This simple experiment was testing the children’s “cognitive control” or their ability to control their own behaviour in order to achieve better outcomes. (i.e. Self discipline).

This study is famous in behavioural science as “The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment” and it’s fame is partly due to numerous follow up studies that have shown that the kids who got two marshmallows tended to grow up to be smarter, more competent and more successful than the others.  This idea of self discipline being the most important attribute of successful people was also discussed in “The Road Less Travelled” by Scott Peck and it had a big impact on me.

Peck was a psychiatrist and wrote “The Road Less Travelled” based on his experiences with his patients where he described what he thought was the recipe for a healthy, fulfilling life.

Self discipline took up the first quarter of the book and lack of it was the key problem found with the majority of cases he saw. Peck stated that you are not born with self discipline, you have to learn it from family members or other influences like school teachers. He also says that the more you practice, the better you get and suggested consciously giving up something you like for a week or a month just to prove your self discipline ability and exercise it.

I tried this and went slightly overboard by giving up something I liked for a whole year as a new year’s resolution. I think the first thing I gave up was french fries but over the years I have gone without chocolate, fast food, soft drink, biscuits, cake, ice cream, coffee(hard!), beer, coca cola, rice and potatoes to name a few.

People get confused when I tell them what I am doing because they assume it is a health/weight decision. It’s easy to see why because the things I like tend not to be health foods but this has never been the reason for going without. It is simply my way of practicing self discipline and building those psychological muscles. I always go back to having that treat the next year.

Has it made a difference? Maybe. What do I compare myself to?

But I do know this: After 12 months of going without something, on January 1st I do feel an incredible sense of control and pride in what I have achieved. I also get to enjoy something I have not had for a year!

FYI – Coffee smells about 1000% better than it tastes.

If I was to give some advice to someone just starting out with GTD, it would be to stop reading the book after the chapter on workflow and only come back once you have developed habits around these three separate modes.

My experience has been that if you blur the edges of these activities, the whole approach collapses and you end up drowning again. Outlook is an especially difficult environment to keep these activties separate but I thought I would share what I have done to implement GTD for my work emails.

In Outlook, the collecting part of the workflow is trivial since all your emails come to the inbox but going straight to action mode and using it as your task list is not a good idea. You need a process mode in between.

Each morning and at various times during the day, I spend 5-10mins processing the emails and moving them one of 3 ways in my own simplified GTD workflow. Anything I need to action goes into “For Action”. Useful information goes into “Reference” or I delete it (I delete a lot of email.).

The “Completed folder” is mainly for items coming out of the “For Action” folder but do find myself moving things straight here from the Inbox if I want to keep the messsage threads intact.

It is really tempting to start actioning the emails when you are doing this so the trick is to make the processing stage as quick and as painless as possible. To this end I have created some custom buttons in my outlook toolbar that are attached to some macros I adapted from here. This means that I can flip through a lot of emails quickly and process them into the correct folders with mimium of effort.

Once you have done this you move into the “For Action” folder and pick off anything that can be done in less that 2 minutes and after that…well the rest is not something I have perfected as yet!

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.

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.

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.

Even though I am pretty much a contract manager now, I aspire to be a craftsman.  Someone who is a master of their trade. Someone with that amazing ability to deliver outstanding quality reliably.

Those last four words are worth repeating: “Deliver outstanding quality reliably.” That ability to get it right first time is quite rare. Its valuable. People are prepared to pay money for that sort of thing. In some ways we expect this to happen as a matter of course ie. things are going to turn out exactly how we want them to, but they rarely do. Unless you are, or have hired -  a craftsman.

I find one of the most interesting aspects of really good tradesman is their tools. They are rarely shiny and new but more likely to be well used and battered but well cared for all the same. The tradesman will know exactly how they work and any idiosyncrasies that may have. They produce predictable results and you have confidence in them. Each one will have a specific purpose and place in the toolbox.

Check out this video I have attached below. It shows a real craftsman using his tools I think it illustrates what I am talking about really well.

Having trusted, reliable tools is rare in the information/digital world where new and improved seems to trump tried and true every time. People say…”What you are using a SWOT analysis technique for? You should be using this new technique which is like SWOT on steroids!” or “You are still trying to using Agile? Lean is the new thing you should be implementing.” etc.

The result is that we (ie. information workers) seem to spend all our time trying new tools and always feeling unsure if its working or not and then moving on to the next shiny thing. The risk factors are always high and it is rare to find someone that amazing ability to deliver outstanding quality reliably.

Of course what you are thinking now is that it’s easy to “deliver outstanding quality reliably” if all you are doing is just building another widget. That guy in the video has obviously made that exact bench many times before and he was just following a known process and had specialised tools for that process. The life of the information working is never like that. Its always about discovery and is never about building widgets.

I agree. But there are tools that can be applied to the discovery process. There are tools that can be used repeatedly and together, can form an information worker’s toolbox. I just don’t see that same level of trust and care about these tools in my day to day experience. I have started putting my own information worker’s toolbox together and over the next few posts I will describe what they are,  why I used them and what I get out of them.

Craftsman* create and build things. They take some raw materials and do some work to make something more valuable.  In today’s corporate world  this is not necessarily about building furniture or pottery because the raw material is most likely to be information. All large companies today rely on information technology and therefore depend on craftsman to be creative with it.

office by kirwilliam, on Flickr

When an organisation doesn’t have the right type of craftsmen internally, they contract the work out and employ contract managers make sure they get what they want within the time frames required. For the purposes of this post I want to extend this definition to say that contract managers are essentially “craftsman wranglers” whether they be internal or external.

