Building good habits: How I taught this old dog new tricks

Building good habits—you can teach an old dog new tricks! A photograph of a black and white dog leaping to catch a Frisbee.Leonard Cohen wrote “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” One bright silver lining of the COVID pandemic is that it’s given me the opportunity to work on building good habits. Habits that I’ve struggled for years to create, because personal change isn’t easy. Though I’m in my 70’s, I’ve found that I can teach this old dog new tricks! In this post, I’ll share my specific challenges and, in detail, how I accomplished my successes.

Creating daily habits

It’s really hard for me to create a habit to do a daily task at some point during the day. I find it much easier to complete a daily task at the same time every day. For example, it wasn’t hard for me years ago to create and maintain the habit of washing my hands and brushing my teeth right when I get up and stagger sleepily into the bathroom. The habit is engrained in me, it’s automatic.

But for a long time, I struggled with reliably performing the following daily tasks:

  • Taking vitamins and meds;
  • Recording website statistics;
  • Posting on social media;
  • Avoiding sitting at my computer for long periods of time;
  • Exercising; and
  • Meditating.

Over the last two years, I successfully created daily habits to handle all of the above! Here’s how I did it.

Three habits built by changing my environment and chaining

A simple set of changes made it far easier for me to create a reliable daily habit for the first three tasks on the above list. I need to take vitamins and meds daily for my health. Because my website provider’s statistics page occasionally stops working, I wanted to record cumulative visits every day so I could contact support promptly and avoid losing data. And each day, I need to schedule a bunch of social media posts of my latest weekly blog.

One of the simplest ways to create good habits is to make them easy to do. Environmental design is about creating a personal environment where performing desired tasks is as easy as possible. This may sound obvious, but it usually requires a little creativity.

Vitamins and meds

For example, I’d always kept my vitamins and meds in the bathroom cabinet and would sometimes forget to take them daily. If it occurred to me I hadn’t taken them, I’d usually be in my home office downstairs. That meant I’d either have to stop what I was doing and go upstairs or try to remember to take them when I was next in the bathroom.

So I moved my vitamins and meds to a shelf in my office. It then became much easier for me to take them whenever I remembered.

So far so good. But how to ensure that I’d remember every day?

Once I decided to track daily website visits I needed to create a habit to remember to do so. In this case, creating a regular time to do it made it much more likely to reliably occur. But when?

It was my desire to build the third habit on my list—setting up a bunch of daily social media posts—that solved the “when?” portion for all three of these tasks. I invariably schedule my first social media post for 9 AM local time, so I had to get this task done before then. The obvious thing to do was to schedule all the day’s posts in one go.

And then I had a simple idea that has worked flawlessly since I implemented it nine months ago.

Chaining habits

I decided to chain these three desired habits into a single sequence.

Chaining habits (which James Clear [see the resources below] calls “habit stacking”) grafts new habits onto a single well-defined habit that you do every day. Choosing that existing, well-established habit was easy for me because I always start my office day with a cup of coffee.

Here’s how it works. When I walk into my office with my coffee, after the first sip I put it down and immediately go over to my vitamins and meds shelf. I get the pills I need and take them with a drink of water (new habit 1). Next, I sit down at my computer, click on the browser tab with my daily website stats and record the current visits (new habit 2). Finally, I copy the text for the social media posts I want to make that day and schedule them in another browser tab (new habit 3).

Bingo, all three desired tasks are done! No more remembering is required during the day!

At this point, the entire sequence from the cup of coffee through the last post has become automatic.

What’s been interesting to observe is what happens when I’m (occasionally) traveling and not in my office. I may not be able to start my day immediately with a cup of coffee, and my vitamins are in my suitcase. Even so, this set of chained habits is engrained enough that I have little difficulty in enacting it in an unfamiliar environment. I’ve created a single giant habit that satisfies several goals.

Designing my environment to make habitual tasks easy to perform and then chaining habits so that when I do one I do them all is an incredibly powerful way to build good habits that stick.

