Link of the day: Tour of David Allen's office

Now you can see how the GTD master, David Allen, organizes his office in this video.

Grad Hacker

I found a new productivity blog (yes, I know, yet another one). It's called "Grad Hacker" and written by a graduate student in the natural sciences. I like his view on productivity:

Let me start of by declaring this outright: my goal in personal productivity is not to minimize the amount of time I spend “goofing-off” it’s to maximize the amount of time I spend in the focused, imaginative, stress-free “flow state”. I spent some time walking the first path and it just made me tired, bitter, and sick. But, now, changing the way I view productivity has made life absolutely splendid.

Here are some posts that caught my attention:

• "My views on productivity" - the above quote comes from this very post
  
• "Getting up early: Week 1" - logging and reporting on his experiment to get up early. As he says and also in my own experience, it's really hard to keep it up because one day you stay up late and screw up the next morning.
  
• "Simple GTD: Do you really need need contexts?" - an interesting opinion, that graduate students don't need GTD-style contexts. I agree. I always end up organizing my todo list by project (that is, when I was using my todo list).
  
• "Reading natural science papers: A method I swear by" - I suck at reading papers. Maybe I'll try his advice.
  
• "Notecard for the week" - Yup, I love the one-notecard, one-pen in pocket method. I have three posts just on that very topic.

Overall, a great blog! I look forward to more thoughts from Grad Hacker.

Link of the day: Interview with Matt Cornell

Academic Productivity interviewed Matt Cornell, a productivity expert who specializes in helping professors. What I found most interesting was the mention of alternative productivity systems to Getting Things Done.

Link of the day: Three rules for making resolutions that stick

I really enjoyed this post by Cal Newport called "Three rules for making resolutions that stick." His rules are

1. Resolve to follow a system, not achieve a goal.
   
2. Establish an exception policy.
   
3. Respect the rule of three.

You need Rule 1 because goals are not enough. However, goals will guide you in setting up your system. As Cal says, it's much easier to do something (e.g. eat one piece of fruit a day), then resolve to achieve something (e.g. eat healthier).

I really like Rule 2. I always get thrown off by long vacations. It's easy to slack off on things like exercise and eating well when you feel like you have less control than usual over your surroundings. I should figure out a good exercise and stretch routine for being on the road. Good idea, Cal!

I'm pretty bad at respecting Rule 3. If you've been reading my blog, you see that I've had a whole bunch of ideas and have been (perhaps foolishly) trying to implement them all at once. I think I would have achieved the same results in the same amount of time if I had just focused on implementing one new part of my system at a time. I guess I don't have the patience. I still achieved what I wanted, but it was an emotionally taxing to have one part of my system fall apart while trying to get another part started.

Why GTD and lifehacking?

This is going to be a short post. I was just thinking today that there are many good reasons to setup a GTD system. Two obvious reasons are efficiency and the peace of mind that comes from knowing that everything is capture. However, one reason, that I think is overlooked, is that having a system allows you to run on auto-pilot. In particular, if you work in a creative field like art, music, theater, science, etc, there will be long stretches where inspiration is dry. Having a system will keep you going until you find your inspiration again. And since GTD encourages you to constantly re-evaluate yourself (provided that you do your weekly reviews), you can make changes to (perhaps) find inspiration again. The postdoc I work with has a wonderful quote on his Facebook page:

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up.
- Anne Lamott

As we get older, we learn to be disciplined, so that we are ready when that moment of inspiration comes. Having a good system makes discipline easier, though discipline is never easy.

Quality of joy

People often seem to think that I'm a workaholic and overly serious. I consider hockey to be my fun away from work and even then, I'm constantly reading up on techniques and working on ways to improve my skills. My teammates think I'm a little nuts. This season, I've decided that my focus will be skating, so I'm trying hit the rink twice a week for one hour skating sessions. GTD and lifehacking also can seem that way. People spend all this time to develop their productivity systems, boost their efficiency, etc and it's as if they're giving themselves more work (well, except when you have too much fun developing your system :) )

The best justification I can come up with, for the perhaps non-mainstream way I live my life, is that I believe in quality over quantity. I like to work 90% of the time to get that 10% of euphoric joy when I truly understand a physics concept, when I cap off a research project by writing a beautiful paper or give a lucid talk, when I rip a slapshot off.

