Discipline. Now that’s an old-fashioned word. It conjures up images of strict parents, being stood in the corner, being unable to do what you want; but there is another side. Any skill that takes dedication and focus is also called a “discipline”. The image there is of perfecting a movement, refining your understanding, excluding distraction. The common theme is focus, excluding one thing so that another can be successful, pouring your energy into one bright spot, rather than dissipating it over a wide field.
Of course I am not very much about focus. Everything interests me, including the busy fireworks of my own neurons: I am blessed and cursed with lots of ideas. All the time. One of the reasons that I use Getting Things Done is that it helps me to keep focussed on the stuff that I need to… wait for it…. get done. The ability to boil the mass of distractions and projects down to lists is very useful to me.

As I wrote a while ago about the Pomodoro Technique it can also be useful to work on how we handle that one task. Pomodoro does not say anything about how to handle your mass of inputs, that is what you have GTD for after all, but it is a very effective discipline when you get to the point of doing something. The pomodoro technique simply says that you need to fully focus on that single thing for a short (typically 25 minutes) space of time, to the exclusion of everything else. I have to admit I initially did not apply it with much… here is comes… discipline. Discipline is necessary to get the benefit. Discipline in this case is quite simply not letting yourself be interrupted, staying on target. It requires a little effort of willpower, but only for a short time.

You need to exercise discipline to run a pomodoro and get the benefits of the focus it provides, but like every exercise it is strengthening : you need to actually do the movements to get the muscles and do the thinking to get the ideas. The trick to any kind of exercise (or new behaviour)  is to make sure that you perceive benefits very close to the time when you make the effort. Do 25 minutes of effort and then give yourself a (short) reward. Then do it again…and again. I have been running Pomodoros for a week and a half now. It certainly has improved my ability to concentrate and it has had an unexpected side-benefit too: quality improvement. When you break things down into 25 minute blocks you inevitably find yourself finished with time to spare at some point. The Pomodoro technique says that this is an opportunity for “overlearning“, which makes sense for study tasks, but not when you are writing a document or coding a program. What does make sense is quality checking. I have consistently found that being forced to stay with something that I had mentally declared finished and double-check it has improved the final quality. I always find something to sharpen and improve. Curving back round to the subject of discipline, the extra value of small disciplined step is that is reinforces your faith in your own ability to drive yourself, keep promises to yourself.

Bottom line? I recommend the Pomodoro technique for those of us (=me) that are easily distracted from doing. It is very GTD-complementary and gives a nice little win at 25 minute intervals. Give it a try.

I got used last week.

But that’s ok. Here is how it happened.

At the moment I spend part of my time in an environment were there is fear and lack of candour. People feel threatened and powerless and unable to connect to each other. Such situations are anathema to me, they dampen down our fire and life and infect us with secrecy and doubt. Anger and complaints do not counter this. Bitching around the coffee machine does not help. The only cure for fear is truth: gentle, unremitting personal truth. So I told the truth about what was happening to me (I am going to leave) but that I was fine and would be happy to talk to anyone about my situation. This undoubtedly helped the manager concerned to avoid a confrontation with his staff. He used what I said to paper over growing concerns. So he will probably not properly resolve the situation. That is a shame, but I stand by my principle. I knew that I would be used and did it anyway because, as I tell my sons very often, I wish to behave according to my own best principles rather than responding to other’s worst actions. I hope that some of my co-workers will feel a little easier, a little stronger and less alone. It was for them. I was a small thing I could do.

So what am I telling you? For me, it does not matter if others would put your actions to bad use. Tell the truth. It really will set you free.

As Bruce Wayne’s father says “So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

It is a hard thing to do, perhaps the hardest thing. Coming back for something that really hurts you, really makes you doubt: very hard. But if you can do it, you will be stronger, simply because you know that you can. You will have done something that you will remember every time you get knocked down. I do not believe that suffering ennobles people. But surmounting it does. It opens up possibilities.

I recently read a blog post by a creative writer who fell on his face, was utterly incompetent in front of a group because he was not properly prepared. It almost crushed him, but he summoned up from somewhere the anger and spirit to “get back on the horse” and try again. As I wrote to him, I believe from the bottom of my heart that such moments are magnificent, they are triumphs of the human spirit and beautiful in the eyes of God. I do not wish you adversity, but I do wish you the strength to surmount it and a long and powerful memory of having done so.

Why do we fall? So that we learn how to pick ourselves up.

