Eric Hanberg is a regular community contributor to GTD Times, bringing a fresh perspective to GTD as a writer and coder. You can also follow his personal blog, with musings on the arts, technology and politics.
Eric Hanberg is a regular community contributor to GTD Times, bringing a fresh perspective to GTD as a writer and coder. You can also follow his personal blog, with musings on the arts, technology and politics.
A Community Contribution from Erik Hanberg
There’s an idea I’ve read about when it comes to how different kinds of people schedule their day. It’s maker versus manager. Like me, many people work as both maker and manager.
Managers tend to schedule in one hour blocks. There’s usually not a question about whether or not there’s a meeting at 2:00; it’s a question of who that meeting is with.
Makers tend to think in half-day blocks, scheduling three, four, or more hours for a single task. Writing, coding, creative problem solving, etc., are all done best with a lot of hours put toward them all at once.
I’ve found the same tension in my own schedule as well. Some of my work makes perfect sense in hour-long segments. But some of it really needs to be in half-day chunks: building websites really requires at least two hours of solid attention to get anything significant accomplished, and often more.
I’ve gotten much better at scheduling meetings to give me the half-day chunks I want for coding or writing. Here are some of the ways I’ve balanced it:
A Community Contribution from Erik Hanberg
For me, one of the easiest and yet most difficult concepts of David Allen’s Getting Things Done was thinking of everything as work.
After all, who wants to work all the time? But I quickly learned there was strength in the idea.
As I was implementing GTD for the first time, I understood the concept as a way to make sure that I didn’t lose track of the fun things in life. [Read more →]
A Community Contribution from Erik Hanberg
Here’s how I deal with email and keep from getting too overloaded:
My income mostly comes from two areas: writing and web development.
Doing both, I’ve discovered certain similarities of work between writing and coding. Each has certain activities that can take a really long time. And in both, it’s often important to attack those activities in large chunks of time. I’ve come back to a writing project after a break feeling like I’ve lost my understanding of the structure of the piece. The same is true in web development, where I can keep track of div tags and CSS classes easily when I’m working, but find it difficult to sink back in after a day or two away.
Knowing that a single task–like “Finish Chapter 10″ or “Validate Test Site” may take many hours of my time–changes how I use GTD.
Most effective, and most obvious, has been using my next action list to write notes on new problems that occur to me while in the middle of those big tasks. I’ll see an error, maybe, realize it’s repeated around the site, and rather than fix it then, make a note and stick with the task I’m working on. I’ve done this with writing too. If, while writing Chapter 6, I realize that I missed something in Chapter 4, I’ll make a note and go back and fix it later.
I’ll also try to do a mini-review after finishing a long task. If I’m writing fiction (which, alas, I’ve yet to publish), this has given me some interesting next actions–one still on my list reads “Henry asks Arthur to find the blackmailer.” (Hmm, with plots like that, maybe there’s a reason I haven’t published.) But it’s specific enough that I remember what’s supposed to come next.
Using GTD while writing and coding has had some difficulties, though.
One is that having really long tasks on my list is that those tasks can seem daunting. I know they’re going to take a long time, but the task can’t effectively be broken up into smaller chunks. In that case, I’ll create an action item that says something like, “Continue work on About template.” When I’ve finished for the day, I’ll mark it as done and then create a new item that says the same thing. It’s a little redundant, but sometimes just being able to mark something as done can feel really good.
Probably the hardest part of having such long tasks on my list is the backlog it creates. I normally have 160 or so next action items, but recently it’s been more like 200. It’s been making me feel behind, which I’m not used to. How odd that even though I have a complete picture of the tasks I need to do, I’m still conscious of how many are pending, something that wasn’t true 40 action items ago.
But maybe those difficulties just come with the territory. Could I have written 37,000 words in the last 6 weeks without GTD? Complaining about the tasks that piled up in the meantime doesn’t make sense, since they wouldn’t have piled up if I hadn’t been so productive.
In other words, it wasn’t my GTD system that swelled my next action list, it was the hours and hours I spent writing. GTD just lets me keep track of it all.