Moving regularly and getting enough exercise

What if you want to create good daily habits that can’t be scheduled at a regular time or chained with another habit? As I age, staying active and exercising every day has become especially important to me. I spend significant time at my computer each day, and it’s easy for me to lose track of time. When engrossed in work, I may not know whether 45 or 90 minutes have passed. Sitting for long periods is not good for my health.

Since I purchased it five years ago, my trusty Apple Watch Series 3 has become an invaluable tool for building habits to move regularly and exercise every day. As I write this, I have met my move, standing, and exercise goals every day for the last three years!

The Apple Watch has two separate tools that have helped me build these habits. A set of three colored rings, shown by a touch on the watch face, concisely display your desired daily levels of standing, movement, and exercise.

Standing, movement, and exercise

You close the Stand ring by getting up and moving around for at least 1 minute during 12 (the default) different hours in the day. This is a perfect tool for avoiding becoming a couch or desk chair potato. If you’ve been sitting for a while, the Watch supplies a gentle reminder to get up at ten minutes before the hour. When I started using the Watch in this way, I frequently needed these reminders. Over time, the device made me more aware of how long I’d been sitting, and now I rarely need a nudge to get up and move around. Apple’s Stand’s default goal of having active periods in 12 or more different hours in the day works perfectly for me.

The two other rings, Move and Exercise, can be customized to any level you choose. I leave them at their defaults (320 calories and 30 minutes). I run almost every day, and when I do these levels are easy for me to achieve. But my desire to meet these goals means that I’ll check my Watch activity any day I’m not able to run and figure out some other form of exercise.

Without my Apple Watch or a similar fitness device, I doubt I would have ever built my now-engrained habits to stand and move regularly and get enough exercise to stay fit. It’s proved to be an invaluable wearable for me.

My biggest challenge: meditating every day

As I’ve previously chronicled, I’ve struggled to meditate daily for decades. Unlike the three habits above, there generally isn’t a fixed time for me to meditate each day. I’m too sleepy when I wake up, and too tired when I go to bed. My chosen challenge is to meditate for ten minutes or more at some point each day. And my life is too varied to pick a time that will work on any kind of regular basis.

The closest I’ve come to scheduling a regular time to meditate is a recent addition to our life, a Monday – Friday 8:45 – 9:00 AM Insight Meditation Zoom session led by Narayan Helen Liebenson. My wife, Celia, and I join whenever we’re free at this time. Often, one of us will remind the other of the session and see if we can both take part.

Having a buddy system like this is a great way to reinforce habits! In addition, my friend, Sue, also tries to meditate regularly. For over a year now, we’ll email each other after we’ve meditated.  No pressure, but it supplies another reminder to practice.

These two support systems are really helpful, but I want to meditate every day. What I needed was an unobtrusive way to remind me that I hadn’t yet meditated so far that day.

Creating a trigger

Just over a year ago, I hit upon a simple method inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. As I’m at my computer frequently, I made a card with the number “10” on it and placed it below my keyboard each morning. (It’s stored propped against one of my vitamin bottles so I don’t forget to move it.)

building good habitsDuring the day, this card reminds me to meditate. Once I have, I email my meditation buddy Sue and return the card back to its vitamin bottle prop, ready for the next morning reminder.

This has worked! I have only missed four days of meditating in the last year, usually because I’ve been on the road and the card trigger wasn’t available. I’m OK with not being perfect, and very happy to have finally built this difficult (for me) habit.

Getting better at remembering to do stuff

If you’re young and reading this, you may be thinking, “What’s the big deal? I don’t have any problem remembering what to do.” Well, in my twenties and thirties, I never needed a written to-do list. I had a great memory and could easily keep track of everything I needed or wanted to do each day.

Today, an idea can flash through my mind, and I know that if I don’t capture it right away it will likely be forgotten in ten minutes. Yes, I might remember it later, but there’s no guarantee.

Unlike in my youth, if something comes up that I need to do but can’t get out of the way right there and then, there’s a real chance I may forget to do it later.

So for many years now, I’ve solved this problem using a written To Do list or software app, and/or timers.

Using timers

I’ve written about how I use To Do lists, but using a timer to remember to do stuff is worth a mention. As an example, my wife goes to bed earlier than me and I like to go and say goodnight to her before she goes to sleep. To remember to do this, I set a timer to ring when it’s her bedtime. I used to use a cheap countdown time to do this, but now I use the timer function on my Apple Watch. (I’ve found that my memory is still good enough so that when the timer goes off, I still remember what I set it for!)

