Productivity lessons from mountain biking. Or, what sports can teach us about doing

I'm reading The Inner Game of Tennis, and the first page sounds like a how-to for becoming more effective. From "The Inner Game of Tennis" is Genius:

The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. He aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body, which finds its own surprising ways to surpass its own limits again and again. Moreover, while overcoming the common hand-ups of competition, the player of the inner game uncovers a will to win which unlocks all his energy and which is never discourages by losing.

Sound familiar?

This made me wonder if we substitute "work" for "tennis" we'd get something readily transferable. And this happened while mountain biking [1], so I thought I'd play with connections between it and being productive. I've made the following light-hearted observations, which I hope you'll find valuable.

• Steady beats sprinting: Steady, consistent pedalling beats sprinting for efficiently covering ground. But a mixture is natural, and sprints are important for hard sections. Interpretation: Avoid "binge" work, e.g., putting off something until a big chunk of time is available, then focusing on it long and deeply. It doesn't work because those chunks don't show up anymore. Much better to break big tasks into bite-sized pieces - something you can do in one sitting, say an hour or less - and tackle them one at a time. For particularly hard tasks, consider sprints (AKA "dashes" [2]) to unstick them.
  
• Exercise is good for you: Not a breakthrough thought here, but it's good to tie in health when talking about making progress on the things you care about. I've found that exercise helps me relax and take my mind off work, which opens up my brain to receiving ideas. And while I might disagree with Pressfield in The War of Art (buy it!) about where they come from, I'm not about to lose them. Interpretation: Staying healthy is important.
  
• Be ready for inspiration: When those ideas hit you, always be ready to capture them. My riding buddy uses Jott, but I just carry a small pad of paper and pen. Disadvantage of paper: Reading notes later (the pages go into the inbox like anything else) is a challenge because the writing is all jerky and scribbly. I guess it's an occupational hazard in sports involving sweat, adrenaline, and bears. Interpretation: Always have a note-taking tool with you. For work I love my legal pad during meetings, client sessions, and reading, but anything will do. Avoid a PDA, though - too slow. Another tip: When you're having a hard conversation - such as a dispute with the phone company - record the facts then file them in a "problem folder." If you have to follow up (and you probably will) your case will be much more compelling when you can rattle off who you talked to, when, and what they promised.
  
• Notice when making mistakes. In the productivity blogosphere you can find a lot about making mistakes. They're good, you're not making them if you're not doing anything, "good" ones are those you learn from, etc. And I agree. When biking I find I make them when my judgement is off, esp. when I'm tired. If I try to push through I get hurt. It's better to slow down, take a break, or switch it up (e.g., hike-a-bike for a minute). Don't let that get in the way of happy accidents, though. I've been delighted more than once discovering a new trail or running into another biker. Interpretation: Be aware of your energy level, monitor errors and flow, and don't be afraid to take breaks. It's not a sign of weakness.
  
• Sometimes going faster is safer: This is counterintuitive and requires trust, but there are times when it's best to push through something faster than you're used to or comfortable with. On the trails there are rocky sections that, when taken slowly, feel like you're hydroplaning on gravel. But if you speed up, your shocks start taking over and you can fly. It's like breaking through the sound barrier, except you're on a bike instead of a jet, and you're going a hundred times slower. Interpretation: Control your perfectionism by being a bit less careful and pushing for faster progress. Use Parkinson's law to limit how much time you allocate to the task, and stick to it. Also, consider lowering your standards. It's not a bad thing in this case. (See Great Time Management Ideas From The World Of Improv Wisdom, esp. the fifth maxim: Be Average.)
  
• Always wear a helmet: When you're doing something that's risky (i.e., involves costly potential mistakes) it's foolish not to have protection [3]. Interpretation: Have a safety net. For example, back up your To Dos using your calendar: In addition to putting the item on your actions list, create an all-day event that identifies the deadline for doing it (if it has one) or an informational "__ days until __" or "it's been __ days since __" entry. (There are some subtleties with using the calendar effectively. Start with "Do On" or "Due By?") Another example: Make sure you have regular automated backups of your computer. (I learned about triple redundancy as a NASA employee [4].) When I mention this to my individual clients I often get a big "THANK YOU!"
  
• Try biking with friends: While I enjoy soloing, I really love sharing the trails with people. It's more fun, I get to learn from them, and we're there for each other in case of a spill. Interpretation: If you work on your own, consider scheduling a work date, either in person or by phone. Also, consider the value of asking for help. Sometimes a second opinion can get us un-stuck or give us some needed perspective.
  
