Rich Mintz  

One of my new year’s resolutions this year is to be better about note-taking and followup.

I tried a couple of years ago to adopt some productivity tips from disturbingly organized person Russ Fagaly (involving a scanner, which I never ever seemed to make the time to use). This year I’m trying again, now that my productivity “system” overall is better than it was then.

I’m carrying a small spiral notebook around with me (roughly 5 1/2″ x 4″), along with a nice pen that I enjoy using, and taking down all my notes in there — meeting notes, incidental notes, things I want to remember later, whatever. Then, at the end of the day (or, more often, the week), I sit down at the desk with my spiral notebook and JotNot on my iPhone, and do the following:

• For meeting notes I want to keep, I snap them into a JotNot document, then send them to Evernote.
• For incidental notes (things to do, books to read, etc.) that I need to capture, I transfer them into entries in my task system.
• As I run through each page, I put a slash across it to remind me that I needn’t visit it again.

This may sound tedious, but so far it seems to be working for me. Knock wood.

Patricia Cohen’s essay in the Sunday Times about the creative power of midlife struck a chord for me. A lot of my own musings on this blog are consistent with Cohen’s thesis, that people in their forties often feel more comfortable with themselves and their own knowledge and mastery, freer to be creative, and less constrained by society and limited by what they don’t know than people in their twenties and even thirties. Certainly it’s been that way for me — I’m a happier person now than I was earlier in my life, my confidence is higher, my interests are broader, and I’m much less concerned with what anybody thinks.

I particularly liked this part, given that I’m currently reading widely and, with everything I read, thinking “Hey, I bet I could write something like this”:

The mix of experience and native ability often reaches a high point in the creative realm as well. Despite the media’s obsession with young talent, psychologists like Carl Jung and Erik Erikson maintained that middle age propelled individuals toward their greatest achievements. Consider, for instance, the difference between Beethoven’s First Symphony, written at 29, and the Ninth, composed in his late 40s and early 50s. Profound genius is midlife’s territory.

Countless writers, filmmakers, musicians, poets and painters have expounded on the artistic insight of midlife. “I’m glad I didn’t get a chance to make movies in my 20s or 30s because I was a very bad writer,” said Paul Haggis, who was in his 50s when he wrote screenplays for the Oscar-winning films “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash” (the latter he also directed).

Works for me!

Just finished my last expense report of 2011 (a week late), and now I’m staring at a stack of bills and random desk paperwork from December — vote for this, update my account information for that, write my appeal letter for this other thing. Checking account needs to be balanced, and my Quicken doesn’t run on Lion, which means I need to move my Quicken data file to the new computer, which means I need to power up my two-computers-ago old computer to convert my data file. Haven’t synced my phone to the new computer yet, not sure what will break when I do. I owe a dozen thank-you and Merry-Christmas letters to people who were kind enough to offer me their many happy returns of the season (an expression nobody has used much in twenty years, but it’s still rattling around in my brain).

I don’t know how everyone else deals with these kinds of things — the work-like tasks that accumulate, which have to be done but which you don’t get paid for and which will eventually interfere with normal life, cost you extra money, hurt someone’s feelings, etc. if you don’t do them — but they drive me crazy, the way they hang over my head. And there are always more of them coming along, so it’s no good just deciding you won’t bother and hoping they’ll go away.

I actually did that — pretended they didn’t matter, let them pile up, like a sort of hoarder but of petty obligations rather than of things — at various times in my past, when there wasn’t enough time to do all the things I felt had to be done, and I decided to prioritize my various business activities rather than my home life. No need to go into specifics, but it didn’t end well, so I try not to do that now. But my aim is to minimize time spent and maximize efficiency, so here’s how I handle it:

Don’t obsess about the mail. As a kid, I loved getting mail. I filled in those magazine coupons for free literature and sent them in (there’s a family story about a real estate salesman coming to call on me about Lake Arrowhead vacation property when I was about 8), I corresponded with cousins, I had pen pals in faraway lands. I still like the mail, but I keep it constrained. I get my mail at the post office — a habit I got into almost 15 years ago, when I was living by myself in a little house (a house with a small mailbox, in Atlanta, a city where it rains every afternoon) and traveling all the time. I kept the habit up when I opened a book sales business that took me to my neighborhood post office in East Atlanta (pictured here, courtesy Google Street View) every day with tubs of packages, and continued it after I moved to New York, where I lived pretty itinerantly for the first couple of years. Fortunately, this being New York, the lobby of my post office is open 24 hours a day, 362 days a year.

