I have a new blog so this blog is now closed down! 

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http://steves.businessblog.com/

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http://steves.businessblog.com/blog/index.xml

If you want to know why I switched have a look here

http://steves.businessblog.com/blog/_archives/2004/8/25/129522.html

I came across this site in the OneNote forum,  it has some nice concise tips for studying and note taking

http://www.westshore.edu/webs/ltc/study_skills_resources.htm

of particular note is the Cornell Note Taking Method, which although not fancy does provide some insight into the fact that learning does not stop when you finish taking notes!

http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2004/08/08/2238.aspx

This is a posting that I made to the GTD discussion forum.

 

I am about to start a small research project into personal productivity,  I am going to be looking at the following main areas:

 

• Personal knowledge management
• Time, task and action management
• Communication and collaboration
• Team working
• Subscription and research

As you can see these are quite relevant to exponents of the GTD methodology, and so I need your help.

 

First I wanted to explain a little about my personal experience with GTD and history in using similar techniques.

 

“I love to be organised”

 

I am one of those people who likes a clear desk, who like kids to have tidy bedrooms, who likes to be in control.  I invest a lot in my IT, and a lot of my time in researching how to be organised.   I can also invest a lot of time in establishing a new system.  But once that new system is established, I find it hard to keep going.  Here are some of the reasons why:

 

1. I only tend to be motivated to create my list of, “everything that needs to be done”, when things are out of control.  The process of creating the list brings me back in control and that tends to last about a month.  During that month I gradually begin to feel that I am working for my system rather than my system working for me, so I give up.
2. I find that although they all seem important when I write them down many of the items on my, “everything that needs to be done list”, never actually get done, as new things keep being added.  So in reality I am only ever working with the things that filter to the top.  In most cases I already know about the things at the top of the list.  It’s the 80/20 rule all over again, I only ever work on the top 20% of my list, and most of the stuff in the 80% never gets touched because new items keep adding themselves to the top 20%.
3. During the times of my life when I am not following a GTD like methodology, I find I value the fact that my  Brain forgets the 80% that’s never going to be done, and lets me keep my sub-conscious focussed on the 20% that is, and my conscious on the 5% I am working on.  When I do follow GTD, I find myself distracted by the 80% feeling it’s important and must be progressed, managed, tracked, researched etc.  For example for a month I captured research notes in Microsoft OneNote on everything related to my GTD list.  Most of that time was wasted because in the end I never got around to the tasks.  After the month was up I ended up deleting most of it because I wanted a tidier and better organised OneNote.
4. I find my Brain balances, “Important/Urgent” , pretty well
5. I generally always do some form of daily and weekly review and I get close to the “mind like water”, feeling.
6. I have seen lots of projects suffer because of too much project planning, and too little project management.  By that I mean the project manager and project team start to serve the system, they spend all of their time and energy on task definition, tracking, reporting etc and not enough time on requirements, millstones, dependencies, estimating. 
7. I think the above problem with projects is the same problem I see with GTD.  Too much attention to managing your tasks and not enough time managing your time and goals.

 

Ok so you sort of get the idea of where I am coming from with the above, but I said I needed help.  Well I have seen a few posts in this forum that really got me thinking.  I will repeat a few of the key points here:

 

1. Someone said that it was the act of making the list of things to do that was key, not the resulting list.  They tested it with for example shopping lists.  If you make the list and then forget to take it with you, you still end up buying everything you need.
2. This was built on by someone who said that if you forgot the list you might actually do better because you might respond more openly to inputs/ideas that you have while out shopping, and maybe reassess your needs more openly as well, (i.e. decide not to buy things, whereas if its on this list you feel compelled to buy it).
3. In a critique of presentations someone reported how PowerPoint stifles many meetings.    The bulleted list stops people thinking, because it trivialises issues, and the slide by slide format constrains discussion and debate.  I have actually tested this myself by presenting on an eWhiteboard and its amazing how liberated you feel.
4. Discussions comparing “Putting first things First”, top down methodology, (which works like my Brain, but perhaps not everyone’s brain), and GTD help to bring the debate into focus
5. A few people have pointed to Life Balance and there is certainly a lot of thought gone into that software. I tried it for a while, but again concluded that I was likely to end up being controlled by the software, and spend a lot of my time working for it, rather than it working for me!
6. Finally its obvious that a lot of people love GTD more than I do, I want to understand why!

 

I was hoping that in discussion of this post more nuggets like those above might help me work this topic through in my mind in a more open way that I have been able to do by just reading the GTD books.

 

The final problem I have is the systems that support these processes just don’t work for me.  When I look at my starting list again:

 

1. Personal knowledge management
2. Time, task and action management
3. Communication and collaboration
4. Team working
5. Subscription and research

 

I really need an integrated system that supports all of these.  I have not found such a system.  Although if I were able to use Outlook for my email maybe I would get close with the combination of NewsGator, Outlook, Outlook GTD plug-in and OneNote.

In this post I described my "information processing pipeline".  Here is a diagram that touches on the same area.

It was created by Mario Asselin in a response to this paper "Distributed KM" by  Martin Roell

This is a very very nice summary of how blogs work by Roland Tanglao at Streamline, it complements my comments because it provides more details of some of the server side infrastructure:

1. Joe Blogger writes something and publishes it to his blog.

2. Joe's Blog system updates his site's HTML, updates his RSS file and sends a 'ping' message to the 'Aggregation Ping Server' indicating that his site has updated.