• Pick a good line: Identifying and carefully choosing your path can mean the difference between sailing and grinding. But there's a time for both. When I'm climbing a steep hill I sometimes choose an easy one because if I stop I'll have trouble getting started again. But there are times when I want to challenge myself by taking the hard way. In either case, it's better to find some way to get up rather than stopping to think too much. Interpretation: Plan as much as necessary, but error on the lesser side, and stay flexible. Also, if you're working on a problem, play with possible solutions before jumping in. But again, as my painter friends say, "Don't over-work the piece."
  
• Know what trail you're on: Going fast, but on the wrong trail, leads to frustration and backtracking. It's better to pay attention and have a map as backup when riding new trails. Interpretation: Keep your larger vision in mind. When you pick your next action, factor in which of them will move you towards your higher goals. If you're not doing at least one of those every day, you have some thinking to do. Also: If you're trying something new, tap into the experience of others and learn how they did it. History, repeating mistakes, etc.
  
• Buy a good bike...: No question about it, when I'm out there I depend on my bike. The trails are rough, and lower-quality equipment literally slows me down. It's also more vulnerable to failure. Interpretation: Your equipment and tools are essential to your work, so invest a bit in quality ones. A powerful computer, multiple monitors, and good filing cabinets. Ditto for your desk chair [5].
  
• ...but the rider matters more: Buying a new bike or getting upgraded parts is fun, and you might see a performance boost while still novel, but it's still about the rider, not the bike. Interpretation: Don't fall into the tool trap. Changing tools is easy, but changing metawork habits is hard. Keep in mind, the method I teach just uses a calendar and three lists.
  
• Try visualizing: Sometimes stopping to visualize your path is helpful, especially on new and difficult sections. For me, following a line with my eyes and imagining myself riding at each point makes a big difference. But after one or two mental "runs," it's time to give it shot. Interpretation: Try visualizing for motivation (e.g., seeing finished projects), results (e.g., fantasizing phenomenal success), or courage (e.g., dealing with possible scenarios).
  
• Avoid backtracking: I've noticed that when planning a ride no one likes backtracking. We seem to naturally prefer loops instead. Maybe this has an evolutionary origin. As hunter-gatherers, staying in same place probably posed a risk - we could use up the resources, become prey, or get fat and lazy. Interpretation: Challenge yourself and try doing things a new way. Also, look for opportunities to automate. Use checklists to make regular work routine and to reduce unnecessary attention sinks. Remember Matt's Law of the Routine: If you're repeating work, it's a waste after the third time [6]. (OK, I just made that up.)
  
• Stay back from your edge most of the time: For a long time I rode at my edge, both in terms of of endurance and skill. This was partly due to ego, and partly due to wanting to improve my performance. Then I had a conversation with Chris Crouch, which changed my perspective on the relationship between it and maximum productivity. Check out The Productivity I/O Sweet Spot, Or Why Balance Is A Bad Thing, but the take-away was to back well off of the edge, at least most of the time. For riding this meant taking more breaks and being more respectful of difficult sections of the trail. And guess what? I had more fun and performed a lot better. Surprise! Interpretation: Pick smaller tasks (be more granular in breaking projects down) and take frequent short (micro) breaks.
  
• Talking's talking, and riding's riding: When it comes down to it, putting your butt in the seat and pedalling is what gets things done. Interpretation: Work takes seat time. As Don Aslett writes in How to Have a 48-Hour Day [7], the biggest secret of accomplishment is time on the job (what he calls "banging things out"). I love how he puts it: "It's amazing how much of a time management expert this will make you."
  

How about you? How does your favorite non-work activity improve your personal productivity? How has it changed how you look at your work? Any take-ways for us?

References

• [1]I love mountain biking. I ride a couple times a week during the season, and here in New England we've a bunch of fantastic trails [1]. Is it dangerous? Somewhat. Is it painful? Sometimes. But it is a heck of a lot of fun.
  
• [2] A reader asked recently what I thought "about the whole 'work in dashes' concept." I replied that it's a useful technique. Merlin describes it in Kick procrastination's ass: Run a dash. I call it time blocking and work chunking, but it's the same idea: Break work down into a fixed segment (preferably small) and focus. It leverages the idea that getting started is hard, and that momentum builds once we dive in. Mann also has a formula to get started: Break an hour into 5 10-minute segments, with a 2 minute break between - (10+2)*5. (Speaking of formulae, you might enjoy my Some Tasty Morsels From The Ideamatt Self Help Formulary.)
  
• [3] Jeez - I sound like a condom commercial.
  
