Honors, Mac tips, plus (apparently) a iCal-GTD-Quicksilver mini-tutorial

I apologize for the delayed posting these last two weeks. This was due to a vacation, and consulting momentum continuing to pick up. So this week an abbreviated post: Recent honors for this blog, plus some tips for my Macintosh readers, including a mini "GTD in iCal" tutorial.

First, a big thanks to Dustin Wax for including me on his 50+ Personal Productivity Blogs You've Never Heard of Before (and about a dozen you probably have). In addition to the usual suspects, there are some previously undiscovered gems. I'm in great company.

Second, a round of thanks to the super successful Leo Babauta and his post The List to Beat All Lists: Top 20 Productivity Lists to Rock Your Tasks. What I like about Leo's post is that he links to specific articles he found useful. For mine he liked 10 GTD "holes" (and How To Plug Them). (Side note: Speaking of good company, Dustin, Leo, and I are listed as contributors to Tatsuya Nakagawa's (et al.) Overcoming Inventoritis: The Silent Killer of Innovation, along with Steve Wozniak, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki. I'm thinking of having a get-together ;-)

A few others: MikePierre called me the "Brainiac Dad" of productivity in The Productivity Family Tree and I was listed in the College Degree.com Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs.

Thanks to these folks, and to you for reading.


Finally, since my switch to the Mac I've been collecting (in classic IdeaMatt capture fashion) tips for the the OS. Following are a few, just for fun.

• Spotlight results: command-down (and -up) to jump to the first result in each category.
  
• Spotlight results: command-return reveals the selected item in the Finder.
  
• Finder: To get the full path of a file, drag it into the Spotlight text area. This requires a bit of multi-step keyboard-fu: Start dragging the file and while dragging invoke Spotlight (command-space by default) and drop the file into the search text area that pops up. (You'll see the green plus cursor when you're on target). Then, (because this adds to the last search text) immediately cut via command-x.
  
• Any standard text area (e.g., Spotlight or Safari): Some Emacs-like edit keystrokes work, including control-a, control-e, control-f, control-b, and control-k. Unfortunately, option-f and option-b insert special characters instead of what I'd love: forward and back a word. Instead you have to use option-left and option-right.
  
• Finder: command-shift-open does a slo-mo version. (More of an Easter egg than a use-it-daily item, but fun.)
  
• iCal: For a super-easy (and very workable) GTD-inspired implementation, create four calendars: "Projects", "Actions", "Waiting For", plus a general "Calendar" one at the top. Select the "Calendar" calendar so that it's the default for new date-related action and reminders, and new To Do items. Use the latter as your quick-capture inbox via command-k. Later you can drag these into the appropriate calendar to categorize. Make sure to select "Show To Do List" to see them, and to possibly print your daily Plan.
  
• iCal: To really leverage the previous GTD setup use Quicksilver as a rapid entry front end: Invoke Quicksilver (control-space by default), type a period for text entry, type your To Do item, type tab, invoke "Create iCal To-Do" (I type "t"), and type return. This creates an entry in the selected calendar, which should always be "Calendar" (see above). This sounds complex, but it becomes send nature and is very efficient. I wrote a bit more detail about this here. (Bonuses: You can use these same Quicksilver keystrokes to put appointments right into the calendar with date/time text parsing. It's a bit wonky, but usable.)
  
• Almost any app: Type command-shift-/ to open the help menu, type part of a menu item name, and use the up and down arrows to choose a result. What's cool is the animated blue arrow showing the item (and its associated shortcut). Neat.
  
• Firefox: When in find mode (command-f), command-return highlights all matches.
  
• Firefox: Space pages down, shift-space pages up, and delete goes back.
  

Cheers!

An interview with Scott Ginsberg, author of "Hello, My Name is Scott"

Starting week I'm extending my interview series with the top experts in the field by sharing productivity insights and stories from people who are influential and successful, i.e, highly productive. I'll start with highlights from my recent coversation with Scott Ginsberg (site, blog).

I found out about Scott via his book Hello, My Name is Scott, which takes an happy accident (leaving his nametag on after an event) and extends it to a unique perspective of the world, one of my absolute favorite topics. (It's why I got into productivity consulting in the first place.)

Rather than a story format, I'll take a cue from the list master himself. Thus I present: 18 highlights from my conversation with Scott Ginsberg.

On mentoring

The key is mentors plural - many of them. Also, Scott identified three types: direct mentor (e.g., his high school English teacher), indirect mentor, (e.g., someone whose books you love to read, say Seth Godin), and a distant mentor: when an experienced or an encounter or just a random person you meet just mentors you. (Scott didn't have an exact term for this last type.) I really love this idea of being open to learning from any interaction. Very rich.