Whenever I give a Getting Things Done training course I start with a funny little exercise I developed. I spread out a pack of “e-mail” cards on the table, labeled “urgent”, “from your boss”, “from a colleague you do not like” and so on on the table. On the other side of the cards is a money amount representing the value of handling the e-mail. People home in on the Boss and Urgent e-mails and find tiny or even negative amounts on the reverse of the card. Naturally, some of the least appealing cards have very high values. , making this a game that is hard to win.

Once a couple of people have failed to “score” by picking random e-mails I show them that the only way to truly win is to turn over all the cards. You cannot choose what to do until you have Once you have found out what something means, to you, you can decide about priorities.

Back when my beloved wife and I were DINKs (Double Income No Kids) we had a cleaning lady called Norma. She was a smart and capable lady but had a tendency to store anything we left lying on a surface in any random, nearby place into which it fitted.  This made things so hard to find that even now, years later, we  we call any situation in which something has been carefully put away in the wrong place “Normalized”.  Norma was no dummy, but of course did not know where to put our random items because she did not know what they meant, to us. To give an example, nobody could know where to put the cinnamon away in my kitchen, unless you know I like cinnamon on my raisin-toast in the morning (habit I picked up in Australia).

The point of this is that if you do not know what something means, what action it demands of you, you will be unable to store it correctly, let alone attempt to prioritize it with respect to other things in your world. 

There is something that I want to say, somewhat out of the ordinary for this blog, please be patient while I find a way to say it.

I am a scarily cheerful person almost all of the time, particularly on diamond-bright blue-skied winter days like today. Things are actually pretty grim in the Netherlands, where I live, right now. The economy has taken a hit under the waterline and people are losing jobs, businesses and houses. Such times are of course sent to try us and they have one gift to give: perspective, they force you to focus on what is truly important.

I may lose my job.

But, I have a close and loving relationship with my wife and children. I am healthy (though a little overweight right now) and live in comfort and safety. I consider myself fortunate beyond all reckoning.  If was going to have a problem with something I would definately have chosen the economy and work. I am therefore filthy rich in any coin worth counting.

In these times it is tempting to “turtle”, pull the covers over your head and wait for it all to blow over, but that is not what we are for. If you do have perspective and strength this is the time to reach out to others. I spent various moments this week with people who are overstretched by their work, put at financial risk, or worse dunked in confusion and sadness by turmoil and tough decisions in their personal lives. There is little you can do but listen attentively and perhaps offer a little practical help and perspective. You can be gentle. So that is what the title is about. Even now, even when money markets lurch around like drunken giants there is no force, no dictum greater than love and the ability to care for your fellow-person.

Gentleness is your super-power. Use it for good.

Use it.

I recently ran a course for a group of colleagues on e-mail handling. Though this is one of the classic benefits of GTD,  getting to grips with e-mail, it is one I have slightly avoided teaching or coaching. For me the chief benefit of GTD is that it clarifies your thinking; as a result you do not get snowed under so easily. Many e-mail handling courses are merely “go-faster” tricks for Outlook and fancy macros. That covers up the real problem. To handle e-mail, voicemail, drive-by bosses and a day chock-full of meetings you do not need macros or short-cut keys. You need to be able to think clearly and productively about one thing. Finish that thinking, store the result and refocus rapidly on the next thing.

I caved in and taught the e-mail class because I had the freedom to teach the basic principles up front: for everything that comes into your world you need to know the desired outcome and the next action. I also wanted to teach the class because the people doing the asking were being run ragged by e-mail. I have a personal mission to strengthen my colleagues and protect them from burn-out.

The course was a success. We made good progress and I shall follow up all the participants to check if the new behaviours have settled in, but from the questions I was getting during the course I am convinced that a number of them have “got it” and will incorporate GTD behaviours into their work.

To kick the course off I invented a little game, which you can try too… I wrote on a number of file cards some “e-mail headers” with things like “from the boss”,  ”urgent”, “legal issue” etc. and on the other side I wrote down prices, ranging from minus one thousand euros to plus ten million. I then scattered them on the table, price side down, and challenged my trainees to choose which of these e-mails they should work on to get the most (monetary) benefit. Of course the only way to choose with any certainty was to turn over all the cards. I then pointed out that if you did not handle all your e-mail you could not have priorities. You can’t prioritize your work if you do not know what your work involves…

As always when giving a training I learnt at least as much as they did.

I have not posted in my blog for quite a while, which is strange because I enjoy writing.  I did some thinking and realized that though I still use GTD and coach others about it, I have little need to blog about it: any more than I would blog about cleaning my teeth. I still have insights and make mistakes of course and I shall bring those here, but I shall be moving this blog gently in a more personal direction. I feel the need for a journal…

Given that I live and breathe personal development there will be plenty of that in my journal. But I may also just talk about my kids and my job.

I may also post a few cartoons and illustrations: I have a creative side that needs to get out and play occasionally. I hope that there will be things for you to use and relish.

One of the things that has got my attention now is happiness. How can it be achieved and why are people not often focussed on achieving it!? I get a lot of insights into this from The Happiness Project.

Now if you are going to disagree with someone to make a point, you need to pick someone who’s opinion is worth considering. So I am going to pick on the thoughtful and helpful Merlin Mann.

Now I have been gettingt lots of useful information about how to get yourself moving on things, how to handle forgetfulness and distraction, from 43 folders, but an alarm bell went off when Merlin started saying that we all “suck at something“. I just hate the focus on weaknesses. Well of course he is right. I am pretty solid at GTD these days, I love and work hard at facilitation, coaching and clarifying communications but…. I am kind of terrible at short-term, common-sense logistics. The kind of stuff my way smarter wife effortlessly juggles when we need to shop, drop the car off at the garage, get someone a haircut, take a kid to a play-date and truck another one to a swimming lesson in one afternoon.

But it is certainly not just Merlin.

Lots of the personal effectiveness stuff I read is focussed on dealing with common human weaknesses like that. The only trouble is that spending all your time working on your weaknesses is rather depressing. I have been reading about focussing on strengths recently and the basic wisdom there is that you should spend most of your time investing in the things you do well and just do minimal “damage control” on the weaknesses that really hamper you.

For every hour of effort and attention put into handling something you are not good at you can get ten times the results by extending and deepening an existing strength. The time you focus on weaknesses is when they fundamentally prevent you from deploying a strength, given the context you are in, the work you are doing.

They way Getting Things Done fits into this for me is that it is an “enabler”. It allows me to get clear of the anxiety that I am not sufficiently in control, missing something important and leaves me room for creativity, for fun. It clears my head, so I do feel more able to use my skills. It is a catalyst. My personal strengths lie in first contact with new people, communication, finetuning, and connectedness. Feeling in control helps me have the confidence to lean into these strengths and apply them.

So I am still still dedicated to self-improvement and any and all methods that let me achieve that. The kicker is that you need to make sure that your self-improvement effort is focussed on your strengths, no your weaknesses

Sometimes I write things on this blog that am almost ashamed to admit it took me years to realise. I find that the great revelations for me appear not as a flash of light but a slap on the forehead. The corollory of that is that I also hesitate to tell you guys what I learned because…well…. you probably all worked it out long ago….

My latest flash of the bloody obvious is that working on things you truly enjoy will cause you to become much, much better at them. I read a while ago that the latest research on the creation of expertise, a high level of a particular skill, has little to do with innate talents (yes that is NOT what you expect) and everything to do with large amounts of mindful practice. About 10,000 hours of mindful practice actually. That means gaining expertise at anything requires remaining motivated during many hours of practice AND being prepared to think carefully and critically about what you did: that is what mindful means. If you rattle off a non-challenging task and are not looking to improve in any way the practice will not benefit you.

So you had better love it. To bits. Otherwise you will never, ever put in that amount of effort. I must certainly have clocked up the requisite number of hours driving cars of various kinds by now, but I am not an “expert” car driver. That is because I do not pay attention to what I am doing, I am not engaged with driving the car and seeking to perfect my practice of it. On the other hand, I can swim a pretty decent crawl now, because I once spent a six months (between girlfriends) swimming four times a week. I did a lot of laps and, crucially, swam with great attention. I noticed what worked well and what could be better. I tried new positions, different timing and also observed other people who could swim faster than I could. I enjoyed getting better and better and relished the feeling of growing skill.

The lesson I took from all of this was to look carefully at the work I do and to write down in a journal exactly which activities had been the most enjoyable and fulfilling and what exactly I had been doing when I had those feelings. That did not change my job title, description or responsibilities. It did lead to me working in a certain style. Where other people do things by making a detailed breakdown, I do similar things by getting my ideal team together and focussing them on what needs to be done. Where one person will make a huge GANTT chart, I will make a simpler chart and run fast, sharp meetings to track the details. I am just happier, and a ton more effective, doing it my way.

A nice side effect is that having a big list of sucessful moments is wonderful for cheering you up when times are tough. All you need is a notebook and a little quiet time to focus on ”what did I do really, really well this week/month/year?”

I recently blogged about using GTD in large organisations: it is an ongoing story. I have been working with an IT department and we have been using GTD as a way to ”cascade” the goals of the whole company all the way down to individual projects and next actions.

The key insight is that even the most beautifully crafted strategy is just “stuff” for you until you have made very explicit what you are going to do about it. Hmmm, we know that to do when we want to get clear about dealing with stuff, we use the fundamental thinking process. The way it works in practice is that managers at each level in the organisation look carefully at the vision and goals that they have been handed and use GTD-thinking to “boil them down” for their own area.

Of course when you are a manager many, even most, of your goals will be reached by delegating projects. That means you then need to run a negotiation with your direct reports and hash out exactly how they are going to respond to you: they may surprise you. Our experience so far has shown that people closer to the day-to-day operation have very useful things to say about what customers want and how services can be improved. That may of course mean you want to add some things to your and your boss’s plate, too…

The implication is that you get a chain of negotiation and feedback up and down the organisation. That may sound like a lot of work, but it is absolutely necessary if you want your strategy to actually make a difference to what people do! It is the “due dilligence”. This stuff is not effort-free, but it is wonderfully transparent and genuinely empowering. I rather hate that word, but it is very applicable to this process. I have seen some fairly hardened, cynical people sit down in workshops and come out with a can-do attitude simply because they can now make the link between the “high-falutin” strategy and tasks that they can go out and accomplish.

That is the magic: instead of worthy powerpoints about “being a major player in the dumbly whatsit global thingummy” you can prove to people that if they fix the problem handling process, document the new program release, schedule a regular quality review with the customer or index the database they are actively contributing to the management’s vison and the success of the company.

Everyone has heard the classic managment story. A traveller comes across three men cutting stone blocks and asks each one what he is doing. The first replies, ”I am a stone cutter and I am cutting stones”, the second replies, ”I am a stone cutter and I am working to keep my family secure and well-fed” and the third says, ”I am a stone cutter and I am building a Cathedral!” I strongly believe, influenced of course by Victor Frankl, that pretty much everybody would like to feel like the third man. What we are doing by making link between the work of the day and the vision of the organisation is giving people a view of the cathedral and of where their block of work fits into it.

I illustrate this for people with a dumb example. If I asked you to “make the world better for me” you would be paralysed by indecision. If I tell you that the world would be better for me if someone fetched me a strong espresso (no sugar) then we can at the very least have a useful negotiation as to whether you will do that for me or not.

We started GTD-ing the management processes for the department since the end of 2007 and got lots of concrete actions and some very delightful “quick wins”.  In january, when we started gearing up for the second round of workshops, we first went looking for guidance from top management: we intended to take that vision and translate that down to departmental level and then hand it to the team leaders so that they could get a response from within the scope and expertise of their teams. But there was a slight snag. Though we were off and running, because of some major organisational changes, the strategy we were looking to use was still being formulated and discussed. At the same time the two teams we had coached last year had had a very productive sit-down and presented the team-leaders with their own suggested objectives, based on what thery were experiencing operationally.

It was almost embarassing to find that they were ahead of us. The people we had been working with had taken us very seriously and had set some concrete, achievable but also fairly challenging goals for themselves. They now expected us, quite rightly, to carry those up the tree. So we did just that. We got their input, checked it against the draft policy we had got hold of and started doing Natural Planning with the teams. The team leaders were delighted: everthing their teams had proposed was relevant and addressed cost-control, quality and customer service goals that they would have been setting anyway…

The other thing we realized was that we were in fact defining goals for everyone that they could and should use in their planning meetings with their managers. That did require some decision making: the organisation in question has a classical year-long plan-coach-evaluate process, but the GTD process naturally had people defining results to achieve in a much shorter, 6-12 week timeframe. That meant more work for the team leaders, but it gives them a much closer link to what their teams were actually doing so they agreed immediately. It also eliminates something I hate: that evaluation meeting at the end of the year in which your targets have become irrelevant (due to a changing world or marketplace) and you sit their with your manager trying to negotiate what your performance was with too little common ground. Of course the classical defense against that is to set the kind of broad, vague goals that will be just as irrelevant and uninspiring at the end of the year as they were in the beginning.

Where we are right now, is getting the projects and larger outcomes that the teams have defined into the planning and coaching system. Given the commitment of all parties I am confident that will succeed. Someone said to me recently “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and taking a step back from our process, I am starting to see what we are doing as a culture change. That needs some more thought and of course action, so I think I shall save that for a later post…