TheScri.be

So, after sorting through my home filling and organizing my projects, I moved on to my filling at cadets. I’ll not bother explaining the process as it was much the same as the process I went through before.

Essentially, I requisitioned the file cabinet drawere that holds blank forms. As we print most forms on demand, there are only a few blank forms stored in there these days. I gave each of these a file folder and included them in my alpha file system along with everything else.

During this process I also cleaned up my desk, threw out some useless reference folders and created two new ringbinders for reference:

• Annual Camp Folder - For documents relating to camp inspections, drill competitions & formal parades
• Lesson Plans - For paper copies of all the lesson plans used in the squadron

Here are some pictures.

So the Second round of GTD-inspired stuff happened this morning. There’s not much to explain here really, except that I’ve just gone through all of my reference materials and condensed & sorted them.

On looking at each piece of paper or folder I asked the following questions:

1. Will I need to look at this again?
2. If so, can the information be better stored electronically
3. If not, does it need archiving?
4. Is it in the most appropriate folder?
5. If not, where should it go? What should the folder be called?

What I ended up with was a bloody great pile of stuff to bin, a small pile of stuff to shred or burn, a small pile of stuff to file at cadets and a surprisingly tiny set of nicely labeled file folders in alphabetical order, filling less than half of one file drawer. Cool. here it is:

While sifting, sorting and scrapping I was reminded of one or two things I should be doing and these duly went into OmniFocus via the (pretty cool) quick entry box. There were duly made into projects and, if they had paper stuff, were given file folders too.

Project Front Sheets

The next stage in my journey to sort shit out involved defining outcomes, ideas, constraints and what not for all of the major projects I’ve got going. It’s worth noting here that these only apply to major projects. All the smaller projects that are simply a reaction to life aren’t worth worrying about.

Below is the sheet I use for defining projects. I knocked it up the other day after reading the section on project planning in GTD. Let me know what you think of it.

I’ve switched over to a new domain and am in the process of sorting a website or something for it. Henceforth, this site will do bugger all, except act as a place for me to jot down my ideas and progress with…

Sorting my Shit Out

After reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done for the second time (the first was three years ago), I was inspired to get on one sorting things out with me. Perhaps it went the other way around - I re-read GTD because I wanted to sort things out. Either way, I’m feeling inspired.

My intention is to go through the following steps, roughly speaking:

1. Sort my organizational stuff out
2. Do less stuff I dislike and more stuff I like. See less people I dislike and see more people I like
3. Get my Being Healthy thing on.
4. Start building a bit of a brand

So, the other day I started with the first bit, sorting my organizational stuff, all GTD inspired. I bought a nice Brother Labbler from Amazon and set off on a Collection & Organization Binge.

1. Collection

I gathered up all the things that were dotted all over my computer, at home, at work and at cadets and dumped them on my mattress or in a my INBOX folder. After that I wrote down everything I could think of that was bugging me, big and small and piled them on top. That’s about it for collection.

2. Organization

Yesterday Morning I went through all of the items in my Inbox, creating project files for any defined projects with paper-materials and adding those projects to OmniFocus.

Any small Projects which won’t need support material and should have only a few actions went into a n OmniFocus folder called “Small Projects”, and paper for them went in a file folder with a shiny new label “Small Projects Support Stuff”.

For the rest, the projects were split into three Categories: Cadets, University, Others. You can see my Projects list in the screenshot on the left.

One of the issues I had with using OmniFocus in the past was the enormous number of projects I racked up. Anything that required more than one action step was made a project, and this quickly cluttered up both OmniFocus and my brain. This time around I’ve decided to put any small, two-or-three-step ‘things’ into the Miscellaneous Project (shown below).

After this almighty great job I set up a bunch of contexts and a definite next action for each project. Then I had a cup of tea.

It feels pretty good to get all of my stuff out of my head, it’s already allowing me to focus more on what I’m doing and less on what I have to do. What’s the next step? More Organization, with a sprinkle of brainstorming thrown in and of course, more labeling. Cool.

A few days ago, my girlfriend Frankie bought me an iPhone. I thought I’d mention the few things I did to get my new toy up and running.

