This is a guest post by Daryl Furuyama

Hi everyone. This post is not about dictating rules, but about how rules affect the enjoyment of our lives. I love how the posts here at WLC encourage us to examine ourselves. Hopefully this will stimulate some thoughts that you will be excited to share in the forum.

Rules Are Not Bad, They Are Part of Life

We are surrounded by rules, many of which help us. Rules are created to increase order, predictability, and reliability. Driving within the lines on the road helps everyone travel faster and safer. Being aware of the rules of any game enables you to create a strategy to reach your anticipated future.

Without rules, there is no way to tell what you can do or what you can expect. Rules help us concentrate, so we can get somewhere and make progress. Rules become problematic when we become concentrated in an area we do not like.

Sometimes rules hold us back. In order to increase predictability and reliability, rules sometimes make sure that you do not go anywhere. When we are unable to move to where we want to go, we become frustrated and stop enjoying the rules.

The Revolutionary Changes the Game, Not Abolish It

We often do not notice the rules that move us forward because we enjoy the game. However, we do notice the rules that hold us back because they cause friction in our lives. This friction causes us to desire rejecting all rules (especially in the name of freedom).

It is easy to be met with rules we do not like and give up on the game. We become disengaged from our own life and seek an escape. We may imagine being another person or even dream of a better life for ourselves. Dreaming is a wonderful thing, but are we pursuing our dreams or do we keep them off in the distance?

When met with rules we do not like, we look to creativity to turn them into rules we do like. A common rule in Monopoly is collecting a bonus when you land on free parking. It is not an “official” rule, but so many people use it because it makes the game more enjoyable. When we enjoy the game that is our life, we become more engaged and invested in ourselves.

Remember that rules just serve to concentrate you. Changing where you play may lead to increasing your enjoyment. Maybe you do not know what makes your life enjoyable, so you need to define rules. Maybe there are rules holding you back; is there a hidden path around them? Maybe there is no way around and you need to grind; can you create a meta-rule (like “see how many tasks can I finish in an hour”) to make it enjoyable?

Is there a rule that is preventing you from enjoying your life? Maybe some individuals in the forums can offer a creative solution. Or maybe you have already found a creative solution that made your life better and you want to share it with us in the forum.

This is a guest post by Daryl Furuyama, owner of WhiteHatBlackBox, which has been featured in Lifehacker.com for its free paper-based productivity tools.

Part of the idea behind this community is to share thoughts and ideas about the things we do. Today I would like to share my own personal thoughts on my Productivity (yes, with a capital P) practice. Not the nuts-and-bolts of how it works, that is what you can find at my own blog, rather I’d like to share and discuss the “why” and the “what’s in it for me”.

My own personal approach to achieving a productive workflow practice is not to find a way to force my nose down to the grindstone and crank, crank, crank my way through a never-ending list of tasks and obligations. Nor is it my desire to create a series of lists and sub-lists that I can scan for something to work on based upon the time of day and where I happen to be sitting, like some sort of choose your own adventure story.

Rather, my goal is to be able to manage and maintain a capture & filter system that allows me to quickly sort & identify the urgent and the important tasks that will require my full attention. “Cranking Widgets” is no longer the source of any personal satisfaction for me. Instead, I have chosen to lovingly hand-craft the widgets that I choose to make.

Is Everything Work?

In the introduction to his latest book, “Making It All Work“, David Allen writes:

“…any number of techniques and tools are available to help us get organized, manage our time, and be more efficient. What’s missing is a fundamental understanding of, and effective model for, the dynamics of the process as a whole – a way to make it all work.”

The first time that I read this I took it to mean that there is some sort of global system of processes that can me wrapped around every aspect of our lives, not only our work but our home and families as well. The more I thought about this idea, the more it bothered me. This concept, in my own personal opinion, goes against much of what the founders of this very forum wrangled with as we were creating it.

