March 14, 2007 by Kara.

I’m already a post behind in my aggressive schedule and I have a couple of other ideas on posts I want to put up.  I could make all sorts of excuses as to why I’m behind but the big one is that I got the call on Monday for a second interview for the new job to which I’ve applied.  The interview is tomorrow at 12:30 and I’ve been preparing my heart out.  But - as with all such things - that which is supposed to happen will be and the reasons why may never be understood.

So, on with our post. This is a post about in baskets.  I could start by saying I like baskets.  I used to be a Longaberger consultant so I have many, many baskets (nice ones, with pretty fabric liners and plastic protectors to keep them safe from harm). However, for some reason, the inbasket concept has never worked for me.  I think it’s because in my current job there is too much to do in order to keep it all in one basket (the current stack of paperwork that needs my attention is about two feet high - it takes a big basket to contain that).  Now - you might say - you just need to buckle down and get to work if your paperwork stack is that high.  But, in my defense, I will tell you one of my primary roles is working with a construction project and it only takes one change order (complete with its six official copies and all attendant documentation to support that change order) to make up six to eight inches of that stack in my inbox.  So - get four change orders on the same day (which is what happened yesterday) and you’ve got two feet of paperwork.  And - that construction project is only 1/2 of 1/3 of my job.  

So - one problem with in baskets is that my job requires asking a lot of questions about things before they get signed.  So - it doesn’t necessarily help to have my staff members all put their signature folders into my mailbox or even to bring them to an inbox in my office as normally there are verbal conversations which need to occur with the bulk of the documents.  I have three different teams of people that work for me - each requires signatures on/reactions to a completely different variety of items (facilities issues that require fast turn around and quick decisions, finance issues which require a keen eye and thinking like an auditor, and IT issues that require asking what if questions - sometimes fast and sometimes needing to slow down the speed of the bus to let the riders catch up). 

But that’s not my biggest problem.  My biggest problem with inboxes is I just simply have too many of them.  The problem above with my work inboxes just underscores the issue, but it gets worse when you put it all together with my personal life.  It seems like everywhere you go now someone wants to give you more and more to do.  So - I thought it might be helpful to list what I consider my inboxes and see if you really do have just one.  I’ve sorted these by work and personal. It’s important to note that because I work for a public institution that receives taxpayer dollars as a part of its funding, I’m militant about keeping my personal life and my work life separate (personal calls only get made on a personal cell phone, etc.) So, here goes my list of inboxes…

Work

1. Exchange Email Account
2. Central Mailbox
3. Departmental signature folder (x3)
4. Phone w/voice mail
5. Cell phone w/voice mail
6. Help desk ticketing system for both our IT office and facilities office (I normally don’t have to respond to tickets, but if a staff member is out for the day because we’re not deeply staffed they become mine to worry about)
7. The in basket I do keep on my desk that some people do use
8. Trillian (for instant messaging with my boss and my staff)/Google Talk

Work isn’t such a bad list when you look at it, but I average about 40 “gotta read this or gotta do this” in detail messages a day and average 18 phone calls in a day.

Home

1. Personal email account on Gmail.  I have accounts on most other providers (yahoo, aol, hotmail, etc. simply for instant messaging purposes, but they don’t get checked that often.)
2. Google Reader
3. Personal cell phone - I average about two calls a day on this one plus 10 - 15 text messages (a little news and some personal communication with family and friends)
4. Home phone with voice mail
5. Mailbox at the end of my driveway and wherever the UPS/FedEx driver decides to lay packages on a given day. (They are both very creative with where they will stick a package)
6. The inbox at church - I am the volunteer audio visual coordinator at church (which basically means I spend as much time doing that job as I do on my full time job - or at least it feels that way). This isn’t too bad now as most stuff gets sent through on email.
7. The inbasket on my desk at home where I lay stuff I really should be doing.
8. My Tivo “Now Playing” list.  I love Tivo!!!

Those are my lists, although they probably aren’t 100% complete, but it is everything I can think of.  I’ve tried every way I can think to get all this down to a smaller number, but the plain and simple fact - at least as I read this - is that technology doesn’t always make our lives easier.  I remember a time (barely - I am still pretty young) before answer machines and voice mail; before cell phones; and even (gasp!!) before email.  Take out those from my lists above and my lists get cut in half.  (Don’t take away the Tivo though as that is nothing but a good thing - some technology really does make our lives easier). 

There you have it - my inboxes.  I’d love to cut this number down and know that if I spent some time forwarding phones and forwarding emails and doing all sorts of other things I could probably reduce this number - but what if you do want (or in my case need) to keep your lives separate.  Personal and work shouldn’t mix (at least not where there is a fiscal ramification or where church and state need to be kept separate and my personal political opinions and affiliations can’t mix with my job).  How do you maintain all these inboxes and keep your life a little less hectic so you don’t have all these inboxes?

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March 9, 2007 by Kara.

