Assess – Decide – Do In Under 2 Minutes

Well, since things are going on just well with my iPhone app, which, by the way, is called iAdd, and can be seen directly in iTunes here, I thought it would be about time to make a short video explaining what’s the thing with this Assess – Decide – Do framework.

Without further ado, go on and watch this (very) short video. I suggest you see it in full screen, since I fiddled a little with the app, and it would be a little difficult to see all the things in just one tiny window.

Now, you know. Hopefully.

As you can see, it’s not very difficult. And I never claimed ADD would be something difficult, on the contrary, it’s simplicity at its best.

I did this video after I started to receive the first round of feed-back form my very first customers. Without exception, all were attracted by the “clean” interface and the apparent lack of complexity in the app. While the lack of complexity is a deliberate act, the clean interface is just the result of enforcing the Assess – Decide – Do framework. The information is the same in every productivity methodology, it’s how you look at it that differs. And, for what matters, what really makes a difference.

One more thing. Before posting the video on my blog, I shared it on twitter and facebook. Apparently, people loved it. So, I think I’m not too far from the truth when I’m saying that I will do more of these in the very near future. I already got some ideas about some very, very short tutorials, under 1 minute, which will fit great in this video scaffold.

Until then, remember that iAdd is still in its very first stage, in what I call MPD, or Minimum Product Demo. In this state, the app is only enforcing the framework, making you the obey some simple rules, like

• you cannot edit a piece of information if you’re not in Assess
• you don’t have to “sign the contract”, to actually commit for a task, unless you really send it to Do. The task can stay in the Decide realm for as long as you want, and you can select different contexts or deadlines for it as you see fit
• on the Do realm you’re only doing, there’s nothing more to distract your focus from that. You can only see the tasks from whatever perspective you want: time (today, soon or overdue) or space (meaning the contexts you assign in Decide).
• you can only add information in the Assess realm, in Decide and Do, you are performing completely different. Some clients suggested that I should add the possibility to add tasks from Decide or Do. That is very unlikely to happen.

Well, that’s it. If you have the app, just let me know in the comments and also feel free to give suggestions, critiques or any type of feedback you want. If you didn’t buy the app yet, you can do it by clicking here, for just 2.99 USD.

Or, at least, you can start assessing the possibility.

Inhale. Exhale

For the last 40 days my work routine was completely messed up. Some of you noticed it by the number of guest posts on the blog, which was really high lately (and for that I am thankful to all my dear friends and contributors here). Some of you noticed it by my (highly unusual) low presence on social media, on twitter and facebook. And some of you noticed it when I kindly asked you a small favor: helping me test one of the most interesting things I done lately: an iPhone app based on my Assess – Decide – Do life management framework.

Why iPhone Programming?

I can hear you, guys. Loud and clear: “what are you trying to prove with this iPhone stuff? I mean this is hundreds of miles away from being a blogger. I’m confused: what are you? What do you do?“ Well, I can understand your confusion. It may sound a little bit off the track, but it isn’t. This whole 40 days trial had very serious reasons. Here they are:

1. I Love To Make My Ideas Real

Number one reason is: making my ideas come true is one of my biggest sources of fulfillment. I live for this. I don’t have any other satisfaction bigger than that. I mean we all have brilliant ideas. I know some people who can have at least 6 brilliant ideas before breakfast (that would be a hook to a very interesting book, let me know in the comments if you guessed what’s the book I’m hinting at). But an idea is just an idea, an exercise of the brain. Putting all the pieces together, making it all work in the real life, just in front of your eyes, here’s from where the real satisfaction comes.

2. Self-Improvement Is Not About Writing A Self-Improvement Blog

Self-Improvement is about getting better and better at what you choose to do. Writing a blog about it can make a you a very respected blogger but it won’t automatically make you a better person. There are certain skills required to create and maintain a successful blog, I agree, but that has little to do with self-improvement. It’s just a blog. Self-improvement means challenging yourself into more and more difficult ventures, and overcome all the obstacles. This is where the real fun is.

3. I Truly Believe in My Life Management Framework

It’s been almost a year since the first draft of my ADD life management framework. A lot of stuff happened since them. I wrote 4 ebooks (all of them with printed versions published on Amazon too) and started 2 live workshops, one on online business and the other one in professional blogging. None of this could happen if I didn’t consciously apply all the rules in my life management framework. In other words: this just works. It made me far more productive than I was even when I had my online publishing company (and I was somehow forced to be productive). So, knowing that the system has been tested for almost a year on my self, I had no reason NOT to make it available to a wider audience.

The Whole Picture

But wait, there’s more. Yes, of course if is The iPhone app is just a part. The product I’ve been working on includes much more than that. I already have an ebook describing the ADD life management framework in a very advanced stage. I hope it will be ready by the end of this month. Think at the ebook as of a companion for the iPhone app (there will be a whole chapter dedicated to it anyway). And there will also be a series of podcasts on how to use this life management framework, along with the iPhone app (or even separately, if you want, ADD is a very flexible framework, it downs’t tie you down to a certain setup).

