Tool # 3 – A Journal

When people read magazines in waiting rooms they tend not to give it their full attention because their mind is elsewhere. They flick through the pages quickly, looking at the pictures and occasionally reading one of the articles. When they put the magazine down they might say they have read it cover to cover however if you ask them about one of the articles, they might recall the headlines but probably none of detail. A few days later they will almost certainly have forgotten even that.

This is exactly how a normal working day goes for me. A blur of meetings and conversations that only get my partial attention as I concurrently think about all the things I need to do and make the connections I need to make to decide what needs to be done next. At the end of the day, I get a sense of completion but I know that my recollections are for the most part quite patchy and temporary. I know this because every so often I have an attempt at keeping a journal.

I realise this is slightly hypocritical to recommend a tool that I struggle to use consistently myself but I am sure of its benefits. The longest continuous period I have kept a journal was two months while I was working on a special project.  The goal of the project was to trial agile development to improve delivery success rates in the organisation and part of the deal was that we were located in a separate building away from the rest of the company. My boss wanted to stay across what was going on and somehow I ended up sending her a daily email  which summarised the days events. It was my decision to write these emails because, being an experiment, I wanted to keep track of everything so that we could learn what worked and what didn’t and there is no way to tell the difference while you are in the moment. So at the end of each day I would write down exactly what happened and why.

The act of writing this daily report proved two things to me. Firstly, that choosing the right words to accurately capture the key events of the day wasn’t easy. Putting my thoughts on paper meant I had to really know what I was trying to say, which sounds easy but turns out to be surprisingly tough in practice. Secondly, it showed that my memory was not as good as I thought and when I didn’t take good notes I often had nothing at all.

As the weeks past, I found myself doing really well in that job and from a career perspective, it was close to a peak experience to me. The project was considered a success overall and I got a lot of recognition for my contribution. I am sure it was due in no small part to the act of forcing brain to slow down after each day to explain what had happened and what I thought about it.

So this is the real benefit of keeping a regular journal, it makes you slow your thoughts down and structure them into verbs and nouns which makes you really concentrate on what you saw, what you heard and most importantly – what you think. That task is quite difficult even immediately after the event and gets increasingly harder as time goes by. Finding the right words to convert your hazy memories into accurate written statements is the key to clarifying your thinking and even makes you  reconsider what you heard and question whether it was you wanted to hear or the reality of the situation.

I have not kept up a journal for as long since that project despite ongoing repeated attempts. You essentially need to be a writer with an audience of one and there is something about that which makes it easy to give up despite the benefits.  Keeping a journal is once again about discipline and developing a habit. Its about establishing a routine and sticking with it even when you are tired and desperate not to relive unpleasant experiences.

When I do find myself in this situation, I often remind myself that I don’t need to write a novel. It doesn’t even really need to be a paragraph. Just writing a sentence for each thing that happened during the day is good enough to crystallise your thoughts. It is more about the thought process and focus you gain from the task than the amount of words you write. While I have not timed it, I am sure that the actual physical typing is probably a very small part of keeping the journal. The vast majority of effort is staring into space with your mind working overtime.

Reading your journal once you have kept it up for a while is a great experience. You get a unique perspective on yourself before you knew what was going happen next. However, similar to mind maps, the real benefit is not gained by reading your notes afterwards but through the deep comprehension you gain as a result of giving your brain a major nudge into action. You are creating a mental foundation of comprehension and self awareness that prepares you to deal more effectively with the events of the next day. It honestly does feel like that when you have completed a journal entry. You feel on top of the situation and in control.

Your brain is totally capable of dealing with this extra work. It’s just a matter of creating the time and having the discipline to not to breeze through it like a magazine and then forget it. But you do need to expend the effort in up front and provide the right level of concentration to make it all stick.

Apparently your subconscious takes in much more that you are consciously aware of and court witnesses often give more accurate information under hypnosis than they do under oath but that is no help to you in the course of a normal working day. Keeping a journal will help you maximise your understanding of yourself and your work and therefore how well you deal with it.

Tool #2 – Task Lists

The second tool I use as a regular part of my information workers toolbox is task lists and for a very long time I used them for one reason and that was to get some peace of mind.

