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A quick post today on integrating iOS and OS X’s reminders app into your GTD workflow, with the help of our friend Quicksilver.

GTD relies heavily on the concept of the “tickler”.  A folder that serves as a place for you to put everything that you need to do in the future.  If you want more details on the tickler, you can read about them here.  The intent here is to take Reminders and have it act as a digital substitute for your tickler.

First, if you haven’t installed Quicksilver, do so.  It is fantastic, and will save you time even if the only thing you ever use it for is to launch programs.

Second is the easiest step – setting up Reminders as a tickler.  While I have used apps like Remember the Milk to create complicated solutions to my tickler in the past, I have found that they’ve fallen by the wayside because of the overhead they require.  For our purposes, we want Reminders to be as lightweight as possible.  Here are the rules that we follow to create that:

• create a reminder (with a day and time) for everything that needs to be done this month.  Any hard appointments (requiring a specific time and date – ie, a calendar appointment) should be in your calendar, and not your tickler;
• for everything that is to be completed in one of the following months, create a reminder for the first day of that month; and
• at the start of each month, review each reminder for that month and reschedule with a day and time.

Simple right?  That’s our game.

Third, we want to be able to add reminders efficiently, and with a minimal number of clicks.  To do so, we start by adding a Quicksilver script.  Download it here.  Save the unzipped file in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/.

If you are unable to find this directory in Finder, you may need to change your settings. You can do so by launching Terminal and entering the command:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Once you’ve done this, you can close Terminal.  The folder should show up in your Finder window right away.  If you want to hide the folder again afterwards, simply open Terminal again and enter the command:

chflags hidden ~/Library

Before we restart Quicksilver, there’s one final change we need to make.  First, identify the name of your list in Reminders.  You can do this by opening up Reminders and checking the left side of the app.  My list is called TODO.  Yours might be called something else.

Fourth, we need to update the script with your list’s name.  Navigate to the script you just put in to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ and edit it using either Textedit or Applescript Editor.  Right toward the top of the script is a line that says:

showlist “listname“

Where listname will be the default list name.  Change this to whatever the name of your list is (mine now says showlist “TODO”).  Save the script and exit (you don’t need to compile it).

Now, restart Quicksilver.  At this point, you should be able to load up Quicksilver (using command-space, or whatever hotkey combination you set), and enter natural text reminders, such as “Remind me on may 4th at 9am to call julie”.  The complete workflow now looks like this:

• command-space to bring up Quicksilver;
• Type “.” to begin typing in text
• “remind me to call julie on may 4 at 9am”
• [Tab]
• Type “Reminder”
• [Enter]

Boom, new reminder added, from anywhere on your computer, regardless of what you’re currently doing.

Lastly, I find Reminders integration with Mail.app to be super useful.  Whenever I have an e-mail that requires some kind of action in the future, I drag that e-mail onto Reminders’ app icon in the Dock.  It will create a reminder for me which includes a link to the original e-mail.  I can fill out the rest of the details and then archive the e-mail, knowing that it sits in my trusted system.

Good luck with all your GTD’ing needs, and feel free to post if you have questions.  Follow me at @adamquiney and @evergrowthadam, and my professional blog at evergrowthcoaching.com for productivity tips beyond the realm of tools.  Lastly, a big thank you to @LoveQuicksilver for providing this handy Reminders script.

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You can help me out with 10 seconds of your time.  I’ve been thinking about motivation and how we can best spur ourselves onward to action.  I’ve slowly absorbed the fact that I have a bit of an emotional aversion to the process of actually getting things done (hence the many systems that I set up and maintain to spur me forward).

To help me gain a better understanding of overcoming aversions like this one, use the poll below to answer this simple question:

Without knowing anything else, which of the three lists below makes you most inclined to start filling it out?

Each list has three slots.  List A already has the third slot filled, list B has the first slot filled and list C has the middle slot filled.

Poll

List A

List B

List C

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The results

I will share the results and what I think they mean after I’ve gotten enough answers.  Thanks for taking part in the experiment!

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For a long time, my writing has been heavily focused on productivity.  I love being productive, and it provides me with a sense of purpose and of balance.  When I’ve accomplished things during the day, I feel like I’ve actually made the world a better place through my own industry.

In the first part of my life as an adult, I spent a lot of time learning how to maximize my productivity.  This, in effect, was a way for me to get as much as I could out of life.  The logic went that the more I can do, the more enriching my life is.

However, in recent years, that focus has started to shift.  It’s not that I no longer value productivity — it’s that I value something else above it: balance.

We can spend so much of our time focused on productivity that we lose sight of the present.  If we are no longer able to appreciate the moment at hand, what’s the point?  Without an ability to appreciate what’s going on around us, it doesn’t matter how much we accomplish.  Everyone else may gain from my productivity, but how fulfilling can I really say my own life has been if I’ve been unable to enjoy it?

We have become so focused on productivity.  We’re always looking for new ways to squeeze more efficiency out of our employees, ways to accomplish more during our commute, ways to do more things every day and tools to help us manage everything that we’ve chosen to taken on.  How often do we stop to ask if we’re doing what’s most important to us?

Productivity without balance is a vice, not a virtue.

If we don’t check ourselves and seek out balance by setting our own boundaries, how do we determine when enough is enough?

I know many people that are either unaware, unable or unwilling to set boundaries for themselves and allow the drive to be productive rule their day.  The result?  Their bodies set and create the boundaries for them when they won’t.  Stress, illness fatigue and burnout are all ways that our body provides an indication that we need to re-prioritize balance in our lives.

Tragically, our working culture has evolved to the point that you can often overhear people boasting about how late they’ve been staying at the office, as though it is a badge of honour.  It isn’t; it’s a sign of an unhealthy working culture.  Employers should be seeking to imbue in people an appreciation and respect for balance.  It means that they’ll get more out of their employees, hold better retention rates and have more satisfied workers.

Productivity without balance is a cancerous pursuit.  Without taking the time to check in with yourself and prioritize the other things in your life, your own industry will be coming from a less meaningful place.  Productivity that does not have a purpose behind it is like growth for the sake of growth.  This kind of unhealthy focus on productivity can develop its own vicious cycle.  The more out of balance you become, the easier it becomes to take on more stuff.  With a myopic focus on productivity, you lose an awareness of the other demands on your time.  Without a sense of balance, it becomes easier not to say no.

By making the effort to prioritize balance in your life, you will ensure that you remain productive in the greater sense.  Think about it – if you’re living your life out of balance, worn out and tired, who’s really gaining from your productivity?

By prioritizing balance, you maximize your productivity

By striking a balance in your life, you’ll actually ensure you are maximally productive by attending to all of your needs, rather than just a few.  These needs include things like:

• Sleep
• Nutrition
• Fitness
• Your relationship/Marriage
• Friends
• Family
• Fun

The more out of balance you become, the greater your body and mind will subconsciously pull you back toward your centre.  Your ability to sustain productivity, when done at the expense of balance, will suffer from diminishing returns.

Many of us respond to this reduction in productivity by attempting to push ourselves harder, staving off the inexorable return to balance as long as possible.  We don’t realize that the longer we remain in a productive state, the longer we need to recharge our batteries.  This isn’t a failing on our part (though we often treat is as such) — it’s simply a fact of life.

Imagine yourself as an elastic band.  Our natural, balanced state is the when the elastic band is left at rest.  When we push ourselves to be productive, we are tugging the elastic band from two ends.  The longer we push ourselves to be productive, the greater this elastic band is stretched.  We can attempt to squeeze more productivity out of our heads, but this requires stretching the elastic band even further.  The longer we hold ourselves from a state of balance, the more effort it requires to stretch that band further.  Hold yourself to a state of productivity for too long and the band snaps.  Your body will eventually take over and forcefully undertake the return to balance.  If you’ve pushed yourself too hard, that will often be via crashing into sleep, illness, or worse (Eg, your head could explode).

Summary

Here’s what we’ve covered:

• Productivity, when pursued to the detriment of balance, is not a virtue — it’s a vice
• A tunnel-vision-like focus on productivity is cancerous and self-perpetuating
• When you prioritize balance in your life, you actually maximize your ability to be productive
• If you think you can actually get more accomplished by cutting back on the other important parts of your life, you’re only fooling yourself

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They say that one of the most important things in swimming is learning to breathe correctly.  In a sport that is ultimately based on streamlining and moving yourself as efficiently as possible, the extra drag that is created every time you take a breath can be the difference between winning and losing a close race.

However, if you don’t take breaths often enough, you won’t be feeding your muscles and body the oxygen that it requires to be as efficient as possible, in which case you may be as streamlined as possible, but your engine won’t be functioning efficiently.  (Or you’ll just drown and die.  And also lose the race.)

(It’s a metaphor)

When technology first started to improve our efficiency, it allowed us to shift our focus to spending more time in leisure and with friends and family (formerly only the privilege of royalty).  However, as time has progressed, our focus has slowly drifted away from the notion of technology enabling us to do less, to enabling us to take on ever-increasing amounts of work.

