Your Mileage Will Vary

This might seem like some "fine print," but it isn't really: It is distinctly possible that you will get nothing useful out of this blog.

Everyone is different.  We all have different talents and shortcomings, different wishes and fears.  And this is fantastic, because this is the root of the diversity that will hopefully keep humanity growing as a culture for a very, very long time.



So why should you believe me when I write that tool X or method Y will help get and keep you organized?  You shouldn't!

There is no silver bullet to issues like personal productivity.  What works for me won't necessarily work for you, and vice versa.  There's no way around it.  And you should run away screaming from anyone who tells you they've found a globally relevant way to improve personal productivity, cuz they're just trying to fool you.

People's brains are all different, so one size very definitely does not fit all - et vive la difference!

Since I recognize and admit this, it would be silly to focus only on specific methods and tools that I think will help the personal productivity of others, because I cannot possibly be right for everyone.  Of course, I will write about methods and tools that I think are particularly useful - in the hope that some others may find them useful too - but I'm also going to write about the meta-level - the more abstract level in which you ask yourself questions, and their answers will tell you which methods and tools work best for you.  I can't read your mind, but I can help you learn to know your own mind.

So you're going to find a lot of questions in my posts, questions directed at you.  Questions that I've asked myself too.  They're the questions that have made me think about how and why I try to keep myself organized, and how I've gone about trying to organize myself.

A lot of the stuff in this blog will have to do with my own answers to those questions - the solutions that have worked for me.  But you're different.  So if my solutions don't work for you, hopefully you can use the questions themselves to come up with your own solutions.

And I won't mind answering your questions - as best I can - via the comments you can leave on this blog.  I do this out of motivated self-interest: I'm not perfect, and a really good question can lead me to correct my own mistakes.  But also, of course, it might help you too.

Why should you think you need to be any better organized than you already are?  What is it about your life that makes you think you need to be better organized?

Are people just telling you this?  Don't just take their word for it.  Work it out for yourself.  They might be wrong.

Are you missing appointments and deadlines?  This is a matter of discipline.  No method or tool can keep your appointments for you.  You can get software that will ping you when it's time to go places and do things, but then you need discipline to make sure you add all your appointments into it.  Discipline is still needed.  It's always needed.

You don't need to make yourself into a Buddhist monk, though.  All you need is to establish a routine that includes a few minutes where you can, without any rush at all, consider your tasks, appointments, etc. and make sure they're all in order.  I use the time in the subway on the way to work, and while I'm watching TV in bed at night.  It takes me five minutes a day to make sure I've got all my ducks in a row.

I believe strongly that it's better to spend five minutes a day instead of half an hour a week.  It's harder to find a free half-hour than to find five minutes.  Five minutes is more likely to fit in between all the other things you do.  A half-hour is more likely to be interrupted, and become an interruption, in your life.

Are you always rushing from one urgent task to another? Maybe you've got too much on your plate.  What's on your plate anyways?  How important is it all?  And who says it's urgent?  Do you actually think it's urgent?  Or has someone else told you it's urgent?

Sometimes it helps to look at urgency from the other side: just how bad will it be if This Urgent Task doesn't get done?  And for whom?

What counts as important?  We can often get wrapped up in things that seem to snowball out of control.  The funny part is that sometimes, by the time the thing gets out of control, it's lost its importance for you.  So now you're stuck doing this thing that takes up all your time - and doesn't even really matter.

This motivates the need for regular periods of reflection.  These are times when you stop what you're doing, take a step back, review what you've done, why you're doing it, what's to gain and lose by continuing on, and tweaking your game plan if things aren't quite right.  It's like a course correction: you (presumably) know where you're going, but every once in a while you have to tweak how you get there.  If you don't keep an eye on your course - and correct it when needed - you may end up somewhere else entirely.

Do you think being more organized will make you happier?  Well, it might, if you know where you're going.  Good organization can improve your productivity and increase your sense of accomplishment.  If, on the other hand, you don't know where you're going, you'll only go nowhere faster.

Organization and personal productivity are means, not ends.  You need good goals too, or nothing else will matter.

So why aren't you happy?  Is it that you're not getting what you want?  What are your desires? Are your desires even reasonable?  Are you biting off more than you can chew, or are you just chewing into something nasty?

Be specific!  It's not enough to "not like your job" because there's so many aspects of a job that you can not like.  I love to teach.  I love to do research.  And I just fracking hate, detest, and abhore the administrative parts (which I call administrivia).  Unfortunately, the administrivia will easily consume most of my time if I let it.  So I try my darnedest to avoid administrivia.  Sometimes that means giving up a teaching activity or a research activity that I would have enjoyed.  But in the long run, I'm happier with the absolute minimum of administrivia in my life.  In the long term, this has worked out well for me.

