Article posting on this blog has been sparse of late and that’s mainly because I’m getting fed up of writing…

I’m now going to put video posts on to the blog. The first one is an introduction to the basic purpose of the blog and the main principles that I want to share with you.

In the domain of personal development/productivity a big selling book that has generated a lot of following is ‘Getting Things Done’ (or GTD as it is commonly known) by David Allen. I’ve flicked through the book at airports a couple of times and finally decided to buy it to see what the fuss is all about. This article is a review of what I have discovered about the book and what I like and what I don’t like about it.

The basic premise of the book is that you can never feel properly stress free, and hence happy and productive, when you have too many things to do that are left as open loops. An open loop is any activity that you know that you have to do and yet don’t get around to.

This is my interpretation of his point here. Every desire that you create (in this case predominantly objectives to fulfill) becomes a set-point for your emotional guidance system. This system generates emotions based upon whether you fulfill the objective immediately, or not. If you can immediately fulfill the objective then you will feel good. If you can’t then you generate concern and low-level stress because you will continue to assess whether you have fulfilled the objective or not until you either do it, or choose to abandon the desire.

I agree that on-going, underlying stress and negative emotion is often caused by focusing too many unfulfilled objectives consciously and subconsciously at any one time. However, my ideas and methods for dealing with this situation quickly diverge from David Allen’s from this point onwards.

The basic method of GTD is to create a comprehensive system for capturing, storing and organizing all of the activities that you want or need to do. Once the items are captured they are processed according to whether they can be done almost immediately, whether they can and ought to be postponed and whether they should be eliminated.

I totally agree that choosing to eliminate superfluous and undesirable activities is a great way to reduce stress and negative emotion.

I also agree that actively deciding to postpone activities is a good idea as this removes them from present moment focus and hence they don’t become generators of low key but continuous negative emotions.

[Note: It was rightly pointed out that I misunderstood the 2-minute rule. It is for use when reviewing tasks. If something can be done in 2-minutes or less during that review, then it should be done, otherwise it should be deferred until after you stop reviewing and get to work. I've now removed that section as it was in error and misleading. My thanks to Jeff Korentayer for pointing that out.]

I take the view that breaking down a broadly defined activity requires conscious, mental imagining and problem solving first. By thinking through the problem carefully a process for doing the work can be formed, which simultaneously considers the likely problems to come and finds ways to eliminate them or work around them in advance.

Each part of the process should be something that can be done immediately using existing knowledge and skills. In order to ensure a continuation of activity once started, the necessary resources to do the job must be organized in advance. When everything is prepared, the work can start and it will be accomplished quickly due to effective preparation.

I liken each part of the process as a domino that has to be stood up and put into a sequence of dominos to form a line. The idea is to topple the final objective domino as easily as possible. You do this by standing up all of your dominos in advance and then topple the first one. If the dominos are set up correctly and spaced correctly then the momentum created will pass through and topple the final one very easily.

Most people go wrong because they don’t think sufficiently far in advance of how to topple the final domino easily. They tend to set up one domino and then push it over. They then stand up the next one and topple it. They repeat this a few times and then feel exasperated because it seems like frustrating and hard work. GTD seems to design in such an approach and here is the reason why:

GTD is an approach for making efficient use of time but it places an astoundingly low emphasis on making effective use of time. GTD doesn’t care about the design of your sequence of dominos, only whether you are spending as much time as possible to set them up or not.

This is where my general philosophy on time usage and that of GTD differ greatly. I thoroughly recommend that you seek to maximize the leverage that you can create from what you do. It is your productivity measured in terms of the output per unit of working time that you get and not how much input per unit of working time that you give that counts.

My favorite synopsis of the difference between efficient people and effective people is this one by General Von Manstein:

“There are only four types of officer. First there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm… Second, there are the hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.”

In the right hands, GTD would suit the hard-working intelligent types but since it gives insufficient methods and distinctions about how to work effectively it will also prove valuable to the hard-working stupid types, who create irrelevant work for everybody.

If you want to live your life with highly effective productivity then become a student of Richard Koch’s ‘80/20 Principle’. That’s one of the few books that I’ve ever read that was a life changer. I can also highly recommend Tim Ferriss’s ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ as it is another great book steeped in the principles of effective living (There is a lot of hype about Tim and the book and he does come across as having a huge ego, but put that aside and focus on the principles that he advocates. He gives a master class in effective living).

