Category Archives: Leadership

Ways and means to contribute

Change your paradigm, change your habits: review of The Now Habit

The big impediment to getting things done is procrastination. Procrastination is a habit. The most effective way to break habits is to change the mental stimulus that causes the habitual action. The easiest way to change the stimulus is not to change the environment (though that can help) but rather to change the interpretation of the environment; that is to say that the best way to change a habit is to change the underlying paradigm. The word “paradigm” is often overused and even misused. It doesn’t just mean “point of view.” It goes deeper than that. It’s not a thing you can change over the course of a conversation, and it is a concept that deserves more respect that boar-room buzz words. In general, people are not aware of their paradigm. It is the subconscious value system that filters what we see. Today I’ll discuss that in general terms.

A person’s paradigm is sometimes compared to eyeglasses, but a paradigm is not something you can just take off. I would compare it to a person’s eyes rather than their glasses. Lots of people have bad vision without realizing it. They assume everyone sees the world the way they do – blurred. They don’t know it’s blurred. That’s how the world has has always been. There are mental tricks that are like “corrective lenses,” in that they slowly affect your “eyes” until you don’t need to wear them any more. When a person truly has adopted a new paradigm, they have “new eyes.” It takes a while. What’s more, it’s hard to even remember how the world looked before it changed.

Habitual actions stem from paradigms. It’s easy to see in that analogy: someone with blurred vision might habitually feel and smell objects to identify them. That’s a habit. And it would be foolish to tell someone with bad eyesight “you don’t need to smell that – it says ‘milk’ right on the bottle.” That fact is not accessible from their reality. But then, once their eyesight has improved, the smelling/feeling habit disappears naturally. That’s the power of paradigm. New paradigm yields new stimulus which produces new action, even in the same physical environment.

How does that relate to procrastination? I’m reading The Now Habit by Niel Fiore, which does a great job of explaining the procrastinator’s paradigm. Procrastinators have a paradigm of risk and coercion (I’m generalizing and paraphrasing, so forgive my imprecision). Procrastination is a habit that is a resultof the following stimulus: “I have to do X, and I must do it perfectly, or it will be terrible”

Saying “I have to…” implies a lack of freedom; it implies coercion. Whether it’s self-imposed or externally imposed coercion is irrelevant; the easiest way to rebel against coercion is to do nothing.

Saying “… and I must do it perfectly, or it will be terrible” is the perception of risk. The easiest way to avoid risk is to do nothing.

Hence, procrastination.

If I change the paradigm of coercion and risk, then the perception of how hard it is to do something will change. With that change of perception, Getting things Done will happen far more naturally.

Getting Things Done (GTD) vs. First Things First (FTF)

Stephen Covey’s First Things First (FTF) will help you examine priorities and focus on what is important. It won’t help you end procrastination when it comes to lots of important things vying for your time. David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is a more systematic approach to task fulfillment when there are a myriad of important but not urgent projects on your plate.

FTF sets out two really good principles of time management. The first is the idea of the Ladder. We’ve all heard about the corporate ladder – the stages of professional advancement in the world of corporate executives and lawyers. There are equivalent “ladders” in other professions, of course. The academic world has a ladder toward tenure; the political world has a ladder toward elected position; the list goes on. The ladder is the set of steps leading to a particular kind of success. FTF stresses that the First Thing should be to determine if the ladder is “leaning against the right wall.” That is to say, the success at the top of the ladder is not necessarily the best life for any given person. Since it takes a lot of time and effort to climb such a ladder, the success at the end had better be of the right kind.

The second thing that FTF does really well is to split all activities according to a 4 part matrix. Tasks are split according to their importance and according to their urgency. FTF points out that most people get focused on urgent things, sometimes at the expense of important things. An approach to life that will have an effect consistent with a person’s goals is one that focuses on things that are important to those goals. That’s sort-of a tautology. But what’s frustrating is that lots of times tasks and interruptions present themselves as urgent and critical even though doing them won’t actually create progress. Getting focused on important things is the most important message of FTF.

