After an interesting exchange with Nate Chastain I feel the need to map out a bit more thoroughly than last time the pragmatic mashup of GTD and The Pomodoro Technique that is the method of my current madness. This is then a post about methods…aargh  and I am (strange to say) not much of a method wonk. No really. It is all too common to see productivity methods and the tools that go with them (generally software) become precisely the kind of mental tar-baby that we were trying to avoid by adopting them : goofing around with new software is probably less mentally challenging than dealing with you piles and files. The thing that has always endeared and adhered GTD to me is just that it works for me. Other methods, Covey et al, bounced off my polished procrastination, leaving me feeling guilty. GTD allows me to do things that would otherwise not happen. It sticks with me despite my ability to go haring off after any gaily apparelled concept that trots past. It is just fierce enough to make me do the thinking I need to do but not so grim that I despair of satisfying its constraints : hence the affection and enthusiasm.

GTD evolved out of the kind of busy commercial middle and executive management environment Peter Drucker wrote for. Its bones and brains were honed against a deluge of inputs and interrupts, lack of clarity, moving targets and the pressing need to remain sane while keeping an ever increasing number of plates safely spinning. It is indeed about “getting things done” and the unsaid follow-up is “despite your screw-ball environment”. The assumption is that the (for me unsung) rigourous process of defining a Next Action will automatically chunk things into a size you can focus long enough to handle. That is mostly true, but not always.

I have a set of documents I prepare once a week which takes a serious amount of time and concentration. The action is perfectly clear to me. The doing is sometimes challenging.

The Pomodoro Technique on the other hand evolved from Francisco Cirillio’s wish to improve his ability to study. It is armoured against distraction, lack of focus and loss of the ability to absorb information: it is a way of staying the course, buckling down. The assumption here is that your task may well be large, but it is pretty well defined: it is a book to read attentively, learn from, perhaps a programme to write.The “atom of time” GTD thinks about  is two minutes. Pomodoro’s take 25 minutes: some things need the one focus, some need the other. It is also worth noting that in most GTD forums there is  a lively discussion of procrastination, which suggests to me that GTD needs a little help in the doing area. Also very powerful in the Pomodoro technique is the emphasis on learning, keeping records so that you can see patterns and improve over time: very Kaizen.

There is no wrong here. E-mails patter into my PC at about 40-60 a day right now. The need to be handled and transformed into action and it needs to be done with rigour. It needs a process that makes sense of them quickly and prevents overwhelm. Some of my stuff is just too small and volatile for Pomodoros – I hate mashing disparate tasks into one 25 minute slot. On the other hand, I also have those big-chunk documents to deal with – those work out to about six Pomodoros on a Tuesday.

I also collect vigorously, always have a notebook, take a tear-off pad to every meeting and process my notes afterwards. I need both a toothbrush and a hairbrush, tap-shoes and wellingtons (rubber boots for you US people) even the rapier and sledgehammer on some days. My wisdom here is this: use what works for you, GTD, Pomodoro or both.

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 have a pretty strong distrust of anything that claims to automate your GTD process: most of them claim more attention than they relieve and become jobs in themselves. Nevertheless I do need somewhere to park my next actions at home. Work is wall-to-wall Outlook and I synch it down to my smartphone, but at home I use gmail for email and a low-tech wall-calendar for agenda items because the children can use it too. I looked at both Thymer and Remember the Milk as candidates, please do not write in to tell me that there are others…

Thymer has a very elegant interface, uncluttered and fluid and I found it very pleasant to use, but it is not quite my GTD cup of tea: tasks get hung on a timeline, there is an emphasis on timing activities (great if you charge time) and the ability to bump a task onto a later date is a way of setting priorities. You are basically loading a day with tasks off your inventory and pushing back everything you do not regard as urgent and important. That is rather like Michael Linenberger’s approach, not incompatible with GTD, but priorities play a bigger role than I like. Projects are nicely implemented and Thymer makes it easy to share a project with someone else. I suspect that Thymer might work very well for time-driven project groups working from a bill-of-work, but it did not suit me. I also missed the ability to synchronize, Thymer is expecting to be your desktop and does not talk to anything else. Thymer is freemium, there is a very basic version for free and you pay a monthly subscription for the full product and group usage.