These days, the increasing emphasis placed upon productivity is reaching epidemic levels.  This is in part due to the fact that productivity and efficiency have become ingrained in the fabric of the modern working world.  Operating at the subconscious level, most of us aren’t even aware of how much pressure we put on ourselves to produce.

I am by no means suggesting that being productive and efficient are bad things, all else considered equal.  But when an emphasis and priority are placed on these two concepts to the exclusion or detriment of the rest of our lives, things start to fall apart.  You need look no further than places like Japan’s working culture and our more demanding professional careers like lawyers and doctors to see that efficiency and productivity without balance are detrimental in the long run.  (see my friend Michi’s blog for an insider’s perspective on Japanese working culture).

Recognizing the importance of balance is one thing, but understanding how to actually affect changes in your life that allow for it is another altogether.  Many of us get caught up in feedback loops that lead to a lack of balance simply because we don’t know any better.  All we know is that working hard got us to where we are, so presumably working even harder will take us even further.

But we know that this approach is fallacious in swimming, and so too is it in life.  So what should you do?  Simple:

Stop.  Breathe.  Repeat.

Literally.  Just breathe.  Don’t think about what to do next.  Don’t think about what you aren’t doing while you’re taking time out to breathe.  Don’t think about your deadlines, or what you need to do next, or where you’re going to be tomorrow.

Just breathe.  Physically.

Put down what you’re doing, close your laptop, put your phone on vibrate, and just breathe for five minutes.

It’s not a huge commitment – but it is a commitment.  Five minutes may feel like eternity to you if you’re not used to taking time out from your own productivity.  Commit to those five minutes (set a timer if you need to), and turn your focus toward breathing.

You need to make sure that you’re kicking and stroking with your arms as you swim, but you also need to actively increase your drag (temporarily) so that you can take the time to provide your body with the nourishment that it requires.

Practicing What I Preach

I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.  It’s easy to tangled up by all of the strings pulling at me, and if I’m not careful, I can find myself with days that are booked up from 9 in the morning to 9 at night.  This does not leave much time for reflection or relaxation, let alone spending time with my wife.

I find it especially challenging to maintain balance when I have multiple projects or commitments demanding my time, as they are not always willing to play nice, and the only commonality between them is myself.  This kind of situation makes breathing that much more important.

When things are really busy, it’s all I can do to try to follow my own advice.  Bring up my head and breathe.  Take a look around, see what the rest of the world is doing, and get a handle on what I’m currently undertaking.

The reason that granting yourself moments of breathing and clarity is so valuable is that when our heads are down, we’re unable to get a feel for what we actually have on the go.  Our attention is focused on the immediate task at hand.  Every intrusion feels overwhelming and like a whole new emergency requiring our attention, regardless of what the distraction may be (Eg, e-mail, a new piece of reading, a meeting request, a phone call, etc.).  All we can tell is that it is not what we are currently focused on, it is another thing to be added to our plate, and good grief, don’t we have enough stuff on our plate already?

Lift your head up and breathe

Find time to pull yourself up from what you are currently focused on and assess what you’ve got on the go.  What are the things that are currently demanding your attention?  What are your immediate priorities?  What do you need to do, but can be left until later?  (If you’re having trouble figuring it out, a braindump may be a good way to go).

I generally find that most people prefer not to seek the answers to the questions I’ve asked above — they’re worried that knowing will only add to their stress.  The reality is that there are few things that generate as much fear and anxiety as the unknown.  If you know what the demands on your time are, you can at least take active steps to prioritize what needs to be done, and alert the appropriate people if a deadline is going to slip.

Awareness will free you from the burden of knowing only that you have an undefined number of other things you need to do.  (This is a common concept in GTD, and much of the methodology is based around addressing the open loops that are tugging at your mind, thereby freeing it up to focus).

You’ll be amazed at the relief and clarity that can be brought by the simple action of taking ten minutes out to assess where you stand and what needs to be done.  I can attest that I am regularly surprised whenever I conduct this exercise, generally discovering that I actually have a lot less that needs to be dealt with immediately than it felt like I did ten minutes ago.

Above all, try to remember that the way that you feel about the demands on your time does not necessarily reflect reality.

The larger context

In the larger context, making the time to take a deep breath is analogous to making time to perform weekly reviews, or setting aside time during your day to meditate.  Both of these activities simply represent other ways to pull your head up and assess where you stand and where you’re going.

If these suggestions sound simple, that’s good.  Life doesn’t need to be as complicated as we make it.  Taking steps to simplify your life may be exactly what you need.

TLDR

As always, here’s the summary of the keypoints:

• While taking time to stop what you’re doing may cost a little in the short term, it will benefit you greatly in the long
  • (Remember, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re swimming if you’re dead)
• The unknown will generate more stress than anything else.  Taking stock of where you are and what demands are on your time will give you clarity and relax you
• Learning the skill of retreating to centre yourself (this is what we’ve been talking about) will continue to serve you as you get better at it
  • Meditation, weekly reviews, and other techniques are all just different implementations of this simple concept

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School started proper again yesterday, and that means that the makeup of my days will change radically from that of the previous four months.  Although I’m writing today, the frequency of my posts will decrease drastically once work really gets underway.

I made the decision to take on a fair number of items this term, including:

• Continue to be a good husband (yes, continue);
• Continue to do well in school;
• Devote a non-trivial amount of time to an application I’m working on with some colleagues; and
• Teach weekly dance classes with my friend Jesse at a studio we’re renting in town

All of these items require substantial amounts of my time, and inconsistently to boot (meaning that I won’t get to choose when one of these items will need more attention – there will be peaks and troughs for all of them).  I believe that I’ve got the skills and ability to meet all four of these goals while maintaining my own sanity.  However, it will require planning to ensure that I’m ready when the storms start to strike.

This is a pretty short post, but if you’d like to jump to the summary, you can do so here.

A new way of looking at my available productivity

Because of these competing demands, it’s very important that I figure out the best way to maximize my productivity.  If I waste my opportunity to be productive, things will start to get backed up, and I’ll quickly find myself with too many things to do and not enough time to do them in.  Something will necessarily fall by the wayside (and if I’m being honest, I suspect it will be item #1 – it’s often easiest to let things slide with the person around which we’re the most comfortable).

Rather than try to plan everything down to the hour, I took a new approach to scheduling my productivity this term.  To start, here are my assumptions:

• I can achieve what I’m setting out to do.

This is the most important assumption because it’s the starting point for everything else.  If I don’t believe this, then I should return to my list above and remove one of the items.  (If you don’t get this, ask yourself why you are planning to try and accomplish something that you don’t actually believe you are capable of achieving?)

• I was apathetic the previous term and often felt myself wasting time playing video games instead of studying.

While I found the feeling of apathy generated stress, my grades did not suffer and I exceeded the standards I had set for myself.  This suggests to me that I had additional spare time that could be put to better uses.

• I don’t want to spend any time this term feeling bored.

That is an indication to me that I currently have too much spare time.  Relaxing and just cooling out is one thing, but sitting around literally feeling bored is off the books.  If I find myself feeling this way, I should be looking to engage myself with a different pursuit.

• I can be more efficient if I’m able to divide my time across multiple tasks.

Like most of us (all of us?), I experience diminishing returns the longer I spend working on any one particular task.  If I can divide my time across a number of tasks related to the different projects I’ve set out for myself above, I should be able to avoid the fall off that results from working on only one task for too long.

• I have, roughly, between 3 and 5 good bouts of productivity in a day.

On really good days, I can get my process started first thing in the morning, and also find a second wind after the post-lunch tiredness.  On a bad day, I can’t seem to get the gears turning until 11AM, take a break for lunch, and only just manage to accomplish things by the time 5PM rolls around.

• My bouts of productivity cannot easily be divided up into “clean” blocks of time.

Just like I don’t know what kind of day I will have until I find myself at the end of it (or mid-way through at least), I don’t know beforehand how long I will be able to stay in my flow for, nor how long it will take to read a particular set of readings.

Creating a workable system

So, with the above assumptions in mind, I set aside a couple of hours on the weekend to devise the system by which I would plan out my time and stay on track this term.  That system is based on the concept of productivity units (PUs from here on in).  PUs are what I call the blocks of productive work that I am talking about above in items 5 and 6.

Based on my assumption in #6, I don’t think that it’s a worthwhile exercise to try and map a PU to a specific amount of time.  In fact, it’s clear that I don’t usually think that’s possible.

Taking my range from item #5, I estimate that on any given day, I can probably accomplish about 4 PU worth of work in any given day, with no other demands on my time.

What does this actually mean?

So, what does it actually mean to accomplish one PU worth of work, if you can’t map the block reliably to an amount of time?

Here are some examples of what I would consider a PU worth of work:

• Complete a set of readings for one of my classes
• Spend some time writing out a few pages of a paper
• Sit down and clear out my inbox, processing everything there and responding to any necessary e-mail
• Spend some time working on my development team’s wiki, organizing everything and ensuring that all of our recent thoughts have been captured and stored somewhere for later reference
• Attend one class

It is important to understand that these are the benchmarks I have drawn for myself.  Based on what you see above, you could probably estimate that one of my PUs probably roughly translates to 1 to 2 hours worth of work.  This is reasonable.  However, this will not always be the case, and there are times when it will take two PUs to finish a set of readings, or only half of my available energy to complete something.