I wasn’t totally conscious of what I was doing but whenever I felt overwhelmed or out of control, I would eventually make a list of all the things I had on my mind. The end result was I got to see that there was  not as many issues as I had imagined and they didn’t look quite so bad after all (most of the time).

Making a list gave my brain a break from continuously looping these thoughts one after the other to make sure I didn’t forget them. Once the things where safely down on paper I was free to let my mind start doing other things with the reassurance that I could always go back and refer to my list if I needed to. Although in practice  I might refer to them once or twice after I wrote them they would soon be discarded with their job done.

So making a list made me feel better and more in control without really doing anything.  In his book “Getting Things Done” which is the recommended reference for this type of thing, Steve Allen mentions that the human brain is not designed to store lots of lists. The key thing here is that your brain IS capable of storing lists but not without a lot of effort and concentration. So going about your normal day with a list of things to do on your mind is using a lot of your available brain power and making you less effective at whatever else you need to do. The act of storing your list of concerns outside of your brain invariably a mental release. It makes you feel better and in effect smarter.

While the most basic benefit of using a task list is this peace of mind, the benefits are pretty short lived if you don’t actually do anything about the tasks. Writing the list out again with the same items usually does not have the same effect.  The serious stuff starts when you develop a habit of returning to your task list to update it with changes. Changes like marking a completed task or adding a new one or updating an old task with a new description because you misunderstood it the first time round. This is where your lists become less about calming frayed nerves start making a significant difference to your productivity and effectiveness. No matter what the format, recording the tasks you need to do, no matter how trivial, then working to complete the task in whatever order is make s huge difference. You get a sense of progress and completion that feeds your energy and motivation to continue.  Once you have developed this habit you can start looking at more complicated issues like prioritisation which is a whole other thing.

In the first office I worked in, the personal assistant of my manger used an exercise book for her task list and as each job was done she would rule a line through it from edge to edge.  When you asked her for something she would never do it straight away but instead but she would record it in her book and get back to what she was doing. At first it was annoying that she would not drop everything to help you but she always delivered without fail. To this day she is my benchmark for effective and habitual use of task lists.

I don’t claim to have developed a strong habit with my task management routine. It still find myself forgetting to keep it up to date but I have never abandoned the system. I have also developed some bad habits like writing poorly defined tasks that are really issues rather than discreet actions. Like “ Why is the business case is late” or “What are Lisa’s concerns regarding the plan”  I usually end up deleting these. A task that lives on the list for a long time is probably not important or not a real task. If you find yourself in a situation where your task list has become long term storage for things your are not going to do or not sure how to do then pretty soon it will become another source of stress.

The exercise book that the personal assistant used was her trusted system and the essential elements are exactly the same in the digital world. (i.e.You record tasks then mark them as complete when you are done). Paper has always had the edge over computers because it’s completely portable and easy to update. Personal Digital Assistants came along and were portable but painful to use. Things are changing now with touch interfaces and synchronisation and there are lots of different task management applications available.

In my opinion there is a very low level of functionality required to make a good task list application and virtually anything will do the job. Even a basic text editor is effective. It just needs to be with you all the time and be easy to update. The lower the barriers are the more likely you are to use it repeatedly.

While I total stand by the previous statement, my trusted system is OmniFocus by the Omni group and it might be the most complicated personal task management software available on the market. Since it is only available on Apple hardware, it is probably the most expensive too.  I bought it while I was still thinking that productivity software would magically transform my life but  it happened to be the one I was using when I realised that its not the software but the discipline that matters.

That is probably the most important point I wanted to make here.  If you find your self thinking that new task management software is going to turn your life around because of a shiny new interface or syncing capability then you are probably mistaken.  You need to have developed the habit of writing down every task you need to do and continually referring to it before productivity software become useful as a tool.  Otherwise, downloading new task list software just an expensive way of getting the temporary peace of mind we spoke about at the start. If that’s what you want then a piece of paper is much cheaper.

