Local Insanity

I have a problem. Getting Things Done is a book by David Allen, and I enjoyed it greatly. I would love to put his ideas about stress-free time management into practice but, as I said, I have a problem. The problem is that I am lazy — I can’t be bothered to remember anything. What I’ve found from a practical standpoint is this:

• irrelevant projects and distractions never last very long
• useful projects have to repeatedly break into my consciousness
• it’s easy to temporarily give distractions free reign
• keeping a list of things to do is only useful if I actually look at the list

Of all the reasons my ventures into GTD have failed, the last one is the biggest. The things I’ve been successful at are the ones that required very little motivation from me. A good example is paying my credit card bills. I get reminders a week before they’re due, and I go right then to schedule my payment. I could set this up to happen automatically, and I probably should, but either way it works and I don’t really worry about it.

Make it Automatic

This is the world according to The Automatic Millionaire: set up your system once, and make it automatic. I’ve been looking for a way to apply this to GTD with minimal success. It seems that I must either make my system electronic and pervasive, or make it live on paper and carry it with me at all times. The problem with the former is synchronization. The problem with the latter is notification.

Electronic

For the electronic solution it seems clear that it must live on the web, and that the phone is the only logical place for me to interface with it on the go. I am in the habit of carrying a phone, but I cannot bring myself to carry any other devices — the bulk is just too much. Such a system would have to make it very easy for me to enter new todos, view existing ones relevant to my context, and to set reminders from anywhere.

Paper

The paper system would live with me, carried on my person. It’d most likely be a pen and some index cards (in fact, that’s what it is right now). This system doesn’t work for me because it has no way of notifying me about what’s going on and has no way of reminding me to look at the lists to see what needs to be done when context switching. The only thing I can think to do is to set a periodic alarm that makes me review the lists.

The Solution

I’m not sure what the final answer is, but I may have a preview in the form of my latest revision of my perpetually-under-development personal finance app. For years I tried the track-all-expenses route, complete with tagging. This required far more work than I was willing to put into managing my money. My new approach is based on a series of spiders. They crawl my banking sites and report on how things are going. At the moment it is not automatic: I must start the server, then click Refresh, and then it’ll show me my latest account balances. It’s certainly much easier than logging into each system separately and taking note, adding them up, etc.

But it could be better — it could be automatic. The next feature I’m going to add is that of Goals. I might set up a goal that says I’d like to net $1000 this month, and then my script will automatically let me know how that goal is going. That way, I analyze things only occasionally, then I get feedback as time goes on. The feedback will tell me whether I can eat out, or whether I should pack a lunch.

Is it possible to apply this methodology to GTD? Or am I trying to shove a square peg into a round hole?

We all have things that we want for ourselves: traits, skills, experiences — just look at 43things.com — and yet most of us fall short of these goals. Why? Thinking about this today, I discovered that the reason I’m not doing certain things I’d like to do — buy property, get regular exercise, learn a new programming language, etc. — is due to my being stuck in certain local extrema — I’m living in a cheap place that is good enough and close to BART, my bike is in Santa Barbara and I walk a bit every day, and I’ve gotten really good at Ruby.

To envision what I’m talking about, think about a surface with some hills and valleys. Then imagine dropping a ball on that surface. If you do it enough, it’ll settle in different spots. These spots are called minima, and the lowest one is the absolute minimum. All others are local minima. To envision local and absolute maxima, imagine Mount Everest (the absolute maximum) and all the other mountains surrounding it (local maxima).

The trick is determining whether these things are local or absolute extrema. Whether buying or renting is the absolute extremum is yet to be determined, but my semi-unhealthy state vs. regular exercise is more clear. If you think about the example with the ball, it won’t move out of its spot without some sort of disturbance, and even so small disturbances won’t do it. You really need to shake things up to get it out of its current position. Interestingly, this is the same method used by simulated annealing to solve constraint-satisfaction problems.

So what lessons can we take from the world of math into the world of the real? If we’re to take it literally, it tells us that we need to devise ways to knock ourselves out of local minima, try new ones, and go back if the new situation is much worse than the old. This threshold of tolerance for worse situations should decrease as time goes on, and so we should be led to expect that, by using this approach, we’ll spend a fair amount of time trying to find the absolute minimum. Keep in mind that, like with math, simulated annealing isn’t guaranteed to find the absolute minimum.

