Okay. First of, let me say that writing a blog entry about managing people is a bit of a head trip. As I eluded to in my previous entry about this new promotion, I have a lot of assumptions and attitudes about what it means to be a manager.

I have no illusions. I am not a good manager yet. I have learned 2 very fundamental pieces of the puzzle here: learning to let go (i.e. delegation) and learning to slow-the-fuck-down. The thing is, everything I am doing, and learning about management is like looking an an elephant in a dark room with a flashlight. I can see bits and pieces everywhere, but what I am looking for is two things:

1. the overall big picture, and
2. the linchpin that holds it all together.

The thing of it is, I cannot really talk about these things without turning into one of those fluffy "personal power" Tony Robbins worshipers that squick me out.

Essentially I am battling two problems, the first is one of ignorance. I know I am ignorant, but I don't even know enough to ask the right kind of questions to erase my ignorance. The second is the stereotypes, prejudices, and attitudes I have about management. So not only do I have a problem with not really being able to ask the right questions, but I also have a problem understanding, and even accepting the answers that I get. I think that the biggest resistance comes from the fact that I want to keep looking at the people I work with as the people I work with, not the people "under" me. I especially want to avoid the kind of attitude where they are not people anymore, but just means for the overlords to get more profit.

What I need is the management equivalent of "Getting Things Done". GTD basically gave geeks the tools they needed to be really geeky about their productivity. I need to find a similar process to get really geeky for managing people.

Merlin Mann over on 43 folders has this great post on what can be called the Tale of two selves. The meat of this entry is that the unified self that we believe is responsible for our actions is an illusion. The self that might set goals like "I wont to work hard, be productive and buy a house." may be over-ridden by another self that is faced with the prospect of hard partying and instant gratification. We wander through life assuming that the 'I' is a stable rock that we can cling to, when there seems to be similar selves but with different motivations at different times. The same I that says "I am on a diet!" is not the same I that is buying the ice cream.

But this separation of selves is much more subtle then a distinct dumb-ass-instant-grat-self and the monocle-wearing-disciplined-self. Not only are the selves that we wear when at home, work, or the club are all different selves, but the selves that we present to our bosses and our team members are different. The same me that comes home from work is not really the same me that kisses my daughter "goodnight". So what happens when one self wants something, but the other does not? Which self wins? Which self should win? Which self is the real me? Which me should make the decisions?

Perhaps most illustrative of this whole concept of multiple selves, and more importantly, multiple selves in conflict is illustrated with a self-battle every day at around 5:30. I know I should be heading home, cause that is the optimal time to catch the train, go see my wife and daughter, but... just. One. More. Frag. (won't hurt). The me that is in the immersive game of Quake 3 wants to show these jerkbags what-for, but the other me wants to go home and see my family. On to of that, there is a background me that is avoiding going home, cause that means I'll have to deal with my other job sooner.


This is very deeply connected to the "50K feet", and "runway" views of your life that David Allen talks about. For those that don't know, the "Runway" is whats going on (and what needs to be done) right now. Then there are the views of your life, getting higher and higher. 10K feet being your current projects, 20K feet being the projects for this year, all the way up to 50K feet, which is your life's goal, your raison d'etre. The thing is, that you have to have a clear line between the runway and 50K feet. If your nose is pointed at the British Isles, but you want to go to Japan, then you're going to have to make an in-air turn, and that is going to be painful.

Now the first urge is to say "Well okay, lets turn this plane west, and be done with it.", which is to say, buckle down and get to reaching your goals. But if your nose is pointed East, but your goals are pointed West, which is out of sync? Do you need a course correction at a higher level or a lower level? In reality, two goals aren't quite so mutually exclusive. That being said, if my 50K feet goals are in sync with the selves-that-I-am-in-my-daily-life, then it is much easier to achieve them. But if you really feel that your life's work is to save the world, and you are cranking widgets from 9-5, then you have a problem. Maybe you need to reset your 50K view, and choose a different direction for your life, maybe you need to work toward quitting your job and figure out how to save the world instead, or perhaps you need to re-evaluate how the widget cranking is helping you to save the world.

I think that the crux of getting your selves to work together as a unified country, instead of a civil war is to start by extending lines down from the 50K view. To meet your goal of changing the world, you need to eventually boil that down to action steps and this process of boiling down your life's work means starting at your top, with things like retirement goals and the goals you have for the next 50 years, and working your way down the ladder to 20, 10, and 5 years, until you get down to where the rubber meets the road (or runway in this extended analogy). As you start this boiling down task, you might see goals that work their way upward. In fact, ideally, you will have a situation where some of your more immediate goals can start to fall in sync with the loftier goals as a person.

