Psychology Today: The Creative Personality

[via delicious.com/huxant, w/a reminder by Jack Shedd]

Some days, I can’t decide how I feel about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say: “chick SENT me high”). He’s written some great stuff, but, sometimes, he mixes Big-Word academicspeak with anecdotal observation in a way that smells a little hokey to me.

So, although I’m trying not to audibly roll my eyes at a pop-psychology Top 10 list about creativity’s “dialectical tension,” I definitely am interested in one of his observations about the “paradox” of creative people.

Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility

This is a theme that comes up again and again when professional artists and writers talk about how they approach their work. I’m thinking in particular of things I’ve read recently by Stephen King, Anne Lamott, and Twyla Tharp.

Most all makers with longevity talk about a process that involves regular, scheduled work periods that allow generous time for warmups and getting into what Csikszentmihalyi himself has called, “Flow.” For as long as he or she can stay in that Flow state, a good artist is capable of synthesizing unbelievably disparate material and ideas in a way that’s often satisfying and productive. For those who cannot, it means another morning of video games, Facebook, and binge eating.

Artists who are in the early draft stage of a given project tend to adopt a generative attitude about capturing and accepting whatever shows up without judgment or self-editing — having a gentle attitude about imperfection that gives “bad” or “incomplete” ideas the same wide berth as the the apparently-great ones.

This is not stressful for the gifted artist who knows the dirty little secret that nobody shits a masterpiece; it’s all about editing, re-writing, and shaping the raw materials into something that will eventually become whole, polished, and cohesive. Eventually. But, first, you have to get something down. And that’s where that supposed “paradox” sure comes in handy.

My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Selfe, introduced the concept of the paradox by saying it was something that “contradicts itself…or seems to contradict itself.” I recall my 14-year-old self thinking both my teacher and this recursive concept were very profound and deep. But, really, that second part is entirely appropriate here.

The artistic combining of “playfulness and discipline” only seems contradictory to the aspiring artist who believes creativity means buying a beret and playing a Miles Davis record while you shoot black-tar heroin. The truth is that creativity is much more about combining the self-discipline to tolerate ambiguity with the will to transform the results into something meaningful. It’s not really contradictory; it’s largely an issue of intentionality and attention.

If you can find a regular time and place where you feel safe to let all your ideas sit naked for a while, you’re much more likely to produce work you can be proud of. Granted, in the editing process, you’ll adopt a schizophrenic alternation between openness and judgment, but it’s still not really a paradox at all — no more than “heads” and “tails” make a coin paradoxical.

Sure: you can call this, “dialectical tension” if you like. But, from a tactical standpoint, this stuff comes down to basic attention management — finding a way to shut out everything that’s not the thing that requires your focus to get made.

And, yeah, “talent” doesn’t hurt either, but there’s no way to even discover if you have talent until you’ve made a lot of crap and an occasional good thing, and find a way for that all to be okay. Plus, anyone can tell you, “talent” is like having a nice ass or a rich father; it helps open doors, but the actual work on the other side of the door is all on you.

Donate your beret to Goodwill, clear a Saturday morning, and maybe brew a pot of coffee. You have a lot of work to do, and the paradox is that you can’t work on it while you’re reading about the non-paradox of creative paradoxes.

How you like that one, Mr. Selfe?

My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they’re planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I’m late getting it to them (typical), but if it’s still useful, I’ll post it here in a day or four.

As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog.

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their specific trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.
6. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.
8. Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

Coming soon: the blogs I read, enjoy, envy, and admire.

Last night, I got home from a lovely one-day trip to do some speaking, and I was catching up on a couple emails before I went to bed. One of the messages was a thoughtful note from someone who works in the US Government (and whose name, job, and identifying elements I’m changing to protect his or her privacy).

“Sally,” I’ll call her, likes the 43 Folders stuff, but has legitimate concerns about how all this “attention management” stuff might send a wrong or hostile message to her colleagues. It’s a great point.

As is so often the case, I ended up realizing I had a lot to say in the response, and, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share what I had to say to Sally with you, as well. Especially since it’s a question that’s been coming up a lot, and I’m happy to have had the chance to address it at length.

A Nice Exchange with “Sally”

“Sally Griffith” wrote:

Heya, Merlin - big fan of all your talks and trying to figure out a way to get the [BIG US GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT] to hire you to speak to we [KNOWLEDGE WORKERS] who really produce nothing but knowledge - and then only occasionally.