In my opinion, the objective is to create a simple life where you do a few things so effectively that you create massive leverage and massive resources for yourself. Those resources are usually money or freedom of time. When you get that right you will no longer feel harried and GTD becomes superfluous.

On the whole, I don’t advocate GTD as method to implement in its entirety. It’s always to your benefit to manage your desires through elimination of unnecessary desires and the acceptance of postponement of fulfillment. However, once you choose to fulfill a desire then GTD does not give you the knowledge and methods that you need to do so effectively.

GTD is primarily an organizational tool and I find it somewhat perverse that in order to manage objective desires so that they don’t cause stress it institutes a system of such exacting standards that keeping to the system will prove far beyond the means of most people. I won’t use the system because the expectations of GTD will create more ill feeling than I get from having open loops in my mind (The idea of implementing it is daunting, especially when he says that it takes about 2-years to introduce the system fully into your life!).

I’d recommend it for sorting out your email inbox at work but not for much else (To do that delete unnecessary emails that require no action or have no reason to be stored. For those that you want to attend to another time, create topic specific folders to store them in with subfolders for ‘important short term’ ‘important long-term’ ‘not important interest only’. For mails that require action keep them in your in box until done, or delegate the task and store the mail in a folder titled ‘delegated: for review’ and follow up on those delegated actions as often as you feel the need until they are completed and then shift them to one of your other folders).

Finally, GTD is one of the most boring books that I’ve ever read and considering that I’m something of a geek when it comes to productivity methods, that’s saying something.

If you use it and find it effective, or if you’ve read the book and struggle with it, then I’d love to hear what your opinion of GTD is.

I have a colleague on my project team at work who regularly complains that no one responds to his emails. He usually copies me on them and it’s plain to see why no one responds. His communications are vague. It’s not clear what he wants, why he wants it or even who should respond, as he often addresses multiple people in the opening greeting.

The need to make requests and to delegate tasks is a common feature of working life. If no one responds then you can not move forward and you feel somewhat helpless and frustrated. If you are not careful then this can soon create an excuse for procrastination and subpar performance.

There is a way to get much better and quicker responses but it does require you to do more preparation, i.e. work (sorry about that, but I’m afraid it can’t be avoided). I’ll start with a little analogy using a fictitious practical problem as that will help to understand what is in reality an abstract problem.

Imagine that someone gave you a picture of a complex Lego model (the biggest Lego model is a replica of the Millennium Falcon - Wow! Check this baby out!). They give you an instruction to say “Make this.” That’d be a pretty tricky thing to do. You have no materials, no design, no process, and no idea of how long it would take or how many people it will need.

It would be practically very, very difficult to do. It would require a lot of brain work and a lot of trial and error experimentation. It might be that you like that kind of challenge, but if you already have a bunch of other demands on your time then you will naturally do what you can immediately do, which is the easy stuff.

Imagine that for some reason of skill or authority, you are the only person that can finish the model. The person who wants the model, wants you to deliver it as soon as possible, so what could that person do to make the task easier for you and preferably immediate? That person could progressively make things easier by doing the following:

• Provide a clear specification of what the model must look like
• Provide a clear set of instructions on how to create the model
• Provide the exact materials
• Provide the materials organized into the parts needed for each submodule
• Provide finished submodules of the model

Ideally you would end up with everything prepared for you so that you can take the final completing actions that only you can make to finish the model and deliver it.

Now then, in the competition for your attention and your effort within an organization, which task would you choose to do first. The request with no clear specification and no supporting preparation, or the one that is so well prepared that it would be hard not to do it immediately?

If you want fast results from the people that you depend upon, then you must make that task as easy for them to do as possible. The more problem solving you expect of them, the harder you make it for them. This means that they are more likely to keep putting off your task until some other reason occurs that forces a response. In essence, you design-in the grounds for procrastination!

When you create emails, or make requests of a colleague, then do the following:

Provide a clear specification - Tell people the exact result that you are looking for. If it helps to engage them, then give reasons why this result is necessary so that they understand the importance and how this task fits into the overall picture. Include a time for when this must be done and the consequence of a delay.

Provide a clear set of instructions - It might not be your place to tell people how to do their jobs but you can tell people how you want the results delivered, such as the sequence of results and the delivery dates.

Provide the exact materials - If you have resources available then include them with your emails or give appropriate links.