On listening

Scott says wearing a nametag has helped make him a good listener. His strategy? "Just shut up, sort of end it right there, and let the other person talk and just listen and be open." He says it's cool, fun, and beautiful. Check out his 17 Behaviors to Avoid for Effective Listening.

On differences

Scott says he uses the nametag as a reminder to respect people who are different, e.g., different appearance or religion. With that he tossed out this sweet little idea: "I think everybody can paint themselves into a good corner in their own way." (Note: I've been having a blast collecting potentially useful phrases in my My Big-Arse Text File - more on capture systems below!)

On getting clients

Scott says his growing success comes from great ideas + hard work (he publishes a lot and spends plenty of time on the road meeting people and presenting). (If you're into formulae check out Some Tasty Morsels From The Ideamatt Self Help Formulary.)

On writing

Write every day and read a lot. And Scott loves Julia Cameron's work, including her "filling the bathtub" metaphor (keep things flowing until the good stuff comes, then start capturing) and her morning pages exercise, which he calls "the greatest thing I have ever done." Scott said he'd send to my readers his piece about how to do morning pages - just email him. her book is The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. And yes, it's in my candidates library.

On entrepreneur success

Do not be stopped by not knowing how. For me (having started my own company) this was very welcome advice. I love how Scott put it: "I have had my company now for six years, I am still not sure I know what the hell I am doing." :-)

I firmly believe in the concept of just go, just start. All that matters initially is the what, and then just go and just go and just learn and ask questions and make mistakes and screw up and read lots of books, and eventually the how will come to you.

On discipline

Scott says this is (not surprisingly) crucial, esp. for solopreneurs - there is nobody down your neck, and there is nobody waking you up and getting you out of bed to go to work.

On luck

He does not believe in luck, and says he never has. "I have always believed that luck is an acronym that stands for working your ass off." (You will definitely want to read How to Attract Good Luck, one of those few "wow" books.)

On accomplishing so much in a short time

Scott says he's asked frequently how he's done this, e.g., "Scott, you are only 28 years, how do you explain your knowledge on this topic." You'll love his answer: "I am a genius." He continues:

There is no reason to think that age is a barrier. I mean, I read five books a week. I write five hours a day. I ask a lot of questions. I have got a bunch of mentors. I mean, I am a lifelong learner, and I think that there is lot of stuff you can do, especially the young entrepreneur can make the learning curve nonexistent.

On learning from experience

Scott and I agree on another favorite topic of mine - how to lead a life of curiosity with an experimental attitude. (BTW, stay tuned for news on book on the topic I'm coauthoring - very exciting.) He says he's an expert at learning from his experiences. As Scott puts it: "It's one thing to say, oh yeah, I wore a nametag, it is cool, it is fun, it is another thing to say, yeah, okay, I did that, here is 500 lessons I learned, and here are how those lessons can help other people have a better life." Neat. (Reader question: What other books fall into this "apparent gimmick to insight" class? One that comes to mind is The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.)

On asking questions

And yet another topic Scott and I see eye to eye on, the value of asking good questions (the "ask, don't tell principle"). (In fact, I'm considering structuring one of my talks entirely this way :-) He says he keeps a running list of what he call leverage questions - over 5,000 in his database. When you experience something, it's a big opportunity to reflect and learn (i.e., leverage it) via questions like, "What wisdom have I gleaned from these hardships?" "How could this mentor me?" "What are 101 lessons I just learned?" "What is another use for this failure?" "How could this be used as a marketing tool?"

On lessons learned

I mentioned my practice of tracking Lessons Learned and, not surprisingly, he does the same. Scott writes them in his journal every morning - things he learned the day before. And not all necessarily about business - it can be general. (Recent examples from mine: *Always* use FedEx to send proposals, and letting go of personal agendas during conversations can be much more fun.) Importantly, he reviews them regularly (including at the end of the year) to make sure they stick.

On the definition of productivity

In response to the question I always ask, Scott pointed out that activity is not always progress. We can keep ourselves busy and doing stuff, but that does not make it productive. This is that classic point of effective vs. efficient. For the latter, he uses ideas from GTD, and is a fan of Lakein's Question ("What's the best use of my time right now?") Scott also has a list of (well expressed) goals which his productivity aligns with.

On his media diet

He doesn't read the news "because the news is crap." Yes! he doesn't read many because there are so many - Seth Godin's blog (and Scott's girlfriend's blog) is an exception.

