Billions With Zero Knowledge

The time of year has come when everyone makes resolutions, ponders lessons learned and slip into Nostradamus mode making bold or obvious predictions for the coming year. (Unfortunately no longer in the form of quatrains. I strongly believe all predictions should be made in the form of quatrains for the amusement of those who have to listen to them.)

I apologize but after taking some time off the blog, this is going to be a long post since it is my major goal for the entire year - and I feel it’s cathartic to post this in detail.

I took some great downtime over the holidays to think about some of what I accomplished in 2006 and my plans and projects for 2007.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to like living with a very full plate. I am active in many business & personal projects, volunteer organizations, advisory relationships and still try to have tons of fun while doing it all. I’m also spending more time in various Internet communities building experience and relationships that all take time, adding more items to my inboxes.

I also have a hyperactive mind (those who know me can attest to this) that is always in overdrive with ideas, projects, conversations, things to research and skills to develop. I have lot’s of hobbies and unlimited interests, and try to lead a rich life by exploring it’s diversity.

My past business & personal success can be attributed to many things ranging from luck, some personal quirks & skills and mostly to the teams of people I’ve been around. If I had to point to a single quality that has served me best in life, it has been my passion & energy (I’m also a fairly quick learner). I just don’t know how to do things without going at them full blast like a kid racing after an ice cream truck, no matter what I tackle.

That being said, I know that my success is in no way related to my organization skills. I have never been that type of person. So when it comes to my inboxes I know the problem is me. I’ve tried various tools and systems before, but I’ve always petered out in applying them after a couple of weeks of not being able to dig myself out the existing hole I was in. I also don’t believe I have ever found a suitable mix of tools and methods to support the habits I need to develop. I know the problems is not the tools, it comes down to me not being a tool.

So instead of listing the hundreds of goals or resolutions I have, I’ve decided to scrap them all and make just one goal this year and that is to fundamentally renegotiate my relationship with my inboxes.

I get about 200-300 emails a day, regularly live with 5000+ items (around 1200 unread at anytime) in my email inbox, maintain busy task lists in various places, manage project plans, make around 15-20 phone calls a day, maintain a busy calendar, read 400+ news feeds somewhat regularly, read 5-10 books a week, am listening to 20 odd podcasts almost weekly, and read about 30 magazines a month.

My office desk, my home desk, my mail, books & magazine piles, computer desktops are all generally messy and chaotic. Add voice mail, Skype calls, IM, notices from an increasing number of online community services, my personal and home responsibilities (bills, errands & life stuff), the number of companies I’m involved in, my exercise & health regimens, friendships, my dog and my relationship with my girlfriend and my life tends to always be active.

I’ve had an executive assistant and team of financial and bookkeeping staff taking care of organizing my life since I was 21 years old. They were instrumental in keeping me organized and productive. Despite this I never felt particularly in control of the many things I juggle on a daily basis. For the first time in almost fifteen years I am flying solo, with no executive assistant. This is a major change for me, that I’m dedicated to maintaining until I get organized myself. If and when I need some help after getting organized, I want my next executive assistant to help me amplify the volume of productivity I can accomplish by executing tasks on my behalf, not spend all their time chasing after me to organize my messy life.

I spend my days fighting my inboxes like a fire fighter addicted to the thrill of battling fires. Tackling the issues of the day, with constantly changing projects, tasks and priorities I’ve always felt that I was able to deal with it through a high tolerance for chaos. I think I’m a great multitasker but it requires a lot of effort and lot’s of good help to keep those tasks even partially managed. I’m getting to phase in my life where I’m trying to simplify those things that are burdens, and spend more time doing things that are fun and meaningful. My inbox is a burden.

I feel I’m always barely keeping on top of the most important items that I can handle at that time. Many items that aren’t critical sit around for long period of times gathering dust. Too many require some simple actions that take me too long to get around too and lead to stress, that just isn’t helpful or productive even though I’ve become quite accustomed to dealing with it.

This video reflects how I have come to view my current relationship with my inboxes.

Lately I’ve been investing my time and energy in those things that will give the best results for all areas of my life. I mention the idea of leverage points in my previous post. For the last two years my major goals were related to my physical & mental health and my choice of career path. This is the best I’ve ever felt in my life with how those things are progressing.

So my goal for this year is simply to get control of my inboxes, becoming naturally organized so that it’s effortless and second nature to organize my inboxes, tasks and commitments.

This includes the following specific goals;

