Music is forcing its way into my life again, and I’m very glad for that. But I keep on looking wistfully at my bookshelf, and asking myself why I’m not spending more time with them. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Jacobs recently, and in particular it’s well past time for me to revisit Systems of Survival; or I’ve been talking with a friend of mine recently about Buddhism, thinking it’s time for me to revisit that. (I suspect I’m the only person in my circle of bloggers who studied Pali for a couple of years in college and who has 45 volumes of the Pali Canon sitting on his bookshelf; I’m particularly fond of the elephants on the spines of those books!) It’s not that I don’t read books at all, and in fact sometimes an author will still grab me and I’ll read several of her books in close sequence; but it’s far too common for me to go multiple weeks without finishing a book.

And that’s not good. So I have to make more time to read. Regularly carve out time in the weekends to read; but I should also carve out a weekday evening a week to read too, I think.

That, of course, means that something has to go, especially since I’m spending more time than I had been on music. So, the first step: re-examine my long-term ongoing projects. Do I want to continue studying Japanese, do I want to continue learning guitar? The answer to both of those is yes, so they’re staying.

Do I want to continue to read and write blogs? I certainly want to continue to write; in fact, I’m hoping that I’ll start blogging more about books! I don’t want to stop reading blogs, either, but that’s clearly an area where I can do more pruning, and constrain my blog reading more: I don’t want to have evenings where I start reading blogs, then do a bit of this and a bit of that, and end up feeling unhappy with myself. (I’m totally fine with spending evenings doing bits of this and that if I end up feeling happy with myself, though: sometimes I’m just feeling blah, and should recognize and embrace that.) That alone may actually be enough to help me carve out one evening a week.

Do I want to continue to play video games? That question gave me pause, but I think ultimately the answer there is a clear yes: Christopher Hyde I am not. But, as with reading blogs, I should be more aware of what I’m playing. It’s time to stop playing games just because I feel that I should, and instead to play games that I feel are calling to my soul in some way. So fewer sequels, more returning to old favorites (I just got a refurbished Dreamcast: here I come, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue, and of course the PS3 Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remakes), and when considering new games, I’ll lean towards games that I hope will speak to something deeper within myself (Child of Eden, presumably preceded by Rez HD; Dragon Age 2). (Actually, if my brain is telling me to spend more time on music and on Buddhism, then Child of Eden is probably a rather good fit!) It’ll be a while before I start any games, though: I imagine I have at least another year of Rock Band 3 in front of me, Ni No Kuni DS will probably take me a couple more months, and one non-Rock Band game at a time is my limit.

And then there’s the possibility of new creative projects forcing themselves upon my brain. Fortunately, right now I’m at a bit of lull in terms of feeling that I need to program something at home (doubtless helped by the fact that programming at work is rather interesting); if that changes, though, I’ll embrace it and re-evaluate. Hmm, thinking about games, I wish I were spending more time playing board games, too; and I should be spending more time with non-family members outside of work. In college, I watched movies a fair amount; I miss that, but I’m comfortable enough having that stay by the wayside for the time being.

So: a balancing act. But it always is, and it always comes down to: what is my soul telling me to do? Right now, my soul is telling me to draw strength from friends, and that the friends I’ve been neglecting the most are books.

In particular, we’ve taken care of a ridiculous amount of house stuff. Earlier this year, we got the only major bit of planned house work taken care of, namely fixing our front door / steps. (And that was before the GTD implementation changes.) But there were a lot of small items to take care of, too, items that had been bugging me for months (some of them for years, actually).

So, when I looked at those items, I decided that yes, they really were high enough priority for me to keep them on my Next Action list. The result was that, within half a week, I’d made a phone call to kick off getting non-plumbing house items taken care of; and as soon as that was done, I made another phone call to start dealing with the plumbing. The upshot:

• Our dryer is no longer blowing lint into our crawl space.
• We are no longer being driven crazy by flickering lights in the kitchen.
• Two towel racks and a rag hook are now firmly attached to the wall.
• Two sinks have working drain catches.
• The showers are all regulating their heat properly.
• The upstairs toilet doesn’t drip. (I can’t take (almost) any credit for that one, though, it was all Liesl’s doing.)

Which is great! And the best thing is: it was really easy. All I had to do was decide that these tasks were important: I actually already had phone numbers for people to call. In one of the cases (the non-plumbing case, I’d already used the plumber in question twice before), I wasn’t sure that he was the right person for the job, but that worked out great. Which means that it will be even easier for us to take care of this sort of thing in the future: in particular, in a couple of years we’re probably going to do some kitchen work, and now we know whom to call when we decide to think seriously about that. Obviously it would have been harder if I hadn’t already had an idea of whom to call, but still, the same principal applies: decide that something’s important, figure out the next step to make progress towards it, and do it.

So, with the house work out of the way, what next? I’m actually working on a few too many things right now: each of Rock Band 3 and Minecraft is taking up rather more time than I’m used to spending on a single video game, I’m going through a book on iOS programming, and I’m reading about CoffeeScript and using it to write a bare-bones game framework for a project that Miranda and I are vaguely working on. And those are all substantial enough that it’s hard to make progress on all of them.

So I should wind them down. Rock Band 3 is far too rewarding for me to want to stop it now—I’m just getting to where I’m actually learning to play guitar!—so I think I’ll keep going with in for the indefinite future. (And, honestly, given that I’ve been playing one Rock Band game or another for three and a half years straight, why stop now?) And the game project with Miranda is the most potentially rewarding of anything on the list, so I’ll keep on going with that.

I don’t have as much active energy to write iOS software now as I did two or three months ago, however; so, while I plan to finish going through that book, I probably won’t actually do anything concrete with that knowledge in the short term. And, as much as I love Minecraft, I may be starting to reach a point of diminishing rewards, so it may be the case that, after finishing my train stations, I’ll give that game a pause, too.

Or maybe not! Who knows, maybe at some point over the summer somebody will come up with a great iPad game proposal to work on with me, and I’ll dive into that; or maybe the Minecraft railroad work will suggest further projects that I have to build. I suppose it’s even possible that I’ll get frustrated with Rock Band Pro Guitar and give up on it in a month or two. All I’m committing to is what I’m doing in the short term, and I’m planning to keep all four of those strands going for the next few weeks; after that, all bets are off.

At any rate: yay for limiting (and being honest about!) work in progress.

Meandering on from the discussion on forms of responses from a couple of months ago: my tolerance for snark has gone down markedly over the last few years. And it’s not just snark: it’s responses that, in whatever fashion, have as their substance “you are wrong, I am right, and I am going to focus on this”. Which is a frequent symptom of comments that I dislike: the commenter who is motivated to speak because of his or her strong feeling that the article being commented upon is misguided.

But my dislike bothers me, too! Not least because I feel that pull strongly myself at times: I’m getting better at telling when I’m feeling the pull of “someone is WRONG on the internet”, but even so much of the time I don’t manage to resist it, or other similarly negative urges. (And I’m rarely happy about the result the next day.) That’s not the whole reason, though: part of my disquiet is that I don’t understand all of the components of my dislike, that I’m fairly sure that there are positive aspects playing into that dislike, and that I wish I knew better how to tease out those positive aspects.

For example, let’s set aside the negative aspect of snark and negative comments, and focus on their self-centered aspects. Replace a negative comment with a positive one that’s similarly self-centered; how would I feel about that?

My first reaction is that I am, in fact, okay with this. Part of that feeling comes from the idea that the web is a customer service medium, motivated by a question of “why wasn’t I consulted?”. This is a motivation that can lead to excess, but in general it points in a direction of more participation rather then less participation, which I feel is to the good.

