Wagon. Off.

So, been a while.

I'ved really fallen off the wagon recently, re productivity. Not in any gross way - weeky review, up to date lists, empty inbox - check. But nonetheless, I still feel leaden at work, like being at work is a chore.

Its at times like this that I really appreciate having my journal. A quick scan through the last few months reminded me that Iv lost track of my meditation a great deal. I think this in turn has led me to lost a little of the enjoyment that you can find in doing any task. Its also hindered my attention span, which means harder tasks are becoming less fun sooner, if you get my meaning.

My aim therefore is to really go at my meditation again - to simplify my evenings to include yoga, exercise and meditation as my main hobbies (alongside, of course, spending time with freinds and family, eating etc - im no monk). Computers, books and so on - they can go to the side for now.

Hope this helps.

Living off cash

Since the New Year my wife and I have a new plan for saving money – CASH. We got married at the backend of last year so invariably that cost a lot of money. Came straight back from our two week honeymoon to Xmas and NY, so again, money spent. We have plans to get a house, maybe a family and so on, so a thorough look at the budget was important our plan this year was to save at least £5k – that’s 10% of our income, more or less.

My income is pretty straight-forward – monthly pay, £2200 after tax. My wife’s is more complicated though - £650 monthly from one job as an employee, £180 weekly from another job self-employed.

This always made budgeting difficult when we lived off credit cards. You get one persons pay, pay off the credit card (or most of it anyway), then each week have to remember to move some of that weekly pay into the relevant account to cover whatever bills are coming out.

When we sat down and looked at our budget we noticed an interesting coincidence. My monthly pay and her monthly pay were almost exactly the same as our monthly outgoings. Her weekly pay was the same was our weekly outgoings.

Monthly? Rent, utilities, phones, internet, savings, tax (for self-employment), travel cards (Zone 1-2 London), insurance etc.

Weekly? Human food, cat food, lunch at work, going out money, booze, meals with friends, expensive cheese, snobbish coffee, etc.

Since we had this weekly amount in cash we thought we’d try an interesting experiment – live off cash. Every Sunday evening we draw out £170 in cash (leaving a tenner in for good measure) and put it in a tin, then just take out of the tin as we go along.

The impact has been amazing.

I never realised how detached I had become from budgeting, self-control and the reality of money  when I was living off credit cards. We used credit cards for nearly everything – deliberately. Neither of us had a great credit history – no problems, just not much credit used. So we thought we would start using it to build up a history. Trouble is it bears no reality to any budget you set.

Picture this – Tuesday morning, hard day at the office, you’re walking to another meeting and you pass a coffee shop. Your “treats” budget is £50pm. You remember a few coffees here and there, the odd drink after work perhaps, but have no idea really. How do you know whether you can stay within budget by having that coffee?

What rules about living off cash is that budgeting is immediate. You look in your wallet, you have a tenner. You know that‘s all you’ve got for the week at work. You can have the coffee if you want, but you a) have to have a cheap lunch b) have no other coffees all week c) take food in from home d) spend less money over the weekend.

Trying to decide if you can afford a coffee when you have access to £3000 on a credit card is basically impossible. Trying to decide if you can afford a coffee when you have a tenner in your wallet to last you three days is easy.

Other breakthroughs my wife and I have had – 

Sitting at home with the wife before we went out shopping, deciding that as we were going out that Friday night, we would only buy food that would allow us to eat food we already had in the cupboard or freezer; deciding a few weeks later that we would stay in this weekend to allow us to restock the freezer.

Getting a kick of managing to eat at work every day all week for a tenner.

The joy of avoiding spending any cash all day for two consecutive days.

Realising that we could cook twice as much food for basically pennies more, then take it for lunch, and the money we save would buy us a couple more drinks on Friday night, pay for a new book, or if we did it all month, buy a new top or pair of pants.

Blowing money on a take away at the beginning of the week and regretting it all week when we had no money to go out.

In all the cases above, with a credit card it would have been so easy to just think “oh we’ll stick it on the card, we’ll stick it on the card, we’ll stick it on the card”. That’s how the bills rack up.

There’s also a reverse psychology in play. Twice since New Year (7 weeks) we had to draw out an extra £20 to get by – and boy it sucked. I felt like a failure; I’d set a standard and failed to stick to it. The following week I tried extra hard to stick to the budget.

It becomes like a game – how little can you live off. And unlike living off a CC, the success is immediate – making it to Friday with half you cash left and knowing you can blow it all and stick to your budget – amazing feeling.

Choices

Hardly seems fair, but sometimes you have to choose between two goals.


One of my goals at the moment is to avoid spending those little bits of cash that make the money float out of your pocket. Drinks, snacks, etc. So drinking tea in the office instead of going out for coffee, taking the remains of last nights dinner into work to save on lunch. Great.