So when magicians are talking about their true-will, this is where they are going with it. To understand ones desires, from the base desires like,"ugh! want to have crazy-sex shoot big imaginary virtual guns at people and eat cookie dough ice cream!" all the way up to the lofty "I must save the world—no one else is." is to get at the heart of ones "true will".

Now that I have actually read GTD (twice) and reviewed it, I am finally ready to explain my own implementation of its process. This topic has been expounded upon at great lengths by various bloggers, so even if my voice isn't lost in the choir—or perhaps "din"—I may not end up saying saying anything new; the chief reason however, is to firm up and think about my own process of applying Getting Things done.

I am surprisingly low-tech in my implementation, my computers and PDA are secondary to my GTD process. I don't have 43 folders, and I don't own, or even want, a label maker. This is probably like heresy in some circles, but I have done the folder thing before, and it just didn't work. I also don't generate much in the way of paper reference. Some people seem to generate 6 folders-full in a work week. That is about as much as I generate over the course of a few years.

My central station of stuff collection and lists are 2 bound notebooks: one for home, and one for work. I may end up getting a smaller pocket style notebook for when I am in transit as well, but for now, my PDA suffices (sometimes I feel that my PDA is a bit of a wrench in my freshly created GTD machine). I split these notebooks into 3 major sections: daily tasks, projects, and project notes.

I date each section of daily tasks so that I can have a peek at what I did when, which is especially important when I need to look at what day I did something for client work, or whatever. I write each task down, and a little check box beside it, when it is complete I check it off. If I have decided to not do it, I X it out. When I delegate the task to someone else, I draw a left-ward arrow across the checkbox. Of course, some tasks don't get finished on that day, so I just carry it forward to the next day, and then I fill in the bottom left corner (kind of like filling in a spare on your bowling sheet). I only do this when I have finished writing in the task for the next day, lest I get interrupted in mid-carry-over and suddenly a task goes by the wayside. Horray for atomic commits! Finally, this system is great, because I can look back over a week, or a month, and see just how much I have accomplished. It feels good having this kind of permanent tactile record. I paper clip old daily pages together, so with just a flip of the notebook, I can access the tasks for the day.

The projects section is full of lists-with-checkboxes, that are basically a list of all the projects I am involved in. In the GTD vernacular, they are a combination of the 20,000 ft. view, the 10,000 ft. view and the projects view. At work, this is a list for each project, but for home, I maintain separate lists for my PHP projects, website projects, commitments to friends and family, music, and all the other insane shit I am involved in. Frequently the project lists will have sub-projects such as a list for my Meditation project, or a list for the S9y plugins I am working on. The list also serves as a someday-maybe list.

Finally, the project notes are more free-form: mind maps, outlines, scrawled notes, images and all project support materials all go in there. I try to reserve at least one page for each set of notes.

Frequently I will need to transfer things between work and home, or write down notes and ideas, or even process incoming stuff as it occurs to me. I do all of this on my PDA, to be transfered to either my Work Book or Home Book as the situation demands. It also serves as my "tickler file" for any of my time sensitive personal or contractual obligations. At work, Outlook performs the same tickley function.

I have tried a few different methods that just don't work at all for me. The first of which was a pure PDA solution. You'd think that it would; they're small, portable, and fun to play with. The problem however, is that graffiti as an input mechanism just sucks; it is too slow for me to generate the volume of text that a daily task list entails. If the lag between thinking thoughts and writing them down is too great, I am liable to forget a few tasks before I can get them down. That is no good.

I've also tried a wiki implementation—also no good. The latency between updates was too large (more a fault of my server/connection then the wiki itself I am sure) and it lacked portability or flexibility. Sure a wiki is available everywhere, that is, assuming you have a computer. You can't really add drawings or mindmaps effectively in a wiki either. Outlook wasn't even in the running. It isn't that portable unless you are a Microsoft junkie, and while it has a lot of beef, it all seems to be in the wrong places.

So why does my method work for me? Well first of all I am a real hard core stationary geek. I love stationary. So an excuse to have 2 notebooks (as well as a journal and sketchbook) is a-ok with me. Raw paper and pen is easy to work with, adding tasks and notes are easy. Everything is immediate and available. It is also easy to get very free form, sometimes a task can be a quick sketch—a picture is worth a thousand words. The stacking and permanence of the tasks are also a visual reminder of just how much I am getting accomplished which feels great, and being a stationary geek, I love filling notebooks up with useful stuff.

As I work with the system, I see some of the problem areas that need fixing. The more savvy amongst you will notice that I completely skip the whole concept of the context based lists. I haven't yet had the workload at work to warrant that kind of list, but that day is fast approaching. At home it is another story entirely . Instead of doing a weekly review, and making context lists, I do a daily review instead. I prefer this method for now, as I have a few scant hours in which I can get the stuff I need done at home, so there isn't much in the way of context shifts happening. I have enough time to get a few important things done, a few smaller things done, and then its bedtime.