Timers are great ways to keep me on track with tasks that need to be done later in the day. I also use the snooze function on my Apple Calendar to delay calendar reminders of daily tasks when it’s not a good time to do them immediately. Thinking about the duration of the timer or snooze also helps to reinforce my intention to actually do what I decided earlier.

Recommended resources

Here are two resources for creating good habits that I’ve found really helpful.

Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Building good habits

I’ve written frequently about facilitating change for organizations and groups. Building good habits is about facilitating personal change. Like me, you may also have specific wants and needs to make changes in your life. I hope my examples inspire you to work on personal changes that are important to you.

Have you used a seemingly unwelcome change in your life to create opportunities to facilitate personal change by building good habits? If so, feel free to share your experience in the comments below!

Image attribution: C Perret on Unsplash

Being Present in the Age of the Mind Outside the Brain

being present: An image of looking up into the leafy branches of trees. Photo attribution: James Reis, from his exhibit Closer and Closer

Being present is tough! The other day, Celia and I were walking in Boston’s beautiful Arnold Arboretum when she asked me who’d responded to an email I’d sent. When I pulled out my phone to answer her question, she said she felt she was walking with a third person, a stranger.

Where are our minds?

Once, our minds were in our brains. Before tools, painting, language, and writing were invented, people had no way to represent knowledge outside their heads.
What if Celia had asked her question on a walk ten years ago? I would have either been able to remember the answer — or not.

Today, parts of our minds are outside our brains.
being present: An illustration in shades of blue of the silhouette of a person's head, with a melange of letters contained in a bubble behind them. Photo attribution: pixabay.comMore often or not, answers are available from devices in our pockets. Today we rely on machines for connection with information and others. Machines allow us to research what we want to know or explore.

We also have the routine ability to capture pertinent information in an appropriate secure store outside our brain — an in-basket, notepad, voice recorder, electronic device, etc. This frees us from the need to memorize data so we can work on other things. When we need information, we access it from the external data store, not our brain.

Ridding ourselves of the necessity for our brains to remember everything

Such access allows me to worry less about remembering information I may need. Like my upcoming appointments, background on a client before an initial call, or exploring places to visit on an upcoming trip. This is a core credo of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

This freedom makes me more productive. It gives me a way to capture fleeting creative ideas that, in the past, I would have forgotten before they could be explored. I especially appreciate these technological benefits as I grow older and my memory is not what it once was.

The downside

Celia’s response, however, illustrates a downside to extending our minds beyond our brains. When we perform a move to secure storage or retrieval from it, the associated technology invariably intrudes into the relationship of being with other people present.

Celia says, “When I walk alone with you, I don’t want to feel I’m also with your 200 closest friends.”

I get it.

When I’m paying attention to my device, I am not present with her.

Some people seem OK with ignoring their partners or friends at the expense of their devices. I still marvel when I see a couple sitting together for dinner at a nice restaurant, both immersed in their phones for the whole meal. I wonder about their relationship, not that it’s ultimately any of my business.

Also, we don’t need machines to connect us when we’re alone. I recently returned from a five-day silent retreat in New Mexico where we did not interact with our fellow participants apart from the start and end and were miles away from cellular and Wi-Fi signals so our devices were off the grid. It was wonderful, and I learned a lot. [Here’s my post about a similar retreat held two years earlier.]

Luckily, compromise is possible between these two extremes while together with familiars: exclusion via total immersion in the digital world and shunning all machine connection while you’re with them.

A compromise

What I think works is explicit respectful negotiation when you want to move from direct presence to accessing devices. I could have said to Celia: “I don’t remember.” [Then I could pause to let her respond: she might have said, “Oh, don’t worry about it,” or “Can you look it up?”] … If she doesn’t respond I can ask: “Would you like me to look up the answer now, or can it wait?”

Sometimes I remember to negotiate to switch my presence in this way. It’s respectful and allows the other person(s) to choose what they want.

I know Celia appreciates it because it places our relationship first.