Remember the Milk has slightly clunkier tabbed interface, orientated around an inbox. It lets you set up task groups any way you like and synchs reliably with my Windows Mobile smartphone and reputedly also with iPhones. Cute, but currently not very necessary for me is the Twitter interface: a well-aimed tweet will insert a to-do into your RTM account. RTM is definitely less fun to use than Thymer, the interface needs two clicks to complete a task for instance, but they win on synchronisation ability:  I like to have the same task list at home and work.

What goes around comes around and one of my hobby-horses has come around again. My personal approach to GTD coaching is to emphasis the mental game. It is not about having a particular set of macro’s or a specific tool. It is about how you think. For me this is very basic, but I keep having to prise people away from a technology of some kind and demand they do their own thinking.

It is a  great human weakness to wish for a magic wand, the device, glistening and replete with hard-coded wisdom, that will fix your wagon for good. It should dovetail itself to your psyche without actually needing any kind of conversation with your conciousness or change on your part whatsoever.

No dice.

This applies in many fields of effort. I remember consulting with a company which insisted that only the promised following version of a particular bit of call-center software would enable them to do their jobs properly. One of my other clients had the same job to do. For that client is was executed by an experienced and painstaking man with a bunch of file cards and an excel spreadsheet.

This particular train of thought was sparked for me by a course I gave recently, my super-fast half-day GTD intro, in which a lady sat who, without being difficult about it, had already implemented the behaviors I was describing with simple tools. This was for the good and sufficient reason that she had what Dutch people call a Duo-Baan or shared job. She and her job-partner rarely met, but remained in absolute synch with each other by exchanging lists. She had knife-sharp Next Actions, well-defined Waiting Fors and a complete project list all set up in Excel and paper files. Her partner could walk in and pick up everything that was relevant immediately.

The tools are not important. Clarity is important. Completeness is important and above all Thinking It Through until it is blisteringly explicit is very, very important. If you can get those things right you could probably use trained rats and parchment to run your life.

I am currently coaching a particularly creative person who generates ideas continually. He needs GTD specifically because he creates stuff that he could move on, meetings he could go to, initiatives to pursue more quickly than any of the standard strategies that people use to handle their lives can cope with.

One particular kind of “stuff” that accumulates in his life is meeting notes. He has many pages of them and it has become a goal of mine to have him throw them away. This is because in my own personal experience, trashing your meeting notes after you have processed them into your GTD system is the an act of faith. The first time you do it there is always a wince, a little qualm… Have I truly captured all the projects and actions we discussed? Did I miss some important note or outcome?

Trashing your notes forces you to be

(1) rigorous about sucking every last commitment and next action out of the notes and

(2)  utterly dependant on looking at your lists in order to know what to do.

It could be entirely legitimate to keep your notes of course – there could be a whole mind-map on there that deserves a place in your reference material or project support folders. That will happen sometimes, but often you will be able to boil the whole meeting (for you) down to a couple of projects and half-a-dozen next actions and waiting-fors. Better yet, knowing that you are going to faithfully process the meeting into your trusted GTD system will make you alert during the meeting to promises made to you (waiting-fors) and commitments you make to others (projects, next actions). You will automatically chase down the information you need to make a concrete commitment and to get clarity about what other people are going to do for you.

This attitude to meetings is now so ingrained in me that I actually work as a facilitator in meetings, where I use structured questioning to help everyone get that kind of clarity.

My challenge to you, as it was to my client: after your next meeting, tear out the sheet with your notes on it, process it out of your inbox and throw it away!

P.S This whole post was one Pomodori!

I have been working seriously with the Pomodoro technique recently. I find it genuinely useful for achieving focus on a single extensive task. I used it to plow my way through an extensive e-learning trajectory (3 hours of material) and to focus on writing documents.

