Sanity Check

Concluding my series exploring the intersection of Getting Things Done and Lotus Notes, here's a summary of my experience using the GTD-enabled  eProductivity template as my production Lotus Notes mail file.

I'm no GTD newbie, but I'm no GTD blackbelt either by any stretch.  A couple years ago I read (or more accurately heard via audible.com) David Allen's book Getting Things Done and implemented many of the GTD principles using the vanilla Notes mail file as I documented in this previous post. I was doing well, but I realized there were significant holes in my system, particularly my inconsistent use of ToDo's vs Calendar Reminder vs flagging emails for Follow Up. But the most significant hole in my system was the lack of completing the cycle by performing a GTD Weekly Review. This lack was probably because the Weekly Review forces you to look at all your lists (except the Someday Maybe list) and quite frankly there were things in my lists I preferred to forget about. I never really did fully clean up the accumulation of emails flagged for Follow Up, some going back a couple years. Ploughing through those once, never mind weekly, seemed to high a hill to climb. But with a new tool comes new energy and inspiration.

The goals I hoped to reach with the help of eProductivity were:

(1) save time creating Next Actions that I could use in Notes or my BlackBerry
(2) track projects and their associated Next Actions in a more integrated way
(3) make the Weekly Review bearable, if not fun.

Installation was as simple as replacing  the design of my mail file with the eProductivity template. By the way, going back to vanilla Notes is just a matter of returning to the standard Notes mail template. eProductivity works within the standard Notes fields and forms  so there are no interoperability issues with your co-workers.

After the replace, opening the mail file launched a wizard that walked through the basic eProductivity setup steps starting with entering the free trial license key. Next, the wizard presented a list of suggested Contexts for categorizing Next Actions. "Contexts" are general locations or situations where you can execute a Next Action. I went with the typical ones related to places where I'll typically be: Work, Home, Errands/Car, & Church. I didn't choose At Phone or At Computer because I find those contexts redundant since I have a computer at home, at work, and carry a BlackBerry. But then again, others might think differently, so its nice eProductivity provides the ability to customize contexts.

Next, the wizard brought up a list of my existing Notes ToDo documents (37 of them) for the purpose of mapping them to the contexts I selected. Using a simple and intuitive drag n' drop interface I recategorized all of them in no time. Next wizard steps involved selecting which Project categories I wish to work with (e.g Projects - Home, Projects - Work, Projects - Pending) as well as to choose what other GTD lists I wanted to use like "Waiting For", "Someday Maybe", Agendas, if you wanted to use the Tickler Calendar, and so on. I personally think it helps to already be familiar with GTD terminology and concepts before using eProductivity, but you can probably grow into it and learn as you go.

Warning: If you have a local replica of you mail file, after running the wizard you should fully replicate before opening the other replica. Otherwise, you will most likely experience replication conflicts, particularly with your ToDo's. This happened to me...no biggie.

With eProductivity all configured, I went through all my Next Action documents (formerly referred to as Notes' ToDo's) and edited the subject field to begin with an action verbs e.g. "Read linked article about DAOS", "Verify Photo Credits agent ran correctly" and so on. If I discovered that a Next Actions was actually a single step in a larger project (In GTD-speak a Project is defined as any objective that requires more than one Next Action to complete it), I associated the Next Action with a new Project document.

At this point I was a little lost about how to proceed, so I watched the eProductivity Video Tour. Its about 20 minutes or so and walks through all the essential features, demonstrating how they work and explaining the GTD principles behind them. That really was when I "got it" and felt energized and prepared to tackle my Inbox and the dreaded Follow Up flagged emails. 

Newly inspired and with confidence, I started to process my Inbox which had grown to 155 emails. My Inbox wasn't that bad because about 5 months prior, in a good GTD moment, I had my Inbox down to zero, but I had fallen off the GTD wagon since. Here's where I suspect many of you will be challenged. Most people have hundreds if not thousands of messages in the Inbox...my co-workers definitely do. Its strange that there was a time when most people understood the concept that an Inbox was a temporary repository for  Incoming until it was processed. Office workers in the pre-email days understood the essential nature of a paper Inbox where whatever goes in IN was eventually moved to OUT. I am glad our accounts receivable clerk who processes my expense reports doesn't use her paper Inbox in the way people manage their email Inbox or I would never get paid. Really, its ludicrous when you think about it.  One practical hint for tackling a bloated Inbox is to sort it by sender. Now you will quickly find a huge amount of stuff you can purge right away...newsletters, advertisements, closed support tickets and other non-actionable emails. Alternatively, you could do what I did when I first started GTD a couple years ago and just move all read email older than _x_ months old into a folder called Inbox Overflow and then just focus on processing your relatively current emails or those you marked as unread because you knew they were important. If it makes you feel better, after you're done with your current mail, you can make yourself a goal of spending 5 minutes a day processing the backlog in your Overflow folder until its completely purged.

