Prioritisation

The killer feature of productivity software and methods should be prioritisation rather than filing. We deal with such a large volume of inbound traffic in our digital lives, from social media to email to articles and videos from our favourite websites that we need systems to help us focus on the most important things first. Facebook already tries to show you what's most important on your Timeline, but as far as Facebook is concerned, Facebook is all there is. What we need is a way to draw absolutely everything in our lives, from all that digital stuff above to the actions and projects, movies, TV shows, books and so on into one inbound stream, or as few streams as possible. That makes the next step easier: figuring out what's most important out of everything.

This will always take some time. After all, there's always more stuff coming in, and you'll always have to deal with it. However, if you're dealing with the most important stuff first, and you know that it's properly organised, you'll know that everything is as good as it can get. There's no need to stress that you aren't dealing with the hundred and three things that came in this morning when thirty of them are company update fluff from upper-upper management and another thirty are a passive-aggressive "reply-all" war about no business of yours. This, to me, is a key of GTD. Consolidate your inboxes, your filing and your action lists, prioritise them properly and then just do the work. It gets really hard to do sometimes, but it's absolutely worth it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have too many digital inboxes that refuse to play nice.
PPS - One day, I'll figure out how to manage them better from a single interface.

Personal space on planes

When I read opinion pieces about air travel and leg room, reclining chairs and all things related to personal space, I think of the current designs for car trailers on trucks. See, when I was a kid, if a truck was hauling cars, they would be lined up in two layers of three, nose to tail. Then someone designed this nifty new way of cramming more cars onto a trailer at a lot of weird angles including one hanging over the truck cabin and hauling cars by truck became a lot more efficient with a lot less wasted space.

My point is this: you might think that your current personal space and comfort woes are about as bad as they can get on a plane right now, but just wait until someone clever figures out how to stack human beings in weird and interesting patterns to fit twice as many into the space as currently fit and you'll wish you lived back in the good old days when our only concern was having barely enough room for our knees and people reclining their seats at us, all facing forwards and upright.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Almost nothing is as completely bad as it could be.
PPS - We humans are great at making things worse for each other.

Personal disaster planning

Whatever role you are in, it's important for everyone around you to have an idea of what you do and how they could replace you in case you were hit by a bus tomorrow. It doesn't even have to be such a permanent situation as that. If you broke your leg and had to stay home from work for six weeks, how would the business cope? In some cases - menial work - there won't be much of a problem. Someone else will cover your shift, some other person with similar skills can fill in on a temp basis, no big deal. In some other roles, though - husband, parent, museum curator - your disappearance or disablement may cause serious disruption to the people around you. If you are proactive about this, you should prepare for this eventuality. I call this "the black envelope".

Inside the black envelope is everything anyone would need in case you are no longer available to fill your role, permanently or only temporarily. What you do day to day, how you do it and where everything important is kept. It's like putting together a job handover package before it's necessary, because you might not get to deliver all the information in person.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I actually don't have one of my own yet.
PPS - But, like backups, I've been meaning to start any day now.

Deciding and doing

Knowing what to do and doing it are much more fun than trying to find out what to do next. Decisions are hard. Action is easy, unless you've convinced yourself that you need to get motivated to take action.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Separating your deciding time from your action time is a big part of GTD.
PPS - At least the way I remember it. I need to re-read that book.

Most of our information is disorganised

Does Google go far enough in actually organising our information? They have the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive index of websites, and for some very simple questions they have "top-box" answers. There's also Wikipedia, which is a pretty good summary of the most significant items of human knowledge. Still, there are vast swaths of human knowledge that are too esoteric or difficult to be addressed these ways, and that feels like a wide gulf we can't yet cross.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Wolfram Alpha tries to be a factual answer engine. That's something.
PPS - Neither of them has answers for questions like "what might be wrong with my router?" though.

