An IdeaMatt Update 2010-05, The IT Crowd, TTL, and a Call For Help switching to Tumblr

In case you think I've given up on you, let me give you an update on what's going on here, and get your technical advice on changing my blog over to Tumbler (but still located here).

Health

The main reason I went on hiatus was because this winter was a major life stress for me and my little family. It's now been a little over five months since my mom died, four since my mother-in-law died, three since my spermatocelectomy, and three weeks since my gum graft. Whew! As usual, I expect myself to jump back to normal productivity levels right away, but nature has something else in mind. I continue to struggle with this discrepancy. Fortunately, most of the post-op drugs are out of my system (my wife hates Prednisone, BTW) and I'm getting back into mountain biking [1] this week.

Consulting

Consulting continues to be a heady mix of rewards, struggles, and uncertainty, and I'm still loving it and learning how to grow from it. In-person training and coaching is still slow, but picking up. Maybe the economy's turning around a bit. I'm in the early stage of an experiment to put on a local day-long seminar to gauge interest.

Products are still where I plan to put my main focus, including: 1) a solid e-book on meetings from a novel unique Think, Try, Learn perspective, 2) a nice little slidecast on email using my "Fewer, Faster, Clarity, Control" framework, and 3) a video recording of my 90-minute productivity seminar. In addition I'm in active discussions with two universities on partnering up for an on-line version of my full-day "Workflow 101" seminar. sI'm excited about all of these.

Keeping it light

To help manage the stress, esp. while exercise has been constrained, I'm inviting more humor into my life. I'm enjoying listening to Bernie Siegel's The Beginner's Guide to Humor and Healing (his book Love, Medicine and Miracles is good too), which is giving me a lot of Think, Try, Learn ideas.

However, my biggest discovery and delight in years is a brilliantly funny TV show from the UK, The IT Crowd. I love to laugh, but most stuff on TV doesn't work for me. However, this show is a delight. It could be you need to have a geek in your life to appreciate it, but parts were so funny that I had tears running down my face. My wife loved it too. Surprising, I find myself re-watching episodes because the content and performances are so good.

I've even gained a few pearls of wisdom from it, such as the Think, Try, Learn-ish quote "It does you no harm to look a little foolish from time to time." (Roy, S02E05), and the scene where the instructor of a stress class asks for a volunteer to demonstrate his machine. I love how the class applauds for her when she timidly stands up. Why do they clap? I think it's a sign of support, and an acknowledgment of her courage. Look for it at around the 1:40 point in YouTube - IT Crowd Stress class.

I'm widening my lexicon based on the character's expressions, which is a sure sign I've gone overboard. Highly recommended.

On Amazon: The IT Crowd: The Complete Season One, The IT Crowd: The Complete Second Season, and The IT Crowd: The Complete Third Season.

Edison development

I'm putting renewed energy back into Edison, the Think, Try, Learn experimenter's journal, with the focus being releasing version 1.2. The new features are ones we consider crutial before working on getting more users, including Facebook-style email notification when someone comments on your experiment, or comments after you on someone else's experiment. The meta-experiment is Design and Release Edison v1.2!.

We have some nice recent experiments, including a mind blower to add a sixth "EM" sense by implanting a magnet under the skin (see Have magnet implanted in finger - inspired by the Feeling Waves blog). You might enjoy others like Learning a new language, Avoid owning a car, Use Elance for a Commercial Programming Project, and Plant my first garden. I love our Edison users :-)

(Side note: I'm looking to hire a Ruby on Rails developer to implement this version. I have an excellent team in place, but our current developer is booked and I need someone who can fill in. Do you have anyone you've worked with that you love?)

Writing the TTL book

I've now jumped into writing my book, "Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness," which I'm tracking in Edison. Anne Lamott's sublime Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life has been tremendously inspirational and helpful.

This was after I finished structuring the concepts using ideas from Writing the Natural Way (the process: nucleus word -> clustering -> internal pattern awareness -> emotionally charged trial-web shift -> impulse to write), plus your advice in Question For You: How Do You Organize A Book? The experiment was at Use Post-it note techniques to organize book ideas.

Help! Lowering the barrier to blogging

I would love your help on an experiment to lower a barrier to my blogging by switching to a Tumblr-based tool. I still have a lot to share, and I want to tap your ideas, but this current system doesn't support the way of writing that's natural right now: very short posts with lengths somewhere between Twitter and essays, but tilting toward the former. (These days, essay-length writing has to go into my book.) I'd use my Facebook account for this, but that venue seems better for the personal side. I've entered some sample entries here to give you a sense of the content and format I have in mind: ideamatt.tumblr.com.