And part of my happiness with such an approach comes from the self-centered nature of my blogging: this blog is purely about whatever happens to be interesting my brain at any particular moment, what I want to get out of something that I’ve encountered, and I’m pretty happy with that. It means that much of what’s here isn’t particularly likely to be of interest to almost anybody else; that’s fine, and I’m also perfectly happy for other people to write similarly self-centered blogs. In fact, I often find such blogs surprisingly interesting: I’ll find myself reading about a post on something that I would normally not think twice about, and being drawn in by the author’s focus and interest on that topic.

Teasing these apart, I suppose I’m not so thrilled with responses that come from a place of “why wasn’t I consulted?”, after all. I’m generally for a positive response that goes into what the responder cares about and that is oblivious to others’ cares. I’m less for a positive response that does that while actively expecting me to feel that the responders’ cares are important. And when a response is all about the respondent validating the post in question, then my first instinct is to roll my eyes. Yay for participation, but only yay if we’re building something by that participation. (Hopefully together, but separately is fine, too.)

And then there’s the ego-boost factor to positive responses. I don’t think that adds much to my feelings, though: a vapid positive post or one that’s all about the respondent’s feelings isn’t much of an ego boost, while one that ties in to something else the respondent cares about can be interesting enough to sidestep the question of ego boost entirely.

That’s the self-centered aspect of snark; what about the negative aspect? Would I be as unhappy with posts that are negative but not self-centered?

Probably not. Take, for example, “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful, arguing against a particular kind of negative essay. I agree with much of that article; having said that, I’ve also learned a lot from some “considered harmful” essays, and in fact referred back to Recursive Make Considered Harmful just a couple of months ago.

So I’m okay with a well-thought takedown. But they have to come from a position of understanding, even sympathy for me to enjoy them. Quoting Chesterton:

If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

So yeah, it really is the combination of self-centeredness (or rather, other-denying) and negativity that bothers me. How should I deal with that when I see it?

Gerald Weinberg recommends an “aikido way to engage blaming”: yield, accepting the other party’s anger, without accepting their blame. Then, once you’ve aligned with their anger, redirect it somewhere more productive. “Dealing with Internet Trolls – the Cognitive Therapy Approach” gives some recommendations that aren’t too dissimilar to that approach. In general, if negativity is coming at me from elsewhere, then responding in a not-directly-opposed manner makes sense to me.

What if it’s coming from me, though? A few years ago, Kent Beck was talking a lot about appreciative inquiry. The idea there is: focus on strengthening the good aspects of a situation, on growing the seeds of good events in your past, and the good will outweigh the bad. Which makes a lot of sense: don’t let bad experiences drive your life.

A pure appreciative approach wouldn’t work for me, though. As GTD teaches us, if something’s in your head, it needs to be acknowledged: in particular, ignoring something bad can cause it to fester and grow. So yeah, stating “this bothers me” is necessary. That’s the first part of the aikido approach: acknowledge the anger, let its energy flow if it needs to. But acknowledging that anger doesn’t mean giving in and letting it control you: if you can interact with that anger with compassion (towards others, towards yourself!) and redirect it, maybe something good will come out of it.

A few notes:

• Image sources are linked to on the images themselves, except for the troll/fish picture, which is a combination of this troll image and Shlomi Fish’s logo.
• This post isn’t a sign that I’m feeling particularly bad about anything right now—I’m really quite happy with my life these days! It’s mostly an excuse to do a linkdump of some related articles that I’d come across recently.
• One link I didn’t manage to fit in: Long Overdue, from Dubious Quality. Bill Harris says that his writing was much stronger when he was funnier and angrier; I wasn’t reading him back then, and I’m sure that writing had its virtues, but I really like what his writing has turned into.

Actually, maybe that’s not the best analogy: the tasks don’t crash into each other, instead it’s like a game of Flight Control HD where more and more planes get added, and where planes don’t actually collide but where you stop being able to guide almost all of them to their landing spots, instead filling up your screen and annoying you / making you feel guilty. Which is kind of what my next action list looked like a month ago: way too many tasks competing for my attention.

So: if I wanted to design Flight Control HD such that I was engaged as frequently as possible without feeling overwhelmed, how would I do it? To avoid feeling overwhelmed, I’d want to limit the number of planes; but to remain engaged, I’d want enough planes to keep me on my toes. If I could find that magic number of planes, I’d have a great time.

Of course, in real life, the planes tasks keep on coming. But GTD has a safety valve in the form of the someday/maybe list: if something seems like a good idea but you’re really not up to dealing with it right now, you put it on the someday/maybe list. Used properly, it keeps you from getting too stressed out about things: if you’ll be happier not doing a task right now than doing it right now, then over to the someday/maybe list it goes.

With that in mind: how many tasks should be in flight (on our next action list) at any given moment? The someday/maybe list takes care of the problem of having too many tasks in flight; the other side of the problem is having too few tasks in flight. If we run out of stuff to do, we’ll either be bored or go through the someday/maybe list; and if we do the latter too often, then the someday/maybe list ends up really being a next action list in disguise. (With all the usual potential for hidden problems, e.g. probably somewhere in your brain you’d be keeping a list of “things that I really want to treat as next actions but are on the wrong list”.) So the answer is: our next action list should be long enough that we don’t have to go to the someday/maybe list more frequently than we’re comfortable with.

And, happily, GTD has some advice for how frequently we should look at our someday/maybe list: you should do so once a week, during your weekly review! So: your next action list should contain a week’s worth of items, plus enough slack to deal with variation. (As a bonus, keeping it at that length should make your weekly review quite a bit more interesting.)

With that in mind, my new rule is: if I don’t expect to do something within the next two weeks, then it’s a someday/maybe item, not a next action item. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m a lot closer than I was a week ago, and it’s been very refreshing. My morning ‘scan the next action list to get some ideas for today’ routine has gotten a lot more focused and productive; and items that I feel are important to me have a much harder time hiding. I’ve moved a ton of stuff off to the indefinite future, and I feel fine about that; I’ve also gotten some things taken care of that I’d been putting off for months, and I feel great about that, too!

Having said that, the new system isn’t working perfectly yet: I’m pretty sure my next action list is still a little long, and I don’t expect to actually start refilling it from my someday/maybe list for at least a couple of weeks, maybe a month. No longer than that, though; and if it takes as long as a month, it will mean that I’ve decided to actually concentrate on longer projects and carry them through instead of working on a bunch of unrelated projects, which is an outcome that I would be perfectly happy with. (My problem before wasn’t just with the length of my next action list, it was with the number of different projects that I pretended I was working on at once.)

Or, alternatively, if it takes me a month to start looking at my someday/maybe list, it may also mean that I’m spending more time consciously deciding not to knock off items, instead just hanging out more. Which I would also be perfectly fine with! GTD isn’t about being “productive”, it’s about doing what you most want to do at any given time, and isn’t at all judgmental about what you should want to do. It does surface tensions concerning what different parts of your brain most want to do, but whatever answer they come up with after duking it out is okay with GTD.

Last week, Rob Myers tweeted that “Why do I assume that someday I will get caught up?” Which is a very healthy point of view, I think. The point is not to make a huge effort to get “caught up”, whatever that might mean, after which mythical moment we’ll somehow be able to relax. I’d much rather instead figure out how to feel relaxed right now, while spending time being engaged on tasks that I both enjoy and find rewarding.

Much of that is due to how new my work setup is: my Playdom Next Action list got to be significantly longer over my time there than my Sumo Logic one currently is. And part of it is the nature of the tasks: at work, I generally have one large project that I’m focusing on at any given time (which I break up into multiple tasks, of course), with only a few side tasks, while at home, there are a bunch of different areas that I want to be working on.

