John Borwick’s blog

I just upgraded from my Cingular 8125 to the AT&T Tilt. The Tilt is a neat looking phone.

As you may know, I was very attached to my 8125. I learned pretty much everything there is to know about the “vanilla” 8125. In particular, I use Tasks like nobody’s business.

The Tilt runs Windows Mobile 6. WM6 apparently has a bug where its “Active Tasks” filter shows tasks with a start date in the future. That is, it shows you stuff you’re not supposed to start until 6 months from now as “active.” This is frustrating, as I have tasks going well into 2009 that I don’t want to see.

My other issue with the Tilt is it no longer has a voice recorder button. Instead, it has a “PTT” (Push To Talk) button. This button lets you pay AT&T money (it’s their walkie talkie system). I cannot override what this button does. I no longer have a one-button solution for voice recordings.

Those two very frustrating issues aside, the Tilt is much faster than the 8125, has an awesome 3 megapixel camera, has lights to show when you’re hitting the shift or function keys, and has some neat new programs on it. It’s frustrating because you can just tell that marketers got ahold of it and added their junk, but outside of that, the task thing, and the voice recorder thing I’m pretty happy with it.

Update: This AT&T forum explains how to make the PTT button map to the voice recorder:

1. Download a registry editor e.g. PHM Registry Editor
2. Delete everything under and including HKLM/Services/PTT
3. Create HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\Keys\40C6 as a Key, and under that String Value named “Name”, value “Button 6″
4. Create HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\Keys\40C7 as a Key, and under that String Value named “Name”, value “Button 6 (hold)”
5. Soft reset

(I’m recording this here because I know I’m going to need to do this every time I hard reset the phone.)

Also, “Pocket Informant” looks to use Windows tasks as its basis, but it doesn’t have the active tasks future date limitation. So it would still work with ActiveSync but it would show my tasks the way I like!

I’ve been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system for over two years now, and I’ve gone from having over 200 open tasks, to 80 tasks, to 40 tasks, and have gone from a task-level view to a (more-or-less) project-level view of what I’m doing. I’ve reviewed The Book several times and have gotten to what I believe is a steady-state in my task management.

From this experience, I conclude that productivity to me is comprised of four factors:

1. Follow through on (or renegotiate) promises

Getting Things Done is all about following through on promises: promises that you make to others or to yourself. GTD tells you what promise you could be working on at the given moment. Are you in the grocery? …then you could get these groceries you told yourself you wanted. Are you on-line? …then you could check out that web site your friend mentioned to you.

Notably, I’m emphasising “could” over “should.” GTD is telling you what your options are. It’s not making the call on whether you should really be doing those tasks.

Following through on promises is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of “productivity.”

2. Choose the “Right Stuff” to work on

GTD struggles with helping you choose what to work on: by starting from a ground-up, next-actions approach and working towards the project view, your one year goals, your three year goals, and your areas of responsibility, GTD helps you think about why you’re doing the work you’re doing–but GTD is not helping you much in figure out how to narrow your focus and choose the goals you really want to achieve.

GTD is a tool, but you’ve really got to be careful or you can drift towards burning your most productive time accomplishing goals you don’t really care about.

3. Don’t get bogged down in the mundane

With GTD, I do what my phone tells me to do. I don’t question why I’m going to the ATM once a week, and I don’t really think through why I spend an hour on e-mail a day.
The Pareto principle (i.e. the 80/20 rule) is more useful here: you should radically triage your work to maximize your time doing “the Right Stuff.”

4. Work very hard, focusing on “spinning the flywheel”

To steal from “Good to Great,” this last component–”spinning the flywheel”–means that you have to choose a goal and stick with it, and orient all your actions towards that goal, so that all your actions and therefore the outputs are getting you closer to that goal.

That is, you’ve chosen your goal, and you know how to work effectively towards that goal, and you know that you can follow through on the promises needed for that goal: now you need to bear down and do the work, and continue focusing your energy on that work.

So, those are my thoughts for the year about how to become radically more productive, and how GTD fits in with all that. Right now I’m using GTD quite a lot, but my current “steady state” really means that I have a list of tasks that I know I can wait until the last minute to complete. I think these three subsequent points, to complement GTD, could really help me/anyone be more productive.

I just switched my pobox.com account so it forwards to gmail. That’s one of the reasons why I love pobox.com; as long as you’re pretty good about advertising the pobox.com address over the actual address it forwards to, you can change your “back-end” system pretty easily.

I changed because I’d been experimenting with mixing work and personal e-mail–and that system has worked really well, because I can check that e-mail on my phone, but for a while I want to try gmail.com + alerts of some kind.

Lauren and I are excited about moving into our new house. In order to make our house liveable, we availed ourselves of Sears’s July 28 “10% off” sale. That in itself (today’s August 7, a week and a half later) should tell you we’ve had a problem.

We used sears.com to order a refrigerator, a microhood, and a stove. We checked the “ice box” option on the refrigerator: we asked for the ice maker that sears.com told us to get.