On reading

He spends the majority of his time and money staying up to date on books. (Check out Reading Gone Wild! How To Read Five Books A Week and How To Read A Lot Of Books In A Short Time.) He talked about his "success library," meaning books earn you money, earning comes from learning, so cherish your books. Scott buys used, marks them up, highlights, makes notes in them, and uses them for reference. He also transcribes his notes into his computer (see The 4-hour Workweek Applied: How I Spent $100, Saved Hours, And Boosted My Reading Workflow) - his "portable success library." He also blocks out time for reading, and slips it in while traveling. Finally, like Leveen, he has no compunctions stopping a book early if it's not valuable.

On his productivity system

Scott says:

I still use a handwritten planner, believe it or not. I cannot go digital. So I have, one of my mentors taught me this, I think sort of in terms of the month and the week. My little to-do list, if you will, is caught up into five different areas. I have things to do, people to see, people to contact or call or email, things to read, things to write. So I fill up those five boxes and hopefully I will get everything done.

On priorities

He prioritizes his lists, and keeps five criticals that, if he does nothing during a week, as long as those five things got done, on Friday afternoon he'd feel satisfied. (You might enjoy the section "deciding what constitutes a 'good workday'" in A Daily Planning Experiment: Two Weeks Of Accountable Rigorous Action.)

On idea capture

I told Scott about my pickle jar and asked what he uses to track all the ideas, lessons, questions, etc. that come to him. I was surprised to learn he has an entire concept management system he's been developing for the past six years. We didn't go into much detail, but it's essentially a hypertext system with independent chunks ("modules") he ties together as needed. There are other ways of categorizing. This flexibility prevents what he calls "Premature Cognitive Commitment." (Love that phrase!) He also points out that when we name something we immediately limit its possibilities. He estimates there are 10,000 items in his system. (Wow! I'm at ~4,500.) Like me, he thinks of it a major empowering tool.


Thanks, Scott!

The Path of Maximum Productivity: Seven tensions, and how to resolve them

In What Are The Laws Of Work? I made a humble stab at defining the first principles that might inform designing a productivity method from scratch. The discussion was stimulating and led to more thinking, in particuarl how might we structure our environments for success, hopefully tying in Fritz's work in Path of Least Resistance.

One big idea (lots of wows in the book) is tension/resolution systems, which got me thinking about the connection between the productivity "laws" and the tensions we face doing our work. Paraphrasing Fritz,

Tensions seeks resolution is a basic principle found throughout nature, and also applies to human events. For example, during a conversation the question, "Did Martha go with you to the dinner?" creates a tension (waiting for a response), and the resolution is the answer "Yes."

This made me think of the tension of everyday actions [1]. For example, when I know I need to do something, I feel an internal mental tension that can literally feel physical.

So: What are the tensions of productivity? Is there a finite set? How do we get resolution? And what can we generalize from this? Today I'll just list the ones I came up with, and ask what you think.

A tension sampler

Here are a few work-related tension sources I came up with. Care to generalize or add your own?

• Things undone (unfinished work). (Some tension parameters that raise/lower it: complexity, interest, ...)
  
• Things not found
  
• Needing to be somewhere
  
• Waiting for a response
  
• Unknowns
  
• Things undecided
  
• Untrused delegations (including promises made by ourselves or others)
  

How do we resolve them?

Given that we have these tensions in our lives, and that they cause some level of mental stress, how do we resolve them? There are two possibilities: Eliminate the source, or structure them so as to feel as if they're eliminated. Examples:

• Say no (e.g., get choosier taking on new ones)
  
• Change your mind (e.g., go on a media diet or renegotiate)
  
• give it to someone else [2]
  
• Take care of the thing yourself ("Just do it" [3])
  
• Stop caring (e.g., lower your standards
  

Careful with the last; it only works if you really can stop thinking about it.

What's particularly interesting is the "feel as if" case. For productivity, this means rigorously tracking these somewhere, that is, "To Do" lists [4]. I got this insight ("good lists relieve mental burdens") from the folks over at Mission Control, though it's not uncommon among the different approaches.

Is all this sounding familiar? It should; we've just teased out Delete, Delegate, Do, and Defer. Hey - we also got Deter! A satisfying convergence [5].

Future

Interestingly, Fritz describes sample tension/resolution systems, and says the path of least resistance oscillates in some structures and resolves in others. If it is an oscillating structure, you will experience a recurring pattern. This leads me to ask whether there's a non-oscillating way to be productive... Thoughts?

References

• [1] A crazy micro example: Copying something to your PC's clipboard creates tension: You're "carrying" it and you might lose it before you use it. Of course the resolution is: Paste! And yes, I do realize thinking about clipboard stress is rather batty.
  