3. Search engines like Google and RSS specific services like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub periodically ask the Aggregation Ping Server, "Which sites have updated?".

4. Since Joe's site sends pings and has an RSS file and is easy to update frequently, Joe's search engine rank is higher than a 'normal site'.

5. Techie Teresa uses a program called an RSS reader to subscribe to Joe's site. The RSS reader checks Joe's RSS file for updates periodically (usually once/hour or once per day) and notifies her of Joe's updates. Teresa no longer wastes time manually surfing Joe's site. She just checks her RSS reader.

6. As a result, Teresa's information flow is more efficient and she can monitor more sites in less time.

7. Joe Surfer (who is not related to Joe Blogger) still can access blogs the old fashioned, slow and less efficient way using his web browser and search engines.

This article describes some of the characteristics of XML that make it so powerful  The bottom line is that its generic nature means that generic solutions can be created tat can be applied to all manner of different problems.  The example quoted is a tool that compares two XML files, produces an XML file showing the differences.  The article then goes on to explain how this generic tool might be applied to different types of problem.  Well worth a read if you are trying to get your mind around some of the things that will be possible in the future.  Reminds me a bit of Unix pipes!

A new version of open office is available.  The main improvements are:

Enhancements to the open-source productivity suite include support for PDF and XHTML exports and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to the OpenOffice Web site. The new release, for example, will support forms conversion within Word documents and import text document layouts with more fidelity. OpenOffice 1.1 also boasts enhanced support for mobile device formats such as Palm's AportisDoc, Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

IBM has ideas of its own, taking a thinner approach with its WorkPlace products

A wild card in the Office wars is IBM, which plans to offer server-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functionality to buyers of its WebSphere portal. At the very least, that could allow large customers to negotiate better Microsoft Office pricing/licensing, observers said. (See IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office.)

The MS Office team are majoring on quality for their next release, does this imply major changes, requiring major testing, or just good practice?

Software development, especially for a product as feature-rich as Office, is a repetitive process comprising what can seem to be endless feedback loops and rework.

"We're trying to reduce the iteration of that cycle because it's extremely costly," said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Group. "We want to use our development resources more effectively, yielding higher-quality code and not iterating what customers never see," he said.

The Office 12 team will rely on new tools, including Buddy Web, a system developers can use to privately share releases, according to the memo, from Eric Fox, Office development manager at Microsoft. Buddy Web had previously been used by the Outlook team.

In addition, the Office group will have access to Big Button, a system that gives developers easy access to the appropriate set of tests for their code.

Office 12, will not reply on Longhorn, not really a suprise, but its in print.

Microsoft knows it would be folly to leave the hundreds of millions of Windows XP and 2000 users out in the cold and force an upgrade to the shiny, new and radically different next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, which is now expected to come out in 2007 or later. Office 12 initially was slated to ship with Longhorn, but the next-generation Windows platform slipped and Office didn't, according to one insider. "The Office team is disciplined. They nail down their feature set, set a schedule and usually hit it," the insider said.

Read all this in the context of my previous posts on Choosing an office suite

Atlantic published an article about the tools and techniques promoted by David Allen the author of the book Getting things done, which I read a few months back.  I liked the book and gave it a quick review here.  However for a better introduction its a good idea to read the article.  I have repeated a small snipit of it here to get you started.

The doctrine that inspires this devotion starts with the idea that the difference between done and undone tasks is more stress-inducing than most people recognize. In earlier times, Allen says, work was more physically exhausting than it is today. But it produced less anxiety; because people could easily tell what they had to do and whether it had been completed. Either the wood was chopped or it was not. The typical modern day, he says, is a fog of constantly accumulating open-ended obligations, with little barrier between the personal and the professional and few dear signals that you are actually "done." E-mail pours in. Hallway conversations end with 'I'll get back to you." The cell phone rings. The newspaper tells you about movies you'd like to see, recipes you'd like to try, places you'd like to go. There are countless things that everyone really "should" do more of--exercise, read, spend time with the family, have lunch with a contact, be "better" at work. The modern condition is to be overwhelmed--and, according to Allen, to feel not just tired but chronically anxious, because so many things you have at some level committed to do never get done.

The anxiety is compounded, he says, by a foible of the human mind: it can't remember, and it can't forget. No one can possibly remember all the promises, deadlines, and other "shoulds" of personal and occupational life. The proof is the need for datebooks. No sane person tries to keep all future meetings in his or her head. But, perversely, the brain also can't forget; at some deep and not very efficient level it is always stewing about the things you should have done but haven't, and it tends to remind you of them at the worst time--typically, 3:00 A.M. A vague but powerful awareness of all these uncompleted promises, or "open loops," is what Allen sees as the basic source of work-related stress, Again, datebooks illustrate the point. People complain about their schedules, but they rarely wake up at night worrying that they won't remember to go to the airport on the right day. That is because they trust their datebooks and trust themselves to look at their datebooks regularly.

If you are serious about personal productivity though then you could do worse than invest some time reviewing the discussion forum that David Allen's company hosts.  There is a very active debate in this forum and its quality stuff.