Applications

After unwrapping it, marveling at the packaging for a few minutes, and activating it I set about installing a few basic applications:

• Facebook - A standard really, we all live by Facebook these days.
• Last.fm - I’ve been using iScrobbler and Last.fm for years now, the iPhone version is a great way to get some new music when I’m walking about.
• NetNewsWire - I use the desktop version to read RSS on my mac and having both applications sync with Newsgator means that my latest news will always be with me. I usually spend about half an hour a day reading news but I’m hoping that now it’s in my pocket, I’ll be able to fit that in while I’m waiting around for a bus or a lecture.
• Remote - Now I can control iTunes from downstairs.
• VNC Lite - I don’t often use VNC but as the application’s so small I thought I’d install it just in case. There are times when I’ve dearly wanted remote access to my mac while out and about. I also updated the VNC Server on my mac (OSXVnc).

Although I’m trying not to buy many applications, I did splash out on two.

• Pennies - A simple but useful money tracking and budgeting app. I’ve often recorded my expenses on an index card and totted them up at the end of the week, it strikes me that doing it on my phone will save me both time and effort, and for the sake of the pound or so that it cost I think it’s well worth it.
• AirShare - This is great. Essentialy, it turns your iPhone into a WifFi hard drive, enabling me to drop files onto it from my mac while it sits in my pocket. I can effortlessly pull files off in the same way when I’m at a friends machine or at cadets. The killer feature for me is the ability to view PDF, source code and iWork files with it. It allows me to read eBooks and lecture notes while on the go. I’ve got an alias to the iPhone in my home directory for easy access.

After configuring the phone’s apps, I set up access to my Gmail account and synchronization with iTunes. I’ve currently got the phone syncing with an iPhone playlist and an iPhone images folder, as well as my latest podcasts.

Contacts

It was a bit of a hassle moving my contacts across from my Sony Erricson K810i - it took me about an hour in total. Here’s what I did:

1. Synced the contacts from my K810i to Address Book using the methods described here. Note that I had to remove the K810i from the iSync list, disable iPhoto from opening automatically and then re-add it to iSync before I could Sync.
2. Synced my Address Book with the iPHone and Gmail (using iTunes) to get my gmail contacts into Address Book.
3. Worked through the address book renaming people, editing email addresses, merging contacts and deleting millions of random numbers. At the end of this I used Address Book’s ‘Find Duplicates’ function to make sure I was done.
4. Added the contacts to various groups and distribution lists.
5. Used the wonderful AddressBookSync to match up my facebook friends to my contacts. This imports their birthday and profile picture if it’s available. The automatic matching is pretty good (it matched Gaz to Gareth) but it’s worth looking through the unmatched list because unless you’re perfect at spelling it will miss some.
6. Synced the iPhone wil Address book using iTunes.

I’ve not got my contacts and email synced across my Mac, Gmail and my iPhone and I’ve got everyone’s birthdays and photos in the phone. The birthdays also show up up in iCal, which makes my life even easier!

I hope this was useful to someone!

Hi, I’m not dead.

It’s been an awfully long time since I’ve written anything here (just over a year in fact). Still, a minute ago I felt compelled to write, so here it is.

Shifting Focus

In the past I wrote a lot about productivity. I was an avid reader of lifehacker, zen habits & other leading “life hack” blogs and was keen to pass on some of my knowledge to anyone who’d listen. About 18 months ago I shifted my focus to learning and started reading Cal Newport, Scott Young and other writes on the subject. My desire to pass on what I learned faded. Lately, I’ve had yet another shift of focus - from learning to philosophy, and hopefully for you I’ll want to tell you about it.

In the three of four years that I’ve been learning about productivity I’ve made massive improvements in my organization & workfow: I’ve found software products to help me work efficiently, developed a version of GTD to organize myself more efficiently, learned skills to help me learn more efficienty and made changes to my routine & home so I can live more efficiently. All of this has been great but there’s one problem.

Efficiency is crap

The trouble is, efficiency is only a good thing when applied to the stuff that you don’t really want to do. Some might argue that this is bollocks, that it’s good to be efficient in say, your workouts at the gym. Perhaps technically they’re right.

You see, for me, efficiency means “To minimize the amount of time taken to achieve the goal” and while I attend the gym with the goal of getting fit, I also want to enjoy it.

If I’m constantly trying to be more and more efficient in my workouts, I’ll loose that enjoyment. This is particularly true when thinking about relationships with others - is it really a good thing to be efficient with your partner? Probably not.

With this in mind, I think that I’ve reached a fairly good level of “productivity” - there’s only so much that I can “hack my life”, before I need to look at the bigger picture: Why am I here and how do I make the most of it?

And so to philosophy.

Although I’ve dipped into some philosophy books in the past, and pondered the different philosophies of the people I meet, I’ve not really made an effort to think about things and after all, philosophy is thinking.

