The joys of renegotiation

In his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (AKA GTD), David Allen talks about broken agreements (between ourselves as well as with others) being the cause of many of our negative feelings, and provides advice about how to prevent them. He identifies three options:

• Don't make the agreement.
  
• Complete the agreement.
  
• Renegotiate the agreement.
  

All of these can work to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.

Making my agreements explicit, and faithfully tracking them has made a huge improvement in my life. Here's an example: I'm currently having a slow time at work, and my motivation is terrible. For me this is a problem; when I'm motivated I'm a high performer, but take away the challenge or the creative urge and I'm in trouble [1].

So I decided to meet with my boss (an incredibly smart, motivated, and understanding person) to ask to renegotiate a number of projects that were weighing on me, with the thought of focusing on most important and/or most motivating. He resisted a bit, especially with one of his favorites, but quickly agreed, partly because he's very familiar with GTD (he introduced me to it) and knows they're not gone forever [2].

Let me tell you, I felt a lot lighter after the meeting. With those commitments temporarily off the table, much of my self-imposed stress about those projects is gone, leaving me to focus on the remaining tasks. And this is one aspect of GTD that I love - the how agile it is with respect to change. As Jason Womack says, "Shift Happens," and I need a system that's able to adapt with changes in myself (e.g., energy level, excitement) and in my external life (e.g., changes in job direction). Note that the latter is increasingly crucial in everyone's work, including research, where experimentation and discovery can (should?) lead to radical changes.

Do you have any commitments that need renegotiating?


References

• [1]In his provocative Great hackers article, Paul Graham talks about Nasty Little Problems - those that offer no learning. He says:

  Along with good tools, hackers want interesting projects. What makes a project interesting? [...] any application can be interesting if it poses novel technical challenges. [...] The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler [the first time] is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is.

  This idea really resonated with me - I'm much better tackling problems that involve learning (learning == interesting) than I am at solving Nasty Little Problems.
  
  
• [2]GTD has a Someday/Maybe list for projects that are "incubating." This list is checked during the weekly review, and it's brilliant - it gets them out of your head (and releases your mind from tracking them), but also ensures that they're not lost. I often move projects between this and my active projects list, depending on circumstances. See the "Someday Maybe" cloud (via the "Incubate" arrow) in the workflow chart.
  

What's your maximum response time?

Have you experienced sending an email or leaving a phone message, hoping for a quick response, only to go days or weeks without hearing back? Assuming people aren't using a Magic 8-Ball to decide whether to answer or not to respond (Outlook not so good, Very doubtful, Concentrate and ask again), I'm trying to better understand what's going on.

This comes about as a result of applying Getting Things Done to my life (especially the "Waiting For" list), which has made me increasingly aware of response times, including my own, and has made me wonder a) why people take so long (or don't respond at all), b) what kind of response would be most reasonable, and c) whether adopting GTD would help.


First, why the behavior in the first place? I've brainstormed some possible reasons for slow or no responses:

• No one home - Either no one is reading the messages at all, or multiple people have confused responsibilities about who responds, so no one does.
  
• Too busy - The person has categorized the message as low priority, i.e., the recipient has chosen to spend time doing other work instead of responding.
  
• "You are dead to me" - In this case, the person is trying to passively send the message "Don't write me," "I don't want to talk to you," "You're not important," etc, and so doesn't respond at all.
  
• Unpleasant - The subject is hard to face, and easy to avoid, so the recipient decides to wait. This also includes not wanting to hurt the sender's feelings.
  
• Unclear - The person doesn't know how to respond (needs more information, can't decide, etc.), so puts it off.
  

I'm sure there are better characterizations, but these captured some that I know of.


Second, what behavior would be better? I'd argue that clear and direct decision making is important to good communication. For example, I'd much rather have someone write back relatively quickly and simply tell me they're too busy to answer, rather than being left "on hold." And if the topic is unpleasant, or the answer unclear, I'd prefer recipients to write a quick note saying they need more time. Naturally, there's no reason these can't be phrased politely.

Specifically, regarding how fast to respond, it depends on the job(s) you do and your goals, but I liked these two perspectives:

• In Getting Started in Consulting, Alan Weiss says he responds within 90 minutes to requests, and says he's successful 99% of the time. That's pretty impressive, and seems like an extreme for an individual handling communication by himself (e.g., self-employed).
  
