Spheres of Influence

As I've been contemplating the best ways to a more simplified life, I realize that I need to apply some GTD principles. Doesn't hurt that I'm reading David Allen's follow-up "Making It All Work" right now, reinforcing what I know and giving me some new ideas.

At work, I have a list of about 71 items. They are projects I'm involved in, projects I'm leading, things I need to think about/research, and the people who work for me or closely with me, or whom I work for. Every day I try to advance as many of those items as possible by spending some time on them. Each time I update an item, I move it to the bottom. That way, the stuff that's not getting my attention bubbles to the top.

I've come to the realization that I need a similar list at home. I use GMail (www.gmail.com) for email, Remember The Milk (www.rememberthemilk.com) for tracking chores, financial stuff and random deal-with-and-delete emails, we use Wet Paint (www.wetpaint.com) to track stuff about our house and we have a Google Doc (docs.google.com) for actual home improvement projects, but I don't have anything to tie it all together.

What I need is a master list, like I have at work.  It won't have the minutae of chores, but it may consolidate the stuff on Wet Paint and Google Docs into a central location where it can be tracked.  But I realized that currently neither actually is comprehensive.  I need a list covers all of my "spheres of influence" in my life at a high level and then dives down deeper from there.  With any luck, it will actually help me to keep more organized, be better prepared and get more accomplished, all while using the computer less.

So far, these are the spheres I've come up with.

• Immediate Family and Non-Immediate Family
  
• Home/House/Residence
• Church and Church Friends
  
• Community
• Other Friends
• Car

From there, it would be easy to further segment each of those areas into particular projects, areas of improvement, things and people to remain in touch with and so on and so on.

I'm excited.  I think this will really help.


I've overshot my goal of being in bed reading by a really long shot.

Deluge of Email

I've been asked this question a few times in the past week and I've struggled to give a quick answer.  I thought that maybe it was time I give a longer response. 

How on earth do you handle the volume of email that you do?

 
Frankly, it's an answer I struggle with at times.  At the moment, I'm a little upsidedown, but I will get caught up again when things slow down a little.
 

First off, I recommend reading "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.  If nothing else, this book will inspire you that it is possible, that you can stay on top of things.
 

As always, I am not one content to leave things well enough alone and have tweaked his system.   First, a few groundrules, and keep in mind I'm approaching this from the corporate side of things.  (If you're struggling with your personal inbox, I do feel for you, and some of these tricks may work for you.  As well as mastering Gmail's "multiple inboxes".)
 

(1) An email is unread until it's dealt with.  This causes the little number sign on the inbox(es) to be accurate.
 

(2) Once an email is dealt with, it goes away.  Either to a "file cabinet" with other sorted and filed emails, or it gets deleted.  I delete most emails, if there's something I need to keep short-term, it's probably in my sent folder.  If I need to keep it long term, I have a section on our wiki of mine where I squirrel away small pieces of information.  The wiki has better search functionality and I can rearrange, sort, etc., as I see fit.
 

(3) Practice good outgoing emails.  Address people by name, sign your own name.  Bring up quotes where necessary, and remember that some people may be on Blackberries - no fancy formatting, no colors.  In all things, be clear.  You will begin to help others to be clear.
 

(4) Never delete on the handheld.  You might not be able to find it again, and sometimes you need to dumpster dive for an old email.  I drop all email I no longer need into a folder called "answered on blackberry" - that way, when I'm back at my laptop, I can confirm that there's nothing I missed and then quickly delete.

(5) Never process meeting requests on the handheld.  Looking at the full calendar on your computer may trigger some thoughts or help you see a bigger picture you might not otherwise be able to see.
 

(6) Schedule time for you.  I keep office hours, regularly booked time from 9-10 am and 4-5 pm.  People have learned they can find me at my desk during these times.  This actually cuts down on the number of meeting requests I receive, helps people get answers quickly and gives me some work time at the start and end of the day to handle email.  Friday's are supposed to be meeting-free, but that never happens, so I do block 3-5 to make I have time to get done what truly needs to be done before I leave for the weekend.