As I think about my systems for completing tasks, managing projects, knowing when to be somewhere and where I’m going, there are a few elements which I know work really well for me.  However, I have even more which work terribly – fail completely on a regular basis.  I’ve done a great deal of thinking over the last several weeks trying to figure out what is wrong with my system.  This thinking has brought me to one conclusion.  My soft landscape is seeping out everywhere and is in terrible need of hardening up.

Let me begin by saying, I love my calendar.  I’m also a big fan of my contacts list (which contains a great deal more than contacts).  And, when it comes to checklists I’m your gal.  I am great with the hard landscape.   

I should start by saying that I use Outlook 2003 at work running on an Exchange Server.  I synchronize Outlook wirelessly to an Audiovox 6700 with Verizon.  I’ve tried the Netcentrics GTD plug-in with only limited success as well as Clear Context and I’ve tried three different Outlook Calendar to Google Calendar sync tools which have not worked as well as I would like.  Within Outlook I have a second calendar set up that I use to keep my personal notes from meetings and activities with which I’m involved.  Since I’m a chronic note taker this has been a nice way to streamline storage of my notes from meetings.  At the end of most days with a significant meeting, I print a copy of my secondary “Journal” calendar with the notes in them and file it in a binder by date.  I back up both my regular “public” calendar and my journal calendar weekly and restore the backup on my home machine so that I know the backup is good and I always have a second copy.

In using my Outlook calendar, I use color coding to help me determine work versus personal appointments.  I use my calendar to set reminders of all items with a due date.  If it has a due date – it goes on the calendar.  For large projects, I even set smaller deadlines along the way and place those on the calendar.  The long and short of it – if it’s on the calendar – meaning it has a due date – it gets done almost without question and with little chance that I’ll lose it or just forget it.

The next piece of my hard landscape – the piece that works really well – probably better than any other piece – is my Contact list.  I began using my Contacts in Outlook when I got my first copy of Office.  I’ve continued pulling my contacts forward from one version of Outlook to the next.  My Contacts are categorized by a number of different frequently used categories that I can use to print custom lists.  For example – I maintain a list of “Hot Contacts” (it is a standard Outlook category and I was too lazy to change it) – which I keep a copy of at home by my phone, in the car, in the back of my Moleskine, and by my phone at work.  It’s in every location I can put it where I might have to make a phone call.  But I don’t just use Contacts for “contacts”.  All usernames go in my contacts list along with a note that has the password in a special code.  All frequent flier numbers, banking information, and software registration codes are kept in contacts.  I like this method because all this information can be printed in short custom lists by sorting by category and printing just a segment of the list or I can print a hard copy of the entire set of information and keep it easily in a compact location like the fire safe at home. 

The final piece of my hard landscape that works is the checklists.  I have packing lists for trips, a checklist for emergency campus closings (I’m a small college facilities director), the list of software I install on a PC that I consistently update so if the machine crashes I can load the software back on – a checklist that came in incredibly useful when I bought a new laptop and wanted it set up just like my desktop PC. 

So – the hard landscape works great for me.

The problem is my soft landscape – that list of tasks without due dates, the list of projects that I want to do but haven’t spent time thinking about yet (because it’s still too frightening to think about), and all the rest of it – sits out there without a plan for completion and for me, so far, GTD just hasn’t been the key.  I need a way to take these soft items and turn them into hard – yet I’m not sure how to get that done.  I’ve started using My Life Organized for tasks which has helped probably more than anything as it forces you (or at least it makes me force myself) to do the thinking up front.  When you enter the project into My Life Organized, you enter it in the order you want to complete it and go ahead and set up all the subtasks – and you can see them as subtasks.  It’s very linear – but also allows for you to move things and change them around if you need to – far more flexible than the outlook task list for me.  More on that in future issues.

So there you have it – a brief overview of my current system structure and a statement of what works and what doesn’t.  But – as we all know – this is only a portion of the real system we use to operate our lives.  How does information get into our system – how does it get out.  That’s the focus of the next two articles in my series.  And I’ve thought about those articles in preparation for writing them it may not really be my task list that’s broken (and keep in mind I refer to my task list as the list of all my projects and next actions combined, including the someday/maybe list) – it may be the in and out of the system that’s really broken and not really the system.

What’s your system?  What works for you – what doesn’t?  Are you good with one piece bad with another? Always able to pull your 2^nd cousin’s birth date off your calendar, but forget to pack your shoes every time you travel?  Post a comment – let’s explore all of this together – and see if we can’t all reach productivity nirvana. 

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March 5, 2007 by Kara.

