What's your filter?

Yesterday a couple of cohorts and I were teaching a class on how to do IT audits of change management. This consisted of some lecturing, followed by a few role plays in which auditors interviewed us acting out the parts of a CIO and a Director of IT Operations.

During the exercise, we noticed how large groups of people can hear the same thing and emerge with different pictures of "the truth."

After the class, one of the other instructors said it reminded him of a story he heard once:

A shoe company sent two salesmen to a remote part of Africa to scope out the market.

The first one comes back and says, "It's a terrible market - nobody wears shoes."

The other one comes back and says, "It's a great market - nobody wears shoes!"

A good story, whether it's true or not. Then, on my morning drive today I was listening to "Getting Things Done Fast" and David talks about how you sometimes have to "tune yourself to a different frequency" to change the outcomes your getting.

A good reminder to reflect on what filters might be affecting our results.

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Pressing the reset button

Steve Pavlina's challenging people to do something different for 30 days (kind of a "new month resolution" sort of thing). When I first read his post, I thought "Naah, not for me." But the idea's been poking at me for a couple of days and I've changed my mind [Thanks, Steve!].

Since I'm currently embroiled in a GTD tune-up, I've chosen a 30-day challenge to: end each day with an empty inbox (physical and virtual), and do weekly reviews every week.

Before I start the 30 day timer, I've decided that this weekend I'll take a radical step (radical for me, at least): I will scrap most of my current lists and start fresh.

Why? As I look over my someday / maybe list, projects, and other lists I've come to realize that there is a big difference in the quality of definition, thought, and specificity in things I've added to my lists in the last week vs. those I added last summer. I also think there is value in taking a clean-slate look over what I'm doing - a lot has changed in the last year.

That means I'll miss the "official" window of Steve's challenge (which ends May 20), but it's my life, right?

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Slipstreaming and GTD

intr.v. slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams

To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

I'm doing a bit of slipstreaming myself as I go through my homemade GTD refresher course. I've looked through some of my old bookmarks of Getting Things Done articles, and rediscovered some gems about the joys and challenges of GTD. In case you are on the same sort of quest, I thought I'd share a few:

• Here is a great "one year review" on 43 Folders that I love now even more than when I found it
• Here is part 2 of that same review, in which he shares things about GTD he wishes he was better at - and I share a lot of the stuff on this list
• A broad and deep collection of useful and thought-provoking things at Law4PDA
• And a wonderful collection from the secret site of Bill Kratz on how to do GTD stuff with Outlook. Complete with some good code snippets.
  • Anyone know what happened to Bill Kratz? He went dark, and the home page of this site has been saying "Goodbye" for about a year now. I hope he's OK.

Anyway, these are a few of the sorts of links that have kept me moving on the "just one more click before I go to bed" routine for the past couple of hours. Hope you get something out of them. And when you've used these links up, if you want more good stuff, click around on my link list over there on the right. Some smart folks in there.

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What's the Next Inaction

Spring is in the air, and I'm up to some spring cleaning. Earlier this week, I mentioned that I felt the need to re-ground my self in the basics of GTD. I'm still listening to the Getting Things Fast audio and it's still helping.

As I emerge from my Stuck Place in the quicksand, I wanted to share a blinding flash I've had.

It seems that my kung fu has gotten rusty. I've drifted away from defining next actions crisply enough, and have been defining a bunch of near-actions instead. I'm now calling them 'next inactions' for lack of a better descriptor.

I'm sharing this because you may have some too.

What's a next inaction? An example from my list is "Make dentist appointment." Sounds remarkably 'next action-like' doesn't it? But, it wasn't on my @calls list, didn't have the phone number associated with it in any way, etc.

I've found quite a few of those. Along with ambiguous things like "John comp" - what am I supposed to do there?

The solution is easy, and once upon a time I did it pretty consistently. Just answer the questions:

• What's the successful outcome?
• What the physical next action with no dependencies?

Nothing to it, right? ... Back on the horse.

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[Updated] Re-grounding in GTD

I decided it's time for a refresher on GTD, since I've found myself letting the piles in my inbox get a bit taller lately, I've tended to only empty them partway, etc. - in other words, I feel like some of my old, bad habits are encroaching.

So, I started listening to David Allen's Getting Things Done Fast audio program again last night. It's helping - after listening for the first half hour or so, it was a tangible shift. I went from, "Man, I have so much to do..." to "OK, I can do this - I've done it before - it's not that hard."

By the way - my trigger point was that I realized I was starting to look for yet another organizational tool. Been down that road before - realized I was compromising my process, and it wasn't really a tool issue. And, lo and behold, a few tracks in David says that "the price of all this is eternal vigilance" or something to that effect. No kidding.

If you feel like you're getting a bit 'loosey goosey' on GTD, dust off your copy of GTD Fast and re-ground yourself - it just might help.

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Update:

Further commentary on this - I mentioned I got a Planner Pad a few posts back. Looking at making the transition to paper is what made me realize I was looking for a silver bullet. While it is a fabulous tool as a paper-based system, I am an electronic kind of guy due to the information I deal with all the time. I'm going to try to incorporate some of the "funnel" concepts into my routine, but I'm sticking with Outlook, the GTD Add-In, Goodlink, and KeySuite as the core of my system.

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Timeless leadership lessons

I've mentioned in the past that I'm a big fan of Audible, and I have been sprinkling audio books in with my 'normal' reading fare. As part of my 2-book-per-month credit as an Audible Premium Listener, I recently downloaded an audio book called "The 21 Most Powerful Minutes In A Leader's Day" by John Maxwell. It's available in audio via Audible, or in print form or on cassette from Powell's.

When I initially downloaded it, I thought it was going to be another take on the "start your day by planning what you want to do or you'll end up doing a bunch of random stuff." Boy, was I surprised, and pleasantly so.

If you have something against the Bible, this one may not be for you. Otherwise, read on.

This book is a series of short chapters that take stories from the Bible and relate them to leadership lessons that are very thought provoking, and quite poignant.  The "21 Minutes..." in the title refers to the suggestion that you listen to one chapter a day and reflect on it. That process should take about 21 minutes a day.

For the last week or so, I've been listening to one of these chapters each day during my morning commute (on my lovely iPod Shuffle, of course, which is connected to my car stereo). I really look forward to the chapter each morning now, and the thinking about the concepts have already helped me out at work. The first chapter, for example, is about courage and breaking through your current limitations as a leader, and uses the contrast between the leadership styles of David and Saul to illustrate its points.

If you don't mind getting a bit of business teaching from stories written thousands of years ago, I recommend this one. Even if the Bible isn't your thing, why not give it a try? After all, I'm not Hindu, but I have learned a lot from Ghandi.

One other thing I realized after the fact: this book is published by Michael Hyatt's company - if you haven't checked out his "Working Smart" blog, please do. He has some great productivity tips over there.

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