Efficiency in the face of overwhelming volume

There can come a point in any inbox/process/outbox system, such as email, when the volume coming in simply outpaces your processing capacity. I call it the "firehose point". When you simply get too much email to handle, what can you do? It's not a matter of "time management" at that point, nor of getting more efficient at handling individual emails, because any time management or email handling strategy you employ can be overwhelmed again by more volume. I mean the point when, no matter how quickly you handle any item - even to delete it - by the time you're done, at least two more have arrived.

The only possible response at that point is to accept that you will never see everything. Some people handle holiday email with a kind of declaration of bankruptcy: select all, delete, rely on second-notices if it's important. People do the same on social media, only reading the most recent items. It's an acceptable strategy, in its way, but you really should only apply it to situations where it doesn't matter if you're uninformed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, if you happen to miss the second notices, too, you've got bigger problems.
PPS - Assuming you have real responsibilities managed this way, that is.

File everything

If you're looking to get more organised, it's really a whole journey to having a full system and the habits to maintain it. However, if you're just looking for that quick hack that will give you the most benefit with the least effort, start using a filing system. Buy a ton of manila folders and a filing cabinet, and start using it for literally everything that will fit. Don't leave things around the house in places where you'll "just remember", and definitely don't pile things on the desk, even if you have a piling system ("this is next week's bills, this is letters from Grandma, and these on the floor over here manuals for household appliances that stopped working five years ago"). Your goal in this filing-obsessed situation is that the first response when you wonder "where is such-and-such?" is always "filing cabinet". If you can't fit an item in there physically, you find a place for it elsewhere, then write down where it is in your filing system. It should be like the library card index of your house.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My filing system is not quite as good as this.
PPS - It needs some maintenance.

Setting priorities

I am terrible at prioritising my time. This is obviously not a boast. It's also how I ended up with over a hundred YouTube videos waiting on my attention, a growing backlog of podcasts, tons of unwatched TV and many articles and books (physical and ebook) to read, all sitting and rotting in multiple lists I might never get around to.

Recently I realised that I need to make some choices. Clean house. Admit my limitations. I also realised that I have a suitable toolset for the task already. I have a program I use to vote pending blog posts up or down, relative to each other, to help ensure I post the best stuff here. As it turns out, that same tool can let me prioritise my entertainment if I put it all into one giant list, and the only decisions I have to make, now and then, are whether I want to watch, for instance, this TV show more than I'd rather read a particular book.

So far, it's working pretty well. It's still a bit of a pain deconstructing my other playlists and wish lists, but because everything is in one big list, it's really no extra trouble once it's done. It's helping me to feel like I'm not going to neglect something important or fun. And eventually, if I keep at it long enough, the worst items, whether books, movies, TV shows, articles or YouTube videos, should naturally fall off the end of the list, never to be heard from again. That is the ultimate goal: discarding what I really didn't need to spend my time on while using my recreation time on the most enjoyable things. It's a system for strategically neglecting the least important entertainment.

I'm actually pretty excited about it at this point. My previous method had been to arrange one whole type of entertainment - say, my TV backlog - before all others, and to stick with that until I was completely done with everything in that category. I'd listen to all my podcasts on the train ride home until that queue was empty, then allow myself to read books. It wasn't working. This new way, with everything in one list, a good book has an actual chance of winning out against TV that, in the end, I might rather not watch at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I rewrote the voting algorithm just for this.
PPS - That's another bonus of this method: I get to write more software.

Putting the pieces together

On Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., one of the characters said that she was part of an organisation because one person might not have the whole answer, but 100 people with 1% of the solution will get it done. Those 100 people would still need a coordinator to fit them together, though. A 100-piece puzzle doesn't assemble itself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unless you count "badly, in a random pile" as "assembled".
PPS - I doubt anyone would count that.

Priority vs capacity

Priority traffic sounds like a good idea until you throw enough bandwidth at the problem. For example, laundry. If you have some garment that you need to wear and wash every couple of days, such as your only work uniform for a messy job, you might keep it aside and throw it into the wash whenever you put on a load. Everything else sits in the basket and waits its turn. This is a perfectly functional system, but it can break down if too much laundry gets the priority treatment. At that point, even though you have a system for treating some garments as special, their express handling doesn't mean anything, because they still don't get washed quickly enough.