• [4] Check out this article from my old stomping grounds: Public Lessons Learned Entry: 0659. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I'm not the only one getting value from tracking lessons learned.
  
• [5] A surprising tip from How to save money running a startup: "Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters... invest in it."
  
• [6] The first time it's new. The second time might be spurious. But after the third time you've probably seen enough instances to form a pattern. You might resist taking the time out to automate, but take it from a former programmer: It's always better to write a subroutine than to copy and paste. :-)
  
• [7] This book was controversial. For example, his take on workaholism: A cop out for not having guts (NB: that's my interpretation). And on being present: Busy is the best way to smell the flowers. Here's a good one on work and play: "If Martians arrived and our activities weren't labeled work or play, how would they know the difference?"
  

IdeaLab 0826: Systemic self-repair, over-blogging, faith, and "doing it" productivity style

The latest installment of my IdeaLab mashup - short ideas from the IdeaMatt My Big-Arse Text File to stimulate thinking, lead to discussion, and prevent Alzheimer's.

• Can your system solve problems with your system?: I rediscovered Einstein's idea that "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." This made me wonder whether this applied to self-management systems like GTD. That is, whether we can use a method to self problems with the method... I think the short answer is "Of course! It can solve anything!!" But it would me a strange moment when you realized you needed a major change - would the system look at it as hara kiri?
  
  
• Productivity "Do It" jokes: Just for fun, do you have some good "Do It" Jokes? You know, "Productivity whizzes do it..."
  
  
  • ...in the office
    
  • ...wherever they can
    
  • ...with 100% focus
    
  • ...as much as possible
    
  And yours are...?
  
  
• In the "What's this mean?" department: "It is the busiest man who has time to spare" [3]. My take: If we take "busy" to mean "productive," then then she has freed up important thinking time. Thoughts? (Apparently this is an implication of Parkinson's Law, one I hadn't seen before. Neat! Found via Time Tactics of Very Successful People, which definitely passed the scribble test.)
  
  
• The funniest productivity tip I've found yet: From the brilliant Robert Benchley (quotes here): How to Get Things Done (with edits):

  The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
  
  Instead of putting [the most important items] first on the list, I put them last. My eye catches [the easier work]... I am soon hard at work [on it]. before he knows it, the easier stuff is done, and he returns to the harder one, which he works on a tiny bit more. then drawn to the next easiest thing. Tomorrow I will do the [hard one], and no fooling this time. ... The only trouble is that, at this rate, I will soon run out of things to do, and will be forced to get at my newspaper articles the first thing Monday morning.
  

  Go read the whole thing.
  
  
• There is no reason to blog more than once per week: I know this runs counter to all "how to create a successful blog" advice, but given these days of information overload there is no thinking that's so important that I should see it daily. I'm sorry, but there's just too much interesting for me to invite backlog-producing sources into my life. It simply adds too much falling behind stress. The only exception is emergencies, but those should/do come via other more appropriate means (e.g., university threat warnings via SMS). You might consider news being an exception, but really, anything really important will come to you via friends or walking past the newspaper stand (see media diet). Still not convinced? Try this experiment: Track what news you think is important, then a week later check a) is it still important to you, and b) has anything important about it changed? (And yes, I'm biased by my "news is crap" perspective.) Related: Why Blogruptcy Is A Great Idea But Doesn't Work, And Why SPAM Is Easy To Fix And Information Overload Isn't.
  
  
• 2x2: Serious vs. Fun: Why does work have to be so serious? I had an insight when reading the time management classic Seize the Day!, esp. this passage:

  "We have become conditioned to believe that working is a very serious business and any time, we're having fun, we are probably not 'producing'. Depressed people generally tend to be less productive. Likewise, people who take themselves too seriously create unnecessary tension in themselves and those around them. While there is a basic level of tension which can be very beneficial to performance, too much is counterproductive."

  I take this to mean it's possible (and recommended!) to do serious work, but have fun at it. This leads to the following 2x2: Serious vs. Fun:
  
  
  • Trivial, Miserable: Drudgery
    
  • Trivial, Fun: The Fool
    
  • Serious, Miserable: Death by stress
    
  • Serious, Fun: Great!
    
  
  
  
• Keep a Question Pickle Jar: I'm a huge fan of asking questions. Good ones, and many of them. I think they're essential to living an active life that stimulates our curiosity and engages us in our world. It also opens our minds to seeing the world differently, and helps disconnect ego, opinion, and bias. When I spoke with Scott Ginsberg that keeping a list of questions (around any topic) is a great idea. As a minimum I recommend having a "party of three" at your fingertips for any social situation. In What If You... I suggested:
  
  
  • "What do you do for a living?"
    
