I took a couple of hours yesterday evening to work through a couple of next actions for projects that I wasn't making any progress on. Nice to sit down in your study room, look at the list "@studyroom" and know you're going to check off a couple of actions in the next hours.

What I noticed: sometimes those next actions are the wrong actions. After completing a few of them I noticed some actions further down the list that were actually more practical/easy/fitting to do first. I would have gotten earlier progress on my projects if I maintained them a bit better and spend more time on the order of next actions.

So: if a project lingers on your list for weeks or months: look at that first action and see if you'd rather pick another action as the next one.

Tags: gtd

A couple of weeks ago I got triggered by a short article on working in project space . I've got a great project/todolist application (omnifocus) but there are days when I hardly look at it as I'm on the roll with a customer project. So I considered that a possible problem. The customer projects are managed in our extreme programming management website. No way I'm going to type over my tasks into omnifocus.

I'm now making a distinction:

• Projects that I want to work on for an extended period of time. It is   actually entirely ok to get into the flow of a customer project and spent a   full day on it. One day of focused work can make a huge difference on a   project. Getting into the flow is important.
• Loose tasks ("buy diapers") or projects that consist more of separate tasks   ("eventually I want to move my website from vanrees.org to   reinout.vanrees.org"). I can do those tasks anytime I want.

For me, omnifocus is great for the second type of tasks. I never have nothing to do if I want to do someting: just give me the list of things I want to brainstorm on or that I want to google.

An important note: maintaining the system you use for that second type of tasks is essential. Get all your commitments ("oh, I still have to ...") out of your head and put them in omnifocus/excel/paper. Only then can you really get into the project-flow, confident that you're not forgetting important things.

Procrastination . Today I did a quick re-read of the main points of Neil Fiore's book about procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play. When I read it the first time, 2.5 years ago, I marked up the important sections with a pencil. With some help of the faster reading book I read a few weeks ago, the pencil marks allowed me to zip through it in 1.5 hours. Nice.

My goal: remind me of the important points of the book. The book gave me good input when I first read it, having been a procrastinator for a long time, especially during my studies. Well, time for a summary!

Procrastination is a defense mechanism. You're getting pressure from yourself; from a critical parent; from circumstances; whatever. When you can't cope with it effectively, procrastination is an (ineffective) coping strategy that's almost always available.

The goal of the book is to get you from procrastinator to producer. The number one strategy that helped me: change your language. Of all the characteristics that separate producers from procrastinators, none is more liberating than the producer's focus on "choice" and "choosing". So ring an internal warning bell every time you say "I have to" and "I must". Even if your boss is going to fire you right away if you don't do xxxxx, don't say "I have to do xxxxx", but say "I choose to do xxxxx". You are making a concious adult decision to do it, right? The number one tip.

For a productive life, you need guilt-free play. I'm going to a model train exhibition with my 5 year old daughter tomorrow. I have not a single doubt that that's a good and fun thing to do. And I've known that all week. Knowing I am going to do that tomorrow might have made me more productive. It will definitively recharge me for another round of productive work next week. Playing guilt-free is essential.

An example. Being a christian, the sunday theoretically "ought to be" pretty work-free. Halfway my procrastination-filled student days, I made the concious decision to treat the sunday as a gift: a really study-free day. It is intended that way. That made a difference in my weekly schedule: finally a day to recuperate without guilt! Time to hang out with friends after the morning service, sipping coffee. Having dinner at my place of at a friend's place in the evening and popping open a bottle of wine and having some great conversations. Guilt-free!

Another suggestion to overcome procrastination: paint a good picture of the current situation, the goal, the work involved, etc. An invaluable motivator in the last 1.5 years of my loooooooong study (it took me 9 years, 5.5 is about average) was a *full, online, public list of courses I still had to do. On my own website. And I kept it up to date: showing the courses that I made; the dates of the examinations; my plan on when to do them. A great motivator as I was getting credit for finishing off those courses. And it felt great to publicly check them off on the webpage when done. It forced me to make a plan, which made the whole daunting task of "finishing my study" much less threathening.

A final quote from the book: one of the best-kept secrets of succesful producers is their ability to let go of goals that cannot be achieved or started in the near future. Make choices. Make realistic choices. And don't be afraid to postpone something explicitly. But make sure you have a system that makes you re-view those choices at a later date.

If you're procrastinating, I highly recommend this book. The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play

Everything in omnifocus can have a comment: projects, actions, whatever. I've used the comment field on projects for a while for writing down the outcome ("the bike is fixed"). I've since just changed my style of project naming: big long-running projects still have a generic name ("customer A"), but most of the projects have an outcome-title ("bike is fixed").

