Staying on Top of Tasks

I come off as hugely process-oriented at times, but really I'm not. I've simply learned that trying to work without any kind of structure yields very bad results. I can be pretty organized when I set my mind to it; it's when I fall off the wagon that the trouble starts.

Over the years, I've come across and experimented with a variety of tools, both for myself and for clients and I've learned a couple of very important things.

First, whatever tool you use simply must be a good fit for your individual personality, taking advantage of your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses. Just because it works for someone else doesn't mean it's the best tool or structure for you.

Second, find a tool that will survive having you abandon it from time to time and develop a strategy for getting back into the game of being organized. A structure you don't use isn't nearly as helpful as one that you do.

To that purpose, I actually use two different tools myself, concentrating on whichever works best for me at the time. Ordinarily, I prefer electronic management of my task list because it gives me the most flexibility in terms of availability and in adapting to the fluid nature of my life and work. My favorite electronic task management system is still LifeBalance by Llamagraphics.

Unfortunately, my handheld device and my Vista 64 laptop aren't terribly compatible at the moment, so no synchronization these days. That's where my second tool comes in.

I've discovered that in times of great stress (or non-synchronizing electronic tools), it really helps to be more tactile about managing my tasks. Good list hygiene is important to me - I can't find what still is yet to be done if all of the other nearby items are crossed out - and I like to be able to re-order tasks as priorities shift, so putting my tasks onto sticky notes and managing them in a partitioned folder works better for me than a standard list.

My strategy is to continue using a system for as long as I can, then when it gets difficult for me to keep up, I switch to the other system - sometimes just a change in scenery is all it takes to stay organized. If I fall off both systems and have trouble getting back into either one, then I give myself a short break of a week or two and hope that I don't miss anything too important. I practice being kind to myself when errors occur and use whatever problems arise as motivation to get me back into becoming process-driven again. What doesn't seem to work (for me, anyway), is guilt.

I find it also helps to work higher-priority tasks first, but have been known to shift to focus on easier tasks from time to time when I just need to get myself unstuck. Getting stuck, however, is more likely an indicator of tasks that are too big. What works then is to break the larger tasks down into smaller component tasks.

When I do abandon my systems or get hopelessly stuck, I look for reasons for why. More often I find it is the failure of a system to accommodate my needs than it is a general system failure or something I did wrong. If I can discover the source of the incompatibility, I work on addressing that for the next iteration and then I get back to using some (new and improved) system as soon as possible.

As with anything else, it's a mistake to believe that one will become 'organized' and then have nothing else to do to remain in that state. It's even a mistake to believe that one can become more organized and simply remain in that state even with a huge amount of effort.

The truth is that we capture the state of organization only periodically and then the pendulum swings through or back the the other way and we must start the process all over again of regaining a lock on organization. The best we can hope for is to stretch out the time we spend being 'organized' and reduce how wildly the pendulum swings away from it.

If you've experienced problems or successes with organizing your to-do list, I hope you'll share by making a comment. Perhaps we can help each other.

What keeps you on task?

The High Road and the Low Road

My world is full of technology. Everyone's is these days, for the most part. Sometimes there are some interesting juxtapositions between high tech and low tech aspects of my world. Today, in addition to self-checkout at grocery stores and hardware stores, you can also rent movies from a vending machine for a dollar a day, right there at the grocery store. How cool is that?

Last night, I rented Stranger Than Fiction from a DVD rental machine. All three of us loved the movie. Small Person laughed out loud as soon as he realized that Will Ferrell's character could hear the narrator, and everything about the film - from the graphics that showed how his brain saw the world, to the real end of the story - really worked. What really stuck with the junior member of the partnership, though, was the author's typewriter.

By the end of the movie, Small Person was expressing a wish for a typewriter that he could use, a manual one, no less. It turns out, that I have one - my high school graduation present from my parents. For some reason, he was interested in the typewriter being portable too and it turns out further that this is exactly what I have. Before we all had computers (let along laptops), my parents wanted me to have a portable typewriter so that I could be anywhere in the world and still write - letters, manuscripts, resumes, whatever.

And after all these years, I still have my old portable Olympia B-12 and it's in terrific shape though it hasn't exactly seen a lot of use lately. Even so, it works great and has some rather cool features - like an automated space bar, and a backspace key - that weren't so common on manual typewriters. Of course, manual typewriters - portable or otherwise - weren't exactly common either by the early 80's.

In any case, even with the ribbon pretty dried out because it's been ages since I've used or replaced it, Small Person happily sat down to type on it right away, coming up with some rather amusing stuff in the process. If you happen to run across a story about a wristwatch that's as unhappy about screaming as it is about having ended up lost and on Mars, in all likelihood it started here in this house.

His keyboarding skills are fine but the added pressure needed to get the keys to strike right was a bit tough for him. We figure it's good finger-strengthening exercise for the piano, though, and keep encouraging him to stay with standard fingering rather than lapsing into two-finger keyboarding.

So how strange is this - a digital native going back to visit the old country, seeing for himself why QWERTY keyboards are the way that they are and learning about platens, end-of-line bells, carriage returns and so forth and so on? Next session, I'll teach him about correcting mistakes in the world where backspacing doesn't equal deleting.