My goal is to:

• Write posts on Tumblr
  
• Have new posts show up somewhere on matthewcornell.org
  
• Transparently switch RSS subscribers over to the new Tumblr-based feed
  
• Have existing posts still available at matthewcornell.org/blog
  
• Not screw up my Google or SEO rankings
  
• Continue to drive traffic to matthewcornell.org
  
• Inconvenience readers as little as possible
  

Is this straightforward? I'm thinking the steps are:

1. Set up a Tumblr custom domain name that goes to tumblr.matthewcornell.org (say).
   
2. Write a "final" post on matthewcornell.org/blog that redirects readers to tumblr.matthewcornell.org.
   
3. Change my Feedburner RSS feed (feed://feeds.feedburner.com/ideamatt) over to the Tumblr one (feed://ideamatt.tumblr.com/rss).
   
4. Try and Learn!
   

What do you think?

References

• [1] You might enjoy Productivity Lessons From Mountain Biking. Or, What Sports Can Teach Us About Doing.
  

Temporary hiatus, plus Struggle, and the Quest to Determine What Matters

You might have noticed my sporadic posting here, and I'd like to explain the factors and ask your patience. I also ask you to indulge some reflection in this post after three full years of consulting.

First, this winter has been a challenge, both from the consulting perspective [1] and personally (two mothers dying within two months of each other, plus some surgery). I'm coming to grips with the struggle being important [2], and how a mismatch between "Visualizing wild success" and reality is an opportunity for reflection and considering strategic change. (An aside: I think this coming-to-grips is the engine behind one class of non-repeatable processes, and - to spin the saccharine "Your path is perfect" angle - it literally could not have happened differently, given the models and data I had. My TTL philosophy could not have emerged in any other way, and no one can repeat these steps. I'll flatter myself by comparing it to David Allen and his "20 year overnight success." No one could recreate his process - him, his perspective, the particular people he had in his circle, his timing, luck, and the dues he paid. Same here, I hope :-) Make any sense?)

In general, for someone making a leap into consulting like I did [3], I've found a large piece is the quest to discover what matters, AKA "marketing." I'm dissatisfied with results so far. Or rather [4], "The subject is experiencing feelings of dissatisfaction with the process. Curious."

Second, I continue to evaluate the worth of writing here. The benefits to me are of a certain class [5], and I need to spend time putting them in perspective. Like my consulting path, my blog diverges significantly from most marketing advice, such as: Decide your niche, visualize your ideal client, determine what her needs are, and give away some, but not all, content that addresses her pain via blog and newsletter. After seven drips she'll buy, return for more, and recommend you for consulting. (I apologize for the faulty summary.) While this is completely reasonable, it's not how it's gone for me. Instead, I started with the "What" on a whim to share my thinking when I got turned on by productivity. My topics are all over the place, though converging on are converging on our Think, Try, Learn philosophy. Again, all this is counter to traditional thinking about blogs, such as keep it short and on specific, limited topics. I think that after time, any writing about time management naturally widens. After all, as soon as you talk about spending your precious life, you have to face purpose. With so much to do, what's really important? That is what I was trying to get to in The Real Reasons For The Modern Productivity Movement. Putting on my grandiosity hat, it hit me some time ago thatmy blog is my book/philosophy/purpose process in action. I like to think that if David Allen or Stephen Covey had blogs 20 years ago, they'd take a trajectory like mine.

Third, I need to focus on products. While training sales have been down recently, I am extremely gratified by the sales of my first two products, Where the !@#% did my day go? The ultimate guide to making every day a great workday and You Did WHAT? 99 Playful experiments to live a healthier and happier life. This quarter I'll be adding two short-but-sweet slidecasts on managing email and a time management method, both using a light-hearted sabotage angle that was inspired by fellow consultant Johan Dhaeseleer (thanks, Johan!) They both use my adaptation to training of the so-called "Lessig Method" [6] of presentation. My clients love it ("brilliant," I was told last week :-), so I'll continue integrating it with traditional training approaches.

And fourth, I'm throwing heavy effort into our book, Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness (working title). Our nascent wiki is up at thinktrylearn.com, part of my three-part software vision for a TTL Platform.


Let me wrap this up by bringing in a productivity idea I'm playing with, the thought that we each have a project "set point" that determines how many concurrent ones we are comfortable with. This is akin to ones for happiness (see Want to Be Happier? Here's How, which reviews The How of Happiness), optimism (see Learned Optimism), and ambiguity (I couldn't find a good reference - suggestions?), and is something I was aiming for in Does Having Fewer Projects Make Us More Productive?. I think my set point is low relative to others' [7], say 15-20 at once, with only 3-4 major ones (maybe best called meta- or super-projects). With the ones above, including being my mom's executor, this means I need to turn down others. I find that when my responsibilities exceed a low threshold, the stress impacts my (and my family's) happiness.

Cheers, and stay in touch. I plan to be back by spring. -- matt

References

• [1] Oops: The unspoken rule to consulting is to never admit anything but blue sky. My mistake. I will say that the economy has been a signficant factor.
  