I've now started to use the comment field for reminding myself about project support material. If I've got a physical folder "bike maintenance" that I use to put ideas and whatever into regarding bike fixing, I'll put a note to that effect in the project's comment field.

After a while I tend to forget I wrote down previous ideas and stored them in that physical folder. This fixes that problem once and for all :-)

Tags: gtd, omnifocus

Mark Forster proposes a will-do list instead of a to-do list. Pick one day's worth of items that you'll work on today and do them. If new stuff shows up, schedule them for tomorrow (or later). The will-do list is a closed list: nothing will be added. That way it is actually possible to complete it. You'll never manage to kill off your entire 200-item to-do list, right? (Incoming emergencies are marked especially as "this came in during the day").

In omnifocus (my macintosh GTD app of choice) I'm using the option to flag items for this. Every morning (or on the previous evening) I go through the avaiable tasks and flag a few of them that I'd like to accomplish today.

Problem: I flag too many items, so they currently drown out the rest. On the one hand: fine that I actually do what I'm planning to do. On the other hand: I depend largly on a quick scan of available tasks early in the morning. There's a risk of working too much on seemingly important items in a wide variety of projects: lack of focus and possible lack of working on the really important things.

I'll have to try and cut down on the amount of flagged items: use them more selectively. That way they'll also keep their power. Or I ought to be more focused on certain projects when choosing the items. Anyway: not perfect, but it sure does help me.

I borrowed his book (Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management) from my brother and missed the possibility of marking it up wildly with a pencil... I got my own copy for my birthday, so I'll surely come back on this idea when I understand it better.

Tags: gtd, omnifocus

In the GTD system, you plan in projects. A project is just a grouping of actions with one goal ("Fix bug in pdf generation"). So planning in projects, but you do actions in a context. "Google for obscure pdf error message" in the @computer context. "Brainstorm with colleague' in the @work context.

One problem many programmers have: 80% is @computer :-)

That's actually OK for me. Those contexts are especially useful for the other 20% of the cases. If I go to the city center, a quick look at the @city context gives me a shopping list. @zest shows things I really only can do while I'm at the office (Zest software).

A nice possibility of omnifocus is to nest your contexts. Some ideas on how to use that:

• Remember the big @computer? Most will still go in there, but I've added a   sub-category offline for when I have tasks that I'll probably handle when   I'm offline (which means in the train). And ubuntu for when I'm near my   wife's home computer.
• @city has a few stores I often visit as sub-contexts. Not that I use them   always (the shopping list for food is a note on the fridge in the kitchen),   but it comes in handy when printing the list for offline in-city use :-)
• When I have my screwdrivers and hammer out anyway, a quick look at the with   tools sub-context of @home unearths some small tasks that I can get off my   plate quickly now that I have those tools in my hand.

See also my first entry on how I use omnifocus

Tags: gtd, omnifocus

A few days ago, the final 1.0 of omnifocus was released. Omnifocus is a wonderfully polished "Getting things done" (GTD) application for OSX. I've been following the beta releases for a few months now and the quality of the software humbles me, being a software developer myself. Solid, reliable, userfriendly, handy.

Over the weeks, I'll think I'll add a few entries (look at the GTD tag) telling you how I use omnifocus. Here are some initial ideas that seem to work well for me.

• Weekly repeating items. I don't want to be bugged constantly by items that I   want to do once per week. But I do want to do them about once every week   (review plone.net, review projects, clean out desk). I   especially don't want constant deadlines for them. The solution in   omnifocus? Set them to start 1 week from now ("+1w" is the handy shortcut),   give them a due date 2 weeks from now and set them to repeat themselves   every two weeks, starting 1 week from the completion date.

• I've ordered my projects into three folders. One purely work-related   ("customers"). One purely personal ("personal"). And one in-between   ("plone/skills/maintenance"). In the last category are open source projects   that I might work on at work or at home. And planning work like doing a   weekly review with omnifocus: that touches both home and work.
• Above three project groupings are what I use as omnifocus "perspectives". A   perspective is just a saved view/filter. So I have a "work planning"   perspective showing the work projects and the mixed projects. And a "home   planning perspective with the personal and the mixed projects. Same for the   accompanying "home tasks" and "work tasks" perspectives which shows the   context view instead of the project view (you'll have to know omnifocus or   look at the 15 minute introduction video   to understand those terms). That "mixed" set of projects is essential for me   to maintain my sanity :-)

  Tags: gtd, omnifocus