I just looked at your new slide deck. The one thing I didn’t see (but you may have covered it in your patter) are the intangible “costs” of working in this way. An open door policy gets you interrupted, but pays off in morale and people thinking that you care. Walling yourself off from distractions, you project a nasty image: if I ever were to give anybody a token that says “don’t waste my time,” instant loathing and mockery would ensue. So might be a topic for a future MM talk: How do you do Inbox Zero w/o sacrificing the intangibles?

Then I replied:

To me, what’s important is to make yourself accessible to the people who need you when they need you, but within reason — this is really different from ceding 100% access to anyone anytime. That…is insane, and it does favors only for the people who can’t be bothered to get their shit together and honor a reasonable schedule. (IMHO)

This is all about managing expectations.

Today I learned about a guy who’s one of the most respected and admired people in his company; and everybody in the company knows that his door is closed (really closed — no interruptions, no exceptions) all morning every morning. That? That is when he works. Then after lunch, through the end of the day, his door never closes — yes, come in and “interrupt” all you want. That’s the whole idea. And it works great.

He’s hugely successful, not because he says, “Sure! Squander my time whenever it occurs to you,” but because he essentially tells the world, “Look: both of our time is valuable; I will make time for you, but never for a minute think that I’m your Mommy.”

He’s created an expectation people understand and respect. So they get their shit together before they ever consider asking for his attention. That’s some Batman-level shit, if you ask me.

Also? People will always despise you if you end up doing less stupid BS than they choose to suffer. If you start to firewall your time, it makes you look like a “snob,” right? Meh. I understand and acknowledge your point — it’s up to each of us how to decide the most civil way to get what we need. And, certainly, jokey stuff like Mike’s meeting tokens don’t necessarily need to govern the way you choose to treat actual people. I should make that clearer, but I guess I hope that’s always understood: this all has to be adjusted to what works for you.

But I reject the idea that we should sweat those people who refuse to understand why attention is worth being picky about in the first place. If they can’t respect that in themselves, of course they won’t respect that in you. They aren’t capable. And, if you ask me, it’s time to stop positively reinforcing that kind of execrable behavior.

Then Sally responded:

Point taken. I’m shocked that you took the time to reply. You are a mensch.

Thanks!

Then I said:

For you, Sally? Anything! :-)

Because here’s the real (REAL) secret of attention management: once you stop doing all the stuff you don’t care about, you get an extraordinary amount of time to do the stuff you DO care about. Like making a connection with nice, thoughtful people like Sally Griffith.

Make sense?

your new internet friend,
Merlin

Odd Man Out

Here’s the thing. It’s like being able to see The Matrix; once you realize the control you can choose to exercise regarding your attention, you’ll start to see all the unnecessary waste that everybody else thinks is unavoidable, natural, and even healthy (“I NEVER shut off my BlackBerry!”). See? Now, you are the weird one. Weirdo.

But, man, what a difference it makes to see (but ignore) all those things that you used to allow in. Things that now just bounce off you like raindrops. While everybody else is walking around wearing sponges.

Guy on the Soap Box

Also? Yeah. I understand that I have a really strong personality and know how to push a button until it breaks. That doesn’t mean you have to love me or try to emulate me — you know what you need to do to be the person you want to be.

But, I also tend to shrug my shoulders at folks who charge that this kind of attitude is too aggressive. Maybe. Maybe not.

I believe this is a message that needs to reach everyone, and I’m entirely willing to risk people disagreeing with or actively disliking what I have to say if it means that people who feel they’ve lost control of their life may get to hear it and realize for themselves why this stuff matters. Today.

Why We Fight

As with any revolution, the attention management coup will not be without its (metaphorical) blood, toil, sweat, and tears. C’est la guerre.

Today, you can find 10,000 reasons to keep letting people, institutions, and media noise continue to waste your life. I have only one reason you should not, so I say it over and over again. Often loudly:

Your attention needs a defender. And the people who want you to apologize for that are precisely the reason you need a stronger and more unapologetic defense.

Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner. I had a pot on the stove and a fire going on the grill outside. I was fumbling with a bag of frozen peas when my three-year-old started shouting at me to fix one of his toys. ?Hold on a second, son,? I said. ?I can?t do two things at once.? He looked me, dead serious, and said, ?But you have two hands, Daddy.?

Too Many Pots on the Stove

My life usually feels like this. I set out to do make something nice, and I end up with a scorched side dish, charred burgers, and crunchy peas. The output barely resembles that delicious-looking picture in Cooking Light, but hey, the toy trains are running on time!