Engaging with the Pomodoro technique made me realise that GTD offers relatively little in the way of strategies for executing, so Pomodoro fits nicely into the DO layer of GTD.

If you want to integrate GTD with pomodoro all you need to do is use the work inventory aspect of GTD, look carefully at your Next Actions and select any that you want to move on that need a substantial effort (30+ minutes). These you can block into your diary as pomodoros. I tend to label tasks as “Review course training material 2PD” which means that I should block out 2 pomodoros worth. I do use a pomodoro sheet to record my progress on pomodoro tasks, but I process the “urgent and unplanned” part of the sheet back into GTD.

An unexpected and not totally welcome effect of Pomodoro-ing is that you suddenly realize quite how little focussed intensive effort you manage in one day. My current record is six Pomodoros, though it should be said that I am currently only 60% available as I am recovering from an eye operation. The technique also makes it very visible when you under or overestimate the time needed for a task.

If you have some kind of standard block of intensive work (perhaps a regular report to write) I recommend blocking it out in Pomodoros and seeing how your estimate of the time needed matches up to reality.

Where GTD conflicts a little with Pomodoro is the handling of interruptions. In GTD the emphasis is on flexibiltity: you snap round, handle the interruption and then return to the inventory of your work, perhaps with a different focus as a result of the interruption. Pomodoro emphasises remaining focussed on the task at hand, straight-arming incoming interruptions to handle after the pomodoro has expired. Both have their advantages. As I gain more experience mixing the techniques I will post further thoughts.

I got very interested recently in experiments being done in the field of “ego depletion“. The theory proposes that humans have a  limited quantity of “ego” or willpower. When you exercise self-control you use up this resource and will then be less able to persist with other tasks. In the classic experiment of this field hungry subjects were left with plates of radishes and chocolate-chip biscuits. Half of the subjects were allowed to eat the biscuist and the other half were asked to only eat radishes and ignore the biscuits. The subjects then had to try to complete a difficult puzzle that was, unbeknownst to them, impossible.

The “biscuit-resisters” gave up much earlier than the people who were allowed to eat biscuits and they were more tired at the end of the experiment. Later experiments with tasks that were not impossible showed that people who had not had to “burn willpower” resisting a normal impulse were much better at the task. They got better results. I looks as if “ego” is also needed for complicated thinking, like a sort of mental jet-fuel.

It is of course dangerous to glibly apply a limited experiment to the complexities of everyday life, but the image of will-power being drained away by resisting temptation is very appealing and aligns with many experiences we all share: the fatigue of resisting an impulse, a bad habit, the catastrophic results of trying to adopt several “good habits” at once.

If we do accept these results, what can be do to use them in ordinary life?

1. Allow for reduced performance
   If you are resisting a bad habit you are depleting your willpower and will be less able to keep going in other areas needing persistance or higher level performance. If you are having to keep yourself to a strict diet you will not be as sharp as you might otherwise be…
2. Don’t try to do everything at once
   If willpower is being use for five different things there will be less of it available for each of them, so you risk failing to complete anything. This is very like the classic advice on goals: one or two give you focus, twelve is a recipe for failure.
3. Limit the time you spend exerting willpower
   If you stay in the room with the chocolate-chip cookies too long you are burning will-power all the time. Stay there too long and you may “snap” and grab a handful! The whole point of exerting willpower is to create a success, to visibly, tangibly and emotionally succeed in controlling your own behaviour. Mark that moment very conciously, reward yourself and then back off to give your will-power a chance to recharge!

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.

One of the things David Allen says about thinking and focus, is that “it’s not about whether the information is available, it’s about whether you are available to the information”.  Forget the nutty, mystical stuff where people think that imagining their dream life will cause it to appear. This is all about what you notice, what opportunities you take and what you filter out.

