Ready for Anything - Part Two

This section of David Allen's book is called Focus Productively. It makes the argument that our ability to change how we see things is the key to productivity. Here are the segments in this part, and my notes.

14. For more clarity, look from a higher place.
"It's not what is going on in your world that's good or bad. The world just is what it is. What makes the difference is how you're engaged with it." You need to look at your situation in terms of where you are and where you want to be, taking yourself out of the day-to-day panic and looking at it from another perspective.

15. You won't see how to do it until you see yourself doing it.
Visualization allows you to figure out how to get where you want to go. You have to see the goal before you can go there.

16. Working hard enough is impossible.
You shouldn't be just keeping busy, or latching on to the easiest thing you can be doing to feel like you're working. Having your work collected allows you to figure out what you really need to be doing.

17. Energy follows thought.
We all have tricks to make ourselves more productive and focused. Part of this is thinking about things before they happen, and thinking about the circumstances that allow us to focus.

18. The clearer your purpose, the more ways to fulfill it.
Always ask yourself why you're doing something, or why something is set up the way it is. Often you'll find that it needs to be rethought, particularly if you're unclear about its purpose. Think about the purpose of your daily habits and routines. Look at your workspace and see if it's set up to achieve its purpose effectively.

19. Best is much better than good.
Focus on doing your best. Drop your self-doubt, desire for personal comfort, and habits, and think "what is the absolute best thing for me to be doing right now?"

20. A change in focus equals a change in result.
"How fast can you get back to 'ready'?" What do you do when you get a big surprise? How easily can you refocus and act? How are you viewing a situation or problem right now? Could you see it differently?

21. Perspective is the most valuable commodity on the planet.
Leverage times when you're inspired. Write ideas down when you think of them so that you can bring them back when you need them. Take advantage of challenges by learning to see them differently. Think about situations in which you find yourself inspired. How do you get there?

22. You have to think about your stuff more than you think.
One of the tenets of GTD. You need to make decisions about next actions. You need to write the next actions down, and you need to be able to find the next actions when you need them - in your trusted system.

23. You don't have to think about your stuff as much as you're afraid you might.
People avoid thinking because they're afraid that they will be overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do. They feel like not thinking about it helps them relax. But actually doing the thinking helps you be at peace. "You need to be complete with your incompletions." "I consistently come back to the awareness that I'm not my work, because I've objectified and reviewed it."

24. If you know what you're doing, efficiency is the only improvement opportunity.
This section talks about "Stress Transcendence." "When the fulfillment is present inside me and I'm okay with myself at the deepest level, it's not about getting everything done. It's just a process of doing -- and a very conscious process at that."

25. Only one thing on your mind is "in the zone."
Focus on the task at hand. Be true to your agreements with yourself.

26. The value of a future goal is the present change it fosters.
We set up a dichotomy between "just being" and doing. But it's a false distinction, because we are multidimensional. "You are active by the nature of your intention of where and how you focus your consciousness." To create a balance life, you should ask yourself "What type of doing most aligns me with my being?" so that you can align your goals with your values.

Marc Andreesen's guide to productivity

Remember Marc Andreesen? Back in 1995 when I first started paying attention to the Web, we all resented him for being so young, so smart, and so rich after inventing Mosaic and starting Netscape. Fortunately, I'm older and wiser now, and can let go of my ill will.

This month he's launched a blog, and it's great so far. This post on productivity is well worth a read.

Commonplace books

In case you don't know what a Commonplace Book is, here's an interesting article. As a note-taking fool (see below) it's a concept near and dear to my heart.

Speed feed reading

I have been an RSS-readin' machine since I saw this post on Robert Scoble and his 622 feed subscriptions. I now follow his lead and start with "All items" in Google Reader. I make a first pass using the shortcuts (s for star, j for next item, k for previous item), starring anything that sounds vaguely interesting. Then I hit gs to go to the starred items. Then I have a leisurely read, unstarring as I go. If there's something I want to read, but don't have time, I just leave it starred for the next time. Those shortcuts sure are better than mousing!

Ready for Anything - Part One

David Allen's Ready for Anything has been sitting in my "to read" pile for a while now, and recently I actually sat down to take a look. I thought it might be an interesting blog post to summarize this somewhat scattered collection of meditations on the "why" of GTD. As in, why does it work?

The book is divided into four parts. Each part includes 10-30 short sections, each examining a thought or question related to the larger topic. The first section is called Clear Your Head for Creativity, and focuses on the importance of getting stuff out of your head and into a trusted system.

