Node Glue

Hit zero again.

Been putting Activity Owner’s new stuff on OutLinker and NAA to use.  Check it out!

Well, it’s been several months since I was able to say that I “got to zero”.  I haven’t forgotten about GTD this whole time, but in another way, I have.

Basically, I’ve been breaking all of my rules lately, I guess just to see how the other half lives   I’ve been here before, contemplating GTD Apostacy.

Every time I come to this point, I think it’s time to change everything and make some kind of radical changes.  Surely, there must be a better way, I think.  Here are a few of my latest thoughts.

Over time, I’ve definitely let my dashboards get out of control.  Been here before too.  And I’ve definitely reached that point where I’ve allowed my system to become so unmaintained that it’s no longer a trusted system, but a black hole (thanks to ActivityOwner for that reminder).  I simply must get better at being honest about moving things to Someday/Maybe, and then finally deleting them when it’s clear that they won’t be done or are no longer relevant.  I think I’m doing better on this since I renounced by Maybe Never idea.  But I could stand to do even better.
I think one of the problems is that I’ve been tracking my team’s work in too much detail.  I’m not sure it’s been so helpful to them, and I can’t seem to keep up with it anyway.  The basic mechanism I have been using it working fine.  Actually, once I drastically simplified the export template.  But the problem is more basic than that–the basic rhythm of keeping their work items captured, well defined and up-to-date just didn’t work–at least not at the level of granularity that I had been trying to track it.  Maybe there’s a better way–but for now I’ve basically punted on this initiative.
Another one of my problems lately has been that my life changed and my calendar didn’t.  There were many weeks (months?) where I cannibalized my set aside weekly review time to do other work.  I started teaching a weekly class and been needing to spend more time than usual studying.  With the rest of my calendar so full of other meetings, the best time for the additional study was the blocks I’d already set aside for weekly review.  I know, it’s like eating my arm off, but I used that time for study (and sometimes other work).  So one of my reforms lately is to revamp my weekly calendar to allow sufficient time for both.

So there’s some of the practical issues.  In another post, I’ll talk a little about what’s going on under the hood.

Recently, I’ve been reminded of something David Allen says in Getting Things Done. He is addressing the following question: “so now that I’ve got all my stuff in a trusted system, how do I decide what to do at any given moment?” Allen’s answer: “trust your intuition.”

Sounds so simple, right? But I think I spend too much of my time not trusting my intuition. As a result, I sometimes find myself trying to compensate for that lack of trust by refining the system to make it more trustworthy. The system sets up some rules for me, which helps. These guardrails often keep me out of the ditches. But the rules can also bind me and leave me feeling guilty if I don’t follow them. That guilt itself hinders productivity.

I’ve marveled before at those non-GTD people who just do what seems best at any given moment. Frankly, I’m suspicious that such a method is too susceptible to the tyranny of the urgent, and I think it truly is. But on the other hand, they enjoy a certain kind of freedom in “going with the gut.” So, again, there is the possibility of freedom (going with the gut), and the possibility of bondage (enslaved to the tyranny of the urgent).

So here’s my musing for the day. Perhaps an appropriate tension between these two is: use the trusted system to educate the intuition, making the intuition more trustworthy. Then work from intuition.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, now I’m really excited about MindReader! I’ve been collaborating with ActivityOwner on some minor tweaks that make my life easier, which motivated me to do a few more things with my Outlook Macros. Here’s what we have so far. (link to downloadable Outlook macro code at the end)
ActivityOwner has added:

• Support for “deafaultownerme”: I needed this because I work in a shared map environment. When I capture a task without specifying who owns it, I need my name to be on it by default. I have disabled the option in ResultsManager to take ownership of unowned tasks. So without this tweak, unowned tasks that I meant to be owned by me by default would slip through the cracks. Big win for me personally here.
• Support for “atresource” instead of “resourceat”: by default, when you MindRead something like “talk to Mike about foo”, the partner resource for Mike ends up looking like Mike@ (i.e. resourceat)–@ sign follows the resource name. But my convention is to put the @ sign before the resource name. So now I have the option to tell MindReader to make it @Mike, instead of Mike@.
• Support for a “delegated” resource verb: So now I can say “waiting for Bob to write the draft” and the resulting resources will reflect the delegation, with me as the ActivityManager, like this “Mike;Bob”. This is great!