(7) Use all the tools at your advantage.  If you can swing it, double monitors.  Lots of whiteboards, kept clean.  If you find yourself regularly drawing the same diagram over and over again, draw it on a large piece of paper and keep it hung on the wall ready for the next time you need it.  Demand a screen on your phone so you can know whose calls you're avoiding.  Make it clear on your voicemail message that they'll get a faster response by email.  Use IM.  And when you can't answer a question right away in IM, copy and paste the conversation into an email to yourself and the person who asked you the question.

(8) Adopt a consistent strategy for offline.  I never take my laptop to meetings, unless I'm presenting.  I find it produces a phsyical and social boundary between those who use them and the rest of the meeting participants. I do carry a single notebook that has all my meeting notes going back a few years.  It has grid paper instead of lined paper.  I write down who was at the meeting, where it was held, the date and time.  If there's an action item for me, I draw a square on the left-hand side.  Back at my desk, I act upon the squares and cross them off. 

(9) No last minute meetings.  At 3 or 4 pm every day, I block out all unblocked time for the next day.  This prevents me from being in last-minute meetings, or me not having time for something urgent that does come up.  (We have a culture here that everyone is so busy that when there is something urgent, they will call or IM if they can't find time on everyone's calendar.  This allows me flexibility for the truly urgent.)

(10) Have an email goal.  My goal, each day, is to have 1/3 fewer emails than I started the day, or 30 less, whichever is more.  When I don't meet that goal, I carry over to the next day. This is the only way I keep from drowning, is to realize that the emails are critical and that people are waiting for me, and therefore, it's not something to do when I'm not at meetings, but that it's just as important as meetings, and in many cases, far moreso.  Also the reason I have office hours.

(11) HR is important.  I manage two teams, and while it can seem like a big block of time, I regularly have 1:1's with each of them.  I also try to regularly schedule an hour away from my desk to take care of any HR related actions or go over and understand anything I need to communicate to or ask for from my teams.

(12) The brain is for thinking and innovating, not for storing stuff.  If I need to remember something, I email myself.  Blackberry is brilliant for that.  (Also for when I'm out with my wife and she seems to be expressing interest about something, zing - note to my personal email account and then months later, I have a truly thoughtful birthday or Christmas present idea.)  But yeah, if you're struggling to remember a lot of stuff, then your brain isn't free to think, innovate, come up with new ideas, etc.

Ok, how do I do it?  In a word, triage.

I practice a very weird version of zero inbox.  I strive at all times to keep my main inbox empty.  This only works for me because I have a series of additional inboxes that I use instead.  First, there are a lot of messages I receive over and over again, related to the ticketing system (mostly status changes) used by the two teams I manage.  Those are automatically moved, by rule, into one of my other inboxes.  They are auto-generated and typically low priority, I need to be informed, but they rarely contain action and can quickly be read and deleted.

My inboxes:

z-incoming - this is the first-level catchall.  This is where most automatically sorted email goes.  This is also where I throw stuff to sort.   If I have a few moments to respond to an email, I do it from here.  Otherwise, it gets sorted off into another folder.  (Updated, 12:26 pm) I do use the preview pane to quickly skim emails, and then the tool "AutoHotkey" that I mention below.

 

aa next actions - this is the stuff I absolutely must act upon quickly. After I've sorted everything out of z-incoming, I move on to this folder.  The goal is to clear out this folder, but sometimes I need to move stuff on to bb priority 1.

 

ab schedule/calendar - when it's been a few hours since I've had a chance to read my email because of meetings and stuff, I move all the calendar items here to deal with all at once.  Then I'll bring up the calendar on one monitor and go through the calendaring emails on the other.  I do like using Google Sync on my Blackberry, but it does not play well with recurring events scheduled by someone else, so I'm pretty close to uninstalling Google Sync.

