For the past 24 years, I have been volunteering with groups that produce computing standards.  We did good things, albeit slowly.  But that’s the nature of these groups - it’s hard to get good help; it’s even harder to get good free help!  Being a fan of productivity, I usually tried to impose some structure and process on the group in the hopes that it would get things done more predictably.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.   There’s a saying in the computer industry - “Managing programmers is like herding cats”.  It’s more or less accurate.

My epiphany about this sort of work came in 1990, when I was charged with “project managing” a collection of these volunteer groups in a formal way.  Now, in retrospect, that was just insane.  These are creative, passionate people who were trying to do their best to develop “standards” for the computer industry.  Most of them are doing it in their free time. Many with no support from their employers at all!  How can you “manage” a group of people that not only doesn’t report to you, they don’t even get compensated or reviewed based upon their performance?

My answer?  You cannot.  The creative process isn’t one that can be managed. It doesn’t work on a schedule.  You can’t say “today you three people will write a symphony” and expect a result that is anything other than noise.  I expect this is true across the board when working with creative people.  It takes as long as it takes.  We will sell no wine before its time.  Just because a saying is trite doesn’t mean it isn’t true!

So, getting back to my epiphany, I realized that my job as a manager wasn’t to try to ‘herd the cats’ so much as to manage the expectations of the people who were waiting for the output (I will spare you extending the metaphor to what cats might output).  Sure, we had schedules; but those schedules were guidelines, not deadlines.  It is important that in work, and in life, we make room for the creative process.  So I would continually update MY managers with progress reports, and in each report change the targets.  Sometimes they got earlier, usually they got later.  I stopped pressuring the creative people to create on a schedule.  As a result, we delivered better, more mature, well thought out products.

So that’s my message for today.  Whether we are talking about your real job, or your real life, or something you do in your free time that is neither work nor life, don’t forget that if a task requires creativity, it almost never gets done “on time”.  The creative process is one that is impossible to predict.  If your boss tells you to write a paper and have it done in an hour, push back a little.  If you are the boss, don’t set unreasonable constraints on creative tasks.  Even if you are doing something as simple as making a bird house with your child, don’t just set aside an hour.  Do it until you are both happy you created something!  And along the way, revel in the knowledge that you are doing it until you get it right, not just until time ran out.

How do you make time for the creative process?  Let’s talk about it in the forums?

Lately being productive has been a struggle. Maybe it’s because my schedule is much more relaxed than usual during the the summer months, or perhaps it’s because of some added stress coming from various sources…or maybe I’m just being lazy :). Whatever the cause, I’ve found that how productive I am over the course of the day really depends on how I start things out.

I’ve noticed that if I shrug off the first few items on my plan for the day, I’m much less like to do any of it. If I just discipline myself enough to do the first few items though, I usually come pretty close to getting everything done. After that initial moment of decision to be productive, motivation just doesn’t seem that hard to come by.

So right now, starting my day out right is the biggest challenge for me. It’s not that I don’t want to get things done…in fact, most of the “tasks” on my list are things I truly enjoy (working on my master’s thesis, for example). It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to actually sit down and get started.

A few things I’ve implemented to help myself get off the ground in the mornings:

• I’ve been trying to establish a very regular routine: Get up, eat breakfast, morning meditation, start my tasks.

• I try to make my first task small and easy to complete.

• I’ve been making my second task my biggest one for the day, usually working on my thesis. Once I’ve completed my goal for the day there, everything else seems a bit more manageable.

How do you make sure you get off to a productive start each day? Share your thoughts and experiences in the forums.

Photo Credit: FreeWine

Lately, I’ve found myself in a funk, really annoyed and frustrated when I’ve felt ignored or snubbed, sometimes by small things, things that wouldn’t normally bother me. I suppose there are a number of reasons, probably the main one being that I’m not getting a lot of rest these days due to the little bundle that arrived almost six months ago and has a way of taking over our lives. A lack of sleep can result in a short(er) fuse.

After talking to my wife about my frustrations, I came to the realization that I’ve never learned how to create distance between myself and the things people say and do and not take them personally. For me, that’s tough to do. I don’t know why, but I’ve tended to take a lot of things personally, facing life with a chip on my shoulder. Regardless of the reason why I do that, (that’s a whole ‘nother issue altogether) learning how to objectively approach everything is still something I need to learn. My wife tells me that when she worked at a retail store in the mall in high school and college, she learned to not let it bother her when a customer was grouchy toward her, since 99% of the time it wasn’t about her. Said customer was probably having a bad day and was engaging in some “retail therapy” to make things better.