Still, I like the feel of my Next Action list at work much much more than the feel of my home list. And I’m clearly misusing my home Someday/Maybe list: the age of several of my Next Action items strongly suggests that I’m not treating them as next actions, that I’m in fact treating them as someday items, just someday items that I wish I could wave a magic wand at and have them be done. Also, I’m pretty sure that the rarity with which I move something from my Someday/Maybe list onto my Next Action list is another sign that I’m doing things wrong.

Another piece of the puzzle is Kanban. (In its software development form, as developed by David Anderson, not its manufacturing form.) I’ve been following the kanbandev mailing list for the last year or so and read the book earlier this year, and while I need to get more hands-on experience with the methodology (which I hope will happen at work soon), it makes enough sense to me that it’s my default way of thinking about organizing software production. And, viewed in a Kanban light, I’m clearly managing my personal tasks wrong: I don’t have a pretense of Work in Progress limits, and I have no control over my cycle time.

And it’s not like there aren’t new things that I’d like to do but that haven’t made it onto my Next Action list, either: in fact, right now, my brain seems to be particularly good at thinking of new programming projects to undertake! But there’s no point in doing a half-hearted stab at a bunch of projects: that won’t make me feel any better.

Which means I need to get things under control. Part of that means looking at my Next Action list, and moving some of the stuff there to Someday/Maybe. And part of that means recognizing that a lot of the stuff there is things that is genuinely important to do but that I don’t enjoy doing, and I just have to suck it up and do it. For example, I haven’t done a weeding of financial records for more than a two years; the drawers are getting full, that stuff isn’t going to go away if I don’t spend time on it.

So I’m trying to spend more time driving the list down. Once I’ve done that, I’ll consider putting a work in progress limit in place, but right now I’m just trying to remove items more quickly than I add them for a bit. And it’s not that hard to do so once I put my mind to it: for example, I can easily knock off an hour-long item every evening if I just get it out of the way before reading blogs instead of reading blogs and noting that it’s 9:45 and I’ll be getting ready to go to bed in half an hour or so, and putzing away the remaining time.

I would warn that all this means that I may well not end up blogging as much here for the next couple of months. Honestly, though, that seems unlikely: doubtless going through those backlog items will turn into blog posts, too (and, indeed, several of the current backlog items are to write posts on various topics). And I’ve written ten posts here in the last two weeks even though I’ve been nibbling away at my Next Action list, which is noticeably higher than my average. The contents might change somewhat, though: in particular, I’m not planning to start any new video games for a little while. (But I’ll keep on playing Minecraft and Rock Band 3, and both of those will certainly lead to posts on my other blog and probably here as well.)

I don’t blog here nearly as often about organization stuff as I used to, but that’s not a sign that I don’t think it’s a good idea: it’s more a sign that I’ve internalized a lot of the ideas. For the record, then:

• Agile: still awesome.
• Lean: still awesome.
• GTD: still awesome.
• Inbox Zero: still awesome.
• Checklists / Standard Work: still awesome.
• Kanban: looks awesome.
• Pomodoro Technique: Has a few good ideas that I’ve brought into my practice, and I occasionally turn on my pomodoro timer when I need extra help focusing, but I don’t follow it in general.

But my GTD practice is definitely a bit chipped and tarnished (and should be better informed by Kanban); time to sharpen it up a bit.

So I used my job change as an excuse to try switching my work next action lists to something computerized. I took a look at Things, OmniFocus, and The Hit List; The Hit List didn’t have an iPhone counterpart, OmniFocus seemed a bit heavyweight, so I gave Things a try.

And I ended up rather liking it. At first, I was somewhat taken aback by not being able to map the (to me quite important) GTD concept of waiting items directly to it. But once I decided not to get hung up on that, I enjoyed the program: it’s easy to use, it’s great to be able to pull up a quick entry box to get ideas out of your mind, and the clutter problem that I’d been having with my paper system has completely disappeared.

Things also has one very nice feature that isn’t a standard part of GTD (though it is part of the pomodoro technique): it encourages you to flag actions as ones you’re planning to do today. For several months, I’d been making a tentatively daily plan at the start of the day at work, and I really like the results: it means that I rarely have to refer to my entire next action list during the day, and it makes it easier for me to take care of items that are important but not urgent or ideas that, for some reason, my mind is resisting doing.

In fact, that last point is important enough that I’ll go on a bit of a digression on it. (Partly in hopes that I’ll figure something out, because I don’t claim to have all the answers here.) Too much planning is bad: plans go stale as reality marches on without them (and, in particular, unexpected events can cause priorities to shift quite quickly); and planning takes time, which has a real cost. But avoiding planning entirely isn’t good, either: our lives are too complicated for us to always be able to make the best choices even about a narrow area on the fly, and without plans, it’s too easy to get buffeted around, chasing the urgent over the important.

So you need to balance these two forces. (Or, better yet, come up with a synthesis.) GTD’s next action concept is a great step in that direction: you do just enough planning in advance to be able to make a bit of concrete progress in a project, but you don’t overplan by committing to when you’ll take that next action or by committing to the details of later actions on that project.

That one useful way to ease to this tension: you focus yourself on a single project and are a bit vague about time. But today lists provide an orthogonal easing of tension, this time focusing on a single slice of time but looking across projects. To get them to work, you make sure to have a few minutes of quiet at the start of the day (when walking Zippy when I get up, after checking my e-mail when I show up at work) when you can look across the existing list of next actions on all of your projects and see what might be a good idea to work on next. But you don’t commit to actually doing all of that (surprises can always arise), and if you don’t finish an item on one day’s list, it’s just fine to remove it from the today list when the next morning rolls around. Done well, it only takes a few minutes, it makes it very easy to figure out what to do next, and it helps you make progress across a range of important projects.

So, once the evaluation period ended, I paid for a copy of Things, installed it at both home and work, and bought the iPhone app as well. (Which I sync with my home copy.) And I’m quite happy with my choice; aside from the reasons mentioned above, the iPhone version is quite usable, and it’s made my weekly reviews at home go a good deal more smoothly, for reasons that are idiosyncratic enough to not be worth elaborating on here. It’s not a perfect piece of software—I’m still not convinced by its handing of waiting items, and some of the concepts that it has aren’t sufficiently orthogonal (e.g. there are actions you can do on standalone tasks that you can’t do for tasks that are part of projects)—but it works more than well enough for me.

It’s also changed my GTD usage. For one thing, it has the notion of Areas of Responsibility; that’s a part of GTD that I’d never spent much time with, but once I had software that mentioned it, I started thinking about it a bit more. And I realized that some things that I’d been thinking about as projects (e.g. read books, take care of tasks around the house) are actually areas of responsibility, and are best managed as such. The other thing is its use of tags: that’s the way Things handles GTD contexts, but putting a tag on an item you’re creating on the iPhone version adds just enough friction to be a slight annoyance. And, once I realized that, I also realized that, in fact, GTD contexts are never useful to me! (I’m not saying they’re a bad thing, just that my life isn’t complicated enough in ways where they are helpful.) So now I’m moving away from using tags as GTD contexts, instead just keeping around a few special-purpose tags with other meanings.

I’m very happy with the results, and plan to keep this system for the forseeable future. I still have my paper notebook around, e.g. to take notes about blog posts, but all in all moving the portable part of my system to my phone and the non-portable part to a piece of dedicated software is working nicely.

I’d heard a bit about the technique before, enough to know that it tells you to break your work up into 25 minute chunks and to try to really focus during those chunks, avoiding distractions and interruptions. It turns out that there’s more to the technique than that, however: it gives guidelines about breaks between chunks (3-5 minute breaks normally, longer breaks after every four chunks), there’s a whole planning and estimating mechanic you’re supposed to use with it (starting each day estimating your tasks in terms of pomodori, and reviewing your day at the end), and there are also mechanisms for tracking and actively tabling your interruptions.