So, please keep in mind there will be some buzz again on this blog and make sure you subscribe, because in the next few weeks I’ll be writing far more than usual. Or at least in a different manner than you’re used to.

But until then, here are a few screenshots of the iPhone app. The interface may change a little bit in the near future, but basically this is how it looks:

The Growing Process

After 40 days of totally immersing in a completely new area, I feel incredibly fresh. Yes, there were a lot of roadblocks and frustrations along the way. At some points I felt lost. I also felt like I was going nowhere: what am I doing here in the middle of the night trying to understand a stupid thing like a UIPickerDateDelegate? Why am I doing this instead of sleeping or staying in the backyard listening to some music or just going out to some party?

Well, I did it because this is what I usually do: I try to get better at stuff. I try to overcome my own limitations. I try to discover new things. And I enjoy this far more than sitting outside in the backyard doing nothing or banging my head at some dull party. I love to be challenged. And learning Objective C from scratch in one month looked like one hell of a challenge.

Now, don’t get too excited. Learning Objective C in one month if you’ve never been exposed to programming might be almost impossible. I don’t claim I did this. I am a seasoned programmer (I think I wrote more than 100.000 lines of PHP code back while I had my online publishing company).

And I also did something to soften a potential crash: a dry run using a low effort project, just to get a glimpse of what should I expect. It was what I call “calibration”: do something small just to see exactly what steps do you have to take. So, three months ago I created a small game using a third party SDK, Corona, which allows you to build iPhone, iPad and Android apps. It didn’t took me more than a week. The game, called iFlipEm Lite, was written in lua, a very easy to learn programming language. iFlipEm Lite ( iTunes link) is in the AppStore for more than 2 months now and it had around 1000 downloads. Not to mention the Android version which had around 100 installations.

Once I understood the whole process of app submission and logistic requirements for deploying an iPhone app at a more professional level, I totally immersed into it. I started to daily log my progress (or, for what it matters, my frustrations) and I committed to it totally. I plan to write a very detailed post on how to tackle such a job so for those of you keen on technical details maybe there will be something more.

Now, this whole adventure backfired at me in a number of ways. First of all, the blog suffered a little bit. I didn’t wrote as much as I usually do and I didn’t promote it (or engage in cross-promotions) as often as I usually do. I ran much more guest posts than usual. The subscribers number remained basically the same but the in the blog business, if you don’t grow, you don’t exist. Just being there means nothing, you gotta move. So, my blog was stalled for a little while.

But while my blog was stalled, something else was growing: my personal experience in implementing an iPhone app, based on my own ideas. And even if this wasn’t very obvious (or at least very public) it counts. And it counts a lot. Maybe some of my readers got a little bit confused by the fact I didn’t wrote as often as I usually do. They shouldn’t. It’s normal. I’m not a writing machine, nor do I intend to become one. I’m enjoying the process as much (if not more) as I enjoy the destination. So every detour on my road is part of the journey. And I enjoy it a lot.

Now, since everybody knows now what I was doing lately, a short explanation of the title.

Inhale. Exhale

Every time we’re immersing in something new, we’re inhaling. We’re incorporating skills, information, knowledge, experience. We’re totally immersed in this process. And this is how it should be, anyway. And every time we’re sharing or applying what we learned, we’re exhaling. We’re pushing away our know-how, enriched with our personal experience.

Our entire life process is unfolding like this. There is this game of pushing back and forth that makes the journey worthwhile.

If we’re too much into inhaling (acquiring skills, knowledge or money) we’re going to implode, sooner or later. If we’re too much into exhaling (sharing skills or knowledge) we’re going to dry ourselves out: we’re going to run out of experiences to share.

So, the growth process is nothing more than this simple, fundamental process of respiration.

Inhale. Exhale.

Assess – Decide – Do For Relationships

Assess – Decide – Do is a simple life management framework. Emerged from some limitations of productivity methodologies like GTD, and constructed with a flexible approach, ADD comes handy when you face difficult or pressuring contexts in any areas if your life. At its core, ADD is overwhelmingly simple, it’s entirely up to you to create your very own implementation in whatever area you want to improve.

In today’s post I’ll give you some outlines on how I think ADD can be used for relationships. It’s  my point of view, which may or may not be congruent with yours. And that’s the beauty of it: being so simple, ADD gives you a lot of room on how to implement it for a specific area, as long as you respect 2 simple rules:

• at any time you can be only in one realm, being it Assess, Decide or Do
• the quality of the implementation is given by the Flow, or by the smoothness you achieve in traveling from one realm to another.

If you’re new to my blog, or never heard about ADD like this before, feel free to read the introductory series here.

What Kind Of Relationships?

We’re social animals. We cannot function outside relationships, outside a social paradigm in which we interact with other individuals. Quite often, when you read something about relationships, it’s  about couple relationships. But the fact is we have far more interactions than our love relationships, and this approach will be geared towards this more general perception pf relationships. It’s true, love affairs are quite close to our emotional being, so we tend to give them precedence. Sometimes by ignoring other types of relationships.