The 3 pane layout of eProductivity (Contexts | Email | Folders) made processing the remaining emails easy. Drag reference emails to the right and drop into reference folders. Drag actionable emails to the left and drop onto a Context which triggers a prepopulated Next Actions form to open. I went over the basics for creating Next Actions from email in my last post.

The following couple of days gave me time to go through the dreaded emails I had flagged for Follow Up. About half of these turned out to be obsolete (I just had to unflag them) and the others were converted into Next Actions and then unflagged. Here is where I discovered what an immense benefit is the Linking feature in eProductivity. Linking takes advantage of Lotus Notes main/response document functionality. With two clicks you can link any Notes document in your mailbox to a Project or Next Action document. These linked documents are conveniently displayed in an embedded view inside the the key document. This enables you to work with all your related documents in context. Its very much like a personal version of Activities in Lotus Connections.

Of course, email does not contain the sum total of all the things I need to do. Next Actions and Projects can be added directly via an action button. This was natural for me because, due to the influence of David Allen's GTD, I already had developed a strong healthy aversion to keeping things to do in my head. If something pops into my head that requires an action, present or future, I naturally write it down, and then get it into my system as soon as its convenient. Most of the time, if I am away from my laptop, I just add a quick task using my BlackBerry (not so good when I'm driving). With eProductivity, when I open the mail file, all those newly added tasks (captured via BlackBerry) are magically rounded up and presented to me for further processing like categorizing by context, setting due dates if required, and fine-tuning the Next Action description.

The only thing I found a bit disconcerting was that all the Next Actions that I added and scheduled for a particular due date show up on my Blackberry at 12:01 PM. But this is a Notes problem, not an eProductivity problem. There is a solution: Notes needs to expose the time fields for tasks and display these inline on the calendar. If this bugs you too, consider voting for my IdeaJam suggestion here. More details about this issue can be found in this post.

Did I achieve my goals. Most definitely YES. My first goal was to savie time inputting Next Actions by context. The interface and automation accomplished this goal. You can't beat eProductivity's automated workflow.

My second goal, better integration of Projects with Next Actions, was achieved as well. Project documents display the Next Action in an embedded view as well as any future Next Actions you've queued up. Once the current Next Action is complete, the next Next Action is promoted. Further integration is achieved through the powerful Linking feature which brings together all the pertinent documents for a project.

My third goal, to actually perform a Weekly Review and not hate it, was surprisingly achieved and is the lynch pin to making this implemention of GTD a success. This is where the eProductivity team deserves high accolades. A mentor-like wizard leads you through the process step by step. Its like having David Allen with you, coaching you through the process. You check your lists, your paper mail, do a mind sweep, and so on. If you're interrupted, it remembers where you left off so you can come back and carry on. I found the review painless and eye-opening. I think I shortchanged myself by not paying as much attention to the benefits of the Weekly Review in my previous GTD implementation. I was able complete my review in about 25 minutes the first time. I even went through that eternal stack of mail sitting in a wall folder at my front door. Its hard to describe the feeling you experience after completing the Weekly Review except to say you gain a calm, satisfied sense of control...like all is well in the Youniverse. Allen calls it "Mind Like Water".

No review of any software product would be complete without pointing out some areas that need improvement. I found two and they are most likely only temporary annoyances:

First, the current eProductivity template is based on a Notes 7 template. Unfortunately, being an early adopter, I've already grown accustomed to the improvements in the Notes 8 and 8.5 mail templates, particularly the calendar form. I am using the Eclipse standard client which sports cool new Java views for the InBox and Calendar. I also miss the new 8.5 calendar federation feature that enable overlaying other calendars from the web or other Notes applications onto your personal calendar. This is only a temporary concern. On the eProductivity website there is a statement that a Notes 8+ version is in the works. I wonder how feasible it would be to componentize eProductivity and make it a mail file add-on component that would work with a range of email templates rather than a complete all-in-one mail template which includes both the standard vanilla Notes mail file design elements plus the eProductivity design?

