Getting Things Done in the New Year5 January 2004 It's been a while since I've done a planning column. Like many, I use the transition of a new year to reevaluate my life, set goals for the next twelve months, and vow to myself to actually make some changes this year. And then usually, I do none of that. Well, this year really is going to be different. I've spent the last several weeks reading, digesting and cogitating on David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. I think Allen is On To Something in a big way, and I've decided to adopt his planning methods, adapted accordingly to my Palm. I highly recommend Allen's book, and it's available on Audible if you're too busy to sit down (that's the way I "read" it, since it's only available in paper otherwise; if I can't get it digital audio or an ebook, I ain't reading it). Basically, though, here's the gist. Most people are overwhelmed and thus "stuck" because they keep too much of their stuff in their heads. When you decide you need to do something, some part of you (I think of it as a tiny little drill sergeant) starts hounding you to do it, right now. No matter what else you may be doing, anything else marked as "pending" in your head creates conflict and stress. As soon as you have two things to do and can't do them both simultaneously, you're stressed. Allen has found a way to achieve stress-free productivity, what he calls a "mind like water", to use a karate analogy. You can do things without worrying about what else is being left undone. How do you do this? Get stuff out of your head, and into a trusted system that you know you'll review on a regular basis. Allen spends much of the book explaining how to set up a paper system, but where's the fun in that? I've found that with a few extra software titles, a Palm works just as well, if not better. The first component is Slap, from Hands High Software. Slap is an ingenious little package that does what the stock applications can't: give you one and only one place to write down all your stuff. Slap looks a bit like Memo Pad, with lines for text entry. On the right side of the screen are icons for Date Book, Address Book, To Do List and Memos, along with another icon for other "Slap-aware" applications. Along the bottom edge of the screen are icons to insert the date and time and a button to clear the screen and start over. Here's how Slap works. Let's say you're at a staff meeting. Instead of jumping from app to app trying to create appointments, write down phone numbers and jot action items to do before the next meeting, you just keep Slap open and write down everything that comes up. And example might be:
When you're done, tap on the first line to select "Meet with Bill…" and tap the Date Book icon on the right. Slap will create a new appointment in the Date Book for January 9, 2004 at 2:00 pm called "Meet with Bill". Tap on Bob's name and number, then tap the Address Book icon, and a new contact record is created with Bob's name and number pre-filled. Select the rest of the lines, then tap the To Do List icon, and three new tasks appear in your To Do List. Slap is an incredible way of "dumping" all the stuff in your head into your Palm without trying to figure out what do with it while you're brainstorming. The first step in Allen's process is to get all the stuff out of your head, without making any judgments about it. Trying to figure out what to do with stuff while you're processing it just slows you down, makes you miss things, and often leads to bad decisions because you didn't think things through. Whenever I have an idea, any idea, I whip out my trusty Tungsten E, hit the Notes button (now mapped to Slap) and jot it down. I don't think about it, don't try to plan anything, I just write it down. But the key is that I do that with everything that pops into my head. This isn't perfect, and I'll be better off when I get the OS6 successor to the Tungsten T3 this spring, since a lot of the time I'd be better off recording stuff in the voice recorder, then dumping it to Slap when I park the car. Still, Slap's a pretty good start at being a universal "inbox" for everything that's on my mind. After I've got To Do items created for new stuff (although Slap works with all the built-ins, 90% of my stuff are tasks), the next thing I do is fire up ShadowPlan and figure out what they are. I have a Shadow database that automatically imports any new tasks and appointments every time it's started. I have a few "top level" divisions within the outline for big areas of my life: Personal, Work, Writing, etc. I drag new items where they go, then start figuring out what they are, one at a time. A lot of people get bogged down trying to do projects. Allen points out that you can't do a project. You can only do individual actions related to the project. For each new item in my outline, I have to look at it and decide: is it a project, a stand-alone action (basically, an one-action project), or reference for something down the road? I only use two item views in this Shadow outline: Note, for projects and top level items, and Custom, which shows just the title and To Do link box for actions. If something is an action, I pretty much leave it alone, or move it under any existing project that it fits with. If something is a project, I rename it to a successful outcome. How do you know when a project is really finished? "Conquer Albania" might sound good, but how do you know, really, when you've succeeded? All my projects take the form of a positive statement, phrased as a sentence. The above example might be changed to "I am the supreme ruler of Albania, loved by all its citizens." As long as that statement isn't true, the project isn't complete (if this sounds like a flow chart, my programmer roots are showing). Also if something is a project, I'll de-link it from the To Do database, since you can't do a project. You can do Next Actions, so I'll create new child tasks under the project outcome statement that relate to it. The traditional planning mindset is to break the project down into tasks and subtasks, assign due