Here are the segment titles in this part, and my notes about each one:

1. Cleaning up creates new directions.
Reiterates the importance of always having the tools you need to capture inputs, and the comfort that comes from negotiating all your "open loops."

2. You can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing.
Traditional "to do" lists don't work because they attempt to do all the steps (collect, process, review...) at once, and because they are too simple to really capture all the different things you have to do. You have to know everything you need to do in order to feel good about what you are doing.

3. Knowing your commitments creates better choices of new ones.
"If you don't know the current inventory of your work, you won't be fully aware of what you can't do." You need to practice concentration and cooperation. You need to cooperate with your world (job), knowing what really needs to be done, and concentrate on what's really important.

4. Getting to where you're going requires knowing where you are.
Objectively review your current reality in order to give yourself a realistic picture of what's important and attainable. Take inventory of your life.

5. Infinite opportunity is utilized by finite possibility.
Create a concrete set of actions or be overwhelmed by all the possibilities. "'More and better' will always stretch out in front of you, as you attain it."

6. Two commitments in your head create stress and failure.
You have to deal with the minutiae, regardless of the other priorities you might see. GTD forces you to react to minutiae, and trains you to be productive.

7. Priorities function only at the conscious level.
Getting stuff out of your head and objectively evaluating it frees you up. By evaluating, you do things when they are appropriate, and avoid problems later.

8. Closing the open loops releases energy.
Self explanatory.

9. If it's on your mind, it's probably not getting done.
This is why review is so important. You have to trust that when you get something out of your head, that you will come back to it. If you don't believe that, you will keep thinking about it.

10. Creativity shows up when there's space.
We fear that if we look at it all, we'll be disappointed that it's not enough. But usually it's freeing, and I've also found that I'm impressed and humbled by what I've done and what I'm doing. It helps you see the boundaries you need to set, and that you really are productive after all.

11. The deeper the channel, the greater the flow.
Cleaning up increases our capacity. We hold good things back from ourselves because we don't think we can handle them.

12. Worry is a waste.
Worrying happens when you avoid thinking about thinking. You have to force yourself to think about your work and what needs to happen.

13. You are not your work.
"You process the things you have attention on so you can do what you really feel like doing." (Because you know what can wait.)

The sections are often redundant and they're all getting at the same basic point: that getting stuff out of your head and into a trusted system allows you to make good decisions about how to spend your time, and frees up your mind.

On a related note, lately I've taken his encouragement to capture my "stuff" a little farther than I might have to if I was just focusing on actions. I've started "brain dumping" whenever I can, writing down thoughts and observations in a strange stream-of-conscious quasi-journal. Afterwards, I process this content, looking for action items or observations that I can put elsewhere. For example, I keep my more creative ideas for fiction or literary writing in Stikkit. I keep my thoughts about organization and productivity in a separate document. My day-to-day notebook is just where I get stuff out of my head, without worrying whether it's stupid or important.

I'm a big fan of what Merlin Mann and Anne Lamott, call "shitty first drafts." This journal of mine is a step even lower than that. It's a collection of data that I can later edit into a shitty first draft. I find the whole process very freeing and comforting.

I'll follow up soon with section two.

Clean Edges

Wow, major "blinding flash of the obvious" about GTD today. I've fallen off the stress-free productivity wagon a bit lately and decided to spend some time getting back on.

I've been keeping all my actions and projects together in a Circa/Rolla-based Hipster PDA. Each card in the Circa represents a project, and I use the card to think about what needs to be done, what the status of the issue is, and just general notes about what I'm trying to do. The idea was that each day I'd flip through the cards and figure out my next actions, which I would put on a daily to do list. As things developed, I'd take notes on the cards and update the statuses. (stati?)

But it wasn't working, and I realized that I didn't have what David Allen calls "clean edges" to my system. My "could dos", "must dos", "someday maybes", and "waiting fors" were all mixed up. It was too time consuming to read through each card and figure out what I was going to do next, so I was avoiding the whole thing and just wandering from one interruption to another.

So I decided that I need a list of the actions I'm ready to do right now. The list has to be things I can actually do, not tasks that are waiting for something to happen, or that I think I might do at some point in the future. Sound familiar? Like a "Next Actions" list perhaps?

GTD is so simple but so hard.

Exploiting the Negatives

Waiterrant.net is often wise.