The important part of my system is that it is adaptive, flexible, and dynamic, as these are all characteristics that I wish to imbue in the work that I do.  If my system does not embody the same traits that I myself wish to, there’s going to be conflict (which generally leads to the system being discarded and returning to old ways).

Your mileage may vary – you may find that you prefer to work in smaller chunks, but fit more of them into a day.  Whatever works for you is what you should do.  For me, this provides a clean and lightweight way in which I can rapidly estimate how much work I can accomplish each day.

This approach also provides me with a metric by which I can determine whether or not I should really be feeling upset that I’m not being maximally productive.  Let me explain.

I have no classes on Tuesday, which means that this is a wide-open day.  However, I have no shortage of work, and so ideally, I’d like to get 4 PUs in on Tuesday.  If I’ve finished one PUs worth of work, it’s currently 3PM, and I’m sitting on the couch playing video games, things probably aren’t going too well.  I should be kicking myself back into work.  But, if I find myself in the same situation, having completed 3 PUs worth of work, I’m actually doing pretty good.

Why is this distinction meaningful to draw – isn’t this pretty obvious and intuitive?

No – it isn’t.

These kind of separations are always obvious to us when we’re external to them, having them explained to us or reading about them on someone’s blog.  It’s easy to divide everything into bright clean lines when you don’t have anything at stake and you’re not in the middle of all of the chaos and demands placed on your time.  However, when you do find yourself in the middle of everything that’s when you will most need to be able to determine if the way you are feeling is due to something legitimate or simply a pressure external to yourself that actually doesn’t matter.

Thinking in these terms provides a quick “escape ladder” that can be used if I need to pull my head up from the mess and figure out if the way I’m feeling is really something that requires my concern.

The honest truth is that sometimes you’re going to feel guilty for taking some much needed time to recharge.  It doesn’t matter that that is the best thing you could do – your psychology will play games with you and tell you that you could not possibly take the time off from working on that paper!

Dividing my time up into these kind of chunks is a convenient way for me to check the way I’m feeling and determine if I really need to get the gears turning again, or can relax knowing that the break I’m taking is well-deserved (and will actually make me more efficient on the whole).

The view from my desk

Here’s the example that I’ve created, to provide you with some context.  My class schedule roughly looks like this:

• Monday: 3 classes
• Tuesday: 0 classes
• Wednesday: 2 classes
• Thursday: 1 class
• Friday: 1 class

On Monday, I also run a dance jam down at Centenniel Square in Victoria, which eats up a decent chunk of time.  In short, I don’t have any additional PUs available for Monday.

Tuesday is wide open, and so I can aim for my maximal goal: 4 PUs.  The plan going forward will be to divide this time between reading/studying and the necessary time required for me to continue PMing the project I’m working on.  I have my time loosely divided in half between the two, but I can be flexible and if needed, I can devote all 4 separate PUs to studying (though I would rather not, as that will increase the diminishing returns that I experience).

Wednesday I have two classes, which means I have about 2 PUs remaining.  Likewise, Thursday and Friday each have one class, so I have 3 PUs for both of those days.  Just at a glance, this way of looking at my spare time gives me a rough idea of how much time I will have available to devote to the demands on my time.

If things get panicky or packed in tight, I may need to adjust my schedule, or attempt to squeeze an extra PU out of my day.  While this may be possible for brief bursts of time, I’m skeptical that that would be a sustainable practice.  Being productive for 10 of my 16 waking hours, on an extended basis, intuitively feels like I would be pushing the limits of my mental, emotional and physical health, not to mention my marriage.

Rehash

That’s all I’ve got for today.  In general, writing a blog post is probably about 1 or 2 PUs worth of work.  It requires writing (a task unto itself), then polishing and editing before publishing.  I’ve finished three sessions worth of reading, and completing this entry makes a total of four PUs.  That means that I can now devote the rest of my day to relaxing and pursuing hobbies that are less intensive, and ignore any guilt that may pop up from time to time trying to tell me I should actually be working harder.  Not only should I not be working harder, I’m not convinced that my yield would be worth the extra effort.

Here’s the summary of what we’ve covered:

• To maximize your productivity, break your time up so that you can focus your energy on multiple things throughout the day;
• Breaking your time up into productive units, or PUs, can provide a convenient way to get a loose handle on what you can realistically accomplish in any given day;
• Your PUs may be different than mine, and that’s fine – do what works for you;
• If you’re feeling lazy or like you should be doing more work, check in to see what you’ve accomplished in terms of your PUs, and ground the way you feel based on that.  Sometimes you need to kick your ass back into gear.  Sometimes, you need to relax.  Both of these things will be equally hard to accomplish at different times;
• A system doesn’t need to schedule or track every last available minute you have for it to work for you; and
• Check in with yourself from time to time to see if the way that you’re feeling is a reaction to your circumstances, or something external (eg, unrealistic societal pressure that you can or should be productive for every single minute that you’re at work).

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Most of us know that life can’t all be hard work and no play, but few of us realize that it’s our own responsibility to ensure that this is the case.

I’ve just completed an incredible term working in Vancouver.  I’m in the middle of a retrospective that I want to post, but I’m suffering from mild writer’s block in that department.  Rather than hammer my head against the wall, I wanted to publish something and keep the creative flow going.

Accordingly, instead of a retrospective, today I’m going to show you how to I use Remember the Milk’s tagging functionality to keep my errands and tasks distinct.

Are they actually distinct?

Where you draw the line between an errand and any other kind of task will be subjective.  For me, an errand is any task that requires me to be out of the house, and generally with some degree of transportation available to me (bus, bike, car).  Sometimes that transportation is specific to the errand (to get groceries, I usually -but not always- need a car).

While I assign a time estimate to every task that I enter (it sounds cumbersome but once you make it part of your process, you stop noticing it), I don’t usually bother doing so with an errand.  This is because errands generally happen when I’m doing other things at the same time (I try to do errands in batches).  There’s also a lot that I can’t account for: traffic, running into acquaintances, getting held up somewhere, etc.

Also, because of the nature of errands, there’s no sense in me having them clutter up my attention when I’m planning to spend the next four hours getting work done at home.  At that point, they are simply noise, getting in the way of my signal, and increasing my risk of information overload.

RTM?  Tagging?

If you’ve gotten lost, let me refer you back to my original post discussing what Getting Things Done (GTD) and Remember the Milk (RTM) can do for you and how to leverage them here.

However, here is a brief summary:

Remember the Milk is an application that allows you to manage any number of lists, and is very flexible.  When you combine that with the GTD methodology for managing all of your stuff (information, todo items, chores, etc. – everything that is on your plate, every day), you have a pretty good system for avoiding information overload and staying on top of life.

Tagging in Remember the Milk

Everytime I enter an item into my GTD list, I record the following things:

1. Due date (when do I want it to start showing up on my TODO list)
2. Time estimate (5 mins, 10 mins, 1 hour, 1 day, etc.)
3. Any relevant #tags

Tagging is a skill in itself, and the more you practice it, the better you’ll get (subtext: don’t get discouraged because it seems overwhelming.  Just do it and allow your system to evolve around you).  I have two kinds of tags:

1. Those based around a context
2. All other tags

Tags that are based around a context are tags that let me know, at a glance, what kind of environment I need to have around me in order to complete a task.  For example, if I need to follow-up with someone about a task at work, that will generally require email.  So, for that task, I would include #@email as a context tag.  Assuming that that task also requires that I email Bob specifically, I would include #@Bob as a tag too.

All of the other tags are simply keywords that apply to the task.  If you want to start out simple, you can ignore this part for now and just focus on including a context.  If you are ready for more, this is the place to build from.

The only rule for these tags is that you generally don’t want them to represent context – those tags get a ‘@‘ in front of them.  Your other tags don’t.  That’s all.

Some examples would be:

• #boring
  • It sounds silly to record this information, but if that’s what pops into your head as you’re entering the task, include it as a tag.  It’s better to have too many tags than too few (I think), and maybe you’ll notice that you accumulate a lot of #boring tasks that don’t get done.  (It’s always good to have a place to focus your improvement).
• #chore
  • Many of these tasks might also be tagged with #@home – many chores need to be at home to accomplish.
• #vacation
  • If you have a lot of tasks that relate to your vacation, this is a very convenient way to enter them and be able to find them quickly later on.  You can even create a quicksearch to get all posts tagged with vacation (“tag:vacation”).
• #fun
  • Most of us know that life can’t all be hard work and no play, but few of us realize that it’s our own responsibility to ensure that this is the case.  Tagging items with fun is a good way to divide up your tasks wisely.  With this approach, you can make sure that you do something that is enjoyable in between the lame stuff.  Think of it as a reward for completing the boring tasks.
    • Example: Bay and I have always had fun grocery shopping together.  So, even though it’s an #@errand, it’s also #fun.