What really sold me about the talk, though, was that, 25 minutes into it, a timer went off, and we all took a break for a few minutes! We took another break 25 minutes later; I think that it’s a great idea to break a 90-minute presentation into three chunks like that. As it happened, I’d been feeling over the course of the conference that I hadn’t been getting enough done over the evenings; so, that evening, I decided to give the pomodoro technique a try, and really focus on things for 25 minutes at a time.

Which turned out to work remarkably well: I probably got as much done that evening of the conference as in the other four evenings put together. Despite which I didn’t use the technique over the next month or so: I was pairing on a project in my last weeks at Sun, we were doing quite a good job concentrating as it was, and it didn’t seem to be a good time to introduce something new.

When I started work at Playdom, though, I picked up the technique again, and I’m glad I did. When I describe the technique to other people, one frequent concern that comes up is: doesn’t the timer going off interrupt your flow? For me, though, my problem is almost always too little flow rather than too much; and the pomodoro technique works great with that. I can stop myself from wandering for 25 minutes if I try, and I know I have a little release valve coming up in the not-too-distant future if I need one. And it occasionally happens that I’m banging my head against something unproductively and need the cooling off period between pomodoros to get myself thinking that I really should take a different approach. Also, it can be a big help if the next task seems frightening in some way: you’re not faced with wandering through something unknown and probably unpleasant for an unbounded amount of time, you’re faced with spending 25 minutes trying to shed a bit more light on your current situation, which is a much more palatable prospect. And I think the explicit guidelines for both shorter and longer breaks are helpful for me.

I’ve tried other aspects of the technique as well; they have had benefits, but I’m less sold on them. The planning period is a helpful reminder that I should think about all the different things that I’m considering working on (my next actions for my various projects, in GTD speak), and pomodoros give me permission to carve out a bounded amount of time to work on tasks that are important but not urgent. Having said that, I haven’t found much of a benefit from the actual process of estimating how many pomodoros a task will take at the start of the day: it doesn’t seem to be solving any problems that I have, and I have other mechanisms for telling myself when I’m getting stuck. (E.g. if I’m not doing multiple git commits over the course of a pomodoro, that might be a sign that things are going well.) So I’m stopping that for the time being.

And there’s one aspect of the pomodoro technique that I’m actively dubious about. One of the core rules is that the pomodoro is indivisible: if you don’t spend the whole 25 minutes working on what you planned, then it doesn’t count as a pomodoro, and you’re strongly encouraged to have as many pomodoros count as possible. There’s a bit of wiggle room here—if your plan at the start of the day has tasks that you think will take less than one pomodoro, then you can combine multiple of them in your plan to make a single pomodoro, and if you finish a task within the first five minutes of a pomodoro, then you’re encouraged to cancel the pomodoro, with the feeling that it was “really” finished in the last pomodoro. If you go beyond the first five minutes, though, you’re supposed to stick it out until the timer rings: in particular, the technique recommends that you spend spare time overlearning, delving into the area in question more deeply than you would otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, overlearning is a great idea: it’s a similar philosophy to always doing a bit of refactoring once you’ve got your code working. Except that the pomodoro philosophy is different: you don’t always do it, you only do it if there’s time left on your pomodoro, and the amount of overlearning you should do is proportional to the time left. And that just seems bizarre to me.

Take this blog post, for example: I have a pomodoro timer running as I type this. If the timer goes off when I’ve got it done but not properly edited, I don’t want the pomodoro technique encouraging me to hit publish so that I won’t have a big gap to fill in my next pomodoro. After I’ve hit the publish button, probably a bit of overlearning wouldn’t be a bad idea—e.g. this blog post is suggesting an idea for another blog post I could write, so maybe I’ll take some notes on that. But that sounds like a good idea no matter how much time is left on the pomodoro; and those notes will probably take about 5 minutes, so what am I supposed to do if I turn out to have 15 minutes left on my timer when I hit the publish button?

So that doesn’t make much sense to me. The result is that I’m not feeling any guilt about either canceling a pomodoro if I finish a task in the middle of one or about not canceling the pomodoro and launching into a second task without a break in the same pomodoro. (Hmm, I probably should have a preference for one or the other of those solutions, maybe the former?)

But the core idea seems sound, and many of the surrounding ideas have seeds of something that I quite like (e.g. the concept of overlearning), even if I’m not convinced by their details.

Some resources I’ve found useful:

• The main pomodoro technique site. In particular, it contains a 45-page PDF book giving more details into the technique.
• Pomodoro Technique Illustrated. I haven’t read the final version, but the author had a beta version on his web site for a while, and I quite liked it.
• The pomodoro timer I’m using on my Mac.

So I filed away their existence in the back of my brain (well, actually, in my GTD someday/maybe list) and mostly forgot about them. Not completely: at the time, I was thinking about possibly changing jobs. But my general conclusion was that I was in general rather happy with my current job, and that while I was starting to feel a bit antsy, I’d probably prefer to change jobs towards the end of 2009 than towards the middle. I sent out a few feelers at the time, but none of them paid off, so I was happy enough to shelve the issue.

It turned out, though, that one of the feelers wasn’t dead, it had just gotten buried for a bit. It resurrected itself in the middle of the summer, and shortly after that happened, I got cold-called by a recruiter who mentioned Playdom! So I sent in my resume, and went in to interview. And I’m very glad I did, they look like they’ll be a very nice match for what I’m looking for. In fact, going down the checklist from the aforementioned blog post, they hit on almost every front: a local game company working in small, cross-functional teams with very fast iterations and which would expose me to many domain and technological areas that I’m not very well steeped in yet. (No Erlang, but I can certainly live with that. It’s also not clear to me how many of the agile technical practices they use, but that’s an area where I should be able to contribute if doing so turns out to be useful; anyways, right now I’m a lot more curious to see what a fast-moving team looks like on the business side than the technical side.)

They focus on social games. Which might seem like a bad fit for me, because my taste in games is fairly traditional. Actually, though, it’s something that I’m rather excited about, for two reasons. (Or perhaps one reason with two sides?) One reason is an aesthetic one, or a cultural one: a new art medium is a gift that we should cherish, so the last thing that I want is to see it have its practitioners bore into a tiny area of the design space, ignoring vast reaches of what is possible. That is, unfortunately, exactly what several major players in the game industry have been doing over the last decade, so I’m very glad to see companies like Playdom consciously setting their sights elsewhere.

The other is perhaps the business side of the same argument: one excellent book that I’ve read recently is The Innovator’s Dilemma. (Ironically, I read it because my current boss made it sound so interesting.) The thesis of that book is that highly successful companies, exactly by doing such a good job of paying attention to their best customers, end up refining their current technologies to make them more and more appealing to the core of their customer base. As part of this, they discount customers that are on the fringes (low-margin customers, frequently with somewhat different interests); new companies can then take slightly modified (and less technologically advanced) versions of those same technologies and use them to build up a following in a new customer base. (And, more importantly, using a new value network: their suppliers, their income sources, their distributors are all different from those of established companies.) What starts as a small market soon grows to a quite respectable size: also, the companies in the new market can typically improve the quality of their technology at a faster pace than companies in the original market, so after a few years, the new companies end up making products that are technically quite adequate for the majority of customers in the original market (but with lower prices and otherwise more appealing!), which quickly spells doom for those original companies. And, as far as I can tell, Playdom looks like a textbook example of a company at the early stages of such market innovation; if they follow the course outlined in that book, the sky’s the limit.