Eric Hanberg is a regular community contributor to GTD Times. You can also follow his personal blog, with musings on the arts, technology and politics.
Eric Hanberg is a regular community contributor to GTD Times. You can also follow his personal blog, with musings on the arts, technology and politics.
So I’ve done pretty well in the last 9 months adopting GTD into my daily life.
I’m more productive, I’m happier, and I don’t feel like I’m ducking when I haven’t done something.
But I still have not totally grappled with one of the biggest challenges of the Information Age: Continuous Partial Attention.
Thomas Friedman joked in a column that we’re no longer in the Information Age, we’re in the Age of Interruption. And it’s exactly how I was feeling, I just kept getting interrupted.
The biggest challenges were inbound emails. Last month, when I started to realize the problem, I tried a novel solution: Gmail Lab’s “Email Addict” feature. It disables access to e-mail for 15 minutes in order to let you actually get something done. Should help my productivity, right?
Ha. Right.
At first, it did feel pretty good. But then the Gmail icon in my task bar lit up and the tab changed to Gmail – Inbox (1). Ooh, a message! But I couldn’t get to it!
I tried hitting escape. I couldn’t get back into Gmail. I tried hitting escape twice. Then I tried escape and then enter. Then the space bar. Then random panicked clicking.
Then I took a deep breath and decided to be Zen. I don’t need to look at it right now anyway, I told myself.
About 2 minutes the tab changed to Gmail – Inbox (2).
I couldn’t take it. I restarted Gmail entirely. I lasted all of 4 minutes with Email Addict.
The two emails that absolutely could not wait were a two-word reply to a meeting request and a coupon to Barnes & Noble … Not exactly worth it.
My attention was getting distracted by a lot more than just e-mail. I felt like I keep getting derailed by Google Reader, pointless refreshes of Facebook, and a constant stream of tweets (sometimes even tweets from David Allen himself!). Even my Google homepage–with all the customized content I’d put on there–was interrupting me with interesting links.
But of course they were interesting links! I’d selected those widgets because I liked the content, and now I couldn’t stop clicking. That’s when it dawned on me that every single interruption I faced was an interruption that I’d actually planned and created. I was my own undoing.
I set up my phone to ding when my friends twittered. I set up three different reminders that I had e-mail. I set up reminders all over the place that the blogs, sites, and people I like had new content online.
How stupid was I being, I wondered. It’s hard enough staying focused on the web when every headline, every advertisement, and every blue-underlined word is a potential temptation to get distracted. So why had I made my life even more difficult?
There was only one solution: purge the reminders. I scrapped the widgets on my Google homepage that had outbound links and left the rest. I disabled the Gmail Notifier on my laptop and made sure that when I was working my Gmail account up in a window separate from the one I was working in–so I can’t see the tab change when e-mail arrives. I turned Twitter updates off so my phone doesn’t buzz anymore.
The aim was not to reduce the collection of content. In fact, content feels like it collects faster in my reader and inbox because I check it less frequently now. The key was to reduce all the reminders that it was there. It’s helped keep me more focused. I “flit” between web pages much less often.
The two activities that pay the bills–writing and web coding–both go much better when I’m not getting pulled away all the time.
The lesson I’ve learned is that once I got my next action list under control and scrubbed away my mental clutter, I still had a lot of virtual clutter that needed my attention too. My advice to others is the same: you don’t need all those reminders. Let Google Reader gather the links you want and open it only when you want a break. Keep your e-mail in the background. If you can, turn off the feature that displays how many unread messages are waiting for you in the dock (Mac) or menu bar (PC).
The web is one of the few places where we can really manage distractions. We are in control of what we see and when we see it. Remember, you can only handle one thing at a time, even on the web.
For an interesting read on multi-tasking, I’ll refer you to Walter Kirn’s story in the November 2007 Atlantic. This short bit is key:
Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating.
If you have an article you would like to submit to GTD Times, please let us know!
A Community Contribution by Erik Hanberg
January’s Wired magazine carried an article by freelancer Chris Hardwick testing out different systems for helping him structure his work and life better.