Your social behavior is sculpted by everything you do, with everybody, not only your couple relationship. It really doesn’t matter if you have a great couple thing, if you’re socially impaired. And it wouldn’t help you much to be the funniest guy at all parties, if you can’t settle in a long term relationship. Besides living in a couple, there are many other levels of social life: friendship, relatives, work, incidental relationships.

The goal is to have a consistent relationship approach to everything, not just to your intimate behavior. Creating a manageable approach to every single interaction is what gives you balance, not excellence in one single area.

Assess For Relationships

The first thing you have to assess when in a relationship (again, being it a couple relationship, a friends relationship or a work relationship) is its dual nature. There are always two levels:

• you, as individuals
• relationship, as an entity

The way you interact as individuals is one thing, but your relationship expands beyond this. The relationship as a single entity has an impact on the outside world. Every single action inside this relationship will create something outside the reach of each of you.

I have to admit I never thought of that until I started to learn a little bit of astrology, and heard about synastry, or composite charts. By studying the charts of two individuals you can extract a lot of meaning for the relationship as a whole, and that relationship is usually different from what you would expect just by looking at the 2 partners. There is no 1 +  1 = 2 in relationships. It’s 1 + 1 = more.

Energy Exchange

Another key point in assessing a relationship is the energy exchange: do I give? and do I receive? You can give a lot of stuff: your time, your money, your knowledge, or you can just give love. It really depends on what type of relationship this is. For instance, if you’re having a working relationship, you’re giving both time and knowledge. If it’s a friendship relationship, you’re giving your time, your understanding, your listening capabilities and love. And perhaps some more.

The same goes with what you receive. You can receive money, time, knowledge, experience. Or, of course, love. If it’s a working relationship you receive most of the time money and experience. If it’s a friendship relationship you receive understanding, guidance, compassion or love.

The biggest obstacle for assessing the existence of a real energy exchange is the status quo. You may think: “well, he was always my friend, even if I don’t get much out of this relationship”. Or: “we’re married, what can I expect more?”. Or: “I’m not getting too much out of this job relationship, but I cannot change it”. Status quo is the biggest enemy of your relationship, because it makes you keep that relationship going, even if the energy exchange is not there anymore. If you can’t challenge your relationship at least every 6 months, you’re in a status quo.

The thought that you may get something unpleasant out of this assessment may also make you avoid the whole process: better stay as you are than to realize you’re not well.

Hopefully, applying an ADD approach will make things a little bit easier. You’re in the Assess realm, and one of the most important characteristics of the Assess realm is that you don’t have to decide or do anything. The Assess realm is giving you the freedom to see things as they are, without taking a decision. You may stay in the Assess realm as long as you want, without deciding anything, if you don’t want it.

Is This Better Or Worse?

Another thing you will usually do while in the Assess realms is what I call the quality assessment, an evaluation of what makes you better – or worse, for what it matters – by staying in that relationship. It’s a very important assessment, and it’s usually the very next after the energy exchange check. Since you already had an energy exchange, and decide it to pursue it, now let’s see if it’s good or not.

It will depend a lot on your personal values system, so there’s no rule that says: “this will be good for your relationship”. I don’t encourage anyone to buy ready-made opinions about what is good or bad about them. Instead, I encourage people to think for themselves and reach to their own conclusions.

Knowing if you’re getting something good or bad out of your relationship can be difficult. Things are changing, you are changing, the partner is changing. What was ok yesterday may not be ok today. Will see more about the time constraint in the next paragraph, but until then, let’s note that it’s very important to find a way to realize if it’s good or bad for you.

As a rule of thumb, if you can be relaxed in a relationship, this is usually a sign of positive energy exchange. If you’re uptight and feel pressure, probably you’re getting some bad vibes. But there are exceptions to this: for instance, if you’re having a challenging partner at work, that means you can learn and grow faster, although it will cost you a little stress. And you can feel relaxed in the company of a deceiving person who’s trying to fool you. It’s really your job to see if you’re getting something valuable or not.

The Time Constraint

Is this relationship temporary? Is this going to last more than a night, or a train conversation, or a temporary assignment? There are a lot of relationships modifiers based on how long the relationship have to last.

If you’re having a conversation with somebody you don’t know, about a problem you must solve, this is going to last until the problem is solved, no more. From several minutes to several hours or days. It will require a different amount of commitment than a relationship meant to last for a year.

I consider the time constraint very important in assessing a relationship because we tend to act on auto-pilot: we learned several approaches and we tend to apply them without thinking too much. So, we end up giving too much attention and commitment to insignificant relationships, while ignoring other, allegedly more important ones.

Let me explain: if you have a relationship at work with somebody who’s repairing your computer, you don’t have to give him flowers at the end of the job. A simple “thank you” will be enough. But you may want to give flowers to your wife every other day, in order to feed a longer relationship. We tend to take the longest relationships for granted, while new, intriguing things are far more appealing. Taking those intriguing relationships through the time constraint always puts me on the right track.

Decide For Relationships

As you may already guessed, this is not a guide on which decision you have to make in order to improve your relationships. It’s more like a general approach, leaving the implementation details up to you. However, there are some things which are specific to relationships, things which can dramatically improve the effects of any decision, making it work faster or deeper.