dates and priorities to each, and then get freaked out when you're behind schedule because no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. Allen doesn't do that, and I'm starting to see the wisdom in his approach. He suggests only putting one or maybe in rare cases two items under each project. The key word in "next action" is next. If you had nothing else to do but make progress towards this outcome, what is the very next physical action you would take to get the ball rolling? Sticking with my example, the next action would be "Find Albania on a map." (I know it's in Europe somewhere, but not exactly where.) Only after I accomplish that will I really see what the next step is. Planning stuff out too far in advance, and in too much detail, leaves you ill-equipped to respond to the chaotic roadblocks fate will inevitably throw in your way. Sometimes I'll do what Allen calls "back of the envelope planning," literally jotting down little bullet points in the note of the outcome statement to block out the big steps, giving myself little milestones to guide my next actions. But really, that's it. I don't plan out in detail more than one or two steps in advance. This keeps me more nimble and less stressed than in other planning methods I've used. Once I've linked my next actions to tasks in the To Do database, I open up the To Do application and put them in context (a new-fangled way of saying categorize). I have my To Do categories set up to correspond to settings in my life. "Home" for things to do while in or around my apartment. "Work" for things to do at the store where I work. "Phone" for calls I need to make. "Computer" for things I have to do at my PC. And "Anywhere" for things that aren't location-dependent. (Writing tasks go in Anywhere since I always carry my Palm.) Once I'm done with this step, I can quickly see anything I need to do when I have a few moments in any given location. This massive Shadow outline becomes the basis for my weekly review. At least once a week (but more often if I'm hit with changing focus or I feel myself starting to drift) I go through my Shadow outline and assess each outcome statement. Is it complete? If not, what's the next action? I then create new child tasks for next actions, then go into the To Do List and assign the proper contexts. Not all of my projects are things I want do right now or in the near future, and maybe not at all. For these items, I have a final top-level view called "Someday/Maybe." Into this level go outcome statements with no next actions, or at least no next actions that actually link to items in the To Do database. The Someday/Maybe list gives me the freedom to record everything, no matter how "blue sky" it may be. Anything I may want to do, no matter how silly, unrealistic, or foolishly optimistic gets recorded because somewhere down the road, I may decide to do it. An example of one of my Someday/Maybe items is "I've published Saurians, the long-awaited sequel to Between Heaven and Hell, and it's a runaway best-seller." I'm not working on this project currently, so I have no next actions for it, but it is something I want to get back to eventually. Also notice that outcome statements are the best possible outcome, so your next actions lead to towards great success. If you aim low don't be surprised when you hit what you were aiming for. Allen stresses that there is a difference between long-term tasks and someday/maybes. Long-term tasks may take a long time to complete, but they should have a pending next action. To extend on Lao-tzu, the journey of a thousand miles may start with a single step, but if you don't start walking now, you ain't gonna get anywhere. It may take me decades to conquer Albania, but I'm going to figure out where the heck it is today. Speaking of today, now that I've explained how to record all your stuff, decide what it is, what to do about it, and where to do it, it's time to discuss how to remind yourself to do that when you're in the proper context. I toyed around with the Tungsten E/T3's stock Calendar and Tasks applications (which, as I've said before, are significantly improved over the original Palm Date Book and To Do List), and Iambic's Agendus. In the end, I went back to Pimlico Software's DateBk5. The clincher for DateBk5? Context views. DateBk5 supports a feature called Saved Views. This allows you to switch between multiple configurations of how the program is set up. While saved views can dramatically change the way the program operates (I've even seen one that turns DateBk5 into a contact manager, with nary an appointment or task to be seen), all of mine center on the Day view, and they all show all my appointments. Where they differ is in the To Do categories they display. For example, I have a DateBk5 view called "@Work". This shows me all my appointments on top, then a combination of all my Work, Phone, Anywhere and Unfiled tasks, sorted alphabetically, with no displayed priorities. This way, when I'm at work, I see all the next actions I can knock off while I'm there, and I'm not forced to filter out on my own the stuff that can only be done elsewhere. When I'm at home, I use the "@Home" view, which shows me my appointments and the Home, Computer, Phone, Anywhere and Unfiled categories. My "@PC" view shows the same stuff as the "@Home" view but without the Home category (basically, just the stuff I can do at my desktop PC without getting up). Finally, I have an "@Out" view that shows the Out, Anywhere, Phone and Unfiled categories, stuff to do when I'm at neither home nor work. The reason this works so much better than the stock To Do List is the ability to mix and match categories into contexts, rather than viewing them one at a time. When I was using the Tungsten E's Tasks program for this, I'd have to show just the Work category while at work, and I couldn't see phone calls I had to make or stuff that wasn't location specific, like my weekly planning sessions. By the same token, DateBk5's views can be used for single categories if you want. I'm thinking about adding an "@Phone" view that just shows my