The second issue is that that it can be a little slow to open and work with the mail file directly on the server over a wireless VPN connection at  home. I noticed in the status bar it does a license check everytime you open the file. I'm not sure how much overhead this adds to opening your mail. Clearly there's a lot more code executing over the wire than in a standard mail file. A contributing factor could be that I'm using an ancient slow laptop due to current financial constraints at my work. The best workaround I found for this issue was to "work locally". That is, set up Notes to use a local mail replica and replicate in the background. See further on this technique in this IBM article.

In conclusion, I am clearly hooked on phonics eProductivity. My roadmap is to continue to use it for another month then approach key users at my company, especially those who have shown interest in GTD. I'll post a follow up here and there as I get more established in eProductivity. A few features I'd like to understand better are the Tickler Calendar and the Reference database add-on.

Thanks for coming along this journey with me. The exercise of writing this blog series has helped discipline me in learning eProductivity and better crystalize in my mind the GTD principles.
 

This post continues the series on exploring the intersection of Getting Things Done and Lotus Notes. 

I have used eProductivity, a GTD-enabled Lotus Notes templates that replaces the design of your mail file, for a full work week now. I was comfortable doing this because I knew that I could just roll back to my Mail85.ntf template and carry on if I didn't like it.

I am gathering my thoughts for a more complete review that I'll post next week, but in the meantime, I thought it would be useful to show you in a few screenshots how eProductivity enables you to get actionable email out of your Inbox and create a manageable list of next action that you can execute when time allows. This, is pretty much how I got those 155 emails out of my Inbox  at the beginning of this week. About half of those emails were irrelevant, obsolete, or actionables that were already completed. Those I deleted or filed as required. A small percentage of the emails were tasks I could complete in a few minutes, so I just did them, then came back to my Inbox. The remaining 70 emails were items that I will address on a priority basis over time. All of them were transformed into Next Actions and removed from the Inbox following the technique below. Nothing went back into IN.

Here is an actual example of an email that came in late afternoon today bespoiling my empty Inbox. It was an actionable email which I cannot act on till Monday. Its a straightforward single step process that will take me 15 minutes maximum.

Note on the left Navigator below there is a "context" called Office (you add whatever contexts you need when setting up eProductivity). I will be working on this request in the Office on Monday. I simply drag and drop this email over onto the Office context.

NOTE: These screenshots can be viewed closer by right clicking on them and choosing View Image if you're a FireFox User.



This is the magical part: Next, I am prompted for the next physical action required to move this task along. I edit the original email subject using an action verb like "Setup". Since I know I'll be doing this Monday, I also enter this as the due date. Note that the body of the original email is conveniently imported into a RT field at the bottom of the form. Click on Save & Close.




Next, a dialog box prompts about what to do about the original email. I choose to move it to a reference folder where I can refer to it later if I get questioned about it.



Fast forward to Monday, I will see all my scheduled next actions above my calendar. If this wasn't something I explicitly wanted to do on Monday, I could have located it in the Office context view.



Remember, this email was removed from my Inbox. If I need to refer to the original email again, I'll just double-click on the Next Action document and access it from the linked items section (see screenshot below). Even cooler, if I happen to receive any further updates from the requester over the weekend, I'll just link them to this action where I can review everything together.

What do you think of them apples? Now I realize that not all tasks come in through email. Inputs come in all different ways, but regardless of the source, they can all be "Next Action'd" and entered into eProductivity into the context and timeframe where and when they can be done. I cannot describe the peace of mind you can achieve once you stop juggling all the things you need to do, both personally and professionally, simply by entering everything into a system you trust will present that information back to you again, at the appropriate time and context when you can act on it.

Today was primarily a home work day (semi-vacation day) and GTD ensured that I got my driver license renewed, made a run to the dump (result of spring cleaning), changed a burnt out headlight, bought a pair of pants, picked up a can of fence paint, studied John chapter 4, took the kids out for a soda, exercised with Wii fit, and wrote this blog. And all of this was on my list of next actions. Today, was mission accomplished and tomorrow, Saturday, I have a good plan including a good mix of work and play.

Have a good one.

This is my mailbox at EOD Monday. There were 155 messages in there this AM. This is what is called "Mind Like Water".
More details to come next week. No point in boring you with incremental progress steps in the meantime.

Yesterday I got started with Eric Mack's eProductivity template, which gets applied to your mail file. I'll hold off on any comments until I've gone through a full cycle including a weekly review (potential blog silence for a week),  but it got me thinking about how Lotus Notes implements tasks on the calendar. (Quick lingo check here: Notes calls Tasks "To Do's" but uses a Task form. BlackBerry calls Tasks Tasks.)