“What is the point?” we asked ourselves and each other, “Why are we doing this?” Part of the answer was “to create a community where people can share ideas”, and another part of the answer had to do with applying creativity to our work and to our lives so that both could be full and rewarding. To be able to avoid having our work encroach on our lives.

It’s About Being Done

As you can see in the tagline at the top of this page, we believe that Life is not about making everything into Work – to be managed and processed, instead we believe that we should be using our powers of creativity and innovation to enhance our life and our work. These two realms may have some overlap but they are distinctly different.

They require different approaches. As anyone who has ever tried to manage a spouse or child as if they were an employee can tell you, using the same approach to both is a difficult proposition.

Getting my Work done, as efficiently and effectively as possible, allows me to close the office door and go into the living room and start on my Life. I practice my productivity principles while I am working so that I can stop working. So that I can live my life without worrying about work.

It’s about being done.

Share your thoughts in the forum [link].

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

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.

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.

Lately there seems to be a shift taking place in the blogosphere.

The more you read some of the mainstream blogs, the more you see the word “simplicity”.

I like the word “simplicity”.  Just typing it makes me fell less stressed.  Simple is of course the opposite of complicated.  Complication, naturally, increases stress.

The mantra we have started to march to of late is to simplify our lives.

I like the whole simplification push.  It is necessary. However, I do see some on the bandwagon to stop productivity in its tracks in the process.  I, for one, think that is not such a good idea.

Those that know me closely know that my thinking tends to gravitate toward the hybrid.  I am always piecing things together with ideas from several different places to make something work for me. Some of you will shreak when I say this, but my organizational philosophy is pieced together from several different schools of thought.  I personally believe that Stephen Covey speaks well to areas that David Allen does not spend a lot of focus time on, and vica versa.

For me, it is the same with simplicity and productivity.

There are some of us that no matter how well we organize and make our processes better, we still have way too much on our plate.  Then it becomes necessary to simplify our lives…eliminate some things…cut out unnecessary noise.

Simple processes are also desirable. Especially since simple processes breed effectiveness and efficiency.

But should we throw out the baby with the bath water on productivity?

Let’s look at these two terms and think on that.

In your dictionary, you will find this definition of the word simple…

1. easy to understand, deal with, use, etc.
2. not elaborate or artificial; plain
3. not complicated

On the other hand, the definition of produce is…

1. to bring into existence; give rise to; cause
2. to bring into existence by intellectual or creative ability

So, simple, an adjective is descriptive of a process or a task. Produce, however, is a verb. It requires action.

What does this mean for the people who are looking to not only get things done, but get the right things done when they matter?

It means that we should focus on simplifying the things we do as much as possible.  Why? Because we want to spend our time doing the right things with as little drag on the process as possible. Thus we focus on simple processes.  We also want to simplify in terms of our lifestyle. What do we need in life? What makes us happy? If something we do is not helping us achieve happiness and peace…should we be doing it?

The point is this…

Simplifying a process speaks to disciplining a process or procedure by which we do things.  Productivity is about disciplining ourselves to not just simplify that process or task, but to take action and be a doer.

Productivity and simplicity go hand in hand. Simplifying things makes us more productive.

Just remember, it is all about being done.

What are your thoughts?

I’m not a workaholic (that’s for sure) but lately I’ve found that it’s easy to for me use my entire day for work, work related tasks, or chores. Just a few weeks ago I realized I’d gone for well over a month without reading anything for fun! Worse, sometimes I’ll go an entire day and realize I haven’t had one real conversation with my wife.

To combat this problem (and it is a problem…what’s life without the people you love and stuff you love to do?) I’ve started instating some self-imposed boundaries  on my work habits, and I’ve actually begun scheduling out some time just for relaxing and hanging out (no computers allowed, unless video games are involved!!). I’ve had a lot of success in some areas…my weekly “date night” with my wife is a great example. We’ve both freed our schedules completely for Saturday evenings, and–barring some emergency or urgent engagement–the only thing we’re allowed to do during that time is hang out…watch movies, go out to eat, whatever. It’s a great way to catch up on the past week and relax in preparation for my busiest workday (Sunday).