Of course, future promise is one thing, but the question remains of how interesting their current games are. Some of their early games seemed to me more like experiments than compelling packages (though they’re experiments that many people were happy to play); within the last month, though, they launched Mobsters 2, which I’m really quite enjoying. It took me a few days to figure out how the mechanisms in the game worked, what they meant and how they interacted together; that was enough time to get me sufficiently hooked that, even though I’m in general not uncovering too much more in the mechanics, I still happily log into the game a couple of times a day to do some leveling up. (And, as I said before, they iterate quickly, so for all I know they’ll introduce interesting new mechanics next week, next month!) So if that’s what their second wave of games looks like, I have high hopes for what they’ll be producing a year or two from now.

Ironically, the one part of the game that I haven’t explored is its social aspects: I’m currently not much of a Facebook user (follow me on Twitter instead if you want to know my hour-to-hour activities), so I don’t have a big pool of friends to draw from to expand my mob. I would like to change that: if you’re a blog reader, feel free to add me as a friend; if you do so, please give the game a try and ask me to join your mob! (Do Facebook friend requests include a note? If not, and if you’re not sure I know you, just e-mail me or leave a comment or something—I’m happy to add any blog reader as a friend.)

I’ve very much enjoyed my current job: it’s been a wonderful place to spend the last few years, I’ll miss my coworkers very much, and it looks like the product is going through an exciting phase in its development right now that I wish I could see the other side of. Having said that, I’m very excited to be joining Playdom at the end of the month, and I can’t wait to see where that journey will lead me.

As I’ve been thinking about it more, though, I’ve realized that there’s more to my unease than a philosophical distate: it turns out that I don’t have a very good answer myself to the question of why I play games! Do I play games for fun? For beauty? To learn something? For some other reason? It’s actually not at all clear to me.

And what makes this especially weird is that, even though I can’t explain why I play games, I am quite confident that I’m not playing games just out of inertia. Over the last few years, I’ve been getting more and more conscious in my choices of how I spend my time. And I’ve chosen over and over again to continue to make time to play games, even though I have enough time pressure that it would be very easy for me to stop doing so and fill up that time with other activities that I would also find very rewarding.

I’m not even doing this out of a sort of inertia once removed, e.g. because games are an entry (a few entries, actually) in my GTD projects list. GTD is a way of structuring my life to increase the chance that I’ll be able to do what I most want to do at any given moment, not something that I follow indefinitely on autopilot. Every week, I have to ask myself “is playing games really part of what I want to be doing?” And, so far, the answer has always come back “yes”. (With the occasional caveat.)

Part of the answer, I think, comes from my recent Christopher Alexander reading: he’s gotten me using the word “soul” in public, and asking myself how I feel at a fundamental level about various choices. With that in mind, it may be that the question of “why do I do X?” (for broad questions X) is becoming, to a larger and larger extent, irrelevant to me: on the one hand, perhaps I’m getting better at telling which broad choices feel right to me, and then using techniques like GTD to have me spend as much time as possible actually doing that.

But, though I’m sure there’s some truth to that, it’s not all of the answer. In particular, it’s also true that both of the influences I’ve mentioned here, GTD and Alexander, have analytical components that I’m not actively using. GTD has its horizons of focus (which I should consider taking more seriously at some point); Alexander has his characteristics of living structures. So it’s entirely possible that, if I were to apply similar techniques here, I’d be able to figure out better what makes those parts of my brain tick.

Indeed, it’s possible that I’m being somewhat disengenous by writing this post—I have, in fact, been known to spend time thinking in public about various choices that I’m making. But I’m not being completely disingenuous: I really don’t have a great explanation for why I play games (or program, or read), but at the same time that lack of an explanation isn’t giving me the slightest pause that I might be spending my time in ways that aren’t good for me.

Who knows. I suppose the most likely explanation for my lack of worries in those areas is that I’m turning into a fundamentalist, or indeed have long since done so…

Being a good GTD devotee (or a good lean/agile devotee), this means that something has to go. Fortunately, I’m actually pretty well on top of things right now—in particular, my Next Action list is about as short as I can ever remember its being—so I shouldn’t have to prune too much; but I have to prune something. And I’m certainly not going to take a break from learning Japanese—in fact, one of the unintended consequences of the memory project has been to make there be pretty serious consequences if I take even a couple of days off from my study. (One could make a sensible case that I am being a total idiot in subscribing to ChineseClass101 right now, however. Though I certainly don’t intend to treat that as seriously as I’m treating learning Japanese.)

So I think my only choice is to cut down on my video game playing for the time being. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not going to stop completely, you’ll still find me every Thursday evening at the VGHVI play nights, and I’ll keep up with VGC activities. I imagine I’ll do some playing and blogging outside of that, too, but for those of you who read this blog for game-related content, don’t be surprised if there are relatively slim pickings here for a while.

But don’t unsubscribe, either! In particular, my conference activities won’t continue forever, so by the fall I should be back to normal. Heck, I might even be back to normal after Agile 2009—I certainly want to find time in early September to play a certain game.

A lot of it was based upon my experience getting a black belt in karate. … One of the things you need to learn is the strategic value of clear space. Trust me, when four people jump you in a dark alley, you do not want to have your brain wrapped around 3000 e-mails sitting in your in basket. That’s why, when I’m not doing anything else, folks, I’m cleaning up e-mail to zero: if I’m not exactly sure there’s something mission-critical I need to be doing right now, I am cleaning up.

Why? Because there is a surprise coming toward me I can’t see, and when that sucker hits, tonight, it might be landing while I’m speaking, … when that surprise hits, do you want to have still a lot of unconsciously accepted but not clarified agreements with yourself that you don’t know exactly what it means but it might be important and then suddenly having more stuff come in on you? That’s why interruption and surprise is becoming such a stresser these days, simply because most people have such a backlog of stuff that those surprises are hitting on huge backlogs so you have a subliminal sense of angst, you’re going to have a level there that is not clear to engage with that appropriately.

Which is a great argument for paying down your technical debt, too. If there’s one thing you can be sure about when working on legacy code, it’s that surprises are going to hit you when you don’t expect them. And, when that happens, you’ll be so much better off if you have a relatively small backlog of technical debt to work with. Whereas, if your code has “a lot of unconsciously accepted but not clarified agreements with [itself]” (where “not clarified” can mean untested, it can mean tested but badly structured, it can mean code that only one person knows how to work with), then your sense of angst will be far from subliminal, and you won’t be able to engage with the code appropriately to solve your problem.

Incidentally, about 50 minutes into the talk, he mentioned that he’s started generating a tentative daily plan. He’d previously recommended against that, since one unexpected event can and probably will change the course of your entire day, but now he’s finding it useful to structure his day by picking up a few candidate high-priority items, while accepting that events may cause that plan to change. Which I was glad to hear, because I’ve been doing that at work for a few months, and am quite happy with the results. Though he also says that he didn’t need to do that until a year ago; I’m quite sure that I’m less busy now than he was a year ago, which suggests that I’m having problems with managing my commitments and next actions.

Can you be too organized? Not in the pristine sense of how I define the word. If things aren’t where they should be, and accessible as you need them, you’re simply not organized enough. If you have created structural systems that are unduly complicated and that cause you to have difficulty in accessing what’s required, when it’s required, you are also disorganized. (Making It All Work, p. 133.)

What struck me the most this time was the discussion of the J/P split. This split is related to how you act: the J side (judging, scheduling) likes to have a plan and lists, while the P side (perceiving, probing) likes to go with the flow. (One of the session leaders described P’s as people who make late-binding decisions: until a P has actually done something, who knows how or if he will do it.)

