Mark Freedman’s Blog

Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

I’ve been sick on and off for the past few weeks. It reached a pinnacle last week when I inevitably came down with the flu. I hadn’t been this sick in a few years, and like many of us who’s experienced this, not being able to do anything towards my goals was driving me absolutely insane.

Ok, so I thought I’d take advantage of this externally (perhaps, self-) imposed restriction to slow myself down, get the rest I’ve been lacking, and help myself re-focus (a common theme). But just trying to take naps had been next to impossible. Even through my dehydration-causing semi-delirium, my mind had never raced so much with all the things I wanted to be doing, needed to be doing, wished I was doing. Maybe it’s time to learn some meditation techniques?

I consider myself an underachieving overachiever. I think in the past couple of decades there has been an explosion of people like me (sounds messy), who not only began to understand their potential for the first time, but also became aware of the opportunities never before available to the human race for actualizing this potential. This has created a culture obsessed with achievement. But it has also created a lot more disillusionment, not only with society, but with ourselves.

We’re wondering why we haven’t achieved everything we expect ourselves to achieve. Why does one person do one thing to change the world in obvious ways, while the next, just as capable person, can barely change the department he works in?

And we have so many potentially life-changing projects going on at the same time. We want to do everything before we’re gone. In this world, we’re more aware than any previous generation of how relatively short our time is in this life, and we’re always in a rush to make things happen.

We don’t even give ourselves time to get sick, or recover when we do.

We read self-help books, blogs, go to seminars, listen to tapes, and even practice all the best practices, and still it feels like it’s all a race.

And it is. You know why? Because we’re racing against ourselves. We have so many things we’re trying to achieve at the same time that we give everything, and I mean EVERYTHING the short end of the stick. Nothing gets our complete attention. Because we’re afraid.

We’re afraid of choosing the wrong thing to focus on. We’re afraid of taking the wrong turn. We’re afraid that several years down the line we’ll look back and realize that we chose the wrong things to focus on, and we’re now just that many years closer to the end. We’ll look at the other paths with regret, and we’ll notice who succeeded down those paths. So now we try to cover all our bases, and head down five paths at once, trying to grab our piece of each, hoping we’ll make our mark in at least one or two before it’s too late.

Sound familiar?

But all of those are half-hearted efforts. And none will truly succeed. If we put 20% of our efforts into 5 different paths, we’ll make maybe 15% of our goal in each of those paths at best. But if we put 80% of our efforts into 1 path, and split the other 20% into another 1 or 2 paths, our success rates would go way up, and when we notice we took a wrong turn (after bypassing the Dip), we can then refocus the 80% on one of the other paths.

I don’t have many answers yet. Like so many others, I’m still struggling with this, so I’m just thinking out loud here.

One of Alan Cooper’s arguments in user interface design has been that explicitly asking the user to save a file is a waste of time. I’ve always agreed with that, but I wonder if we’re too late in making autosave the standard. These days, many applications have an autosave feature in addition to an explicit save command.

For years, people have been taught, usually through an extremely painful episode or two, to constantly press CTRL-S while working on a document or any other type of data-centric application. I do that several times per paragraph. As a matter of fact, I’m doing it now, and this is where the problem lies. I’m typing in WordPress, in a web-based UI. CTRL-S in Firefox is not “Save” — it’s “Save Page As”, for the purpose of saving a web page to your hard drive. Thankfully, WordPress has a very cool autosave feature.

But habits die hard. You see, the fear of losing my work is so embedded that autosave is not enough for me. I regularly click “Save and Continue Editing” within WordPress, because I’ve been taught not to trust that my data is saved if I don’t explicitly do it. I’ve seen many others do the same.

And that’s what makes the implementation of this idea too late.

I’m currently working on the detailed design of a product for my software startup, and I’m trying so hard to convince myself that we’re going to help move the industry towards eliminating the need to explicitly save. But I just cannot get myself to commit. I’d feel like a hypocrite. This product has to be so incredibly easy to use in order for mass market acceptance, and I feel like if we eliminate the save button, it’ll slow people down looking for one, and expecting one. It would slow ME down.

Sorry, Mr. Cooper, but I’m afraid autosave will be forever regulated to the fall back position you see it in today.

Random Thought:
I love this post by Eric Sink on the Perils of Wikipedia, especially the punch line at the end. Classic!

