So, where was I? 

Oh yeah… I was talking about maintaining focus when writing and doing other production work. I find that my brain is constantly throwing completely irrelevant ideas into my conscious awareness.

As a coping mechanism, as a student back in high school and college, I frequently used to study to music, and found that it usually helped my concentration.As an adult, I started slipping into the habit of media multi-tasking — trying to watch TV, IM/Twitter and read/write at the same time. NOT effective!

So as an experiment, I’ve reverted back to my school-age practice of using music to try to help me focus. The difference is that now I’ve approached it more scientifically, testing and comparing my ability to maintain sustained, focus effort with different kinds of music. Now, I’m not claiming that I’ve been rigorous — I won’t be publishing this in any medical journals — but I’ve definitely found what does and what doesn’t work for me.

Here’s what doesn’t seem to work for me:

• Lyrics – If there are vocals, it seems to activate the language center of my brain and distracts from writing or reading effectively.
• Too mellow – If it’s too relaxed, it puts me to sleep.
• Too simple – Apparently my subconscious mind requires a certain degree of complexity to keep its attention on the music. Ambient music allows my mind to wander still.
• Too complex – Polyrhythms, complex chord changes, etc., become an intellectual exercise of their own.
• Multiple instruments – Another form of complexity, multiple instruments demand more conscious attention. A simple rhythmic accompaniment is usually OK, but large ensembles don’t seem to work well.
• Too familiar – If the songs I hear are too familiar, my mind wanders to memories associated with the songs.

So that was my challenge: to find music that is energetic, moderately complex, performed on a single instrument (or small ensemble) and not overly familiar.

Enter the marvelous world of social music. Sites like Pandora and Last.fm allow you to create “stations” that play music of a particular style. You can “seed” the stations with particular artists or songs, then vote “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on the songs as they’re played. Over time, you can create stations that are tightly formatted to the specific musical characteristics you’re looking for, but provide you new and unfamiliar music so you get plenty of variety.

I’ve been working on this for months, experimenting with the various musical formats. I’ve created/found a few stations at Pandora that perfectly suit my requirements for “music to work by”. I invite you to have a listen and see what you think. And if you don’t like them, you can modify them or create new ones for your own tastes:

• Modern Fingerstyle Guitar
• Flamenco Guitar
• Contemporary Solo Piano
• Impressionist / Modernist Solo Piano

How about you? What music helps you get things done?

Image by Jesse Therrien via sxc.hu

I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it. “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.

You know the feeling. Inbox…empty. Weekly review…done. Deliverable…delivered. Project…complete. That slight rush as you say, “It is finished.”

This can be a great additional motivation in getting things done. One little completion “fix” after another and pretty soon you’re on a major productivity roll.

But there can be a dark side.

See, the act of completion feels so good that it can become an addiction — to the point that we very easily find ourselves finishing something — anything — that we can finish quickly, rather than diving into larger, more difficult tasks.

We all know the joy of picking low-hanging fruit. On the up side, at least it’s productive — at least it’s doing something to help us move forward.I don’t know about you, though, but I could probably spend an entire month knocking out a backlog of low-hanging fruit without doing anything on any of my major projects. While a month might be a bit much, in reality I frequently find myself spending several hours – even an entire day — finishing things that are productive, but not truly the most important thing I need to be doing.

But that’s not the worst of it. When it becomes downright destructive is at the point that you start feeding your addiction by finishing anything. A game of Sudoku. Another level in World of Warcraft. Random house cleaning. Watching the last episode of the Monk marathon you recorded two weeks ago. Replying to all your Twitter and Facebook messages.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, assuming they are truly at the top of your priority list. And yes, entertainment can be at the top of your list even when you have work to be done. Your brain needs a break in order to be at maximum productivity when you’re focused on work.

But the appeal of these things is in more than just their entertainment value. A big part of the appeal is the illusion that you’re actually accomplishing something — feeding that fix of getting things done, even if what you’re getting done isn’t at the top of your list.

So what’s the solution?