Similarly, David Allen has said that he developed his GTD system so that he would have time to do what he really loves like bonsai gardening.

People often say that their greatest joy in life is their children and maybe what they really mean is that yes, it takes a ton of work to raise a child, but the joy they get from doing it is off the charts.

As a footnote, I should add that I personally find it aggravating to be bad at something so I also have a negative motivation for working hard! Both physics and hockey are difficult to learn and it's just no fun to do either if you haven't mastered the fundamentals. Of course, once you master the fundamentals of one stage, you move on to the next stage and sit around being frustrated with feeling stupid, work hard to learn enough to get past that stage and so on.

Link of the Day: Study Hacks

I stumbled across a blog by Cal Newport, who is a computer science graduate student at MIT. His blog focuses on productivity advice for students. He espouses some interesting ideas like the Straight-A Gospels.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye:

• "Never be hungry" - I have learned the hard way about skipping meals. JUST DON'T DO IT. Cal also suggests that you should drink three glasses of water and eat one healthy snack per caffeinated beverage.
  
• "Studying is a technical skill" and "Pseudo-work does not equal work" are posts about you can train yourself to be ultra-efficient with your studying. This is related to the old adage of "work smarter not harder."
  
• "What makes an interesting life interesting?" - I like idea #4 of having one secret project. Feynman used to work on multiple secret projects at the same time. At any one time, one of them would be successful, so it made him look like a genius (not that anyone thought he was dumb).
  
• "Paying your dues" - I agree with Cal that the baby boomer generation is really harsh on us twenty-year olds. We should all send this blog post to our parents to make them realize that no, we are not a bunch of spoiled brats. To me, the idea of paying your dues is just a vicious cycle of abuse. Your boss: My parents/elders/bosses made me suffer, so you should suffer, too.
  
• "The graph as a question" - I like to structure papers and presentations around figures, but I've never thought of figure-based learning.

How to get started with Getting Things Done

A friend of mine asked me how to learn about GTD (Getting Things Done), so I thought I'd help out by writing a post on how to get started with GTD.

First, you need to learn what GTD is! You'll want to read the book by David Allen once and then put it aside and think about it. The book is really abstract and encompasses many concepts (like theoretical physics, but not quite that hard). It will help to review parts of the book as you go along implementing your GTD system. The GTD Primer provides nice summaries of each chapter in David Allen's book. It may also be helpful to take a look at the GTD FAQ and the 43Folders getting started guide for a basic overview of GTD.

The first task is to collect all your loose ends (mental and physical) and sort them. It's called a "mind sweep".

Next, you'll want to come up with your own implementation of a GTD system. For some inspiration, you may want to see what other people have done. Some low-tech pen and paper systems: the Hipster PDA, the Moleskine PDA, how to make a GTD system for $20, Patrick Rhone's productivity whitepaper, the D*I*Y planner, my Cross ion pen and index card capture device. As for software systems, I've only used two tools: Backpack and todo.txt. Backpack is a great web-based GTD system (Patrick Rhone has a description of his Backpack GTD system). For those of you who are into Unix and command line like me, I really like Gina Trapani's todo.txt script (my current system). Download Squad has a feature article on GTD software tools and Wikipedia also has a table comparing various GTD software. If you want to procrastinate, you can look at this epic list of GTD tools.

As you spend more time developing your GTD system, you'll probably mess up and get off track. Don't worry if you fall off the wagon. It happens to everyone and the best part of GTD is that 1) it gives you breathing space to get back on track and 2) it's easy to pick up from where you left off. The most common pitfall is failing to do a thorough weekly review (or not doing them at all). Here's an article about how to go about doing the weekly review (Lifehacker has a shorter process for the weekly review). Another problem is poorly written to-do lists. 43Folders has a post on how to build a smarter to-do list. Remember that you can *not* do a to-do item and just cross it off the list. To-do lists aren't the end of the story; you also have to choose your priorities skillfully (what to-do next?). If you've come up with a wonderful GTD system for yourself and have mastered your to-do lists and weekly reviews, it might be time to examine your life goals (the "30,000 ft level" mentioned in David Allen's book). Steve Pavlina has some good advice in "how to discover your life purpose in 20 minutes", "setting your primary focus" and "living your values."