• [2] Be careful, though; see Why *my* NUTs Should Not Be *your* NUTs!
  
• [3] A search for this phrase yielded the expected Nike advertising hits, but also turned up Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!) Has anyone read this? Sounds like useful fun.
  
• [4] And I mean the good kind of To Do items: Atomic, specific, and independent.
  
• Interestingly, I couldn't find much on design convergence. I turned up this lecture by Kara Bartelt (a USC architecture professor) and this Wikipedia article on Convergent evolution. What I couldn't find was detail on a story told to me by one of my NASA clients. (Hey - these folks love cool hardware.) He said that Ford independently researched and developed a hybrid powertrain, then realized they had basically re-invented the Toyota one. So they were forced to buy a license to produce it! Closest I could find: Ford to Use Toyota's Hybrid Technology. Do you know anything about this?
  

IdeaLab 0624: Ice Cream, attitude, danger, and dishwashers

A continuation of the ever-enlightening IdeaLab series from the patented IdeaMatt My Big-Arse Text File.

• "Flight of six" ice cream: While walking with my daughter around town (it's summer here and I get to spend a lot of time parenting - very good stuff, but does cut back on work time [1]) we decided to enjoy some ice cream together [2]. Immediately two thoughts occurred to me. First, because here in the U.S. restaurant portions are ridiculously large [3], so a "regular" is two large scoops - must be 20 WeightWatchers points! This will make me fat and unhealthy. Second, I love trying many different flavors, rather than one huge helping of one flavor (variety, spice, life, etc.) So I hit on an idea: Why not have an option for a "flight of six" - instead of one large scoop, serve six small tastes of different flavors. So Katie and I headed out to try it - and our local ice cream cafe was happy to accommodate! Perfect. A nice presentation would be to serve it in a pretty glass scalloped dish with six separate scoops to keep the flavors from running together, something like six of these connected.
  
  
  After a bit of research, it turns out that this option is common with alcohol, including beer, scotch, and tequila. I found only one mention of an ice cream version: The Phantom Gourmet Guide to Boston's Best Restaurants 2008 mentions ice cream "shooters" at Smith & Wollensky (I've never been there). What do you think? What else would this apply to?
  
• 2x2: Dangerous vs. Exciting: In patented ASCII-Vision(TM):

  
                 Dangerous         Safe
              +-------------+----------------+
     Exciting | Sky Diving  | Roller Coaster |
              +-------------+----------------+
       Boring | Cell + Car  |   Dilbert      |
              +-------------+----------------+

  I'm not totally happy with the names. Thoughts?
  
• Attitude self-coaching: Here's something I like to do before important interactions or events (e.g., consulting, sales calls, or workshops): I write out the top two or three positive attitudes I want to bring to the occasion. For example, if I'm nervous about a call regarding a possible problem I might go in Curious, >GraciousTransitions: A Secret Ingredient To Getting Things Done?) and has helped me a lot.
  
• Productivity tips from my automated dishwasher: (With apologies to Jack Handey and the ever amazing Nicholas Bate):
  
  
  • Like filing, does one prioritize ease of storage (just putting the dishes, cup, and cutlery willy nilly) or ease of retrieval (sorting likes together)?
    
  • Clearing cleaned dishes (e.g., emptying the inbox) is a kind of a forced closed list: All the clean ones must be removed before putting new (dirty) items in. Implications for collection tools...?
    
  • Emptying should require minimal thinking, which means batching likes (see above). This relates to the power of structure: Once we're in "plate mode," doing plates as a batch requires far less thinking than handling individual items. Implications for working your tasks list?
  
  
• Less is more: A quote from one of my clients (they're always teaching me something):

  Having less stuff on your list is not necessary selling yourself short.

  
  
• Attracting life: While sitting in my kitchen I noticed something moving in the potted tree on our back deck. Surprise! It had attracted a Robin. So a nice test in life: Does what I'm doing attract life?
  
• Matter, energy, and information: Is life all about inputs and outputs [4]? If so, implications: we can control the inputs (what we invite into our lives: people, media diet, thoughts), the process (e.g., the efficient turning of inputs into outputs - my specialty), and the outputs (what is valuable for us to do). Stimulated by this passage from Nicholas Carr's [5] book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google:

  All living systems, from amoebas to nation-states, sustain themselves through the processing of matter, energy, and information. They take in materials from their surroundings, and they use energy to transform those materials into various useful substances, discarding the waste. This continuous turning of inputs into outputs is controlled through the collection, interpretation, and manipulation of information. The process of control itself has two thrusts. It involves measurement - the comparison of the current state of a system to its desired state. And it involves two-way communication - the transmission of instructions and the collection of feedback on results.