Provide organized materials - If you can, then take your resources and extract relevant information to make it easier to have the right material to hand for each part of the process that the other person must carry out.

Provide finished subsections of the work - If there are parts of the whole set of tasks that you can do for the other person then complete them.

Additional tips:
Tell them that you have done this preparation work in an effort to assist them and to get the job done easily. Show that you are an ally. You can even phone people in advance and ask them directly how you can prepare the work so that they can get it done as soon as it arrives.

Keep your request focused on one problem at a time. If you ask for responses on a multitude of things then you will get the easy, instantaneous responses and the rest will often get overlooked. For additional problems send a separate email.

Make one person the key addressee. If you are not sure who is responsible, or you want a response from different people, then send a separate email to each person. Otherwise Person A will hope that Person B will do it and vice versa and the likelihood of no response at all greatly increases.

By doing as much preparation work as possible for the other person you make it much easier for that person to get the parts done that only he or she can do. The best result is if you can prepare the way so thoroughly that it is actually more difficult and bothersome for the recipient to put off doing the task than it is to do it as soon as it arrives.

Whenever people have to think, i.e. do conscious problem solving, to get something done you increase the chances of delay. Whenever people can immediately react using their existing store of knowledge and ability, you massively increase the chances of getting a quick result.

You might feel a lot of reluctance to do this because you might feel that it’s the other person’s responsibility to do the task and most of the time you are probably right. However, in today’s working environments we all face a multitude of activities competing for our attention and our time. If you care about getting things done in the most effective and quickest way, then you will accept that some sensible preparation effort is a cunning way to compete effectively.

When the people around you are moaning and whining about no response and continuous delays, you can smile inwardly because you play the game at a superior level. You also play win-win because you make life easier for the people that you depend upon and over time they will be happy to deal with you, firstly in the instant that they get the mail and secondly, over the long-term because they know that you are a pro. You are someone who gets results through cooperative problem solving and not through coercion.

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A few weeks ago I carried out a little survey to see what most interested readers of this blog. The topic of procrastination was clearly the big winner, but what surprised me was that other topics were very undervalued, in particular problem solving techniques and high productivity techniques, so I’m going to slap a few wrists!

You can never solve a problem by focusing solely on the problem itself. It is not enough to be against something, you also have to be for the flip side. This is essential. Without a replacement behavior to focus on you will continue with your old behavior. The flip side of procrastination is high productivity and a vital component of that is your collection of problem solving techniques. So study the categories of Productivity and Problem Solving. You will find some very useful help there.

However, one respondent mentioned that a primary frustration was an inability to consistently overcome procrastination without slipping back into old ways, so I think that the deeper issue for most people is the emotional battle that keeps occurring of which procrastination is the end result.

On a fundamental level, you procrastinate because you want to do things that you find too difficult (if not downright impossible) to do at the moment that you desire to have the final result.

This inability generates some level of painful negative emotion, which discourages you and your subconscious immediately responds by seeking out alternative behaviors and actions that can be indulged in immediately that are either less painful or, even better, pleasurable.

To feel good about the thing that you want to do, but which is generating negative emotion, then you have two options. One is to give up on that desire, either for good or to accept postponement until another time. Once you remove that desire from your mind then it ceases to generate negative emotion. The second option is to make the objective both possible and easy to do.

For every desire that you wish to turn from intention into reality there are two main parts: a mental part and a physical part. The mental aspect is required to think through the task so that you break it down into separate parts. Each part should be small enough to do in one session of effort using the physical aspect, which is to use capabilities that you already have.

If you resist immediately take action after you have analyzed, solved and planned things in this way then there may be several causes:

Biting Off More Than You Can Chew: Once you put a desire into your consciousness, an immediate assessments starts as to whether you have fulfilled the desire or not. For a long as the answer is ‘No’ then negative emotions are generated. The pain of negative emotions drives us to take action immediately but if what you want is just not physically possible there and then, then you are sunk. You have created an engine of pain and negativity for yourself. You must plan out the sequence of small tasks that will lead to eventual fulfillment and then focus your consciousness on the first task alone and accept postponement of the full desire until the full process is completed.

Lack of Organization and Preparation: You know what to do and you know how to do it but you resist taking action because you have not organized and prepared the resources that you need to take immediate action. You will often find that you have to make organization and preparation a full and distinct task. Otherwise you will scheme and plan continuously without bridging the practical gap to make the task possible.