He sums up:
Now, I know that David Allen is the head vampire of productivity, but if you only have the fortitude to read a single book, I’m gonna throw my lithe frame behind The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss lays out a series of nimble yet perfectly legal cons to help you break out of the corporate Bastille — and work from the actual Bastille, if you want. That sly creativity best fits the rogue nature of the freelancer.
David Allen is head vampire? I’ll have to check for fang marks from my book to see if he got me.
As it happens, I am also a freelancer and I have read Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. So I feel like I can respond to Hardwick appropriately. He is right about some things–like the idea that the books can supplement each other–but I think his recommendation is way off target.
For those who haven’t read it, The 4-Hour Workweek is essentially based upon two big ideas:
Idea One covers strategies for separating your work from a physical location–the office–so that you can work from home, work from Europe, or wherever it is you want to be.
Idea Two argues that for very little capital, a single person can get an Internet business going that will provide them enough money to live on with a barest minimum of work (hence the title of the book).
I believe his ideas are sound. In fact, I’m testing out an Internet business right now with Google ads to see if I can start a side business for some extra income.
But what Hardwick misses about the GTD system is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a corporate CEO working 80 hours a week or whether you’re living off the wealth of your Internet business and only work 80 hours every year. You still have to get things done. You still have to pay taxes and bills, enrich your relationships with family and friends, plan your vacation, and maybe–as in the case of Ferriss–learn to tango (Ferriss holds a world record in tango).
For me, GTD has helped me get out from under the feeling of always being behind, helped me stop thinking about work when I shouldn’t, and introduced a system that means I can remember to buy batteries at the store when I’m actually at the store.
Only with that in place could I really seriously consider the suggestions of Ferriss. Now, one of my projects is creating the website for my Internet business. If things are successful, I’ll add new projects like setting up marketing and shipping.
But I just can’t see tackling those things successfully without having Getting Things Done under my belt.
Editor’s Note: Here’s a post from new contributor Erik Hanberg. When he wrote me about this and said that he was going on his honeymoon with no more advance planning then the tickets home I thought to myself poor man – he’s going to come home a divorcee… Apparently he chose more wisely that I had in my marriage or else his devotion to GTD is a magic elixer for travel trouble with a spouse but it seems he managed to survive the trip unscathed and actually had a little fun in the process. This post is also a good example of doing something with GTD that I need to learn to do myself; that is use if for things that you want to do too- not just things you have to do. Welcome home, Erik and thanks for the entertaining post.
Two Return Tickets, No Reservations. What could go wrong???
A three-week honeymoon to Thailand and Cambodia … what need is there for GTD, right? On my main list of “contexts” for my tasks–home, office, phone, email, online, read/review–there was little I could do. I wasn’t at home, my phone didn’t work, I had limited access to the Internet, and as for “read/review”–I had packed all my magazines and books that I intended to go through. So again, why would I even be thinking about GTD?
Well, how else was I going to make sure I did the fun things I wanted to do? How else to make sure we had our flights, visas and hotels arranged on the fly? And how else could I make sure that I returned home ready to hit the ground running when I came back to work?
All we had was a return ticket and three weeks to kill…
When my wife and I landed in Phuket, all we had was a ticket home three weeks later. No hotel reservations, no tours booked, no real definite plans–just a flight home. The freedom to let the wind carry us where it would was wonderful, but it also gave me a lot of action items at the start of the trip: apply for a visa to Cambodia, book Phang Nga Bay boat tour, research hotels in Bangkok, etc.
Certainly we could have done a lot of that work before starting the honeymoon, but we both felt a lot better about making decisions once we saw the lay of the land (not to mention that the weeks ahead of the trip were full of wedding planning).
To make it a little easier, I created a “Thailand” tag in Things, my GTD program of choice, that allowed me to quickly separate the 5 or 6 action items I needed to do on vacation from the 150 other items. That said, I was able to check off some items I hadn’t expected, like “get a haircut” and some other tasks that would have been mundane at home but were actually kind of fun and challenging to do abroad.
