Program Yourself

“There’s an interesting effect here that I’ve noticed over the years — smart people don’t make the same mistake twice while REALLY SMART people don’t make the same mistake three times. Since they tend to make fewer mistakes to start with, really smart people tend to repeat the mistakes they do make because they are initially convinced that the outcome was someone else’s fault or perhaps because of cosmic rays.”

—Robert X. Cringley

I’m currently experimenting with life organization techniques (see previous entries).

There are two basic approaches: high tech and low tech.

The high tech approach implies keeping your schedule and todo list entered into a computer somewhere, requires explicit categorization, date and timeentries etc. The advantage is that computers are good at keeping track of the “meta” stuff — copying and pasting text, remembering appointments and reminders, and keeping track of categories and links.

But I’ve found that for capturing a thought quickly before it evaporates I prefer pen and paper. There’s no mental effort required to start writing, which is important to me when I have a complicated, half-formed idea that I want tocapture the essence of before it disappears.

Humans have a very small amount of short term memory buffer space (ie 7 plus or minus 2) It’s not a big deal to remember “Pay the phone bill” long enough to walk over to the computer, switch whatever organizational application I’m using this week and enter a new task, but when I’m working at the edge of my mental ability, if even a small amount of extra thinking is required, it can be enough to disturb the mental construct/structure/complicated thought/whatever that I want to record, causing it to evaporate.

For dumping large amounts of data into off-brain storage, typing is always going to be the best interface. Typing into a text editor is the smoothest, most direct path with the least friction from your brain to your computer (the alternatives being voice or handwriting. ESP would be perfect.)

The downside of the high-tech approach is a lack of flexibility, and the high overhead required to get started (ie. at least starting an editor, maybe booting your computer), and the very high coefficient of friction when it comes to free-form formatting, diagramming etc.

So for sentences and paragraphs, computer; for random scraps of data, pen and paper.

I’ve been carrying around a graph paper lined notebook for capturing random scraps I need to remember, and I set up a personal wiki for keeping track of larger stuff, and expanding on the random stuff I manage to scribble down in my notebook. This weblog is intended to be an extension of that; a place where I can put ideas once I get them into a shape that is comprehensible to anyone other than myself. So far that combination is working pretty well, I think, although I’m still experimenting. I’ll write more about this later.

I’m still trying to figure this all out. A related topic is text editors which I’ll also write about later.

(see Cory Doctorow’s synopsis of this year’s Life Hacks talk.
http://craphound.com/etech2005-lifehacks.txt for more useful and interesting stuff. It’s updated from last year’s)

[Continued from Getting Things Done]

Some more barely organized rambling about GTD.

One key for me is that GTD is not a calendar based system. I subscribed to Daytimer for a year once, and found it almost useless for the way that I work. I did really like the little lined, blank notepads that came with it though, and ended up using those quite a bit.

Calendar tools don’t help me much, because I don’t have a schedule-based
job. I have maybe three to five (at the very most) appointments or meetings in a given week, and keeping track of stuff that has to happen at a specific time has never been my problem anyway.

What I do have are dozens of general, open ended responsibilities, assigned tasks, self directed projects, problems to research, and systems to update. I also have to deal with interuptions from programmers with silly emergencies, calls from the helpdesk, questions from coworkers, filling in as backup for other admins, and a thousand other things. Sometimes all at once.

A significant source of stress can be keeping track of all the tasks I mentioned, plus all the ones I didn’t mention, and figuring out how to get them all done. Preferably in the order that makes the least number of people unhappy.

Anyway, back to why most organizing systems suck. In addition to being calendar/schedule based, the other “feature” of other planning/organizing systems I’ve seen is that they all seem to be rigid, top down solutions that require explicit catagorizing, prioritizing and/or goal setting in order to be useful.

I got dragged into a day long “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” seminar
once. I found it very motivating, until about 2 minutes after I walked out of the Covey reality distortion field and realized that I had no idea how to “synergize” the pile of crap on my desk.

If I’m going to stick with a system it needs to work the way I do. I don’t want to have to set goals, state my mission and identify my core principles before I can get any work done. I already know how to do my job, I just need to keep track of the stuff I need to get done. If I have to do a bunch of “meta” stuff in order to make the system work, I’m probably not going to make the system work.

Along the same lines, another important point is that when I fall of the system, which I know myself well enough to know that I will, if it isn’t easy to just start using the system again, I probably won’t start using the system again.

I’ve also tried using PDAs. I used a Palm V for a while, which was nice, even though entering text is annoyingly slow. I eventually quit using it though, because it seemed too inflexible and laborious compared to just a plain notebook and pen, which is the system I’ve used ever since then. I now realize that one problem I had with the Palm is that I didn’t know how to make lists. Now that I’ve figured out the “projects” vs “next actions” scheme from GTD, I think I might fire up the old Palm V again one of these days and give it another shot.

Side note on PDAs: I also tried using an iPaq 5450 for a while, but I hated it. Using it felt like combining the worst features of Windows with the worst features of hitting yourself on the head with a rock.

Note 2: I really, really want a Zaurus SL-C760

Next Time: How GTD works

A few months ago I bought a book called Getting
Things Done by David Allen after hearing it recommended by Danny O’Brien

in his Life Hacks talk at LayerOne. I recently got re-inspired to actually read the book and try out some of the ideas in it.

GTD (as its converts call it) is really not so much a system for “getting things done” as for “keeping track of all the stuff you need to get done and deciding what to do with it”, which I guess is not quite as catchy of a title, but the actual “doing” is almost incidental to the system.

Honestly, I don’t think I would have ever picked up this particular book on my own. The book is written in the language and attitude of the motivational/self-help genre, and could easily be mistaken for just another “7 Habits of Highly Annoying People”-type book. Typically for the genre, it prominantly features the confident-looking smiling guru on the cover,
which made it somewhat embarrassing to read in public. I solved that problem by tearing off the front and back covers.

But behind all the business-speak and positive attitude, it turns out there are some very simple but powerful concepts, and practical details of how to implement them. There are a lot of good ideas in the book which could be very useful even taken alone (and some of which I was already doing). But where the real power of the system comes from the framework/feedback loop formed by the using all the building blocks together, ideally allowing you to keep your mind clear and
to focus on actually “getting things done”.

While the target audience seems to be non-technical, middle management types, GTD seems to also be particularly appealing to geeks (such as myself). At least to me, GTD intuitively feels “right”, one of those paradigm shifts that seem obvious in retrospect.

My theory is that at least some of the geek appeal of GTD comes from the algorithmic approach it takes. Real geeks automate everything — if we need to solve the same problem more than once or twice we script it. GTD is basically a
script, and your physical self is the hardware it runs on.

This is where GTD fits in with “Life Hacks”; GTD is a hack for your life.

Next time: GTD, and Why Every Other System Sucks.