Putting it all together

So, the only other step in putting tagging to use for you is to create and save some searches.  Based on the two lists I mentioned at the start, we’re going to want to create two lists:

1. One list displays all tasks that are tagged with #@errand
   • Search is: tag:@errand
   • (Each of these tasks requires the errand context to be completed)
2. One list displays all tasks that are NOT tagged with #@errand
   • Search is: NOT tag:@errand
   • (None of these tasks requires the errand context to be completed)

Once you’ve performed your search, you can save it by clicking on the save tab in the upper right corner of the web interface and naming it:

It’s up to you what you call the smart list.  I try to choose names that are as intuitive as possible, to save myself time later trying to figure out the clever naming scheme I’d come up with.

I find the most intuitive thing to do in this case is to the corresponding context tag as the name.

Thus, our first list is @Errand, and our second list is @NoErrand.  (Note that this second name is not an actual tag that we’ve created.  Just the name of our list.  I find this makes the most sense to me, but if you find it confusing, by all means try out a different naming scheme).

Now that you’ve completed that, you’re set.  With just a glance at your system, you can now determine what errands you can do while you’re heading in to town.  Or, if you’re stuck at home for the next two hours, you can determine what chores you may be able to take on (without having to wade through the mental clutter of all your errands).

Note that my lists also contain a bunch of other search criteria – this is specific to my system and will likely not be relevant to your own.

Let’s be real

Don’t be discouraged if this stuff sounds complicated.  Find one thing to try and improve upon in your routine, and focus on that until you are satisfied.  The less you can succumb to information overload, the better you’ll be able to devote yourself to your own progress (that blog idea just got added to RTM, tagged with #blogidea and #listitem).

As I mentioned earlier, I’m feeling a little bit of writer’s block trying to capture the massive bowl of thoughts that the past four months represents in my head.  I’ve absorbed so much that I’m having trouble dispensing it in any articulable fashion.

Having said that, I have another week off before classes start up proper, so I have a line in the sand within which I plan to complete the task.  Once classes begin, I anticipate being extremely busy.  I am currently working on an application with two other very capable people and we’re seeing a lot of synergy and dynamism that is very exciting.

In addition to that, I’m also renting a studio with a very good friend and will be teaching dance classes there on a weekly basis.  I am very much looking forward to this development and am very excited to see how it continues to progress (I will post more information here soon – we’re meeting to pound out details this weekend).

With all of these items on my plate, my posting frequency will necessarily slow down – it gets difficult to write creatively when I spend all of my days studying and writing papers.  However, I will post when I have the time, and as usual, my posting frequency will increase again in four months, once my next workterm starts.  You can bet that I will have a lot to report after the coming four months.

Hang in there and stay tuned.  Life is an exciting journey, and if you’ve been reading these entries, hopefully you’re experiencing some of what that looks like through my eyes.

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This coming week will be my last in Vancouver this co-op work term.  A reflection on the last four months will be forthcoming – stay tuned to hear what I’ve been learning!

Until then, let me start with a story:

I was making coffee in our office’s lunchroom a few weeks back and struck up conversation with the co-worker that was waiting for the kettle with me.  Well, waiting isn’t quite the right word.  It was more like she was mentally somewhere in Thailand while her body patiently awaited her return.  We talked briefly and turned our thoughts briefly to what she referred to as “energy management”.  I liked the term so much that I’ve been using it since, and maybe you will too.  Let’s dig in to the concept a little deeper.

(Want all of the wisdom but without the narrative?  Skip to the TLDR section here.)

The set-up

Many of us go through our day vested with the expectation that we should expect 100% efficiency from ourselves, without ever stopping to consider the magnitude of that expectation.

I lay part of the blame at the feet of the modern world in which we work.  If you’re a professional, the expectation is that you come in to work everyday, sit at your desk at 9AM, and work through solidly until 5PM.  Of course, anyone that has ever worked a day in their lives knows that this kind of expectation is completely unreasonable, and yet we persist in mentally holding ourselves accountable to this kind of energy expenditure.

We are not robots – we’re inefficient humans, with quirks, emotions, digestive systems, and energy that correspondingly waxes and wanes throughout the day.  These are some of my own tips for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the negatives that arise from this fact.

Recognize that you cannot be 100% productive

This is basically what I’ve just finished writing.  However, for many of us, it will be the most difficult hurdle to overcome.  The subtle expectations that bombard us on a daily basis are legion – from the way our modern workday (and week) is structured to the desire to be a member of the group rather than not, there are plenty of subtle forces that tug at our psychology.  Before you know it, we’ll slowly but surely start to beat ourselves up over the fact that we’ve sat at our desks for over an hour without managing to get a single thing done.  Even an innocuous comment from a supervisor, such as “Hey, how’s the work coming on the Penske file?” can regress us right back to this mindset.

Recognizing that you’re not perfect and you shouldn’t expect yourself to be will be an empowering experience.  Being aware of who you are and what your limitations are can free your mind up to work around those limitations and give yourself permission to be imperfect.  Until you are able to let go of the fantasy that you can be productive all of the time, you will be hindered in your ability to maximize your potential.

I want to reiterate this last point, because it’s important:

An integral aspect of maximizing your potential is being aware of your own limitations.

If you aren’t cognizant to your own strengths and weakness, you may waste precious resources (time, energy, willpower, money, etc.) seeking to accomplish something unrealistic or beyond the scope of what you really desire.  (..and  most likely, something that you don’t actually care about).

I’m not advocating that you give up on a particular dream you may have, or that anything in particular  you desire is out of your reach.  However, if you’re forty-years old and dividing your energy between managing a career, a family, and trying to make it big in the NBA, you may benefit from understanding what your limitations are and applying the energy that you have available accordingly.

Be present to your energy at any given moment

Most of our time working, our self-awareness operates on  auto-pilot.  It’s rare that we’re actually present to how we’re thinking and feeling, because we’re focused on our work.  If we’re not being particularly productive, we’re probably focused on our web browser and whatever YouTube video has currently gone viral.

Getting in tune with how you’re feeling and how much energy you have available is a process.  It’s not a skill that you can develop over night, because most of us have become so good at setting aside the way we feel in order to get our work done.  After all, that’s the expectation that comes with endless school assignments and 9 to 5 work, right?  It doesn’t matter how you feel, because the time to work is from 9 to 5.  You think about how you feel outside of those hours.

People that have made a positive change to their physical routine for the better will have an analogy to which they can draw.  At first, you start exercising and your whole body aches.  But over time, you start to get a feel for  that type of pain, and eventually, you’re no longer simply feeling “back pain”.

Now you’re  able to identify things like “hmm, my lower back is quite sore, and that feels like muscle pain… that’s probably because I’ve played four squash games this week”.

Getting mentally in tune with yourself is the same thing.  When you are feeling frustrated at work because you can’t seem to get anything done, take a moment to check in with yourself and ask where your energy level currently sits.  NB: Even if all you can do at first is recognize that you are feeling frustrated, you’re making progress.

Over time, you’ll get better at picking up on the cues your body naturally provides you with.  The more you try to check in with yourself, the sooner you’ll be able to pick up on the fact that you may be sitting in an energy funk and address it.

Use your downtime effectively

Okay – hopefully you’re starting to gain a better awareness of your energy level and how it’s affecting your work.  If you’re not yet able to make use of the previous tip, you’re not ready to move on to this one – the next question is what do you actually do once you’ve identified that fact.

Being a law student, I’m no stranger to people that take the attitude that they will hammer the work through no matter what.  In some people, recognizing that they are low on energy almost presents a challenge that makes them feel defiant.  ”Low energy?  Nice try, we’re finishing this tonight”.

On the surface, this may appear to work for some people, but I personally do not feel that this is the habit or coping method that I want to develop.  Is this approach to your body’s physical cue a sustainable practice?  If not, ask yourself why you are continuing to behave in this manner.

How can you effectively make use of your periods of low energy?  Simple:

Do something that doesn’t require much focus or energy

My own solution is to spend the time where my energy and focus are low to go on walks and pursue other distractions (browsing the web, tweeting, drafting blog entries, etc.).

By mentally giving yourself permission to take breaks, you will have scored a double-victory.  First, you’re acknowledging your own limitations and working within them.  Sometimes, you’re simply not going to be able to crank out high quality work – that’s okay!

Second, you’re allowing yourself a break from the exercise of your willpower.  We know that we have a finite amount of willpower (see also here); as a result we can only exercise it so much in a day (like almost every other type of psychic energy, it would seem).  Applying your focus to a task and ignoring distractions that may pop up is a small but constant strain on your willpower.

I can’t speak to your own mental state, but my brain seems to be constantly attempting to sabotage my efforts to focus by taking those moments to think up things that I haven’t yet read on Wikipedia (“Hey, I wonder what critics thought of Mortal Kombat?”).  By making time for these kind of breaks (NB: this is different from having time), you give yourself a reprieve from the application of willpower and take your break at the most opportune time.

Maximize the way you use your periods of high energy

The Yin to the previous section’s Yang..  As the metaphor suggests, if you’re not balancing your application of this principle with the previous one, it may be worth taking some time to recalibrate.  Balance is the harmony within which I strive to live.

Maximizing your periods of high energy is often best accomplished by simply allowing yourself to focus on what you’re there to do.  Many of us have experienced moments of mode known as flow.  Time falls away from your awareness and you hold a wonderful focus that allows you to plough through your work like it ain’t no thang.

