Node Glue

So apparently, I need to torch my hot dashboard.

In response to my post yesterday about my hot dashboard, Nick Duffill addressed the GTD_Mindmanager yahoo group summarizing some very helpful diagnostic points about dashboards, apparently some of the content of the Gyronix Gold Module for reviewing. I thought the guidelines were so helpful, I’ve got to log them somewhere to refer back to. So here they are for myself and the rest of us! Take it away, Nick!

This approach comes from our Gold Module on reviewing. We classify dashboards as:

• Hot (where you’re afraid to look at it)
• Cold (where it doesn’t inspire you to action because it is missing things that you know are important), and
• About right (where it contains just enough actions for the next 1-2 days at most).

How many “next actions” is right for a daily actions dashboard is obviously dependent on individuals.

• Less than 4-5 probably means you might not be breaking things down far enough, ie. they might not be real next actions.
• More than 20-25 might mean that you are over-planning and capturing actions that don’t benefit from being in thesystem, such as something very quick and small.

The overall goal of the Actions dashboard (and ResultsManager in general) is to help you stay focused on bigger priorities.The process for getting a review back on track is roughly:

1. make sure you are scanning all the maps you need to.
2. make sure these maps are up to date.
3. Set to someday-maybe anything that has been in your maps for more than a couple of months, or take a different decision than the one you have been taking every day for the last couple of months. It hurts to do this.
4. Defer the start date on anything that will not kill you if it is not done this week.

If you are a fan of pain and humiliation, a great way to force a review is to share your actions dashboard with a colleague and defend your decisions out loud. I’m not about to volunteer for that myself

Finally, I’d just like to say that, as you can see here, these guys at Gyronix know what they’re talking about.

The beauty of this company is that they aren’t just a software company building productivity tools–though they make great tools. They are deeply into the philosophy of productivity themselves. They “get it”. They know how to help people use their tools for real life. Nick surprises me with how responsive and interactive he is on the GTD_Mindmanager yahoo group and on the support forums on gyronix.com.

So there’s a lot of helpful material for free. On top of that, Gyronix offers training modules for a fee.

I’ve done the Bronze Module, which is a good starter. And even though I’d already been using ResultsManager for a while when I took the Bronze, I found it helpful and learned some new tricks. After realizing how messy my life is for lack of good Review habits, I’m seriously considering buying that Gold Module that Nick refers to above!

I wholeheartedly recommend Gyronix. Not just for the tools, but also for the therapy

Had an Aha! moment reading Nick Duffil’s recent post on the GTD_Mindmanager yahoo group (which discusses ResultsManager) just now. He used the term “hot” dashboard to mean:

the amount of “must do” actions in the dashboard appears to be many times the capacity of their owner

Well, then I think my dashboard is blistering hot, which may account for a fair bit of the heartburn

I did a rough estimate on the number of Next Actions on my Daily Actions Dashboard. Next Actions are those activities that I can or should do now-ish. They aren’t blocking on any other activities. And I haven’t deferred them by setting start dates into the future. And I haven’t marked them as Someday/Maybe for future consideration. So as far as my mind is concerned, I owe every one of these actions to myself or someone else NOW.

How many Next Actions are on my dashboard? Drum roll….

About 100.

100?! (choking…)

Admittedly, I’ve been tempted to think that this ResultsManager thing was just killing me. But actually, it isn’t ResultsManager’s fault. It’s actually doing a good job of showing me my work. And it makes it really easy to move stuff off of my dashboard, if only I’d maintain the discipline to make front end decisions about my work, using “No” more aggressively, being more realistic about punting more stuff to Someday/Maybe, and delegating a lot more.

Doing this little exercise of counting how many Next Actions are on my Dashboard has been an eye opening way to tell me what I already knew–I need to trim the fat. Trimming the fat happens during the Weekly Review. Ergo, I gotta do the Weekly Review. QED.

(BTW, though I estimate about 100 Next Actions, the stats on my dashboard show that there are about 485 activities all together in my system, some of which are delegated.  But, even the 100 Next Actions, seemingly impossible in their own right, only accounts for 20% of the “stuff” that I think I’m supposed to care about!)

I’m about to commit GTD heresy. But I have to be honest–I’m feeling a little more like “Mind Under Water” than “Mind Like Water” lately.

