Node Glue

Here is a great video on YouTube from David Allen himself explaining the basic concepts of GTD.  Wish I’d had this link a long time ago–I can’t count the number of “GTD in a nutshell” pitches I’ve done

I hit zero again yesterday. It took me nearly 8 hours! Admittedly, that’s because I had email two weeks old that was “urgent” (well, after 2 weeks!) that I needed to “Do” and not “Delegate”. I also had a bunch of stuff on post-it notes around my desk to drain into my trusted system. (I’d resorted to keeping the post-it notes stuck to the wrist-rests on my laptop, following the principle of “put it in front of the door“.)

The other thing that I tried to do, however, which significantly extended my time, was to attempt to improve my overall system by setting up MindReader. Unfortunately, I hit several snags that I just couldn’t push through. So I now have a partially working installation/configuration of MindReader, and a loss of two hours (or was it three!?).

I have two main motivations for trying set up MindReader again (my second attempt–I tried before about 10 months ago, I think).

First, I collect a lot of actions with GyroQ. So when it comes time to review, my In-Tray will be full of partially defined items that I captured in haste with GyroQ. One step in my weekly review process is to finish defining them, which means adding due dates, assigning additional owners, delegates, or partners, maybe adding a context. Because opening the ResultsManager edit activity dialogue is relatively inconvenient, and adds time to the overall process, I’m thinking that if I could define some of that additional task information at the moment of capture with GyroQ, that puts me ahead when it comes time for review–because I won’t have to do it again.
Second, when things around the office get really crazy (as it has seemed to be the case often lately), it may be a full two weeks between moments that I “hit zero”. In that interim time, my In-Tray can grow rather large (maybe 50 items?). Which means that, in there, somewhere, might be an activity that I would like to know I’m assigning to, say Bob, one of my direct reports. But until I take time to edit the activity and add Bob’s name to the Resources line, it won’t show up under Bob’s name on any dashboards I generate. Again, however, if I could add Bob’s name to the activity at the point of capture with GyroQ, then even if the activity isn’t fully defined and still sitting in my In-Tray, at least it shows up on the dashboard when I meet one-on-one with Bob and go over his activities. What I’ve been doing to work around this is OK, but inefficient. I look at Bob’s dashboard, and then I scan my gigantic In-Tray to make sure there isn’t anything else in there for Bob. Then in Joe’s one-on-one, right after Bob’s, I scan the In-Tray again to make sure there’s nothing in there for Joe. Then in Bill’s one-on-one…you get the point. So that’s inefficient, which is why I’m looking for a solution like MindReader.
So, I hit zero, despite the disappointing snag with MindReader. I can live with that.

This is an update to a series of posts from almost a year ago, back in November 2006. The series was entitled Using ResultsManager to Reorganize My Work (Again). In the final article in the series, I suggested the idea of adding a bucket called “Maybe Never”. This was the bucket of tasks that wouldn’t even show up on my dashboards, I was so uncommitted to them. And yet, I couldn’t just let myself delete them either. It was my ResultsManager equivalent of the Windows XP Recycle Bin. I can delete…and then if I change my mind…undelete.

Well, it’s nearly a full year later, and I’m here to report the total number of times that I’ve opened my Maybe Never map and reviewed it.

Never.

Nick Duffill of Gyronix (the maker of ResultsManager) commented insightfully in that series that:

You’re absolutely right about resistance to deleting things, but it is a cathartic habit to take positive decisions, even wrong decisions. History and commerce have always favoured the decision-takers higher than the opportunity-creators, even if they turned out to be wrong later. Another way to deal with things in this category if the review process might not catch them is to defer them for a few months, then they will come back again. When you have deferred them several times in a row, you might feel more comfortable with deleting them.

So, lately, I’ve been much more free with the delete key–and I rarely look over my shoulder. This is yet another example to show that my biggest productivity bottlenecks are not in my software, but in my mind. The corollary would seem to be that my biggest productivity gains will be achieved by tweaking my mind. So I do that. And then I tweak the software some more

Here’s something else I’ve been trying to figure out lately…

I can’t believe that I’ve only recently discovered the project management technique of the Role Assignment Matrix using RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).  It seems that I should have stumbled onto that much sooner.  I think it’s going to change my life and the lives of those around me–time will tell

Anyway.