For now, I'm just letting him enjoy himself.

Meanwhile, I myself am playing on the computer with ActiveWords, after having heard about this pretty nifty little tool at a recent Seattle Lunch 2.0 free lunch/networking event for geeks. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about capturing keystrokes just yet, nor do I have good data yet on how much memory the application consumes. I can say, however, that the ease with which I can now launch some of my favorite applications makes it pretty slick to use and I know that's just the tip of the iceberg.

For instance - I have also worked out how to use ActiveWords to navigate to URL's I visit a lot. Right now, I'm navigating quite a bit to a couple of different Basecamp accounts, one for Startup Weekend Seattle, and another that we've set up for one of my closest friends who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.

What we decided was that all of the logistics around battling breast cancer - researching information, gathering the right health care professionals, strategizing and making plans, mobilizing all of the friends and family who are offering to be resources, and so forth - was just like managing the kinds of projects some of us do for work. And so now we have Project Boob Management, which makes me - for the time being anyway - the Project Boob Manager. Life takes odd turns.

As useful and interesting as high tech can be, I find it can also take over our lives in ways that are not so helpful. Now that we both have laptops, there are times when I realize that Tall Person and I are both in the living room together, navigating around in our own personal online worlds with little or no conversation between us. Something similar happens when we read sometimes too, but somehow it's different and even more disconnected when it's the computers. It's times like these that I see how important it is to strike a balance between high tech and low tech.

For those of you who who agree and are still striving for that kind of balance in your own lives, you might be interested in the Soul Tech workshop put on by Leif Hansen. If you missed out on tickets for Startup Weekend Seattle, it might be a great way to spend your Saturday afternoon this weekend. I wish there was a feasible way for me to be in both places at once, as it's a topic I feel strongly enough about to sometimes wish it was my workshop. Leif is good people though, and I'm glad he's getting such great attention for his work.

In the end, high tech that helps facilitate more human interaction - by making it easier to find each other and work together, or by saving time and reducing stress so that we have more time to spend with one another with fewer headaches - is probably some of the highest and best use of technology. Where it interferes with human interaction is probably a mistake, something I'm far more likely to think about the next time I go to the grocery store and am making the choice between using a check-stand with a real-live checker and going through the automated self-check.

Those automated movie vending machines are way cool though, just about any way you look at it. I have even noticed DVD kiosks in hospitals. I know from past experience that sometimes connecting over a good escapist-type movie can be a great way to recover from surgery or get through chemo if it's one of those times when no one really feels like talking that much.

I'll be sure to add that one to the Basecamp-supported Project Boob Management idea list.

And you should feel welcome to add a comment if you have questions, thoughts, ideas, around taking the high (tech) road vs. the low road.

How is technology helping or hindering what's important in life?

Archealogical Dig

This week I've been working on cleaning up my office a bit. I'm one of those who prefers to see everything so there ends up being a lot of stacks of paper around; not that you can really see it when it gets to that point but that's how it gets there. Now that I understand this, I actually am developing a better system that seems to be working but the old stacks are still there, hence the clean-up effort. What's fun (and sometimes annoying) is all the stuff you find - so that's where that's been all this time. See... so much for being able to see everything!

I started with just a few minutes at a time at the beginning, and now I can hardly stop. It's like the stuff demands to be organized, I swear - it's not like this is an activity I normally enjoy! Where I started was with my desk where all the papers that I felt I had to have right in front of me or I'd forget them had accumulated. Once I realized that I'd forgotten about pretty much everything from the third layer on down and couldn't even get to it if I did remember, it was a relatively simple task convince myself to scoop it all off into a pile on the floor. Of course, that meant one more pile on the floor but then with as many as there were, it was sort of tough to tell the difference.

So in ten minutes, I completely emptied the desk and in another ten minutes even took off every computer component so that the entire desk was bare. Then I walked away from it and left the house for the rest of the day. That's it.

The next day, I walked back into the office and took a fresh look. Did I want or feel the need to move the desk? Probably not, at least not yet. But I did re-arrange a few things and started immediately to like having things in their new places, like the fax machine next to me where I could actually see it and use it instead of on the lower shelf of the desk where I had to push the chair out of the way and kneel next to it if I ever wanted to send a fax.

I left it like that for a few days just trying to pay attention to how I work and how I wanted to use stuff. Then I started slowly, with a half hour of collecting stuff into paper sacks. The one labeled "Afraid I'll Lose Or Forget It" only narrowly edged out the one labeled "Sure I'll Need It For Something Someday" in terms of how quickly they filled. I will still have to figure out how to store the sorts of things I am so deathly afraid of losing or forgetting so they'll be readily accessible but I'm sure there's a lot of the stuff I've been so sure I'd need at some point that I can simply eliminate and that will make storing everything else so much better.