• I also liked the points made in Respond to your business email FAST!, which advises businesses to get back within 24 hours maximum with no exceptions. They say 12 hours is even better, if they want to be exceptional.

Finally, what does GTD have to offer? I believe it's helped my response times in these ways:

• Processing messages using Allen's workflow chart, esp. by answering the questions "What is it?" and "What's the next action?," allows me to quickly hone in on the central issues of each input, make clear decisions about it, and dispatch appropriately.
  
• The two minute rule, which David Allen is well known for (see the "Do it" box in the work flow chart), really speeds up message processing because so many items fall into this category.
  
• By following Allen's advice to separate the five workflow phases (Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Do - available in his Advanced Workflow), I'm better able to concentrate 100% on each phase (processing, in this case), instead of giving it continuous partial attention.
  
• Finally, having a complete inventory of all the commitments in my work and life helps me be more judicious with how I spend my time. As a result, I've found I have a more businesslike focus when it comes to processing.

More generally, adopting GTD has given me increased energy just to deal with all the incoming "stuff," including email and phone messages. I find I'm just plain more on top of things.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Debbie Downer and the Six Thinking Hats

I'm starting to promote myself as a productivity coach, and I had strange experience recently at a holiday party. While talking to a neighbor about full-time consulting, I noticed that all her comments were extremely negative, including such classics as "You can't make enough money doing that," "You'll have to put in too many hours," and "You won't find enough business." These were all spewed out in the space of about one minute. Bleh!

I had two reactions, and thankfully they helped to moderate this person's toxic effects on me (which I'm pretty certain she was unaware of - I believe she felt she was helping). The first reaction was a little internal chuckle as I remembered the Saturday Night Live character Debbie Downer, whose comments in conversations are always depressingly negative (e.g., "By the way, it's official...I can't have children.") And I had a live one!

My second reaction was to think of this person's response in terms of Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, which I've been working though lately. (There's a nice summary a the Mind Tools site.) I'm new to de Bono's ideas, but it sounded like my neighbor was using both her Red Hat (gut reaction and emotion - she thought it would be hard, and a bad idea), and her Black Hat (caution and negative aspects - this is dangerous, and won't work out). Interestingly, I found that simply identifying these perspectives was freeing, and helped to modulate my reaction to her. In other words, it gave me some needed perspective, something David Allen calls "the slipperiest and most valuable commodity."


I found a refreshing contrast in the book Getting started in consulting by Alan Weiss. He says that these kinds of responses are typical, but:

The problem is that if you educate yourself incorrectly at the outset, you're vulnerable to successfully meeting the exact wrong set of expectations. You will have brilliantly achieved a sorry state.

Also related: Adam Khan, in his book Self-help stuff that works, says "Sometimes you shouldn't listen," and gives examples of highly successful people who persevered in spite of early discouragement (he cites Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and George Washington). He suggests most people are trying to help by attempting to protect you from failure. However, he says failure is just another learning experience. This resonates with Allen's Principle 52: "The biggest successes come from the most failures" (from Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life).

Have you encountered any Debbie Downers (or Bob Bummers) lately?

A review of "Time management for dummies" from a GTD perspective

As part of my study of the field of personal productivity I'm reading (hopefully efficiently) as many books on the topic as I can, including ones on time management and organizing. I just finished Time management for dummies by Jeffrey J. Mayer, and (unlike some others) has enough good content for me to want to pass on.

(Note: I'm focusing on the time management portion of the book. The rest of it covers a broad range of topics including managing phone calls and correspondence, doing presentations, promoting yourself, travelling efficiently, and some now outdated technology tips. Check it out if you're interested; I found some useful tidbits in these sections.)


The "Master List," and processing inputs

In some ways, the best parts of the book are like a "mini" Getting Things Done (but missing some important points - described below). For example, to get started he has you go through all the papers on your desk, and sort them into three piles: keep, delegate, and recycle. You then process your keeper file, writing actions on a Master List, and either recycle or file each item as needed. He discourages you from interrupting the process to do anything; just note work on the Master List and continue. In the "get it out of your head" vein he says:

The habit of [writing thoughts on the Master List] is a very efficient way of remembering that you've got something to do. [It] frees you from having to try to remember what those things are. Now you can use your wonderful brain power for something that is considerably more important.

Sound familiar?

After processing the desk, he has you do the papers in the rest of your office, drawers, and briefcase. (He's big on doing sticky notes too.) Importantly, he has you write both personal and work items on the Master List.

