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.

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!

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.

I think since college I’ve worked on building habits: cleaning dishes, creating time-management systems, following through on projects, establishing five-year goals, and so on. My Myers-Briggs interpretation of this habit-forming is I’ve been working on my “J” qualities.

However, I think my personality and work flow is less “sequential.” I think fundamentally I like to spend a week learning about something, learn it/do it really well, and then I’m ready to move on to the next thing that pops into my head. I say this is part of my Myers-Briggs “NP” quality.

The two are at odds. My “NP” side inevitably creates dozens of half-finished, discarded products, which my “J” side feels guilty about. My “J” side wants me to wake up early and exercise every day, which demotivates me and makes me feel guilty about not doing. I track the habit carefully with GTD, to help appease my planning mind, but really I don’t want to do the same thing every day.

So, I guess I’m working on how to use the structure of “J” cooperatively with my “NP” dreamer side, and feel better about balancing the two.

Over time I’ve watched my GTD system’s average number of active (actionable) tasks decrease from around 250, to around 190, to 100, to 50. Right now it’s edging up to 100 again.

I wonder what my goal should be. Whenever you get rid of tasks, more eventually take their places. I wonder what a minimum number of active tasks should be reasonable? Is it virtually impossible to get below 25 without either lying to yourself (forgetting some tasks) or a life “pausing” event (eg a vacation)?

Should I be happy keeping my steady state at 50 or do I aim for an impossible ideal (completing all tasks)?

I just scored a 48 on the “GTD mastery checklist.”

As I’ve written before, sometimes I have GTD breakthroughs. Today was one of those days.

I ran like 10 errands after work yesterday and today. I did a fair amount at work too, and it doesn’t hurt that I’m going on vacation tomorrow so I reassigned some of my work to others.
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For the record, Lauren is all about “Getting Things Done” now.