And that’s important to us.

Getting the best of both worlds

Being present with people you’re with is always important. Taking advantage of our modern abilities to expand our minds outside our brains can enrich our lives together. Negotiating the switch between these two forms of being allows us to get the best of both worlds.

Photo attribution: James Reis, from his exhibit Closer and Closer, and pixabay.com

How I manage my life with Kanban and Getting Things Done

Do you have a perfectly organized life? Familiar with Kanban and Getting Things Done? If not, read on!

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists…”
—Umberto Eco, SPIEGEL Interview, 2009

Managing my life

Are you blessed with a perfect memory? Me neither! To avoid unpleasant consequences, everyone needs a reliable way to keep track of things we have yet to do. As I age, my memory slowly deteriorates. But my life shows no sign of becoming simpler. There will be entries on my To Do list until the day I die.

Over the years I’ve tried many different methods to implement effective To Do lists and I’m sharing here the system I’ve used successfully for the last 11 years.  I hope it will be useful information for anyone like me who has struggled to track and prioritize their personal life and professional work.

Creating a successful To Do list methodology

One reason it’s hard to track and prioritize To Dos is that we tend to pick an available tool without first deciding what To Do list methodology will work for us. So many tools exist—simple written lists, elaborate day planners, electronic devices, software, apps, etc. Most of them have built into them an implicit methodology for managing our tasks. Unfortunately, one person’s methodological meat may be another’s poison.

After much experimentation, I have settled on using a combination of Kanban and Getting Things Done methodologies to capture and prioritize my life tasks.

Kanban was originally developed in the 1940s to schedule just-in-time manufacturing. In the 2000s, Kanban was adapted to manage and communicate software development. Recently, Personal Kanban has become popular, and I’ve been using a modified version since 2014.

The simple yet brilliant Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology doesn’t prescribe a complete system for organizing your life. Instead, it encapsulates only the essential workflow processes you need to follow to clear and organize your work life, plus what you need to know in order to choose tools and procedures that work for you. Each person’s implementation of GTD is unique.

Kanban and GTD — a winning combination!

The essence of Personal Kanban is the creation and continual updating of three lists: To Do, Doing, and Done. Tasks migrate from To Do –> Doing –> Done as we work. Most practical implementations (including mine) add a Waiting For list to capture top-of-mind tasks that currently require action outside our control before working on them.

To these core lists, GTD suggests adding separate lists for each set of project tasks. So I have a Brattleboro list (things to do when I go into town). A Boston list (when I am at our apartment there). And a Book 3 list (for tasks remaining before I publish my next book) and lists for current client projects. I move tasks from these lists into and between the core Kanban lists through the review process.
Kanban and Getting Things Done: A screenshot of a Trello project showing Doing, Writing, Done, Brattleboro, and Boston listsRegular review and updating of your To Do implementation is essential for it to be useful. Schedule reviews in a way that works for you. I like to review my Kanban/GTD implementation at the beginning and end of each day. Also, I review it whenever it’s not obvious to me what I should be doing next.

Implementation

Trello is a superb tool for implementing Kanban/GTD; check here for more information on how I use it. When I’m occasionally deviceless (yes, it still happens in this oh-so-connected world), I rely on good old paper and pen to capture ideas and build short, in-the-moment To Do lists, e.g., shopping lists. My manpurse holds a Levenger Pocket Briefcase, always filled with 3 x 5 cards, a Reporter’s Notebook, plus a variety of reliable pens, ensuring I can always fall back on a two-thousand-year-old method of making lists.

Conclusion

Amazing methodologies and technologies are available to us. Effectively planning and managing a complicated life can be easier and less stressful if you adopt approaches like Kanban/GTD and adapt them to work well for you. The choice is yours!

My favorite to-do list manager

favorite to-do list manager: a screenshot of Adrian Segar's Trello To Do list

My favorite to-do list manager

I’ve lost count of the number of to-do list managers I’ve tried over the years. There have been so many. Most recently, Omnifocus and Wunderlist were my repositories, but I eventually grew frustrated enough to dump them; nothing I’ve used has eliminated the time-honored alternative of writing notes on scraps of paper that get scattered around my desk.