Notes' To Do's do not have an exposed time field in the Task form, just a date field for Start Date and Due Date. These values are saved in four fields StartDate, StartDateTime, DueDate, and DueDateTime with a 12:01 PM time stamp. If you set the preference for displaying To Do's on your calendar they show up separate from the other calendar entries (reminders, meetings, appointments) above the calendar.

Syned to a BlackBerry, the Task will show up inline on the BB calendar on the correct date, but always at 12:01 PM. If  you subsequently edit this task on your BlackBerry and set another time the Task will show on your BlackBerry calendar inline at the time expected (e.g. 4 PM). Syned back to Notes, you will notice the StartDate/StartDateTime, DueDate/DueDateTime fields are updated by the BlackBerry, but the task remains sitting on top of the calendar. And of course there is no facility on the Task form to edit the due time in Notes.

Here, BlackBerry has gotten it right. Notes unfortunately forces me to use Reminder calendar entries in place of Tasks where I want to show a Next Action inline on my calendar. This is not ideal, because To Do's are the correct document type to use for Tasks because the have state (done/not done), and can be categorized ("Context" in GTD-speak).

I've posted this idea in IdeaJam for those of you who concur:
Preference Option for GTD users - Enable To Do's to use a time field to display inline on the calendar

Note: I am suggesting this to be a preference option so those of you who fear (irrationally) tasks showing up on your calendar, either  inline or on top, have no reason to vote against ;-)

This is my fourth post in a series on exploring the intersection of Getting Things Done and Lotus Notes. The topic for this posting is how I currently (try to) implement GTD today without any fancy schmancy templates. Just vanilla, out-of-the box Lotus Notes + BlackBerry.
As I alluded to earlier, the beauty of David Allen's system (or probably better to say "the productivity principles Allen discovered") is that its non-proprietary as far as tools go. You can do GTD with a paper notepad, Franklin Planner, any PDA, Sidekick 95 (though I think that program had a Y2K bug), a spreadsheet (why not, people use it for word processing), DOS text editor, Lotus Notes, and yes, even Outlook (if that can be classified as a system you trust). The main functionality required in your Organizer system is basically the ability to manage lists plus some sort of calendar that let's you defer follow ups.

After "listening" to the GTD audio book a few times I was somewhat energized and enthusiastic about implementing GTD with what I use and am committed to as a Lotus Notes DevAdmin. I wouldn't say GTD is a religion, but it does produce wild-eyed zealots and in my case I was all set to customize my mail template. Fortunately, I knew from experience that customizing the mail template, then trying to maintain those customizations through version upgrades was a royal pain, so I turned to DavidCo.com to see what advice they had for implementing GTD with Lotus Notes specifically. I found help in an eBook: GTD and Lotus Notes a 35 page step-by-step manual for optimizing Notes as a personal productivity tool. Cost $10. The introduction reads:

"The following recommendations come from thousands of hours of one-on-one coaching with professionals at all levels, many of whom work in a Lotus Notes environment."

This eBook also functions as a great mini review of GTD productivity principles like

1. Don’t leave anything in your head or in unprocessed stacks
2. Decide the next physical action
3. Review and update the contents of the whole system regularly

The eBook GTD and Lotus Notes teaches some interesting new ways to leverage the much neglected ToDo function in the Mail Template.

"The To Do function can be simplified to be a powerful list manager, and as such can be effective in organizing reminders in a way that works in real time. It can also be used to store useful reference materials and checklists, thereby adding sophistication to your personal management system."

One recommendation I found really helpful is to repurpose the Category field in the ToDo app as the title for the list. They provide suggestions for list titles like @Car, @Home, @Computer, @Phone, etc. which serve as context lists (the Context is where you can execute the Next Action). Other lists you can use the Category field for are WaitingFor, SomedayMaybe, Projects (which I don't use...more later on this), etc. This is a much more powerful and usable methodology than the traditional homogeneous prioritized ToDo list.

A couple caveats before you consider downloading this eBook: First, it assumes you are already quite versed in GTD. I don't recommend you use it as a shortcut to learn GTD. You really need to get the full book, paper or audio versions, first. I've read more than once about people trying to implement GTD, even using Eric Mack's eProductivity Template, who say they didn't fully get it because they hadn't read the book yet. Second, its a little dated, written in 2006 using Notes 6.5 screenshots. So if you're used to version 8 or 8.5, some of the menus and Action buttons have changed. Strangely absent from the eBook is mention of the Follow Up Flags feature that was added in 6.5, which is great for tagging an email with a Next Action and optionally scheduling it with a reminder.