appointments and my Phone categories, so I can easily sit down and knock out all the phone calls I have to make or return in one swoop. Allen recommends a category called "Waiting for" that contains next actions that are deferred or delegated to others. Basically, stuff that you can't do until something else happens. Rather than give this its own category, I've found it better to keep these items in whatever category they'd be in when ready to do, and assign them due dates in DateBk5. If I decide something can't be done until Friday, and assign it a due date of Friday, it disappears off my list in DateBk5 until Friday, when it magically reappears. I find this simpler than assigning it to a different category that I'll have to remember to refer back to later. Keep in mind, the point of all this is to get stuff out of your head and into a system that you know you'll see later that can be trusted to recall stuff you won't. One of the criticisms I've seen of Allen's method is that the lack of due dates and priorities could lead to an "easy things first" mentality. What's to stop someone from just checking off the easy things on the list and procrastinating on the more challenging items? In practice, I've found little difference in effort with anything on my lists. When you break projects down into true next actions, each individual action is pretty easy. I check off lots of stuff every day and rarely do any of them take more than half an hour to complete. The lack of priorities means I rely more on my own judgment and good old-fashioned intuition to pick the next item from the list, but so far I've found that this works pretty well, and I'm making consistent progress on all my projects. When something has a hard deadline, convert the task into an appointment (via DateBk5's /5 command) and block out the time to get it done before the deadline. While items on my tasklist are discretionary, anything on the calendar is sacred. It has to be done when I schedule it, or not at all. On the rare occasions that I have had something on my next action lists that I just kept avoiding, the reason became obvious as soon as I forced myself to take a good look at it. Invariably, these "problem" next actions weren't next actions at all. There was always something that I still had to do before I could address them. Once I figured out what that was and made that my next action for that project, things started to move forward again. I've taken to using Inbox2Go from DataViz instead of VersaMail for reading email on the go. I have two reasons for this. One, I've found that for some reason when I delete email in VersaMail on the Palm, it doesn't delete on the desktop and I have to remember to go into Outlook and delete it again. When I delete a message in Inbox2Go, the same message disappears from Outlook on the next sync. The second reason will sound a bit strange. One of my favorite features of VersaMail was that it supported syncing subfolders under the Inbox folder in Outlook. Since I made extensive use of Outlook rules to sort incoming messages into folders for different mailing lists, etc., this allowed me to preserve that organization on my Palm. For example, all the messages from the Writing On Your Palm Yahoo Group were in their own folder, rather than clumped into the Inbox along with everything else. This was nice, but something always subtly bugged me about it. It wasn't until I read Getting Things Done that I figured out what it was. A lot of my mailing list traffic was backing up on me consistently, and once I had a few hundred backlogged messages to slog through, I tended to ignore that folder "until I had time to get caught up". Big surprise, I almost never did, and my sync times just got longer and longer as HotSync had to sync more and more email messages, and the RAM on my Palm continued to shrink. Allen recommends keeping everything in the Inbox and processing it completely on a regular basis. Don't leave anything in the Inbox once you've seen it. Start at the beginning, and go through each message in turn, no skipping to something juicy five items down. With each email, decide what it is, what to do with it and where it belongs. 90% of the email I receive (which is about half the email sent to me, but I never see the spam) is mailing list traffic, which can be deleted as soon as I read it, unless I wish to reply. Anything I want to write a lengthy reply to or file for reference gets moved to Inbox2Go's Filed folder, and I create a new task to remind me to write out the replies when I have time. Anything that can be handled in less that two minutes gets done immediately, then filed or deleted as appropriate. I "grew up" with email while working at the Pentagon in my late teens to mid-twenties, and got into the habit of filing everything for future reference just in case I'd need it for CYA purposes. Now I'm trying to break myself of that, since I know I don't ever reference more than 1% of my old email. If I don't know I'll want to come back to something later, I delete it. If I keep it, I create a task to review it. The end result is that since switching to Inbox2Go and following Allen's advice, my inbox is cleaner than it's been in years (maybe ever) and I'm up to date on my mailing list traffic, since I don't let it pile up in the first place. I toyed around with using Natara's DayNotez for journaling, but I've found that most of the features that make it so cool (like the ability to select text from a journal entry and create a task out of it) are duplicated and refined in Slap. For any Daily Record of Events stuff I do, I've found that the "Daily Journal" feature of DateBk5 works just as well, and the PalmOS Find feature makes it equally easy to find stuff in either location. Of course, this is all just my implementation, and I'm sure I'll continue to revise/refine it over time. If you're interested in actually getting things out of your head and off your plate, I highly recommend reading Getting Things Done and check out the GtD_Palm Yahoo Group for more tips and tricks. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |