GTD can help you focus on the present

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David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done” (and the process the book explains, known simply as “GTD”) put out a very simple tweet recently. He said:

If you can’t read the embedded tweet, he said: “GTD = freedom of consciousness to be present with what you’re doing.“

If you practice GTD to a decent degree, it makes it easier to stay present with others. Two examples from past posts of mine come to mind.

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Back in 2009, I mentioned how GTD can help with your prayer life and with sleep, because it helps free your mind.

Then in 2016, I pulled another of David’s quotes where he says to “only think about cat food once“. If you have something rumbling around in your brain, get it into a trusted system so you can focus elsewhere.

If you have your inbox clean and your priorities straight, you’ll be able to focus on the task at hand instead of worrying about those other things you need to do later.

Other distractions

The other challenge can come from notifications that might pop up while you should be focused elsewhere. One thing I’m doing to try to help with that is to use my reMarkable in meetings instead of my laptop (though that’s often not feasible). There’s a lot more to unpack there, but even if your head is clear it’s hard to stay on task if your phone keeps buzzing.

David Allen’s original Getting Things Done book came out nearly 20 years ago, but so much of it is still practical today. If you can keep your data and ideas where they belong, it makes life so much smoother.

How the hierarchy of attention affects deep work

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I’ve talked about the hierarchy of attention on here a variety of times. When communicating with people, different types of communication imply different types of urgency, with a phone call meaning “I need your attention right this moment“. That’s not always ideal.

We all have times during the day when we’re really focused in on a problem or idea, with a million things going through our head, and then a brief interruption destroys it all. This comic from Jason Heeris shows it well:

It requires a bit of sonder to think about this before you pick up the phone (or Slack or Snapchat or whatever you use) to ask someone a “quick question”. That 30 second question could take the other person 20 minutes to recover from and get back to that headspace. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, and it’s something I’m working on.

This is why, despite all of the great technology out there today, that email is still ideal for a lot of communication. If it’s urgent, certainly call me. If it can wait a little while, though, send me an email and I’ll get back to you in a few hours.

Organized browser tabs with Workona

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I try out a lot of productivity tools over the course of a month, and most come and go pretty quickly. If they stick around in my workflow for at least a few weeks, I like to share them here. That’s the case with Workona.

Here’s a quick intro video that they created for it a few years ago:

In short, it allows you to save a group of tabs in a “workspace” for quick access later. Since my life is 99% in browser tabs, this has been an incredible find. For now, Workona is helping me a lot in two ways.

Work Projects

When we have a website project that we’re actively working on, we have a lot of resources we need to pull in from different places. We might have:

  • Their contract (Google Docs)
  • Their pricing/scope (Google Sheets)
  • Our task list (Teamwork)
  • Their sitemap (Slickplan)
  • Their existing website
  • etc…

Rather than have to track those down each time, I can just open that workspace in Workona and all of those various tabs fire back up.

Personal Tab Groups

I also keep a handful of tab workspaces for personal use, such as:

  • A workspace for this blog, with a handful of resources (recent posts, drafts, stock image sources, etc)
  • A workspace for social media, so I can open and close all of those sites at once (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)

So far, I’m finding Workona to be a pretty handy tool. That said, there are a ton of tab management tools out there, so if you use something that you prefer, please leave a comment and let me know.

Writing every day vs. publishing every day

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I’ve been publishing a daily post on here since late October last year — I believe today is number 163 in a row. I’m happy with that.

However, I was careful with how I worded that sentence: I “publish” every day, but I don’t “write” every day. There’s a big difference, and it’s something I’d like to improve upon.

I explained last year why I’m posting every day (I said “writing” at the time, but that’s not really accurate), and those goals are working well so far. I mentioned Seth Godin and Chris Lema in that post, and as far as I know they’re both writing every day.

Seth has mentioned it in some of his podcasts, and Chris mentioned it in a recent tweet here:

Writing daily?

In my case, I find ideas throughout the day, almost every day, but I often don’t have time to really think through them. Many of my posts are written over the weekend, and then slowly released throughout the coming days. As an example, I’m writing this post on April 2, but don’t plan to publish it until April 9.

For now, I’m blaming it on my schedule. Some days I find time to write, and some days I don’t. I hope to get to a place where I can consistently find time to write every single day, and we’ll see what happens.

For now, I’m quite happy that I’m at least able to press “publish” every day. Eventually, if things work out well, I’ll be able to write every day as well.

Time-shifting and Clubhouse

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One of the greatest things that technology has created is the concept of time-shifting with much of our entertainment and communication.

  • Back in the day, you had to tune in at a certain time to hear Paul Harvey. Now you can listen to Mike Rowe’s podcast, but listen whenever it’s best for you.
  • Back in the day, you had to have your TV on at 8:00 on Friday to see the latest episode of that show; now it’s just “released” on Friday and you can watch it whenever you want.

Communication works that way too. While we can feel “always on” too often with technology these days, and we need to work to fight against that, most communication is at least a little bit asynchronous. This kind of points back to my theory on the hierarchy of attention: phone calls are asking for your attention right now, but text messages and emails can wait a little while.

Clubhouse

This is the problem I have with the hot app Clubhouse, but it’s also what’s helping make it so popular. If you’re not on it right now, you’re going to miss out on what’s happening.

If you’re not familiar with it, Clubhouse is essentially voice-based chat rooms. Some people can talk, and others can choose to listen in. Thinking of it as “live podcasts” isn’t too far off.

Therein lies the problem (and the excitement) — you can’t time-shift it at all. They’re talking live right now, and you can’t catch up later. Sure, some folks record what they’re saying and republish it later, but the vast majority of the conversation is live and fleeting.

Given the pace of the world, I don’t see it sticking around without some changes. The ability to time-shift is amazing, and the lack of it in Clubhouse could pose very challenging as time goes on.