Regarding filing, he has you use file folders (even for one sheet of paper), and to hand-write labels for speed. He encourages you to save all related project material in a corresponding file folder, and to refer to it when working on the project. To process reading matter he suggests creating a reading file, and to file only the relevant articles and stories, tearing out or copying as needed. To stay on top he suggests you spend time at the end of the day getting re-organized by processing mail, phone, and email messages, by adding actions to the Master List and/or filing appropriately.

He cautions that it takes time and effort to stay organized, but the results are worthwhile - staying on top of important work, feeling more in control, and increased satisfaction at the day's end.


Where the book lost me

Where I think Mayer's book starts losing cohesiveness is when he introduces using daily planners. In order to integrate with calendars, Mayer tosses out the great idea of a Master List, and has you plan your days and weeks in detail by scheduling tasks "when you think you can get to them," then crossing them off the master and eventually throwing it away. New items go directly into the planner on specific days. He then admits this is problematic because (as Allen points out) life seems to have a way of ignoring even the best plans. As a result, you have to copy tasks that aren't completed to the next best time you think you can get to them.

For me, the book makes its final plunge at the end of Chapter 4 where he summarizes all the problems with paper planners and suggests you start using Act, a contact management program which carries action items forward each day if they're not done. (Note: I haven't substantiated this, but an Amazon review complains that Mayer is employed by the ACT software people.)


Comparison to GTD, and summary

In a way, Mayer's transition from Master List to planner, then from planner to software makes sense, given his perspective of needing to schedule every task on a specific day. What I like about David Allen's system is that he has analyzed the problem with "hard" scheduling (interruptions can't be predicted, which leads to being less agile than desired), and instead splits actions into two very different types, with two correspondingly different artifacts for tracking them:

• Things that must be done on or by a certain date (tracked using a calendar), and
  
• Things that should be done as soon as possible (tracked on action lists)

From this insight, one can almost see the reasoning David Allen might have taken if he read Mayer's book:

"OK, we need to keep time-specific and other actions separate, so use the calendar for the former, and action lists for the latter. This solves the problem of having to carry forward non-time-specific actions when they aren't done. But the action list is too cumbersome, and it's hard to pick out things to do when I'm in different places with different resources available. So why don't we categorize items according to where they can be done - home, computer, phone, etc? And we should probably separate out delegated items, because we need to track them specially, so let's have a list of items that we're waiting for. Cool!"

And so on.

This is fun, but I don't want this little Gedankenexperiment to minimize Allen's contribution. Not only did he crystallize the basic GTD concepts, but he went way beyond actions to consider the role they play in larger projects, identified the five phases of workflow (seen in this pdf - Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do), and created a straightforward method for doing the Process and Organize steps (found in this pdf). Clear and brilliant!

Finally, I do not want to disparage Mr. Mayer's work. As I said, I think there are some good ideas here, plus other sections that I found useful. And many people praise his work (his site is here). However, after having drunk the GTD Kool-Aid, I now come to every time management book with my perspective having been permanently altered, in a way I think is much clearer.

Where the rubber meets the road

In LAX-ORD: air; ORD-CLE: car, Jason Womack describes choosing to drive all night from Chicago to Cleveland after his flight was canceled, to arrive just in time to deliver a morning presentation.

The principle at play here wasn't apparent to me at first. Certainly it's hard not to be impressed by Jason's willingness to go the extra mile (over 300 of them, actually) for his client. However, at a deeper level was his GTD-style decision making, in which he made a conscious choice, based on the situation, priorities, and time available, and was agile enough make it quickly, then take action. In other words, he chose to undertake something relatively extreme (drive many miles, overnight, without sleep, to arrive just in time to deliver), and he did this explicitly, knowing the risks and potential benefits. I also admire his attitude ("shift happens"), and that his principles are so clear (e.g., "I keep my agreements," and "People can count on me").

With respect to David Allen's work, this story reminds me of a quote I recently came across: Time management is not a technique. It is a way of relating to the world. (Apologies - I couldn't find the origin.) Jason's behavior helps me realize that a core principle of GTD is about making clear and informed choices, based on the context. After all, how we spend our time (of which we all have a limited amount) determines our impact in the world, which means every single choice - day in and day out - is where our commitments are realized. In Jason's case, it was literally "where the rubber meets the road." Good show!