GTD

Thoughts about productivity, often in relation to <a href="http://www.justagwailo.com/latest/2005/07/06/gtd"><i>Getting Things Done</i></a> by David Allen.

Notes of Pete Quily's Talk on Goal-setting and Following Through, Part 2

You've seen part 1 of my notes on Pete Quily's presentation on setting goals and following through. Part 2 takes us through Pete's coaching demonstration. He took a volunteer from the audience and demonstrated for 10 minutes (enforced by his $20 timer) how he would coach someone through setting a goal and following through on it. I've omitted the answers to the questions, but they illustrate that Pete would almost exclusively ask questions and rarely give advice, only offering suggestions along the way when the interviewee got stuck. Pete asked us to listen to the language and questions he used:

Coaching Demonstration

  • what's the one specific goal you would like to work on today?
  • do you know what you need to do?
  • what do you need to do?
  • what's stopping you from doing it? (interviewee identified two specific goals as part of his larger goal)
  • which would you want to focus on?
  • should you be the one doing? (interviewee indicated that possibly he wasn't the right person for the job)
  • how much time do you think it'll take?
  • do you know where you could go to find the person who can do it?
  • (some digging down to the main problem)
  • how could you get the money?
  • Pete elaborates on the interviewee's answers, repeats them back to him
  • let's the interviewee talking it out
  • do you have any skills you can teach the person to do it?
  • repeats out what could be done, suggested by the person wanting the goal
  • what's easier among your options? can the students write the grant?
  • empathizes with interviewee, who identifies that a student could do part of the work
  • what do you need to do to get a student to say yes?
  • gets the interviewee to suggest options, ideas
  • are you clear on what to do?
  • when are you going to do it? (interviewee indicates he could start in April)
  • why April? presses on why that specific time, gently presses interviewee on getting confirmation about assumptions, nudged interviewee into a very small specific task that gets interviewee closer
  • how are you going to remember when to do that? is paper or computer better for you? (interviewee indicates a calendar might work)
  • when are you going to buy a calendar
  • what's the reward you're going to give yourself after the micro-goal is done? let's schedule the reward in first

Pete mentioned the term "onemoreitis", that is, the idea that we can do "just one more" before getting out the door or moving on to what we need to do. The assembled group discussed clutter and hyper-organization—ADD people can leap over to the other extreme; physical clutter is mental clutter. Perfectionism can look different ways to different people. It will stop you from moving forward, as it's attached to an idealized outcome. "It has to look like this" will prevent it from even getting started. Pete suggested giving up on the idea that "someone else said I should do it like this and I'm wrong if I don't". Other notes:

  • if you can't accept the way you are now, you can't change to where you want to be.
  • from that point of acceptance you've drained a lot of negative energy
  • from the audience: understand the mechanism of change
  • strength and weakness of ADD is curiosity
  • if things aren't going your way, get curious about why, what to do differently
  • different goals may require different tactics
  • that said, a strategy in one situation might work in another.
  • what motivates you to action, what demotivates you to action

Following-Through

  • systems should be as simple as possible
  • break down the goals into component pieces
  • Anthony Robbins - books are pretty interesting. when you schedule it, it's real.
    • schedule the pieces, if not all of them then at least enough of them
  • don't assume you'll remember
  • system to identify resistance and friction to working on your goals, don't get judgmental on it. instead of "what's going wrong?", ask "what's going on?"
  • different word for failure == feedback
  • learn how your individual brain works
  • feed your brain - take regular breaks

In Part 3 I will wrap things up and talk a little more about the books that influenced me on this subject, both directly and indirectly, and the changes I hope to make in the next few weeks.

Notes of Pete Quily's Talk on Goal-setting and Following Through, Part 1

On the evening of February 17th, 2009, I attended a presentation by Pete Quily, an Adult ADD coach, to a group of people attending a Vancouver meeting of CHADD. These are part one of my notes of that session. In this section, I document the goal-setting half of the presentation, with a quote from True Professionalism by David H. Maister. In a forthcoming part two of the notes, I write about Pete's coaching demonstration and tips on following through on the goal you've set.

Warm up

Before he started, Pete asked the audience to think of the answers to three questions he wrote on the board. He would then ask us to introduce ourselves to someone in the audience and talk about all three questions.