Which shed a new light on yesterday’s post. My first recommendation, “At any time, figure out what you most want to do, and do it”, is pure P. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a J could follow it as well: their responses would just have a different flavor, since what they most wanted to do (keeping in mind their deep-seated feelings as well as their surface desires) would more likely be to follow some sort of plan. Still, though, it’s basically an expression of the P ethos.

But then the other two steps, reflecting on what you’ve done and (especially) having them lead towards a longer-term plan is much more strongly J. Again, it’s not incompatible with P-ness: the plans are still created based on your feelings at that moment, and you don’t have to follow them, but the flavor this time is much more J’ish.

If I’m remembering correctly, when I took a sorting test in the past, I came out fairly strongly on the P side of the P/J split. This time, while I was still a P, I was much closer to the boundary. I attribute that largely to my GTD practice, with a side helping of lean Standardized Work thrown into the mix. Heck, if I drill down a bit further, maybe even a bit of pattern language / systems for creating life in there, too? (No, probably not: the latter is more fundamentally P, in that at any given point you really have to sit down and observe what the current situation is telling you, no matter what your prior ideas suggested.) Of course, the question remains whether I’m being swayed by superficial practices or uncovering something deeper about my psychology; check back in a few years and I’ll let you know.

This seemed like a sensible enough idea to me: in particular, it’s all to the good to have an reminder to lift your head a bit and step away from the details in order to get a broader overview of what you want to be doing. And, at home, it’s worked out in a fairly straightforward fashion.

It’s worked out well at work, too, but with one surprise: doing a weekly review takes forever! Well, not forever, but about an hour on average: put another way, even though I have GTD and the whole agile toolbag to help organize both my general priorities and my specific next actions, I still have to spend around two percent of my working time making sure that I’m not going off the rails. (Hmm, what percentage of my working time is spent on planning and organization in all its forms?)

It’s definitely worth it, though: much better to spend time to learn each week how I’m starting to go off the rails than to save time in the short term by doing the wrong thing! (Ending up with a bad product and, probably, spending more time later picking up the pieces.)

So what’s going on there? Part of the difference between work and home is that I just have more moving pieces at work than at home: I’m interacting with more people, and I have more projects. Come to think of it, maybe I have about the same number of projects at both places, but I’m generally happy for the ones at home to be done when they’re done, while the ones at work have more pressure behind them.

Part of the weekly review at both places is a sweep through my e-mail folders: actions/waiting/scheduled/conversations. That definitely takes more time at work than at home: I save a lot more e-mails, and I’m more likely to have to spend time thinking about whether or not I’m comfortable with, say, letting an e-mail thread in ‘conversations’ rest, or whether there’s a covert action / project / someday lurking in it.

But probably the biggest difference is that, at work, I accumulate new potential tasks at a much higher rate than I do at home. Each week, new high-priority items will come along; I’ll typically shuffle them into the projects / action item lists somehow, but every week I need to take a hard look and ask myself if I can really expect to make progress on all of these projects. And the answer is almost invariably no, at which point I have to move something from projects to someday / maybe, and communicate that decision to other people.

Looking back, it seems that I’ve been doing GTD for more than half a year now. I remain convinced that it’s a great system: well-thought-out parts, simple ideas, and I’ve found it personally quite effective. Though I still have a ways to go to implement it fully: in particular, I’m seeing more and more that I need to regularize my filing system at home. But I have a project for that (together with its next action or two) in my projects file, so I’m confident that I’ll accomplish it!

This is, of course, not an idea that is original to lean, and, in fact, I have heard David Allen mention it (either in a podcast or in another book, I can’t remember), under the term “checklist”. But I still think its absence in the book creates a gap; here’s why.

One of his quotes in that book is “There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” (p. 22) That’s perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but it is true that GTD trains you to capture certain kinds of thoughts (worries, ideas, …) as they flit through your mind, and write them down.

So: if the thought is a next action, it goes on your next action list. If it’s related to a project, it goes on your entry for that project. If it’s something you’re thinking about but haven’t yet committed to, it goes on your someday/maybe list.

But what if it relates something that you do repeatedly? You may be able to place that in one of the above categories, but, for me, they’re not a particularly good fit. That may sound a bit abstract (or wrong!), so let me give you an example as an explanation: sometimes, I am hiring. When I hire, I bring candidates in for interviews. And setting up an interview involves several steps: the candidate and I have to agree on the time, I have to reserve a conference room, I have to register the candidate with the visitor system, I have to make an entry in my calendar, I have to e-mail the candidate driving directions. And probably other steps that I can’t think of right now, which is exactly my point: I can try to hope that I’ll remember all of those steps, but they’re exactly the sort of thing that GTD teaches us not to keep in our brains, to keep instead in some trusted location.

But where? If I’m hiring, I’ll have a ‘hiring’ project, so I could keep it there. If I’m not hiring, I guess I could shuffle it over to the someday/maybe list. But that sounds like a lot of busywork for no particular reason; instead, I find it simplest to have a ‘checklist’ folder where I keep stuff like that. (If you’re curious, the GTD directory on my computer contains my tickler file plus four subdirectories: ‘projects’, ‘someday’, ‘reference’, and ‘checklists’.) So, at work, this is more or less my current set of checklists: a couple of hiring-related ones, one for when somebody leaves, one giving the steps of my weekly review, and my favorite ones, the checklists for when I get to work and leave work. (I created the “get to work” checklist the second time that I realized that it was almost lunchtime, that I’d been too busy to eat breakfast at home, and that I’d gotten distracted and hadn’t eaten breakfast at work; so I created a checklist whose fifth item is “have I eaten breakfast?”.)

Incidentally, my GTD system is settling down pretty well. I’ve made peace with the e-mail sorting issues that I mentioned earlier; once I’d added short keystroke commands to file an e-mail as action/waiting/scheduled (along with keystrokes for various reference folders), I found that having separate folders for those categories worked fine. I’ve instituted weekly reviews at both home and work; they haven’t had any big effects yet, but seem to be a positive occurrence as a whole. My personal next action list has been getting out of hand recently, but I made some progress in taming that this weekend, and it’s been a successful feedback mechanism in preventing me from taking on more personal projects that I really don’t have time for; my work next action list has remained pleasantly manageable. In fact, while I plan to continue tweaking the system indefinitely, I’ve declared the “adopt GTD” project at work a success, and I only have a couple of action items left on the home version of that project.

One concrete effect of this realization is that it gave me a way to flag the current status of all of my projects. I have a list of projects; each project has to have to have at least one item associated to it with the label NEXT, WAITING, or SCHEDULED. I may have multiple such actions, if I’m proceeding along multiple fronts; I may also have items on the project that don’t have any of those labels. (Those items might be ideas for future actions or reference materials.) But I have to have at least one item that’s flagged with one of those labels: if I don’t, that’s either a sign that it’s really a someday/maybe item, not a project, or that I need to sit down and come up with a next action on the project.

This also applies to e-mails. Some e-mails, even e-mails that I have flagged as active instead of archived, aren’t associated to a project; I stick these in a folder called ‘conversations’. But lots of my active e-mails are associated to a project. So I have folders ‘actions’, ‘waiting’, and ‘scheduled’, corresponding to the labels above. (As well as another folder, ‘projects’, for reference material that I don’t want to archive just yet.) (Actually, not every e-mail in actions/waiting/scheduled is associated to a project in my formal project list: some of them are single-action projects that I don’t feel compelled to capture elsewhere. Though some may be few-action projects that really should be captured elsewhere? I don’t think it’s hurting me yet, though.)

The problem is that this requires too much work for some common operations. Say that an e-mail comes in that I’m waiting for. Then it’s a response to something that’s currently in my ‘waiting’ folder; to avoid forgetting that I’ve gotten the response, I typically move the response to ‘waiting’ as well, then (once I’ve finished clearing out my inbox), go to ‘waiting’, look for e-mails that have gotten responses, and characterize them accordingly. Another difficult issue is when an e-mail requires some amount of context to respond to entirely: do I just have a single message in my actions folder, or the whole thread?