Finally, if you want to get some advice from the guru David Allen himself, check out his podcasts with Merlin Mann on 43Folders (the Productive Talk series). Another set of excellent podcasts about GTD is the first 12 episodes of the Fisher Files (the first episode "Introduction" is here). The Fisher Files is hosted by MIT physics professor Peter Fisher and has an academic leaning to it.

If podcasts are not your thing, check out 43Folders Recap: Best of Getting Things Done.

Email folder re-organization

I thought I was an e-mail ninja (to use the words of Merlin Mann), but then I realized that I had too many email folders. I had something like 25 folders when really I could consolidate them into a smaller number and just search them. I don't actually look at my old email very often. So now, my work email uses the following folders: admin, colleagues, cqed, family, ffiles, friends, physics. admin is just anything related to administration like correspondence with administrative staff, housing, financial stuff, etc. colleagues is correspondence with senior people (e.g. professors). family is correspondence with family, and friends is correspondence with anyone who is not a colleague or family. cqed is research, ffiles is emails about the Fisher Files. physics is emails about science which are not related to research. I think 7 folders is as detailed as I need to get.

GTD and creativity

Both Keith Robinson and Merlin Mann discuss how creativity fits into the GTD system.

As Keith shows, you can use GTD to setup a framework for doing creative work. You can write lists of things you want to be creative about. You can use GTD to process the outputs of your creative thinking. If your brainstorming yields five ideas, you can put down "investigate idea #1, investigate idea #2, etc" on your to-do list. You can use your GTD system to capture all your ideas. But the one thing that GTD can't do is make creativity like cranking widgets. I suppose you can make a to-do item like "Think about X for one hour". But then the next action (assuming that you don't come up with any ideas) is to "Think about X for another hour."

GTD is a system for processing, not coming up with ideas or brainstorming. One should recognize that limitation and remember to keep up to date with the @someday list!

Link of the day: Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann gave a talk at Google about getting your email to inbox zero. Nothing really new here, but it is a nice presentation and a very good introduction to email processing such that you could send it to your mom or co-worker.

Link of the day: GTD FAQ

There is an excellent introduction to GTD on Zen Habits. Now I know where to send my friends if they want to know what the hell GTD is.

Link of the day: Academic Productivity, GTD in Academia

I found two great blogs over the weekend. The group blog Academic Productivity focuses on how technology can help increase efficiency in academia. There are also some posts on GTD-related topics. The solo blog Getting Things Done in Academia is written by Professor Mike Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma. I like his posts on writing effectively and ants (even though that has nothing to do with GTD).

A collection of miscellaneous notes on the Fisher Files

I finally finished listening to all 13 of the Fisher Files podcasts. Here are some notes on points that I found particularly interesting.

• Project is defined as a series of next actions and a "done" state
  
• Schedule time for interruptions
  
• Job of a scientist (particularly postdocs and faculty) is to share ideas with people, go to seminars, and basically talk to people
  
• When you acquire a new tool or piece of technology, put in the effort to read the manual. In order to use any tool well, you have to invest the time.
  
• Don't be shy about delegating "crap" tasks to other people; you need the time to do more important things. Research is a team effort.
  
• Use an alphabetical filing system
  
  1. Divide current files into research A-Z and non-research A-Z
     
  2. Once a year, clean out current files and move them to archives A-Z
• Make a folder (physical or digital) of important, fundamental papers in your field
  
• If you are having a meltdown, make a list of what is causing you anxiety. Then decide to let one or more of the items go. Embrace mediocrity; look at what you can get away with doing badly. Having meltdowns happens to everyone. You can't prepare for it; you can only get through it. After the meltdown, be sure to think about why it happened and if you could have avoided it. Then do a weekly review and move on.

I omitted most of the GTD-like stuff, since I have already discussed quite a bit about that topic in this blog.