So my question to you is this: how do you go about creating distance between your emotions and what goes on around you? How do you get yourself out of the way? Let me know in the forums.

I’ve been away for a while, re-organizing my professional life after the death of a colleague.  My new responsibilities dramatically reduced my free time, and had a less-than-perfect effect on my personal life as well.  But, in the midst of the chaos, I have (again) started thinking about how to keep my work out of my business (forgive the pun).

I have a saying I use a lot - ‘I refuse to get stressed over leisure activities.’  What it means is that, in general, work is stressful enough.  Life, kids, the house - those are stressful enough.  When we do finally manage to squeeze in a little leisure, it’s a minor miracle.  So, in those moments, I try hard to ensure that whatever I have planned isn’t planned too tightly.  I don’t worry about being late.  I don’t worry about my appearance (too much).  I definitely don’t worry about the cost.  I want to enjoy the whole activity - “The journey is half the experience”, or whatever trite saying you want to use.

When work gets crazy, as it has for me, it often spills out of the office.  The text messages, phone calls, email via iPhone/blackberry…  heck, even what is in your head.  It is all distracting.  It all can detract from your rare leisure time.  Worse yet, for me anyway, it can bring stress into my leisure activities.  And that’s one thing I won’t tolerate.

So, what do to about it?  My current strategy is to try to take myself off the grid a little, but to abort the leisure activity if it seems stressful.  It isn’t doing anyone any good, so I just pack it in and try again another time.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t worked out very well.  I need a new approach.  I need a way to periodically and briefly divorce my professional life from my leisure time.  And that way needs to not involve drinking until I can’t remember I have a job.

Suggestions?  Let’s discuss it in the forums!

One Saturday morning in March, I found myself in a hotel room in Birmingham, Alabama. I had an hour to kill while my wife was at a conference, so I brainstormed one-and-a-half dozen blog post ideas and did a lightning-quick but thorough mind-sweep to create a new projects list from scratch.

I did a lot in that one hour.

It made me consider two things: 1) the limited time I had forced me to work quickly. 2) The different environment forced me to focus.

I’d wager that my output was probably due to the time crunch since I had a lot to do and a short time to do it. I blocked out any distractions there were — especially once I turned off the remodeling show on HGTV. But the unique environment made me consider whether it was a factor in my increased productivity. It was a hotel room — a rather nice one at that, in a historic building in Birmingham — but it was free of familiar distraction I have at home or at work. The only things familiar were the clothes in my suitcase.

So I began to wonder how digital nomads to it — how do they stay productive when the environment constantly changes? I wonder if I’d be distracted by the ever-changing scenery, or if that constant change would force me to be disciplined. Chris Brogan likes working in coffee shops and bookstores. They inspire him.

If you’re a nomad, digital or not (in my case I was working entirely with paper, as I didn’t have a laptop), how do you do it? Does the ever-changing environment distract you? Or does it help you be productive? I’m curious to know.

“Down among the dancing quanta
Everything exists at once.”
~Transverse City, Warren Zevon

This post was supposed to be done yesterday, but my day sorta got away from me. This got me to thinking about where I am really going with this Empire I am building…

There are those times when life throws us a curve-ball, yet if we have a plan and a system we can get through it. Other times our personal productivity is limited by the way that we are thinking about our lives, our goals, and our future. And obviously, my plan is not as detailed or as flexible as it should be. So I will take some time, after I get back on track, to take a look at where I want to be going.

Take control of your perspective

When our view of the future gets obscured by the events of the day, it is time to pause in our travels and take stock of the situation. This is when my intellectual self needs to “take back the steering wheel” from my emotional self, who was definitely in charge yesterday. I was literally sitting at my desk shaking with excitement and anxiety about what was happening. Today I am thinking about the bigger picture:

• What do I have to do today to be prepared for tomorrow?
• What can I delegate? and when is it due back?
• Why was it so difficult/time-consuming to manage the tasks that derailed my day?
• How can I improve my processes to prevent this from happening again?

What are your thoughts on this? Share in the forum.

An important part of my productivity system is taking a little time at the end of each day to do a quick review of my tasks, brain dump whatever is on my mind, and plan the next day. I’ve found that best time for me to do this is about 10:30pm, right before I hit the sack at 11. The problem is, I’ve found that when the last thing I do right before I go to bed is stare at a computer screen for half an hour, I’m usually not very relaxed, my mind is often racing, and I have a little trouble getting to sleep.