The other approach is to use logic to try to solve the problem. This approach is often used with things that are expensive (either money, time, or both) to try, and so do not lend themselves to simulated annealing. An example might be the process of buying a car. As much as we might like to, we can’t just buy a car, try it out for a while, then return if if it’s not as good as our old one.

What other things keep you from becoming the person you’d like to be?

I’ve always hated carrying stuff around. My pockets are big, but I really don’t like carrying anything in them thicker than a thin wallet - even my mobile phone seems thick when I sit down. What’s the solution to this? I don’t know, but I’m not the only one with the issue on my mind.

The inventory of my pockets is typically:

• Wallet
• Cell phone
• Keys (carrabeaner + 2 keys)
• HPDA
• Pencil

This is quite a bit, and is only alleviated when I have a backpack and/or jacket on. Here are my problems with this setup.

1. My cell phone is slightly on the big side. I strongly prefer a cell phone with bluetooth (Mac/iSync friendly please!), but brand does not matter so much for me.
2. My wallet is a good size as long as it doesn’t hold too many receipts, but smaller is better. Any ideas for a day-wallet (like a day-pack)?
3. The keys do not need the carrabeaner, technically. However, I have found it to be useful on enough occasions to warrant carrying it around. I’ve shrunk from four keys recently to two keys, one of which is quite small. Unfortunately I added an Albertson’s card to it today (damn marketing).
4. The HPDA is about as small as it’ll functionally get, I believe. Using the D*I*Y template has caused the size of my HPDA to expand slightly, but it does increase the usability of it.
5. The pencil is useful and good, but it has a sharp metal point which pierces clothing and skin if pressed hard enough. It’s the Pentel Techniclick, and it’s nice except for that metal tip. I’ve always used pencils due to their erasability and the fact that I majored in math, but recently the idea of a pen has intrigued me (especially since the HPDA pages facing out will smear when written on in pencil).

I’ll follow up on this when/if I find better solutions.

Update: I hadn’t read the article linked from that one when I wrote this, so the coincidence of our having the same items listed in almost the same way with almost the same link is just … a kinda freaky coincidence and a sign that perhaps there really is a baseline for the stuff you have to carry with you.

Wow. My enthusiasm for the Hipster PDA, which has been waning as of late, just got a stim pack in the form of the D*I*Y Planner Hipster PDA Edition. I hope this will encourage me (and Sarah with the pink ones I printed for her) to stay on top of our business.

Why doesn’t Cingular just shrivel up and die? It is more frustrating that there is no one person I can hold accountable for my terrible cell phone service than the reality of the terrible cell phone service. I started writing this as a long away message, but decided that it deserved a blog post.

What is wrong with Cingular? They have terrible reception in my apartment building and several isolated locations on campus. Is it their fault? Maybe. If it is, there is no one person I can blame and motivate to fix the problem. I think this attitude is linked to Cingular’s (and other carriers’) typical business practice of getting customers hooked on a one or two-year subscription. Once they’ve got your business, you’re most likely going to stay with them for the duration, so what do they care about improving quality of service? That’s not even it. They don’t have to care about quality of service. They don’t have to care about their customers. They ought to recognize the choice the consumer has in the matter though, and that they are so indifferent toward this fact is what bothers me.

Is Cingular a symptom of a growing trend? Or is the trend only the increase of my own awareness? As I mentioned earlier, UCLA has decided to do nearly the worst passible job on their Senior Survey, which is required. What does this have to do with it being a public institution? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I have no reference point from which to judge except my own reasoning. It has been my observation that UCLA is composed of people who will be allowed to keep their positions if they don’t do their job too poorly or too well - good enough, no better, no worse. What a terrible place to be.

If these “good enough” people are the majority, how much of a majority are they? They are not all stupid by my usual standards. Some are smart, or at least somewhat reasonable. I was one of them until recently; I thought that I’d never be able to do certain things like run a business or break the rules. The only barriers it seems worth erecting are the ones I erect for myself; it may be that these are also the only ones worth tearing down. In other words I plan to set my own boundaries. People can tell you to think outside the box all you want, but it is up to you to realize what that means. More importantly, is it up to you to realize that you have the ability to do it. Do I sound like a motivational speaker yet?