While having a decent amount of energy is necessary to get into a zone, it is not sufficient.  Meaning: you will not be able to enter flow every time you are experiencing the upper part of your energy levels.  You will also need to sit, focus and work without distractions for a period of time.

Logically, it follows that our path to maximizing periods of high energy should be spent free of distractions, focused on the task at hand.  As before, if you are able to recognize the cues that your body and mind are sending you, you will better be able to position yourself to take advantage of these periods of high energy.  Regardless of what you want to do, your head and the people around you may not be willing to co-operate.

While there is not too much you can do to deal with co-workers (closing your office door is quite effective, though I’m generally not a big fan of closed office doors), I have two strategies you can employ to try and keep your brain in check.

The first is to employ a way to address the thoughts that pop up into your head without actually pursuing them.  My way of achieving this is to write down on a piece of paper anything that is a distracting thought and holding my mind hostage.

If I’m trying to get myself into the zone and thoughts about Mortal Kombat pop into my head, I pick up my pencil and write “Mortal Kombat” on my note pad.  I’m not actually pursuing this distracting thought, but I have addressed it in a way that allows my mind to go “okay, I’ve dealt with that – back to the work”.

If this sounds cheesy to you, think of it like another tool you can put in your toolbox.  You don’t have to use it now, but if you’re sitting there feeling like you’ve tried everything and can’t break out of your habit, give this a go.  It is simple and will not introduce a lot of overhead to your existing process (have a pencil and paper next to your workspace).  The results can be quite surprising.

The second approach that I take is based on a recommendation that Seth Godin made on his blog (an excellent resource that I certainly suggest checking out).

Find some means to offload all of your distractions to something other than your main computer.  Those of us that work on computers generally use the machines both for our productive work and our distractions.  We like to think that we’re pretty good at dividing the two up (though most of us recognize that we’re not as good as we’d like to be).

Example: use a tablet computer as your dedicated “distractions device”.

Don’t allow yourself to use your computer for anything other than work.  If you don’t have a tablet, try using your smartphone.  No smartphone?  Start reading instead of browsing websites for a break.  (Believe it or not, we took breaks even before the Internet existed!)

This change too will have a rather profound result.  Framing your computer mentally as the device that you sit in front of when it is time to do work will cause your psychology to naturally align itself within the context of this frame.  When it’s time to work and you position yourself in front of your computer, your subconscious will take note and click you into a productive frame of mind.  If you don’t believe me, prove me wrong by giving it a go.  (The results surprised me when I did the same.)

TLDR? (Too long, didn’t read?)

That’s okay – you probably wanted to get back to being productive!  (You can click any of the summaries here to be linked back to the corresponding content). Here’s the summary:

• Learn to accept the fact that you can’t be 100% productive.  You’re not a robot; you’re not perfectly efficient, and; that’s just fine
• Try to get more in tune with your energy levels throughout the day
• Make good use of your periods of low energy
  • (and give yourself breaks from exercising your willpower)
• Make the most of your periods of high energy
  • (by reducing distractions and allowing yourself to focus)
• Two tricks to help yourself focus:
  1. Write down any mental distractions as they come to mind, then let them go (keep a pencil and paper near you)
  2. Offload distractions to something other than your computer, and let your computer be a machine that is devoted purely to productive work

As a parting shot..

If you like my writing and would like to see more, I ask that you show support however you can – leave a comment if something that I’ve said turns some gears with you, or help me out by mentioning this site to anyone else that you think might be interested in the same topics.  If an article I wrote was especially meaningful to you, share it on Twitter or Google Reader.

Eventually, I would like to take these articles and compile a book (and release it open source, no less!), but in order to achieve that goal, I need the inspiration that comes from speaking to an audience and feeling some support.  I love doing the hard work – you just have to help me out from time to time by telling like-minded individuals and communicating back.  We all benefit in the long run.  Thanks for the support and keep reading!

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One of the projects that I had decided I wanted to take on during my break was to review the web application called Remember the Milk (RTM), and see how it would integrate with my existing GTD (Gettings Things Done) workflow.  I am being far from original by writing about GTD and RTM at this stage in the game, but what I can provide is a narrative that may help you in getting yourself more organized, and provide some insight into how you may be able to migrate your own tasks or current system into something similar to this.

My GTD system at home has evolved organically, and partially through my love of aesthetics.  There, I said it – I like things that look pretty.  That’s fine, as long as it doesn’t hinder any of the more important things.  Although my system looked nice and was functional, it felt like it was limited in scope and what I could accomplish with it.  If I wanted to quickly get a view of what tasks I needed to do based on some new arbitrary criteria that I hadn’t thought of before, I would either need to manually search through all of my lists, or create a new list to redundantly store all of the items that fit this new criteria (and in doing so, manually search through all my lists in the process of creating this new one).  Although I liked the way the system worked, I always had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I could do so much more with a system that was designed from the ground up with GTD in mind, rather than what I was currently using.

Since converting everything over to RTM and making a go of it for one week, I am sold.  The application is very efficient, and integrates perfectly with my GTD workflow.  In fact, it synergizes with it, providing me with many new ways to use my database of TODO items much more effectively than I ever did before.

Remember the Milk has a couple of things going for it.  First of all, it is a web application, which means that my lists and tasks can go with me wherever I am.  I don’t need to check in before leaving the house and copy anything I may need onto paper in order to reference when I’m out.  If I’m working on a computer other than my own and an idea pops into my head, I can put in all of the work up front, adding an item to one of my lists and filling out the relevant details.

In addition to this benefit, RTM is simply a much more comprehensive tool for the job than using an ad hoc system like the stickies.  What I mean is that RTM has been built with the concept of creating lists of tasks and TODOs in mind, so it provides many options for capturing the pertinent details relevant to things you need to get done.  As an example, instead of simply entering in the name of a task, I can enter the name, add any relevant tags (@errand, @home, etc.), provide an estimate for the amount of time required (more on this later), and assign an item a due date.

I can also add any number of notes for a given item, which are then displayed sequentially in a separate view.  This is especially handy for capturing any ideas or stray thoughts related to a particular task, and allow for a very organic workflow that can include mini brainstorming sessions related to a given task.  With my previous ad hoc system, I would simply add any notes underneath the main item’s name by indenting and adding more text.  That attempt would quickly grow out of hand for any item that had more than a few notes, as it would scroll the rest of my items off the screen.

Migration

• Create a new list called Gift ideas for Bay
• For each item in my previous list, create a new item in this new list

Okay, so that’s a pretty trite example, but we’re easing in here, so lay off.

Transferring most of my lists was the easiest task, as this had a one-to-one correlation with RTM’s native state.  Once I started working on converting my TODO and project lists, I ran into a few snags.

The biggest catch was related to contexts and the division of lists.  As of late, I have started to capture contexts for all of the items on my TODO list.  The concept behind a context is that it is a quick reference to determine who, what, and where you have to be in order to accomplish a task.  If I have a task that is Blog about RTM and GTD, I will assign that task the context @web (GTD uses @ as a shorthand to indicate a context).  The reason for this is that I need web access in order to fully public a blog entry.  In truth, I could break this task up into two parts: Write Blog Entry (for which the context would possibly be @laptop, or really just @computer), and Publish Blog Entry (for which the context would be @web).  In this example, I have them together, as I usually accomplish the two parts in the same sitting.

I will explain more on how contexts can enable you to be more effective within RTM shortly, but for now, the main point is that moving these over into RTM presented my first speed bump.  The real hurdle was simply that I actually needed to sit down and think about what contexts and tags I needed to capture in my system.  Nothing is worse for functionality and searching than having a bunch of similar but different tags or metadata in your system, as you then end up searching for something like “All tasks that have tag:@web”, but end up missing the tasks that have the tag:@internet.  Although it required a little extra time on my part, one of the steps of my migration process (in fact, one of the first tasks I entered into RTM) was sitting down and planning out what contexts and tags I would actually need.

The other item that I wanted to be able to move across was my status
tags.  With the sticky system, I created places on my TODO list to hold
items for which I was waiting on something else (typically another
person).  Whenever a TODO item was no longer in my control, I would
move it down into the Waiting For section, and go from there.  But, how
did I make sense of this concept in the new system?  Did I move an existing item into a new list whenever it left my control and passed to someone else?  This was certainly one option, but I decided that I wanted to interact with lists as minimally as possible (ideally only having to work with this part of RTM/GTD when initially entering a task) and instead mainly interact with my tasks by changing the tags and other types of metadata associated with them.

Lists

One of the first things I did was look online for some ideas as to how to effectively order all of my tasks into lists.  As you can tell from above, I was having a hard time getting a feel for where the distinction between tasks and tags lay, and how I could make good on my goal to work minimally with lists, and maximally with tasks.  The first blog entry I came across was this one here, featured on the RTM Blog.  In this entry, the author recommends creating lists for every project you have, dividing them up into personal, work, and school by prefacing each list with the tags ps, wk, and sc, respectively.

