) version of myself.

As I learned to eliminate sentimental clutter, I found that the two kinds respond to much the same treatments. Here are four strategies I’ve used to great effect.

1. Conduct an experiment.

If purging everything at once seems traumatic, start by tossing one item. After a day, week, or month, check in with yourself. How do you feel? If you need more rigor than that, productivity consultant Mathew Cornell offers some thoughts about conducting personal experiments.

An Unclutterer reader asked Erin Doland if she had ever regretted eliminating something; she replied that the only things she regretted tossing were things that, in haste, she threw away by mistake. That probably isn’t what most of us imagine will happen, but we do not (can not) know until we try.

In my own experience, after previous purges, I noticed that I felt many of the benefits that the uncluttering experts promise: I felt lighter, freer, more energetic. I liked my space more and could clean and locate things more easily. I even felt younger--the act of dispatching physical baggage had a salutary effect on emotional baggage. I believe I noticed this primarily because I went to the trouble of consciously getting rid of something and paying attention.

2. Take a picture--it will last longer.

Another tip that I found just in time (right before a big move in 2008) was simple and surprisingly effective: take a picture of the memento. This trick came via a Lifehacker post pointing to an Unclutterer post on the subject.

The textures, weight, shape, feel, and smell of an item might trigger memories more readily than a photo. Still, souvenirs from high school and my freshman year in college (like a twelve-year-old backpack with a broken zipper) were easy to toss once I had snapped a photo. I don’t often (ever) feel the need to look through the photos, but I don’t miss the physical objects, either.

3. Pick Your Battles

Just because something doesn’t fit 100% if your current life doesn’t mean you should automatically toss it. I am all for having less and enjoying it move, but it isn’t a black-and-white moral question. In Getting Things Done, David Allen wrote a passage about reference materials that I think applies to most areas of life:

It's likely that at some point you'll come up against the question of whether or not to keep something for future reference. I have two ways of dealing with that:

• When in doubt, throw it out.
• When in doubt, keep it.

Take your pick. I think either approach is fine. You just need to trust your intuition and be realistic about your space.

If clutter isn’t interfering with your life, is it still clutter?

Oddly enough, this helps me let go. When I make it okay to keep some things, I can easily toss others.

4. Ask the Right Questions

If you get hung up on deciding what to keep and what to toss, maybe a better set of questions will sort it out.

In SHED, Julie Morgenstern asks Is this the best and most significant reminder of that time in my life or that person I knew? If you have a lot of stuff reminding you of the same time, experience, person, or achievement, maybe you should eliminate most of it (maybe after taking a photo?) and keep the one or two items that mean the most.

Unclutterer’s Doland recently asked Does this make my life better? As she points out, this question’s incisiveness lies in the present tense; not did, or will, but does it improve my life. It also offers the possibility that the answer, for some items, is yes.

Final Thoughts

While I am not an anti-clutter zealot, I recognize the positive difference clear space makes in my life. I have less, but enjoy it more. Your mileage may vary (both in using the techniques above and in ultimately having less clutter in your life), but if you are willing to experiment with it, I believe the rewards are great.

Friday, November 6, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:34 AM | Contact

What you don’t need to know can hurt you

Mistaking unknown information for needed information

Have you ever delayed a decision because you needed more information? Or ever used "I need more information" as an excuse?

If so, Nonconsequential reasoning and its consequences might prove interesting:

[People] sometimes pursue noninstrumental information--information that may appear relevant but ought not alter the decision. Having pursued such information, people misconstrue it as instrumental for the decision and proceed to make choices they would not otherwise have made.

Picture this example: You want to buy a new CD player. You find a nice one on sale, but your amplifier just broke. The repair will cost $90, but the warranty might cover it. Anthony Bastardi and Eldar Shafir used that scenario in a 1998 study. They assigned each participant to one of two conditions:

• Simple Condition: Participants knew immediately that they had to pay the $90 out of their own pocket.
• Uncertain Condition: Participants didn’t know whether they would have to pay the repair costs. If they decided to wait and see, they later found out that they, too, had to pay $90 out-of-pocket.

What happened? In the simple condition, 91% chose to buy the CD player. What about those in the uncertain condition? In the worst case, they would have to pay a $90 repair bill; most of their friends in the simple condition bought it despite this. The status of the warranty doesn’t matter . . . does it?

In the uncertain condition, only 26% chose to buy the CD player immediately; 69% waited to find out if the warranty covered the repair. After finding out they had to pay, most of the wait-and-see participants said "No." In total, only 55% in the uncertain condition chose to buy the CD player. Faced with an expensive repair, people postponed their purchase. This seems reasonable, except that most of them (91%!) would have bought the CD player anyhow, had they known up front.

Bastardi and Shafir cite studies in other contexts:

• Redelmeier, Shafir, and Aujla (2000) asked nurses whether they would donate a kidney to a hypothetical elderly relative suffering renal failure.
  • Among nurses instructed to assume they were compatible, 44% were willing.
  • Among nurses told that their compatibility was unknown, 69% were willing to be tested. When instructed to assume the tests showed compatibility, 93% agreed to donate.
• Bastardi and Young (1999) asked students to respond to a scenario inspired by a real ongoing price dispute between a campus bookstore and a student group.
  • The majority of students in a simple condition, told that there would be no disciplinary action for a protest, voted to accept a compromise measure.
  • The majority of students in an uncertain condition voted to wait and see if there would be disciplinary action for protesting. Once told that there would not be, a majority voted to reject the compromise and protest.

All stereo-shoppers had to pay the repair bill; all nurses were compatible donors; all students faced the same freedom to protest. But in each case, those that waited for or pursued this information expressed a different preference.

There are legitimate reasons to want more information. Surely you would be tested for compatibility before donating an organ. However, for 91% of the CD-shoppers, repair bills didn’t matter (they bought anyhow); for 56% of the nurses, compatibility didn’t matter (they refused to donate). That is, it didn’t matter until they had to get the information themselves

Seeing this as a problem assumes that initial preferences--preferences expressed when all the cards are on the table--are the most "pure." Bastardi and Shafir point out that more research is needed on that question*, but also suggest that this appears intuitively correct. In any event, they also describe other costs of waiting for unneeded information: delays and missed opportunities.

What can be done?

1. If you find yourself delaying a decision or action because of uncertainty, ask yourself what effect the information would have if you knew now. If you would ultimately act the same whether x was true or false, proceed without finding out. The authors refer to this as the "Sure Thing Principle," and violating it sets us up for delays and distorted preferences.
2. If you tend to procrastinate certain tasks or decisions, be honest with yourself about it. If it is a difficult decision, or if you fear the consequences, own that. Don’t blame insufficient information. Bastardi and Shafir suggest that some of the nurses agreed to testing because it allowed them to put off (and possibly dodge) a difficult question, yet it still changed their preference.

Don’t wait for information that isn’t necessary for the decision at hand. You might unwittingly change your own mind, and not necessarily for the better.

* - Ironically, waiting for that additional research might change the importance we give it.

Monday, November 2, 2009 Posted by Max at 9:09 AM | Contact