  • "What do you love about your work?"
    
  • "What makes your job hard?"
    
  Yes these are all work related, but I have no problem with that. Everyone has some kind of work they do. (Plus, I couldn't come up with a general question that doesn't assume out-of-the-house work. "What keeps you busy?" "What do you love to do?"...)
  
  
• Treat yourself like a kid: I need reminders to not be so serious (see above) and to give myself some slack (I'm very hard on myself around expectations - "I should be doing more," etc.) While observing my (now 8 year old) daughter playing with friends I thought I could take some hints from kids:
  
  
  • They're allowed to be super (over?) confident.
    
  • They have fun. They do silly things. They dance and pick flowers while playing in the outfield.
    
  • They know it's OK (and good) to get a kiss on a boo boo (i.e., to ask for support).
    
  • They "talk like they talk," i.e., they use simple language. Plus, what professional wouldn't benefit by adding "pee" and "poo" to his vocabulary?
    
  
  
  
• Matt's Question: What value am I creating right now?: OK, ego dictates that I have "my question," ala Alan Lakein's "What is the best use of my time right now?" (from How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life). So I thought mine might focus on value made in the moment. Variation: "What meaning am I making at this moment?" So: What productivity question do you ask yourself to get on track?
  
  
• Some recent acts of faith?: Having become self-employed in a career based on a $12 book, I am rather aware of leaps of faith. Some early ones included buying a couple of dozen labelers, reading lots of books, getting my CCR number, and ignoring (flouting?) conventional wisdom around marketing myself (turning down low paying opportunities, for example). Interestingly, faith (not necessarily the religious variety) comes up in some surprising places in my study of the field:
  
  
  • Three predominant elements of making a response lucky: high energy, a vigorous imagination and a strong faith. (From How to Attract Good Luck.) Sadly, Carr nails the description of a significant personal limitation of mine:
    

    People take twisted pride in not having a faith, a sneering disbelief in a religion contempt for philosophy seems the stamp of a superior mind has not science negated religion.

    Time to do some work...
    
  • The FAITH processing method from Organize Your Office In No Time: File, Act, In-coming, Toss, Hand-off.
    
  • In Kaizen: Faith that with small steps we can better overcome the mind's initial resistance to change (from One Small Step Can Change Your Life).
    
  • From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't: Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith).
    
  So what are some acts of faith you've recently taken?
  
  
• Tennis match or juggling tournament?: In describing the daily flow of work, productivity is often portrayed as juggling - keeping multiple balls (projects) in the air at one time. This gets at the parallel nature of work, but ignores the back-and-forth that's required to get things done. How about looking at it as a tennis game, but with multiple balls? OK, it's a bit contrived (OK, completely contrived), but goes farther to capture delegation ("It's in your court"), waiting (and, importantly, tracking these things), focus ("Keep your eye on the ball"), making decisions when too much is going on (intentionally "Dropping the ball"), and the overall dance we have to do in our high-speed workplaces. Thoughts?
  
  

Cheers!

A conversation with Ron Hale Evans, author of "Mind Performance Hacks"

In my continuing interview series with top people in productivity I'd like to share highlights from a recent conversation with Mind Performance Hacks author Ron Hale-Evans. I'm a big fan of Ron's book, having mentioned it in How To Use The "I'm Not Going To ____" Mind Hack and An Idea (and Question) Dump From The Big-arse Text File. It's loaded with great tips, including (paraphrased):

• #12 Overcome the Tip of the Tongue Effect: Instead of focusing on the few relevant things that you can remember, it's better to recall as much information about the topic as possible no matter how loosely it is related. For example, if you can't remember the title of a movie, try to remember plots and details from other movies with the same performer as well as what you were doing when you saw the recent film who you were with, etcetera.
  
• #14 Write faster using a shorthand hack called Dutton Speedwords.
  
• #22 Scamper for Ideas: It's an acronym, substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate and reverse (from the book Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques).
  
• #57 Learn Your Emotional ABCs: The ABC of a model of emotion holds that it is not an activating A event that causes your emotional consequences C, but the linchpin is your invisible beliefs B. You use this in practice to perform a rational self-analysis in the order CABEDF.
  
  
  
  1. 
     
