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.

As I very often say – I have an astounding ability to finally realize the extremely obvious. If I have an intellectual guardian angel she probably spends a lot of her time slapping her forehead and going “good grief”. My current brainstorm is on the subject of learning a new habit. I have finally realized one of the main reasons it is so hard.

It is hard because we do not train ourselves the right way. My dog sits when I say “Sit!”. This is not because I am wonderfully masterful or very skilled with dogs. It is because when my dog hears “Sit!” he knows that if he does indeed sit he will get a munchy. He has a great liking for dog-munchies and so he sits.

That’s it.

I did warn you that it was obvious, but what is astonishing is what we humans do when we are training ourselves to adopt a new behaviour. We do the equivalent of whacking the dog for standing or not sitting fast enough. We withhold the munchy. We sometimes (whether the dog sat or not) bury the dog in steaks. The message here is simple:  all you need to do to get yourself to behave differently is to consistently give yourself a small but noticeable reward when you do the new behaviour at least a bit. Do not give the reward when you do not do the behaviour. Always give it when you do. Despite our wonderful yearning spirits, the learning part of us is no smarter than a dog. So if you want to lose weight, jog regularly, study French etc. build in a human-munchy until whatever it is is second nature.

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.

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!

Let me tell you a story.

I once ran a team into which was dropped a grumpy and rigid old-school programmer. He was unhappy to be landed with me and I was similarly unhappy that this ugly duckling had been dumped into my budget.  Fortunately I had through personal experience one insight that served me very well: if you cannot get efffective work out of someone it is probably because you did not find the right framework, the right goals and match with their skills. You, as a manager, did not do the due dilligence to locate that thing which needs to be done which the person you are confronted with will do well and (hopefully) enjoy. I finally found a task within my purview which needed doing and which this person did well. He never quite got over the grumpyness, but he became more positive and gained respect from other team members for a job well done.

It  can be a tall order.  It may be that the right frame for your ugly duckling,is not in your team, or even your company. But do not make that judgement too soon. I work as a project manager and I and my colleagues are therefore often dropped into a new context. I have very often seen and personally experienced that the same person working in two different contexts within the same organisation went from excellent to not merely less capable but incapable. Subtle differences in management styles and culture can make a huge difference.

This, of course, also applies to you.

Look carefully at the social, functional and managerial context in which you are working.  Have you suddenly found yourself struggling upstream rather than going with the flow? Are you suddenly the black sheep? If nothing has significantly changed in your life and attitude, it could be that you are in the wrong framework. You may need to look carefully at the situations, groups and tasks where you excelled and enjoyed your work. That is your frame and you will be happier fitting in to it.

Sometimes what I need to say seems to obvious. One of the things I am still learning is to say it anyway.

I am a deeply fortunate person. I have a family I love,  a cheerful disposition and there are moments in my day which are eternal, where I am breathless with the glory of the world. I do not feel grateful because there is an obligation or that it is expected. I feel grateful because it is a natural state and so profoundly mixed with what I understand of happiness that I cannot seperate it out.

So I say to my sons “What goes around…” and they answer “comes around” and they know that I mean that the large and small generosity and acts of kindness that others show cannot be repaid, but only transmitted.

My oldest boy biked off to see his good friend home and  got lost on the way back. It was getting dark and everything seemed strange and threatening to him. He did not dare talk to the big, tough-looking teenagers he saw in the park. Fear and embarassment gripped him and held him back from finding help until tears came, until Rosanna came. I have never met Rosanna and I probably will never find her, but she put him back on the right road and guided him home.

Thankyou Rosanna, for sending him home. I was very scared too. May you be helped in all your journeys.

I have laid upon oldest boy a debt of honour. “Someday”, I said “you will find someone lost and afraid when you are a big, perhaps tough-looking, teenager. Then you will remember Rosanna and a scared ten-year old.” So much of what we say to children fades, but I hope that that will remain.

I do not know you and perhaps I never will. I am writing this out into the strange, busy echo-chamber of the Internet. Wherever you are, I hope that you will always be guided home. If some day a lanky great guy helps you out, it may be that my son remembers Rosanna.

I read a  lot of webcomics. I have always loved comics, having been brought up with the Sparky and the Beano. Unlike their squashed-tree cousins, webcomics have almost no threshold. You could turn away from reading this, draw something, scan it and have a webcomic up in ten minutes. This means there are hundreds of dud, repetitive, game-themed, puerile comics out there and there are wonderful ones and foolish ones etc etc.

Getting started is simple. Continuing, updating regularly with new episodes, is a tremendous challenge. It requires an investment of time, creative energy and technical skill that commands respect. If you follow a webcomic for any period of time you will see the creator’s ups and downs, family crises, bursts of inspiration and periods of despairing blankness. Of course, given that all the sustained webcomics have huge archives, you can follow someone’s entire artistic history from beginning to end in the course of a couple of hours of clicking your mouse.

There is no other medium I can think of where you can so easily and precisely trace the growth of someone’s skills and creativity.  It is an arc that is otherwise only visible to the expert who can gather an artists timeline in his mind’s eye or by visiting a skillfully-crafted exhibition. I get a kick out of seeing skills build. It is a validation of my cherished belief in growth through enduring effort.

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.

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!