I’m starting to think that gmail has gotten it right by replacing folders with (per-thread) tags. But I’m not willing to move even my personal e-mail usage to gmail’s web interface, and I certainly can’t move my work e-mail there. Does Thunderbird use tags, and make it easy to restrict your view to only messages with a certain tag? (Looking at the web page, I think so, but I’m not completely sure.)

For the time being, I am one of the eccentrics who reads e-mail using Gnus. I assume I’ll move off of it one of these years, but that time hasn’t yet come, and (despite Gnus’s folder-centric nature) I don’t think this will push me off of Gnus, either. I spent a few hours digging through the source code and asking questions of the newsgroup; Gnus doesn’t have tagging support, but it looks like it should be workable to add an extra header to saved e-mails and tell Gnus to limit its view to headers matching a certain value on that header. (A nice benefit of having a mail reader written in a scripting language.) I haven’t yet found the time to implement this, so there might be something that I’m missing, but I’m optimistic.

Once I’ve done that, I can get rid of the separate action/waiting/scheduled folders: those messages can all be in my projects folder, and I can add keystrokes to narrow my view to messages with a certain tag. Of course, this doesn’t solve the ‘response to waiting’ problem listed above; I may actually have my inbox be the same as my project folder. (I’m not sure what the effects of that will be.)

Even the current system is a big improvement over what my inbox used to look like. My actions folder never gets very big; when I got back from vacation, I had 50 e-mails in there when I was done with my inbox scanning, but that was an exception, and having those e-mails all in one place was very useful. (In particular, it allowed me to get it down to the normal 5-or-so level by the next day.) And the waiting and scheduled folders are useful views for periodic reviews. But it’s clearly an area where improvement is possible.

This is a list of things that you’re thinking of doing but don’t currently have in progress. As with most GTD concepts, much of its power comes from allowing you to create clear boundaries: the relevant boundary here is that something you’re thinking of doing is either in progress (in which case it’s on your projects list) or is something you’ve consciously decided to defer (in which case it’s on the someday/maybe list). This forces you to think for a few seconds: do I want to work on this now or postpone it? If I want to work on this now, what’s the next action? But once you’ve done that, you can stop worrying about it. (Or at least that’s how the theory goes, and it matches my experience well enough.)

So, basically, the someday/maybe list is a repository for all those pipe dreams and worries that you’ve had that you’re not dealing with right now. Much of its value is simply as a place to write things down: part of the GTD idea is that, when a thought flits through your mind, you probably want to write it down somewhere unless you particularly want that thought to continue flitting through your mind. And many such thoughts translate into either new items for the someday/maybe list or comments on existing items for that list.

Of course, just making a list won’t do you any good if it turns into sweeping unpleasant thoughts under the carpet: that will translate into some combination of not getting things done that should get done and of worrying that you won’t get things done. So you’re supposed to look at your somebody/maybe list once a week, to ask yourself if any items there should be promoted to active projects.

The reason why this struck me so much is that it gave another way to look at my preferred way of dealing with books, namely to have a very short stack (ideally of length at most 1) of books that I’ve bought but haven’t yet read, while keeping a much longer list of books that have caught my eye for some reason. I got this revelation from lean (inventory is waste), and it’s served me very well over the last couple of years, but I had a hard time explaining just why it is that having a big stack of books that I really want to read but haven’t gotten around to reading is bad while having a long list of books that I really want to read but haven’t bought or gotten around to reading is good. (The third option would be to not have a list or a stack; for me, that would translate into an unreliable mental list, which is worse than a physical list.)

If you think about it in GTD terms, though, what’s going on is this: you see a book, and the thought flits through your mind that you should read it. Being a trained devotee, you know that you need to write this down somewhere: so is reading that book a current project, or a someday/maybe item?

If it’s a current project, then the logical next action is to buy it, so by all means do so at once. If you don’t have definite plans to read it soon, though, then it should go on the someday/maybe list, in which case buying it now isn’t appropriate. If you want to get a bit subtler, you can say that you have a current project of “always have a book to read”, in which case buying the book is appropriate if you’re close to finishing your current book and you want to read that book next, but isn’t appropriate otherwise.

Basically, there are (in my experience) a few reasons why I’m tempted to buy the book on the spot. One is because I like to fantasize how exciting it will be to read the book. That’s very pleasant, but buying the book isn’t a good response to fantasies like that: I should only buy the book if I’m actually going to read it, not just because I want to bask in the thought of reading it and can hallucinate that buying the book right now is a constructive step towards that end. Another reason is because I’m afraid that I’ll forget about the book if I don’t buy a copy right new, and I really would like to read it at some point in the future; fair enough, but making an entry on a list (possibly with some notes about what attracted me to the book) is a better response than buying it. A third is because I feel guilty walking into a bookstore, browsing their books, taking notes about what books to buy, and then walking out without giving them money; I still think that’s actually a pretty good reason to buy a book, but what I’ve found is that, if I have a low (frequently zero) unread book inventory, then I can assuage my guilt by buying one book and reading it next (or possibly after I’ve finished my other book in inventory). And if I’m not sure that I want to read the book next, then maybe that’s a sign that I shouldn’t buy it right now: I have lots of experience with the strategy of buying books because I feel that I should read them, and the results aren’t generally particularly positive.

The upshot is that I’ve moved my books-to-read (games-to-play, music-to-listen-to) lists to a ‘someday’ subdirectory of my GTD directory, and added a generic someday list there. And the results have been generally pleasant: it’s nice to have a place to write down ideas about things that I’m thinking of doing in the future. Equally importantly, it let me stop worrying about certain things that I knew I should get around to doing but just didn’t have enough spare cycles at the moment to work on; enough items have graduated from the someday list to full-fledged projects that it’s not just a sham.

First: I really am getting things done. Simple things that should get taken care of immediately are, in fact, getting taken care of immediately: before, I would have forgotten them or put them off for no particular reason, now I’m doing them and finding that it doesn’t take any more time in my day. And I’m also getting some important, larger things done that I’d been putting off for months: in particular, we’ve finally gotten our dryer vent fixed, but the piano is also getting tuned this week and I’ve gotten all my 2007 dependent care reimbursements in.

The dryer vent is a real success: I’ve known for a while that it was important, I’d even thought about what I’d do about it (in particular, decided that I didn’t feel like fixing it myself), but I hadn’t actually done anything concrete. Following what I remember as good GTD style (I still haven’t reread the book), I wrote down my next action (google for handymen near Mountain View), which I got around to doing a few days later. And then I wrote down my next action (call the handyman I’d decided on), which I got around to doing a few days after that. And once that had happened, we set up an appointment, he came and looked at things, and he came back and fixed it the next day.

All I needed was to find half an hour to do some googling and make some phone calls. Once I’d reduced the problem to that and written down the action items in a place where I am reminded of them multiple times a day (and, in particular, am reminded of them at times when I have a few spare minutes), it got taken care of in a couple of weeks.

The nice thing about that, too, is that it didn’t depend on guilting myself into being more active than I can sustainably be: guilt was involved, but it was a small amount of actionable guilt, and guilt that I could ignore for a few days if I really was too busy to act on it.

In another pleasant surprise, my Todo list isn’t spiraling out of control. In fact, right now there are a grant total of four items on it. And that’s not a sign that I cleared it out before writing this blog post: the same four items were on it yesterday evening, and I made the decision that catching up on my blogging was more important than acting on any of them. (But, assuming it doesn’t take to long to finish this blog post, I’ll work on two of them once I’m done writing this.) Four is shorter than the norm over the last three weeks, but the list has never been too bad, and when it’s been longer, it’s been full of trivial stuff that gets cleared off almost immediately. (“When I get to work, write down X in my calendar and send an e-mail to Liesl about Y.”) (In fact, I just added a fifth item in that trivial vein, to write down something on the calendar when I get downstairs!)