  2. Experience emotional consequences C.
     
  3. Identify the activating event A.
     
  4. Identify which beliefs B the event filtered through.
     
  5. Determine what effect E you would have preferred.
     
  6. To that end dispute D old beliefs and create new ones.
     
  7. Make plans for further action F.
     
  
  

I won't go into the book's detail here. You can find summaries at Safari Books Online and its O'Reilly page. Of particular interest is his self-management tool (an "exoself"), described in the Google Book Search entry.

Instead I'll focus on Ron, the history of the book, and other parts of his story. As we covered a wide range of ground, I'll structure this as a bulleted list of goodies. Enjoy!

• Origin of the book: The book emerged from Ron's Mentat Wiki ("thinking without computers"), a project he started to collect thinking about thinking. (Hey, who can avoid circularities?) Ron credits a dozen people for their contributions (including Lion Kimbro, author of How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think [1]), which eventually led to the book via Merlin Mann. Ron says the Wiki structure [2] lead naturally to the more structured format of the book.
  
• Book license: While not able to release the book under a more general Creative Commons license, Ron worked out a Founders' Copyright for it (after 18 years). I'm very new to how the different licenses work. Any comments?
  
• External factors driving intelligence: I asked Ron what is it about our minds that's so fascinating. He talked about how tools and environments cause us as individuals to stretch our faculties. Two examples are the difficulty of using the vi editor [3], and a drooping economy, which might require taking on additional jobs, which leads to seeking out tools to squeeze more out of our minds. He likens these as puzzles to solve that make us smarter.
  
• General Intelligence: He mentioned this term, taken from Greg Egan [4]. Snooping around led to Egan dismisses Singularity, maybe and Levels of Organization in General Intelligence. Neat!
  
• Mobile computers: Ron was excited about these, especially the One Laptop per Child project (site here). He's also a fan of ebooks [5], which the OLPC will support. Ron currently uses the ASUS Eee PC ($299 at Amazone) with its bundled FBReader.
  
• Information sources: Given the problems of information overload, I was curious how Ron managed to find high-value sources. He admitted blogs and sites are a distraction, and stays on a pretty strict media diet with some of his favorites being Creative Creativity and Kevin Kelly's blog. He says carrying his ebook reader helps focus on what he's previously decided is important. Check out Ron's Delicious account for others.
  
• Legos et al.: Ron mentioned a love for construction kits like LEGO and K'NeX, and esp. interconnecting them (a metaphor for many of his interests). Check out WeDo and Sploids. :-)
  
• MotivAider: Ron uses one of these gadgets to help his productivity, including as a reminder to check his To Do cards (his "stack") and as a procrastination controller to interrupt wasteful activities like (some!) web surfing. The folks who make it wrote the book Following Through: A Revolutionary New Model for Finishing Whatever You Start, which passed the Scribble Test with flying colors - a bunch of good ideas there.
  
• Sci Fi goodness: A few classic ideas from speculative fiction came up including the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, and Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics. OK, the latter isn't necessarily Sci Fi, but it seems cool anyway. Check out this mind bender:

  It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.

  
  
• The source of ideas: When asked about the best sources for ideas, Ron said that he usually finds that the ideas that inspire him "don't come so much from a single trove of ideas as from the juxtaposition of multiple books or articles with my own ideas or one another." He gives the example of a doctoral thesis on ludology (Games Without Frontiers) and how its concept of metamood could be useful:

  "Metamood accounts for a mental process where individuals experience unpleasant emotions on the object level, but also positive emotions and enjoyment on a meta-emotional level. This is done to achieve other goals and purposes, such as being entertained. Hence, underneath the agony of losing, being scared, or shouting in anger, the player might enjoy the gaming encounter - in similar fashion as a roller-coaster rider enjoys the ride, or a film audience enjoys suspense or horror." (p.36)

  In this case Ron extends it to productivity: "It may be very hard and painful work to do something productive, but on a deeper level, it can be an utter joy. If you can discipline yourself to tap into your happy metamood, you may be more productive because you can somewhat ignore the pain of the task." He calls this collecting and filtering of ideas "meme condensing" - gathering ideas from disparate sources and dumping them together in one place in an organized way - and is how his book came together.
  
• Currently reading: Perdido Street Station, Incandescence, Finnegans Wake, The Physics of Christianity, and some of Stanislaw Lem's works.
  

Future

Ron's next work is a book on games called Games Unboxed covering ones you can play with "standard equipment" - Chess and Checkers sets, a plain deck of cards, coins, etc. Sounds like fun! He's also interested in writing a second edition of "Mind Performance Hacks," but hasn't been approached yet.

Thanks again, Ron.

References

• [1] As usual, following Ron leads to some surprising stuff, in this case to God Wants You Dead ;-) Anyone read it?
  
