Managing the Deferral Engine

(Or “ The Confessions of a Digital Pack Rat”.)

I have engaged with too many services that allow me to squirrel away digital media for consumption (and no doubt a lot of productive, insightful and deep reflection) at some notional future date. Here are some strategies that I have derived for managing a large inflow of content.

The days when I had a physical in-box full of photocopied articles and white papers nagging me to read them is long past. Now I have to deal with an effectively infinite in-box of material to read instead.

My iPhone is optimally efficient at filling my interstitial time with short reading bursts. The incessant rain of emails, blog posts, status updates and other quick-hits means that, in practice my longer-scale reading activities are too often getting pushed down my to-read list.

It is pretty trivial at this point to observe that Instapaper is the optimal solution for consuming and managing all of the long-form articles I want to read. But given that it is so easy to scan through multiple sources online, and even filtering those sources so that I only push less than 20% of posts into Instapaper, I still end up with an unrealistic queue of archived material awaiting my attention.

Before I started using Instapaper I had a folder in Evernote called “Articles To Read” and another equivalent folder in Gmail. I was using both in parallel, along with a tagged list of bookmarks on Pinboard. I also had a related “Videos To View” folder in Gmail. The majority of the contents of these folders being neither read nor reviewed.

To take control of this I have reorganised and rationalised my approach to managing all classes of media inputs. I think this process might be useful for anyone with a similar mindset, so I am sharing it here.

Quote of the Day 05/03/09

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving the non-essential things undone.”
—Lin Yutang

My MA Cloud Toolkit

When planning my working methodology for tackling this MA programme, I set out to work in the cloud as much as possible. I did not want to be tied to having to work only on one computer in the office or at home. I wanted to build a framework of tools that would support my needs in such a way that I could always work on whatever aspect of the programme suited me, optimised for the time available, the resources I had to hand and my own energy levels.

With that objective in mind, I have chosen to use the following online services and software:

• Gmail for all email communication.
• Google Docs for all writing and document management.
• Blogger for hosting my Learning Log.
• Zenbe Lists on my iPod Touch for to-do lists.
• Notepad on my iPod Touch for first drafts of everything from learning log entries to presentations to essays.
• Evernote for ubiquitous capture.
• Twitter for status updates and self-depreciating humorous asides.
• These next two are infrastructure, but still deserve a place on my list:
• Amazon for books.
• iTunes for audio-books.

Discussing this topic with my classmates and reviewing their chosen methodologies it seems that I am taking a comparatively novel approach to all of this. So I do think it is worth taking a snapshot of how I am working at the beginning of the MA programme and then reviewing that workflow at the end. Whether all of my Cloud Toolkit makes it over the finish line with me is worth finding out.

How ‘Getting Real’ Relates To Our 'Discipline Of Teams' Presentation

One of the most useful business books that I have yet read is ‘Getting Real’ by 37Signals. Although ostensibly about getting things done in the context of software development, the principles and practices they suggest map to all businesses. Reading through it this afternoon looking for something that would resonate with our topic of ‘The Discipline of Teams’ that I could include in our presentation and that would be contemporary I came across this quote(excerpted).

Less Mass
The leaner you are, the easier it is to change
The more massive an object, the more energy is required to change its direction. It is as true in the business world as it is in the physical world.

Mass is increased by:
—Meetings about other meetings
—Thick process
—The past ruling the future
—Long-term road maps
—Office politics

Mass is reduced by:
—Multi-tasking team members
—Small team size
—An open culture that makes it easy to admit mistakes

Less mass lets you change direction quickly. You can react and evolve. You can focus on the good ideas and drop the bad ones. You can listen and respond to your customers. Nimble, agile, less-mass businesses can quickly change their entire business model, product, feature set, and marketing message. They can make mistakes and fix them quickly. They can change their priorities, product mix, and focus. And, most importantly, they can change their minds.

The complete article is here.

Going On My Information Diet

I am busily unsubscribing from all of my (quite substantial list of) podcasts. I will not be listening to any of those on my daily commutes any more. I am ring-fencing those hours for MA time. It is five hours of uninterrupted attention every week and undoubtedly will become essential. Hacking all of the distractions out of my content stream is another step in managing my attention. One unanticipated positive impact of the MA Programme shall be that I am going to have to break all of my media-diet habits. I hope to rationalise and manage what content I allow back into my time and attention when (and if) I revisit those next year when the Masters is complete.

In Training

I am currently reading ‘Bit Literacy’ by Mark Hurst. I imagine that I am going to generate a substantial volume of digital files and data over the next twelve months as I engage in the Masters programme. This book is a good refresher on effective life-hacks for managing your digital deluge.

I may also need to re-read David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ as well, as my GTD habits have gotten more than a little lax. Every spare minute is going to count, and I am going to need to have laser-focus on my objectives and to neutralise as many of my distractions as I can.

Pre-Blogging Versus Post-Blogging

Here is a blogging tip I have discovered after a few years of posting here. Do not blog something you intend to do, only blog about things that you have done. Case in point, I blogged about GTD eight weeks ago and made sweeping generalisations about how I was going to reorganise myself for optimum productivity and so on. I have not opened my copy of David Allen’s book since then. So now whenever I am asked questions like “so how is that GTD system working out for you?” I have to look sheepish, shuffle my shoes, clear my throat and quickly change the subject. Talk about your Not-GTD...

Gotta-Gotta Get that GTD

There is a truism which states that you will invariably have most of your best ideas when you least expect them: in the shower, walking your dog in the park, you know the type of scenarios. Basically everywhere except the time and the place that would be optimally convenient. As I spend my time thinking about, and generating ideas for, my client’s branding and design requirements, I have found this truism particularly apt. My friends who work in other creative disciplines would no doubt agree.

That I now find myself increasingly having to address this is one of the unforeseen consequences I have to live with since the arrival of ‘The Boy’ (to borrow a phrase from Homer J. Simpson). It has only now become truly apparent to me how much of my project and career-related thinking I have always been processing offline in my free time. Issues and challenges that were utterly defeating me on, say Tuesday afternoon, I would often efficiently resolve on Wednesday morning after more-or-less unconsciously working them through the previous evening. Alas no more, my evenings are now completely consumed by Ethan-related activities (and no complaints about that).

Consequently, I find myself now having to address means of maximising the hours I can assign to my career and of making every minute count. Given that I believe that I already have some of the accepted personal productivity basics in place after working for fifteen. What I need is something that will help me to move everything up to the next level. Researching this online, it seems that there is a lot of renewed talk in the blogosphere about ‘Getting Things Done’ or GTD – the personal productivity system du-jour for today’s time-poor knowledge worker. It is also obvious, from looking at Lifehacker, 43Folders and their ilk, that I am not quite as organised as I like to think I am.

The Guardian also seems to be on a definite mini-GTD trip at the moment, with Ben Hammersy’s recent interview with David Allen and last week’s Tech piece on successfully implementing the system.

GTD seems well-worth a try, so I have bought the book. I am only as far as chapter two so far (those busy evenings, remember), and I have not fully re-organised myself yet. But let’s see how it goes. Maybe I will be a super-optimised individual, with a ‘mind-like-water’ before I know it.

One niggling aspect is that GTD (online at least) seems to be at risk of evolving into a ‘Cult Of GTD’, along the lines of the ‘Cult Of Mac’. I do not have an intention of becoming a GTD Evangelist, hassling all of my friends to get with the programme.

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