Merlin Mann of 43folders.com in his podcast from January 14, 2007, entitled Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sex talks about how we need to move our productivity system from a point where we spend so much time thinking about the system to actually doing the things held by the system.  Merlin creates an analogy between the coffee cup and the system for maintaining your list.  If you spend all your time thinking about your coffee cup, you spend far too little time drinking your coffee (obviously you can think about the cup while drinking - but hopefully you understand the basic idea).  Being at a point where my lists have fallen apart in my initial implementation of GTD and I’m back to what I feel is square one, I’m devoting a series of posts to my search for productivity nirvana.  While Merlin has a point that we need to stop thinking about the system, searching for the best way to contain the system, and the best tools to use to implement the system, I think we do need to spend that up front time thinking about the system.  As David Allen states in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” target=”_blank”>Getting Things Done, “Thinking in a concentrated manner to define desired outcomes is something few people feel they have to do” (p. 15).  So while Merlin is right that once we are to the point of trying to utilize the system we need to stop thinking about the system and start doing the work contained in the system, I contend that the system will never work if we don’t spend that necessary time up front thinking about it and working through how it will apply to our lives.

In order to hold myself accountable to the whole process I’d even post what it is I’m thinking about as the outline for this series (The quest for productivity nirvana) and the publishing deadlines (self-imposed) for those.  So, here goes:

1. The quest for productivity nirvana, Post #1 - Series Purpose and Overview; post by March 6, 2007
2. Post #2 - Hard vs. Soft Landscape; post by March 9, 2007
3. Post #3 - Where are the in-baskets?; post by March 12, 2007
4. Post #4 - Where are the out-baskets?; post by March 15, 2007
5. Post #5- When to ask for help; post by March 18, 2007
6. Post #6 - When to say no; post by March 21, 2007
7. Post #7 - What is a project?; post by March 24, 2007
8. Post #8 - What is a task?; post by March 27, 2007
9. Post #9 - Where do I do work?; post by March 30, 2007
10. Post #10 - When and where do I work and think best?; post by April 3, 2007
11. Post #11 - Ways to organize it all - using paper; post by April 5, 2007
12. Post #12 - Ways to organize it all - using technology; post by April 8, 2007
13. Post #13 - Ways to organize it all - hybrid; post by April 11, 2007
14. Post #14 - Happily Cranking Widgets - Keeping it all up to date; post by April 14, 2007
15. Post #15 - Happily Craking Widgets - Have I reached Productivity Nirvana; post by April 17, 2007

Of course, I reserve the right to change the publishing schedule if necessary - but you’ll at least get these posts over the life of the series.  I hope you enjoy and I welcome your comments or thoughts for additional articles.

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March 5, 2007 by Kara.

I used to consider myself a good multi-tasker.  Then, several months ago, I started to feel drained - constantly.  I would be pushing things around - doing little bits of three or four projects at a time - without the opportunity to finish one, get that since of accomplishment, and move on to the next.  For a week, I tried to do a good job of only doing one thing at a time - no multi-tasking.  Since I keep a pretty detailed journal of the tasks I complete on a daily basis, I realized I was getting as much done doing one thing at a time as I was trying to work on three or four things at the same time. 

In my opinion, multi-tasking came about when email and our first rounds with internet connection came online.  Early internet connections were slow - hence we would load a web page, wait while it loaded, and then could go back to it once it loaded.  In essence, multi-tasking came about because we needed to fill that time while the page loaded.  (I once had a dial up connection so slow I could make breakfast while the page loaded).  As faster connection speeds has come about our need to fill that void while pages load has ceased, but our urgency to try to do multiple tasks at one time has not.  We still think of ourselves as multi-taskers and so we try diligently to live up to the expectation of doing multiple things at the same time.

In this same vein, the amount of information not only to which we have access in order to make decisions, but also the paths that information can take to get to us have increased tenfold in the last five decades.  Crackberries, IMs, emails, multiple email accounts, RSS feeds, cell phones, voice mail, unified messaging, and much more have forced their way into our personal space and we allow them to constantly draw our attention from what’s important (relationships, personal growth, happiness) to what’s urgent (fires to be put out, projects to be completed).  What if we turned off all those items for a day and focused on the really important stuff? 

I’m interested in the studies that say information overload is actually good for us and that it can allow our brains to make more connections between topics and expand our horizons a bit.  While I certainly don’t disagree with that at all, I also believe that we need points of rest and that those points need to occur more often than what they probably do right now.  I often use an analogy that was included in a humourous Internet post about cats and how they are “distracted by shiny things”.  All the information coming into us in all these formats comes as a myriad of shiny things which draw our attention.  However, if I also learned a lesson from my cat, it’s to take frequent rest breaks (my cat takes full on, sleeping on his head he’s so out of it, naps).  Our bodies and our brains need a chance to digest information, think about it, process it, and then determine what we can do with that information that might change the world.

So, while information overload might be good for us, it’s also important to set limits - delete a few emails that aren’t critical for you to read, without reading them.  Say no to a project or an idea - even if just for now.  Spend time with your family, your coworkers, your staff in a supportive environment - rather than just a run, run, run type of world.  Take time for yourself - doing something you truly enjoy.

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