• [2] More circularities.
  
• [3] I'm an Emacs guy, as you may know.
  
• [4] One of my favorite authors.
  
• [5] Ebooks had fallen off my radar. For example, I had forgotten about Gutenberg, with its 25,000+ free ebooks. I also found Free-ebooks.net and ManyBooks.net. Any favorite sites? Also there's the popular Kindle at $359 a pop (not including any books, but apparently continuing to generate interest), a forthcoming foldable reader. Anyone using one of these? There's a characteristically long Slashdot discussion at Which eBook Reader is the Best?
  

Why Blogruptcy is a great idea but doesn't work, and why SPAM is easy to fix and information overload isn't

I won't quote you a zillion statistics on the problem information overload causes. I'm sure it's one of the items on the Galactic Scorecard that the Federation of Sentient Species uses to evaluate progress. You know, rate on a scale of 1-5 the following:

• Plays well with others (didn't annihilate selves with nuclear bombs)
  
• Picks up after self (didn't dirty the nest with pollution or global warming)
  
• Is careful with lunch money (didn't squander finite oil supply)
  
• Learns well (managed to create an effective planetary data network)
  
• ...
  

This is especially noticeable for RSS feeds, where there's always more blogs, posts, and ideas. While talking about this with my friend and collaborator Tara Robinson (site, blog, book) she mentioned being ready to commit "blogruptcy," a phrase with surprisingly few hits.

The idea is simple, with steps as inspired by the original Lessig story Declare Email Bankruptcy:

1. Unsubscribe from all your feeds.
   
2. Try going feed-free for one [week | month].
   
3. Evaluate: What did you really miss?
   
4. Add those back in.
   

This is a fine practice, and I'm using it right now. It's very often the case that most of the feeds aren't crucial to our work/lives, and that we always have more than we need. This is in the general category of going on a media diet [1].

The only problem? It doesn't work. The tactic is OK with email because (depending on your power/repute/fame) there's a built-in recovery mechanism, a pull that will bring important things back to your attention. RSS, however, has no such pull. No one is watching your reading (the equivalent to responding to email messages) to see what you missed and make sure you're getting valuable information - there's no helpful nagging.

Of course few people can use this "Bill Clinton" approach (you need me, I'm hard to get in touch with, I have an assistant, so just keep trying), so we're stuck doing it ourselves. That's the bad news. The good news is a solution is possible, and - like many things - it depends on collaborative filtering, in this case by trusted people in your personal network who know you and can predict with high accuracy what information you find valuable. I've no doubt a trainable program will emerge, but that approach is hard [2].

An intermediate "manual" solution might be to track it yourself. As I wrote in Information Provenance - The Missing Link Between Attention, RSS Feeds, And Value-based Filtering, what's missing is a way to feed back value from information sources. I don't know of tools that do this yet.

A related approach you'd think would generalize to information overload is something like Gmail's SPAM filtering. It uses Gmail as what Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch calls a General Purpose Technology - a platform on which many different tools or applications can be constructed. Like their infrastructure [3], Gmail uses millions of eyeballs. To the question "Is this SPAM?" Gmail answers "I don't know. Ask someone else." In this case, 50 million someone elses. Every time you click the "SPAM" button, you're helping everyone else just a little. It's very cool.

However, this breaks down when applied to information overload. This is because SPAM messages are pretty much universally recognizable. If you think it's SPAM, I probably do too. But, like the old saw "One man's treasure is another man's trash," value is not implicit to the content when it comes to information - it has to be contextualized through our history, interests, and ultimate purpose. And these things can't yet be codified in a model that can be run separate from the brain [4]. So we need trained eyeballs.

I see two ways to get them: Money or Love.

Money: Use Amazon's ingenious Mechanical Turk to outsource people who will find important things for us. Problem: We either need the same group of people each time (they have to learn, right?) or we have to express specifically what we're interested in. Oh wait, that's the attention models I mentioned below. So scratch that. Cool idea, though.

Love: Ask people who know us to Send Good Stuff. I tried this as an experiment when I asked you to Feed The IdeaMatt! (and I got a few nice responses - thanks!) More generally, this brings us to why social networking sites like LinkedIn and (increasingly, given the number of connection invitations I've received) Plaxo, integrated with next-generation RSS feed readers, might give us a simple way to solve information overload. We'd need a small network of peers that we ask/allow to send us recommendations. They'd need to know us and keep an eye out for relevant information (see How To Help People for the gist), and send it along using some kind of easy-to-tag system.