While the eBook is quite inspiring and informative in many ways, I didn't find it to be optimal or practical for everything. A few of the suggestions seemed a little forced and not intuitive. One example is the recommendation to use folders for tracking WaitingFors (aka Delegated actions) and Actionable messages. Nope. Follow Up Flags are better and that's one fewer place to look for things.

Based on this eBook and some ideas gathered through reading other tips n' tricks, I've cobbled together a reasonable method for implementing GTD in plain vanilla Notes without customization. So here's a brief review of how I (try to) implement GTD in vanilla Lotus Notes + BlackBerry:

Reference emails - Non-actionable emails that are worth keeping for future (non-specific) reference I remove from the InBox using Folder>Remove from Folder (a single click option would be nicer). I've gotten out of the habit of using folders for 90% of my reference emails simply because Lotus Notes has Google (I mean "Search" function). I especially like how in 8+ the default search syntax is now the same as web search engines (where you don't have to type AND between words and it doesn't assume you've typed in an exact phrase to search on. (Tip: Turn off "fuzzy" search because its just crazy stupid). I may use folders when I know I want to keep a package of emails together related to the same topic (I have a Lotusphere folder), but its not that often.
Via BlackBerry, there is no equivalent remove from folder option (just filing into existing folders), so I generally don't bother filing messages I've read on the BlackBerry and do an InBox cleanup next time I'm back in Notes. Thus, I never really get my InBox to  empty on my PDA, so there's a little inconsistency I've been forced into there.

Other Reference Storage - I make use of the Lotus Notes Journal (renamed Notebook in 8.5+) for organizing and storing reference information that I expect will be useful in the future. In my pre-Lotus Notes days, this electronic file would have been an intricate, complicated set of folders and Word/Excel files on my hard drive. Once I switched to Notes I pretty much abandoned the hard drive style of storage for text and small files. I still use my HD for large files and large collections of PDF reference docs though. My Notes NSF Notebook consists of programming & administration tips, sample code, notes from courses and conferences I've attended, and random thoughts about various topics that I've felt compelled to capture.
This journal.nsf syncs with my mail file (which affects my quota unfortunately) and thus also handily syncs with my BlackBerry.
 
Converting Emails into Actions - GTD promotes that you turn all actionable emails into Next Actions that you can perform at an appropriate time (the exception is any action that you can complete now in 2 minutes which you just do immediately). Lotus Notes has a handy function for copying the contents of an email into a new Task or new Calendar entry through the Action button "Copy into >New Task/Calendar Entry" (in versions 4-7). In version 8 the same features is buried under the More action button requiring one more click than before :-(
Time specific Actionables go on the calendar as a reminder or appointment depending on the requirements. Actionables that are not time-specific can be turned into ToDo's. Once you've converted the email into an Action, you can either delete the original email or remove it from the Inbox (Folder=>Remove from folder).
In the BlackBerry, unfortunately there is no equivalent for the "Copy into New" function, so to create Next Actions from an email, I just manually create a new Calendar or ToDo item and copy and paste any important information from the original email if necessary. Another pain in the BlackBerry butt is that it has no equivalent for Calendar Reminders entries (0 time entries), but if you adjust the begin and end time to the same value (0 hours, 0 minutes long), it serves the same purpose and doesn't muck up your Domino freetime schedule that will cause meeting conflicts with others.
How does  the BlackBerry handle Next Actions in the Task Application? Pretty good actually. I use the Category Filter to choose the Context I am in to view any Actionables I can take care of while in that context. For example, I choose @Car as the category filter and I see that I am due to buy and replace my furnace air filter. Even the size is listed in the notes because I can never remember that spec.

Alternative way to make an Email Actionable -  Beginning with Notes 6.5 I started to make good use of the FollowUp Flag feature. Caution, there's a GTD way to use this feature and a non-compliant way. Just clicking on the flag button to place a flag icon on the email isn't GTD compliant and really is nothing more than the common (bad) practice of marking an email as unread after you've read it., just so it stands out in your massive InBox. The proper way (GTD-compliant) method to use FollowUp Flags is to use the Edit Flag feature and always insert the Next Action into the Follow up field. If its time specific, put in a date and time to pop up a reminder. Then remove the email from your InBox (Folder=>Remove from folder). Remember, FollowUp items can be viewed in the FollowUp view which can be sorted in a variety of ways.

Tip: Customize the columns in the follow up view so that the Follow Up Action field is easily visible and wide enough to be readable.