Another goal is to eat more healthily. Im generally pretty healthy, but I have a definite sweet tooth, and I find the best way to minimise the amount of sweet stuff I eat is to avoid starting. Once I get the taste...


So, its Wednesday afternoon and I'm hungry. I have no food with me, but there's a fruit stall 'round the corner. Alternatively, there are biscuits in the office. What to choose?


Its deeper than it looks. The key to successfully sticking to your goal is to make them habitual. Habitually keeping your money vs habitually eating healthily. Which habit are you going to break first. 


It seems to me that it will come down to one of two things


1) Which goal is clearer or stronger for you - if you would like to save money, but your major focus is staying fit, fine, simple.


2) Where your weaknesses lie - If you compulsively spend money, you'll nip out and buy fruit and justify it by saying you're staying healthy. If you compulsively eat sweets, you'll eat the biscuit and say that you're saving money.

Same outcome, different reason. So if the outcome is the same, does it matter?


Abso-friggin-lutely. 


Habits remind me of entropy. If you dont keep putting energy into the habit, it eventually falls away. 


Life gives you tough decisions, but if you consistently see that there are choices, and try and navigate the best you can between the difficult options, then in the long term you're going to be headed the right way. the decision will stick with you and remind you that "I really need to take some healthy snacks to work with me"


If you allow the good habits to be a tool to reinforce the bad habits, you're gonna have one hell of a job shifting em in the future. You're gonna deliberately ignore the ways to get round both problems, using one of them to justify your decisions.


So, fancy a biscuit.

Honesty

Wow, forever since I did a post. The small matter of getting married, going on honeymoon, Christmas and employing three new staff at work, amongst other feeble excuses.


Nonetheless yesterday I had a fascinating conversation with the Chief Officer of our charity. We were planning our business for the coming 5 years or so, and were thinking about the words we wanted to associate with our business. Everyone wants to be efficient and fun and innovative. However I had suggested honesty as something that we should have as core value.


I have previously worked in a organisation where honesty was seen as a key part of the way everything worked. Its incredibly powerful, and far more difficult and effective than you might imagine.


An example of the power of honesty


Scenario A -  you ask a staff member if they have done something, something that's important and has consequences if they forget. They forgot. If honesty is valued, they will tell you, knowing that lying is so serious. The result? A problem is out in the open and the people affected can deal with it. Are they happy with the person that forgot? No. But at least they can deal with that problem.


Scenario B - you ask a staff member if they have done something, something that's important and has consequences if they forget. They forgot. If honesty is not valued, they say "oh I emailed so and so and they never got back to me". The result? The problem is still there, only now its on the back of one person to sort out, if they can at all.


In both these situation the problem already exists, whether its out in the open or not. The difference is that the problem is solved with the power of the team rather than the individual.


Another example of the power of honesty


Scenario A -  a department in an organisation is measured once a year on how well its doing, whether by financial targets, output, quality of service, whatever. If honesty is valued in an organisation, the penalty for lying about your performance is greater than poor performance itself. The result? The poor performance comes to light and the organisation can take whatever action is needed to increase the performance in that department.


Scenario B - in an organisation where lying or "exaggerating" results is the norm, the department would find a way to show its output as being better than it really is - double counting, false disasters, creative accounting, etc. The result? that organisation continues to perform poorly.


In both these situation the problem already exists, whether its out in the open or not. The difference is that the performance problem is never addressed, and either the truth comes out further down the line when its two years deeper, or the organisation's overall performance continues to suffer.


Honesty is hard - there is some part of it that's about taking your medicine, taking responsibility for what you have or haven't done and accepting that ultimately we all make mistakes. It means risking losing face, it means being honest with yourself as well as others, and knowing when you've let yourself down.


Alternatively honesty is easy - I work hard enough in a complicated environment without having an overarching complexity about who I told what, when and to what aim? I want all my efforts to go on work, not lying about it. I work hard so I make mistakes, not because I'm sloppy but because I'm pushing myself. I want to be able to come in in the morning and work hard on my job, not on creating a network of fine threads to cover those innocent mistakes, or to feel that if I dont create the network of lies I'll be punished, because everyone else is.


Honesty has to be a culture. And all organisational cultures take their cues from the top. The examples set by your senior management, directors and CE all drip-drip through everyone else that works there. if they bluff and blagg about what they do, how great the business is going, then everyone else will too. The day your CE comes to you and says "this is our problem, this is the reality if our situation, its time to roll up our sleeves" is the day your workforce rolls their sleeves up to.


How honest are you about your financial situation? How honest are you about the impact of the recession on your team? How honest are you about whether your staff members feel fulfilled and are looking for work elsewhere? How honest are your best staff members when they're being poached by someone else?


I began to wonder about Nick Leeson - how many people's lived were affected by the fact that he worked in a culture where lying about your mistakes was accepted, and raising it honestly to be dealt with was not? Extreme example perhaps, but easily understood nonetheless.