Too bad, because I never want to do that. Just like I never want to work at McDonald’s or Burger King or the Sanitation Department. What about the saying we hear so often about “Well someone has to work there!” Bullshit. They don’t have to do anything of the sort. People work there because the jobs exist, created by the demand for those services. If no one wanted to work there, either the service providers would be able to provide the service even with the increase pay given to attract employees at a price the market would support or they wouldn’t. Do I sound like a capitalist yet?

Okay, fine. I don’t know if that title sits well with me, but I’ll wear the shoe if it fits. I think my coming around to capitalism was sparked by my interest and acceptance of natural selection as the agent of evolution. Capitalism does not fight our nature, it encourages it. This is what makes me uneasy. Human nature is not always a pretty thing, but I believe that our intelligence permits us to make the best of it by intelligently encouraging our selfish nature. Is a man happier when he has worked hard to deserve a modest living space or when he has done nothing to earn the palace he lives in? Having travelled the middle road my entire life, I cannot answer that question from experience. I nevertheless contend that it is the man who has worked for what he has who is truly happy. That, incidentally, is perhaps the best way to ensure that your stuff does not end up owning you - own it completely by having earned it. Do I sound like a social darwinist yet?

I am not. Despite their pretense, they did not encourage a meritocracy. They wanted the favors and red tape and bullshit that went along with the system as they’d already devised it - social darwinism was merely a justification.

I have my own demons to work out in working toward my own ideals. Mostly they involve settling doubts. In the meantime I remain hypocritical and demanding of others what I should be demanding of myself. How long will it take to overcome? Maybe not as long as you’d think. It’s amazing what a little self-confidence can do.

I knew that 43folders advocated Getting Things Done, the book I’ve been reading, and I figured that 43 was just some random number and folders was… well folders are clearly organizational tools. It didn’t hit me until I got near the end of GTD that 43 is the number of folders required to set up a tickler file system. You can read more about it by clicking the above link.

I’ve been putting some pressure on Sarah to maintain her own HPDA, and so far she’s done it (day 2). It takes some getting used to, since most TODO lists are just lists of objects related to things that need to happen, but not the things that need to happen themselves. An example from GTD:

For example, a client will have something like “tires” on a list. I then ask, “What’s that about?” He responds, “Well, I need new tires on my car.” “So what’s the next action?” At that point the client usually wrinkles up his forehead, ponders for a few moments, and expresses his conclusion: “Well, I need to call a tire store and get some prices.”

That’s the sort of thing I had on my lists at first. Sarah did too. The next problem that I encountered was appropriately grouping my next actions lists. At first I grouped them by relatedness. If an action was to advance a school project, it went on the school list. If it was to advance a personal project, it went on the personal list. This makes sense, but is completely non-functional. It makes more sense, as GTD advocates, to group things by context. Where can I do this action? At the computer? At home? At school? In the car? Anywhere? With my cell phone? Once this became the setup of my lists, it became much easier to get through them because I didn’t have the subconscious barrier to processing my lists caused by an inappropriate organizational system.

This last point brings me to the single greatest thing this book has identified for me: the reason I could never effectively get organized in the past is not me, but the system I used. If an organizational system is less than completely usable in some way, there will be a subconscious barrier to using it that will eventually overcome your desire to be organized. The same is true of exercising regularly and eating healthy. Make the system easy and fun, and you will use it.

Today Sarah and I went shopping for calendars. I tried to keep in mind ease of use and effectiveness when choosing. I eventually settled on one that is quite small (easily fits in my pocket, reducing the barrier to carry it around with me), has perforated corners (easy access to “this week”, reducing the barrier to open it and flip to the current events), and has mini calendars for this and next month on every other page (reducing the time it takes to figure out when something occurs relative to the date I’m looking at and on what day). I plan to keep it with my HPDA and to use the calendar only for date-and-time-specific items and my HPDA for everything else. This will work better than using an index card for a given day because it will reduce the barrier to adding a date-and-time-specific item to my collection system.

I’m endeavoring to put everything down on paper, but it isn’t easy. But it is fun, so I think I’ll stick with it. Here’s to mapping the storm.

I’ve started reading GTD by David Allen and I must say I’m fairly impressed, but in a ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ way. In my push to get things done more effectively this quarter, I lost steam about halfway through. There were a number of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is that I had no system in place to keep myself organized.

