Productivity (Ivities part 2)

This post is part 2 of a 3 part series with me rambling about how I cleaned up my life and found more time and more energy to get on with my personal projects outside of work. Without burning out.

First: Part 1, Ivities
Finally: Part 3, Creativity

I've been trying to work out where to start to present how I've implemented GTD (or perhaps more accurately “how I've gotten productive”), in the hope that it will stop me lecturing to all my friends.

So let's start right at the beginning. Back in 2008 I felt bad. Depressed, even, and quite frustrated. Everything was too much, the handful of small (and larger) jobs I had to do was overwhelming, and I just couldn't ever see the point any of it. If you've ever felt like that and come out the other side, you'll understand how debilitating it can be.

During the frustration of it all, I talked to everyone I could think of. Anyone who would listen. I knew something was wrong, but couldn't put my finger on what it was, let alone how to fix it.

I was …

1. Feeling guilty about every task I wasn't doing.
2. Switching and changing tasks frequently to try and do them all at once.
3. Never feeling satisfied regardless which task I chose to do.
4. Reacting to everything, often, never anticipated on got ahead.
5. Sleeping badly or not at all due to the number of things that kept popping into my head to do.

Reading back those old posts now now it's very clear that I was depressed and probably going through something of a life crisis, but at the time I couldn't see that. I mean, life! What's the point!

A lot of my anxiety centered around tasks that needed to be done, or things I was promising to get done. So, I wrote a list of everything I had to do. It helped a little bit, but eventually it overwhelmed me …

It wasn't until mid-2009, a full year after I started my todo list, that I read Getting Things Done and actually started actively looking for other productivity advice. Blogs like Tools for Thought, Put Things Off (now Modern Nerd), Productive Flourishing, Lifehacker, 2Time and later Aliventures have all played their part in honing, refining and making me think more conciously of how to “do productivity”.

That ball of anxiety of things undone has a name in GTD parlance. Any task or thing that's incomplete (defined as “work still to be done”) that is occupying your mind, is an “open loop”. The more open loops you have, the more you feel torn and eventually just want to break down and cry.

At the risk of turning into another self-help/GTD site, let's start with what I mean by productivity:

Productivity is the act of completing necessary evil tasks [of life] efficiently.

Depending on who you speak to, productivity can mean efficiency (you're productive if you can crank 10 widgets a day) or organisation (you're productive if you get enough time to do what you want to do). For me, it's closer to the latter of those two ideas. I'll capitalise the word so you know when I'm talking about my definition of Productivity.

Being productive isn't the same as being organised, although being organised often helps with being productive. Efficiency is a measure of productivity - a rate - not productivity itself. Efficiency can get things done faster with less fuss, and when coupled with organisation can get things done on time, but neither is strictly required for Productivity.

I define a “necessary evil task” as pretty much anything you would rather not be doing but that must be done. If it could be done automatically, you'd sign up for that. That's not say it's inherantly evil, but it is at least necessary.

So, my todo list was a good starting point, but adding items on the end of the list is only half the battle. You've also got to complete the items, else your todo list becomes an anxiety in itself. I took a deep breath and got to work. The most important part of GTD for me was the process to determine my next action. Run through the massive list and for each item:

1. Do it. If it's less than an X minute task (where X is whatever works for you. I've seen 2, I like 10).
2. Delegate it. Is this actually something someone else should be doing? Not usually a problem if it's your home task list that's causing you grief, but a supportive partner and good friends could be a major help if you're stuck in a rut.
3. Defer it. It's a bigger job that still must get done, so you have to allocate some more time or resources to it. Defer it, but make sure it's going to get some attention at some point.
4. Drop it. Seriously, do you need to do this item now? Has it been on the list for so long that it's no longer important? If it's no longer relevant, don't give it anymore consideration, just drop it.

GTD has a lot of ideas in it, but that one helped me get through the backlog and set myself up to start fresh. Copying the system verbatim, there are a few more points surrounding the list-making section (referred to as collection or capture):

• Context lists. Each item has a context (@home, @work, @town, @phone, etc) so that you can blitz through many items in the same context at the same time.
• Project lists. If it requires more than one step, it's a project, and you should always know what the next step is for that project. Each step, of course, probably has a context, so you move the project on when you're next in that context.
• Big-picture lists. These are things like someday/maybe lists, bucket lists, and other big ideas.

These didn't really work for me. I found context lists annoying and my implementation ended up causing more headaches and replication where I already had a plan laid out for a project, but had to copy out the necessary parts onto another list. Equally, it irked me that I was copying phone numbers and other details onto cards that would need to be recycled.