Transparency

Whatever decision you’re taking, in a relationship this must be transparent. It’s so simple, yet so often forgotten. It comes down to this simple word: “talk”. Talk with the partner about your decision, talk about what made you took the decision, talk about the effects of that decision.

If you’re not transparent about your decisions, you can’t have a relationship. It’s simple: if the other one is not aware of what are you up, can’t help you. Can’t disturb you either, that’s true, but that’s exactly what I said: this isn’t a relationship anymore.

Lack of transparency is very often the root cause of any bad relationship. Being it an intimate relationship, a friendly one or a work relationship. Just talk it out loud.

Challenge

Another specific point in the Decide realm for relationships is that your decision will be most likely challenged. The other one will hear you – if you were transparent about the decision, of course – and will respond. Sometimes will agree, sometimes not. That’s the nature of a relationship, there are more than one people in it and in order to function properly, everyone must agree.

If you’re a strong headed individual, that will hurt. Having your decision challenged can be a real pain if you’re not used to it. But once accepted, the benefits of this constant challenge will be fantastic: you’ll actually start to function on a new level, in a relationship. You’ll become part of something bigger than you, no matter the type of the relationship.

If you’re not having your decisions challenged, the relationship is either not working, or not worth continuing.

Do For Relationships

Again, the Do realm won’t teach you how to make a friend from your boss or how to avoid a weekly fight with your wife. You’re already smart enough for that. But it will show you instead some of the subtle differences of the Do realm when it comes to relationships, as opposed to other areas of your life.

Doing Means Receiving

Whatever you chose to do in your relationship, there will always be a receiving part of it. Since you’re in a relationship, you’re not only giving, you’re receiving too. The energy exchange you identified in the Assess realm will still be active in the Do realm, so better take it into account.

Like the transparency thing, this is also forgotten big time. One must be prepared to receive as well as to give. Not receiving from the other part (not listening, not doing required stuff, not accepting gratitude or love) will block and eventually drain the energy exchange.

Doing Means Completing

In a relationship you’re going to support, more than achieve. As an individual, you’re mostly achieving things, but in a relationship you’re forming alliances, you’re creating shared values, you’re implementing strategies. Keep in mind that whatever you’re doing, in a relationship your actions must complete the actions of the other partners, in order to have a working environment.

This comes often to a sense of oneness, a higher level of human interaction. Relationships are born from a need and as you’re satisfying your needs through that relationship (security needs, emotional needs, material needs) the other part must do this too. Whatever you do, keep in mind the other and his needs.

***

As you can see, in this ADD exercise, the biggest part is the Assess one. It’s not a surprise, since many relationships are broken because of hasty decisions or immaturity, which are both signs of an incomplete Assess realm.

Assessing what you’re giving and receiving through the energy exchange and putting it into a time perspective are not rocket science. They are simple actions which can be converted to habits and streamline your relationships approach. Other key points are that every decision will be transparent (must be, since it will affect other persons) and challenged. In the Do realm, expect to receive from and to complete your partners.

Any other ideas on how to implement ADD for relationships? Would love to hear about that in the comments.

Waking Up Early

Waking up early is probably the most popular topic amongst the personal development blogs. Not to mention the fact that is almost the first thing you hear during a personal development seminar: I will teach you how to wake up early, my friend. It’s the “Hello World” of the personal development (“Hello World” is the first application you build when you learn a new programming language). I have to admit that I was quite busy with this too, back in my early personal development endeavors.

So, why is this so important after all? Why waking up early? In today’s post I’d like to focus on the reasons behind this popular topic as well as on some of my own techniques to accomplish this.

No Time Mindset

With all due respect, I think that waking up early comes from a “I have no free time” mindset. Waking up early is for people who have daily jobs but want to win extra time on the side. Waking up early is a signal you send to yourself with the content: “free some of my limited, allotted time, and do it early in the morning”.

That approach changes your time perception. It makes time a finite resource. We may perceive time as a finite resource, but that’s only a convention. You know, when you’re in love, a second can seem like minutes and an hour can last days. When you’re bored, a whole day may pass in a second. We manipulate time through our perceptions. If we perceive time as infinite it will be infinite, the same as it is when we’re in love.

The empty goal of waking up early changes our time perception into a limited resource.

So, waking up early as a goal comes from a scarcity mindset. The underlying reason is: “I am in serious trouble with my time, I don’t have enough, I have to win some otherwise I won’t be well”. Lack of something is a powerful motivator and this motivator works for many of us. Especially when you can have some quick and visible victories. If you can create a habit of waking up early in a week, you’ll have some quick victories on your side and that will make some boost in your self-respect. You get the feeling you are not missing that thing anymore.

But the main question is: “what are you going to do with all that free time?”. I know people who were really good at creating the habit of getting up early but they reverted back to a different routine after several weeks, because… well, because they had no idea what to do with that free time.

So, if we’re going to wake up early, we need a better reason for that. We need to know what are we going to do with that free time, otherwise it won’t work. Or at least, it didn’t work for me. Waking up early must be a consequence of something much bigger than a habit, it shouldn’t be just a goal on itself.