These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself.  I'll revisit many of these questions over time.  And so should you, plus any other questions that you yourself think of.

Don't try to deal with them all at once.  Make a list of them.  Pick one and ponder it (in your spare time, as you drift off to sleep, on the subway to work... wherever) till you can answer it.  The other questions can wait.  One thing at a time will get you there.

Remember, your mileage will vary.

(And in case you're wondering: I keep myself organized because I'm lazy.  By staying organized, I end up with more free time to do whatever comes over me.  For me, it's all about having free time.)

Balance, Effectiveness, and Efficiency

I've already described what balance is.  In this post, I'm going to relate balance to two key factors that affect productivity: effectiveness and efficiency.

The way things are - the current state - can be described in terms of forces acting on us.  The current state largely defines how effective and how efficient we are at things.  If we want to change our efficiency or our effectiveness, we need to change the forces at work.  But to know how to change the forces, we need to understand more about our current level of efficiency and effectiveness.  So knowing about effectiveness and efficiency, as it pertains to our lives, is a necessary prerequisite.



There is a global interest in efficiency these days, so this is a good place to start.  Efficiency is quantitative.  It describes how much we can do, the speed we can do it, and the error rate of our activity.  Efficiency is a big deal these days because of climate change; if we're not efficient, then we're creating waste, and waste is a key factor in climate change.

Applied to personal productivity, we're talking about wasted time and wasted effort.  If you can cut down on the time and effort you waste, then your efficiency - and therefore your productivity - will improve.

This can be very hard to do, because once you've done something, you can't just go on to the next thing.  You need to stop, step back, and assess how you did that one thing.  What sources of waste were there?  How can you offset those wastes?  All this reflection itself takes time and effort, which eats into your free time.  So trying to make yourself efficient can actually make you less efficient.

That's why time management systems exist: they provide the methods and tools you need to skip doing all that reflection, and still improve your efficiency. Of course, everyone's brain works differently, so one time management system will work for everybody.  And that's why there's so many time management systems out there.

But there's a problem with efficiency: too much efficiency will make a thing too sensitive to change.  To be extremely efficient, you have to be extremely specialized.  But when the current state changes, your specialization becomes irrelevant, and your efficiency takes a nose dive.  Extremely efficient systems are brittle - they can't handle much variability before they shatter like glass.

The U.S. financial system is a great example.  It was hyperspecialized - and therefore hyperefficient - at making money for anybody who could get involved.  But it got stressed a little too much, and BAM! it just fell apart.

This same effect is evident in the animal kingdom too.  Animals that are too specialized just can't handle situations where the context changes too quickly.  A cheetah is very fast when it's running in a straight line - it's specialized for that sort of thing.  But once it's up to speed, it can't manoeuvre worth a damn.  Horses are specialized for running on relatively flat areas, whereas mountain goats are specialized for getting around on very uneven ground.

A key reason why humans are the most powerful creatures on the earth is because we're not specialized.  We're adaptive.  Lots of animals are faster than humans, or stronger than humans, or bigger (or smaller) than humans.  But we can adapt better than other animals.  So no matter what Mother Nature throws at us - no matter how the current state changes - humans are more likely to survive than other animals because we're not hyperspecialized to the current state.

Adaptability is a sign of effectiveness, which is the other side of the efficiency coin.  While efficiency is quantitative, effectiveness is qualitative.  Efficiency relates to how fast we do things; effectiveness relates to how well we do things.

Effectiveness and efficiency are the yin and yang of balance in personal productivity.  They're the two basic forces at work.  Too much of either one and, overall, you suffer.  Striking the right balance between them is the key to optimal productivity, traded off with everything else - happiness.

Effectiveness is important because the world will change around you.  You need to be able to change with it, to adapt, so that you can keep going.

You might be spending 80 hours a week at work, and you might be terribly efficient during those 80 hours, but how effective is that if you have no life?

You might be able to churn through email at a voracious rate, but how effective is that when you can't get online?

You might be able to accurately account for and optimize every minute of your business day, but how effective is that if everyone you work with works to only a resolution of 15-minute blocks?

You might have optimized your finances to the point of saving more money than anyone else you know, but how effective is that if you'll live your life as a hermit and a miser?

Effectiveness is grossly underrepresented in modern society, but effectiveness is where the real good comes from whatever you do.  If you can't be effective then, quite frankly, there's not much point in doing anything.

So the real question of balance is simple: we need to balance efficiency and effectiveness.  Everyone will find a different balance point, because everyone's situation is different.

The most basic questions you can ever ask yourself are:

• Am I really being effective?  Does what I'm doing really matter?
• Am I really being efficient?  Am I doing the best I can?
• Where is the best balance point for me between effectiveness and efficiency?

Many things I will write about will return to these questions, in more specific forms.

What is Balance?