• [2] Steven Pressfield's brilliant little book The War of Art continues to be an inspiration. I mentioned him elsewhere:
  
  
  
  • My men@pause interview is up, plus an invitation to a four-square-o-rama!
    
  • Could you outsource painting your life? Or, Would Mick Fleetwood do GTD?
    
  • New! Matt's Guides: You Did WHAT? 99 Playful experiments to live healthier and happier
    
  • A late adopter's productivity experiment with Twitter, plus some 140 word humor
    
  • Productivity lessons from mountain biking. Or, what sports can teach us about doing
    
  • A dozen important productivity blog posts that haven't been written yet
    
  
  
• [3] I was ideally unsuited to do this, incidentally. Pick your best set of success factors for becoming self-employed, and invert them to get my situation. Staying in the same field. Having a large network. Having people skills. Having business knowledge. Etc etc. I'll pat myself on the back and say my success so far has been doubly astonishing.
  
• [4] For Think, Try, Learn we're working on language that gets people thinking our new way. This is akin to GTD's "actions," "commitments," and "open loops." In this case, I'm finding that using the third person helps create what we call a "healthy sense of detachment." The idea is to treat yourself as a creature in the wild, make observations, and be curious and surprised. After all, much of our behavior is absurd if viewed objectively.
  
• [5] On the plus side they include a prompt to write regularly, develop my thinking, provide a body of work, increase organic SEO, and provide value to my readers. Economic benefits include a few product sales and a little Amazon "book money" each month. Before I sound ungrateful, let me give a big thank you to my customers. Also I thank reader Greenman for his generous insights around the topic.
  
• [6] Sources: The "Lessig Method" of presentation, the Pecha Kucha ("chit-chat," roughly) format: 20 slides, on display for 20 seconds each (also described at Presentation Zen), and the Japanese Hara hachi bu ("Eat until 80% full," roughly) also at PZ.
  
• [7] I'd be curious to hear what yours is, and what kind of job you have.
  

Question for you: How do you organize a book?

I'd like to tap your experience to help with my in-process book, "Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness" (working title). I've collected ideas for five years (since I started this consulting journey), and it's time to pull them together into a structure that leads to chapters.

A few examples I've found:

• Rico's "clustering" technique in Writing the Natural Way. There's a clustering example on Gabriele Rico website - which looks a lot like a mind map. Thoughts?



• I also found Ayn Rand's The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers.



• The LinkedIn answer If you plan to write a book, how you organize this work? suggests outlining until it's clear to everyone, analyzing 200 books on the subject (!), and resulting in a 50 page outline having 100 points per page. Fascinating. Another: 100s of 3x5 cards (I have this, basically)) -> lay them out -> gather into categories -> give categories chapter names -> transcribe cards into the computer -> re-work the material a half-dozen times. Also: Use an hierarchical style: start with as many levels as necessary -> try to get it down to 3 levels -> write the paragraphs.



• In How to write a book Peter Seibel suggests: Write the index -> Write a hierarchical outline -> Write a a flattened outline (linear, including splitting the taxonomy across chapters, and limited to three levels: chapters, sections, and paragraphs as topic sentences) -> Write the book.

I'm curious

• What ways do you know, or have used, to group ideas?


• Do you have resources around this that you'd like to share?


• What works have you applied your methods to?

Thanks a ton!

P.S. The tool I'm using to organize is decidedly low-tech: Post-It notes! I love sticky notes, and I'm sick of my text outliner, so I figured a change might help. Great results so far (my Edson experiment is at Use Post-it note techniques to organize book ideas), which supports my experience reported in How Else Can You See This? Perspective And The Value Of A Tool Change. Find a picture here, for fun:

Please let know if your comments aren't getting through

I'm double-checking my comment spam filtering software, and I don't want to miss your insights! So let me know if you posted something that I didn't reply to. Cheers -- matt

47 Ways to Kill Your Curiosity

"Curiosity is antifreeze." -- me :-)

• act your age
• don't act your age
• be uninterested in learning
• be cautious
• feel old
• be afraid of the process
• keep a closed mind
• assume one true answer
• be too busy
• be smug about how much you know
• assume only one chance
• focus on the past
• go it alone
• be embarrassed to ask questions
• be part of a community that discourages questioning
• be in crisis
• don't be around children
• don't be skeptical
• be afraid of the results
• ignore things that surprise you
• don't form hypotheses
• look at things through the same glasses
• have an agenda
• be bored
• assume you know the results
• surround yourself with sameness
• be tired
• tell yourself you need a map
• be afraid to look stupid
• be disengaged
• try something that's way beyond you
• surround yourself with incurious people
• don't pay attention
• don't stray from your field of study
• ignore the unusual
• be blind to surprises
• try things one time only
• be ashamed to be proven wrong
• don't write things down
• be afraid of making mistakes
• be impatient
• think teacher, not student
• be a specialist
• look down
• be serious
• say "I know I wouldn't like that"
• talk more than listening
• complain