Email “thanks” versus a Slack emoji

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I recently heard an argument that email should continue to fade away in lieu of apps like Slack, which make for much more seamless communication. It’s a good consideration.

However, part of his argument related to acknowledging receipt of a message or small task. If you send someone an email with info, they’ll often reply with a short message like “thanks”, which adds a good bit of overhead to deal with a bunch of “thanks” emails throughout your week. However, if you send that same info on Slack, they might give your message a thumbs-up emoji to acknowledge it. That’s not bad, but there is a big difference.

With email, you’ll see the response.

With Slack, it’s easy to miss. Those emojis don’t give a notification, so you have to dig in a little bit to see if there was a response.

Which is better?

It’s hard to say. My initial response was email, as it’s a clear indication of a response that you won’t miss. However, it’s also a handful of clicks to open, view, and then archive the email away. With Slack, you just need to glance at the message to see the status.

This may seem trivial, but we have dozens of these types of conversations each day. Even at just a few seconds each, it adds up to many hours over the course of a year.

I think the answer here is situational, but I’m leaning more toward Slack for more of these kinds of things. This ultimately comes down to some companies that are creating policies of “no internal email” — if you need to talk to someone on your team, use Slack. I’m not fully there yet, but I get where they’re coming from. What do you think?

The benefits of changing to a new tool

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If you’ve followed this blog very long, you know that I like to try out different tools. I often change what I use for my tasks, planning, email, all kinds of things. I enjoy learning new technology and have fun trying out different tools.

However, there are two other big advantages to changing tools from time to time.

Enjoy the new stuff, but bring along things that worked before

No two tools are the same. When you switch to a different tool, you’ll likely gain and lose a few features. When possible, though, you can often bring along ideas from one tool to the next, making for the best of both.

For example, when I moved from the Full Focus Planner to Notion for my daily and weekly planning (and later to Roam Research), I brought along quite a few lessons and implemented them in Notion and then Roam. I got the benefits of the newer systems, but brought along lessons and ideas from the older systems.

Get the clutter out of the corners

Part of the pain of moving to a new tool is cleaning out some of the cruft, whether that’s old tasks you never got around to, or junk from six years ago in your Evernote. Either way, moving to a new system is a great time to clean that stuff up and give yourself a bit of a fresh start.

When I change systems, I generally do it manually. That creates a lot more work, but it gives me a chance to clean-up, reorganize, and really do it right.

When I moved my stuff out of Evernote a few years ago, it took quite a while to move everything but it gave me an opportunity to put things in the right places. Most stuff ended up in Roam Research, but some things were put in different places. For example, I had foolishly stored some password in Evernote years ago, so those went into LastPass for safe keeping.

Do you enjoy moving?

Part of this comes down to your personality. For me, I like trying out new tools and tend to move frequently. Others don’t, and that’s fine. I’d still encourage you to keep your eyes open from time to time, as a move to a better system might benefit you in a lot of ways, and the processing of moving itself could be great too.

What’s your system for disposable notes?

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I don’t necessarily like having too many separate systems for your notes and ideas, but I have one that is becoming particularly invaluable — a place for temporary, disposable notes.

About five years ago, I heard David Allen mention that “you should only think about cat food once“. You can read this post for more info, but the basic idea is that if you remember that you need cat food, you should put that into a trusted system to get it out of your mind.

Trusted Systems

Nearly 12 years ago, I wrote about the idea of a “trusted system” for your notes. The idea is that you need a system that you really trust, deep down, or else your mind won’t be able to let go of what it’s holding.

Further, you need a system that you know you’ll get back to in time. If you just throw “get cat food” into Evernote with your 10,000 other notes, there’s a good chance it’ll get lost. I think the solution is a disposable notes system.

Disposable Notes

This is really pretty simple; everyone should have a place to take quick notes that does not also hold long-term notes. This system should be completely emptied as frequently as possible. Your notes from there become items for your grocery list, or events on your calendar, or whatever they need to be. Deal with them properly, and get them out of that system.

Personally, I use Google Keep for my disposable notes. It’s easy to access and easy to keep clean, and frankly, isn’t great for long-term storage anyhow. I have a widget on my phone for quick notes, I can speak it in my car (“hey google… take a note…”), and then I have desktop widgets for it. Stuff goes in it constantly, and then comes back out when I have a chance to sit down.

You can use whatever you want for it. Other good options could be Apple Notes or Simplenote or one of dozens of others. Even a small paper notebook could work great.

Tools like Evernote, Notion, and Roam Research are better solutions for long-term notes — those are very important too, but not really for what we’re talking about today.

Ultimately, my advice is to keep those notes somewhere that you won’t forget about them and where the notes won’t get buried, so you can really trust stuff that you put into it and won’t have to think about cat food twice.

A quick agenda beats no agenda

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It’s been true for decades, and with everyone forced to switch to Zoom for the past year it hasn’t changed much — meetings without a clear agenda are often a complete waste of time.

While we have solid agendas for many of our meetings, there are times when we don’t have a chance to put together a solid plan before we start. A quick solution for that can be the “POP Model”. Just agree on three things before you start:

Purpose

Why are you having this meeting? If you can’t come up with a good answer to this, you should probably just log out of Zoom and go on with your day.

Outcome

What do you want to accomplish with this meeting? You know why you’re having the meeting, but what do you hope to walk away with? It could be a decision on a color for a logo, or agreement on the name of a product, but there should be some clear outcome that you’re aiming for.

Process

How will you make that outcome happen? This generally means assigning specific tasks at the end of the meeting so that everyone knows what needs to happen next.

If you can create a clear, detailed agenda before your meeting, that’s often preferred. If not, a quick “POP” might be a good way to help people stay on track.