Until now.

I have been using Trello for the last six months, and I’m very happy with it. [Update in 2021: Six years later, it’s still my favorite to-do list manager!]

Here’s what I like about this nifty piece of software.

  • It runs on my desktops and mobile devices, syncing seamlessly between platforms. I can update my to-do lists anywhere. (Trello runs on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, iOS 7+, Android 4+, and, should the spirit move you, your Kindle Fire HD – 2nd Gen.)
  • It works flawlessly. (Wunderlist, I’m looking at you. I shouldn’t need to frantically email tech support when all my lists vanish. Yes, you did restore them for me which is very nice for a free service but…)
  • Trello can handle much more than to-do lists. I keep all my to-do’s on one Trello “board”, but you can easily create additional boards for projects that have more than a few associated tasks if that works better for you. (Or you could color code a project’s items so they stand out on your main to-do board. Or you could tag them. Or…)
  • It’s very flexible without being over-complex (Omnifocus, I’m talking about you.) I use a combination of Getting Things Done and Kanban methodologies, and Trello makes it a snap to extend the core Kanban model (To Do, Doing, Done) in any way you like. Each Trello board can have any number of Lists, and each list can hold any number of Cards, which are your basic individual action items.  For an example look at my to-do board above, which includes a set of three priority lists (cool, warm hot), a Brattleboro list (for things to do when I go into town), a Waiting list (off-screen) for things I’m waiting for someone else to get back to me on, as well as Doing and Done lists.
  • Moving stuff about is a dream. On a desktop device, drag a card with your mouse to where you want it. No delay, just drag it to a new list and it pops into place. On a touch-screen, use your finger to drag; it works the same way. Wunderlist sometimes had annoying lags  (“Did I move it or not?”) while Trello just works—Steve Jobs would be proud.
  • More features are available when you need them, but they don’t get in the way. See this intro Trello board that lists some of the things you can do that maybe I’ll want to do someday.

favorite to-do list manager

  • Trello is free for the functionality I need. If you start using it inside an organization, you can purchase Trello Business Class, which costs $5 per user per month or $45 per user per year and adds administrative controls and security (plus export in CSV format; see below). That’s how they make money. At the time of writing, Trello has ~5 million users.

See why it’s my favorite to-do list manager?

Any quibbles?

Of course—nothing’s perfect! (But Trello comes close.) The main thing that’s a little disturbing is that all your data is stored by Trello and if the company’s massive server cloud was vaporized you’d lose all your lovely to-dos. The free version of Trello only allows export to JSON, which cannot be opened by Excel, and you’d need to use a JSON->CSV converter to get your To Dos in a form that we mere mortals can view and manipulate. The only other thing I find a little clumsy is the procedure to add or change a due date for a card, though writing this article led me to discover a world of Trello shortcuts that simplify such operations. (Yup, more evidence that the best way to learn about anything is to try and explain it.)

Conclusion

Sign up today! It doesn’t cost anything, and no salesperson will call. Want to explain to me why the to-do list manager you use is way better than this? Type away in the comments!

How to continuously improve your work life

continuously improve work life: photograph of happy workers in an office. Photo attribution: Flickr user jamescridlandI’ve already shared what I’ve learned about working productively. Now, here’s a simple review you can use to continuously improve your work life.

But first a confession…

An important part of the Getting Things Done methodology, of which I’m a devotee, is a weekly review. For years I’ve struggled to consistently implement the GTD weekly review, but I’ve never been able to completely integrate it into my professional life. Creating a regular review habit isn’t easy for me, and, I suspect, for many. That’s why my success with a work life review could be valuable for you.

An accidental discovery

I fell into doing a work life review by chance. When I was an information technology consultant, I billed my clients at the end of each month. As I added up the billable hours I found myself thinking about the work I had just completed for them: the effort it took and the aspects I did or didn’t enjoy.

As the months went by, based on what I was noticing, I slowly started to make changes in:

  • How I was doing my work.
  • The kinds of work I promoted to potential clients.
  • The clients I chose to work for.

