Tag Archives: Leadership

Review of Steve Pavlina’s “Personal Development for Smart People”

S. Pavlina wrote this book, “Personal Development for Smart People,” in the same field as 7 Habits, which I reviewed earlier. The 7 Habits has a somewhat paternal tone, which I think puts off some readers. I like Steve Pavlina’s “Personal Development for Smart People” because it is written much more from the perspective of a young professional in the Internet age. It is not filled with managerial and parental anecdotes, though it does more than flirt with mysticism. I imagine that will put off a different set of readers.

Like Covey, Pavlina tries to capture some of the essential principles that produce a well lived life. The three he settles on are Love, Truth and Power. He explains each, and explains how they relate and combine to produce other important virtues.

His conception of Truth is a little strange – it borders on truthiness at times. Essentially, truth is the alignment of statements and actions with Reality (!?) and the methods of probing reality are vaguely scientific. But for things that can not be probed through empirical means, then Pavlina is perfectly happy to just be pragmatic about which ideas are “true” and which are not. “You shall know them by their fruits,” I take it. True ideas produce good results. For some more metaphysical propositions, that leads to a pretty relativistic conception of Truth. I suppose that doesn’t bother me much, but it might bother some people.

Pavlina takes Love as very broadly defined, and I’m fine with that. He relates love and connectedness in an interesting way.

Power is closely related to responsibility. I think that’s right on the money. Taking responsibility is not the same as being at fault. I think that there is a funny trick of language going on. We say “I am responsible for this situation,” and that means “I am at fault for this situation.”

I wish that there were a better way to say “I am responsible to this situation.” What I mean by that phrase is not that I am at fault, but that my responses to the situation are entirely my choice. I am not at fault for the earthquake (though if I am unprepared, I am at fault for that). I am responsible for all my actions in response to the earthquake. Only when a person is responsible to every aspect of their life (a proactive response-ability) can they hope to have any power in their own life.

My favorite part so far is his perspective on goals. This gave me a minor paradigm shift that was worth ten bucks. Covey and Pavlina both talk about the importance of goal setting. Pavlina makes an excellent point that I had never considered: the metric by which a goal is evaluated is not just whether achieving it would be good. There are lots of things that would be nice to do or have some day, but that are not necessarily good goals. For instance, I would not mind being a millionaire someday, but it is not a good goal for me because it does not excite a deep passion for me.

The litmus test for a good goal is: how does having that goal make you feel and behave right now? Goals are really most important in the immediate present. Being a millionaire would be nice, but I have no hunger for it. The possibility does not excite or motivate me. I am not pumped about it. I just don’t care that much. So it’s not an effective goal.

Finding a good goal that does excite a upwelling of passion is actually harder than it sounds.

Cheers,
Peter

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.

green politics, chemistry, utopia and simplistic economics: greenwashing

Green is fashionable now, and that is great. “Green chemistry” is becoming a buzz word, and that is great, too: “green is the new nano!” Nanotechnology, as we all know, is derived from the Greek root meaning “successful grant application.”

If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you all about the Future when we would do away with material scarcity and people would have “enough“. I was young and naive. There is enough right now. And I’m not a communist: I don’t think the solution is taking it away from those who have in order to give to those who have not. The solution is not try to make more stuff, but to try to live a happy life. The solution is not to satisfy more wants, but to want good things. The solution is not for the rich to have less, but for people to see each others’ needs instead of their own desires. A happy culture is one that values service over material prosperity.

Where does Green fit into this? It’s hubris to think that we can grab the world by the carbon and shake the prosperity out of it. “Better living through chemistry,” is only half of the issue. We can make more stuff (e.g. chemicals, beef, plastic, homes, anything), but it has to be directed by a culture of service or it is just that: stuff. For it to be wealth, it has to represent substantive connections between people. Green can be just more stuff, or it can start to recognize the interdependent nature of the scientific game we are all playing. Our research means better living not through chemistry, but through the contribution we make to a safer, cleaner world – a goal that is only definable in terms of our connectedness to it and to each other.

The big upshot is that green is good, but look out for “greenwashing.” Greenwashing is where an organization cashes in on the Public Relations benefits of going green without making changes that reflect the rhetoric. It’s the same with the term ‘organic.’ It’s fine, but be careful that it represents what you think it represents. As Mark Bittman tells us in his TED talk while chilean farmed salmon fed organic chicken bones flown on ice in a huge freight plane from south america to your doorstep may be technically organic, it doesn’t represent the ideals. It’s elitist and unsustainable and the green sticker doesn’t change that.

-Peter

Gumption traps and how to get motivated, part 4: Over-prioritizing

Over-prioritizing. That’s what I call it when I stare at my list and agonize over what is the most important thing. To be fair, it is important to prioritize your to do list. But don’t spend more time on the list than you spend on the items in it. One thing I like about the GTD system is that you don’t put things back in the inbox. Until hard-landscape items come up (appointments and meetings) you work on the next thing. All of the next things are treated as equal priority. Prioritizing next things can be a full time job, even above doing next things.
If it’s an official Next Thing, then it made it through your weekly review. It must be important. If it’s important, it doesn’t need to be the most important thing to be done next. It just needs to be done. In that spirit, I’ll keep this brief.

-Peter