  1. think of one example where you've set a goal and followed through on it
  • for me at the beginning of this year, I wanted to achieve an average response time to support tickets under 4-hours. That includes time not on the clock and sleeping.
  • list 1 or 2 reasons why you followed through
    • it was something I could measure (the software we use to track support tickets can generate a report on response time), measuring happened in the background (the time of new ticket creation and my response are automatically recorded) and I had a couple of plan for it (respond within 5 or 10 minutes with either the answer or to let the person on the other end we were looking into it)
  • think of 1 specific goal you want to focus on tonight
    • Karen and I needed a place to stay in Seattle on the way back from our trip to Portland. It was the only loose end on the trip, though we had time to figure it out. I, as surely did she, wanted certainty about where we would sleep in a city we're not exactly very familiar with.

    Pete had us go through the exercise because we often hear—from ourselves and others—why we don't follow up on goals. He wanted us to hear ourselves and others talk about what we did follow through on.

    As he has before to a crowd of ADHD and allied, Pete recommended everybody invest in a cheap timer. People with ADHD, he says, easily lose track of time, and a timer lets people limit the time they spend on a task so that they can get it done. He spent $20 on a timer, and I spent some $600 on mine, which came with a really nice phone, iPod, video player and Internet-enabled device. He describes ADHD people has having both the "now" and the "not now", and that if you don't have a good internal sense of time, you need an external sense.

    Thoughts, wishes, and dreams do not equal goals. He emphasized this throughout the presentation. People think of 2 to 3 times more things than they can do in the course of a day, and people with ADHD can think of 10+ times more things they can do. People only have so much energy and resources: Pete suggested that you can increase the goals you achieve by decreasing the amount of goals you set. You need enough and challenging-enough goals so that you're not bored, but not too many or too challenging so that you shut down. He recommends that people don't suppress ideas, since they'll come out anyway, likely when you can't use it. Instead, write them all down and toss them in a possibilities folder (David Allen calls this "Someday/Maybe"), to capture the idea in a place to review later. Set a time to review, pick out ideas based on the time/energy you have.

    S.M.A.R.T. Goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based

    • figure out what works for your unique brain, ADD 10x more important
    • two people could have same problem, but person A will have solution A, person B will have solution B
    • need clear goals, otherwise follow-through is difficult
    • something that stretches you but not overwhelming
    • structure around it, time, scheduling
    • an emotional reason why you're doing the goal: intellectual reasons alone usually aren't enough. Emotional reasons will give you the juice to follow through
    • also think of the reasons why you might not want this goal

    Goal setting

    Pete led the audience in brainstorming ideas in what would increase the likelihood of following through on a goal.

    • a strategy
    • making it fun
    • post-its, reminders
    • tying your feelings into it
    • flexibility
    • accountability. I offered my thoughts on this, from David H. Maister, in his book True Professionalism: The Courage to Care About Your People, Your Clients, and Your Career. He wrote about one way to keep accountable to the people you know, which I mentioned to the group. “A few years ago my wife, Kathy, resolved to quit smoking, and gave me the right to nag her if she was ever tempted to weaken. There were times when I had to be her external conscience and (lovingly, but firmly) remind her of her objective. She reached her tough goal—she quit. By giving me nagging rights, she obtained bragging rights!”
    • visualizing what comes out of the goal
    • feedback, demonstrate it to someone
    • give yourself a reward at the end of it
    • deadline, not on a regular basis, as cortisol will deplete you
    • set the goal's importance level
    • stay on the commitment wagon
    • break the year-long goal into three month goals, managable chunks
    • focus on effectiveness rather on consistency
    • there are too many "should" goals, they need to be "really want"

    You don't have to to do all the above or in a certain order, they're just tools in a kit. Tasks get confused with projects, most goals are projects (you can't do a project). Get it on paper: if it's just in your brain it's just psychic rent

    Next up are notes on Pete's coaching demonstration and tips on following through. The demonstration, as I say in the forthcoming notes, reminded me a lot of the section on advice in Good Intentions: The Nine Unconscious Mistakes of Nice People by Duke Robinson.

    Contextual to-do lists

    One of the problems with GTD is that many who write about it love talking about the tools more than what they actually accomplish with the tools. Alex Payne has some ideas about where to put to-do lists, arguing that they should live in the context in which they are done. Development tasks in tickets, conversations in email, blog posts in the drafts folder/status, tabs or bookmarks for unread articles. Writing a list of topics to write about so far hasn't worked for me, so I'm going to stop doing that.

    Tips on clearing out issue queues
    Applicable mostly to the Drupal issue queue, specifically the Ecommerce module developers' experience, but useful nonetheless.
    It&#039;s okay to check your email in the morning, says Matt Inglot
    I tried the "don't check your email in the morning or before you go to bed tip" before I realized 95% of my job is responding to email.