Be Present
After the burst of planning, the need to plan ahead fell by the wayside and we were able to just be present to enjoy the beauty of Thailand and Cambodia. We explored ancient temples, sampled pad thai from street vendors, and lounged on some of the world’s most beautiful beaches. With limited advanced planning, we operated based on how we were feeling that day. If we were tired of hanging out at the beach, we grabbed a taxi and headed for a remote attraction. If we felt like we hadn’t seen enough of a particular town, we extended our stay another night.
Work and home were far away things, and if I ever had a thought I wanted to remember later, I jotted it down and went about my vacation.
Two Weeks In
After about two weeks of travel, I started to notice I was getting fidgety. Home and work–which had previously felt light-years away–were now suddenly looming. My mind was starting to dwell on projects and tasks I had waiting for me back home. Late one night while on an overnight train transfer I pulled out my computer and–for the first time on the vacation–did a full weekly review. There hadn’t been any need before that, but I found that tucked into the narrow confines of an upper-berth bunk I was in the perfect place to cleanse my mind of the random thoughts that had been distracting me. In less than an hour I added more than 40 action items to my list and a few new projects that had occurred to me on the trip as well.
Going through that short exercise helped me fully engage with the last week of our vacation with no worries about the jump back in to work. It also gave me a renewal of energy. The wear of travel that had slowly accumulated over two weeks was washed away, and it felt like the trip was starting over. The next day I took a Thai cooking class. The day after, I bathed an elephant–a task that doesn’t normally appear on my action list, unfortunately. (If you want to see a short video of my excursion to the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand, check it out here.)
Now that I’m back
Coming back from long trips, I used to feel like I needed a vacation from my vacation. That wasn’t the case this time. Was that GTD? I don’t know for sure. But I came back feeling refreshed, excited, and ready to go.
Community Contribution by Erik Hanberg
I lurched into a Getting Things Done system over a couple fits and starts. First it started with two friends who had read the book and were talking it up. I was uninterested in what I thought was a “self-help” book.
But that soon changed when I discovered an Atlantic magazine article about David Allen and GTD by a writer I particularly like, James Fallows. Some of the ideas were interesting enough that I started doing them right away, based on Allen’s quotes in the article.
It took another week or so for me to get a hold of the book, and I fine-tuned my process as I read. I could quickly see the potential of the system, but I thought that it would take a lot more work to really get the system working the way it was described in the book (the collection phase seemed particularly daunting).
A couple weeks later, though, while spending the Fourth of July on beautiful Madeline Island, Wisconsin, I’d done a passable enough job of getting my lists assembled and I was ready to enjoy my vacation. One incredible morning I spent on the front porch of the house: just me, a cup of coffee, the view of Lake Superior, and not a thought in my head.
I was finally clued in to what David Allen had been getting at: with everything off your mind and on paper, you are free to just be. That morning was all the evidence I needed that I should make the effort to fully implement GTD.
The Sunday after returning from Wisconsin I scheduled off six hours and completed a full GTD collection. Suddenly my file system worked, my action items were easily collected, and I was feeling on top of the world.
Amazingly, six months later, I’m still doing GTD. This is unheard of for me. I’m much more the kind of person to become fascinated with an idea, an author, a certain world-view, or whatever other bright shiny thing I latch on to—only to drop it a month or two later for the next bright shiny thing.
But GTD was different because of one important function: the weekly review.
Certainly the feeling of being on top of things is a high sufficient to keep a productivity system like GTD going, right? Well … no. I feel great after burning 300 calories at the YMCA and eating a healthy dinner, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to go back the next day.
The weekly review has become an essential part of my week. Using Things for Mac, an action item appears weekly that tells me to do a weekly review.
Cribbing directly from Getting Things Done
• Find all loose papers
• Go through last week of calendar
• Go through next week of calendar
• Review projects and action items. Should I add a project for any action item?
• Am I waiting for anything?
• Go through Someday/Maybe List
• Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas I can add?