I’ve also thought about scheduling in smaller blocks of time throughout each day as well, but this is a bit more difficult for me. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence on the web regarding increased productivity when people take regular breaks, etc. I think it will take substantial discipline to develop this habit for me; when I’m deep in “work-mode” I can easily go 4+ hours without a break. When I do take a short respite, it’s hard for me to tear myself away from something fun after only 15 minutes or so.  So, it’s a struggle to find the best “rhythm” for me. Should I take a fifteen minute break every two hours, thirty minutes every four? I don’t know…maybe trial-and-error is the best way to go here.

One thing is for sure though…as much as I love my job, my studies, and getting things done around the house, I get miserable real fast if those are the only things I’m doing. I think that although I may not get as much done in the beginning, making a conscious effort to put leisure activities at a higher priority on my lists will help bring a bit more balance to my life.

Do you schedule your leisure time? How do you find the right balance between work and break periods during the day? Do you find that regular “fun time” gives you a creative/productive boost? Let’s take it to the forums.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but some days are better than others.  Thursday was definitely an “other” sort of day.  I work in IT, and last night I was on call.  A customer in India had trouble with their server, and I ended up baby sitting it most of the night.  Then I had to go into work at my regular time anyway, and that made for a long, “other” sort of day.

Since I was being massively unproductive anyway, I started thinking about the times when I was unproductive while at the office.  Was there a pattern?  Was I just tired?  Bored?  Thinking about golfing?  I decided to take a few minutes and identify my “other” days on a calendar – could I correlate those days to specific events (like being up all night helping a customer)?

Sadly, no.  There was no obvious pattern.  However, the exercise of looking for a pattern helped me to discover my real problem: Sometimes when I am “at work”, I just don’t feel like working!  I know there are tasks to do, I have my prioritized list (with real tasks and alternate, “fun” tasks for when I can’t handle the real ones), but I’m just not in the mood to do any of them.  Instead, I end up puttering around the web, or organizing my email folders, or water-cooler chatting with people, or some other nonsense that has little to do with what they pay me for.

Then, in my sleep-deprived delirium, I had an epiphany: It is more valuable to have an employee at work when they are going to be productive than have them take up space when they are unproductive.  An unfocused, unproductive employee is a distraction to the people around them.  They should go do something else, and come back when they are ready to focus on their real, work-related tasks.  I, for one, want to be “actually working when I work”.

Obviously you can’t let people just come and go as they please – there has to be some “reasonableness” test applied.  It would be easy for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of such a policy.  But in an organization of like-minded staffers, is it possible to say “we have some core work hours – you should be available during them. Otherwise, please get your tasks done by the deadlines, working when you can focus on those tasks”?  Or is this just too Utopian a concept for a typical corporate environment?  Let’s discuss it in the forums!

I am still slogging my way through Making It All Work, David Allen’s latest book extending the Getting Things Done philosophy.  I only say slogging because there is a lot of thought generating stuff in there so far. This has not been an easy read, but it has been worthwhile, because I keep stopping every few pages to capture, take notes and digest some of the ways it is spurring new concepts and ideas. This said, there is one idea that has really resonated with me…

What is true now?

Are you looking for the reason to always have something to capture ideas with you at all times? Are you looking for the point in doing regular reviews? Are you stuck with not knowing what to do next out of the 50 things you should be doing and the 500 you could be doing? Then the solution can be found in answering, to the fullest extent possible, the one question above. Other questions, such as…

How much time do I have?

What tools are at my disposal?

What is the next action to move the project forward?

None of these questions can be honestly answered until you have truthfully quantified “What is true now?”. This is why regular reviews, brain dumps, capturing things easily, etc. is so very critical. Until you can define all of the truths of your world, until you know where you are right this moment, until you can appreciate both what you have and what you don’t, there is no possible way you can know for sure that the next step you take is the one you should be.

Want to discuss further? Join me in the forums.