I’ve not got much more to say on the subject at the moment but I’ve found that the notes (MP3 and PDF) at philosophersnotes.com are great for setting the gears in my brain whirring.

Time to think

The first step in thinking is finding the time to do so - everyone yearns for some quiet retreat in which to ponder and recently I’ve found that my own head is the best one (thanks Marcus). The thing is, before I can crawl into my head I need to have less stuff in it. No one likes pondering in a junk shop.

In an effort to remove some of the mundane “gumpf” in my head I have, in true Danny style, written two lists:

• Important Ongoing Commitments
• Important Finishable Projects

The first list contains all of the commitments that I’ve made to myself and to others over the past few months. I’v also added some of the people I’m committed to supporting and removed some of the things that I’m not whole-heartedly committed to. The important this is that none of these items are finishable.

All of the finishable commitments I’ve made, like “Remove Vista from my girlfriends laptop so it actually works”, make up my second list. Every item in this list has an obvious and intuitive end condition, some test as to whether I’m done or not.

These lists reside on the whiteboard next to my desk and above them is the promise that I’ve made:

Everything that I do will either further a commitment in list one, lead directly to the completion of a project from list two, or else be fun!

I will not take on any more projects until all of those in list two are complete.

Perhaps I’ll let you know how this goes.

A note on the future of this website

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of redeveloping TheScribe and indeed it’s still on my list of things to do. I’ve got a few interesting ideas and It’s looking likely that the blog will eventually be running on a specially designed engine. Don’t hold your breath though - this isn’t on my projects list and isn’t likely to be for some time.

If you want to keep up with me I do occasionally post interesting things over at dannyat.tumblr.com.

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a great deal about the direction of my business and work, and also of this blog. It’s lain dormant since May thanks to a lack of motivation on my part, and a busy schedule elsewhere.

One of the things I’ve been thinking abut is creating an online portfolio of my illustrations and design work, along with a website to create leads for my business. Initially, I thought of using this blog as both a business front-end, and as a productivity and design blog. After working with this idea for some time and talking to various people about it, I’ve decided against the idea.

This decision is based on three factors:

1. This blog focuses mainly on productivity and lifehacks, my portfolio site should focus on design and creativity.
2. I’d like this site to have a clean, minimalist design whereas I think my portfolio site should showcase some more impressive and off-the-wall stuff.
3. I have two separate audiences: prospective clients and interested readers. My readers don’t want to look at my design, and my clients don’t want to be overwhelmed by articles on productivity.

My next idea was to maintain a portfolio site with an attached blog on design and art, and focus this blog on productivity. A sensible idea? Perhaps not.

Time constraints

Although I’d like to write more, I’ve found in the past that my posting schedules are far to ambitious. I’ve got a number of commitments that draw on my time and I often find it hard to maintain this one blog, let alone two separate blogs.

This thinking led on to the idea that I could maintain two sites, but only one blog - One site hosting my portfolio and business details and this blog, covering articles on productivity and art & design. The simplest way for me to separate the two “streams” on the blog would be to offer three RSS feeds.

• A Productivity feed for my productive audience.
• An Art and Design feed for my artsy audience.
• A combined feed for the nutters who are interested in both.

After putting this to my friends, I’m convinced that this is the best way to go. If anyone thinks differently, please let me know.

The next steps

My work on a new theme for this blog is coming on nicely, as is my article on the process I’ve used to design it. Now that I’ve decided to keep my portfolio and blog separate, I’ve removed a large chunk of the work involved. Hopefully, you should see a relaunch of this site in the near future, with a new design and some flagship articles.

Assuming my other commitments don’t get in the way, and my motivation to write doesn’t decline you should also see an increase in post frequency. I intend to post about three times per week:

• Once on productivity.
• Once on art or design.
• Once with a short story or poem from my girlfriend (or perhaps something else silly).

As far as my portfolio site is concerned, I think I’ll wait until i’ve got this project sorted before I embark on that.

Over the past few years I’ve tried a number of goal setting techniques with the intention of improving myself, learning more or getting more work finished – none of them have worked. Earlier today I set out to discover why and found that structured change doesn’t suit me. I need loose change instead.

What went wrong?

My earlier attempts at a structured form of goal setting and habit change failed monumentally. While I diligently worked away at my goals and stuck to my aspired habits for a bit, after a few days the novelty fell off and I sacked more and more. This is testimony to my lack of motivation, perhaps another problem with goal setting. If I’m not motivated to work towards my goals then how can I hope to achieve them?