We all do a lot of filtering. If you want to prove this to yourself just take a moment to think about books and then look around you for a few minutes. Anything remotely book-related will jump out at you. It you do this on your way to work you will see book shops and people reading, things you never noticed on any other day. This is also why you notice anybody driving the same make of car as you, things related to a sport or hobby you are keen on, anything about food when you are hungry!You can tune your perception to anything This is why you should be very careful about what you focus on: your perception will highlight it for you, even if it is unpleasant…  If you go into a meeting expecting everyone to be obstructive you will perceive all comments in that light and, by reacting to your negative image of the other participants, generate resistance you would otherwise not have met. In conversation and negotiation your preconception of how well things will go is crucial. It will communicate itself to others through your body language and in every word you use. See youself as a beggar at the table and you will get treated like one!

It goes further. I have a wicked, bad habit of riding my bicycle without hands. If I focus on how difficult balancing is, I end up doing a lot of balancing and start to wobble. If I focus on how smoothly I am going round the corners, I go, wait for it, smoothly round the corners. The less attention I pay to the fact that I am not using my hands, the better the ride. Holding an image of catching the ball, making the jump, balancing flawlessly are all crucial in sports. Top athletes of all kinds spend significant amounts of training time visualising the kind of race they will run, the line they will take down the course.

Of course, when I put like that it is hard to say when someone is “planning their approach” and when they are using imagery to guide their actions. But that is a false distinction. When I am planning a project, the most important part of planning is getting a clear image of what the sucessful outcome of the project will be.

Do a little exercise with this. Choose a guiding image, or if you prefer goal. Visualize a concrete success for tomorrow. Write it down and run it around your mind first thing in the morning and at regular intervals during the day and see what you notice and what difference that makes.

I am doing this exercise with you. I had a conversation recently in which one of my clients said, kindly and with concern, that he had found me rather too careful and reticent in a meeting. “I am used to you being a terrier”, he said. “You chase after people and get things done”. He was right. I had had a bad conflict with a colleague shortly before and it had closed me down a bit. But I was grateful for the positive image of me that he held and I shall spend tomorrow imagining that I am indeed a fierce, but gentle, terrier: determined to get to the bottom of things and chasing down every result we need… Let me know how your images serve you!

I was inspired by this post at 43 folders to start thinking about meetings. I seem to be at different meetings to most people, perhaps because I have the luxury of running many of the ones I attend. Many posters complained that meetings they were attending were boring or irrelevant. I may be a bit hard-assed here, but I feel that you should then be questioning  the purpose of the meeting. It is highly professional to say respectfully and without malice that a meeting is not relevant to you.

Of course being able to say that with conviction depends on knowing the purpose of the meeting! My favourite question for starting any meeting is, ”why are we doing this? What do we hope to achieve?”. You would not believe how often people give me blank looks or contradictory answers. Do not back down from this question. You need to quickly determine the purpose of the meeting, so that you can work out what your outcome is. If you cannot see any useful outcome inside the meeting then state that in a respectful way and depart: you will be more productive elsewhere.

Another benefit of asking the why question is that it gives everyone a common focus. If a number of people do not agree on the desired outcome then you need to have that conversation before trying to decide anything else. Everyone needs to be pulling in more-or-less the same direction!

Once the outcome is clear the job of the chair is much easier: it is to ensure that everyone remains focussed on achieving the outcome agreed to at the beginning. Having clarity about purpose, is crucial: it allows her to decide whether what is being said is germane. If we all know that we are deciding how to handle a specific risk to the project, rough-up figures for the product introduction or choose a training programme for next year it will be clear when someone is going down a “rabbit trail” and you can close them down without friction.

I also feel that I have an obligation towards any meeting I attend: I must ensure that I understand what is going on or I shall not be able to contribute usefully. That is why I ask questions about anything I do not understand.

Finally, at the end of the meeting, you can check whether you achieved your outcome.

That is the quality check: did we do enough in this meeting or are there more actions needed to achieve the desired outcome? What next-actions did we define, for who? Do not wait until the last minute to call for next-actions, it always takes a little while to get that clarified.

Question for you fine folks: how do you keep meetings on track? What are your golden rules?