Assess Your Time

What are you doing with your time throughout the day? Have you ever had the curiosity to write it down, to journal your time usage? I bet you’ll have some big surprises. It might sound awkward to journal every 15 minutes what are you up to, but if you can do it for just one day long, it will be enlightening. You’ll be dazzled to find out that your daily time is huge, you’re just not using it properly.

But, suppose you’re using it properly, but need more. If you haven’t notice it so far, I am using my Assess, Decide, Do life management framework for this. If you haven’t read yet the ADD series, feel free to do it right now and then come back here to read this post. By using this ADD approach, we’re going to traverse each of the necessary realms (from assessment to doing) until we’re actually going to implement the habit.

So, for now we’ll be starting in our Assess realm. Suppose we really have to do more (out of pleasure, for instance: we started a nice project, we love it, and want to do more of what we like). We gathered all the information we need.

Here comes the decision realm. We can decide to free up some time throughout the day, by eliminating some other tasks, for instance, or we may chose to free up some time from our sleeping routine. Again, suppose we’re not going to free time from the early night (which will result in going to sleep later than usual) and we decide to free up from the morning routine.

As you may see, this approach is really different from other DIY tutorials or self-improvement programs. We take a step back and first we assess the need for that specific habit. And then, after we have all the information from the assessment realm, we make a decision. And again, note that the decision could be quite different from our initial intention: we may find out that we’ll be better going to sleep later than waking up early.

Now that we assessed the need, took the decision, all we have to do is implement the doing part.

Waking Up Early – How To

In my experience, there are two ways to achieve this: brute force and gradual adaptation.

Brute Force

Back in time 20 years, for a personal story. At that time I was doing my military service in a Romanian city called Timisoara. We were still under a communist regime and military service was pretty bad. But out of nothing, during December, some people in Timisoara started a Revolution which ultimately led to the fall of the communist regime. Years after, that was to be called the Romanian Revolution. I didn’t have any idea what was going on in the city, but the most important result for me, as a soldier, was that I was forced not to sleep for 5 nights and 6 days.

That’s what I call brute force. From that event on I was able to manipulate my sleeping patterns much more easily. The duration of that sleep deprivation was so huge that made 2 nights of sleep deprivation in a row actually manageable. Of course, I was under extremely stressful conditions. But the main result was that I knew I was able to do it. Ever since I find it really comfortable to have 24-36 hours in a row without sleep, every once in a while.

Word of caution: I do not recommend to try sleep deprivation like this, it was just an example on how bigger and faster moves can make regular moves achievable. It was also something that took place in very stressful conditions and also generated very stressful effects, apart from this new ability. Sleep deprivation can be extremely dangerous for your health, and it is something you should know before starting a waking up early routine.

Another example for brute force is running: if you manage to run one day 10 miles, you’ll find the next day quite comfortable to run 3 miles, although your regular habit is to run only 1 mile.

I was applying this technique in my guest posting habits also. I never had a guest post in my entire life, but that was until last month, when I decided it’s time to start doing this. And last month I implemented an experiment called “Massive Guest Posting” (feel free to read the post for more info) during which I wrote and published not one, not two, not three, but seven guest posts. To make things a little bit spicier, each post was part of a series, was published on a different blog in a different city on the globe, but at the exact same time.

Guess what, now I’m finding pretty comfortable to write 2 guest posts per month, and that without affecting my regular writing routine for the blogs I already own.

Gradual Adaptation

Gradual adaptation is a cumulative technique in which you are making and assessing small progress each day.

It’s the 5 minutes per morning rule: put your alarm clock 5 minutes earlier each morning. If you do this for a week, you’ll have 35  minutes of free time. It’s important to assess the effects each morning, in order to see how much you can push. I know people who are able to push 5 minutes per morning for two weeks continuously. That gives them an extra 10 minutes aside the expected extra hour. Other seem to do it better in installments: 5 minutes for a week, than one week at the same hour. And then another week with the alarm clock 5 minutes earlier each morning.

Gradual adaptation works. Period. I never met somebody who didn’t get results from that. This is why is so spread as opposed to the brute force technique. I successful used gradual adaptation when I learned a new language and I found it much more appropriate than brute force. For instance, when I was in Japan I tried the brute force approach in learning Kanji. The result was a lot of frustration. I was so confident that once there I will learn my way out in one or two days that I totally neglected to learn some Kanji before getting to Japan. Once there, I was completely puzzled and despite my efforts I had to rely only on English signs for my orientation.

Adequate

Waking up early works only if you have something to do with that hour. If you don’t, you’d be better sleeping more and hope you have some nice dreams. So, if you ever want to implement that habit, I highly suggest to give some meaning to that extra hour. Start a list of things that you have to do during that hour. And then do them.

ADD stages – Do

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

If you came here directly you may want to check out first the Assess realm and Decide realm posts.

Today will talk about the Do realm.

Closing The Circle

The Do realm is where you are closing the circle you started to draw by assessing and then deciding something. It’s the final stage and the most physical one. Usually, what you’re doing is something touchable, real, as opposed to the Assess or Decide stages, which are mainly mental activities. The Do realm is like the visible part of an iceberg. You know an iceberg can show only a small part on the surface, and this is the Do realm, but the core of it is under the water, in the initial Assess and Decide stages.