    Still Loving Bookmarks

    Ian McKenzie points to 6 ways to fall in love with bookmarks again. Except that I've been in love with them since day one, still. Now, with RSS, "store the daily visits" is kind of pointless, but I use bookmarks for reasons other than mentioned in the articles. Below is a partial screenshot of the main categories of bookmarks.

    my folders in Firefox's Bookmarks menu

    I wish I could remember the section it was from, but I remember starting the folder names with "Staging:" because of something in Getting Things Done which recommended collecting materials to read later on. "Articles to Read" is pretty straightforward: these are longer essays that I have for time when there isn't anything to read. "Software to Try Out" are tools that don't necessarily solve problems today, but tools for which I can see might solve problems later on. "To Watch or Listen To" are mostly podcasts I can put on while ironing. "Blogs to Syndicate" are weblogs I need to put into an online aggregator, almost all of them French-language weblogs writing about China. "Blogs to evaluate" are weblogs I'm on the fence about subscribing to. There's likely a better way to organize my bookmarks, but I use bookmarks still and almost exclusively for stuff that doesn't need my attention now but is there for when my attention needs something, anything.

    Come to think of it, someone could potentially write a very good article on when your attention needs something, anything.

    Like Ian, I use my bookmarks toolbar for frequently-accessed almost-entirely-work-related links that either don't have RSS feeds, are reference material, or "do something", such as the link that creates a randomly-generated, 6-letter password with no numbers.

    Sacha Chua takes notes of her conversations using her Moleskine
    She cross-references information by writing down page numbers and creating an index.

    Following What Bloggers Say About Her By Deploying Human Filters

    Pamela Paul: “While the temptation to correct errors - which often reverberate from blog to blog - can be strong, counterblogging can be counterproductive. Authors report sad tales of the flaming feedback loops that follow such confrontations.”

    The article links to the most blogged-about books of 2005, and I'm linked on the page for Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd (which links to my 'just quote' of a review of the book). Most of the writers asked seem overly-sensitive about reactions they read in weblogs, but then again, aren't writers overly-sensitive to begin with? (And the same for bloggers?) Dowd seems the most sensible about following what bloggers say about her by deploying human filters—her assistant and her sister—to forward her the important reactions.

    Dowd's book is not listed in the top-20 list, however, but two technical aspects of the list strike me as interesting: you do not need an account to view the list and also search engines are allowed to index the list, though not archive it in a cache. (But what, no links so that I can purchase any of the books, with the newspaper getting a cut?) It's unusual for The New York Times to allow search engines to index anything—but it's very smart, because users coming in through search engines are more likely to click on the ads which most bloggers and weblog readers probably have learned to ignore.

    Here are the books on the list that I've read, with, if applicable, a link to my short review for each:

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  • 3. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (my brief review)
  • 5. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (my brief review)
  • The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
  • 12. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki (my selection as best book of 2004)
  • 14. 1984 by George Orwell (my favourite book of all time)
  • Dave Pollard&#039;s style of Getting Things Done
    Everybody has their own after having read the book, it seems.

    "Notebook 2.0"

    I decided finally to succumb to the cult's wishes and buy a new notebook? Which cult you ask? One that lamely doesn't have sex as its primary selling point, but which is wrapped up in the larger cult that preaches the art of not fucking things up.

    Which notebook, you ask? Why, the Moleskine Ruled Notebook of course. Or, as I call it, "Notebook 2.0".

    Last night at 2 AM I looked up 'moleskine vancouver' and found a wiki page for where to buy Moleskine notebooks in Canada, and went with Essence Du Papier on Robson & Granville (inside the Sears building), mostly because buying something from a store with a French name makes me feel snootier than I really am (also because it was close to work).

    Darren Barefoot mentioned the Moleskine occasionally (see his article on marketers as liars and his mentioning that he wondered where they are sold locally and the question he posed on AskLocally Vancouver) so he and some people I work with have them and were happy with them. I've written only on one page of it—notes during a meeting—and so far so good. It's a nice-looking notebook with a few cool features (elastic closure, pocket in the inside back cover, and a bookmark), and I'll use it mostly for taking notes about how to do stuff and ideas when I'm not near a computer. For $27 Canadian, it's a lot more than I normally pay for something like this, but then again, for a notebook, it's on the higher end. There's a weblog about Moleskine notebooks and even a weblog about art created in and with Moleskine notebooks, but I plan on not following them, because there's only so much I, a non-artist, am going to do with a ruled notebook.

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