There are some downsides to using FollowUp flags that you should keep in mind before using them excessively.
(1) For one they don't have a category field so you can't place them into Contexts like you can with other Actionables.
(2) Flagged email reminders don't translate to reminders on PDA's. Plus you can't view the FollowUp view on a PDA (at least the BlackBerry anyway) nor is there a corresponding equivalent method for flagging an email on a BlackBerry. On the other hand the BlackBerry doesn't have a "Copy into new" function either so you're stuck either way.
(3) If you overuse the feature, you can experience excessive alarm-itis where you have alarms overlapping alarms e.g. scheduling reminders for a Monday morning. While this gets your attention, it can be very distracting.
(4) The Follow Up view is yet another list you need to review along with your other lists. It can be confusing to have your To Do list with Next Actions plus a FollowUp view also with Next Actions.
Still, all taken into consideration, I find FollowUp flags irresistibly convenient and timesaving particularly for @Work actions where I'll be primarily be dealing with them through Lotus Notes rather than using a PDA.

Next Actions for Projects - Projects are any task that requires more than one action. I depart from the GTD methodology of having a Projects list separate from Next Actions List. I am not comfortable having two related, but disconnected things. My brain won't allow it. Thus, my solution for this is to list the Project Name in the ToDo title then a colon then the next action (i.e. Project : Next Action) . For example  Family Room floor :  Measure room. I'll then categorized the ToDo by context (in this case @Home). In the body field of this entry I may list future Next Actions so that I can promote the next one into the title when I have completed the current Next Action. The body field will also contain notes about the project, attachments, other other project support.

Miscellaneous Lists - In my ToDo's, in a similar vein to the SomedayMaybe list, I maintain other lists with titles like "Movies to See", "Books to Read", "PlacesToGo" and any other list that seems useful. Its beautiful to have a sense of control over all the random thoughts that come into my head or through conversations and blogs I read.

Weekly Review - Hypothetically speaking, if I do a weekly review following the practices I've laid out above, I would need to review all the Next Actions, Projects with their inline Next Actions, as well as the miscellaneous lists under all the ToDo categories, plus review the FollowUp view in Lotus Notes. Typically, I don't include my calendar in a weekly review because I pore that nightly (or so) looking for items that I may have missed on the previous day that need to rescheduled (renegotiated with myself). Occasionally, every couple weeks I might run out of first level priority projects at work and I then review my Follow Ups for lower priority items that I've put off. Over all, this review process has to be the weak point in my system.

Well there you have it in all its glory, warts and all. That is how I (try to) implement GTD using Lotus Notes.

Next I'll give Eric Mack's eProductivity replacement Lotus Notes mail template (the one David Allen uses personally) a go and see if that works better than what I've cobbled together. I feel confident and riskfree with going this route because in a webcast over a year ago (Taking Notes?) I heard Eric promise that the template does not alter the existing Notes fields (or uses them in a compatible way with the mail template) so if you don't like the system you can just revert to your regular mail template and all the data will be intact.

Here's my Project entry - Evaluate eProductivity Tmplt :  Download and register trial

Update: I've added a paragraph on how I manage my Next Actions via BlackBerry

This is my third post in a series on exploring the intersection of Getting Things Done and Lotus Notes.

I was going to post about how I use GTD with vanilla Lotus Notes + BlackBerry, but a couple other things are worthy of comment first. I'll get back to that topic Wednesday night. Besides I just wrote my Java Exam at night school and my residual mental energy is waning.

Wow, its great to see how many bloggers are giving voice to this topic in the yellowverse. I have no inside information, but seeing the interaction between David Allen, Ed Brill, and Eric Mack on Ed's blog here makes me think that something's afoot. Perhaps a deal is in the making? if I could I'd quickly be buying some stock in Eric Mack's company (alas its not a public company).

I want to share a couple anecdotes on the GTD prime directive "Thou shalt not store tasks in thy head, but only in a system that though though trusteth" (translated into the king's English).
 
Anecdote #1
How many times have you remembered something while in bed, but didn't have a notepad or PDA  handy to get it out of your head. That happened to me again this Sunday AM. I remembered that I needed to check something on one of our VP's BlackBerrys and since I couldn't write it down, my brain conveniently decided to rehearse the task over and over, making sleep impossible. Having great insight into the inner workings of the brain, thanks to David Allen, I realized this was perfectly natural stupid brain behavior and if I valued my sleep AND not forgetting that important task i had better get up, go downstairs and fetch my BlackBerry and put it on my calendar. And as predicted by prophet Allen, once it was recorded, my brain let go, and sleep was soon upon me. Taking the BlackBerry to bed for me is better than a notepad because at least I can use it in the dark and not wake up my better half by turning on the light.