My immediate solution has been to limit the inputs and not try to do so much at once. If I can?t cook a nice meal with a preschooler underfoot, then I won?t even try. Chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for everyone, and you?ll like it, thank you very much. While this approach to dinner fulfills various statutes regarding child neglect, it?s also not very satisfying. Apply this approach to work and it certainly creates more time to do Important Things, but it makes for soggy, microwaved output as well.

For example, around the same time my son was questioning my competency with opposable thumbs, I was going through a phase where I had stripped by my daily routine down to the bare bones. I wasn?t happy with my word count, and I blamed it on the internet. I unsubscribed from RSS feeds right and left. I shuttered my blog. I quit visiting forums. I stopped following half the people on my Twitter list. And it worked, for a while. In the first few weeks of this monastic regimen, I wrote a 20-page essay?with footnotes?about my childhood baseball hero that was accepted by the first publication to which I sent it. Score. I thought I was on to something.

Then my ideas ran out.

My creative beast is restless and hungry, and I?ve learned that if I starve it by arbitrarily limiting its routine, it?s not happy. It?s all well and good to cut the fat out of your life to make time for what?s important, but you can take it too far. By turning off the internet, I turned off my source of inspiration. I was trying to write in a vacuum.

Apparently this works for some people. I was in a workshop recently with a guy who has a cabin in the New Mexico desert where he holes up with four dogs, smokes pot, and writes novels. He said it was the only way he could get any work done, but that wouldn?t work for me. Not yet.

Batting Practice

I?m learning, slowly, that creative work requires both inspiration and a certain amount of warm up. Fooling around online gets my creative juices flowing and helps jump start more important work. The benefit doesn?t come from the sheer volume of information I consume; it comes from redirecting some of that stream and trying to synthesize it into a blog post or a pithy comment, none of which may be things I?ll put on my CV at the end of the day. But one-off, frivolous activities like that keep my brain working, and help me warm up to create things that will make me proud. I?ve cautiously reintroduced some of my old online haunts back into the routine since the summer drought, and sure enough it?s helped shake more ideas loose.

To torture another metaphor, it?s like baseball players taking batting practice. It?s fun for them to crank balls into the cheap seats to make the crowd ooh and ahh. It doesn?t count in the standings, and yet it?s serious work. They?re sharpening their eye, loosening muscles, working on hitting balls to the opposite field. If they went a week without launching a few crowd-pleasers into the stands, their performance in the real games would suffer because they?d be wasting their first few at bats working out the kinks that should have been worked out in practice.

The same goes for writing, or any other creative work. You need to let yourself practice with blogging, journals, or throwaway poems and work under less than perfect circumstances, the same way a guitarist noodles around with chords while watching TV, or an artist scribbles on a sketchpad while riding the bus. You can?t be too precious with your words or your notes or your brushstrokes. Believe me, someone will be there to trash your work anyway, no matter how long you petted it and brushed its hair. It?s more important to keep your brain switched on than trying to preserve every last bit of inspiration.

Distraction as a Role Player

Blaming your failures on wide distractions like the internet is just an advanced form of procrastination anyway. I?d gotten so used to blaming the amount of time I spent online for why I couldn?t get anything done that it became an all-or-nothing proposition: work or the internet. Dedication or distraction. The distraction became an excuse for why I avoided putting in time on things that matter.

But the trick isn?t cutting out that distraction completely, it?s acknowledging it, admitting its power over you, then drawing lines and finding its proper role in your life. There is a big difference between surrendering your attention to the demands of someone else and simply letting your brain wander off and play on the swings for a while.

Your boogeyman may be Guitar Hero, or fantasy football, or long phone conversations with your friends. This isn?t permission to mainline RSS feeds or wire Wikipedia straight into your brain. We all know where that leads. But you?ll find that in responsible portions, your creative side feeds off those rejuvenating distractions. It can?t live on chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for long.

Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time & Attention (slideshare.net)

Thanks to my pals, Dara and Shawn, I’ve been preparing for a return visit with the folks at GoDaddy to deliver a couple talks on Inbox Zero and Time and Attention.

As I’ve been going over my slides for the Time & Attention talk, I realized I hadn’t shared how the material has evolved since it premiered at Macworld in January. Which is to say, “Kind of a lot.” So, I’ve posted the updated deck.

Of course, the irony of making cool, unbulleted slides is that the decks you create won’t make a lick of sense without the accompanying audio and — you know — human presence. So, I’ve made a special version of this for you to view online, adding slide notes at the bottom that can help give you the flavor for what’s happening as I wave my hands around on-stage like a huge dork.