 

ac waiting for - this is emails that I've responded to but now expect someone else to get back to me before I can perform an action.  I can quickly and regularly scan this box just to remind myself of what I'm waiting for.  If someone's taking too long to respond, I can ping them again.

bb priority 1 through be priority 4 and hr - these are the things that are not immediate next action.  Some newsletters I read go into a particular priority.  As I work through bb priority 1, I may end up moving something to 2.  And then as I go through 2, I may end up moving stuff to 3.  I include "and hr" on the fourth box for two reasons: one - our HR group sends out a lot of emails, and they tend to give us a lot of advanced warning on requirements, and sometimes they dole out requirements in smaller portions.  This allows me to collect them together so that I have them when I need them (and sometimes so I can go schedule some time away from my desk to read them and type them up into instructions that my teams will better understand), and secondly, to remind me that HR is important.  In the end, everything that I haven't already processed to has filtered down to the fourth priority level.  I get to this box at least once a week and by then, there's nothing more urgent and nothing easier to tackle.  Since it's usually the end of the week before I get to this, I also know that this is something that isn't going to come back to me before Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

 
Why do my inboxes start with weird letters?  Speed.  When I'm on the message screen on the Blackberry (where I do most of my triage), I hit "i" to "File" the message and then I can quickly type a couple of characters and pick the folder without having to reach over to the scroll wheel, and then hit enter and I'm done.

(Updated 12:26 pm) Also, on my laptop, I make use of an free, amazingly powerful (but sadly, complex) tool called AutoHotKey.  It allows you to create macros for anything.  So, I have a series of macros that all start by me pressing the ` (the backwards apostrophe in the top left corner of my keyboard).  Then it waits and I can press 1, 2, 3, 4, w, c or n.  That immediately takes the email I'm looking at, marks it unread and moves it to the appropriate folder.
 

Another cool trick is that my inboxes group my mail.  This is a big hack that is harder to come by, but one that saves me incredible amounts of time.  This can be done to some degree with Outlook, but frankly, this is one area (and probably the only area) where Lotus Notes shines.  Because I can completely customize my view, I have all kinds of special things going on.  For instance, if the follow-up flag on an email has a "+" in it, Lotus Notes groups my emails together by that follow-up flag instead of the subject.  Either way, by grouping emails, you can select a topic to work on and knock out a lot of emails at once.

An example of grouping -- the inbox view rule says to put all EmailRoundtable messages together and then group by subject.  (It's smart enough to ignore "RE:" and "FW:" and stuff and keep all like messages together.)
 

 
And you may be wondering why I typed this at work when I seem to be so busy.  Two reasons... one, I have a Blackberry and a laptop, so even when I'm not here, I'm still working.  (Ask my wife, I've been doing a lot of work email the last few nights trying to get caught up.)  And secondly, it's a lot of my colleagues that are asking me how I do it, so now I'll have a place to point them to and save everyone some time.

 

Suggested reading:

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition - Web related, but makes the point that effortless later requires more thought up-front

 And that, is how I get things done while keeping my sanity.

The Power of the Reset

I think I've blogged about this before, but I'm finding that I'm really digging the power of the reset.   I got to see it first-hand again in the hotel this week that I stayed at.  It's not a new concept but I got to think about it a little more since I wasn't the one doing the reset.  I also saw it a few times in Hollywood.  One night on Ventura Blvd. where a person was hanging out of the door of a moving truck in traffic.  They'd do the scene, back all the cars up to the exact same spot, and do it again and again.  Or another time I spent an afternoon on the set of "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" sitting on a staircase while several feet away the same scene was replayed over and over for different camera angles.  (I was not in the movie, I just had a friend who thought it would be fun to go watch the filming and they put us just outside of the shot but right on the set.)

