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Posts Tagged ‘David Allen’
My Old Friend, Paper
I often wonder about the fate of paper. For all the talk about “going paperless,” I think we are still at least a generation away, but that’s probably all. Do children today even have an opportunity to write things on paper anymore? I’ve read that many schools have stopped teaching handwriting, and I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there are plenty of things that children really need to learn in school in order to become prepared for life in the modern world, so perhaps it’s prudent to substitute handwriting for technology lessons. On the other hand, there is ample evidence to suggest that there is a critical connection between handwriting and cognitive development.
Aside from the effect on the developing brain, what is paper’s place in managing the details of a modern life? I always have many people in my trainings who are “list-makers,” and many of those people still make lists on paper, even younger ones. I was one of millions of people worldwide in the 80′s and 90′s who carried the huge paper-based planner inside the zippered leather binder, and I managed my life very efficiently with it for many years.
In the early 2000s, I reluctantly made the switch from paper to electronics. I knew this was where the business world was headed, and I wanted to be prepared to teach my clients. While my paper planner was efficient, I quickly realized that the increased efficiencies and productivity gains offered by electronic tools were so great, paper simply couldn’t compete. I realized that one would have to work much harder and take so much extra time to use a paper-based planning tool, that the financial and time investment made in the technology would provide returns almost immediately. That was more than 10 years ago, and the technology has advanced still more to bring so many conveniences, I find it hard to remember how I lived without them!
I still believe that it’s worthwhile to hand write notes, but I also believe that the most efficient thing to do is to then transfer the relevant parts of those notes into an electronic planning tool. (I now do most of my handwriting on my iPad using the PenUltimate app, which gives me the best of both worlds.)
First, for those “list-makers,” a handwritten list on paper is simply no match for all the ways that modern technology has created to distract us. In your work environment, you are probably facing at least one computer screen (maybe two), a screen on your handheld device, and maybe even a screen on your desk phone and a television or two, depending on your industry. Matt Richtel, technology writer for the New York Times, calls this “screen invasion.” Each of these screens has motion and lights and colors and sounds and all methods of stealing your attention. Unfortunately, your handwritten list is simply no match for current technology.
Just a partial list of other advantages of electronics over paper for managing the details of your life:
- you never have to rewrite or otherwise spend time recreating anything generated electronically
- paper can’t remind you of things
- paper can’t be backed up in any realistic way
- duplicating paper takes time and is cumbersome
- paper takes up much more space than electronic storage
- writing things on paper usually takes more time than capturing them electronically
- electronics provide more media offerings – such as pictures, videos, audio, or text
- a living document on paper is difficult or impossible to share with others in different locations
Because of all this, I found it curious that David Allen has just released for 2012, the “GTD Coordinator(R),” a paper planning tool. This is a joint effort between David Allen and MeadWestvaco (a paper company). I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that Mr. Allen, author of Getting Things Done, would launch a paper planning tool, since his book is full of advice on using note cards, notebooks, and endless file folders, but I always thought that was just because the book was written so long ago (although it was published in 2002, at the end of the year that I was making my switch to electronics.) While his methodology is great, I just can’t imagine why someone who teaches productivity systems and processes would advise a tool that is so woefully outmatched by current technology.
I believe that handwriting and paper still has its place, and paper might work best for you. But we have so many more technology conveniences today, and I’ve found that your productivity can improve significantly by harnessing those conveniences. (Check out this post and this post for some suggestions.) So to best capitalize on the productivity improvements of the 21st century, I suggest you pass on the GTD Coordinator.
Thanks for reading!
The Three Stages of Productivity: Which One Are You?
We all have days that seemingly fly by and at the end, we know that we were busy, but we can’t really articulate exactly what we got accomplished. I’ve come to recognize that as “stage one” productivity. For some of us, many days go by like that. And for still others, it’s a way of life. When you’re at stage one productivity, you are almost exclusively in reactive mode. And being reactive doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t being productive, because it means that you are dealing with the other people in your world, and we all have to do that sometimes: going to meetings, answering emails, returning phone calls, putting out fires, etc. In fact, maybe you are someone whose job it is to be reactive. For example, if you are a manager, and you don’t have any other responsibilities except to be there for your employees, help keep them on track, make sure they are meeting deadlines, dealing with interpersonal issues, etc., then I would say that means your job is to be reactive. However, if you have even one responsibility that isn’t dependent on your staff, at least one thing for which you alone are responsible, and there are parts of it that other people can’t do for you, then you must find some time to be proactive, in order to get that thing done.
