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.

Being grumpy

Its been a hard time at work the last few weeks. I started a job at the end of last year and I’ve been uncovering unpleasant things about the finances ever since. Over the next two months I have to break this news to the senior bods, and its not going to be very much fun.

I found myself getting very grumpy about it – worrying about what people would think, would I be blamed, is my job at risk, is this going to be a black mark on my career. Rationally, none of those are even issues. There could be a bit of shoot the messenger perhaps, but its nothing ive done or not done.

What I found really interesting though, was how much it affected my productivity last week. On the way to work my self-talk got on a downward spiral – its not my fault, don’t blame me, its all so bad, why am i even bothering etc. etc. And somehow, even though I knew ‘rationally’ that I shouldn’t think like this, I kept on doing it. It was kind of like indulgence, and very hard to get out of.

Even more interesting, when I got to work I was totally off my game. I really couldn’t focus, i wasn’t enjoying the stuff I normally enjoy, and really hated the stuff I normally “prefer not to do”. I was less likely to attach my inbox and intray once or twice a day, and the “stuff” started piling up. Before I knew it I was getting that out of control feeling again.

Of course, having been very organised for the last few months, one week wasn’t going to knock it all out of whack – rather, having been organised, a little disorganisation is very noticeable. But I realised that it was important to knock it on the head.

So what did I do – well, there’s invariably no one thing that you can do to change your mood. However, the first thing was checked how I talked to myself – it can seem kind of forced at first, to tell yourself to be positive, everything will be fine, you’ll find the way to fix it – but its no more contrived than telling yourself the opposite. So i started there, telling myself positive constructive things about how well work was going, how it would work out, how I always found the answers and how the only thing Id have to deal with would be a few good hard days of work – something im never afraid of. Even better, I then started telling myself how good it was that I was having these hard times – its during the hard times that we grow, that we test out strengths, that we use the skills we bother to learn in the simpler times.

Other stuff happened that helped, but by the following week I was, mostly, back on good form. I’d managed to get the spring back in my step and more importantly, my productivity was getting back to normal. I’d start looking at the piles that would appear throughout the day, and going at them with a kind of roll-up-your-sleeves attitude.

I’m a big fan of Martin Seligman, and his various books, most notably Learned Optimism. Amongst other conclusions, one thing he found in his work was that optimistic people were by and large more successful. There are caveats, as ever, but if you could choose a mindset for success, optimism would be the one. However in Learned Optimism, he gained his conclusions via a statistical analysis, the biggest study being of insurance salesmen. Now that’s fine for a scientific study, and its what you would expect. What I found interesting last week was how the relationship between my own sudden dip in optimism and my own successes could be so immediate and so obvious ; this wasn’t a statistical connection this was a clear as day consequence over a timescale of  few days.

My (non-statistical) conclusion would be thus; we all have an average (mean) level of optimism – however there is variation in that level over periods of time. To put it in meaningful terms – some days we feel better than others. Those days when we feel better and more optimistic, we’re more successful, and since doing things is an indicator of success to me – I get more things done when I’m in a good mood.

In  a nutshell then, if I’m really interested in being productive, I need to stay positive.

The 1 Habit of Moderately Effective BishBlaize

Habits – its all about habits, really.

If we really want to be productive, effective, outgoing, happy-go-lucky kind of people, then it isn’t when we consciously do things, its making the extraordinary ordinary, as it were.

When I first read The 7 Habit If Highly Effective People, what struck me wasn’t so much the habits themselves, it’s that they were habits at all. It wasn’t called “The 7 Things That Successful People Do But Suckers Like You Will Never Be Able To Learn”. Granted, that would hit sales. But more importantly, it reinforces the fact that this is simply about learning to do something, then doing it so well that you automatically do it.

We need habits, of course. Imagine the pain in the ass if you had to get up each morning and decide, consciously, what to do – every morning. If you had to consciously think about and choose your route to work, the order you turned on the computer and whether to check your emails before you turned on the kettle.

Truth is much or our lives are simple things we do habitually – and here’s the problem. It seems our sub-conscious, which I guess handles these things we do automatically, doesn’t seem to care if something is good or bad for us, in any objective sense. It just wants to keep doing what it’s doing. Not only that, but since it takes care of so much of what we do, were at its mercy.

It doesn’t matter if our habit is eating too much, snacking, drinking too much coffee, going to bed too late, waking up at daft o’clock in the morning, taking on more work than we can do, or getting into stress. We seem to keep on doing it.

Even worse, our sub-conscious seems much more stubborn than our conscious mind. Any of us can think “right I’ll never ear chocolate again”, but will we do it? Doubtful. Our sub-conscious mind is waaay more stubborn.

And yet we learned these habits in the first place, we weren’t born doing them.

Seems that our sub-conscious learns through repetition. Many of our habits we either decided to do at some point in the past, or maybe just fell into doing path-of-least-resistance style, and did it often enough that we don’t think about it any more.

So, time for some action. I don’t have any wildly destructive habits (double vodka for breakfast, that kind of thing) so the habits in my life that I want to change are the daft ones.

For example, in the mornings I have to remember every day to put on moisturiser and hair-stuff (feel free to insult me for using moisturiser). Teeth, shower, no problem. Similarly I like to mediate in the mornings, but since i moved to London I’ve gotten out of the habit. Sometimes I put some washing in, if i remember, other times I forget. How good would it be if I did all of these things, every day, without even having to think?

So what I did was this – 

• brainstormed out all the things Id like to do in the morning; 
• narrowed it down to the realistic ones (out with the 100 sit ups for example, but kept in that I wouldn’t have anything with sugar in it for breakfast); 
• wrote out a list in order that I wanted to do them; 
• printed it and put in a place that I would see it (notice board in front room);
• put reminder in my phone with my alarm to check it. 

The idea is that every day, for as long as it takes, I’ll get up, see the reminder, check the list and do everything on it, in order. Even if I work out a “more efficient” order of things, I won’t change. I’m trying to imprint a habit, not save time. Then, fingers crossed, in a week or a month or a year, I’ll have learned everything on it as habits and won’t have to think about it at all.

Now you might be thinking, “Dude, why not just let things flow instead of being so anal about it all”. Its back to that 7 Habits thing again. Some people, effective people I suppose, have some habits naturally. If you’re one of those people who makes no effort and just falls into positive, constructive, interesting habits, then cool, write up a blog and let me know how. With me, if i let it drift I sometimes fall into good habits, like showering as soon as I wake up, and sometimes fall into bad ones, like eating sweet waffles for breakfast.

So enniways – I’ll keep nagging away ay my sub-conscious and see how this habit develops. Success, failure, I’ll let you know.

Why hello

So, yeah, last year was a good year, very good in fact. In terms of doing stuff, a lot got crossed off the list.


So I decided to up the ante a little. One of the things that has helped enormously over the last 18 months or so has been keeping a journal. Writing things down not only helps you understand what it is you're thinking about, it kind of forces you to face what you're saying. 


I'm not going to be keeping a journal on here - but there are aspects of my work that I think might be good to write down, and if anyone ever bothers to read it, they might find something of use.