I have made two changes to the cards that I’m carrying around in my pocket. The first is that I’ve moved the Projects list out of there and onto my computer. (Actually, I have one list at home and one at work.) Projects are longer-term, so the lack of backups if I stored them in my pocket bothered me. I frequently want to add notes to a project, and there’s no easy way to do that on a physical medium without dedicating a card to each project, which I didn’t want to do. Also, I’m not actively working on more than a few projects at any given time, so there’s no need to have reminders for all of them in my pocket: I have the next action items for the (few) active projects in my Todo list, but everything else can be stored in a location that I don’t have immediate access to. (If I think of something project-related while I’m out and about, I just add a Todo item with the thought, telling me to transcribe it onto the Project list.)

The second is that I’ve switched from a case of 3×5 cards to a Levenger Circa notebook. (Their “Hipster PDA” model; I also bought some tab dividers.) Which I’m very happy with so far: it’s noticeably less bulky than the case I had been using, to the extent that I barely feel it in my pocket most of the time. And the design is great: the cards are just the right thickness, I love the clean look of the pages with lines of just the right strength and spacing, and the Circa rings let the cards rotate very easily. I’m still a bit worried that it might not be quite sturdy enough, but it’s held up well in my pocket for the last week, so I’m optimistic.

My Projects file grew a lot a couple of weeks ago, as I kept on thinking of things that I’d been meaning to do at some point; I’ve dutifully been adding them to that file together with notes on them. (Typically including a next action, though I haven’t been dogmatic about that for projects that I know that I’m not going to get around to in the next couple of months.) It’s still entirely possible that it will turn into yet another list of tasks that grows in an unbounded fashion, but the rate at which I’m adding new items has slowed down noticeably over the last week, and I’ve also completed a few projects and carried out one or more steps on a few others. So, even if I’m adding to the list faster than I’m removing items from the list, I am at least removing items from the list faster than I’d been doing in the days when the list was purely in my brain.

I’ve refined the Tickler list a bit. I don’t think I need a daily tickler list: my schedule just isn’t that busy, and my Todo list and my work calendar handle that granularity fine. So I have a weekly tickler list for the next couple of months, and monthly tickler slots after that. (And yearly tickler slots after that: Miranda has to renew her passport in 2010, I have to renew mine in 2012, Liesl in 2015.) I noticed one mistake in the way I’d been using the tickler list: initially, I’d entered the next steps on a few projects on my tickler list, even though the dates I entered the reminders for didn’t correspond to any triggers related to those projects, because I knew I didn’t have enough time to work on those projects now but wanted to work on them soon. But that’s a bad idea: it muddies the purpose of the tickler list, forecasts like that are likely to be inaccurate, and scheduling myself to be guilty about something in the future is pointless. The correct thing to do is to look over my Projects list every weekend, and think a bit about what’s most important right then and about how much time I have available right then. (Taking into account the tickler items from that week, which really are important right then and which will affect my available time!)

I still have the Shopping and Blog items lists in my pocket. The Shopping list isn’t getting much action, but I tentatively think that’s okay; it’s not hurting anything, and I think it still serves a purpose. (At some point I’ll either pass an Indian grocery store and buy some ground coriander or we’ll start running low at home and I’ll promote that item to the Todo list!) The Blog list is more problematic: it is growing, and shares some characteristics with the Projects list. But, for now, I think having it in my pocket is the right decision, for two reasons: for one thing, if I don’t get around to blogging about something for a few weeks or months, my thoughts on it will go stale, so blog topics should have a significantly shorter lifespan than projects. Also, I find myself occasionally wanting to take long notes on thoughts about a potential blog topic when I’m just sitting somewhere, and I’d rather not have to transcribe those notes into another list when I get back to a computer. I’m not completely convinced that that list will stay in my pocket forever—in fact, “Where should blog topics list go?” is one of the bullet points under the “GTD” item in my Projects list—but for now I want to experience the current setup a bit longer, to get more of a feel for its strengths and weaknesses.

I will close with my current list of bullet points on the aforementioned GTD item. And then I’ll post this, and remove one of the bullet points from the list!

GTD:

• Read book!
• Blog about moving projects list, once I’ve got a bit more experience under my belt.
• Make projects/tickler available via a vcs to multiple machines?
• Where should blog topics list go?

Which is something that I can use: sometimes I forget tasks, I procrastinate on large/important tasks longer than is desirable (the GTD system has some special techniques to address that one), and my e-mail inboxes are pretty cluttered.

Of course, since this is a potentially large/important task, I immediately set hard to work on procrastinating, not doing anything about it while periodically worrying that I should be something. Which is just the wrong thing to do, from a GTD point of view: instead, I should identify the next concrete step towards implementing the system, write it down somewhere where I won’t forget it, and then take care of it when I have a free moment while I’m in an appropriate place.

I decided that the next important step was finding a place to write down various lists. The main criterion is that it has to always be accessible (part of the system is that you can write down an idea whenever you think of it, and look at your todo list whenever you have a moment). The cool kids all like Moleskine notebooks, and for all I know I might eventually move to one of those, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to start with: I don’t even know what my categories are, and I certainly don’t know at what proportion I’ll move through pages in those categories, so I’d rather start off with something random-access.

My boss carries around a case for holding 3×5 cards; a couple of weeks ago, I took a look at it. It was a bit bulky, but it fit well enough in my pocket. And 3×5 cards are perfectly suited to my random-access desires: give me some white cards to write on and a few colored cards for category dividers, and I’ll be all set. I haven’t yet found a link to that specific case online, but a local Office Depot had one, so I went out and bought one about two weeks ago.

So far, results have been good. I’ve been getting prosaic little things done quickly and reliably: if at home I think of some information at work that I need to e-mail Liesl (e.g. exactly what information I need her to get from the daycare so I can file my last 2007 dependent care receipts), I now get that taken care of the next day. I’ve taken care of some slightly larger projects, and taken a first step (and written down my next step, I just need a bit of free time at work to make a phone call at lunch and a morning when I can work from home, neither of which have been in great supply recently) towards a bigger project. I’m still in the first blush of excitement, and I’m not at all convinced yet that it will continue to have an effect of guilting me into getting stuff taken care of, but it does seem to have real organizational benefits in situations where guilt isn’t necessary. (Which is most of them!)

So far I’m using categories of “task list”, “blog ideas”, “projects”, and “shopping”. (The latter isn’t for stuff I need soon – that goes in the task list – and it’s also not for abstract wish lists, it’s for notes like “if I happen to pass an Indian grocery store, I should buy a bag of ground coriander”.) I expect that I’ll think of one or two more categories eventually, though. The card case I bought works well enough, but it really is a bit thick; I just went and ordered a Circa PDA Notebook from Levenger, and we’ll see how that turns out. It should be thinner and more stylish; I’m worried about how durable it will be, and it may or may not feel less random-access than my current index card solution in ways that matter.

I’m still very much in the playing around stage, of course. I need to reread the book, for one, to see what I’m missing. And, of the things I can think of from the book, I’ve got my task list taken care of, and I’ve stored a simple tickler file on my computer, but I need to rethink my e-mail sorting strategy. That will happen soon enough, though (yay short book queues), and it’s not urgent: if I don’t get around to rereading the book until a month from now, the plus side will be that I’ll have had a month of experience with my new system, which will give me something more concrete to test against when reading it.