Which brings me to the second stage of productivity. Stage two is where you are making time, every single day, to be proactive. You are knocking things off your to-do list, and you finish each work day feeling some sense of accomplishment…some sense that you actually got some stuff done that day. This is a great place to be. If you find yourself having a hard time getting to stage two, my suggestion to you is to break your habit, which I’d bet money that you have, of checking your email first thing in the morning. If the first thing you do when you start your work day every morning is to check your email, that sets the tone of the day for being reactive. It sends you down that rabbit trail of answering emails, responding to people…before you know it you’re reading blogs, checking your Twitter stream, your Facebook notifications…then next thing you know you’re off to a meeting, then to lunch, and when you come back, it’s back on email, and the cycle starts all over again. Break that cycle by going to your to-do list first thing in the morning, instead of checking your email. Work for an hour or ninety minutes checking items off your to-do list, and then check your email. The result will be a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, even if the rest of the time was spent being reactive. You’ll be able to point to some concrete things that you completed that day.
But for many people, there are probably things on your to-do list that need to be done, and may even be important, but completing them may not have a significant impact on your work or your life. Many of them may not bring you closer to the big picture goals you are trying to achieve. So this brings me to the third stage of productivity: not only marking things off your to-do list, but completing things that bring you closer to your goals. Some people call them “big rocks.” If you are unfamiliar with the metaphor of the big rocks, you can watch a video of Stephen Covey illustrating it. He was not the first one to come up with it, but I couldn’t find the originator to give credit.
You are working at stage three of productivity when you accomplish one or more goal-dependent things in your day. Things that are steps toward achieving your major goals or initiatives. It’s similar to the concept Brian Tracy calls, “eat that frog.” My suggestion to reaching stage three productivity is to make sure that you have your “big picture” objectives always visible to you. I do this through my “projects” list. I need to always be able to lift my head out of the “trees” and see the “forest.” Keeping a list called “projects” helps me accomplish this. However, every project must have one thing that you can do next, to keep it moving forward. These concepts are part of my process, the Empowered Productivity System, and some of them are also in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. I learned them long before GTD was written, however, through a company called Time/system International, among others.
It’s helpful to remember that it’s sometimes important to be in stage one and stage two productivity, but you’re really empowered and shaping your life with intention when you are spending time in stage three productivity.
Thanks for reading!
The Relationship Between Happiness & Productivity
There are a few magazines I read with regularity, and one of my favorites is Real Simple. If you are a guy, I hope I haven’t just lost you! Bear with me, if you will. Real Simple magazine surveyed 2600 women and men on their keys to happiness. My wonderful husband, Shawn, is a statistician so I must acknowledge here that yes, 2,600 is a very small sample and yes, I’m sure the survey was quite unscientific. Nevertheless, I think some of the results are illuminating and seem perfectly plausible to me.
One of the results was that 72% of people report that happiness, for them, lies in making progress toward their goals, even if they never achieve them. This is easy to believe because other studies of happiness report the same thing. In The Happiness Hypothesis, author Jonathan Haidt writes that people report being happier before they’ve achieved their goals, and happier before getting things they thought they wanted, than they are after. It seems that the lesson here is that it is indeed true that it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
Part of the Empowered Productivity System teaches people to translate goals into projects, and projects into single-step activities that are actionable. Because it seems that merely having goals is helpful, but not enough. Actively making progress on them is one of the keys to happiness. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” For example, “get fit” is a great goal to have. But if you put it on your to-do list like that, it’s likely never to happen, because as it is, it’s not actionable. A great way to tell if something is actionable is to to ask yourself, if I had some time right now, could I get that done?
So first, it must be translated into a project, and a project must have a definable beginning and end. You must be able to tell when it starts and when it will be over. So one project related to our “get fit” goal might be, “exercise a minimum of 3 times per week for 6 months.” Once this project has been completed, exercising will likely be a habit that will be continued. This project, however, it also not actionable without some further definition. So the first step (or the Next Action of the project, as David Allen writes in Getting Things Done) might be, visit www.mylocalgym.com for membership rates and class schedule. Or, an alternate Next Action might be to visit the local running store and get fitted for shoes, or make an appointment with a friend to walk a mile on Tuesday….you get the idea. Goal becomes project, project becomes actionable next step. This contributes both to your happiness, and to your productivity.
There was one more interesting result from the Real Simple happiness survey that I’ll share with you tomorrow. If you enjoy these posts, please use the RSS feed link in your browser or on the right side of this page, or follow me on Twitter @mnthomas, so that you can get updates as they happen. Thanks for reading!