Could something this obvious and simple work? Hell, maybe it's already here - delicious is the classic "bookmark and tag" system. Maybe we just need a little layer to make sharing explicit. But like picking up the phone instead of sending an email, it has that simple, directly-connected personal feel of helping. Simple tools to help us connect and share meaningful stuff, and filter out the garbage? Sounds like a great use of technology.

Thoughts?

References

• [1] The best two resources for this are Bit Literacy (interview A Conversation With Mark Hurst, Web Usability Expert And Author Of "Bit Literacy") and The 4-Hour Workweek. Mark's model: Create a media portfolio with two main components: Lineup and Tryouts. Lineup: Those that've earned their place as your most valuable sources. (The three types: Stars, Scans, and Targets.) Candidate sources get into the lineup by going through a tryout phase. Guidelines: Be discerning, be intentional, and be biased toward rejecting.
  
• [2] The research group I worked in before changing careers is a good example of these machine learning efforts.
  
• [3] See Google platform or Jeff Dean on Google infrastructure. I esp. like the summary at Narayanan Shivakumar on Google's Software Infrastructure, including bullets on Google File System (GFS), MapReduce, and BigTable (gotta' love those names :-)
  
• [4] While at KDL I speculated about "attention models," digital artifacts that I could train then set out into the world (AKA "agents"). A fun variation would be to send mine to yours, where you would give it permission to see some subset of your bitstream. Of course I'd want yours too :-)
  

IdeaLab 0729: A little GTD heresy, willpower, jealousy, and straight talk

A continuation of the strange mashup known as the IdeaLab - odditites from the patented IdeaMatt My Big-Arse Text File.

• Listen up!: Did something you read, heard, or thought ring true for you today? Pay attention to that and make sure you capture it! This awareness was kicked off when a scientist friend told me about his data "speaking to him." Neat. So for the last few months I've been collecting phrases I like or might find useful, including

  Clerical workers use information - about, say, customer orders - to aid the smooth working of the company. Knowledge workers use information to change themselves.

  (From The marks are on the knowledge worker via In praise of clutter.) Also:

  "We are hunter-gatherers at the core. We open e-mail and hit 'send and receive' to see if something interesting has come in." - Tony Wright, CEO of RescueTime

  Related: What To Do When An Excited Person Person Is Waving Something At You
  
  
• Beware the large To Do list: A common complaint for people practicing a rigorous self-management system like GTD is that too many tasks accumulate, i.e., they have too much to do. You only have two possibilities work faster or commit to less. However, having this many should be a warning sign - why is there so much on your plate? This is especially true if you're a manager. Going higher up the ladder doesn't mean you should be working harder than ever. In fact, the opposite could be argued - less routine business, more innovative thinking. From Beware the Busy Manager:

  GreatQuote: Managers are not paid to make the inevitable happen. In most organizations, the ordinary routines of business chug along without much managerial oversight. The job of managers, therefore, is to make the business do more than chug -- to move it forward in innovative, surprising ways.

  (Related: Got The Email Blues? Only Three Things You Can Do: Get Fewer, Get Faster, Get Control.)
  
  
• The absurdity of the two minute rule: Related to above, the common idea of not spending too much time dispatching individual items while emptying inboxes can become absurd. Don't get me wrong, the intuition behind it is solid. As Len Merson puts it in The Instant Productivity Toolkit:

  The idea is that you don't want to be filling your Turtle stack [To Do list] with nit picky work items if you can take care of them quickly and immediately, one at a time. If you perform the task immediately, it might take you only a minute; if you wait and accumulate twenty such tasks, they will seem overwhelming and add to your stress.

  But two minutes (or one or three) is on the edge of being too short, I'm coming to think. As one client puts it, we start resisting creating "too much work for our future selves."
  
  
• From the "please pass the mustard" department: Courtesy question: In a crowded theater is it better to unwrap a noisy piece of candy slow or fast? I.e., are you "patient and quiet" or "loud but fast?" Hey - a 2xw matrix! :-)
  
  
• Cat tip: Flushing clumping cat litter down the toilet is a Bad Idea. A housemate did this once and we've never had the same flow state since.
  
  
• Willpower boot camp?: From Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind, it appears willpower can grow in the long term. "Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another." What are the implications for productivity? E.g., do one extra task when you don't feel like it?
  
  
• Being present ... remotely: Simulated by the BBC NEWS article Searching for a new virtual life via this post, I wonder if we could use Virtual Reality to improve productivity? I've already used screen sharing to work remotely with clients (sharing calendars and lists, and setting up and working tools), but what would a more immersive system allow?
  