The real solution is more capacity, not prioritising. If you wash enough laundry per day, then all of your garments get washed, whether they are high priority or not. It doesn't make sense to bypass a queue that operates at high speed. The same argument applies to anything buffered: theme park queues, to-do lists, internet traffic, highways or airport security. The answer to delays in general is not to create a new, better, alternative queue, but to throw a lot more capacity at the existing queue.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you're selling express tickets, though, you have no motive to increase capacity.
PPS - In fact, you are now motivated to clog up the regular queue as much as possible.

Randomness

I like this quote from Randall Munroe on xkcd:

"In retrospect, it's weird that as a kid I thought completely random outbursts made me seem interesting, given that from an information theory point of view, lexical white noise is just about the opposite of interesting by definition."

He makes a good point, if not for the fact that kids actually do find that kind of random outburst both interesting and hilarious. Within the kid subculture, on some level, the most random person wins.

As adults, we lose a lot of that, but not all. How many people avoid being organised or planning anything in advance, just because they value spontaneity over predictability? We all know that predictable and dependable are synonyms for boring, and nobody wants to be boring, so the person with the least organised life (the college dropout who stumbled into a million-dollar idea, or the hipster girl who changes hairstyles and jobs every few weeks) wins at being interesting. Everyone else who keeps society running, like the dependable electronics engineer, the honest cops and judges, gets shoved to the back as irrelevant when they are actually the fabric on which the "interesting" patterns are drawn.

That doesn't make random outbursts more interesting, though. They're just a less mature, more desperate version of the way a lot of adults live their whole lives.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm pretty much one of the boring ones.
PPS - Most of the time.

Goal setting

I used to get very upset when people talked to me about the important - some would say paramount - task of setting goals. You have to set goals, they said. It's vital. The most important thing you can do, or else how do you know where you're headed?

Okay, I'd reply in my head, I have a goal to own and run a software company. Now what? There was no guidance on that. That's what frustrated me. I could have goals, but no idea how to get there, even in very tiny steps. What is the task I should have done, that day, as a high school student, to progress towards my goal? The only thing anyone seemed able to offer me was "set goals". It seemed as if their entire strategy was to impress upon me the importance of goal setting, and then let the rest sort itself out in my undeveloped teenage brain somehow.

My point is that goals are only half the story. You need a plan to get there and, in that sense, the plan is even more important. Yes, you need to start by figuring out where you want to be, what you want to do, but how you're going to get there is essential.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - These days, my life goals are only reviewed once or twice a year.
PPS - According to GTD, they're supposed to help filter my day-to-day actions for relevance.

Domestic User Manual

Someone should write a list of things you should know how to do around the house. Not basic domestic skills like washing dishes, but how those tasks map to the particular features of the house, such as:

- How to turn the mains power on and off
- How to turn the water mains on and off
- How to work the washing machine, clothes dryer, dishwasher, barbeque, oven and stove
- TV, DVD and stereo operations
- Where all the cleaning products are kept

And my personal favourites:

- Restoring internet connectivity
- What's the wifi password?

Those kinds of things should go in every house's operating manual. I plan on drawing up document templates that anyone can fill out. Then, if you ever need a house-sitter, or you move out and make your current house a rental, you can just hand over a printout of all the pertinent information. It might work even better as a digital document, with photos and videos embedded for some elements, but it would be easiest to put together as a paper document.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For house-sitting, include some info on pet care.
PPS - I also need a good name. "Domestic User Manual" makes for a mildly insulting acronym.

Menial knowledge work

I think if I had to take a menial knowledge-work job, I would work with people to help get them organised. I'd teach them how to file things properly, get their calendar in order and I'd teach them about action lists and how to use them. I could do that. I'm not sure how much people would pay for it, but I could do it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, it would all be stolen from David Allen.
PPS - That's Getting Things Done, which I haven't actually been doing that well lately.