Triage mail immediately. Whenever I pick up the mail, I sort it immediately. Anything I won’t read goes right in the trash without opening; then I open the rest and throw away the bits and pieces I don’t care about; then, from the rest, I pull out anything that needs immediate action (but the bar for this is set very high). The rest goes into my bright red inbox, where I forget about it until it’s paperwork time.

Do the paperwork in big bursts, not in dribs and drabs. When I was a kid, my dad was always working on paperwork of this sort, and that system didn’t seem fair, even to him; I suspect he spent most of his peak adult years worrying about the things he’d left undone. We all do that, to a degree, but he seemed to have the curse worse than others — he always seemed anxious about not being able to keep up, and I’ve worked to avoid that tendency in myself. So I pile the mail in my bright red inbox and put off a paperwork session to once a month or so.

There’s always an extra heap of stuff to be done around year-end/new-year time, which is what I’m facing now. So I’m going to try to clear out the backlog. But I have plans tonight, so I only have a couple of hours to do it in, and I’ll have to work fast…

I’ve written about this plenty before. Like most people I know, I have a busy professional life with lots of commitments to keep track of, most of which are not tied to the calendar: documents to write, work of others to review, management issues to talk through with my colleagues, and milestones to track in the communications programs of more than a dozen clients. I’ve tried lots of time management systems, schemes, and software, finding myself generally comfortable with the GTD philosophy (with some modifications).

But a GTD-type time-and-commitment-management system only works if you pour everything into it, because nothing corrodes a time management system more quickly than that nagging feeling that there are tasks or obligations or important factoids that you’ve forgotten to account for.

This, in turn, means that every bit of user-interface friction in the system you’re using (whether it’s software- or paper-based) has the potential to compound into a big problem. And in the past, that’s usually been what’s made things break down for me.

I tried Things for a while, but after a few months I was finding it too heavy, and there were little missing features and conveniences that felt important to me whose absence nagged at me.

So now I’m back with Taskwarrior, the UNIX-based command-line task management system, and it seems to be working for me. About 5 years ago I actually started writing a system very similar to this, using Perl and the Perl shell; I got a barebones version working, but extending it proved too time-consuming and I gave it up. That was long before I discovered Taskwarrior, which as it happens offers an optional shell environment, which is what I use.

I figured it was time to say something about it, since tonight I hit the threshold of 300 active tasks. (To be explicitly clear: yes, there are 300 things I have promised, committed, or decided to do that I am actively keeping track of in a system. If your response to that is “this person is insane,” well, then, this probably isn’t the blog post for you.) I like Taskwarrior because it’s easy to drop stuff in, and easy to review and manipulate useful subsets of my tasks. It’s no Lotus Agenda, but, then, nothing is, unfortunately.

There are a few customizations I’ve made that make it more likely that I’ll stick with this system for a while:

• I’ve paid attention to the way I work, and configured my environment accordingly. In particular, I’ve built a nesting structure of projects that reflect the way I actually categorize tasks.
• I’ve configured custom reports to be easily and quickly accessible. I have about a dozen command-line reports that show me filtered subsets of my tasks, color-coded and ordered in ways that are useful to me. For example, I can see all my management tasks at a glance with a two-letter command that’s easy to type, sorted in a useful priority order and color-coded so I can pick out certain types of items almost unconsciously. The report customization isn’t perfect, but it’s quite good.
• I’ve set up my user environment to increase the chances that I’ll actually drop things into my system. I now always have, in a predictable place on my display, a characteristic-looking terminal window that’s easy to spot, with the task shell always running. This means the switching cost to dip into the system (to add something, update something, or review something) is really low.
• I’ve made an absolute rule that I must move everything into the system as soon as I commit to do it. Leave nothing implied; trust my memory for nothing; don’t use my email as a reminder system; don’t keep side lists. Nothing is too small to be in there. If I want to remember to do it, it goes into the database.
• I keep the data files in my Dropbox so that I never have to worry about losing them or backing them up.

This may or may not last, but for now, it’s looking good. I’ll keep you posted.

Inspired by the Holstee Manifesto and Dear Sugar and Aileen of Creating Clever, I’m trying to think bigger this year about where I want to take my life. It’s easy enough to make lists, and lists are important. But if you really want to create change, you also need to think about where you’re headed and what kinds of habits will help move you there.