For example, I realized that working with clients who paid well but wanted me to be at their beck and call, or who treated me disrespectfully was not worth the stress and occasional unpleasantness I experienced. Over time I dropped these clients and became better at choosing work situations that were a better fit for me.

My monthly work life review became an essential part of my professional routine during my 23 years as an IT consultant. Twelve times a year, with the results of the past month’s work spread before me, I gave myself the opportunity to reflect on what had happened and what I might like to change. This practice made me a better consultant—and a happier one!

But I’m not a consultant!

Even if you’re not a consultant or self-employed, invariably there will be aspects of your work that you can make choices about, and a regular work life review will still be useful. Implementing a work life review is important because, in the constant rush to keep your business healthy and responsive or to keep up with the demands of your job, it’s easy to neglect to review the direction of and satisfaction with the work you perform. When you don’t take the time to do a regular work life review, your relationship with your work is likely to get stuck in a rut.

For example, during a review perhaps you’ll notice there are certain work tasks you like better than others. At some point you may be able to alter your job duties so they’re more aligned with what you’ve discovered you prefer. Or you get an opportunity to delegate activities that don’t fit with your abilities or interests. Being aware of what you want for your work environment makes you ready to act on openings that could appear at any time.

Even if your manager or boss directs every minute of your workday, a work life review can still be a useful exercise if you’re considering changing your job.

Getting in the habit

Convinced that a work life review would be useful for you? It’s helpful to tie it to a regular and appropriate work activity. Why? Because it’s hard to make time for, and easy to put off such optional activities. My end-of-the-month billing was ideal since it required me to review all the work I’d done over the previous four weeks. Look for similar kinds of reviews you already perform as part of your work. See if you can incorporate a work life review at the same times.

It’s important to schedule a regular review. Once a month worked well for me.

Review tasks

Here are questions to ask yourself during each work life review.

  • What activities am I spending time on?
  • How much do I enjoy working on each activity?
  • How stressful has my professional life been since the last review, and how is that related to the amount and type of work I’ve done?
  • Could I change my work emphasis to make my professional life more enjoyable/lucrative by:
    • Concentrating more on a particular subset of clients, or giving up a client?
    • Focusing on the kinds of work I enjoy/find more lucrative?
    • Turning down work offers that my reviews indicate are not a good fit for me?

I didn’t find it necessary to include the development of action outcomes at the end of every review. Rather, I began to notice patterns over several months and these helped me make changes, both small and large, to my consulting practice when the right opportunities presented themselves. You may prefer, however, to include a brief evaluation at the end of each review, perhaps in writing, so that you can discover recurring themes from one review to the next.

I encourage you to develop your own design for your review. You may decide, like me, on an informal, intuitive review, or a more formal process with fixed questions, written responses, an evaluation, and action steps. Ultimately, creating a review that works for you and is easy to implement regularly is what’s most important.

Perhaps you already use a work life review? What do you do, and how has it affected your work life? Share your process and discoveries here. And if you are inspired to start a work life review, I’d love to hear how it works out!

Photo attribution: Flickr user jamescridland

What I’ve learned about working productively

I’ve worked out of my home office for the last thirty years, and have learned a few things about working productively. During that time I:

  • Consulted on information technology for hundreds of companies.
  • Wrote and maintained almost a million lines of code.
  • Ran a couple of small non-profits (still do) and served on my local United Way Board.
  • Wrote Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, and am now hard at work on my second book.

Along the way, I spent a fair amount of time experimenting with different environments and work processes, always with the goal of improving my productivity. As you might expect of a proponent of the philosophy of risky learning, some things worked and some didn’t. I’ll reserve the things that didn’t for another post.

You may not have as much control over your work environment and process as I do. Nevertheless, perhaps you will find helpful some of what follows.

Work environment: Office furniture, ergonomics, and beauty

working productivelyTwenty-five years ago I purchased two astronomically expensive high-quality office chairs. Until then I had sat on a sagging ancient chair rather like the one pictured. Hours spent in this chair had taken their toll. A kneeling chair replacement, while an improvement, was not comfortable for long periods. The marvelously adjustable Steelcases that made me gulp when I signed the check paid for themselves many times in adjustability, comfort, and eliminated physical therapy appointments.