  
• I wish *I'd* said that!: Feeling some professional jealousy? I sometimes do, which I'm not happy about. For example, this pops up as I continue my interview series with the best and brightest. Recently two things hit me. First, because I'm comparing myself to people who excel at what I do (or want to do), there's an opportunity to learn from them. In fact, it's one of my motivators for *doing* those interviews in the first place! Second, having this feeling is an indication that you're comparing yourself to someone really good. And everyone agrees that a major success factor is surrounding yourself with people like this. As Chad puts it, try to be the worst musician in the band. In other words, it's good you're aiming high. (Related links: Green Is Not Your Color: Professional Jealousy and the Professional Writer, MEAN PEOPLE SUCK #2a: Professional Jealousy Part Deux, and On friends, colleagues and jealousy.)
  
  
• Why is being productive so frickin tough?: Why is it hard to adopt new (and better) productivity methods? It goes to the more general question of why it's hard to make lasting changes. To that end I came across this goodie in HBR: The Real Reason People Won't Change (thanks for the pointer, Marilyn!) The authors describe a a three-stage process to help organizations figure out what's getting in the way of change, which makes me think I've some learning to do when teaching clients. Process summary:
  
  
  
  1. Managers guide employees through a set of questions designed to uncover competing commitments,
     
  2. employees examine these commitments to determine the underlying assumptions at their core, and
     
  3. employees start the process of changing their behavior.
     
  
  
  
• Attention duration + staying power: I've been contemplating how long something holds our attention vs. how long it stays with us. I'm not sure what to do with this, but... Low attention: A simple toy or TV show. 2 minutes. Middle: A good movie: 2 hours; a good puzzle: 2 days. A college course or study group: 2 months. High: Reading, a vocation: Lifetime. Thoughts?
  
  
• Self experiment suggestion: In the honorable spirit of trying things out on ourselves (one of my themes here - A Daily Planning Experiment or Tracking "lessons Learned" for example) I'm considering this one: To overcome procrastination and lack of inertia, try breaking *every* action into a maximum 5 minute chunks. It's OK to work longer of course, but nothing over. Be prepared - you're projects list will grow. Try for two weeks and report back. Any takers?
  
  
• In the "Plain Language" department: A workshop client came up with an expression I love. When we were talking about agendas (separate "to discuss" lists for meetings - individual or group - that are regularly scheduled), she said "Oh yea, save-up lists." I love the homey way she put it. A nice discussion about straight talk comes from Beyond Buzz, where the author encourages us to "Talk like you talk."
  
  
• TV - Is it only me?: I've recently noticed (in my part of the US, at least) television's insidious spread to almost every possible venue. We take it for granted in airports, bus stops, etc. But lately it's made inroads into restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores, and doctors' offices. As an avid "TV plain sucks" person, this bugs the hell out of me. After a few conversations with managers at those places, I've found I'm apparently in a very small minority, which shocks me. Are we so starved for stimulation that we need the near-constant (and face it - pretty low brow) distraction TV offers, even for a two minute errand? I must have the wrong attitude. Maybe it's a welcome comfort and respite from a hard day's work and a worrisome economic climate. Or is it that we are simply not taught how to be prepared to wait productively. (That's easy to fix. 1) Have a steady stream of high-value inputs. 2) Print or clip them. 3) Put them into a portable "To Read" folder. 4) Carry it with you when you're out. Easy!) (And yes, I *really* have a problem with TV in schools. Ick!)
  
  
• The world's shortest productivity FAQ: While I don't write about basic ideas that are covered well and broadly elsewhere, I'll share a few trinkets here:
  
  
  
  • Myth: Too little time (the real problem: poor choices)
    
  • Myth: The quick fix (all the "25 ways to..." and "7 tips for..." lists won't solve underlying problems like "no system" and "working on the wrong thing.")
    
  • Whiteboards: "Do not erase" is a bad sign! Use them for transient brainstorming and planning, then capture and erase. Acceptable use: List tool (Projects, Actions, Waiting For).
    
  • Desk layout: "U" is best, then "L," then parallel.
    
  • Tickler file: Don't need it. Use "Calendar + holding file" instead.
    
  • Record retention: Ask: 1) Do I need this for my work, or for tax, legal, documentation, or other archival reasons? 2) Do I foresee a *specific* need for it? 3) Does a copy of this item exist somewhere else that's easily accessible? Still can't decide? Rule of thumb: When in doubt, throw it out. (OK, this is covered many places, but what the heck!)
    
  
  
  

Cheers!