So honesty it is for our business - honesty with our funders, with our Directors, with our stakeholders, with each other. Because the alternative is so destructive, so backward and so futile, that it barely seems a choice at all.

Tales of the unexpected.

I saw last week one of the most impressive things I have seen in some time.


At my work we recently found that one of our key funders does not intend to continue funding one of our projects. This would mean the redundancy of 2 members of staff, including a director, plus several sessional staff, and mean that the charitable service we provide for almost nothing for 65 kids would be lost. It would also mean the end of 10 years work on the project - a long time for something in the charitable field.


We were due to have a meeting about it, but I wanted to give our director the heads up anyway. I explained the position, to his understandable shock. We had the meeting one hour later - he had already developed a plan how to make the entire project self-sustaining.


One hour. Think seriously, if someone said to you that you might be losing your job in a month, could you kill the shock, get creative and solidify that idea in one hour?


I was seriously impressed.


I've come to think recently that this kind of refocussing is one of the prime skills for people these days. Its about how we deal with insecurity, with change, with the unexpected. We live in that kind of world - so the kind of person that can deal with it has a huge advantage.


How do we even get there? 


Confidence, clearly, is one thing. I know, as the director did, that he would get another job and most likely soon.


Secondly, its about already being used to change. If your only concern is a logical one about finances, well, that's just another task to be managed like any other. If your fear is actually about change, which is being manifested in terms of worrying about specific things, thats something hard to deal with. This person travels all over the world, spends all his time moving from one location to another, meeting new people in different countries. He's doesnt live the normal 9 to 5. This means that he doesnt worry about things like a new route to work, new colleagues, new sights and sounds, new bosses, new time schedules, a new desk etc. Lots of people wouldn't mind doing new jobs as long as they could do them at the same desk. 


Finally its about getting moving. When I spoke to him after, he said he simply thought "how can i make this work" - and as soon as he started moving, he carried on. When you get hit by shock, you feel helpless. As soon as you start doing something you start to feel in control.


So my aim for the coming weeks is to explore this issue..

GTD and One Note

I thought I would outline my GTD system today. I have seen many ways of doing GTD in OneNote (ON), as I do, but a small number of them seem to get the strength of  ON and others miss the crucial point.

I've tried lots of different ways to run a GTD system. I'm mindful that much of it depends on your work, your personal preferences, how much time you can spend at a computer, and so on. i spend most of my time in the office, and get a good chunk of time at my desk most days. I want everything to run through the computer where possible, and hate having to have paper involved at any stage. This works for me, so here goes.

Firstly, here’s how it looks.

Along the left it says Work and Home. I have two separate notebooks for these; you could just as easily have one. I like to keep them separate, but as we’ll see later on it makes no real difference in the end.

Along the top I have Next Actions, Someday/Maybe, 20,000, some reference stuff, some checklists.

A few points here – you’ll notice I have a tab called WF. This means waiting for, but I don’t keep my waiting fors here. For some reason I have quite a few projects where everything I’ve done is complete, but I just want to make sure someone else finishes the job. For example I recently raised an invoice for another company. I won’t hear anything now for a month and then should just get an online payment. I don’t want to keep it as an active project because 9 times from 10 I won’t need to do anything else. However, since its money involved, I want to keep an eye on it.

You may notice I also have a “Not Yet” tab, separate from my Someday/Maybe. When I started this new job I found piles and piles of incomplete work. Its work I want to do, I’ve definitely decided that – I just don’t have the bandwidth to do it now. To show my point I have about 110 projects right now, with a further 48 in Not Yet, a 49 in Someday/Maybe, and that just my work notebook. Anyway, that’s something else.

Along the right each tab equals a project. I used these pages as projects because I like to be able to see the projects as a list. Sometimes it’s good to be able to see all your projects in a single column, helps you quickly scan through and see what's alive. You’ll note a couple of them are inset – this is just a quick visual cue that they are related. Apart from the inset there’s no difference between them. Something worth noting is that in ON 2010 you can collapse and expand these. I don’t have it yet so I don’t know whether it’s going to be useful or not.

On this page I mocked up a project page. Few of mine have all these things but most have a few.

I love mind mapping so if it’s a project of any decent size Il do a mind map and insert a grab of it. (The software is Tony Buzans iMindmap).

On the left is a table called “Steps”. If I know how a project is likely to go, or Iv brainstormed it, I write it down here to keep a record.

Next to that I have my Next Actions. Note the tags next to each Next Action, il come back to that in a mo.

Next to that is a screen grab I took from Lifehacker (respect). The text is searchable even from a screen grab, which just makes things a ton easier. You can screen grab anywhere in Windows with a hotkey too, it makes clipping notes really quick.