A few years ago I replaced both chairs, and this time I was happy to sign the check.

In the same spirit, I learned the importance of correct ergonomics for computer keyboards and mice (later, touchpads). Long hours toiling over these machines translate to pain and discomfort if keyboard heights aren’t right and you don’t position pointing devices correctly. Don’t skimp on firm work surfaces, keyboard drawers, and touch devices that are easy to use; your body will be the victim if you do.

working productively: a photograph of the view out of my office window in early winter Finally, when I had the opportunity and funds to add a custom home office to my home I spent serious time and money creating a space that I would find beautiful. Built at the northwest corner of my home, the office receives natural light from two sides and looks out onto a flourishing garden and beautiful Vermont stone walls and woods.

Knowing my appetite for workspace, I also took the opportunity to build about three times more beautiful custom desktop space than I thought I’d ever need. (A good thing I did—these days it’s pretty full most of the time.) Having a beautiful space for my work feeds my energy and spirit and helps me get through those times when I’m feeling creatively blocked and work isn’t going so well.

Getting Things Done

No question—until the day I die I’m going to have tasks on my to-do list. Being at peace with this reality in the here and now is hard. I am perpetually interested in exploring more than I can practically accomplish. As I age, my ability to keep track of and continually re-prioritize what’s important lessens. Embracing Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done has been a lifesaver. I may always be trying to bite off more than I can chew, but GTD allows me to avoid being overwhelmed by the consequences of my curiosity. What many don’t understand about GTD, and what makes it so powerful, is that it doesn’t impose a specific implementation on you; it’s a framework that helps you build processes customized for your needs. Here’s more information on why and how GTD works.

Highly flexible, continuously-on backup of digital stuff

I have one word for those of you young enough to miss the decades when personal computers were expensive, hard to use, and frequently broke. Lucky! I’ve spent too much time configuring and running expensive and all-too-fallible equipment designed to back up valuable digital data. Today, there’s no excuse for losing any of the ever-increasing quantities of information we entrust to our electronic gizmos. My four computers continually back up to each other (local backups—great for fast restoration of a lost file or two) and to the internet cloud (remote backups—where I’d go if a catastrophe took out all my computers).

You can easily back up to other computers or hard drives in the same location or across the internet (perhaps your friend’s business across town) or to hosted servers sitting elsewhere on the internet. The name of this magic is CrashPlan. (No, I do not get a penny for recommending their service.) If you’re not using a service like this with every computer you own these days you’re nuts.

For working productively, run sprints, not marathons

It took me years to learn that working on a problem or task for hours on end without a break is not an optimum way to work. Please don’t make this mistake (no matter how young you are). Currently, I decide on the task I want to work on, set a timer for twenty minutes, and work uninterruptedly until the timer sounds. Then I’ll take a break for five minutes and repeat two or three more times before taking a longer break. I came up with this approach myself; an almost identical version is called Pomodoro. The frequent breaks give my brain relaxed downtime to mull over a problem and, often, propose creative solutions. And I find it easier to ignore the lure of the modern environment of constant email and internet distractions by telling myself I’ll just work for twenty minutes first.

That’s my summary of what I’ve learned about working productively. Do you have lessons to add?

Chair photo attribution: Flickr user spyndle

 

The most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment

improving your personal work environment: a photograph of an incredibly messy desk. Image attribution: Flickr user harryharrisHave you ever thought about improving your personal work environment?

Your web browser has eight windows open. Each window sports at least half a dozen tabs. Your monitor is festooned with Post-it® notes. Hundreds of handwritten reminders, business cards, file folders, magazines with slips of paper peaking out, and unread articles litter your office desk.

Are you, perhaps, feeling a little overwhelmed by your personal work environment? If so, and this is a habitual state rather than an occasional, acceptable occurrence, read on!

Here is what I have found to be the most powerful tool that will help to restore your sanity when workspace chaos has expanded beyond your comfort zone. (You do have a comfort zone, I hope?)

Losing control

Let’s start with a key question. Why is your personal working environment habitually and unacceptably out of control?

Answer: Because it’s reflecting a way of working that isn’t working for you.