As with any habit or addiction, quitting cold turkey is difficult if not impossible. The best way to quit a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. It’s OK to be addicted to getting things done — just replace getting anything done with getting the right things done.

You don’t have to be perfect at it. In my own experience, I’ve found it just about impossible to leap directly from that completely wasteful time to maximum productivity. Just take one step up the ladder. If you find yourself doing something pointless just for a completion fix, start picking some low-hanging fruit instead. If you’re on a roll with low-hanging fruit and avoiding bigger tasks, choose just one. Pick the highest-priority task that you can get done in, say, an hour and do it.

No matter how good your system is, it’s still ultimately only as good as your ability to stick to it. If you find yourself having a hard time, this is one place to look. Watch yourself for a week and see if you may have an addiction to getting anything done, rather than getting the right things done.

Image: Missouri Bike Federation

Frankly, I’m not enough of an expert in GTD to do a point-by-point analysis, either of agreement or rebuttal. However, I don’t think it’s really appropriate to refer to these as “holes” in GTD — they’re more an issue of scope. GTD isn’t the be-all end-all system to make every decision in your life. And while I believe it can make everyone more effective than they already are, there are some things that GTD simply won’t do or fix. Here’s my very personal take on what those are for me:

1. Self-discipline

There’s a difference between being organized and being disciplined. You can have the best possible system showing you what you need to be doing next, or today, or this week or this year, but no matter how good that system is, it’s not going to help you much at the point of decision as to whether you do what your system is telling you to do or whatever other options are vying for your attention.

Personally, I’m not much of a creature of habit. Oh, I suppose I have a few, but I have a terrible time developing new habits. I can’t even seem to take medicine or vitamins consistently for more than about a week. My sleep patterns are inconsistent and so are my work hours.

So I can handle GTD’s basic organizational framework of consolidating and clearing my inboxes, making a big list, the four D’s, etc. But my weekly review doesn’t happen every week, and it never happens at the same time when it does happen.

My problem — not GTD’s.

2. Attention Deficit Disorder

I believe most entrepreneurs have ADD, it’s just a matter of degree. This isn’t just a lack of self-discipline — it’s a fundamental difference in the way the brain works.

As for me personally, I’ve never been clinically diagnosed with ADD, but since I started exploring the subject a few years ago, I’ve taken several assessment tests and generally score somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% indication of ADD. I was fortunate to grow up in an environment that allowed me to become high-functioning, but I’ve still always had challenges with it.

Now that I recognize it for what it is, I’ve learned and implemented some specific coping skills and adaptations. But it’s still incredibly easy for me to get distracted, or the reverse, hyper-focused to the exclusion of other things that are important. I’ll take one of those 2-minute tasks and spend 10 minutes on it when I really should defer or delegate it.

GTD isn’t a cure for ADD, and I don’t expect it to be.

3. Addiction

Hi, my name is Scott and I’m a computer game addict.

(“Hi, Scott!”)

Left to my own devices, I’d just as soon spend most of the day playing Anarchy Online, Rappelz, Onslaught or any number of completely pointless games (WoW anyone?). Other people are addicted to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, porn, television — any number of activities that suck away your productivity.

But I’m not ready to give up games completely any more than I would recommend people completely drop out of social networking. There’s a positive side to them, in moderation. They are relaxing, enjoyable and offer a break from the thought patterns of our work, while still exercising the brain.

So I find tools and tricks to manage my addiction (my personal favorite is LeechBlock). Many others don’t. I know hundreds of people who throw themselves into social media WAY beyond the point of productivity and simply refuse to be self-aware of that fact.

GTD isn’t going to cure our addictions, small and large, and those will be a drain on our time until we address them in other ways.

4. System overload

Every system breaks down when you exceed its operational capacity — period. The fact that GTD does too can hardly be called a shortcoming.

If you are allowing so many inputs to come in that it takes you 4-5 hours a day just to process your inbox, what do you expect? If you make commitments to clients and business partners that will take you 50 hours a week to do the work, then you’re going to be working 60-70 hours a week, because your other operational overhead doesn’t go away.