In contrast, I’ve noticed that when I take some time to “unplug” before bed, I tend feel less stressed and quite a bit more calm when I go to sleep. So I’ve decided to take my task list completely offline for a while, and do my daily review/planning not in my office at my computer, but in the living room while resting in a nice, comfy chair.

I’ve already started implementing my daily “lo-fi ritual” and I’m already seeing some key benefits:

• It’s more social. I usually plan while my wife reads. While we’re not having a fully interactive discussion, it’s nice to just sit in the same room, listening to the same music together as we wind down our day.
• I’m learning how to better use paper tools. I recently invested in a whole slew of Circa stuff from Levenger, along with a Shirt Pocket Briefcase, and I’m enjoying learning how to best use these new tools. I’m rediscovering a love for hand-writing things that I thought was long gone. Paper may or may not be the most efficient process for me (I’m still learning) but for some reason I’m finding it satisfying and stress relieving to physically write down my tasks and thoughts.
• It’s more focused. Even when using my to do list & note applications full-screen, there’s always this temptation to check Twitter or my email. With just a pen and paper, I can really zero in on what I’m intending to think about.
• It’s easier on my eyes. I do most of my work each day at the computer. I do a lot of my “for-fun” activities (StarCraft, ftw) staring at a screen as well. By the end of the day, my eyes are tired, so taking a break is a welcome relief.

I’m sure I’ll discover even more advantages to making lo-fi notetaking and tasking part of regular routine and productivity system. Do you have a lo-fi ritual? Why not share in the forums?

For a while now, I have been toying with the idea of having a machine with nothing but what I have dubbed “simple apps” on it. A simple app, in my mind, is an application that provides a bare minimum of features for the task at hand. I’m on a Mac so for me some of these would include:

• TextEdit - The built in text editor for Mac OS X. This has just about everything one really needs to commit words onto the page and share it with others.
• Notational Velocity - A great application for small notes and “snippets”. I have mentioned this a few times before.
• Fluid - Fluid creates site specific browser instances. This is crucial for me because a lot of apps I use are web based. Instead of having a full browser open with tabs for these applications, I can create a single instance for each and switch between them as if they are a desktop application.
• TaskPaper - A very clean and simple list manager that saves it’s files in plain text.

I am sure there are many more simple apps out there. I am also sure I am not the only one who prefers a good non-cluttered app. Let’s start a list in the forums.

I know it’s absurd, but I think there are times when a long list of todos might motivate more than a short one. Why? Well, if you have a long list, you have more motivation to get everything finished on that list. If it’s short, you might say, “Eh, that won’t take long. I’ll do it later.”

Maybe it’s a form of procrastination, since I don’t think it’ll work in the long run to let your list build up till you have enough stress to go and do it all at once.

On the other hand, as anecdotal evidence, I offer you the friends I had in high school who made their best grades during basketball season. I think the increased workload and limited amount of time to study forced them to be more disciplined.

So what’s the best way to do it? Have a short list with a few things to do, or a long list with a lot of things on it?

Of course, I think the ideal way to handle your list is to keep a short, effective list, with things appropriately delegated or deleted, plus high motivation and discipline to accomplish what needs to be done. Be conscious of your own energy level and tolerance for the right list length. I think it requires a bit of experimentation as only you can know what the right “workload” is for you.

If your list is too short, you’ll get bored. Or you’ll get lazy and not do anything. If it is too long, you’ll get discouraged and give up.

Just remember, if you have to put “shave” on your todo list, you’re probably taking it way too seriously.

So what do you think? Discuss amongst yourselves over in the forum.

The Storylines module on Ubuntu Linux

I’ve recently started brainstorming for my Master’s thesis, and turns out I’m actually going to have to do some story writing and plot outlining for the project. Seeing as I know pretty much nothing about constructing a story or developing a plot, I started doing some research on software that might come in handy for such a project, and I found this: Writer’s Café.

From the website:

Writer’s Café is a set of power tools for all fiction writers, whether experienced or just starting out. The heart of Writer’s Café is StoryLines, a powerful but simple to use story development tool that dramatically accelerates the creation and structuring of your novel or screenplay.

I’ve actually been pretty impressed with the application. The Journal and Notebook modules are fairly simple, but the Scrapbook seems like it would really useful for any creative writing project, and I have to say I am very impressed with the Storylines component. The way it allows you to manipulate virtual notecards on multiple timelines is just plain cool, not mention really handy for organizing your non-linear thoughts into a more cohesive whole.

How do you organize your thoughts when it comes to writing long-form projects? Notecards, a personal wiki, mindmap? Let’s discuss at the forum.