I also really liked the author’s recommendation that you assign a “goal task” for each of your project lists.  Create your project, and make the first task you enter take the following format:

.. [Goal of Project]

This will, in theory, do two things: This task will sort to the top (when sorting by name) due to its preceding two periods, and will provide you with an immediate idea of the aim of this project when you are performing your weekly review.  Having this information readily available will make your life easier when you are reviewing your lists, and thinking about the underlying goal of a given project is a great way to ensure that you are on track (and stay on it) when you initially start entering a project. 

It will also get your brain engaged in the process of brainstorming tasks when you initially enter a project.  Sometimes you may be surprised simply by the process of writing down the goal for a given project (“Okay, so I want to have the TV on the wall.  …  Hmm, why do I want that?  It won’t actually look prettier..  Am I only doing this for the coolness factor?”).

I also made it a point to assign a priority of “1″ (the highest priority) to all of my Goal tasks so that these sort straight to the top of my list no matter what.

What are you waiting for?

We still haven’t covered something I mentioned earlier: items we’re waiting on.  The author of the above blog recommended creating a list for all items that you are waiting on, and moving those items into the list.  However, I didn’t like this idea for a couple of reasons.  First off, this approach would require interacting with lists more than I want to.  More of an issue though, is that, currently, the lists are the way that I can identify the project for which a given task pertains to.  If I move a task called Crop Photos from the list ps – Wedding Photos to Waiting For, I lose the information that that specific is a step in the Wedding Photos project.  How do I know which list I move it back to when I am no longer waiting for something?

No, this wouldn’t do.  I made a mental note that I would need to find a better approach to accommodating these items, and moved on.

The last step of the process was creating a Someday/Maybe list for each of my personal, work, and school tasks.  The Someday/Maybe lists contain items that may be cool to take on someday, but don’t really fit in with your current objectives, goals, or time-commitments.  This is the place for any task like Go Skydiving or Learn Spanish.  If you intend to complete these projects now, then they should be in their own list.  However, if these items are currently just passing fancies, then they go in the Someday/Maybe list, and you capture only the general idea (for these items, it is not yet valuable enough to brainstorm tasks and steps to achieve them).

Productive graffiti

• Tags preceded with a @ are for context: @Home, @Downtown, etc.
• Tags preceded with a – are for status: -NS, -WF
• Tags preceded with a . are for project names: .FixSink, .FrameWeddingPhotos, .RedesignBlogLayout, etc.

In addition to these special tags, you can apply any other tags that you like to your projects.  Once you have completed this process, you will have a large number of tasks that have specific contexts, some that will have a status (those that don’t will typically be tasks in a project that need something else to happen first), and lastly, a set of tasks without a project name tag (daily or ad hoc tasks) and those that do belong to a project.

The contexts that I am using are: @Web, @Laptop, @Home, @Downtown, @Phone, and @Errand.  In RTM, you will want to assign any physical context (a specific location) as a location rather than a tag (these behave almost the same way, except that locations integrate with Google Maps, allowing you to quickly search for everything you can accomplish within 10km of your current location).

The statuses I use are: -NS, and -WF.&nbs
p; A task is either an actionable item (-NS) or not (in which case it does not have an -NS tag.  Additionally, a task can be waiting for someone or something before I can complete it (-WF).  Avoid the temptation to assign -WF to every task that is not an actionable item.  -WF should be reserved for those tasks that have been delegated out to someone else.

The projects I have.. are too numerous to bother mentioning, and will not coincide with your own anyhow, so we can leave that one as is.

Smartlists and Handy Searches

• Errands – “tag:@errand AND status:incomplete AND tag:-ns AND NOT tag:-wf”

This list displays all errands that I’m currently able to run.  I define an errand as any task that I need to accomplish when I’m out of the house.  Groceries, picking up drycleaning, buying a new set of squash shoes, all qualify as errands.

• Waiting – “tag:-wf AND status:incomplete”

Nothing complex here, but this is an important part of the weekly review.  With this list, I can quickly assess who and what I am waiting on, and determine if I need to follow up with anything.  This helps ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

• Quickies – “timeEstimate:”< 1 hour” AND tag:-ns AND NOT tag:wf”

This is a very handy list to have.  If you’ve created time estimates for your tasks as you’ve entered them (and you should get in the habit of doing this, as you won’t bother after you initially enter them), you can use a list like this to determine what you can accomplish quickly when you find yourself with a desire to get something done and only 30 minutes before you need to go and do something else.  I often find myself referencing this list before I go play squash and before bedtime.

• No Due Date – “status:incomplete AND tag:-ns AND due:never”

This list allows me to assess all of the next steps for which I have not yet assigned a due date.  These are items that are likely to slip through the cracks, as they will not show up in my main TODO list (see below).  The items in this list may or may not be legitimate.  Legitimate cases are the ones where I have planned out the tasks for a project and identified what the next steps are, but have not yet made the decision to actually commit to working on the project.  If an item stays in this state for too long, I will eventually move the project into the Sometime/Maybe list (or just delete it if I no longer want to do it).  This list is always checked as part of my weekly review in order to determine if I’m ready to commit to a new project, and to make sure I have no tasks that I have accidentally neglected to assign a due date.

• Completed Today – “completed:today”

I created this list when Bay came home one day and asked me what I’d done.  I couldn’t tell her immediately, but quickly typed in this search and was able to show her everything that I’d accomplished (seriously, my marriage is more exciting than this makes it sound).  Being able to quickly assess what you’ve accomplished in a given day is good for your psyche and will help you on those days when you feel like you haven’t been able to get anything finished.  Don’t underestimate the value of this list.

• Todo Next – “status:incomplete AND tag:-ns AND (dueWithin: “1 week of today” OR dueBefore:today)”

This is the main list that I work from on a daily basis.  It contains all items that are not yet completed, are next steps (ie, actionable), and that are either due within 1 week of today, or are overdue.  The list is ordered based on due date, so that I can work through from top to bottom, closing out tasks on my plate, and getting a feel for what the coming week looks like at any moment.  This list currently contains items that I have tagged as waiting for something and I am not yet sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.  As this list essentially acts as a daily tickler file, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing being reminded that a given task is approaching a due date but that I am still waiting for something before it can be completed.  If this becomes bothersome, I will simply update the search to remove all tasks that are waiting for something, and rely on my weekly review in order to ensure that they don’t slip through the cracks.

Additional Lists

Trick out my RTM

One thing I noticed is that RTM’s interface is a little spartan, and at times, cluttered.  It becomes especially cluttered when you are running a large number of lists, as you will have the tendency to do if you are using it for GTD in this manner (every project ends up being its own smartlist, adding to the smart and regular lists I’ve just mentioned above).  I went searching for ways to alleviate and improve the look and feel of this interface within Firefox.  I’m using Firefox because Safari is my main browser, and I needed a application to remain persistent on my machine and allow for as much customization as I wanted.  Firefox is a bit of a memory hog, though I haven’t noticed any real problems.

In order to make this a persistent part of my system, I ended up doing the following:

• Set Firefox to open and sit in, by default, my first virtual desktop.

 I use six virtual desktops – one contains my GTD system, one contains my browser, one my mail, one my music, etc.  This simply provides an easy way to mentally and visually separate my windows, and is functionality that is supported by default on Mac and UNix/Linux machines.  Windows users can download third-party applications to support this (though I don’t know offhand what they are).

• Set the home page of Firefox to be three tabs: My RTM home page, A page showing the list of keyboard shortcuts for RTM, and a page showing a list of search criteria that can be used in RTM.

This gives me a quick s
et of reference pages to jump to whenever I can’t quite remember how to search for a specific thing, or if I am trying to learn a new keyboard shortcut

In order to improve the layout of RTM, I followed a number of the suggestions in this lifehacker article.  The significant changes are:

• Show keyboard shortcuts next to each item

This removes the guesswork for keyboard shortcuts, and will help you learn the appropriate shortcuts much faster.  Using keyboard shortcuts is a must if you want to get the most out of your system, as I find mousing around horribly inefficient when you can click on key and jump straight to the appropriate spot on screen, ready to enter your text.

• Longer search box

Nothing is more annoying than trying to review the search you just created to ensure that it’s correct, and having to arrow-key through 15 characters of text.  This improvement simply makes the search input box larger so you can see most (if not all) of what you’ve entered.

• Widescreen layout

This simply optimizes the RTM interface for a wider screen, allowing you to view more at once.

• RTM Greasemonkey Script

Greasemonkey is an add-on for Firefox allowing you to add custom user-scripts to the application.  These scripts can be applied globally, or specifically for a given site (in this case, for RTM).  This tweak is the most important one, as it moves all of your lists from tabs to a much cleaner look on the left side of the screen.  It also creates some much needed shortcuts (Control-Shift-J and -K to move up and down the lists on the left side, Control-G to jump to a given list, and Control-M to move the currently selected task(s) to a given list).

Quicksilver

That’s all for now – if you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment and I will address.

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Lifehacking is an odd term, but the benefits that the activity bring are well worth getting past that initial connotation.  To me, lifehacking is the process of making changes in your life, your routine, and the way you think, in order to make you more efficient, accomplish more, and generally getting yourself out of your way so that you can do the things you want.

