Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance applied to technology - Part I


I read Pirsig's book almost 10 years ago, but it made a huge impact on how I think about technology.

Frustration

I remember at a point in the book, the author describes the frustration of individuals that purchased expensive BMW bikes only to have them break down.  He then shows how the meditation he does with maintaining his own older bike leads to him having a understanding of how the bike operates and therefore reduces frustration.  Individuals become angry when they pay for value and then feel powerless to fix the problems when they occur.  Then they take it in to a shop where they are even more frustrated by additional costs to fix problems they don't understand.

The parallel to expensive computers is easy to make.  I've encountered so many furious owners of computers that just paid 2k for machines they now can't "log in" to or have problems with "the machine dragging".  It is an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, and a sense of entitlement that this should work because I gave money in exchange for great value.  The frustration is then extended to IT similar to a mechanic fixing a car.  The owner may believe that (IT) is taking advantage of their lack of knowledge, and they can't shake the feeling that if everything worked how it was supposed to, they wouldn't IT departments to clean up the mess.

Pirsig talks in length about how through "meditation" and understanding of the way the system (motorcycle) works he achieves a happiness that extends beyond even the ability to produce (in this case ride the motorcycle).

In this IT world of high expectations, rapid deployment, agile development I feel we are dangerously forgetting this lesson of a root cause of frustration.  With rapid change, how can we manage our own understanding of all that is new and how it fits in our current machine, if we haven't even mastered the base understanding of what we operate.

In truth it is daunting to look to try to understand the myriad of technology pieces that exist, and the fear of course is that it will take up our most valuable resource in life.. time.  Time that could be spent with families, hobbies or sleeping.

So where do I begin?

As I type this, I realize I have no idea how this post will get to the internet, how anyone follows it, what the functions of the Blogger application are that I'm using and how the entire ecosystem of the internet and the MacBook Pro actually work.  If the publish button doesn't work as I expect, I'll meet the frustration of this lack of knowledge head on!

So again where to begin?

I may pick up this blog again, now 4 years after my original posts.  The couple that I posted in 2010 are solved with OmniFocus for Calendar and the Inbox Zero workflows that have been published.  I do think there is a lot still to talk about with productivity, which ironically is not involved in actually being productive.

Calendering vs Task Management

There are some programs such as the Things app for the iphone/mac that coordinate tasks and Evernote for everything that work to manage tasks and notes. Whichever you choose I've found that these management systems don't really do much for calendaring. I've had good success in just separating the calandering system from the task management system.

Task management inherently seems to involve things that I need to do at some point. Most of the apps/information out there is based in some part on Getting Things Done by David Allen who somewhat advises breaking out tasks into things that you do immediately, things you do sometime and things that are involved in projects. I've seen alot of applications that copy this like the aforementioned Things app as well as Egretlist that integrates with Evernote. Usually there is a Today bucket, a Next or Someday bucket and a project bucket that can coordinate tasks with specific projects. I've found that introducting order and calendaring (GTD also talks about this) just ends up making tasks fail as you either have to re-add tasks you didnt get to, procrastinated, etc. It's nice to have a task system that just rolls over the today tasks that didnt get completed.. so it stays in your task cache until you get around to it.

For calendaring, I use Outlook. The main reason currently is that my wife also has outlook at work and if you're working in and out of work email all day, its really convenient to have the calendaring tool that will integrate with every device AND my lovely wife is familiar with. We've gotten in the habit of scheduling ever single thing that needs to happen. We'll mark the event as personal and then invite each other. We'll accept the invitation if we're going and mark tentative if we aren't. This keeps our calendars in sync and seems to work really well. (It gets rid of the "I had no idea you had a tennis match!" problems).

The other nice effect of using separate systems.. is that scheduled events that don't require action are out of your "Have to do" stack. Once you schedule.. you're done.

I also schedule reoccurring tasks in oulook, like Flea Meds etc, as they are time sensitive, and I dont want to think of them till the day. The problem with this though is if I don't complete the task on the day, its effectively lost. So far though there aren't that many of these.. and these would be the only tasks I may transfer over to my task management solution to track if I forget on the day they are due. I still think having this exception is far easier that trying to make a task management app do everything Outlook Calendar can do out of the box.

Happy Producing!