Tool #1 – Mind Mapping

As I started thinking about my own information worker’s toolbox, it occurred to me that I do have some things that I habitually use in my working life. “Habitually” is probably too strong a word, but there are some tools that I repeatedly find myself using over and over again. At the very least, I know them well enough to explain what they do for me and why I keep on coming back to them. The first of these is mind mapping.

What needs to be said up front is that if you want learn how to do this properly, then the best thing you can do is read Tony Buzan’s book.  What I am going to talk about here is my usage of mind mapping for certain tasks.

How I got started with mind mapping is a bit hazy now but I seem to remember attending a training course early in my career that introduced it as a brainstorming technique. (ie. a long time ago!) Tony Buzan claims to have invented modern mind mapping and certainly wrote what are the generally accepted guidelines for creating a mind map:

1. Start in the centre with an word/image of the topic.
2. Build out ideas related ideas to the central topic, with each word/image placed on its own line.
3. All the lines should be connected, starting from central thicker lines and radiating organically out from the centre.
4. Keep a clear hierarchy of ideas. i.e. The words near the centre start generic then get more specific as you radiate out.
5. The lines should be the same length as the word/image they represent.
6. Use images, symbols, codes, as much as you can.
7. Print all the words.
8. Use more than one color.
9. Show emphasis of important ideas and associations .
10. Create your own personal style.

My own style follows these rules except: I use one colour (black) and I only use words not images.  I am also quite particular about the stationary I use too. I carry around an A4 visual diary with very thick, high quality paper and a particular brand of ball point pen that pumps out a lot of ink when you use it.

I use mind maps almost exclusively for taking notes in meetings. I spend a lot of time in meetings and I have found that they very rarely proceed in a linear fashion. There will be a central topic but the conversation will jump around quite a lot between the various ideas.  There will be a great deal of detail on some issues but almost nothing on others. I find that traditional notes with sentence structure and verbs and nouns never really capture the sense of the meeting very well at all.

However, when I mind map a meeting, I find myself  thinking critically about the conversations and how they relate to the meeting over all. You can’t help but comprehend  the logic behind the discussion as you draw it. I  can also see areas that have been discussed heavily and other agenda items that have barely been touched. I  have also developed the habit of “colouring in” the connecting lines around a branch while people are discussing that topic. This means that looking at the size and boldness of the lines gives me a really good indication of what areas we spend most of the time on.

I feel that I come away from meetings with a much better comprehension of what was discussed. Easily more that what I would  have got if I had just sat there passively listening and maybe taking a couple of lines of notes. I find I don’t often need to refer back to these mind maps because I remember what was said and what it meant. However when I do, I am not just seeing words, I am seeing ideas and their relationships to each other which is of far greater value.

One specific kind of meeting I use mind maps for is the weekly catch-ups I do with my staff. As I map out all the projects they are involved in and capture all the issues or problems they are facing, the act of mapping seemingly has the effect of bringing it under control.  I come away with a good mental picture of where they are at and most of the time they come away with clearer appreciation their own workload and what need to be done. Its a way of organising problems and freeing up mental capacity to solve them rather that just remembering them. Also, don’t start one every week. Instead I refer back to the previous one and build it out with the new information which give a sense of progress as well.

Another less common task where I turn to mind mapping to help are the occasions where I need to read an important work document like a business case or discussion paper. I find it very hard to concentrate on this sort of material. Its not written to be enjoyable and rarely is. While I will set out with the best intentions, invariably I end up zoning out, skipping paragraphs and flipping pages till I get to the end and only absorbing a fraction of the information.

However, If I set myself the task of creating a mind map of the document, that turns it into  a completely different task. One that I can get my teeth into! I am building something, thinking about the structure of the information and how each piece fits into the whole. Subsequently, I can quote whole lines and figures for the document but only because I forced myself to transform it into something that made sense for me.

So, in terms of an information workers toolbox,  you can use mind mapping to accelerate comprehension.  Whether it be meetings, staff reviews or just getting your head around business documents, the act of using this technique will  force you to put a structure around it and make it more palatable to your brain. I hear it is also quite good for creativity and brainstorming activities as well but that is not what I use it for right now.

There is a reason I choose Mind Mapping as my first tool to write about. It is easily the one I use the most.