Although the lay-person’s idea of hacking is some 35 year-old sitting in their parent’s basement breaking into the military’s computers, the reality is that hackers are generally just people that tinker with their computers in order to optimize them as much as possible.  In order to determine the best ways that you can modify a system, you need to undergo a process of analysis to figure out how things fit together, and where you can make changes that will have the most benefit.  Lifehacking is analogous to this process, but applied to our life, our bodies, and our minds, rather than to a computer.

Although some people refer to each of these pursuits individually (mindhacking, bodyhacking, and lifehacking), I lump them all together into one term, because I find it hard enough to accept that I go around using the word lifehacking, let alone two other equally awkward sounding terms.

My three week retreat since leaving my job is mostly devoted to this pursuit, in preparation for the start of school, but also simply because I would like to establish a number of new and positive habits before I am under the familiar, crushing burden of school work, at which point I will not be given an opportunity to affect new change in my life until the first term is complete.

Today I’m just going to review some of the items I have recently introduced into my daily routines and life, and how they have allowed me to become more efficient.

Biphasic Sleep

I have recently posted the first of three weeks worth of journals related to my experiment with biphasic sleep.  The notion of biphasic sleep is that by sleeping in two intervals, rather than the more typical single interval, our sleep becomes more efficient, and thus we require less.

By introducing this routine into my life, I have been able to squeeze an extra two hours out of every day.  It is pretty rare that you will be able to introduce a lifehack that makes you efficient enough to gain an extra two hours out of every day, no questions asked.

The counterpoint to this method of sleeping is that having an extra two hours of wakefulness may be a waste of time if you spend a lot of time sitting around bored.  Personally I think boredom is the worst way to spend time imaginable, and so I diligently keep track of all my projects, ideas, and activities that I’m working on, and manage my tasks using the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology (more on this further down).  Whenever I’m bored, I review my TODO list, my projects, and see what I can work on and go from there.  If nothing jumps out at me, or I feel like I just need to relax and take a break, I’ll read or play video games, and this is fine too. 

The real key here is that if you are considering making this change in your life, be sure that you’ve got things with which to fill your time.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is an application that is available for Macs.

Before I go any further, I would like to preface this section by talking briefly about Macs (the computers).  I firmly believe that Apple makes products with one of their goals being that the user experience should be paramount above all else.  What this means is that using a Mac is almost always a pleasing experience.  Not only have Apple designed their products this way, but they have built their operating system in a manner that allows and encourages third-party developers to design programs that adhere to these same principles.  The end result is that you get a product that is very polished (not just superficially, but all the way up and down the user experience), and stays out of your way when you are using it.

I am not speaking as someone that has existed inside a Mac-only bubble his entire life – I grew up using Windows machines and went through my entire Computer Science undergrad using Windows machines.  I lovingly purchased and cobbled together powerful PCs, managed and upgraded the machines, networked and tinkered with them, and hacked with them to make my experience with them as efficient as possible.  Then I got a Mac and within a week realized that I would never again own another Windows machine unless absolutely necessary.  Everything is that much easier, that much more efficient, and that much more pleasing (this last point is where most techies typically get hung up, making the assumption that is the only thing that Macs have going for them.  That’s fine with me, but it’s inaccurate).

The Mac community is one that has developed around a shared appreciation for good design and efficiency, and as a result, Macs generally have a large amount of applications available that allow for these kinds of practices.  Chief among those products is Quicksilver.

Quicksilver can be summarized as a keyboard launcher, but this understates how much it can do for you.  In reality, Quicksilver allows you to do anything and everything rapidly and with just a few keystrokes.  If I have a file on my desktop that I want to move to a folder on my computer called Adam/Cool_Stuff/Ninjas/Robot_Parrots_vs_Ninjas/, I can do this in two ways. 

The standard way that many of us are used to doing is to click on the file on my desktop, hit cmd-x (ctrl-x for Windows users), then open a Finder or Explorer window, then click through our directory structure until we get to the appropriate folder, then hit cmd-v (ctrl-v for Windows users), pasting the file into the folder.

The Quicksilver way that I would accomplish this is to click the file on my desktop, hit cmd-escape (which brings up the Quicksilver window with my file selected), hit tab, type “move”, hit tab again, and type “Robot_”, and then enter.  I don’t need to type the whole folder name because Quicksilver narrows down the list of places I can send the file as I continue typing until I’m left with just one result.  This is significantly faster, does not require using the mouse for a lot of the work (which is inefficient compared to the keyboard), and does not leave me with extra windows open that I then need to close.

This is a pretty mundane example.  How about a cooler one?  Let’s say I’m reading an article online and I see a word I don’t know.  Typically you would open a new tab, head over to http://dictionary.com, type in the word, read the definition, close the tab, and resume reading.  With Quicksilver, I highlight the word, type cmd-escape (which this time brings up my Quicksilver window with the highlighted word selected), tab, and then start typing “define”.  As soon as the results are narrowed down to “Define word”, I hit enter and a small window pops open showing me the definition for my word.  I can close this window quickly once finished by typing cmd-w.

For both of these examples, it is very easy to counter by saying “Yah, well, I have my own way of doing that, and it’s plenty efficient, so there’s no need for me to bother with Quicksilver”.  This is a fair counter-point, when you are looking at specific cases.  However, the thing that makes Quicksilver not just handy, but essential, is that it provides an efficient way for you to do virtually everything you can possibly imagine, and always in a fairly intuitive manner.  Additionally, Quicksilver provides plugins for virtually everything you can imagine.  There’s an iTunes plugin, so that you can change your volume, change to the next track, request a new song in iTunes DJ, a
nd rate the current song, all with a minimal number of keystrokes and without having to leave the task you’re currently working on.  There’s a websearch plugin so that you can use Quicksilver to instantly search whatever site you like with the search string of your choice, without having to go through the process of opening up a new tab, typing the website you want to search, finding the search box, entering the search string, and hitting enter.

Again, don’t look at the specific examples and tell yourself that you can do that in a different way.  The reason that Quicksilver shines is that it allows you to do almost everything this quickly and effectively.  Once you start tinkering with it and adding new plugins, you’ll be amazed that you were able to function without it.

Windows users – your best choice is something called Launchy (which I used at work).  Launchy is better than nothing, but it doesn’t have the modular design that Quicksilver does, meaning that it doesn’t have anywhere near the comprehensiveness or number of plugins that Quicksilver does.  Still, just adding a keyboard launcher can make you more efficient.  Hitting alt-enter, and typing “excel” is generally going to be faster than using the mouse to click through a number times to get to Excel from the Start menu.

Getting Things Done (GTD)

Being organized and having effective time-management skills will both create more time for you.  By having a clear head and an awareness of what tasks you have on your plate at any given time, you will be able to spend more time present in the moment, and waste less time trying to remember what that thing was that you had to do, and figure out what your next step is.

While many people will throw up their arms and claim “I’m just not good at being organized”, this is a cop-out.  Organization and time-management are both skills that can be practiced and cultivated.  Although some people will naturally be more intuitive at applying these skills, there is no reason that you cannot learn new skills to organize yourself, and new methods for coping with everything that life demands of us.

Getting Things Done is a methodology conceived of by David Allen.  This method provides a workflow and a system for dealing with every new piece of information that comes at you, tracking your projects and tasks, and completing things in a timely manner.  My mentor at Refractions, Krista Stellar, had been practicing GTD for a while before I started working with her, and it was something that I learned largely through osmosis.  In spite of the many excellent things she taught me, I think that the introduction to GTD was the most significant thing that I took away from my time spent working with her. 

The reason for this is simply that the GTD methodology can be applied to almost everything that comes at you in life, and staying organized and on top of things will give you a relaxed sense of control.  Stress robs us of our ability to think clearly, our ability to enjoy ourselves, and our ability to remain present.  By eliminating stress related to poor organization, you will remove this time-sink from your life, and gain more time to focus on the things that are important.

If you are interested in reading more about GTD, you can click the appropriate tag on the cloud to the right, or check out Merlin Mann’s 43Folders blog post here.

If taking on an entire new system seems like too much overhead right now, you can start by making two changes in your daily routine:

1. Start maintaining a TODO list.  Write down whatever you have to do, along with any information related to each item that is needed to accomplish it.  When you finish an item, cross it off your TODO list.  At the start of each day, create a new TODO list, and review your old TODO list.  If there are items that you no longer care about, cross them off, and  move over all of the remainingitems that did not get finished from the previous day’s TODO list.
2. Apply the two minute rule.  Whenever a new piece of information or task comes at you, deal with it immediately in two minutes.  If you can finish it right away in two minutes or less, get it done.  If you cannot finish it in two minutes, but it is something you will do soon, add it to your TODO list.  If it is something that you need to file away, do so.  Whatever it is, deal with it in two minutes.

Just by implementing these two rules, you will remove a lot of the overhead that is caused by letting new pieces of information come at you and simply sit in your inbox (physical or e-mail), or worse yet, in your head.