I’ll usually be able to add another 20 action items or so during the review. Some of them are triggered by the review of papers or the calendar (That’s right, I need to get that document reviewed by Tuesday’s meeting), others are triggered by reviewing the project list. (One of my projects is “Enrich relationship with friends.” This usually puts an action item on the list like “Email Aaron” or “Call Phil about games.”)
In the last six months, there have been plenty of bad weeks—bad because I’m feeling spacey, lazy, or grouchy—and I am negligent with logging action items, checking my next action list, and recording ideas when they come to me. Each and every time, the weekly review has pulled me out of it.
To make sure I actually do the weekly review, I make it as pleasant as possible. On Sunday nights I gather all my loose papers and take them into the living room, where I sit in my favorite armchair with my computer on my lap. A glass of wine and music on the stereo are usually involved, too. I’ll tell my fiancée Mary that I’m doing a review and will get a quiet hour of uninterrupted time, although recently I’ve been able to get the whole review done in 30 or 40 minutes.
Some Sunday nights scheduling won’t allow me to have the time to do a review, so I’ll usually bump it to Monday afternoon. It doesn’t have the same “feel good” impact, but I get through it and make it to the next week.
I’ve made it through 25 weeks of solid GTD work. And 25 weeks is a pretty good sign that this is bigger than a bright shiny fad. I’m sticking with it … weekly review by weekly review.
A Community Contribution by Eric Hanberg
When I started implementing GTD this summer, I thought the main benefit was going to be felt in my work life first and foremost, as GTD would help me juggle my pieced-together living as a freelance writer and web developer.
GTD has certainly helped me professionally, but it has been my personal life—the non-work, non-paying responsibilities I have—where I’ve seen the most dramatic changes thanks to GTD.
Let me give you an example.
I have lived in a condo in a small four-plex building in downtown Tacoma for the past five years. I’ve served as the president of the condo association since moving in. This was an accident. At the very first meeting of the four owners I made the mistake of asking; “Who’s going to sign checks?” Apparently everyone decided that the person who thinks of the question should be the one to do it, since I was immediately elected.
But with such a small association, a better title for my high office might be Master Light-bulb Replacer – Or Chief Leak Investigator – Or even Director of Spider Removal. The sum total of the work required of the president probably totals no more than two hours of work a month. And yet I never did it. It was as if the less time it took, the more likely I was to put it off.
Neighbors complained about dark staircases, or poor lawn care service, or the build-up of recycling in the garage. And I felt ashamed I hadn’t been more proactive. I didn’t deal with problems until the last minute, sometimes much later. I got in to the habit of ducking my neighbors and hated bumping in to them on the stairs.
Managing Two Minutes at a Time
The GTD system has turned this around, thanks almost exclusively to David Allen’s Two Minute Rule. (For the uninitiated, the Two Minute Rule states that if a task can be done in less than two minutes, it’s best just to get it done there on the spot.)
It was amazing how many of my duties were only two minutes long. A neighbor says the gardeners are missing a patch of grass? Fire off a two-minute e-mail to the management company. I notice some windows have lost their seal in my unit? Fire off e-mails to the other owners to see if they are having the same problem. Standing water got me worried? Call the handyman and schedule a time for him to come out.
Because of my shame at the lousy job I was doing, I used to mull over these tasks and endlessly put them off. Which, not surprisingly, made me feel worse about the lousy job I was doing.
And now it’s hard to even remember why I dreaded them so much. Most of them take just two minutes!
Certainly, I can’t credit the Two Minute Rule for everything here. The whole GTD suite of solutions has been helpful. But I’ve come to realize that so many tasks I used to dread at work or at home are really just two minutes of my time once I commit to doing them.
When I think of the worry and heartache I used to put myself through … I’m relieved that it’s all behind me.
These days, I doubt I spend anywhere close to two hours a month on the condo association. So I’ve cut the time I spend on the job, stuff is actually getting done, and I don’t feel guilt or shame when I see a neighbor. In fact, I enjoy running in to them in the hallways and catching up.
So, yes, good fences make good neighbors. But I’ve learned good task management systems make for pretty good neighbors, too.
