Node Glue

Kyle McFarlin, a Gyronix trainer, posted yesterday about how technology attempts to define us, and urges us to think about what we would do with our time if it all disappeared.

Ironically, I think I’m constantly trying to get the technology to help me do the very things that I would do if there was no technology, only more of it. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t.

But Kyle’s thought certainly resonates with me. There are days when it feels like the technology is taking over and I’m being assimilated into the Borg.

Using ResultsManager to Separate Committed from Active
The Daily Actions Dashboard is ultimately where I want to see the effects of my work to separate committed activities from merely active ones.I’ll do that by creating a separate branch within the dashboard that shows only explicitly committed activities.

First, here’s a screenshot of an the sample project map that I’ll be using.

(more…)

My New Review Process

With these two concepts creating clear divisions between Committed and Active, and between Someday/Maybe and Maybe Never, I can now reassign my work to each of those different buckets using the following guidelines.

1. Identify the activities that are truly committed to other people and explicitly mark them committed. This is done in ResultsManager simply by checking the committed box on the Edit Activity dialog as shown above.
2. Identify the activities that are truly Someday/Maybe and explicitly mark them as such. This is also done in the Edit Activity dialog.
3. Identify the activities that should be punted to Maybe Never and exclude them from the dashboard or move them to a separate “Maybe Never” map.

The remaining parts of this series will cover the How To of using ResultsManager to support these modifications to my process. Next, I’ll discuss: Using ResultsManager to Separate Committed from Active.

I’ve been promising for a while to post the glue that ties together Outlook, ActiveWords, GyroActivator, GyroQ, ResultsManager, and MindManager. (Whew! That sounds like a lot of gadgets when they’re all written out in a list like that!) What follows is my attempt to deliver on that promise.

This is just one of the handful of tools/workflows that I use. I call it “tfe”, which stands for “Task From Email”. This was my original Holy Grail usage scenario, meaning, I figured that if I could use these tools to accomplish this, I figured it would dramatically enhance my productivity. Back when I used the Outlook GTD Add-in, I got really attached to working like this. When I’m in the mode of quickly process my inbox, item by item, two minutes or less per item, I want to be able to quickly make an email actionable in as a few steps as possible. The Add-in was very, very good at enabling such a workflow–turning each email into a task very easily.

My “tfe” mashup doesn’t make for quite as smooth an experience as the GTD Add-in in this particular use case, but it’s Good Enough.

Without further ado…

(more…)

Concept #2: Separating the Someday/Maybe activities from “Maybe Never” ones

In the recent past, the Someday/Maybe designation for activities had begun to lose all meaning to me. Part of my journey back to sanity is to reclaim it!

I had been using Someday/Maybe like a black hole, relegating anything marked Someday/Maybe to oblivion. And since so many things lived there, I became rather unmotivated to review it often enough to pull things back onto my dashboard when they should.

Now you might be asking, “Well what difference does that make? Why bother to bring it back once you’ve pushed it out to Someday/Maybe? It must not be that important.”

(more…)

A Brief Detour: Priority is Subjective–Commitment is Objective

Several months ago, when I was trying to whittle down my dashboards, I began using the “Priority 1″ feature of ResultsManager. During my weekly review, I’d mark those actions and projects that needed my special attention for the week as Priority 1. Then I could use the “Priority Actions Dashboard” to generate a dashboard showing only those activities marked Priority 1.

This gave me the ability bubble something to the surface for special focus on a given week. The problem was, as usual with assigning priorities, it became the way to cheat my own system to force something to be in front of me. Priority quickly became just another disguise for Urgency. And since everything is urgent, too many things became priorities, which in turn renders prioritizing useless. If everything is a priority, then nothing is.

(more…)

Concept #1: Separating Committed activities from merely Active ones

For my purposes, I’ve defined committed to mean those activities that have been verbally agreed upon with other humans. (That’s probably how it’s already defined in the ResultsManger help docs. But I’m just now getting it.)
Active tasks, then, include the rest of the activities that I’ve planned for myself, self-committed activities, if you will.

As David Allen points out in Getting Things Done, it is important for me to respect the commitments I’ve made to myself, because if I break them, I’m likely feel the same guilt as if I’d broken a commitment with someone else. On the flip side, however, when I’m deciding when to do my work, and what work I can renegotiate, it’s easier to renegotiate commitments I’ve made to myself than those made with others.

Here’s a picture that makes sense to me:

I’m finding that with so many spinning plates, and a propensity to generate too much work for myself, I need to be able to remind myself about what I’ve actually committed to do, versus what I’ve only told myself I plan to do. That’s why I’ve chosen to start drawing a stronger distinction between Committed and Active activities.

By the way, I didn’t come up with the idea of a committed activity, I’m just capitalizing on it. The committed attribute is a standard attribute of a ResultsManager activity, as shown on the following screenshot of the Edit Activity dialog.

Next time, I’ll take a philosophical detour into the difference between using Priority and Committed for organizing my work.

If you been reading this blog over the past couple of months, you know that I’ve been groaning under the weight of too many activities. Not that I’m doing too many activities, of course, just that the proliferation of undone work is getting to me. This is the first in a series of articles about some changes that I’m making to help me cope.

A lot of this is relevant to anyone paying attention to how his/her work is defined and organized. So even if you aren’t familiar with GTD or ResultsManager, you might find some good in reading it.

Some of it is based GTD concepts and terminology. If you aren’t already familiar with GTD, I would invite you to check it out, starting with David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done,” or looking up GTD in wikipedia (or click here).

And since I use ResultsManager as my preferred tool for organizing my work, all of what I’m talking about is ultimately implemented in ResultsManager. But there are many ways to implement a GTD system, including using simple paper index cards.

(more…)

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!)