You can see from this blog's tagline that balance is a big deal to me.  It rather makes sense to kick things off by looking at balance, and why it matters in DFW.

Balance is big in nature.  Ecosystems balance; physical forces balance; energy balances.  Nature's been around for more than a dozen billion years, and it's been working on balancing things out ever since the Big Bang.  I humbly suggest there's something to this balance thing.



We humans tend not to do well when it comes to finding balance.  If you're liberal enough in your interpretation of things, you could argue that all sorts of things result from imbalance: war, economic disparity, climate change, jealousy, and generally feeling like crap at the end of a bad day.

Here, I'm not worried about the big picture stuff.  Instead I'm worried about my own personal balance.  You're personal balance will be different from mine.  Having you chase after my ideals won't do you any good - don't even try.  Instead, try to ask yourself the same questions I do, and accept that you'll answer them differently.  Vive la difference!

Probably the easiest way to think about balance is to consider an analogy with physical forces.  Physical forces cause change in things: they make things bend, speed up, slow down, turn one way or another, change shape, and explode.  If, however, you introduce a balancing force that acts against the first one, the changes stop:

• Your car speeds up until the force of the engine is balanced by the drag forces of the wind.
• The force of gravity pulls things down till they hit the earth, at which point the resisting force of the ground balances out and stops the falling thing.
• You squeeze a stress ball and it changes shape till the force of your hand balances against the resistance of the stress ball.

There's a reason why we think of forces of good and evil, economic forces, military forces, psychological forces, and so on: the analogy to natural forces works.

Balance happens when all the forces acting on a thing add up to zero - no net force means no net change.  If you don't like how things are, you need to exert forces that will change the balance.

The point at which balance happens depends on the forces acting.  Think of a seesaw with an adult sitting on one side, and a young child sitting on the other side.  How do you arrange it so the child can lift the adult?  Move the pivot point of the seesaw so the child has a very long arm and the adult has a very short one.  The pivot point of the seesaw is the balance point.

The way things are - that is, the current state - is as it is because all the forces balance at the current state.  Situations will naturally find their balance points.  If you don't like the current state, you have to change the existent forces - or add or remove forces - so that the balance point moves to some other state that you prefer.

The balance point depends on how the forces are directed too.  In billiards, a glancing blow at high force can be enough to nudge a ball in the right direction.  If the blow were head-on, it would have to be much weaker, or the ball would go flying.  So not only the magnitude of the force matters, but it's direction matters too.  When the cue ball strikes a glancing blow, it can careen off and hit various other balls too.  So while a glancing blow can have a desired effect, it can also have many other, undesired effects too.

When you decide to try to change the way things are by tweaking the forces in action, you have to be aware that there will probably be unintended consequences too, and that you need to try to prepare for those, to make sure you're actually not doing more harm than good.

The forces that cause imbalance are always in flux.  So whatever you do to try keep balance requires constant vigilance and tweaking.  Setting the level of your house's furnace to maintain a reasonable temperature depends on the temperature outside your house, and the other sources of heat inside your house.  To balance those thermal forces requires regularly checking the actual temperature, and activating the furnace as needed.  Good thing we have thermostats - I'd hate to do that by hand.

It's like riding a bicycle.  If you were try to be consciously aware of every action your body has to do to keep riding the bike, you would fall off.  Go ahead and try it if you don't believe me.  Even for very simple activities - like riding a bike - the brain is not well suited to manage them in detail consciously.  Learning skills is how we make up for this cognitive shortcoming.  A learnt skill is automated by the unconscious parts of the brain.  Our conscious minds can then act at a more general / abstract level - giving high level commands that trigger all kinds of complex activities automatically in other parts of the brain.

Just because you like (or hate) the current state doesn't mean it won't change.  Indeed, the one thing you can count on is that things will always change.  Trying to manage them all consciously will drive you nuts.  But managing them well will help you lead a happy life.  So you need to learn skills that will help you manage things automatically, which will help you have a happier life.

This summarizes the key characteristics of balance.  Next, I'll write a little more specifically about how balance affects our activities, and how we know if we're doing things fast and well.

Welcome to DFW!

This is yet another blog about staying organized.  But it's not so much about life-goals and long term strategies, as it is about simple tools and methods that let you get more done.

I've worked at keeping myself organized for decades - I guess it's an occupational hazard for academics.  Over the last couple of years, however, I have reflected more intensely on personal productivity, and I've also read up on the many existent methods to improve my productivity.  Armed with that information, I've found I'm being far more conscious about how I manage my productivity.  Given my natural inclination to designing, it's not surprising I'm moving from conscious reflection into proactive design and development of personal productivity methods.

Obviously, it's very new and at the moment there's no actual content yet.  My "day job" keeps me quite busy, but I do intend to make this a serious project of mine.