Also, in my notebook, I have intermixed my someday-maybe projects with my current projects. This is mostly just how I work, jumping from project to project on a series of whims, based on what my current interests are. This intermixing may make some of the more organized of you cringe, but so far it seems to be working for me, allowing me to get a lot of my smaller "maybe at another day" tasks completed, or that much closer to completion.

Keeping track of my time sensitive tasks is a hard one. Mostly I just need to get more into the habit of using my PDA and Outlook calendar. Really it is just a case of paying attention to them.

Finally, one final nitpick I have is that i haven't gotten into the habit of dating my notes. This isn't fatal, but it could be potentially useful.

In the future I am going to start playing with some more, and better, contextualizing. Contexts like @home or @work are just far to wide and far-reaching for my needs. I will quite likely drill down to things like inCode, inPhotoshop, etc. Most of my context shifts happen on the computer, rather then in the world around it. Instead of keeping separate context lists, I will probably maintain the daily lists, as it gives me a set of goals to reach, and just use "icons" instead.

I hope this little foray into how I get things done inspires you, or at the very least interests you. Now, do any of you other stationary geeks wanna hit up an office depot? Lets go!

Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a small book written by David Allen. It is, as the title suggests, a book explaining a method that you can use to get shit done. When I first heard about it, I had relegated it to a Tony Robbins style "increase your personal productivity" affair. But it make large in-roads with the geek crowd. It seems all kinds of uber-alpha-geeks have drank the GTD kool-ade, and are evangelizing it like David Allen is the son of a carpenter.

Why? At the risk of sounding like a bad televangelist (blogavangelist?), I'll give you the answer: It works. It's that simple. Most people have problems where the day-to-day interruptions and madness interferes with the stuff they need to get done. Some of us have all that going on and a hard time organizing their tasks on top of it. With all of this happening, stuff—sometimes important—slips through the cracks. usually this happens because there is a list of things in all of our heads of things that we need to do, but keep not getting done. These things David Allan says, consume a large chunk of our mental processing and energy because they are not getting done, but they are also not stored somewhere in a trusted system so we can let our minds forget about it.

The system that David Allen presents is a relatively simple one that can easily be applied, whether you are a stay-at-home mother, or a high powered executive, it is all the same. You can implement the GTD (Getting Things Done) system with a set of folders and a pad of note-paper, you can go high-tech and use a PDA along with the PIM software of your choice, or anything in between. The key is to gather all the "stuff" in one big pile, and start to process it all. "Stuff" is all the stuff sitting at your desk, in your drawers, filing cabinets, inbox, voice mail, window/mac desktop and even the stuff floating in your head. Once you have gathered all this stuff (and made it tangible) then you go through each item, one by one, and put it in your system.

The system is very simple, given piece of "stuff" you decide whether or not that item is actionable, and if it is, determine what that next action is, and either do it (if it takes less then 2 mins), delegate it, or defer it to a later date. If it isn't actionable, then either it goes in the trash, goes in a reference system, or gets put in a "someday/maybe" folder. the key to the whole system is "What is the next action?" which is to say, what is the very next thing you can do to bring this item to completion. "Pay the taxes" is not a next action, but "go to the accountants and pick up completed taxes" is. This has the effect of turning a lot of "small" projects into what seems like larger ones, but in fact, puts your mind into a sharper focus, because when you are in the middle of your day, you don't have to spend time deciding what you need to do, but instead go through your next action list, and chug through it, depending on time and energy available, priority, and context.

The hardest part of the GTD system is the initial collection procedure. David Allen says that it can take up-wards of 2 days to go through the initial collection and processing stage, depending on how organized you were before and how much stuff you have. Now I had it easy, I grabbed and started reading the book a few days after I started work at Critical Mass, so the initial stuff collection at work was painless, and it's kept me organized ever since. However, at home, it is a whole different ball of wax. I have since re-read the book, and have only just started to put it in practise for my personal life. Don't do this. You should really go the whole hog and organize your whole life, instead of just your job. If you do it half-assed, you will end up highly productive at work, but your productivity elsewhere will suffer, because it will be so much harder (by virtue of not having a working system in place). Yes, the initial outlay of time is hard, and the collection process is hard, but it is worth it.

All in all, I would say this book is monumentally helpful, whether you stay at home, work at home or work in an office. The initial investment in time is very high, but the return is even higher still. David Allen's style is light, friendly, and not too preachy. It can get a little new-agey-power-of-positive-thinking at times, but this seems to be more of an explanation of the result of the process, rather then part of the process itself.

If you have any problems staying organized and on top of stuff: Go. Buy. This. Book.