So I've been back in town a few nights but I haven't been able to get stuff reset here like I've liked.  (Not to say I found the house a mess or anything, it was quite tidy.  But as stuff gets pulled out and played with and when dishes get used and the dishwasher isn't empty or something, stuff piles up.)  There's also the matter that at the hotel this is someone's job.  They get paid for it, it's not something you layer on top of everything else.

Well, I got a reset in on most of the places I try to do nightly, but not everywhere.  By tomorrow night I'll be back on track.  But I've been thinking about what makes it work, or why certain rooms as just get dirty all over again, no matter how hard we work at them.  (The kitchen counters, the laundry/cat room, my side of the bed.)  As I strive to live a more Uncluttered Life amidst the hustle and bustle of life, the phrase "A place for everything, and everything in its place." comes to mind.  Sure, that's all well and good.  Makes sense.

But as I looked at the counters of this upscale ($500/night - we got a massive discount) hotel, I noticed something... whether it was the coffee service by the door or the ice bucket, empty glasses and open it and it's $5 bottles of water; or even the soap and extra hand-towels in the bathroom -- they were all in trays.  Trays.  In some ways, that feels like extra stuff.  Another thing to buy, to keep clean, another piece of stuff to own.  In a world where people are dying from diseases that could be prevented if only for the lack of clean water, or even the lack of food, here I am looking at molded pieces of plastic and coming to a realization. 

As the trays define where something should go, just as much, they define what does not go there.  A tray next to the computer could hold printer paper of varying sizes, incoming receipts, bills to be paid.  Suddenly, it indicates that the counter next to the computer is not a place for circulars, kid's craft projects or dirty dishes.

And trays can also be used to contain things.  The cats are messy.  They seem to eat with their mouths open, there is always small bits of food on the floor around their dishes.  And it spreads.  But if I put their dishes inside an upside paper box lid, I'm guessing I'll no longer have food everywhere, just a box lid to upend over a garbage can.

And so, just like that, less mess.  Less frequent need for cleaning and a more peaceful state of mind (because clutter is a subconscious broken promise with yourself per David Allen and GTD) and in some cases, less stuff.

This must be why trays and the like cost so much, because they know by the time people have put this much thought into it, they're going to be committed to the outcome because of the peace they believe it will bring.

The Last Word

It's difficult for me to get an email and read it and then not respond. Sure, there are some where deleting is fine, and some I delete without even reading.

But I'm talking about emails from actual people sent directly to me. I feel like I owe everyone a response. To not respond seems, well, rude.

But I was thinking today. What if everyone felt that way? Our inboxes would be more paralyzingly useless than they are today.

But what I need to keep in mind is that there are plenty of times where I've written to someone and they haven't responded. In many cases, I probably won't remember that I wrote to them, so I'm not sitting there upset at the lack of a response. Moreso I'm pleasantly surprised to find a nice new personal email in my inbox.

And someone has to make the bold commitment to kill a thread that has died. Like when you stand there with someone in the hall long after you've run out of things to say and both of you are panicking because your coffee is getting cold and you can't break free. (I'm not good at ending those kinds of conversations, either.)

So, that's an unofficial goal of mine for the year. Getting better at knowing when a thread should die -- and then letting it go peacefully into the Trash folder without worrying that I've offended.

Still Not Using Google Reader?

"RSS" (Really Simple Syndication) was something I came really late to the game, considering my typical early adoption when it comes to web technologies. (I've already forgotten my password to more facebook and twitter clones than you can even imagine.)

But I've found it difficult to explain to others why they should care about this, why it's so great, and why it's an amazing time-saver. Until I discovered RSS, I had to actually set reminders for myself to go and visit my friends' blogs. I would get busy, or distracted and realize I hadn't checked in on my friends in over a week. And over time that list got really long.