I have cooked up:

• An Outlook macro like my old one to “convert” an email into a ResultsManager activity. But now, instead of enqueuing the activity with plain ol’ GyroActivator, it is enqueued with MindReader, via GyroQ. And it still carries the link to the email item with it using MindReader’s [link] keyword. After adding this macro to my Edit menu in outlook and assigning a keyboard accelerator, I can now key “Alt-e-v” and almost instantly, the email is marked read, moved to my saved folder, link to it copied to the clipboard, and GyroQ pops up with the ‘fq’ tag selected and the dialogue prepopulated with the [link] keyword, and the cursor focused for additional text input. I can then enter the subject of the activity, hit enter, and done. sweet. And it runs faster than my previous “tfe” ActiveWord that invoked a similar Outlook macro, because I’m skipping ActiveWords altogether here.
• A revised Outlook macro to slurp my Outlook tasks into RM Activities via MindReader. This was my ultimate Holy Grail since I first glimpsed a vision of the power of MindReader. I want to be able to capture a task on the go on my pda, and if I know who owns it, what date, or what context, to be able to enter it in plain text, right on the subject line of the task, and have it all marked up right when it lands in the RM In-Tray. Now, it does. My new Outlook macro builds a temporary GyroActivator file with a collection of tasks selected in Outlook, and feeds them through MindReader. It even slurps up any comments in the Outlook task notes and passes it along to the final RM activity using the windows clipboard and MindReader’s [note] keyword.

So, I have a feeling that I’ll be hitting zero more frequently now that MindReader is helping me to eliminate some of the work of post-processing and refining partially defined actions that I capture with GyroQ, GyroActivator in email processing, and Outlook tasks when I’m mobile.

Here is a link to the Outlook macro code: Outlook Macros for use with GyroQ and MindReader

Whew!  Hit zero again.  This great feeling will probably last about ten more seconds…tick…tick…

This time, I did make better use of MindReader, but it still isn’t humming for me.  I’m having trouble with a couple of the features.  But getting closer, and I’m still convinced that there will be a worthwhile pay off in the end.

Was out of town a while back.  Going out of town on a trip is murder on the inbox.  Recovery time: 1 week.

Here is a great video on YouTube from David Allen himself explaining the basic concepts of GTD.  Wish I’d had this link a long time ago–I can’t count the number of “GTD in a nutshell” pitches I’ve done

I hit zero again yesterday. It took me nearly 8 hours! Admittedly, that’s because I had email two weeks old that was “urgent” (well, after 2 weeks!) that I needed to “Do” and not “Delegate”. I also had a bunch of stuff on post-it notes around my desk to drain into my trusted system. (I’d resorted to keeping the post-it notes stuck to the wrist-rests on my laptop, following the principle of “put it in front of the door“.)

The other thing that I tried to do, however, which significantly extended my time, was to attempt to improve my overall system by setting up MindReader. Unfortunately, I hit several snags that I just couldn’t push through. So I now have a partially working installation/configuration of MindReader, and a loss of two hours (or was it three!?).

I have two main motivations for trying set up MindReader again (my second attempt–I tried before about 10 months ago, I think).

First, I collect a lot of actions with GyroQ. So when it comes time to review, my In-Tray will be full of partially defined items that I captured in haste with GyroQ. One step in my weekly review process is to finish defining them, which means adding due dates, assigning additional owners, delegates, or partners, maybe adding a context. Because opening the ResultsManager edit activity dialogue is relatively inconvenient, and adds time to the overall process, I’m thinking that if I could define some of that additional task information at the moment of capture with GyroQ, that puts me ahead when it comes time for review–because I won’t have to do it again.
Second, when things around the office get really crazy (as it has seemed to be the case often lately), it may be a full two weeks between moments that I “hit zero”. In that interim time, my In-Tray can grow rather large (maybe 50 items?). Which means that, in there, somewhere, might be an activity that I would like to know I’m assigning to, say Bob, one of my direct reports. But until I take time to edit the activity and add Bob’s name to the Resources line, it won’t show up under Bob’s name on any dashboards I generate. Again, however, if I could add Bob’s name to the activity at the point of capture with GyroQ, then even if the activity isn’t fully defined and still sitting in my In-Tray, at least it shows up on the dashboard when I meet one-on-one with Bob and go over his activities. What I’ve been doing to work around this is OK, but inefficient. I look at Bob’s dashboard, and then I scan my gigantic In-Tray to make sure there isn’t anything else in there for Bob. Then in Joe’s one-on-one, right after Bob’s, I scan the In-Tray again to make sure there’s nothing in there for Joe. Then in Bill’s one-on-one…you get the point. So that’s inefficient, which is why I’m looking for a solution like MindReader.
So, I hit zero, despite the disappointing snag with MindReader. I can live with that.

This is an update to a series of posts from almost a year ago, back in November 2006. The series was entitled Using ResultsManager to Reorganize My Work (Again). In the final article in the series, I suggested the idea of adding a bucket called “Maybe Never”. This was the bucket of tasks that wouldn’t even show up on my dashboards, I was so uncommitted to them. And yet, I couldn’t just let myself delete them either. It was my ResultsManager equivalent of the Windows XP Recycle Bin. I can delete…and then if I change my mind…undelete.