Anecdote #2
I met Eric Mack for the first time at Lotusphere a few months back. We'd had some email contact previously over some strategies on bringing GTD to my company. While walking between sessions, Eric asked me some marketing question (don't remember what it was) and I gave him a response he obviously liked and wanted to explore further. I watched Eric closely to see if he was going to keep that thought in his head or write it down. He did not disappoint me. When we hit the escalator in the Dolphin Hotel, guess what came out of Eric's pocket?  One of those fancy schmancy GTD telescopic pens in a notetaker wallet. He walks the talk to my relief.

Next Post (this time I mean it): How I implement GTD using Vanilla Lotus Notes

This is my second post in a series on exploring the intersection of Getting Things Done and Lotus Notes. Shortly, I will be testing a world class Notes mail template replacement written by Eric Mack's company branded eProductivity.

But some theory first. What is GTD anyway? My first exposure to GTD was Internet reviews like this great summary on FoldedSpace.org. The best resource of course is David Allen's book. You should buy it or alternatively listen to it. Not being of the likes of Thomas Duff, who can consume a book a night, I opted for the 2 hour abridged audio version for less than $9 at Audible.com. (They also sell the unabridged (full) version (7+ hours) which looks like it has recently dropped in price). With a 45 minute commute each morning I was able to listen to GTD several times. Once I "got it" the implementation of the basic principles was almost immediate and I can honesty say that the initial enthusiasm helped me complete many home projects that were lagging for years. Full implementation is something I have yet to achieve and through this blog series I am hoping I'll be able to graduate to the next level of blackbelt productivity. I have purchased and given away two copies so far (one to a CEO and another to my best friend). I don't seem to have any copies left on my shelf at the moment, so my summary here will be straight from my noggin alone (consider that my disclaimer for the following info).  Here's the top principles of GTD from my perspective.

1. DO NOT rely on your memory. Rather, record everything you need to do, no matter how small, using some system you trust where you can recall the task later. Our minds are designed to be creative problem solving machines, not reliable record and playback devices. The human brain is just not great at managing large lists of things we need to do today, tomorrow, next month, or next year. The very fact that most of you use a calendar to record meetings and other events is proof that you agree with this in principle. I had a manager once who kept everything in his head. The result was every day we had to chase a new priority. Granted, he had a brilliant mind in many ways, and he was like the elephant who never forgot a conversation or a decision, but you just never knew when it would surface again and that was his downfall.  Allen makes a very convincing case that our minds will never rest until it is assured that we have recorded that item of concern in a system we trust to recall it to us later. In my experience I've found this to be a true "secret" of stress reduction. Record every commitment in a system outside of your mind. If you stop reading right now and you at least do this, your life will be significantly altered for the better.
   
   
2. While you are writing down/recording the task/project/commitment, think of two additional things right now:
   (a) What does DONE look like? Its not always obvious.
   (b) What is the very next physical action I need to take to move toward getting it done?
   For example, I need to replace the floor in my family room. That's a multi-step project. Janice, my wife and I have decided that DONE means that in place of worn out carpet, we will have high-quality laminate-flooring that looks like hardwood. That's what we've had in our living room for the past 2 years and its seems to be perfect for our family of four kids, two cats, and a dog.
   What is the very next physical action I must take towards getting it done? I have decided that the next step is to measure the room and calculate the exact square footage I need. I can go one step further and plan the step after that. My next next step after that is to go to Home Depot with my one-use family discount card and pick up the materials. That's enough planning for now. I'm tired. So I record in some system (I won't get proprietary for now) my project + the very next action. In the notes area I'll record what DONE looks like and the next next step if I have the creative energy to go that far.
   Note that this is NOT your traditional ToDo list. Most people's ToDo lists are an amorphous blog of projects and stuff they'd like to do, but most of the time they don't record the very next action. The result is that every time you look at your ToDo list you psychologically get tired and recoil from it because you have to reprocess the next actions for your list again and again. Next Action lists, which may be tied to larger multi-step projects ensure you can leverage your brain once to come up with the next action which you can simply execute during an appopriate opportunity.
   
   
3. Associate your Next Action list with a context where you can do it. Throughout the day there are appropriate opportunities to do things. I cannot (or rather should not) do my personal errands, banking, or personal calls while at work, on the clock. Rather, on my @Work list are things I can do while sitting at my desk...call clients, follow up on support tickets, research a software widget, etc. My @Car list will be things I can do while commuting, especially on the way home...pickup light bulbs, renew my driver's license sticker, drop my taxes off to my accountant. You get the idea? Organize your next actions to match the context where you can actually do them.
   