Scott H. Young is one of the wisest and most intelligent self-help writers I’ve read, and the fact that he just started college makes this even more impressive. It’ll be interesting to follow his writing as he matures, and to see how he reacts as he experiences life as an adult. I have a strong hunch that due to his foundation he’ll do just fine, and continue to share the wisdom which only comes from experience.

In a recent blog post, he gave guidelines for teaching yourself anything within a few months. I’m a very strong believer in constant, never-ending improvement, and I agree with every point he makes. Although I’ve been working with .NET for several years, I’ve always felt that I was missing some core basics that have been preventing me from being as confident as I should to write a significant software package on my own. My company recently purchased a CBT suite from AppDev (who make terrific courseware, by the way), and dove right into their basic Learning C# 2005 course. A lot of this has been review, but these guys have done such a great job that I learn new tidbits in each and every lesson. I strongly feel that I’m filling in my gaps of knowledge, and I’m definitely looking forward to the more advanced courses.

I’m working on a utility, that I’m planning on releasing here, which has its roots in the GTD system. I know that there are several software packages, utilities, and websites that already wrap around GTD, but I have strong opinions on how to make this better than everything I’ve seen (IMO), so I have a clear goal in my learning.

I spend the majority of my free time teaching myself everything I can — programming, software packages, playing guitar, music history, writing, running a business, the history of the English language, and so much more that it hurts. It’s only when I put together a disciplined structure similar to what Scott recommends that I feel like I’m making significant progress.

Well, on to the next .NET topic. I’m dedicated to running through at least one lesson each day. And remember — CANI!

The ability to focus is one of the most powerful habits that a person can establish. The reason people try so hard to get organized with to-do lists, GTD, etc., is because of the inherent need to free themselves up to focus on something important to accomplish.

There’s a building frustration over the lack of control to focus. We’re pulled in 127 different directions each day, either by others or ourselves. This “MTV world” completely distracts us. The Web is one of the greatest inventions ever, but its paradox is that it’s made us far too distracted by flaunting its links everywhere. Before you know it, you’re sucked into link after link on a never ending path down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.

When I was younger, my friends and I used to play this game where we would have conversations, and after a while we’d realize “how did we get to this topic?”, with one thing leading into another. We’d trace back our conversation, and realize how they became linked. It’s human nature. We’re so easily distracted, like a living Web, and before you’d know it, it’s “six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.”

We often struggle with focus, requiring conscious effort to regain it in order to get things done. One of the things I started trying recently is making use of the calendar (Outlook at work, and Google Calendar for personal stuff), plugging in specific things to do, even if I don’t have any tasks or meetings scheduled for the time slot. I do this just for the purpose of focusing on a specific task. I’ll work on it during that alloted time, and then give myself permission to move onto another task. I know that David Allen of GTD says we should only put items into the calendar that absolutely, positively must be done at that day or time, but I think my “enhancement” is useful.

One method of structuring this is to intuitively pick a “next action” and plug it into the calendar, so that it’ll break whatever pattern you’re in, reminding you to physically do something that needs complete focus 15 minutes from now. Color code the “musts do” items, and leave these other items white (or use a less “threatening” color), and treat these as “must focus” items. You’re essentially scheduling a meeting with yourself, similar to paying yourself first as part of a monetary budget. Treat it as importantly as your other items. If anything, it will help get you into the habit of focusing on a single item at a time.

Although people take pride in claiming that they can multi-task, it’s a fallacy. Even saying a computer can multi-task is a falsehood. Maybe it seems truer with multi-core processors, but it’s still constantly task switching — nothing is truly done concurrently by a single entity. Humans (uh, other than myself) may be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but nobody can really do two things that need focus at the same time. Nobody’s really more efficient when multi-tasking, although there may be an illusion that it’s so. You may feel you’re getting more things done, because you’re in constant “busy” mode. It’s just the tyranny of the urgent. You feel like you’re accomplishing multiple things, but you really aren’t.

I’ve read books that claimed that in order to accomplish more, you should physically move faster. That may be great for a kick-start or caffeine replacement, or to get out of a sleepy rut, but it does NOT work in the long run. You’ll make more mistakes, and will have to repeat the task anyway.

Take advantage of your natural born ability to completely focus and get one thing done at a time. All great accomplishment in human history came out of dedicated focus. It may seem that famously successful people like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison accomplished so much by multi-tasking. I say that’s bull — they just mastered the ability to focus on one thing at a time, MANY times each day.

By doing this, the perceptions of the people you work with may be that you’re an amazing multi-tasker, but only you would know the real secret of doing one thing at a time. How often do they really notice what you’re working on? They’ll just think you’re extremely efficient, anyway. People would be amazed by what you accomplish.