Remember the Milk (RTM)

Remember the milk is a web-application that integrates perfectly with the GTD methodology.  Instead of needing to maintain a physical, or paper-based system, RTM allows you to maintain all of your tasks, projects, and todo lists online.  Not only is all of this information available to you wherever you have access to the web, but it is also supported by an iPhone app and syncing software for other smartphones.

Although I won’t go into detail about RTM today (that is a topic for another time), I think that this is the most significant evolution I have made to my personal system since I began blogging about it. 

Multi-tasking

Everyone likes to talk about multi-tasking at work, but typically what they really mean is that they’re browsing the web when they should be working on a spreadsheet.  This kind of multi-tasking is inefficient, and should really be labelled “working with distractions”.  Although I completely appreciate the need for healthy distraction and allow myself that same luxury, this is not the type of multi-tasking that I’m referring to.

The type of multi-tasking I’m talking about doesn’t even need to take place in front of a computer screen.  When I’m referring to multi-tasking, I simply mean accomplishing more than one thing at once.  If you take a few minutes to think about your daily routine, there are likely certain activities that you will do that include periods of time where you’re not doing anything.  Some excellent examples from my own life are:

• Walking to and from work
• Working out
• Biking
• Waiting for someone to meet me
• Getting ready in the morning

Walking to and from work and biking are essentially periods of down time for my mind.  Sometimes it is important to have time to just let yourself zone out, and I encourage you to grant yourself this from time to time.  However, the rest of the time, you could be putting your mind to work.  One excellent way to accomplish this is using audiobooks and podcasts.  Audiobooks are a great way to learn while you’re doing something physical, allowing you to focus your mind on something constructive while your body works physically.  There are podcasts available on virtually every subject these days, and these present great opportunities to increase the breadth of your knowledge.  Have you got a recurring TODO item like “learn Spanish”?  Download an audio book or podcast related to this topic and get started.

Working out represents a decent amount of downtime, as your mind is not really working throughout, and you also need to rest your muscles in between each set.  I find that with a set of free-weights at home, I can usually complete emptying the dishwasher and folding my laundry by the time I am done my workout, simply by getting up and working on these chores in between each set.

By making sure that you have a notebook and pencil with you whenever you go out,
and your iPod, you can ensure that you never have to sit around doing nothing while you wait for someone to meet you.  You can work on brainstorming or planning out a project you have in mind with the notebook (and throw on music while you’re doing this), or just spend the time listening to an audiobook or podcast.

You can make your morning routine more efficient by pouring yourself a bowl of cereal and bringing it with you into the bedroom while you pick out what you’re going to wear for the day and do your hair.  Some people have weird hang-ups about eating food anywhere but the kitchen and the dining room, but I don’t think there’s much validity to this (especially given that the bathroom is generally one of the cleanest places in your house.  Let’s not talk about your keyboard; you’re not eating around that are you?).  If your response to this is that you don’t eat breakfast in the morning and you save time that way, then you should re-evaluate your priorities.  Saving time in the morning at the expense of your health is the wrong way to go – eat your breakfast, and make time for it by multi-tasking.

Be Efficient

So those are some of the important lifehacks that I’ve taken on board, both recently and in the not-too-distant past.  I recommend giving any of these a shot if you ever find yourself wishing that you had more time.  Choose one of these that compels you, and commit yourself to trying it out for two weeks to see if it works for you.  Whatever you do, make sure you keep one thing in mind: if you find yourself complaining about being bored, you are not allowed to complain about not having enough time.

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It’s been around two months since I started leveraging Macintosh’s Stickies
to act as my digital task management system.  As all good processes
should do, my system has evolved over time in order to better
accommodate the things that I find necessary, and to prune out any
unnecessary parts.

Up to this point, my system has evolved as follows:

• Attempt to implement a paper tickler system, similar to what I use at the office

This attempt failed fairly quickly.  I don’t enjoy amassing
large amounts of paper around the house, I don’t have a convenient
place to put a tickler file that isn’t ugly (I don’t spend a lot of
time in our office, preferring to do most of my work in our dining and
living rooms), and I wasn’t checking it on a very frequent basis.

• Implement a rough system using Terminal windows

This step represented my change from a paper-based system
to a digital one.  Not a bad start, but a long way to go.  You can read
about this step and the one following here.

• Change over to using Stickies to manage tasks

This marks the start of my system actually becoming fluid
and working well with my own tasks.  It is within this framework that
the majority of the rest of my tweaking will occur.

The last step looked like this:

The latest evolution looks like this:

The changes I have made are not massive ones, but the little things make a difference over time.  A quick summary:

• Only the TODO window is fully expanded

The old system had four windows expanded by default – TODO, Blog, To Buy, and Projects.  However, this creates four windows that demand my attention by default.  By changing to a paradigm where I start and finish with just the TODO window being expanded, my eyes are immediately drawn to this location whenever I load up my system.

There wasn’t really a need to have the other windows open either – if I want to make sure that I blog soon, I simply put “Blog” as a todo item on my list.  When it comes time to actually write, I just expand my blog window and look over the potential topics that I’ve recorded, choose one that interests me, and get writing.

Likewise, items under projects simply require my review from time to time.  Whenever I feel like I have enough time on my hands that I can begin to tackle one of them, I open up the window and choose one of them.  Items that I need to purchase, can simply act as a list that I reference when Bay and I head out the door on the weekend to run errands and possibly spend some money.

As an aside, I highly recommend maintaining a list of items that you intend to buy.  Having those items written down and made tangible really makes it easier for you to focus on what you will be sacrificing when you spend your money frivolously.  If I check this list before heading out the door on a Saturday, it just makes it that easier to think “Hmm, this thing is cool, but if I get this, I’ll have to wait even longer to get those bike gloves I wanted”.

• Location Tickler has been expanded

I’m still trying to figure out the best way for this tickler to work.  The location tickler started to accrue a number of items that were related specifically to people, rather than locations.  Tasks that require another person are generally a little easier to act on than a specific location, as I can complete an item marked “Lend book to Davin” when I either go to Davin’s place, or when he comes to my place.  On the other hand, a task marked “Drop clothes off at Salvation Army” requires that I physically be at the Salvation Army.

It is possible that over time these two items will merge back together.  For now, I maintain the two ticklers separately (though physically close to one another on my screen) because I want to be able to check only the People Tickler when I have people over, and both the Location and People Ticklers whenever I’m leaving the house.  The goal here is to make the process of reviewing the ticklers as efficient as possible, in order to encourage myself to actually use them.

Don’t underestimate this last point – I’m still working to develop the habit of actually checking the ticklers whenever Bay or I leave the house.  I have an active item for Vancouver that says Bay and I need to return some items to Ikea.  However, Bay left the house to head over to the mainland this Friday, only to realize that we’d both forgotten this needed to be done.  That’s okay, it’s just another aspect of working to learn a new habit.

• List section

The list section just holds a number of lists that I maintain.  Ideas for dates, gifts, vacations, and other things that I think up, want to remember, but haven’t had a place to store them up until now.  Whenever I have an idea that falls into one of these categories, I capture it wherever I am, and then add it to one of these lists when I get home.  If I don’t yet have a list for this particular idea, I create one and add it to that.  Easy.

• Dance Lessons

Writing ongoing lessons means that I need to keep a stock of fresh ideas and techniques to teach my classes.  The process by which I do this usually involves jamming at the studio, Steve’s place, or my kitchen when cooking, and playing around with various techniques.  Whenever I do something that strikes me as worth pursuing, I make a note in the appropriate sticky.  There are a number of different stickies under the dance heading, because there are a number of different techniques that all fall under the Popping umbrella.

When teaching a class, I find that it’s better usually to stick to one or two of these techniques, in order to get people familiar with a couple of different ways of moving throughout the class, rather than jumping all over the place.  Having these stickies makes it easy for me to sit down during the week and say “What do I want to teach the class this week”.  I can review the items that I’ve captured, grab a couple from each list, and then put together a lesson plan based on that.

• More meaningful use of color

When I initially put together the sticky system, my use of different coloured notes was more whimsical than anything.  I tried to apply colors that helped separate the open windows from one another, and to denote headers for various lists, such as the Location Tickler.

This time, I’ve updated the use of color to follow a more specific pattern.  Headers are generally coloured green to make them stand out a little more.  Beneath these headers sit the actual contents of each category, such as the names of people I need to talk to, specific locations, etc.

Any person or location under a tickler that has active items associated with them/it is colored red so that I can quickly get a feel for where I have tasks with just a glance.  This is in addition to updating the sticky itself to note how many active tasks I have.  So, for example, I have one active task with my friend Rob.  His sticky is coloured Red to indicate this, and there are also the words (1 ACTIVE) beside his name.  At a glance I can quickly determine where tasks are piling up.

That’s the bulk of the changes that I’ve made so far.  As always this is an iterative process, so the more I use the system, the more refined I anticipate it will become.  Eventually I will get things to the point that I no longer really need to make changes in order to have it function in a manner that is most efficient for me on a daily basis.

A final note about the mobile counterpart to this system.  This is the voice-recording application that I’ve been using on my iPhone.  It was one of the first applications that I came across when I searched the app store on iTunes for voice recorder, but fortunately it’s fit the bill perfectly.  Here is a screenshot of the application:

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