“A” is a good example of a craftsman. “A”’s job title is a “Web Analyst” and what she does is look at website logs etc to measure how many people are viewing the company website and what they are doing while they are there.  She is a quiet genius when it comes to this task and is able to identify interesting usage patterns and predict how many visitors the website is going to get in any given month with amazing accuracy. Without her, the company would be flying blind regarding how their website is working.

“B” is a good example of a contract manager.  He leads a cross functional team that includes some craftsmen types like graphic designers and copywriters. While not being a designer or writer himself he is also very good at his job and makes sure the work is done on time and meets quality standards. He is exceptionally organised and excels at planning ahead to make sure his team is run well. He is making sure all the contracts are being fulfilled whether they be internal or external.

While both “A” and “B” both are good at their jobs and take pride in their work, there is a one thing that makes a significant difference: “A”’s work is not scalable while “B”’s is.  “A” can only do so much in a day while “B” can start managing other contract managers ie. A promotion means applying the same skills. “A” can also get promoted but this will mean wholly or partly turning into a contract manager which is not attractive at all to her She loves what she does and is not prepared to give it up.

What this all means is that in large organisations, people like “B” who are good, get promoted while people like “A” who are also good, seem to have limited progression opportunities.

This leads to an unfortunate outcome where companies are run by non-craftsman and think that their particular skills are the ones that are important and increase shareholder value. After a certain point corporate leaders have no idea how their company really operates and find themselves managing a black box that makes money but they are not really sure how. They choose to outsource as much as they can looking for cheaper ways to run the black box without realising that they are outsourcing the creativity which forms the real fundamentals of the company.

The real value of a business lies with the craftsman working there but this value cannot be fully realised unless you have good contract managers organising things and respecting the the work the craftsman do.

*(or “craftsperson” if you like but I assure you that even though I used the non-PC term here I mean it inclusively) 

From a pure survival standpoint you are better off being part of the herd than going off by yourself. Birds have worked this out as have fish and there is strong evidence to suggest that cyclists can benefit from being part of the pack. But aiming for survival is a fairly modest goal and it is not going to take you anywhere special.

Moving on from basic survival, it seems that whatever you do in life, there seems to be an advantage in avoiding the crowds. A good basic strategy, whether you are catching public transport, applying for a new job or even setting up a new business is being different to everyone else.

Crowds by rightee, on Flickr

Here are a couple of trivial examples that demonstrate what I am talking about:

After we got married, my wife and I lived in the central business district and she found that she no longer had traffic problems. Since her office was outside of the city, her commute was always opposite to everyone else. In the morning and evenings she had empty lanes while there was traffic jams as far as the eye could see on the other side.

Now that we have kids, we have moved to a suburban home and I catch the train to work.

There are two trains that arrive at my local station within about 3 minutes of each other. The first is the express and it only stops at 4 stations on its way to the city. The express gets into the city faster but there is standing room only when it arrives and quickly becomes so packed that there is no room at all. It is uncomfortable and annoying.

The second train stops at all 15 stations and arrives at my station hard on the heels of the express. It is always almost empty and I can take my pick of seats. However it takes another 15mins to do the trip. I have made a choice to sacrifice the 15min in favour of a more comfortable journey. I am more relaxed, less stressed and happier as a result. It leaves me in a much better frame of mind to face the day.

However there is always inherent risk in being different, having lunch before or after the rush time is something I have tried and not had much success with. The system is not set up to cater for diners in odd hours. Holidaying in the off season is also fraught with danger, it may be less crowded but everything is closed.

I think the best policy is to always try to be a little different. Experiment with convention and see what happens. It takes a bit of courage sometimes and initially feels a little uncomfortable but my experience has been that choosing not to be a sheep is very empowering. However, there was one occasion where this got the better of me.

I had decided to go to the gym at 3pm in the afternoon during the week. Not in the peak times like before or after work or at lunch but at a time when everyone else would be in the office. I suddenly had easy access to all of the equipment and no one causing me grief. The downside was the guilt factor.

Even though was was making up the time by working later, I could not get comfortable with the feeling of being away at that time or the idea that people “might” be looking for me. These problems were largely imagined and largely due to my personality and probably something I need to work on.

What made me think of it again was this quote that came up in one of my RSS feeds:

“When faced with two choices, simply toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you, but because, in that brief moment when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you are hoping for.” Minimal

There has been a lot of work done in the field of decision making from examining established techniques to complicated medical investigations looking at things like the “ventromedial prefrontal cortex” and its probably worth mentioning that I have studied none of it. Even so I have a theory that much of the practical techniques are pretty much for show and that ultimately, good decisions makers rely on intuition & courage more than anything else.  This is quite similar to what Malcolm Gladwell was writing about in Blink but the distinction I am making is that the process of decision making is a delaying tactic while the decision maker tries to work out how they “feel” about it in order to choose. They will do what feels right.

Fork in the road by MikeSchinkel, on Flickr

I know that  people like to think they have an open mind and gather evidence before making a decision but in my experience the data collected rarely gives a  purely positive or purely negative result. You are going to get pros an cons either way and ultimately you are going to have to make a “feel” call in the end.

“In the end” means you run out of time and are forced to make a call theoretically based on on what ever data you have gathered to that point. Your decision that may be better because you have had some time to think about it a little more or read something that changed your perspective slightly. But not really evidence.

In agile software development there is a saying that the best possible outcome is making the right decision and the worst possible outcome is not making a decision. The wrong decisions sits somewhere between the two. The sooner you make a wrong decision the sooner you discover that you where wrong. If you don’t make a decision then you are not making progress at all, you have stopped moving and probably stalled everyone working with you. You make not realised this at first but eventually you will find your loyal troops have moved on to other work.

What this means to me is that to get the best out of our teams and ourselves its probably best to stop pretending that we go through a decision making process and have more courage to make intuitive decisions.