Habits matter. At the margins, and whenever you aren’t focused on anything in particular, or can’t decide, or aren’t sure, it’s habits that determine the choices you make. And so getting good habits in place at the beginning of the year will serve you well throughout it.

Here are some of the habits I’m flirting with making… well… habitual in the year that’s just begun.

I’ll take some time to think every day.

“Thinking” isn’t just “going through your to-do list” or long-term planning, although it can include these and other medium-term exercises. It should also include stock-taking time. You need time for zooming out to consider what it all means, how the things you’re doing are connected to each other, how they serve your broader life aims, and how they make you feel.

I’ll pay attention to how I feel.

I’m not as good at paying attention to myself as I’d like to be. An exercise that I’ve found useful is that when I’m feeling uncertain, I stop. I center myself mentally and take a few breaths. Then I ask myself, “Is the thing you’re in the middle of right now making you feel good? If not, why not? Is there something else that would make you feel better?” And if there is, and if I can, I stop doing the first thing and start doing the second thing. A version of this exercise can be applied to almost any life question, big or small, from “What should I have for dinner?” to “How should I respond to my crazy aunt’s crazy ravings?”

I’ll listen to my body.

Two things I learned from my body in the past year were these: (1) I like getting a little exercise every day, and the easiest way for me to get it is by bicycle; and (2) Sometimes I eat when I’m not hungry, and when I can stop myself from doing that, I lose weight and feel better. I’ll make room in my life to make observations like those and act on them.

I’ll take seriously my impulse to create and my hunger for solitude.

It’s easy to get caught up in the urgency of work and family life. But for me, at least, stewarding my emotional well-being, although less urgent, is more important. I find that when I do that effectively, I’m happier and calmer and more able to be fully present in my work and for my family. And so I’ll try to give priority to my emotional well-being. And I’ve learned over the years that for me that means two things: making time to create (the nature of the things I create isn’t that important, and this blog definitely counts), and carving out time for solitude and reflection. I’ve rarely had as much solitary time as I feel I need; it’s hard to find, but for me it’s sustaining, so it’s worth the trouble.

I’ll be nicer to myself about the things I don’t follow through on.

The point of life is to live it. If I get distracted before I finish Neal Stephenson’s new novel, who cares? If I never actually learn to read Korean or play the bluegrass fiddle, what’s the harm? Obviously I found something else I’d rather be doing, and did that instead.

Note that there’s nothing on this list about “travel to more places” or “go out and socialize more” or “have more people over for dinner” or “learn how to X.” Things like that are important, and I’ll do a lot of them in the coming year. But I don’t feel like I have to worry about them; they’ll happen anyway. It’s the smaller, incremental changes — the ones that won’t happen unless I opt to change my patterns at dozens or hundreds of tiny moments of truth throughout the year — that really need my attention at this time of year.

I’m back on the modified-GTD wagon again. (I was talking about this last week with Ben Murray and was relieved to hear that my pattern — falling off the wagon, then getting back on, trying not to be too obsessed with the tools and focus instead on comprehensiveness and process, probably eventually falling off the wagon again but what the hell — isn’t unique to me.)

My tool this time is Things, which I experimented with previously and found a little too heavy, but now that I’m genuinely trying to pour every one of my tasks and obligations and aspirational “do-somedays” into one vessel, it turns out that a bit of power for sorting and managing is a good thing.

You’ll recall that I was using Nozbe for a while, and then GQueues, but I didn’t like the Nozbe interface, and GQueues’ reliance on the cloud proved to be tedious. Things is a local app (with versions for the Mac, iPhone and iPad), with automatic synchronization among connected devices; I realize this is not the way of the future, but for now it seems to work better for me.

The interface allows well for the kind of loose GTD I practice, and I have only a few small quibbles:

• At first I didn’t quite understand the way that Areas of Responsibility (which are more or less “contexts”) and Projects interact. The way things are set up, when you place an item in an Area and then drag it into a Project, it falls out of the Area. (You can then drag the enclosing Project into an Area.) It’s self-consistent but not what I would have expected. And there are a couple of other aspects of the Area/Project UI that are confusing.
• The program doesn’t support subprojects or categories of projects, which is annoying enough to me that it might eventually sink the whole enterprise. (The elegance of its project categories is one thing I like about Action Method, but I have so much sheer volume in my system that the Action Method UI would probably be overwhelmed.)
• The Today view is a little too brute-force for me, so I find myself working in Next, but I have too many items in Next (yeah, my own fault) so that’s not as useful as it might be.