I’m proud of this work, and I really hope you find it useful. The 5th to the last slide makes me teary. Partly because I really do believe this stuff is important. It’s about more than email and “productivity.” It comes down to how you decide to spend your life and, on some level, what kind of human being you want to be.

Many thanks to Mike Monteiro, Joel on Software, iStockPhoto, and Futura (the unofficial type family of Mssrs. Anderson and Kubrick.)

And, yes, here’s the minor pimp (I mean, it is what I do for a living). You can hire me to deliver this talk to the time- and attention-addled people you work with. Drop a note if you have an upcoming event where you think this might be a good fit. And, yeah, unless I know you really well or your company is giant, awesome, and MUNI-accessible: it costs money. Yep. So. You know. Serious inquiries only, and what have you.

See you soon, GoDaddy! I crave your hell-like climate right now.

Update 2008-08-15 08:16:27. Had some intrigue last night with the original SlideShare deck (and page) disappearing after an edit. (Confidential to SlideShare: WOW. Heap big bug, Kemosabe! 7- Must Fix)

Anyhow, I’ve reuploaded the slides here.

I apologize for any confusion and busted links. Some days, the internet is a sad, broken little roller skate.

Overcoming Bias: Planning Fallacy

Via The Guardian, via Chairman Gruber, comes this post from the new-to-me blog, Overcoming Bias. It discusses the research behind a common cognitive bias known as The Planning Fallacy, which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to “underestimate task-completion times.”

It’s summed up nicely by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter’s Law regarding the time it takes to do anything:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Sounds familiar. From the Overcoming Bias post:

People tend to generate their predictions by thinking about the particular, unique features of the task at hand, and constructing a scenario for how they intend to complete the task - which is just what we usually think of as planning.

[…]

But experiment has shown that the more detailed subjects’ visualization, the more optimistic (and less accurate) they become.

Cf: The Optimism Bias.

In my days as a project manager (and in another life as a freelance designer), I got into a habit that has served me well to this day: get the best estimate of both job requirements and time-to-completion that you can find. Then add 20%. Then, when nobody is looking, add another 20%. Then pray.

Although it’s no inoculation against the (apparently immutable nature of) Hofstadter’s Law — and you’ll still end up short most of the time — it can help you do one thing much better: manage expectations. Because you’re a project manager, not a magician. Magicians get cooler hats.

I think planning a project is ultimately a little like throwing a donut at the moon. You can never actually hit the target, plus you’ll be lucky if you aren’t hit in the face on the way down.

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail’s unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

Now, as a user, polemicist, and nemesis of Apple’s MobileMe problems, I’m not here to criticize the frustration about a broken cloud service; I know that feeling all too well and have the dents in my wall to prove it. But, I do want to talk about some strategies you can choose to employ whenever a change in access to anything unexpectedly rearranges your day. Because things do break, and there’s no reason you have to break with them.

One of the things that’s most helpful about a system like GTD is the way you learn to think of your work as something that can and should be viewed from multiple angles.

A 90-second GTD primer:

• Project. Any desirable outcome that requires more than one physical action in order to be considered complete.
  • “Present a persuasive pitch to Henderson’s group on 2008-10-03” is a Project.
• Next Action. The next physical activity I could perform that moves a Project nearer to the outcome I want.
  • “Call Henderson to schedule time and location for 10/3 presentation” is the next action for my Project.
• Context. Any limitation, opportunity, tool, or resource that lets me do one of the physical actions in my Project.
  • “@calls” is the Context for my Next Action
  • in this case, “@calls” serves as a list of all items I could do on any Project, so long as I have access to a phone.
  • (See? Different angle.)
• The Four Criteria Model. The notion that Priority is only one of four criteria in deciding what to do at a given moment.
  • The other three are “Time Available,” “Energy Available,” and (you guessed it) “Context.”

Got it? Contexts are a way to horizontally slice across all of your Projects in a way that lets you do what you can do at a given moment — even if it’s not the thing you want to do or most need to do. Because that’s life. And, sometimes, life is a huge dick.

Like a famous religion and a handy bit of Psychology, Getting Things Done acknowledges that, while you have little or no control over the interruptions and unexpected change in your life, you DO have the power to decide what you want to do about it right now. So, while you can’t run your life by Priority alone, you always have plenty to do. If you’ve learned to think in terms of Contexts. Get it?

So if you forgot your phone, skip “@calls,” and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip “@Boss,” and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip “@web, “and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You’ve already guessed it! Skip “@email” and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.