However, for all the pieces in the book that didn't work, there were some parts that did:

• Ubiquitous capture. Didn't work until I'd built my own wallet which contained something like a hipster PDA, minus the GTD cruft, and now I couldn't live without it.
• Centralised storage. I sorted all of my paperwork into one filing cabinet. I don't just mean bills, but also my projects. I gave each project (web site design, guilds, roleplaying ideas, game mechanics) it's own folder and sorted all the scraps of paper and notes in reporters' notepads into each folder, and then filed it.
• Inboxes in other places than the office. Anything that comes in the front door has a place to live, a “to-be-processed” box. Each item I skim through and do it, delegate it, defer it and drop (bin) it.

Stuff that I tried that really didn't work included a physical wall calendar (year to view), a tickler file and the aforementioned context-based listings.

I'm still evaluating the inbox / outbox filing system for the office, but since moving out, it's been hard to keep up with it.

Ultimately, I'd like to revisit the notion of a launchpad, such that I can just grab all my stuff on the way out the door without feeling I've forgotten something.

Part of the reason many of these ideas may not work is that I tried to copy them straight out of the book. Except the book was written before phones were also PDAs, and electronic capture isn't so much of a problem.

So how does my process look currently, in it's entirety?

I have, broadly, 4 context-type lists:

1. I use the todo list built into Googlemail and Google Calendar to list email or web-based items that I need to take care of, these will likely have a deadline, or impact other people's schedules.
2. The physical inbox downstairs captures things that come through the door like bills.
3. The inbox upstairs captures things that I pick up while I'm out and about, like bank statements or letters delivered to my father's house.
4. A file I keep in Dropbox (was on a USB stick) that tracks blog ideas and other open loops that don't really impact anyone except me, so are much more personal.
5. A moleskine notebook for all my lyric ideas.

My phone syncs with the calendar, so appointments aren't forgotten or remembered, they just occur. Most of the time, ideas will be written down on a scrap of paper or in my wallet, and be copied over onto the proper list (on calendar) as soon as reasonably possible. Or failing that, the scrap or card will end up in an inbox, which eventually will get sorted through and dealt with - done (filed), delegated, defered or dropped.

That clears my head of most of my current open loops, leaving me confident that I'm doing the correct thing at any given time, and the rest of my free time available for Creativity.

Completing tasks or closing loops, as I read in the book, has given me more energy to do more tasks or things I wanted to do. This produced a nice feedback loop, where I could tackle bigger and bigger projects and productivity-related organisational stuffs without being overwhelmed by the enormity of it.

If you feel like things are getting out of your control, maybe you need to stop and think a minute about why that is. I started small with a todo list, and built up habits and processes from there. Some final points:

• I tried a lot of things that didn't work, and a few things that I never imagined would work at all, but did.
• Taken verbatim, creative habits and productivity systems will not work for anyone else except their creators, so it's important to read around and understand what each habit or system brings to the table.
• Start with a rough design and be prepared for refinement.
• Don't try changing too much too quickly, since you'll get overwhelmed with new processes - you're trying to improve your life, rather than starting from scratch.
• Make one habit/process stick at a time, and find the holes in your own system. If the process is not the path of least resistance, it's probably the wrong process.
• New productivity advice, blogs, thoughts, feelings and opinions are continuously generated. Sooner or later you must stop reading them and start acting on the ideas you have.
• Get support and get going sooner rather than later. It will take a weekend to get started, but that's only one weekend out of your entire lifetime.

Experimentation is the order of the day, but let me provide a few links that I wish I had when I started out:

• Is Productivity Really Getting You More From Life? - Aliventures
• The Importance of Abandoning Crap - Modern Nerd
• Follow the "Lost" Rule of Organization to Save Time and Reduce Stress - Lifehacker
• How To Lose An Hour’s Creative Mojo In Two Minutes - Productive Flourishing
• Because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running - 43Folders
• A Typo, a Move and Some Lost Habits - 2Time
• Getting Things Dumped: A First Principle in GTD - Tools for Thought
• Why GTD Sucks! - OrganizeIT

I've limited them to one post per blog, but you could read around on the topic for months, so let me say again: don't wait until you've finished reading to try some ideas out.

I think everyone develops their own methods to deal with every day life. Some people are naturally “productive”, because the processes (both thought and physical) they use work for them and satisfy the original constraint: the act of completing necessary evil tasks efficiently. The rest of us, however, need to put a bit more planning and effort in to get results. I would postulate that the conscious act of planning “productivity” gives an edge over those people who's processes don't change, but their circumstances do.

Go now, and be awesome.