But those, as I say, are all quibbles. The program is quite good and (on the whole) visually pleasing. There are things about it I really like — the way that “Someday” is implemented (as a sort of “archive this for later” — and the keyboard command is even “command-y”, analogous to Gmail’s “y”) is an exact representation of the way I use it. The iPhone version of Things is tolerable and the iPad version is genuinely elegant. So I’m going to stick with this system for a while and see how far it can carry me.

For the umpteenth time, I was reborn as a productive person this weekend. The tool this time is Things, which I started using a while back, then let myself go. I read Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality over the weekend, after seeing him speak last week, and it kicked me into gear.

Belsky’s first premise — that a bias toward action, and an infrastructure to facilitate action, are as important to success as creativity — is basically just streamlined GTD. But Belsky presents it well, and makes it seem manageable. (He also makes clear that virtually every creative person feels disorganized and under the gun all the time, which is a relief.) So I’m hoping my renewed good habits will stick.

So after a long experiment with GQueues (a well-planned, well-executed program), I’ve now moved back to Things. It turns out that given how much task-switching I do and how little “margin time” I have, being able to efficiently manage today’s task list is more important than anything else, and Things handles that better. More news as it develops.

I’ve just finally gotten myself more or less ensconced in GQueues when something possibly better comes along: Flow. I can’t go switching every 3 weeks, but Flow does in fact seem pretty awesome, based on a bit of poking around. So if you’re looking for something more Mac-ish and/or more groupware-ish than GQueues, check it out.

Since reaching Inbox Zero last weekend, I’ve been making a valiant effort to stay disciplined and keep my obligations under control. This isn’t easy — I have a high-email-volume professional life, a lot of outside interests that also hit my inbox in one way or another, and (like most people of my professional generation) only limited administrative support. But it’s looking more possible than it used to be, thanks to the excellent tools that are now available to everyone for free:

Gmail. The Gmail web interface is designed by people who use it heavily, and it shows. Message threading, archiving behavior, keyboard shortcuts combine to make it the fastest way to process high volumes of mail by a large margin. And in virtually every respect, the product gets better and better, mostly in tiny ways that wouldn’t show up on a feature list but are obvious to heavy users. If you’re combatting a heavy email volume and you aren’t using Gmail, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Getting Things Done. This is a philosophy, not a product; but despite the cultishness of some of its adherents, it is not a cult for most of us, just a set of effective time-saving habits regarding how we keep track of the commitments we’ve made to ourself and others. I’ve talked about GTD before; here’s a detailed yet accessible introduction. Or if you’re a book person, buy the book that started it all.

GQueues. This free task manager (with some enhancements available if you pay $25 a year) is what Google Tasks should have been. Although you sign in with your Google ID, it was independently developed and is independently run, but (like Gmail) its developers are obviously heavy users of the product, which feels both stripped down and extremely carefully designed.

Evernote. A free notes archive, magically synchronized to the web and to all the devices you use it on. I pay $5 a month for the premium version (I forget why).

Increasingly regimented habits. A GTD-based approach (and I would say my approach is broadly GTD-based, although it isn’t textbook GTD) depends on instantiating a few good habits from which you never waver:

1. Record all your commitments in one place, e.g., a central to-do list or set of lists.
2. Break down complicated processes into individual actions — or, failing that, think about the first few actions you have to take.
3. For each project or group of tasks, keep your mind on the next thing you have to do, not all the things that will follow it.
4. Triage consistently, completing immediately those incoming obligations that will take just a few minutes, and putting the others on your list.
5. Whenever possible, do things now; whenever possible, don’t do them partially, do them fully so you can forget about them.
6. Work from the list, not from your email (which is probably just an endless series of urgent-but-unimportant fire alarms).
7. Review your list on a schedule — a brief review every day and a more detailed review every week — to make sure it doesn’t accumulate cruft.

For me, the single most helpful productivity habit I adopted from GTD is the habit, from item 5 above, of taking care of things immediately if they can be taken care of quickly. An obligation completed is one you’ll never have to think about again — you can move on to something else.

That’s pretty much it. Do those things regularly, and you’ll be in much better shape. A system like that takes some ramp-up time, but once you’re ramped up and have good habits in place, it starts to become second nature and you wonder how you lived without it.