Indecision Over What To Do: You don’t take action because you are not sure what to do overall, or else you are not sure how to do something. This indicates that you lack precision in defining the objective. When you specify with great clarity exactly what you want then the way to create that becomes much, much easier to work out. This removes the indecision of not knowing what to do overall. Note: If in doubt then speculate.

Indecision Over How To Do: You don’t take action because you are not sure how to do something. Ultimately, you can only do something in physical reality that you have the motor skills to do with your physical body. You must work out a process for getting what you want that you can personally do. Otherwise it is physically impossible for you to get what you want. Sometimes this requires developing new abilities and so you have to postpone fulfillment of the objective until that is done. Sometimes the best thing to do is to outsource the activity to someone who can do it for you. Note: If in doubt then speculate.

The Result Is Not Desired: Sometimes you have a task that is possible to do but you know that it will lead to a final result that is unwanted, e.g. more work, more pressure, more obligation, make or break failure. This type of resistance requires some deep thought. It could be that you are heading down a path that you are truly not comfortable with. You must think the whole thing through from a long-term strategy point of view and decide whether to give up or whether to build the necessary mental and physical abilities that will allow you to cope with the results of your success.

A Conflicting Belief: You have a desire to get a result but you also have a belief that tells you that you cannot have what you desire. For example you might have a desire to earn a lot of money but you might also have a belief that all people with a lot of money are dirty rotten scoundrels. You have a desire that drives you forward to find ways to get more money and a belief that tells you that if you do this then you will get a result that you don’t want. A belief is just a guess at the mechanism at work between a cause and an effect. The only way to overcome the belief is to test it and seek proof of whether the belief is properly true or not. You can find extensive help to overcome beliefs here, here and here.

Too Much Uncertainty: You might be clear about what you want and how you might do it, but you might still lack certainty over whether it will all work for you. This is especially true when success is dependent upon external elements beyond your control. You can remove uncertainty by making as much of the process controllable by you as possible. Where uncertainty still remains then you can carry out research to see if anyone has done this thing before and made getting desired results systematic with a very high probability of success. Your greatest ally in removing uncertainty is understanding. Through knowing the cause and effect of systems as much as you can you have a much better chance of removing uncertainty and random results and instead create the ability to predict results with a high likelihood of success.

Always remember that it is your desires that potential emotional conflict that results in procrastination. The only way to deal with that conflict successfully is to manage your desires very carefully, especially at the point where you put an idea into your head to do something. If that desire cannot immediately be carried out physically then you will experience a negative emotion.

You can use willpower to consciously force yourself to take action and attempt to solve the mental aspects of problem-solving and organization on the fly but that only works for relatively simple tasks. You must make the task possible to do in both the mental and physical aspects in order to succeed and generate satisfaction. The bigger the goal, the more effort you need on the mental aspects of planning, preparation and organization. The more difficult the goal, by which I mean the more it goes into unknown territory for you, the more effort you need on the mental problem solving and skill building aspects (which often, but not always, requires developing new physical aspects of your capabilities as well).

If you are ambitious and desirous of doing better and better things (which describes the readership of this blog, I think), then get used to living with frustration, only recognize that it’s just a warning sign that you need to either expand your current level of abilities or that you need to think things through better. It does not mean that you are no good or incapable on an absolute level.

You remove the resistance to doing things (procrastination) by making those things physically possible to do. The book, ‘Make Things Possible’ is solely dedicated to that end.

Don’t Make a Single New Year’s Resolution Until You Have Read This!

It’s coming up to that time of year when people make their New Year’s Resolutions. If you want to increase the likelihood that you will follow through with them this year, then it’s important to do a bit of mental housecleaning first. You would do well to think about your current list of desires and which of them are neatly disposed off, or packed away or which lie strewn all over the place making your house look a mess, too small and uncomfortable to move through.

Each desire, want or need that we have creates a set point in the mind. It’s like an order to a firm that needs fulfilling and is expected to be fulfilled. The orders are stored and the subconscious, which is generally very reactive and reflexive in it abilities, will attempt to carry these orders out and fulfill them. Our subconscious is our worker. Only the subconscious can control the motor functions of the body that actually transform desires into practical realities.