Another place where my structured system fell down was it’s timings. Each step in the process lasted a definite number of days and had a deadline at the end. Deadlines and schedules, say a lot of experts, are great. They motivate you to work towards your goal. Not if you’re me they don’t. Instead the morph a pleasurable and exciting task into something too much like hard work, ruining my enjoyment of it.

For example, attending the gym is a pleasure for me, when I go that is. However by strictly scheduling gym sessions into my calendar it becomes just another part of my concrete “work” schedule and ceases to be fun.

Rigid deadlines too are a problem, they force me to worry unduly about things which have no need for speedy completion. To add to this I suffer from an inability to correctly judge project times, I’m hopelessly optimistic when creating my deadlines.

The final nail in the coffin of structured goal setting was the amount of time I spend thinking about it. Either defining my goals exactly, organizing a progressive schedule towards them or redefining my deadlines and goals as my situation changes.

The Solution?

Loose Change.

This is the rather ridiculous term I’m using for my new goals/motivational/self-help system. When I set out designing it I needed some requirements. Everyone knows that a system needs requirements don’t they?

• Requirement 1: Simple – A simple system won’t take up much of my time and more to the point, it won’t have any novelty. It should be easier to stay motivated if it’s simple.
• Requirement 2: Free of deadlines – I hate deadlines.
• Requirement 3: Free of a regular schedule – This means less time spent planning, and that I’m more likely to enjoy myself.
• Requirement 4: Actually works – If it doesn’t work it’s all a waste of time.

I thought it would be nice if my system could to hep me achieve my goals without utilising specific “goals”. If my goal is to “get fit enough to run without dying”, my non-specific goal might be “The Gym”.

Brief interlude: I can see you thinking “this is ridiculous” but if you stick with it for a bit I might make more sense.

My non-specific goals have very little power, unless isolated and kept simple. To this end I reckoned on two categories for them, with one goal from each category running concurrently, as a segment (I love that word), until achieved :

1. Self Improvement: One learning or improvement related goal.
2. Play: One random, fun goal to work on.

After some reflection, I realised that the term “goal” is a bit misleading, what I’m really referring to is an area of my life: “The Gym”, “Painting” or “Eating Well”, for instance. With this in mind I redefined my categories:

1. Self Improvement: A focus on a particular area of self improvement until it is refined and working well.
2. Play: Continuing focus on one fun activity until I’m proficient at it, or until I’m bored.

You’ll notice the loosely defined time constraints in there. They aren’t deadlines but rather they’re stop conditions and when I’ve reached them I’m done with that goal. Thus far I’ve satisfied requirements one and two. To satisfy three was simple:

Each area has no schedule, one or other of the categories is to be pursued in my newly-unscheduled time.

After a little more thought about how I could improve this system I realised that some vague time constraint was needed. Without one my segment was likely to run forever as the stop conditions might never be reached. The time allowed for each segment depends on the nature of the areas and as I define each set of aims, I’ll define a “Loose Time for Segment” (in days) along with them. I know from past experience I’m more likely to stick to a deadline that isn’t strictly a deadline but is a guide.

After deciding on this time constraint It struck me that I could use this vague deadline to motivate myself towards completing some more pressing work within the same timeframe. This thought led me to add a third category to my original two:

1. Self Improvement: A focus on a particular area of self improvement until it is refined and working well.
2. Play: Continuing focus on one fun activity until I’m proficient at it, or until I’m bored.
3. Project: Continuing work on one project until It’s finished.

So there it is. All that remains is to decide on my first three aims and see if the system stands the test of time, satisfying my fourth and final requirement.

My First Segment

I’ll not elaborate on these too much as they’re meant to be simple and obvious.

• SELF-IMPROVEMENT: A Study on study. Reading and learning about better methods of study and the human learning process.
• PLAY: Vector Illustration.
• PROJECT: Organisation of Admin & Building at 1440 Squadron, Air Cadets. A Project which needs pushing out of the way as quickly as possible.

LOOSE TIME FOR SEGMENT: 30 days.

I’ve printed these in 72pt font and stuck them on my wall above my monitor. Hopefully every time I’ve got nothing to do I’ll work on one of these. As I started this segment on the 10th of January, I should finish round about the 10th of February. I’ll be posting a review of this system around that time, and defining my next segment then.

If you’re like me and hate deadlines then give this a crack, I’d be interested to hear any thoughts and criticisms (or perhaps forecasts of my success) in the comments.