So making changes in your physical environment, by buying twenty plastic filing trays, dumping sixteen piles of paper into file cabinets, switching to an iPad, or even setting fire to your office is not going to solve your long-term problem.

What you need to do is change the way you work. And change, as we all know, is hard.

Luckily, a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time thinking (and written a lot of books) about how to make changes in how you work. Since 1983, I’ve worked for myself, read many of these books, and tried their techniques, usually with limited success.

Getting Things Done

I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (known as GTD by devotees) in 2005. It’s still Amazon’s best-selling book in the categories of Time Management, Health & Stress, and Self-Esteem. This doesn’t surprise me, as the book is brilliant. Unlike other productivity methodologies, it doesn’t prescribe a complete system for organizing your life. Instead, David explains clearly:

  • The essential workflow processes you need to follow to clear and organize your work-life; and
  • What you need to understand to choose tools and procedures that work for you.

Implementing GTD does not involve throwing out or changing all the ways you work now. Rather, Allen’s approach gives you both a powerful lens to see what is functional in your work-life, and a comprehensive framework for making improvements.

Creating GTD that works for you

Each person’s implementation of GTD is unique. One person may use file trays and 3 x 5 cards to capture “stuff”, and another, GTD software running on a personal computer or mobile device. If email messages are piling up in your inbox, there are GTD approaches to keeping your head above water. Ultimately, you’re responsible for doing the work you need to do. GTD just provides a practical way to create the system that works best for you.

I’m not going to delve more into GTD here. There are plenty of resources on the web, including David Allen’s website and this introductory article from 43folders. But I suggest that to start you simply buy the book. It may turn out to be the best way of improving your personal work environment.

Am I 100% successful at implementing GTD in my work life? No. Sometimes I find it difficult to maintain the necessary discipline. I also have some reservations about David Allen’s approach to reviews. But I have integrated GTD’s key features into how I work, and have obtained a significant increase in productivity. More importantly, I understand why my work environment can deteriorate and what to do if it does. Possessing this understanding is empowering for me.

I hope it is for you, too.

Do you use Getting Things Done? What’s been your experience? Or do you prefer another methodology to organize your personal work environment?

Image attribution: Flickr user harryharris

One unexpected reason why I like my new iPad

3G apple-ipadEvery couple of weeks, in the free hour between my afternoon yoga class and evening men’s group, I head to the local library to work on my laptop.

Until yesterday.

Having just received a new 3G iPad, I left my heavy MacBook Pro behind and brought the iPad for its first test outside the office. I also brought Apple’s Keyboard Dock which combines a solid external keyboard with a convenient stand that holds the iPad upright. The combination was less than a quarter of the weight of my old laptop. Nice!

Here’s what surprised me while working at the library desk. The iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, does one thing at a time. To switch apps you have to press the Home button, which suspends what you’re working on, and pick the next app. Writing an outline in Simplenote for an upcoming presentation and want to check your e-mail? Press Home, touch Mail, read mail, then press Home, touch Simplenote. Annoying, right? After all, any inexpensive netbook can run several programs at once and flip between them with a single mouse click.

Well, actually, I liked using the iPad better because I got more work done.

On the iPad, the app you’re currently using takes up the whole screen, so I wasn’t aware that more email or Tweets or stock price changes or new blog comments or <enter what distracts me here> had arrived. So I was able to concentrate on what I was working on. And the extra press/touch needed to switch apps acted as a small but significant disincentive to frequently multitask—so I stayed in my outline much longer than I would have done if I’d been using my laptop.

Yes, I admit it; I could use my laptop in exactly the same way if I was more disciplined. But, usually, I’m not. So this behavior of the iPad environment works for me in a situation when I want to stay focused on doing one thing.

I should be clear; the iPad isn’t going to be the optimum platform for all my work. When I’m moderating a chat, and need a Twitter client open plus multiple browser windows to research topics that surface, the iPad is not going to be my preferred computing platform (though dedicating it to one app during the session might well be useful). But my brief experiment confirmed that, for much of what I do away from the office, the iPad is a viable, and in one way superior, platform for getting things done.

Would using an iPad help you get things done better? Or would your life benefit more from the continuous availability of a multitasking computing environment?