So, assuming you have found an appropriate goal and you are prepared to focus on things that are important to achieving those goals, how do you actually go about the day-to-day business of that? There are a few suggestions in FTF, like setting aside scheduled time for non-urgent tasks on a weekly basis. I can certainly see that being useful for a manager or executive with lots of interruptions. Setting aside an hour for private time to work through a strategic plan might be the only way he could actually have time to do that. For those of us in more free-form enterprises (like science or studying) that’s not so relevant. In a life filled with urgency, I’m sure setting time for non-urgent activities is critical, but my life is not filled with urgency.

I have 6 hours a day to do whatever I feel is important. There are not schedules, no interruptions. That’s great, but writing down in my planner that I want to spend an hour on strategic work during those 6 unscheduled hours seems arbitrary and I seldom make good on the plan. It’s a lot easier to procrastinate when there are no obligations than when there are. When I had classes, I would demand that I plan out the time between them so I could use it effectively. Now I have no classes, and such plans tend to get pushed aside for the importance of the moment (as opposed to the urgency of the moment). Now, that’s not great, because it means I’m not working from pre-planned priorities. I’m “winging it.”

The FTF mentality doesn’t help avoid procrastination when there is no urgency and many important tasks are doomed to failure. That’s science in a nutshell. Often there’s no hard deadline, since we all know it’s impossible to predict how an experiment will go. Although scientists know that it’s important to do the next experiment, without a deadline or any particular assurance of success, it’s a motivational nightmare. Science is all about the Q2 activities, but among Q2 activities it can be hard to discriminate. Reading the Literature, having ideas, surfing the ‘net looking for motivation all can conceivably be classed as Q2 activities, so how do we get pumped to actually get the experiments done?

This is where GTD shines. It won’t help you put the ladder against the right wall. It won’t help you cut out the Q3 distractions. But if you have those issues more-or-less settled, then you can get a lot from the GTD mentality.

The GTD mentality is a lot like a Virtual Assistant. The idea in hiring a Virtual Assistant is that this person will take care of certain things so you don’t have to stress about them any more and can really focus on the tasks at hand. What kinds of a things could a virtual Assistant take care of? Well, he could call you to make sure that you got to appointments on time. He could go through your inbox and make sure that all of the appointments to which you were committed were in the list of appointments about which he would remind you. He could parse emails and phone calls into the bare bones questions and flag them for you to answer. And he could tell you what was the next thing to do between right now and your next appointment so that you could use that time effectively and make progress on longer term projects.

Hiring a person to do all of that for you all the time is rather expensive (though with the connected nature of the world, you can hire a person to do the job at a long distance for a lot less than a personal executive assistant). GTD lets you do all of that efficiently for yourself.

The system works like this (or at least this is my boiled down version): you put everything in a trusted receptacle (like email inbox, phone, Thunderbird Task List, etc.). Call this your “bucket.” You have to make putting things in your bucket a really consistent habit or you won’t trust your bucket. If you don’t trust it, you might as well not waste time creating it. But once you trust it to have everything important inside, start the following loop:

When there is a lull (as when you have completed a task) check the bucket

Look for upcoming time critical appointments and set a timer (unless your bucket beeps at you, like my phone does)

Do any task you can do in 5 min immediately, this includes things like delegating, filing away for long term, short emails, or triaging a task as no longer mission-critical.

Do the thing on the top of the list until your next time critical appointment, or until it is done as much as it can be at the time. Add the next step in this project (and only the next step) to the bucket.

Repeat

The most important thing about this is that you must trust your bucket to have everything in it. If it is a trustworthy bucket (if your habit of adding things to the bucket is good enough) then you will never be blindsided by an appointment you forgot about or a deadline that came out of nowhere.

Both the GTD and FTF systems remind their readers to re-center once a week. Process everything, prioritize, decide if projects are worth continuing. FTF organizes this according to “roles and goals” which is a fine way to do it, maybe a little more systematic than the “altitude analogy” treatment in GTD.

Hope that’s useful to you all.
-Peter

P.S. David Allen did a Google talk where he talked about his method. That might explain it better if you have 45 min. Alas, he’s not as polished a speaker as S. Covey, but it’s still a fine talk.

Peter’s Take on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Introducing the 7 Habits is rather silly at this point considering how old and well regarded it is. Time magazine said “Over the past two decades, Stephen Covey’s best seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has become a management bible in the boardroom.” Its merits are well known. I happen to love the book, but I have some reservations.