The Do realm is also one of the most refined and talked about by productivity experts. Much of the writing and methodologies created in the productivity area is focusing only on the Do realm, including GTD. Productivity and effectiveness are mistakenly defined as a consequence of the Do realm, when in fact they are a consequence of an entire Assess – Decide – Do cycle.

If you did your job in the Assess and Decide stages, you’re not actually doing much in the Do realm. The only three activities are scheduling, prioritizing and finishing.

Scheduling

You have to create an understandable and manageable time frame for your activities and this is done by scheduling. You’re allocating energy and space. You’re putting some order around you. We all live in time and making the most of our time is one of the best thing we can do.

Scheduling means in fact to acknowledge that you will be available for that specific task at a specific time. If you’re not scheduling your activities, you’ll actually reject them from your timeline. You’ll send a message of non-availability. But if you’re scheduling, you’re sending to yourself a message of availability.

As any other activity, scheduling can be improved, refined and automated. There are tons of books on how to use your time, and the intent of this post is not to offer a scheduling tutorial. All I want to stress is that one fundamental activity in the Do realm is scheduling, or sending messages of availability.

Prioritizing

Reality is changing. Your universe is changing. What was important yesterday may not be so important today, or tomorrow. Prioritizing your doing means give room to what’s important now as opposed to what you thought it was important yesterday. Prioritizing comes after scheduling and it’s an important, often ignored part of the productivity process.

Prioritizing will conflict with scheduling and that’s something normal. Prioritizing means giving space and energy to what’s important now and reschedule what was left out. Many people get confused when they have to make changes based on the priority of the tasks but that’s an important part of the Do realm.

How do you know what’s important and what’s not? Well, that is something you will have to micro Assess-Decide-Do every time. As I already mentioned, ADD is an abstract framework and supports any implementation you want. For instance, there will be a different prioritizing strategy in an ADD implementation for programming, than to an ADD implementations for relationships.

Finishing

If you start doing something, finish it. Or cut it out, if you can’t do it anymore. As simple and dumb as it sounds, finishing is a very important part of the doing process. So important, that I felt the need to make it a separate process.

One of the most subtle yet powerful ways to procrastinate (like really procrastinate, loosing your time) is to remain stuck in a project or task for ever. There is this pressure not to finish the task, because… well, because you’ll have to do something else. And you don’t want. Or you are scared. Or bored. Or whatever.

I’ve been there so many times that I had to come up with a finishing strategy. I’ve been caught in so many situations where finishing seemed strange or inconvenient or not appropriate that I really had to reconsider all my attitude towards finishing. I’m sure you’ve been there: caught in a sticky relationship, in a never-ending project, in a just-above-the-fold job, and so on.

Finishing is the most important part of doing something. It frees your resources, it makes room for something new and it feeds the next Assess session. If you’re not finishing what you’re doing, you’ll never be able to assess what you’ve done so far. Your ADD cycle will be stuck.

Creating Miracles

Doing is where the miracle takes place. By doing what you assessed and decided, you’re changing your reality the way you want. Assessing is just a perspective and the decision is just an intention. If those are not backed up with constant activity and with real life actions, your Assess-Decide-Do cycle will be broken.

But if you’re staying enough time in this cycle, if you succeed in Assessing, Deciding and Doing on a regular basis, if you engage totally in each part and let yourself flow freely through those stages, if you really become aware of the whole process, as simple and yet as powerful as it is, you’re going to create miracles.

Starting with yourself.

ADD stages – Assess

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

Today will talk about the Assess realm.

Evaluation

The Assess realm is the place where you will do most of your evaluation. You can evaluate your current situation, the outcome of a previously done task, a possible outcome for a possible task, in one word: everything. In the evaluation process you don’t necessarily have to DO, or DECIDE anything, but this process will deeply impact any of your deciding or doing activities.

Evaluating without the pressure of a decision or a deadline is a very necessary step. Too often I found myself lost in a decisional process or even in the middle of a larger project because I skipped or under-considered the evaluation/assessment step. Assessing something means you’re simply looking at something, you’re acknowledging the fact that something new (or worthy) have entered your focus.

Evaluation is only one of the possible activities in an assessment stage, but it’s usually the one that ends this very stage, by promoting the idea, the project or the task to the decision realm.

Information Management

The assessment stage is the one in which you’ll do most of your information management. Crunching new pieces of information, categorizing them, putting higher or lower in your value system is an activity which takes place in the assessment stage. Again, mixing it with a decision or a doing realm will do no good, as it will either slow down the decision or the doing process, either tamper it with undesired pieces of information.

Managing information is a static activity in itself. You’re not doing anything – doing, as in modifying your universe – while you’re managing information, you’re just classifying various inputs from the outside (or the inside world).

Feed-back

As the name implies, feed-back is an activity which takes place immediately after something was done, after something has been modified in your own Universe. Assessing feed-back is a crucial activity in the assessment stage, it really helps you understand if your actions were improving or wrecking your environment.