  
  

References

• [1] This figures into the estimate of time available in my daily planning regime (see A Daily Planning Experiment: Two Weeks Of Accountable Rigorous Action). Note: This approach really hit a nerve, and led to professional phone coaching and a new consulting service (site not updated yet).
  
• [2] A decision I make pretty carefully - eating well and keeping the weight off is a challenge in our current lifestyle (not everyone has this choice, I realize). See What GTD And Weight Watchers Have In Common.
  
• [3] Esp. compared to (sane) European standards. See Less is More and Survey: Restaurants dishing out extra-large portions.
  
• [4] A favorite topic of mine. See When Inputs Exceed Your Workflow System's Capacity and The Productivity I/O Sweet Spot, Or Why Balance Is A Bad Thing.
  
• [5] You might enjoy his article Is Google Making Us Stupid?
  

The productivity I/O sweet spot, or Why balance is a bad thing

In my one of my conversations with Chris Crouch we talked about how hard we should be working for sustainable productivity. As I summarized in my interview with him (scroll to the section Personal workload capacity), Chris questioned the conventional (?) wisdom of working at or near our maximum. I took it as a smart way to be productive but not burn ourselves out. This is controversial: We are expected (by ourselves and others) to work harder - put in more hours, sacrifice time with loved ones, all to accomplish "more, better, faster." As Laura Stack [1] says in Leave the Office Earlier, most professionals have a backlog of 200 or more hours of uncompleted work. Whew!

As you may have read [2], I've been playing with the idea of how our inputs (things we've invited into our lives requiring our attention) balance with our outputs (conversion of intputs into work we do).

I love how Nicholas Carr frames it in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google:

All living systems, from amoebas to nation-states, sustain themselves through the processing of matter, energy, and information. They take in materials from their surroundings, and they use energy to transform those materials into various useful substances, discarding the waste. This continuous turning of inputs into outputs is controlled through the collection, interpretation, and manipulation of information.

Cool.

After a bit of thinking I came up with a little surprise. Consider your rate of inputs ("I") vs. rate of outputs ("O"). We have these possibilities:

1. I >> O (far more coming in that going out)
   
2. I > O (a bit more coming in "")
   
3. I ~= O (approximately equal)
   
4. I < O (a little less coming in "")
   
5. I << O (far fewer incoming than outgoing)

Questions: Which is your most common state? and Which do you think is ideal? At first blush 3 or 4 seems best. But let's name each one and do a brief analysis:

1. Drowning and desperate. This is that "utterly out of control" feeling, the sense that you'll never, ever be able to catch up. This is the source of big backlogs of email and paper. Work is falling through the cracks, and you have a reputation of "Better follow up in person or it probably won't get done." Grievously unsustainable
   
2. Sinking (maybe slowly, maybe fast). This is the sense of "I just can't quite keep up," and leads to an overall anxiety about work. Your inboxes are increasing, with occasional "binge" emptying happening. Unsustainable
   
3. Steady state, but brittle. You're just able to keep up if it's "a good day," but the slightest lag in work means you start falling behind - a day or two, say. And vacation or a trip? You'd better block out a good chunk of time blocked out to pay your "vacation tax." Brittle (one of the 10 GTD "holes" I identified)
   
4. Smooth sailing. You've got some amount of buffer built in to your life. You can afford a few days of letting things pile up, and emptying is not usually a problem. Sustainable
   
5. Couch potato/proactive monster. You have plenty of buffer. You can take off a week or two, say, and catch up with no sweat. Coasting
   

Thoughts? I'm sure you can come up with better names, but clearly #5 is most interesting. I see two extremes. First ("couch potato") is the unchallenged case. Not much going on, possibly bored. The other end ("proactive monster") is (you guessed it) The 80/20 Principle applied. It's "kill your TV" and don't read the news (bustin' it 4HWW-style). You have no problem picking up the phone and talking to almost anyone you want, and finding time to read and write is not what's holding you back. You're a Hedgehog [3], and things are aligned in your life.

Living #5 goes against common wisdom of "working hard, very hard" being a top three success factor, and I want it. Naughty? Likely. Final questions: What do you think? Is this even possible in modern work, or as an employee/cubical dweller?

References

• [1] See A Conversation With Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro.
  
• [2] See When Inputs Exceed Your Workflow System's Capacity.
  
• [3] From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't:

  Hedgehog Concept: When you align three intersecting circles that represent three pivotal questions: What can we be the best in the world at? What is the economic denominator that best drives our economic engine? And What are our core people deeply passionate about?