As I begin to use RACI for more and more role clarification on projects and activities, I’m interested to see how I can incorporate it into ResultsManager.  It would be nice, for example, to see on a relationship dashboard with one of my direct reports, which things he is an “A” for (accountable–buck stops here), and what things he is strictly an “R” for (responsible–the ‘doer’).  Because I rely on ResultsManager so much to give me views into my world and and the worlds of those I manage, it would be nice to add these new bits of information from RACI onto my dashboards, instead of managing that information outside of ResultsManager (likely a spreadsheet) where it will likely fall out of sync.
I could that easily if there were simply some extra fields on a ResultsManager activity that had corresponding dashboard filters that could be used to group/sort/filter activities by RACI role.

In the meantime, I’m going lo-tech and simply including role information as a text comment at the top of the comments field in each activity.  So it’s there when it comes time to review activities.  But it doesn’t give me any flexibility for automation of group/sort/filter.  I’m trying to learn to live with “good enough”.

I’m honestly surprised to get a couple of comments on my last post, when I haven’t even posted since July! But if I count the two other comments that have come to me “off line” lately, it suggests that some people out there have actually noticed that I haven’t been posting

So, I’ll post again.

Here’s a new thing I’m trying. Very new, but it is in motion–we’ll see where it goes.

Problem

I live my life out of ResultsManager. The team I lead doesn’t. And I don’t want to require them to learn RM or MindManager. I don’t think they are the best tools for them to help them be productive in their work. With the exception of my assistant. He’s a technical guy and uses RM himself. So we sync our maps with FolderShare and it works great between the two of us.

So how do I show the rest of my team members what our agreements are with one another and ask them to report on status in a structured way?

Resources and Contraints

I meet with them each week for 30 minutes as a minimum. In that time, I want to give first priority to their agenda–anything they are blocking on or need to talk about with me. It’s a good time to touch on any more personal concerns they may have as well. So I often don’t have time in that 1:1 to do an exhaustive rundown of the various activities that are on the dashboard with their names on them. And I don’t want to turn that meeting into a purely robotic tactical checklist processing thing; the human touch is more important to me in that context.

I already have a customized ResultsManager dashboard for each direct report that gives me a snapshot of the agreements between me and each person. That dashboard is based on this template provided by Activity Owner.

Solution

Exporting a Word document from a Mind Manager map is a standard feature of Mind Manager.I’ve asked my assistant to weekly generate the relationship dashboard for each direct report, and then export it to a Word doc. He then sends the Word doc, marked “for review”, to each direct report. Marking it for review automatically delivers the doc with change tracking turned on. So the direct report can simply start typing updates into the doc and return it to
my assistant, who can update the maps. They should get this each week a couple of days before our weekly 1:1 meeting.
Evaluation

I talked through this with each of my team members as I designed it. I gave them my rationale (above), and they appreciated it. Most of them were delighted to see all their stuff structured in one tracking document, and may even be interested in adding more stuff to it, just as a convenient way to track more stuff. Nobody has yet balked at the size, appearance, or format of the resulting Word doc.

At this point, we’ve only it made it about half way around the cycle. Meaning, I’ve scrubbed down the dashboards with them to make them current and relevant, and given my assistant the go-ahead to start generating, exporting and emailing weekly. We have yet to close the loop on getting feedback from each of them bubbled back up to me. So it’s too soon to report on how effective this is or isn’t.

My next step, now that they’ve all received real versions of this thing, is to ask them how it’s working and figure out if we need to adjust it or simply beat the drum for a while to get used to a new rhythm.

Just wanted to quickly post and say that, just now, I hit “zero”.  After a week of being out of the office from having a baby, and returning to office to brand new chaos, I still managed to get to zero.

For the GTD newbies, that means that I’ve processed every item in my various inboxes and made a Do, Delegate, or Defer decision, or filing things for reference.  For me, it also means that for any partially defined tasks that I’ve captured with my PDA, in my moleskine paper notebook, or with GyroQ on my desktop, all of them have been properly defined, assigned owners, some dates, some priorities, and moved out of my ResultsManager In-Tray into real maps where they’re supposed to live.

So…email inbox–zero (including personal inboxes); Outlook task list–zero; ResultsManager In-tray–zero; moleskine task lists–zero.
Next step: it’s time for a deep-cleaning review!