Sure, you can delegate some things, but there are going to be financial and practical limits. And, of course, the more you overload your system, the less time you have to manage it, which simply accelerates its inevitable collapse.

You may be able to achieve marginal improvements in efficiency by optimizing your workflow, but ultimately, the only way you’re really going to prevent system overload is by restricting inputs into the system. That may mean learning to say “no” better, networking less (which is counter-intuitive) and going on a Tim Ferriss-style “low information diet”. And I guarantee you those last two are even harder to do than the first one, because we’ve all been taught over and over the value of networking and information, and both are available in over-abundant supply these days.

5. Prioritizing your values

Sure, having a big list gives you better visibility as to how your day-to-day activities affect your ability to achieve your life goals, but nothing in GTD is really intended to help you figure out what’s most important to you — only to help you align your time with your true priorities.

A few years ago (pre-GTD), my wife and I owned a retail store. We finally got to the point that we realized that our system was overloaded. So we went through an exercise together of reviewing all of the major projects and activities in our life. When we did, we realized that the store was #3, but that it was getting in the way of #1 and #2. So we closed it, as soon as we possibly could. No regrets, because we knew we were doing the right thing.

But no action/time management system could really have helped me with that, and sometimes we have to make those difficult choices.

All of the issues I raised above are addressable. But are they really all issues for a productivity management system? Some of these seem like more the realm of behavioral therapy, hypnotherapy, maybe even medication. Or maybe NLP has the answers, or the Law of Attraction, or… who knows? Believe me, if I had quick and easy answers, I’d share them.

The point is, we human beings are complex systems (actually, we’re a system of systems) — far too complex for any one system to provide a suitable framework for total life management. So when I look at how GTD or any other system fits into my life, I prefer to think of scope, not shortcomings — edges, rather than holes.

It’s not your network itself that has value for you, it’s your ability to call your network into action.

That’s a pretty broad concept. What does it mean in practical terms?

Let’s take a simple example: how many people do you know who would loan you a dollar? $10? $100? $1,000? As the dollar amount goes up, the number goes down, of course, not just based on the ability of the people to take that action, but their willingness to do so based on the strength of their relationship with you. Simply put, how well do they have to know you in order to take a particular action on your behalf?

That point is the “action threshold”.

If you build a “network” of thousands of “friends” or “connections”, the vast majority of them are going to be very weak relationships. Frankly, you’re lucky if they even recognize your name. How likely do you think they are to take action on your behalf? In fact, with more and more “noise” being generated in the social media world – Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. – it becomes more and more difficult to even get people to take the most trivial of actions, like replying to a message on Twitter or commenting on a blog post. How much more difficult is it to get people to do something of real value?

Given a limited amount of time to spend building relationships, the more people you try to meet and maintain relationships with, the weaker they will be, on average. I’m not suggesting you should build just a small, close circle of friends, but that you consider whether going for raw numbers is really the most effective use of your time. If a relationship isn’t actionable, how valuable is it, really?

The easiest way to build stronger relationships – the kind of relationships that get things done – is by taking some of those “above the threshold” actions for others yourself, by helping others get things done. Here are some ideas on ways to create real value for people via social media:

• Instead of leaving a dozen or so blog comments, write one guest blog post for a friend.
• Instead of leaving just an opinion on several questions on LinkedIn, spend an hour with the person who needs help with a spreadsheet (I did this one last Sunday).
• Instead of posting on Twitter about what you had for lunch, post a review of a new book or product of one of your associates.
• Instead of browsing a couple of forums, spend half an hour calling one of your contacts and discussing with them.
• Instead of inviting a dozen more people to your network on LinkedIn, write a recommendation for someone already in it.

Social media is a powerful tool for building your network, and a powerful network can help you get all kinds of thing done in your business and your life. But don’t make the mistake of confusing activity with progress. Invest your time in relationships in a way that will yield real returns, not just the illusion of results.