One of the things that's happened is that I actually have to work at limiting myself to 30 minutes a day an activity that normally you cannot beg or pay me to do. The willingness to devote myself to this is likely to fade a bit, so I am working on trying to find that delicate balance between taking advantage of the energy without totally burning myself out in the process. There is no 'done' in this kind of effort. We don't just stop collecting stuff - more gadgets and papers will continue to move through our lives. The trick is to be sure that at least as much is moving out as is coming in. To get there, you work simply on making progress a little bit at a time in such a way that is sustainable once you reach a satisfactory equilibrium. I know this is how it works and that helps a great deal.

And in the meantime, it's sort of like a treasure hunt. One of the things I unearthed yesterday is another of my old television contracts. I'd already found a more recent one, scanned it and have been working on chopping it up into pieces that I can share so we can all have a good laugh. Now we'll have even more to work with and compare. It'll be fun, I promise. Now that enough time has gone by, it's even fun for me - I haven't detected the slightest trace of bitterness yet, which is a very good sign.

After having gone for such a long time putting off doing this work, I have to say it feels very good to be getting rid of stuff I clearly no longer need. That's one of the benefits of waiting. My theory is there's always an upside to poor habits and/or there's something difficult about making a change, otherwise we'd have made the shift a long time ago.

Of course I'm also finding missed opportunities and that's the downside of not having kept up with stuff. And I realize that I can only be better going forward; it simply doesn't help to get annoyed about something that's so far past. No real worth for guilt.

Just clearing some space is worthy of celebration, no matter how it happens or how long it took to get to this point. I'm my own prodigal son.

The other sort of big thing I'm celebrating this week is the news that my ACC application was approved. It is nice to have had that effort rewarded and I'm proud of the accomplishment - now the clock is ticking on getting the next credential as this one has an expiration date. So I'll be collecting more hours (750 is the next milestone), and keeping better track of my Coaching Continuing Education Units. Wow, what a really great time to be better about how I file paperwork!

If you have favorite organizational tricks and tips, I'd be interested to hear about them so send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com or let me know if you'd like to hear more about the file system I'm currently using to keep active projects top of mind without having them clutter up the top of my desk.

How can you work with your tendencies and habits to get what you want instead of against them?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Where Did I Put That?

Sometimes I lose things. I tend to think that it's largely a matter of my brain moving too quickly onto the next thing. The point is that I regularly need to go looking for something I know I've had, said, or written.

And herein lies the problem. My brain collects a lot of stuff. What I've discovered is that I hang onto trivia well because it's information that's tougher to locate otherwise. Anything I think I can look up later, I don't store in my head for very long - FIFO, you know. My brain does a good job of keeping an index of all these things, just not such a good job at tracking the location.

Google may have come up with a GPS locator for the tangible representations of my thoughts with their new Desktop Search capability. Downloading this thing, I had this vague thrill for a moment, not unlike the time I first jumped off of a 25-ft cliff into the water - an activity that was great fun and scarier than all get-out at the same time.

With the cliff jumping, I decided the "scarier than all get-out" feeling sort of took out a lot of the fun, so I stopped as soon as I could be sure I was quitting for the right reasons (fear alone not being a good reason, as far as I was concerned). I don't know yet for sure how I'm going to feel about the Desktop Search tool. Certainly I have to wonder a bit about privacy issues down the road. Of course, I also used to wonder about privacy issues using credit and then debit cards but that didn't stop me from using them instead of cash for purchases... and I still use my grocery store loyalty card even though the very existence of these things makes me madder 'n heck.

I will say that the searches I've tried so far have turned out great. I frequently remember things by a key word or two along with an approximate feeling for when. Oh, and I also tend to remember words by some odd consonant in the middle but I doubt anything will help make use of that particular facility anytime soon. Googling my desktop, I came up with good (and relevant) matches right away - much faster than normal document searches on my hard drive and the searches include my documents, my email, my websearches and (when it's done indexing) my instant messaging chats too. I'm impressed so far.

That FIFO problem also causes me a certain amount of angst when it comes to my literal desktop. I have loads of papers piled up, fearful that I'm going to forget I have this information available to me. Here's what works for me: choose a storage method that aligns with my style (I'm very visual, so storing papers where I can readily see where and what they are is better than locking information away into file drawers) and then work on organizing my papers for just ten minutes a day.

If ten minutes a day doesn't seem like much, then you've got nothing at all to lose for trying it. You'll probably be quite surprised at how well this works... and how easy it will be to stay with it because it doesn't cause a huge time crunch. Face it, you may know "exactly where everything is" but if you can't (near-) instantaneously produce what you're looking for, then you're just wasting time; spending a few extra minutes a day to save you from wasting all that time would clearly be a worthwhile investment.

You may also be surprised that I learned this little trick of spending such a small amount of time on a thing and expecting to make progress from a website on housekeeping (don't laugh, one motorcycle-riding dev dude I know is totally into the whole FlyLady routine). I hear the timers are great. You can choose their recommended 15 minutes if that works for you; in a busy environment, sometimes the ten minutes is less stress-inducing, easier to maintain and just about as effective.

How do you find stuff? Send your ideas (or your Google Desktop Search reviews) to techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com. Curious minds want to know.

Is frustration a normal part of the creative process?