   
4. Have collection systems for all the things you need to capture and turn into next actions. Your voicemail, email, paper Inbox, slot by your front door, are all collection vehicles. Have as many as you need, but as few as possible. This inspired me to put up a hanging wall folder so that incoming paper mail at home could be held in a secure area until I could deal with it.
   
   
5. Process all Inboxes to empty. Once you touch it, nothing goes back into IN. Here's where David Allen's workflow diagram is invaluable. I don't have time here to go through it all. After all, probably at least 5 chapters are used to cover the workflow process in the book. In a nutshell, you take each item in one of your collection buckets (e.g. your Inbox) and decide what to do with it. If its junk throw it out/delete it. If it has future reference value, file it...now! If its actionable by you, can I do it in two minutes or less? If yes, do it. If not, defer it (schedule it) by putting it on your calendar. Use a tickler file for documents. Delegate tasks for others to do (goes on a Delegated list for followup later). When you do this, you will be recording the very next action required for each task. Whatever you do with it, NEVER put it back into IN. This process will enable you to quickly and efficiently process your Inbox and establish next actions for everything that requires it. The goal is to get to empty, then move on dealing with the next actions you have established.
   
   

That 's the very basic basics of GTD in my estimation. Listening to GTD was nothing less than an epiphany.

Coming up next: How I strive to implement GTD using "vanilla" (standard, non-customized) Lotus Notes and my BlackBerry.

Update on April 5:
Sleeping on this post (not literally), I just realized a major lack of my summary of GTD was no mention of the Weekly Review. The Weekly Review is the proverbial Achilles' Heel of GTD. Its the weakness, not of GTD, but of those who implement it, like me more often than not. The W.R. is where you sit down and review all your contextual Next Action lists, as well as the associated lists that are produced by GTD (Projects, "Waiting For", and "Someday Maybe" Lists). The point is to give you an opportunity to renogotiate these contracts and reorganize as needed. The weekly review is hard for me and this is where i expect I'm going to benefit most from Eric Mack's tool which reportedly makes the W.R. less of a chore and more exciting. We shall see.

Definitions first. GTD stands for "Getting Things Done" which is the title of David Allen's wildly successful first book where he outlines basic principles he has observed about how humans naturally collect, process, organize, and then do the things they need to in order to meet the commitments that are demanded of them everyday. I know it sounds like heady stuff, but believe me for now that its really down to earth simple. So simple in fact that its profound.


Speaking of productivity...like many of you, working as Lotus Professionals, who eek out our living by essentially trying to facilitate other's productivity, you know it can be a frustrating experience. At the root of our collective frustration is not the software, the strategy, or anything to do with IBM or any other vendor, but the very fact that those we are responsible for helping at our company, those who can benefit most by leveraging all the amazing tools and solutions we implement, so often just prefer to stay with the familiar. What we see as clearly inefficient, non-productive patterns of working, are to them comfortable and natural. And I am old enough now to recognize that I cannot promote radical revolutionary change in my workplace. My hope is that through education and interactions with individuals I can promote low level, incremental positive change over time, sometimes a looooong time. Oh there are so many examples of things we'd all like to erradicate, like how do you encourage your workgroups to share files, not by firing around email attachments, but by centrally storing documents in a shared repository, and sending links instead, eliminating version conflicts, confusion, and wasted time later trying to locate a document buried in your email. And why is it that people can generally understand that a physical Inbox is where things come in, are processed, and are then removed as quickly as possible,  but when it comes to an email Inbox its ok to pile stuff in there for years? I think you get my point. We need to accept that change is very hard for most people, especially change that relates to our basic way of handling the stuff that presents itself to us every day screaming for our attention. And once we've established a pattern of how to handle all the inputs we allow into our life (emails, voicemails, bills, unwritten requests, events) we tend to stick with this pattern. As change accelerates around us, we tend to preserve, even cherish non-change close by us, thinking that this thin layer of stabiity will help us cope and successfully manage the demands of life and work.

In this vien, my purpose for the next five or six blogs is to try to explain clearly, briefly, and honestly my understanding of GTD, how I've tried to implement its principles using "vanilla" Lotus Notes and other systems at home, show where it works fine and some points of difficulty,. Then I'd like to take you on a live short journey where I take a risk and subject myself to a GTD-compatible solution created by Eric Mack, the former technologist for David Allen, who has developed a replacement mail template product that facilitates GTD principles in Lotus Notes.

I'm going to keep these posts short, sweet, and focused on a couple points, or at least that is my intention.  Hope you come along this journey with me.