You take feed-back by comparing your initial status, the moment you started modifying something in your universe, with your current status. You will receive feed-back for a wide variety of sources: your physical senses (as in it’s colder or warmer than before)., your emotions (this thing makes me feel in a certain way), your memories (this looks a lot like something I’ve done before) or the people you interact with.

Feed-back is usually one of the earliest activities in the assessment stage, as it is often immediately required after an action has been finished.

Observation

Assessment cannot work without fresh information, it needs this as a comparison outlet. In the assessment stage you’ll observe a lot. Observation is an activity closely related to information management, but its place is at the very beginning of the information management. Observation is an input for the information management activity.

As any input, the clearer and less distorted, the best the results. Observing things as they are, and not as you imagine they are is an art in itself. Training observation is a difficult and delicate activity. Becoming a detached observer will make your assessment periods shorter.

Dreaming

Dreaming is the capacity of imagining things which are not yet real. Dreaming plays a very big part in the assessment period. Most of the time, you decide to do things based on deep and extremely emotional inputs, coming from what you call your dreams. Creating a newer and better reality comes from dreaming first, from the ability to imagine unborn things and ignite the triggers to create them.

The classical approach to dreaming is to either discard it totally as completely unproductive, or to classify it as procrastination, the activity in which you are preventing yourself from doing things, by inventing excuses. I do think dreaming is fundamental and is a very productive activity. As long as you acknowledge it as a very necessary step in the assessment realm.

Memories

The things you’re doing are becoming memories the moment you finish them. Accessing your memories is an important part of your life. It helps maintain an identity and a sense of coherence in time. Without memories, your perspective can become twisted. Most of the time, your value system is based on things you recall as being good or bad to you.

Keeping your memories in good shape – like in creating and maintaining a memories management system – will hugely impact your overall presence. Only after you understand the past you, the present you can become a reality. One very common pitfall in the assessment stage is clogging your perspective with unsolved memories, with things from the past which are crying for a newer approach.

Solving those situations in the assessment stage will take a lot of pressure from your decision and doing realms.

Meditation

Assessment needs a clear perspective. When you decide, you already move, when you do, you are the movement, but when you assess, your whole world can slow down, until it becomes stillness. Nobody will rush you. Meditation is one precious activity which can dramatically enhance your perspective. Seeing the world from a sill perspective is enlightening. Meditation can do that.

Of course, is not compulsory to use all of the activities described here, including meditation. As a matter of fact, in real life, it would be rather difficult to identify all those activities in an assessment session at the same time.

When To Move To Decision

The moment you stop assessing something you should immediately move to the decision realm. Staying in the assessment realm for longer periods can induce a sense of comfort and security, which, if not rapidly challenged, will be modified pretty soon  by “outside” factors. In other words, if you don’t move faster, something outside your control will force you to do it.

One thing we should definitely want to remember about assessment, and about the whole ADD paradigm, is that any process can contain smaller, or micro-ADD cycles. During the assessment cycle you may find the need to quickly decide and then do something, and then come back to your main assessment topic. In this respect, ADD is very close to the fractals definitions, in which the smaller parts are actually identical with the bigger parts.

But more on that in the next topic, which will be, of course, about the decision realm.

Assess, Decide, Do

GTD is a wonderful methodology. I’ve been using it for more than 3 years and the benefits are unquestionable. I implemented it in several formats, from pen and paper to digital, and I can confess it really works. I’m productive and more efficient. But – you know, there is a but here – being productive and more efficient is not always enough.

GTD is a methodology for getting things done, period. But there’s so much more to life than just doing. For instance, how you get to know which are the things you want to do? How you know if it’s ok to do those things and not other stuff? How can you assess your overall progress, your internal growth? Certainly, GTD falls short here.

I assume that creating a life management framework wasn’t David Allen’s initial goal. All he wanted to do was to create a tool for making things happening and he succeeded wonderfully. Ironically, he opened a path which eventually made his tool obsolete, at least for me. I already wrote what I kept and what I left out from the GTD hype. And the reason why GTD is obsolete for me now is because I need something more:

A Life Management Framework

Doing stuff is ok. Constantly and effectively getting things done is even better. Is feeding you with self-respect and creates accountability. You have something to show, you did something. But after a while, I don’t care much about doing things. I already created this habit and I’m doing it easier. Sometimes without even thinking, which makes me believe I reached that “mind like water” inner state.

Then why I still feel frustrated? Why I still feel the need for something more? Why I’m not happy anymore just by doing things? Because I need a new paradigm. One that can accommodate my effectiveness with my doubts. My productivity with my laziness (which is not always laziness, maybe is contemplation or meditation). I need a framework to acceptably balance every aspect of my life, not just the doing part.

A life management framework should do that. A life management framework is not a methodology, is not a software, is not a sequence of steps you follow blindly to your presumable redemption. Is just a framework, a wire frame for your own implementation. A life management framework should be light enough to be remembered in one sentence, but powerful enough to sustain your day to day activity as well as your long term goals.

It’s been several months since I came up with my own life management framework. I briefly noted in one of my posts (when I got back from my trip to Thailand) that I will like to share something important for me. The reason I’m doing it only now is because I wanted to put it to test first. As a concept, as a mental projection sounded fine, but I needed to make an implementation for at least a couple of months.