Remember, as long as you “capture” everything, you won’t have your mind interrupting you during your focus sessions. I think that one of the biggest deal breakers when trying to focus is when your mind constantly nags yourself to hurry, because you also need to work on something else. It’ll still be there after you’re done, and you will get it done SO MUCH FASTER if you commit to focusing on that single task.

One more trick is to keep calendar items to half hour intervals. Remember — GTD recommends that “next actions” should be granular. So anything that doesn’t fit the two minute rule should still fit into a half hour scheduled time slot. A related tip is that when you do schedule “must focus” items into your calendar, spread them out to where you have at least half hour chunks between any “must” items, so in case you do get interrupted, you’ll at least have the flexibility to stop any “non-must” items you work on during these open slots.

So what are you waiting for? Set up meetings with yourself, and focus, focus, focus…

As you may have read, I’ve been testing several “key launcher” type of utilities for about two weeks so far. Although a key feature (sorry — no pun intended) of several of these utilities is an “autotext” feature, this is the least of my needs for this type of app (coincidentally, “app” was just expanded to “application” as I was typing this ). I’m mainly focused on launching applications. This is just a short update about my first impressions. I still want to dig more deeply into each before I decide which one(s) to stick with. I’m trying several out on both my main home and work PCs, and I have to say that all of these have impressed me so far:

• ActiveWords
• Dash Command
• DirectAccess
• PhraseExpress

DirectAccess

When I first started, I was most impressed by the ease of use and clean UI of DirectAccess. I love the drag and drop capabilities for adding new keywords from any browser’s address line, desktop icons, and files in explorer. Although there are a few cases where this doesn’t work (ie: Start menu shortcuts; but it does work from the Start menu’s MRU list), it saves me many keystrokes and navigation steps for adding shortcuts. I changed the default “confirm” key from F8 to SHIFT, which I find to be a lot more convenient. I have noticed a potential problem while renaming files on the desktop (I can’t type at times), but I’m not sure if DirectAccess is entirely to blame. Closing and re-opening seems to solve this, but there’s something going on.

ActiveWords

I’ve received great feedback from the ActiveWords team. They are aware of the competition, and want to explain how I can do similar things that I can do with DirectAccess. For a few days, I was enjoying my experience with ActiveWords a little more than DirectAccess, but soon realized it was mainly due to the ability of preceding my keystrokes with an “activator” keystroke, which I’m used to with SlickRun. I’m a bit leery about just typing anywhere, because I don’t believe that these utilities cleanly remove the keystrokes. Within some apps, these keystrokes actually perform a function (such as navigating down a list). “Unmodified” files I’ve had open when typing commands for DirectAccess or ActiveWords get their “dirty bit” set, even though they delete the keystrokes when acting upon the commands. Most editors revert open documents back to their saved state when keystrokes are “undone”, but the act of deleting keystrokes doesn’t always work like that. I’m just afraid of unexpected modifications to documents. So I’m now using the “activator” keystroke of SHIFT-SHIFT in ActiveWords before entering a command. It’s still easier than the chord keys I have to press for SlickRun, though, and I know explicitly when I’m about to enter a command. If DirectAccess had this feature, it would likely be the leader for me so far. An issue with ActiveWords is the delay before it processes keystrokes, but I have to dig through the settings more to see about adjusting that. The UI seems to be showing its age, also.

PhraseExpress

This is was introduced to me by Jarvon, who commented on my original post. This is a pretty impressive utility, with very strong documentation for free software. But even though it has support for launching apps, its major strength is in autotext; low priority for me. I still want to play around with adding keywords, but it seems a bit clunky in that department.* Again, I’m not its main target audience.

*Comment, added 2007-09-20: I just want to clarify that the “clunky” part is adding application launcher types of keywords. Adding autotext is simple.

Dash Command

This is very similar to Launchy (which I still want to revisit), but I haven’t been using much. It’s pretty slick, popping open a command window on an activation keystroke and constantly scanning your system for changes, with several built-in commands. But it still feels like I have to type a little too much (like Launchy) to find and trigger applications. I can tell that this is one of those utilities I’d have to make a habit of using to even remember that I have it running. Only then can I give it a fair evaluation.

So, the jury is still out. I have to do deeper dives on these, and my loyalties may change a few more times before I settle. All of them are worth a look, and I recommend using at least one on a regular basis. The gains in productivity can be enormous no matter which you choose.