Your emotional response system acts like a bookkeeper and a supervisor. If you succeed then the order is crossed off of the books and you can feel content; you’ve justified your pay. If you exceed the order then you get a bonus in the form of a happy emotion because you delivered more than was required. If you fail to meet the order then you receive a reprimand and you will feel unhappy. If it’s a big order and you fail to meet it then you will be punished and made to feel miserable.

However, you are not assessed purely in terms of whether you fulfill the order or not. You are also assessed on the speed and quality of what you do and also whether you have a bias towards fulfilling easy orders only, or whether you also tackle the big, important and long term orders as well.

This is why an overflowing order book is a source of constant reprimand and discontent for the poor subconscious worker as it is always fighting a losing battle. Too many orders in one day will clearly not be fulfilled and the subconscious knows that. It knows that it’s going to be punished, so it resists doing anything in the first place. Why make the effort if failure and punishment are guaranteed? Here lies a principle cause of procrastination.

This is also a reason why we engage in doing so many trivial things. If we have too many things on the books we will feel overwhelmed and since the only way to receive our basic pay is to fulfill at least some form of order then we will opt for the easy stuff. The difficult stuff leads too easily to punishment and a further backlog of unfulfilled orders stacks up whilst we tackled the other stuff.

The problem with your emotional bookkeeper and supervisor is that it is too fastidious. It is too critical, exacting and overparticular. Every entry on the books must accounted for and each entry must be fulfilled precisely or else you will receive a bad report. You can’t really blame your bookkeeper. It has almost zero latitude to judge differently. It has no authority to direct and manage the workflow. Orders stay on the books and must be fulfilled precisely unless the boss says otherwise.

The boss in this instance is your consciousness. Your boss is the one who sends the orders to the bookkeeper. Only the boss has the authority to change the criteria of an order or cancel it altogether. Only the boss can decide whether a time extension is necessary and acceptable, or whether new training, or new equipment is needed to fulfill the order.

A great problem is that the boss is generally oblivious to the state of the order book and the condition of the worker. The worker reports to the supervisor and gets punishment or reward. The worker will solve problems to the best of its abilities but it has little or no scope for original and creative problem solving. If a few trial and error efforts don’t work then it gives up.

It is only when the worker is so heavily punished and important orders go unfulfilled for such a long time that the whole business is put into crisis that the boss gets involved and takes a personal hand in sorting the whole mess out.

A bad boss is unable to resolve the whole mess. A good boss will make a clear assessment of what’s going on. If the order book is overflowing and has too many orders that are impossible to fill then the boss will go through it and cancel orders. Sometimes the boss has to go back years, even decades, to cancel out open orders, because the meticulous bookkeeper and supervisor will hold the worker to account otherwise.

Sometimes the boss must change the criteria for the orders. Specifications must be changed, timescales must be changed, quality standards must be changed. Sometimes the boss has to accept that the company cannot produce what has been ordered. Those orders must either be cancelled, or else the worker must undergo training (and that means canceling other orders so that there is enough time for training).

The boss also needs to accept that the worker needs break times, holidays, and recreation time. These must be planned for.

In summary, if your worker is exhausted and your supervisor is continually dishing out punishments, then you are mismanaging yourself. For 2009, before you put new orders (your New Year’s Resolutions) on the books, do your staff a great favor and go through your order book.

Cancel out every outstanding order that you have that is no longer necessary, relevant, desired, or important. Cancel out orders that are impossible to fulfill. Change the specification of important orders so that you have a decent chance of meeting them. Delay putting orders on the books, if they cannot be worked upon any time soon.

To do this, make a list of the important areas of your life: career, finances, health, fitness, relationships, hobbies, personal development and so on. Then list the desires that you have for each area. Make a note of long term unfulfilled desires in particular and carefully consider whether you can and should strike them from the books. Carefully reassess your current pressing desires to see if you can make them easier to deal with and more likely to be fulfilled.

Do all of this before taking on new orders. It’s an exercise that can take a long time to do well, so do it for your most pressing and most exasperating problems first. The relief that you feel will encourage you to clear the books in the other areas of your life too.

When you do this, you put your house in order. You dispose of your rubbish. You pack away things that are not currently needed. You tidy up your work space and your living space. You can move through your home without constantly having to watch out for things that will trip you up, or that you will bash into, or that will fall on your head without warning.

You can properly assess your real situation and you can now take on important new activities and commitments.

I hope that this helps you to get 2009 off to a great start and I wish you the best of good fortune with all of your (carefully considered) aspirations for the forthcoming year.

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