Sure it’s insanely frustrating and annoying to not have access to something you depend on. And, yes, it’s natural to whine about it and even burn a few cycles on a fast, cathartic tantrum. But, friends, if you’re so mad about an uncontrollable change in your life that it takes you off all your work for half a day, then you’re still playing in the minor leagues of GTD. And you’re not doing yourselves and the people you produce work for any favor in the bargain.

Plan in Projects, work in Contexts, and strive to not let anything stick to you more than you’d like it to.

And, seriously. Guys. When one door closes, just open a freaking window. An hour without email is a great time to dive into sixty guilt-free minutes of writing, reading, or even pencil-sharpening. Work the time.

Because it ends up being a lot more fun and useful to ride the wave than to yell obscenities at it for four hours.

ideas are just a multiplier of execution - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog

Derek Sivers’ short blog post from 2005 has been making the rounds lately — it came to me via Chairman Gruber — and I have to say, I can’t stop thinking about it. I think this is really profound thinking around the fundamental misunderstanding many people have about the value of ideas.

In a nutshell, Derek says ideas are valuable only inasmuch as they can be multiplied by execution. So, if you remember your 3rd grade arithmetic, you can figure out the product of even the most fantastic idea when it’s multiplied by zero execution.

I, too, frequently encounter this attitude of “Sign the NDA! Sign the NDA!” any time someone wants to tell me about their squirrelly idea for making a bajillion dollars on the internet, and I almost always end up saying the same six things to The Idea Men:

1. Ideas are like assholes and blogs; everyone has at least one. And the cost of ownership for an idea is nil.
2. Who will this product delight? Why does it delight them more than any other thing in their world today?
3. What stops Google from replicating your idea — at full scale and with a huge installed base — over a long weekend?
4. Who is the auteur here? Who in your organization gets to tell everyone else to shut up and follow his or her quirky vision and ridiculous obsessions? These obsessions matter.
5. Who’s the proven sergeant-at-arms in your group? Does this person have a demonstrated track record for ensuring that everyone else in the group is executing flawlessly on the auteur’s vision?
6. What will everyone involved give up to become awesome? Alternately, how will you know when this project has failed and should be euthanized?

It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.

They sing themselves little songs and tell themselves little stories over ciabatta sandwiches and Excel, rhapsodizing about their personal Candyland where everybody starts using their goofy product because… just…because. It’s crazy. And it’s everywhere.

As I sit here today, I’m more convinced than ever that:

“auteur * (2x execution) = awesome”

An idea is no more useful than a coupon for a bag of sugar; show me the finished cake, then we’ll talk.

The bottom line is that if you don’t have an amazing, passionate idea and the means to make it superb, you’re probably just a douchebag with an expensive phone. And a stack of NDAs.

Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds - Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun, writing on how buzzwords cheapen language, dull meaning, and enfeeble our thinking:

If I could give every single business writer, guru or executive one thing to read every morning before work, it’d be this essay by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

Not only is this essay short, brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable, it calls bullshit on most of what passes today as speech and written language in management circles. And if you are too lazy to read the article, all you need to remember is this: never use a fancy word when a simple one will do. If your idea is good, no hype is necessary. Explain it clearly and people will get it, if there truly is something notable to get. If your idea is bad: keep working before you share it with others. And if you don’t have time for that, you might as well be honest. Because when you throw jargon around, most of us know you’re probably lying about something anyway.

Marry me, Scott. (And, yes: I, for one, will stop saying “game-changer” now. Tic noted.)

Orwell’s excellent 1946 essay is freely available in numerous locations and in various formats across the web. I like this vanilla version.

[via delicious/charliepark]

The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen’s GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years.

When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here’s how I’d summarize each:

1. Outcome-Based Thinking. Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. Or as I like to put it, “How will I know when I’m done with this?”
2. The Next Action. Knowing that you don’t need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project; you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion.
3. The Review. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you’re doing gets looked at once a week without fail.

While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people’s results change over time.

If you focus on trying to master these three things in the service of stuff you think is valuable, you’re going to accomplish some grand work.

Slightly related, I wanted to share a modest, GTD-esque idea for a fast way to identify the actual Project and Next Action from within a big bunch of “stuff.”

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Let’s say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it’s:

Slides for talk in Arizona

If I re-articulate that in the following format:

I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR

I get something like this:

I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.

Now I’ve said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).

This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you’re feeling adrift about what to do with a something.

Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then figure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.