Link of the day: Fisher Files

Peter Fisher, a professor of physics at MIT, has started a series of podcasts about implementing GTD in academia. The material probably won't be new to GTD veterans, but the podcasts are aimed at senior graduate students in science. At the end of every podcast, Fisher ends with a rundown of that week's cool physics research.

GTD with Google Notebook

I currently use Backpackit for my GTD system, but Gina Trapani at Lifehacker demonstrates how you can also use the (completely free) Google Notebook to implement a GTD system.

Living consciously

I recently read Steve Pavlina's post on gratitude. It reminded me of the concept "to live consciously." It isn't enough to live, we have to want to live and know why. I define so-called living as mere survival: bumbling about our jobs, perfunctorily greeting acquaintances, mindlessly surfing the net or watching television. I haven't read much about living consciously, but I will offer my own interpretation based on my own experiences. I believe to live consciously is to think about every action you do and why you do it, to examine that action in the larger fabric of your life, to never treat anything as merely routine. "Why am I friends with so and so?" "Why am I not very nice to so and so?" "Why am I not putting 100% effort into my creative work?" "Why do I like doing X so much?" "Why do I keep procrastinating?" On multiple occasions, I have heard the idea "most people are only using a tiny fraction of their brain." That refers to what you are missing out on if you don't live consciously. Living consciously requires constant introspection. It's hard work, but don't we all want to enjoy a full experience of life? Kind of like living our lives in color instead of black and white (watch the movie "Pleasantville").

I realize now that lifehacking and GTD are systems with the idea of living consciously at their core. It is very naturally to adopt the principle of living consciously if you're a GTD practitioner. It is very easy to get distracted by the minutiae of life -- and that is why you should do your weekly reviews!!

Some other links on living consciously: a book by the same name, Steve Pavlina's own essay on the topic.

What I learned from David Allen

I just finished reading David Allen's famous book "Getting Things Done".

Fortunately, I am already doing most of the things David talks about, just because of my natural habits and because I've been reading 43Folders.

I want to note the new ideas I learned from finally sitting down and reading David's book.

1. Top item first - Don't "emergency" sort, that is, pick and choose what you feel like doing first. Work systematically from top to bottom, which enforces discipline.
   
2. Embracing the concept of next-action - I'm really good at getting to "inbox zero", i.e. plowing through all my emails down to a near empty inbox. But I'm bad at doing my real work. So I should make a list of next-actions and plough through them just like they are email. The part that gets me really hung up is trying to do something unbounded. "Solve research problem" is not a next-action, but "try to derive X for 1 hour" is a doable next-action.
   
3. Really doing the weekly review - This means going through all lists (projects, waiting-for, next-actions) and organizing them so that you have a strategic plan for next week
   
4. Higher order planning - David calls nitty-gritty planning "runway" and "10,000 ft." Career goals, life goals, etc are at 30,000 and 50,000 ft. I've gotten proficient at "runway" stuff so now I need to integrate higher order goals into my plans.
   

Electronic GTD: Using Backpack

I've finally decided to implement a unified GTD system. Before, I would keep some lists in text files, blog about some goals, use a checklist, etc. Backpack was highly recommended by many GTDers. I tried it and am very happy with it. Backpack is basically a web-based personal management system. You keep a collection of webpages. The webpages can be filled with lists, dated notes, links, images, and files. It's a little bit like a blog but private and more specific to planning.

So far I have four pages. 1) Home page - contains next-actions, 2) @projects - mix of project ideas and next-actions for them, 3) @waiting-for - nothing in here yet, 4) @someday - stuff I'd like to do someday when I have time, 5) Weekly review - log of what I've accomplished this week, what I need to work on based on this week's performance, and plans for next week.

The purpose of a clean desk

I listened to one of the recent 43Folders conversations with David Allen (can't remember which one). Merlin Mann noted, during one of his conversations, that David Allen always has a clean desk and only the materials relevant to the task on hand on his desk. I think that's a good idea. It reinforces one of the principles of GTD which is to concentrate on one task and only that one task at a time. I will try to keep my desk clean more often.