It eventually got really crazy, trying to keep up with everyone. And at the same time, I had all these subscriptions to newsletters cluttering up my inbox. It was getting out of hand. Finally, enough people were talking about it that I finally tried Google Reader ( http://reader.google.com/ )

How does it work? Nearly every website and blog program out there offers an RSS feed of their content. GR (and countless others like Bloglines and Outlook 2007) essentially "collect" and file the content, so that the next time you go to the application, all of the stuff you follow is waiting there for you, all sorted by website (called a "feed") -- and if you want, sorted by "tags" (folders) of your choice. Here's mine at right. It's short right now because I read everything last night and this is just what's been published since then. (Google Reader would even let me, if I wanted to, rename these so that it would say "Jon" instead of "Your Moment of Zen" or "Adrea" instead of "Burnt Fudge".)

So when you click on a category, you see the post. Some sites are stingy and only post short blurbs, forcing you to go back to their website to read the entire post. This protects their advertising revenue (others have ads in their rss feeds) but it makes it really annoying and I'm less likely to pay a lot of attention to their blogs unless it's a super big deal that they're talking about. But for the most part, people post full posts so you can read it all without ever going to any website except reader. (You can jump from any entry to the original blog entry or website post through several links on each entry.)

These days, I do not sign up for newsletters on websites. I look for an RSS feed. If they don't have one, they won't be communicating with me regularly. I'm also actively weeding out the newsletters I already get, trying to cut back on the amount of mail I get. (Even all those Facebook notifications - they can nearly all be turned off and diverted instead into a single feed.)

You can quickly look at a list of entries if you don't have time to read someone's entire feed. (For some reason, Google Reader thinks that you want the newest ones at the top. Fine for a news site, less so for a personal blog. There's an option under "Feed Settings" to change the order.

How do you add a new feed? That's pretty easy. Often, you just get the website address of the blog you're reading, go to reader, click on "Add subscription," paste in the address and it locates the feed. You can also search within Google Reader for feeds you might not have otherwise known about. There are a few other ways to get feeds into Google Reader, but they aren't consistent from browser to browser.

I like Google Reader's ability to create folders/tags. This allows me to group like feeds together, either to read all at once, or so that if maybe I only have a few minutes, I can read my friends' blogs, or read some entertainment news.

You can also easily share an amusing post with someone else. Each entry has a button to email, and even gives you the ability to add your own notes so they'll know why you're forwarding.

You can also "star" entries (just like Gmail) so that you can quickly find them later. I use this for items that require more in-depth study, or visiting other websites, or watching video, or downloading something. Usually when I'm using the reader during the week, I can quickly scan through hundreds of entries in no time, starring some to come back to on the weekend.

You can also "share" items. Your shared items actually create their own RSS feed, which you can post on your blog, or give someone the link to. There's actually one guy in Silicon Valley (Robert Scoble) who reads something like 750 blogs a day. His shared list is subscribed to by thousands of people. (It's in the list at the right.)

And, if you're ever curious, the reader keeps track of what you're reading, when you're reading, and which of your subscriptions are generating the most entries. (Good if you ever feel overwhelmed, you know which ones to save up for when you have more time, or which ones to dump.)

Hopefully this helps a little better explain why Google Reader (and other RSS feed readers) rock and how they can help you stay connected and save time.

All of the feeds I follow are linked on the right-hand side of my blog.

Google Reader is extensively keyboard driven, great for blazing through all kinds of information. It's free. You can sign up for an account here: http://reader.google.com/ If you have a Gmail account, you already have an account.

Wasted Minutes

LIFEHACK.COM -- I liked this article on what do to with those few spare minutes between things that otherwise go wasted. He expands on each of these suggestions:

* Reading file.
* Clear out inbox.
* Phone calls.
* Make money.
* File.
* Network.
* Clear out feeds.
* Goal time.
* Update finances.
* Brainstorm ideas.
* Clear off desk.
* Exercise.
* Take a walk.
* Follow up.
* Meditate.
* Research.
* Outline.
* Get prepped.
* Be early.
* Log.

More...