Action lists programs

I've tried to use Google's Tasks program to keep track of my action lists, but it has always proven inadequate, at least as far as proper GTD practices go. The main reason I use it and not something else is that it's a Google product, so it works well with my phone. But if it doesn't work well with me, then what's the point? It's not Google Tasks I want, but some program that I can access online or offline, on my desktop or my phone, that allows me to set up sequences of tasks easily and to tag them with contexts so I know what type of action they are and can call up the appropriate list when I need it (such as when I am shopping). Google Tasks is just not doing that, and every other program I've looked at so far seems to omit at least one of those requirements - usually offline desktop access and subtask sequences, and quite often context lists. So if I want this imaginary program, I'll have to write it myself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For now, I'm giving Astrid a try.
PPS - It's not bad.

Organising ad-hoc information

Sometimes I get disheartened about my options for organising and capturing information. When I'm at the stage of vaguely contemplating a project, such as building myself the ultimate bedside table, I'll have lots of random thoughts, sketches and research threads to track. And keeping it all together semi-coherently just doesn't happen. I can make notes and keep them in a text file, but if I make a baseline sketch, I'll need to manually digitise it, file it and annotate it to keep it with the rest of the project notes. What I really want is a tool that I can draw in, type in, use like rearrangeable index cards and generally just capture all my thoughts in whatever format they come to me. It sounds amazing, but it's nowhere near reality yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might be too busy with all of those features, though.
PPS - Unless it's really well designed.

Killing Time

Are you killing time or using it? What is the end result of what you're doing with your time? Does anything come out at the end, or are you just more skilled at flinging birds at pigs, or perhaps more informed about the lives of celebrities you will never, ever meet? At least becoming more informed about something useful would produce something, and sometimes we want to kick back and have some fun, but does every spare moment of our lives have to be filled to the brim with aimless overstimulation?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am often guilty of killing time instead of using it.
PPS - But sometimes I get it right.

Sticky note programs

There are lots of programs that simulate sticky notes for your computer. Windows 7 even comes with one built in. And I've just figured out why I don't like them: you only ever get as much space to physically arrange them as you have on your computer desktop. It's as if someone gave you free reign to write whatever you want on an infinite stack of index cards, and arrange them however you want, but only within a tiny little tray. As soon as you try to store any decent amount of information there, you'll run into problems.

Scrolling and zooming are hardly new concepts in software, but apparently these sticky note programs haven't caught up to that point yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure I'd lose track of some of my notes on an infinite canvas.
PPS - So maybe it's not the final answer.

Email and collaboration

When you really think about it, email sucks as a collaboration tool. Either you need to keep copying everyone on every message so they know what's going on, even if you're just passing on a message, because some people might not know that someone else has been informed of something. Maintaining that list of who needs to know what (and who needs to know who knows what) is a major hassle.

That's even before you get to the point of editing documents as a group, where multiple people can be emailing multiple versions of multiple documents so often that it's not even clear what the most recent versions are, let alone whose job it is to merge them into one.

There are solutions, but they tend to be online (where businesses don't trust the data storage) or don't mesh with Microsoft Office. So we stick with that one old tool, email, that doesn't quite get the job done, but manages to do most of what we need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The core problem is solved.
PPS - It's the migration and market share that we need now.

Personal data organisation

How do you store and organise your semi-structured data? Do you make lists on paper? Do you file them in any system? Do you have a card index? I struggle sometimes with the amount of data I store, and not all of it has to do with work. I have a lot of text files that grow and grow, lists of TV and DVDs to watch and buy, logs of the time I've spent at work, not to mention my ongoing work diary and personal journal, plus emails, address books and non-time-related writing on various topics not for blogging, but just to lay things out in my mind.

It bothers me that I've never found even a few systems that can handle this to any degree of consistency, availability and robustness. Databases are generally too structured and require tools I don't always have with me. Spreadsheets would be good, but they'd quickly become too large to manage by hand. Text files are clearly inadequate, or else I wouldn't be looking to anything else, and wouldn't be frustrated with them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm probably after a personal wiki.
PPS - But no personal wiki system has ever struck me as adequate either.