Clean Your Inbox - Outlook and others

There is nothing quite so wonderful to the "constantly searching for any distraction" mind than a clean inbox. A clean inbox means nothing to answer, nothing to reply to, nothing to think about over and over and over again while you are trying to actually get something done already! There was a time when I used to get over 3000 emails in my outlook inbox a week. My email and job seemed unmanageable.. so I cleaned it out.

But then the emails came back in, so I cleaned them out again, and again and again, until I found a working, functioning way of filing everything off so that I could get on with my job. I now (for the most part) keep under 100 emails all the time, and when I'm really working well I manage to keep a sparklingly clean inbox of 0 for gmail and outlook.

Some of you out there may not see the benefits, may not realize how peaceful the inbox can be once it is devoid of distraction. Here is a picture:

What does this image bring to your attention?

Nothing.

What screams "TAKE CARE OF ME NOW!"?

Nothing.

How peaceful. How serene.

Here's some ideas that helped me do this.. maybe it will help you out.

1. Create Subfolders on your inbox (BUT NOT TOO MANY)

The biggest change in getting my email organized was the creation of subfolders underneath my inbox. When I started out I created subfolders for everything and anything, meticulously dividing into atomic logical boxes every item of information. Yeah.. that didnt work. You have limited time in your day for email sorting so the larger the container.. the easier it is to grab a bunch of emails and move them off your inbox to a folder.

As an example, in my job there are alot of emails that are sent en masse to a large IT group and many of them I have no input on or involvement. I created a subfolder called Work Order Management and then a folder under that called "Issues". At some point during the day after I've worked on, read or responded to something, a great group of these emails get dragged to this box.

I did not divide them up into Issues - Email, Issues - Printer, Issues - Idiotic users, etc.. because I found that A. it wasnt hard to find an email in the big bucket B. I really don't go searching for these emails very often anyway and C. Because I do this daily I found I was growing tired of trying to decide which folder a certain issue belonged in.. I mean what happens if an Idiotic user sends an email about a printer?

2. Set aside a time block each day (or certain days)

Back in the 3000 email world.. I was having alot of trouble finding time to manage email. I had constant interruption, issues to resolve, mountains to climb, goals to achieve.. I was Working! Unfortunately, I usually never found time to clean the email until it was clocking over 8k and I'd have to kill a day of productivity filtering it out. I then decided to take a time slice of 15 minutes from 8 to 8:15 in the morning devoted to only email sorting. This was a small enough time to not impact any deadlines, conversations or committments I'd made, and miraculously I was able to easily keep up with the hundreds of emails due to the nice division of buckets described in 1. For some reason just getting it in my head that the 15 minutes was scheduled, mandatory and unable to be touched by special meetings allowed me to do it most days religiously. I did have to change the time slot a few times due to changes in schedule.. but you gotta do what works as long as the 15 minutes a day happens.

3. Keep the to do stuff up front and center

Once you've experienced the clean inbox.. man do emails annoy you when they're there. Luckily the only emails I keep are the ones I actually have to act on.. and usually ONLY the items that require action.. and only the last email from the activity. If you need to find out what happened before.. you can look in your folders or many times just look down the thread of the last email you got. In this way I found that the items in my inbox became constant reminders of things I actually needed to do, the noise filtered out and damnit if I wanted a clean inbox, I better just go do it. I also would not allow myself to file something that needed action.. it encouraged me to act.. to file would be cheating. Voila! Productivity!.. get the inbox to work for you!

4. Create Subfolders for general information

One of my favorite folders is called "Reading and Research". I would very often get forwards from people or notifications on topics that would require me to read something long, digest information and in general "pay attention". Rarely did I get these emails at a time where I wasn't writing code, solving a problem or driving 55 miles an hour down an interstate. I kept loseing these emails and others that I really did want to follow up on. Only when I started filing these away separately did I realize I could go back in and read/analyze/investigate at my leisure.. and these emails weren't diluted by a bunch of information from the Fix Me/Solve ME email camp. It's also nice when you can go talk to a coworker about something they forwarded for review.. even if its two weeks after they sent it.

There you go, 4 helpful tips to get you to the beautiful peaceful world of the empty inbox in outlook. The same principles apply to Google Mail and I'll probably blog about that separately at a later date.

Happy Producing!

Mission Statement

The purpose of this blog is to discuss excellent ways to organize your life, capture more time out of the day and generally reduce productivity by talking incessantly about productivity.