Below that Iv inserted two files. You can insert a copy of the file or a link to it. If you move the file over then the file is backed up wherever your ON is backed up to.

Here’s the really cool bit. Suppose Iv just done my weekly review, and I have 150-odd Next Actions buried within ON. You can search for those context tags and ON will bring them up, ordered according to context. It looks like this

I collapsed a few so you can see the categories, but they’re all in there. 

Even better clicking on one takes you to that page. So if my Next Action is “Call Bob” I click Call Bob and it takes me to the page with his number, the key points I need to raise with him, his extension, and so on. 

Cooler still, the task is highlighted – so once the task is done I hold down Alt then press 0, then – (dash) and it cancels the context and puts a strikethrough the Next Action. I could delete them I guess, but I find it useful to wait until the weekly review to do that. That little run of two keys has become a satisfying little paradigm for me.

All the Next Actions, from both Home and Work, are brought together in this list. So I can separate them in their own categories, but they still get done together.

By the way you can export that list to a document with a button, but I don’t tend to bother.

The ability to keep Next Actions next to the support information and export those Next Actions into a readymade context list is THE killer feature for me. When I first started with GTD I found it annoying either writing Next Actions out twice or having them detached from my projects. This way I get to quickly change from one project to another.

On top of this there are some really nice other touches that are the proverbial cherry on the cake. With one key press I can create an appointment in Outlook – ideal for making day specific Next Actions.

I can print a document straight into ON and then make notes over the top of it; I can prettify things quite a bit – surprisingly important when you use it for several hours a day.

Probably the best addition is that you can sync it into Dropbox. This has 2 great uses. First, all your ON notebooks, including your important Documents, are automatically backed up.  Second, you can open those notebooks from another computer. I have all my notebooks on both my desktop for daily work and my laptop for out and about stuff. The way Dropbox works too means I can sync my laptop at work, and then take it out do my stuff, and then when I get back it will sync. You don’t need a real-time internet connection to use the thing, and when you return it updates then. Great if you don’t have mobile broadband, or if you’re on a train or somewhere with a wobbly connection.

So all in all, I think it’s a pretty fantastic way of doing things. There are caveats though.

Firstly, it’s not very mobile. For me that’s fine, I spend most of my time in the office and only go out about for specific things. If you live on the road, without a laptop, it might not be much use. ON 2010 is supposed to have a web interface, that may change things considerably, who knows. 


Secondly, you're tied in to Microsoft. As an otherwise Linux lover, that grates a little. However, I'm prepared to subjugate that concern for the sake of work. Hey, I run a tiny poor charity, effectiveness is the primary concern :)


Lemme know what you think.

Checklists

In an earlier post I discussed bedding in a new habit by making a checklist of everything I wanted to do in the mornings. Since then I’ve gone a bit checklist crazy – leaving the house checklist, leaving work checklist, travelling checklist, gym checklist.

The idea is simple – it’s not some simple slavish list to be followed – it’s a reminder of all the things that I might need or might want to do. For example the leaving for work checklist – it’s rare that I need exactly the same things every day – have I brought my laptop home or any papers, do I need to take my dry cleaning in, am I going straight out after work so need to take my trainers, my gym kit and so on.

The premise is this – sometime I’m creative and other times I’m not. Sometimes I can think of everything I might possibly need in a certain situation and a million more besides, other times I can barely remember to take myself somewhere. When I do think of something I write it down – that way it’s there, easily checked, for as long as I need it.

The problem with the mind is that when you have something on your mind that you want to be there - be it a good idea, a happy memory, a plan for the future – you feel as though you would never forget it. ‘I wouldn’t forget my gym kit, I love going to the gym’. The next day you’re half way to work before you even have you’re first thought, never mind thinking through whether you want to go to the gym.

Writing a checklist is simply another way of storing good ideas, to be acted upon or not acted upon as you see fit.

I know part of you might be thinking “I don’t wanna live my live like a slave, I’d rather live minute to minute and decide my own fate”. However the response there is simple – what greater freedom is there than deciding what you want to do, and taking the necessary action to do it? And not just the big things, but the whole of your life? Checklists can be helpful reminders of stuff, but they can also be powerful triggers. I have a checklist, of sorts, of the things I like to do on a weekend. These aren’t projects Iv committed to, just things I might fancy on a Saturday morning – good parks to go to, bookshops I’ve seen, coffee shops I want to check out, books I might wanna pick up, and so on. And bear in mind finally, that I can ignore everything on my list if I choose. Generally I don’t, for the simple fact that some part of me has already decided that doing whats on the list is personally profitable for me – why would I not do something like that?

Incidentally, a quick geek out, I’ve been recording my checklists in Remember the Milk. I had used it for my gtd reminders, but I didn’t quite like it for that. For checklists though, it’s wonderful, and it syncs nicely with my blackberry.