Well, it’s nearly a full year later, and I’m here to report the total number of times that I’ve opened my Maybe Never map and reviewed it.

Never.

Nick Duffill of Gyronix (the maker of ResultsManager) commented insightfully in that series that:

You’re absolutely right about resistance to deleting things, but it is a cathartic habit to take positive decisions, even wrong decisions. History and commerce have always favoured the decision-takers higher than the opportunity-creators, even if they turned out to be wrong later. Another way to deal with things in this category if the review process might not catch them is to defer them for a few months, then they will come back again. When you have deferred them several times in a row, you might feel more comfortable with deleting them.

So, lately, I’ve been much more free with the delete key–and I rarely look over my shoulder. This is yet another example to show that my biggest productivity bottlenecks are not in my software, but in my mind. The corollary would seem to be that my biggest productivity gains will be achieved by tweaking my mind. So I do that. And then I tweak the software some more

Here’s something else I’ve been trying to figure out lately…

I can’t believe that I’ve only recently discovered the project management technique of the Role Assignment Matrix using RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).  It seems that I should have stumbled onto that much sooner.  I think it’s going to change my life and the lives of those around me–time will tell

Anyway.

As I begin to use RACI for more and more role clarification on projects and activities, I’m interested to see how I can incorporate it into ResultsManager.  It would be nice, for example, to see on a relationship dashboard with one of my direct reports, which things he is an “A” for (accountable–buck stops here), and what things he is strictly an “R” for (responsible–the ‘doer’).  Because I rely on ResultsManager so much to give me views into my world and and the worlds of those I manage, it would be nice to add these new bits of information from RACI onto my dashboards, instead of managing that information outside of ResultsManager (likely a spreadsheet) where it will likely fall out of sync.
I could that easily if there were simply some extra fields on a ResultsManager activity that had corresponding dashboard filters that could be used to group/sort/filter activities by RACI role.

In the meantime, I’m going lo-tech and simply including role information as a text comment at the top of the comments field in each activity.  So it’s there when it comes time to review activities.  But it doesn’t give me any flexibility for automation of group/sort/filter.  I’m trying to learn to live with “good enough”.

I’m honestly surprised to get a couple of comments on my last post, when I haven’t even posted since July! But if I count the two other comments that have come to me “off line” lately, it suggests that some people out there have actually noticed that I haven’t been posting

So, I’ll post again.

Here’s a new thing I’m trying. Very new, but it is in motion–we’ll see where it goes.

Problem

I live my life out of ResultsManager. The team I lead doesn’t. And I don’t want to require them to learn RM or MindManager. I don’t think they are the best tools for them to help them be productive in their work. With the exception of my assistant. He’s a technical guy and uses RM himself. So we sync our maps with FolderShare and it works great between the two of us.

So how do I show the rest of my team members what our agreements are with one another and ask them to report on status in a structured way?

Resources and Contraints

I meet with them each week for 30 minutes as a minimum. In that time, I want to give first priority to their agenda–anything they are blocking on or need to talk about with me. It’s a good time to touch on any more personal concerns they may have as well. So I often don’t have time in that 1:1 to do an exhaustive rundown of the various activities that are on the dashboard with their names on them. And I don’t want to turn that meeting into a purely robotic tactical checklist processing thing; the human touch is more important to me in that context.

I already have a customized ResultsManager dashboard for each direct report that gives me a snapshot of the agreements between me and each person. That dashboard is based on this template provided by Activity Owner.

Solution

Exporting a Word document from a Mind Manager map is a standard feature of Mind Manager.I’ve asked my assistant to weekly generate the relationship dashboard for each direct report, and then export it to a Word doc. He then sends the Word doc, marked “for review”, to each direct report. Marking it for review automatically delivers the doc with change tracking turned on. So the direct report can simply start typing updates into the doc and return it to
my assistant, who can update the maps. They should get this each week a couple of days before our weekly 1:1 meeting.
Evaluation

I talked through this with each of my team members as I designed it. I gave them my rationale (above), and they appreciated it. Most of them were delighted to see all their stuff structured in one tracking document, and may even be interested in adding more stuff to it, just as a convenient way to track more stuff. Nobody has yet balked at the size, appearance, or format of the resulting Word doc.

At this point, we’ve only it made it about half way around the cycle. Meaning, I’ve scrubbed down the dashboards with them to make them current and relevant, and given my assistant the go-ahead to start generating, exporting and emailing weekly. We have yet to close the loop on getting feedback from each of them bubbled back up to me. So it’s too soon to report on how effective this is or isn’t.

My next step, now that they’ve all received real versions of this thing, is to ask them how it’s working and figure out if we need to adjust it or simply beat the drum for a while to get used to a new rhythm.