Personal Digital Assistant

In the past I had a Palm Pilot - one of the originals - that I used to keep contact information. I tried using its Todo list feature and calendaring system, but I found that I never looked at the stuff again until the relevant tasks/events were long gone. Such a system actually hurts you, because you’re spending time inputting the data but getting nothing out of it. A few years after giving that up, in the midst of my pro-Microsoft phase, I bought a PocketPC under the assumption that it was the Palm Pilot that wasn’t being effective, and that a newer, higher tech PDA would be. I just assumed that it was better than a paper solution because the paper solution couldn’t sync with my computer. It turns out that the MS software was so ineffective that syncing probably took longer doing it “automatically” than by hand. I couldn’t shake - or even see - the assumption that digital was better than paper, so I stopped using the PocketPC and replaced it with… nothing.

Enter Apple

About the same time I realized that Microsoft wasn’t all that great I started noticing the Mac. It was sleek and slender (the PowerBooks), sexy (the Dock, Aqua in general), powerful (Terminal.app and everything underpinning it), and altogether elegant. But it’s a Mac. It’s not Windows. Could I really switch to something that wasn’t Windows? I was so invested, I thought, that I probably couldn’t. Most of the programming I knew how to do was for Windows, all my software was for Windows, all my friends used Windows… But the curiosity remained. After talking to a professor or two with a PowerBook and reading about it, I decided to take the plunge. At first it was confusing. It was new, which was exciting, but sometimes frustrating. I couldn’t perform the simplest of tasks without expending significant mental energy. I wish I could say that now that I’m used to it that everything is problem-free, but that’s not true. I have had problems and things do not operate exactly as I’d like. But the difference between things not behaving as they should on the Mac vs. on Windows is in the community. The Mac community listens, responds, and engages you. Many of the apps I use were written by groups of 1-4, and are very approachable (online, of course).

You may be wondering what this has to do with productivity. For a time my PowerBook was my PDA. Though not well suited to the purpose, it performed better than either of my previous machines. I noticed a few trends emerging:

1. I actually like using it, and I gather my information and use the PowerBook to process it
2. I began to really customize and tweak my setup because I wasn’t living under the constant looming shadow of the monthly reformat my Windows machine required - this broke down much of the subconscious barrier to use it
3. While I could use it effectively to perform certain tasks, it sucked if I had to draw something or take a quick note - such things just got discarded

43folders.com and the Hipster PDA

The site that introduced me to GTD, 43folders.com, is one man’s response to the Windows-centric view of that book (and the productivity world, more generally). I’m not sure who first coined the term Hipster PDA, but it is just a bunch of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. This is my new PDA, and so far it works nicely. I can carry it with me easily, I can use my own pencil as a stylus, I don’t have to worry about dropping it or spilling water on it, it syncs with my computer just about as fast as my old PocketPC, and it never runs out of batteries. I’m still in the honeymoon phase of using it, so we’ll see what happens a few months down the road. In general I’m pleased.

Procrastination

This being finals week, my brain is particularly sensitive to anything that might offer a distraction… like… um… this post. But I’ve allotted time for it! The bane of my existence right now is StarCraft. For Pete’s sake Blizzard! Why’d you have to produce such a good game?! I’m going to eject it from my PowerBook, and go put it in a safe place… there we go. I’ve now raised the barrier to playing it to a level that hopefully will keep me from doing so. While it is my choice to play it, it is hard not to. This is not an excuse, it’s a reason. Now all I have to do is lower the barrier to getting work done to a sufficiently low level so I’ll actually do it. Here’s to getting over my fear of management and “stuff”.

Arthur came over today and we did our math homework for 110a, which isn’t due for 5 whole days. That’s so cool. I can effectively ignore that class for a week or more. If in the next two days I can do that to any of my other classes I’ll really enjoy this next week.

It felt good to get it done, but doing things in advance is so rare a thing for people to do, even smart people. Why? It makes us feel good to get it done and to be productive, to exercise and be fit, etc. But we don’t do it. We procrastinate and put it off until we absolutely have to do it. As an exercise in this, I will attempt to get things done early until the end of the quarter, and I will take note of my desire to procrastinate, and try to figure out what causes it.

I have a few notes already:

• I invariably find anything else to do instead, no matter how inane.
• I think I can do it later, that I don’t feel like it right now.
• I think the task is too big, too difficult (esp. exercising).

What do you notice yourself doing/thinking when you procrastinate?