The Jester is right on the following point: the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is not about “Success” in the common sense of the word. In my estimation, that is a very good thing. It is extremely different from How to Win Friends and Influence People, for instance. The 7 Habits addresses the distinction between effectiveness and conventional success pretty directly: It’s more important to develop character than it is to learn any given technique.

A large part of Character is responsibility (read “response ability”): the ability to respond to a stimulus by choice rather than by instinct and emotion. Character means never saying “I was so mad/sad/frustrated that I couldn’t help what I did.”

The book talks about the reasons for building responsibility and some methods for doing so. The first half really focuses on personal responsibility, and the second half is more about social responsibility (read, “not being a jerk”). Despite what the Jester may believe, people can learn to lead, communicate carefully, and really consider the needs of all stakeholders involved. That builds trust, and with trust there can be a whole different level of productivity.

I have never read Machiavelli, but I’ve learned a bit from others who have. From what I can tell, the 7 Habits principles are really a better approach. Even if both achieve the same result, effectiveness can leave a real legacy; brutality only leaves a power vacuum. I talked a while back about ways to motivate others, and there really are not all that many. Reward and fear are the two most basic (and widely used). There are better ways, based on trust and mutual aspirations. But the Jester is right about this: the higher path is not the easy path.

I will say this about the 7 Habits: I find some of it to be a little hokey. Nonetheless, it is of real value that someone has spelled out a clear framework of concepts around the central principles of personal growth, trust, and shared enterprise.

Next week, I’ll talk about the differences between Allen’s Getting Things Done system and Covey’s First Things First.

-Peter

The National Culture: News as Roman coliseum shows

I ran across an article that is pretty interesting. It’s a collection of speeches by Joe Bageant. He’s enamored with South American culture. That’s fine for him, but I don’t particularly identify with that culture. Too much touching. Joe may long for a “daily life in the flesh, belly to belly and soul to soul, lived out in the streets and parks and public places, in love and the workplace,” but that sounds like hell to me. God. The last thing I need is mutual public belly-touching.

However, his critique of American culture is well articulated:

Our daily news is the modern version of Roman coliseum shows. Elections are personality combat, chariot races, not examinations of solutions being offered. None are offered.

I happen to disagree with the implied solution he proposes (emulate the fuzzy tactile family structure of Belize), but I’m grateful that he actually goes so far as to offer up a solution to discuss. I have a different solution in mind. I think we could do a lot better if we spent more time and money on the work of craftsmen. I think it would be great if we were each others’ patrons when it came to individualized beautiful works of art and technology. The corporate, fad-oriented, marketed to death, planned obsolescence, throw-away culture is oppressive. But there’s no need to give up our comfortable “personal space.”

But my dream of a Neovictorian techno-utopia is far fetched. The blogosphere is my substitute for now, though. A place where people can engage intellectually with a little distance from the pervasive corporate interests… and there’s a great book on the subject over at Amazon.com on how to make money while blogging! Buy it through the link at right and support TBU!

(I’m only being half-ironic. Seriously, that button up top? You can buy that too! Know a designer who can spruce that up that design for me for a reasonable fee? Give me a yell.)

-Peter

Darth Vader's Work Ethic

It struck me this evening that we don’t really know much about Darth Vader’s work ethic. Does he work late? Weekends? It’s totally unclear. What are the hours like for a sith apprentice? For that matter, what about the Emperor, Himself?

It has a lot to do with a TED talk on glamour. By the old definition of the word, the Dark Side has a lot of glamour. It has a seductive, deceptive allure. But glamour has nothing to do with hard work. In fact, if it turned out that Darth Vader spent a lot of his time studying prospective spacecraft designs, thumbing through blueprints and tapping his chin, it clashes with his whole image. I find it strange to think that a character who represents ruthless effectiveness is not superimposable on the prerequisite behavior for effectiveness.

In fact, Vader fails at almost everything in the films. He has no self control. He loses the Death Star and his command ship. I think the films could have emphasized Anakin’s laziness more. I think that’s what got Vader into trouble. Always trying to take the easy way out and get everything at once. That’s what gets him in trouble again and again.

There’s a lesson there.

-Peter