Here’s a summary of our communications with Sears Home Delivery and Sears.com, all via the phone:

• Wed Aug 1: automated call: you’re getting a refrigerator tomorrow
• Wed Aug 1: automated call: you’re getting a stove and microhood tomorrow. Yes, we will install these when we deliver them.
• Thu Aug 2 6:45 AM: we can’t deliver your refrigerator they have to install the ice maker at the factory
• Thu Aug 2 7 AM: we can’t deliver your refrigerator they have to install the ice maker at the factory.
• Thu Aug 2 ~5 PM: mom, at the house, watches Sears deliver but not install our microhood and stove.
• Fri Aug 3: automated call: you’re getting a refrigerator between 7:45 AM-9:45 AM tomorrow (Saturday).  I follow up: how are we supposed to get this stuff installed?  I am told to call “J D–z” (name omitted because I can’t spell it), who is our installer.  “You should have gotten that in e-mail.”  I think, “why do I have to call someone to get this installed when we paid you good money to install it for us?”
• Sat Aug 4 ~7 AM: you ordered the wrong ice maker so we are not going to deliver your refrigerator.
• Sat Aug 4 ~7:15 AM: you ordered the wrong ice maker so we are not going to deliver your refrigerator. Call sears.com.
• Sat Aug 4 7:20 AM: I tried to call sears.com but they aren’t open until 8 AM
• Sat Aug 4 10-10:30 AM: explain myself to sears.com lady, who listens politely for five minutes and then transfers me to someone without explaining my situation, so I re-explain myself and they call sears home delivery while I’m on the line and they talk about how my delivery zip code was wrong or something and they have to do an “even exchange” but they are going to have to e-mail it to someone but I should get a call in the afternoon.
• Mon Aug 6: I call the phone number for “J D–z,” the installer.  The phone rings and goes to voice mail: “The person at the number you have called is not answering the phone.  Please leave a message.”  I leave a message but get no response.
• Mon Aug 6 3-3:30 PM: I call Sears Home Delivery, they say my refrigerator has the wrong ice maker, they transfer me on the line to Sears.com, I talk with Sears.com people, they get Sears Home Delivery back on the line, they put in the order, and they say someone (”an expert”) will call back in 30 minutes.  This is essentially the same 30 minute conversation I had Saturday, except they tell me a specific date.  I threaten Sears that I will never shop from them and will return all our goods.
• Mon Aug 6 4:30 PM: Sears person calls and says delivery scheduled for Wednesday.
• Tue Aug 7 6 PM: I call Sears home delivery. Our refrigerator has the wrong ice maker. Mom offers to call them so I do not rain fiery vengeance. Delivery re-scheduled for Thursday.
• Wed Aug 6:
• Mon Aug 6: I again call the phone number for “J D–z,” the installer.  The phone rings and goes to voice mail: “The person at the number you have called is not answering the phone.  Please leave a message.”  I leave a message but get no response.
• Wed Aug 8 6:15 PM: Sears home delivery scheduled delivery for tomorrow morning. What happen? We’ll find out tomorrow!

At work, we’ve been re-organizing into a “Support” team and a “Projects” team.

At home, Lauren and I have been painting, moving boxes, and getting appliances for our new house.  Today the Wilson Pest Defense people came.
I just finished Harry Potter.

My Getting Things Done system broke down under the pressure; I didn’t do my weekly review on Monday and I didn’t even get through my e-mail inbox from Friday until today!  When there’s too much work to do I’m just piling it on rather than being more judicious with what work should be done.

Today at work I gave a presentation, “Getting Things Done with your 8125.” The 8125 is a Cingular cell phone that runs Windows Mobile 5.0. I use Outlook for my GTD system because it can synchronize to the 8125, which I then carry around.

I didn’t realize how long it would take to describe what I’ve learned about GTD (and task management, and Outlook) in the year and a half I’ve been using GTD! I only covered next actions, task management, and the weekly review–and it took an hour and a half!

I just finished categorizing all my entries, back to when I started blogging in 2003.  My blog taxonomy is a little unwieldy, perhaps because I was making it up as I went along.  Here they are, by category (please note one entry can be in multiple categories):

Technology: 199
Entertainment: 157
Politics: 100
Links: 53
Winston-Salem: 38
Self-Improvement: 32
Tweets: 21
Work: 18
Language: 17
Science: 17
Travel: 14
Writing: 8
ITSM: 6
Religion: 3

Some problems: “Technology” is such a large category as to be useless; and technically everything on here should be able to go under “Entertainment.”

I feel like I need a “re-balancing” algorithm, where if a category is more than N times as big as the average category size then it gets sub-divided or re-assesed.  Conversely if a category has fewer than 1/N of the average size maybe it should be re-factored into other categories.

Arguably, to be an effective blog I should have some theme under which most of my posts reside.  Oh well.

Filed under “Science” and “Self-Improvement.”

I’m categorizing all my old blog entries. It’s pretty boring, it takes a long time, and it’s probably not worthwhile. I’m a relatively strong believer in the 80/20 rule… so why am I doing this? Why am I categorizing my blog?

I’m not really sure. However, the categories I’ve created have helped me better understand my interests: notably, language, self-improvement, and travel.

Lauren and I have started limiting our (home) internet use, to three
hours a day: from 4-7 PM. We’ve done this programmatically–by telling
our Linksys wireless router only to allow devices to talk from 4-7 PM.
I just hard-coded a static IP address on our Wii so it can continue to
talk 24 hours a day.
I’m sending this blog entry via e-mail to johnborwick.com, as I
experiment with ways to blog within our new restrictions.

For the last few years–I guess since 2002–I haven’t had a watch. In school I could easily measure time in my head, because my 55-minute or 125-minute classes programmed me to “feel” how much time was left.

Last week I bought a watch. Some of my meetings have been running long, and in my new position I have to run more meetings. I take meetings very seriously, and especially my obligation as convenor not to waste people’s time.

The first thing I noticed was that I was checking my watch against all the other clocks in my life. Is the car clock fast? The alarm clock slow?

So, this weekend, I synchronized my watch to UTC-4. I then synchronized all our other clocks to that time. I’m very satisfied, now, at the precision of our clocks.