I’ve been using GTD for probably three years now, and I think the first big “Aha!” for me was the idea of Collection–getting all my stuff into one pile. Never leaving “open loops” to bounce around in my mind, but getting them all written down where I could see them and organize them. And I still believe in the merit of that–in theory.

But my current reality is that I have so much stuff that I collect all the time, that it is overwhelming to wade through it all and make “front end decisions” about what to do about it. Just looking at the massive piles of stuff makes me dizzy.

Meanwhile, I watch non-GTD-ers apparently going wherever the wind blows them. They work from a mental to-do list. Whatever is on their minds is what they do. Once they do it, it’s off their mind. (Or so I imagine). Basically, they are using their intuition to guide what they spend their time on–to define their work, in a sense, just in time to do it. So there’s a filtering process. If they aren’t thinking about it, it isn’t getting done. And that, I claim, is a mixed blessing.

(more…)

Seems that Seth Godin has a habit of turning conventional wisdom on its ear. One of the blurbs in “Small is the New Big” is a bit about how competent people have trouble dealing with change and moving quickly. A quick google search turned up the article on Fast Company that appears to be the original publication of this Godin gem.

This is somewhat painful to hear because I think he’s onto something, and because–I must confess–I’m all too often obsessed with competence. But also because as I quickly scan my memory of various exceptional change agents that I’ve encountered in my life, many of them are notably “incompetent” in the Godin sense of the term. Yet brilliant.

This is a strange paradox, don’t you think? Some people who haven’t bothered to spend time understanding what they are doing move faster than others who do. Or, put a bit differently, they have a habit of not letting their lack of understanding slow them down.

So what’s the difference between a fool, and someone who is simply Brilliantly Incompetent?

Gyronix is starting to talk about GyroQ, a handy tool for capturing ideas and actions quickly for later inclusion in MindManager maps. I’ve been testing this in beta for a while and it has become an essential part of my suite of productivity tools.

Backing GyroQ is a nifty scripting-ish layer that allow me to script some things to happen in MindManager, triggered by ActiveWords.

The final component of my inbox-to-map action management system involves the use of some Outlook Macros. I do this because sometimes it’s faster and more precise to run directly against the Outlook object model than to use ActiveWords to script UI interactions.

I’ve been waiting on to get clearance to post some of this stuff since way back when I posted some other ActiveWords scripts for moving stuff from Outlook into MindManager/Results. So this post is a “heads up”, but in the near future, I’ll post the bits and pieces that hold my system together, including how I enqueue attached Outlook email objects as tasks in my ResultsManager InTray using ActiveWords and GyroQ.

Downloaded an audio book for Seth Godin’s new one “Small is the New Big” yesterday. Interesting idea at the beginning of the book: if there was no more anonymity, the world would be a better place–the anonymity of the internet is ruining us. Do you believe that?Godin distinguishes between anonymity and privacy to alleviate fears that he’s describing a “big brother” world utterly lacking in privacy, suggesting that reduced anonymity does not necessarily result in reduced privacy. He dreams of living in a village where “everybody knows my name.” (I can hear the Cheers theme song…)

I think Godin’s onto something. Even “good” people (whatever that means) act differently when they are known than when they aren’t. I personally think that’s because “good people” aren’t really all that good at the core. We are restrained by society’s observations, our reputation. If we don’t want to be outcasts of society, we act good enough (when watched) to be accepted.

I don’t know which philosophers to cite here, but I could imagine one tracing out any number of codes of ethics from this point, starting with one’s belief about human nature:

1. We are all bad in reality, and selfish, and since there’s no higher purpose or greater good, the best we can do is please ourselves. So screw everyone else.
2. We are all bad in reality, and selfish, and since there is a higher purpose, this shows that we’ve fallen. Then the best we can do is to pursue the higher purpose.
3. We are all good in reality, afterall. What’s so wrong with adapting our behavior to the environment, looking better when others are looking? So the best we can do is please ourselves; but since part of what pleases us is being fit in society, it is in our best interest to play nice.
4. We are all good in reality, and it is a function of society to draw out that good that is within us. That’s why we need to be known by society; to ensure that the best is brought out of us. So the best we can do is build community because that makes us all better.