1. An empty inbox by late-January.
   • I started 2007 with almost 8000 items in my inbox with 1000 unread items. I’m down to about 3000 items left (about 300 unread), having deferred, assigned, deleted, filed or created tasks for each item that I removed.
2. Empty my inboxes completely at least once a week.
   • By emptying I mean deleting, filing, assigning, scheduling or creating tracked tasks for each item that crosses my various inboxes. I may not respond to each item in that week, but it will be scheduled and tracked. At least once a week I will have no items in my inboxes.
   • Completely clearing my desk of any paperwork or post it notes. This is a big one for me, since my desk has always been as busy as I am.
   • Empty my voice mail every day, and update my incoming message at least once a week with my upcoming geographic location and availability.
3. Add all my various ideas, notes, tasks and calendar items to the same tracking system and review the lists once a week.
   • I’ve recently begun to schedule exercise time, time with friends, reading time, blogging time and I want all my commitments that have times associated with it to be added to this calendar or time based task list.
   • I normally maintain task lists or reminders in various places from post it notes on my fridge @ home, to slips of papers, my moleskin notebooks, my PDA, my Google Desktop Tasks Widget & Outlook Tasks w/ OneNote integration (all of which suck at task management), project tracking tickets, Voicemail, Delicious Bookmark tags, draft blog posts, idea scratch pads, and journal entries. I am going to empty all my notebooks and journals of any outstanding items or ideas and put them into a single system each week.
4. Completely relax by using a rigid tracking system of organizing my inboxes to allow myself complete freedom to negotiate my commitments.
   • I want the freedom to be able to renegotiate my commitments based on what I think is most productive at that moment, or needed including my personal time.
   • I don’t want to be rigid in my schedule, but rather rigid in my scheduling allowing me mental freedom to know that all my items are scheduled, deferred, or some action is on a single task or calendar list. If I want or need to change the schedule to adjust to new priorities or just because I need some down time, it should be easy to do.
   • I want to be able to be more comfortable saying no, or not right now to many things with the confidence that I can tackle them at future dates that are easily scheduled and tracked.
5. Do the minimal amount of planning needed to accomplish the most amount of doing.
   • In today’s rapidly changing and fast paced world doing too much planning becomes daunting because of the layers of assumptions, interdependencies and rapidly changing learning. I believe that most heavy planning quickly suffers from the law of diminishing returns.
   • Although it’s new for me, I’m am now using more execution biased light weight iterative planning tools. We are using a mix of development methodologies, good sense and financial planning models in all my projects that adopt monthly iterative light weight planning that heavily favor execution, flexible plans, small teams and tracking of the changes in plans to improve the culture of light weight planning and execution.
   • Although I’m still learning these behaviors with a small team again and many of the tools we are using are new to me, I’m happy with how the project and financial/operational management functions at my various company projects are developing. I don’t feel my own personal planning is up to snuff though. This is what I’m going to change this year, by adopting a personal system (including financial, project, tasks and commitments) that mimics the systems we use in my company projects.

I’ve researched various systems before, and now that we have adopted two important principles at my corporate projects including lot’s of alone time and a toxic aversion to meetings I feel I finally can tackle a critical part of my own ability to get more done with less effort. I think this will be the single most important thing I can do to better serve the people who I make commitments and am responsible too, while having the most fun doing what I enjoy.

I have been researching the tools and techniques of David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach. I read his stuff a couple of years ago, but could never ‘clear the decks’ and didn’t really feel like I was capable of being the type of organized person I read about. I reread his two books (Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything) and really feel I am at a point in my life when I can fundamentally tackle becoming an organized person.

I have researched various tools, am subscribed to his podcasts and have generally adopted his basic workflow for handling all my inboxes. (I’ve modified it slightly based on some research I’ve done and my own needs)

I am experimenting with a bunch of the tools, but am mostly using the Outlook plug-in that aside from a few annoying bugs has finally given me confidence in using Outlook to manage tasks and projects, alongside the messages, contacts and calendar that are so integral to working on the tasks. My productivity in just a few short days of using this tool has really improved. Outlook is no longer a place I dread, but is becoming a place where I get tons of work done.

I’ve got a bunch of other mail filtering, organization, research, contact management, personal productivity plug-ins and other personal dashboards that I’ve assembled but tasks was the one area that eluded me until now. In processing my inboxes I’ve quickly created about 400 tasks, 60 project files, 100 sub-projects and added @context and time scheduled reminders or series of actions that are planned in my calendar and organized properly. Working in my inbox is beginning to feel fun, because I’m able to easily get so much done simply by pushing items through the system and onto my new task list.

I’ve been slow to blog and get some other things done lately because I am really hard at work on finishing clearing all my open items and getting them into this system.

I am going to be adapting the system using some utilities and social media tools that I think can be combined with the basic GTD approach to cover more than just inbox items. I’ve already begun developing a macro that takes an URL from my browser or feedreader and creates an automatic task that I can assign to a project, my @context (@blog content ideas, @email for email tasks etc.), or just to my personal learning or @Someday categories. Adapting this to also incorporate De.licio.us, Sphere, Technorati and Wikipedia links for automatic link insertion associated with tasks around ideas, urls and copied text from webpages as part of the same macro is something I want to experiment with once I get the basics of the system down. I feel this will be a more effective way to manage my bookmarks and tags where I am now often tagging items as reminders or for later action items (such as reference material for a future blog post) and my Delicious bookmarks are becoming another place that’s as messy as my other inboxes.

I don’t think I’ll become a Steve Pavlina or LifeHacker type blogger, but I do plan to blog once in awhile on how I’m doing on this one goal.

I’m really happy with how it’s going so far, but need to get a couple months of habitual practice before I start dispensing any verdicts about it’s effectiveness. I’ve burned myself before going gun-ho on a new way to organize and tackle personal planning and have seen those efforts fall by the wayside as mounting priorities become excuses to revert to bad habits.

I invite my friends, team mates, partners and anyone who reads this that I happen to run into this year to ask me about how this is going. My inbox count and the date that it was last empty is available upon inquiry

On Sun 7 Jan 2007.