Cultural change is free from Mindfields College on Vimeo.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

And that is what it is all about.

Yesterday I walked the dog and took a moment to look at the local windmill reflected in the lake. I was wearing my brother’s shoes and my father’s coat. I remembered that when I got married I wore the bow-tie given to me by a friend who’s young husband died suddenly in a car accident.  The world is throwing symbols at me thick and fast.

And that is what it is all about.

Yesterday we sat down and ate Mexican takeaway at the big, slightly scratched and dented wooden table that Marjolein and I bought because we wanted people to sit round it and talk to each other.

And that is what it is all about.

Yesterday I drove away to pick up my middle son’s repaired Nintendo DS. Marjolein found a repairman. Middle son was bitterly sad when his DS broke and he will get it back from Saint Nicholas tonight.

And  that is also what it is all about.

Yesterday my oldest boy sat by youngest and said that youngest could squeeze his hand as hard as he wanted when youngest had to have stinging disinfectant on his poorly toe.

And today will be just as amazing.

And  that is indeed what it is all about.

This is hard to write.

A week ago my brother died. He had been ill for a number of weeks with a rapid form of Leukemia and went quietly in his sleep.

There are no words for how I feel, that is something that bulks too large for my skills to encompass, but I can draw some wisdom from this.

The thing I am proudest of doing in all the world right now is that I made a small  aeroplane, red biro on notepad paper, borrowed scissors from the nurse, cut it out and hung over his bed. He had to lie back because of a lumbar puncture he had had and it cheered him up a little. It was a tiny, hopeless little gesture in the face of the towering, dark wave of his illness, but that and sitting quietly with him was all I had.

Sometimes there is not a lot you can do, so just do that.

Somewhere out there you may have the privilege of  hanging up a small, red aeroplane for someone, maybe making a difference, no matter what the odds. Be brave. Seize the day, you may not get a second chance.