Introducing “ADD” Life Management Framework

As you may already guessed, ADD comes from Assess, Decide, Do. I will start with a brief explanation of the concepts and then I’ll talk about each specific  part .

At every given moment I can find myself in only one of these three stages: assessing, deciding or doing. I’m assessing my current options, I decide what I have to do, and then I do it. From the smallest context in which I may be, up to the long term goals, my overall activity will fall into one of these categories: assessing, deciding, doing.

Every time I have a constant flow between assessing, deciding and doing, I’m managing my life correctly. Every time I have an imbalance in one of these stage, I have difficulties.

If I stay too long in an assessment stage I might lose opportunities or I might lose interest in the desired outcome. If I stay too short in the assessment stage I might lose some precious info, putting at risk my next steps: decision and doing.

If I stay too much in the decision part I may never actually doing what I already assessed and decided. If I stay too little, the outcome might be different from what I wanted.

And finally, if I’m not actually doing it – as in getting things done – the first initial phases were in vain.

A successful ADD life management framework implementation should take care of only two things:

• identify each of your current stage correctly: assessing, deciding or doing
• assure a smooth flow between the current and the next stage

It’s not a big philosophy, but it’s much harder to implement it then to write it. In programming, especially in OOP (Object Oriented Programming) tailoring this ADD framework to your needs would be called: “implementing the abstract class”. Those are just principles, abstract notions and it’s the task of the ADD life management framework to create an understandable, coherent wrapper on top of them.

As a wire-frame, this life management framework should be defined in only 3 words: Assess, Decide, Do.

Now let’s talk about each of those 3 fundamental stages or realms.

Assess

You don’t have to do everything on your agenda, unless you’re a robot with no free will. You have to assess everything around and take into account as many information as you can about any specific task. Assessing is one of the most ignored states of the contemporary, modern individual. When you run furiously in your own rat race trap, you really don’t have time to assess, you just run.

I find assessing vital for a successful outcome of any task, goal or activity I start. If I’m not assessing it enough, if I’m not integrating it into my own personal system of values, bad things are happening. I might get that thing done, but I won’t be pretty happy about it. To say the least. Doing something against your personal values is one of the worst things you can do to yourself.

Integrating a specific task in your personal system of values is of course only one of the things you may want to do in the assessment stage, you can have tons of other things to assess, like the short or long term benefits, the opportunity, the resources availability and so on. You do this on the Assessment realm.

I realized that assessing has a cumulative structure. I put together pieces of information, emotions, memories, until I come up with a specific object. When I can’t add to it anymore, when it looks the same to me regardless of my standpoint, I know it’s time to make a decision. Then, and only then, I can move to the decision realm.

Decide

As opposed to assessing, decision is a one point structure. Once you can’t assess anything anymore, you decide what to do about it. You have only 2 options:

• do it
• don’t do it

If you decide to do it, you’ll move to the Doing realm. If you decide not to do it, you’ll discard the task completely. The nice thing about this dual attitude is that you won’t have to postpone it. You simply decide you ain’t gonna do it, period. You have the freedom to discard it completely or to move it back to the Assessment realm. If you can’t do it now, maybe the future will bring some more info and you’ll be in a better position to make a decision. But you made a decision about it, you can move on.

If I know I have to make a decision about a specific topic I usually do it within a very small time span. Several minutes up to maximum 24 hours. I’m talking about regular, normal tasks like blogging or business. There are some situations in which the decision part can last several months, like moving to a new country or relationship decisions. But if there’s something within my current time horizon, I don’t delay it more than 24 hours.

Being in the Assessment realm before has a very big advantage: I already have all the info I need to work with. Now, if I decided I’ll go further, all I have to do is to move into the Doing realm.

Do

Here is the place for methodologies like GTD. Here is the place in which I make lists and schedule tasks and actually check them as done. If there’s something on my Do list, I know I already passed through 2 filters: Assess and Decide, so I don’t have anything left to do about that task. Except doing it, of course.

The Do realm can be repetitive and can last days or months. It’s not a cumulative structure, although it can produce visible results, and it’s not a one point structure. It’s more like a flow. It’s not unusual to be in the Doing stage for months, if I have a larger project, coding, for instance. Every Do activity or project can be planned and/or managed from within the Do realm, or at least I did it with good results.

Whenever I finish doing some task or project, I go back to the Assessment realm, closing the circle. At this point, I finished an ADD cycle. In this cycle I included a lot of activities, from assessment, to decision making and to actually doing the specific project. Usually, whenever I finish an ADD cycle I have a very deep and powerful sense of well being. Every cycle I finish add to my self-respect in a way I never experienced before. Every ADD cycle is far more than a checked task on a list, is more like reaching the next level on a spiral path.

ADD Imbalances

I couldn’t finish this introductory article about ADD Life Management Framework- yeap, there will be more – without a short section dedicated to ADD possible imbalances.

Assessing Stage Imbalances

One of the most common assessing imbalances is the “analysis paralysis” syndrome. You keep thinking and thinking and don’t do anything. You never move from that realm, you never get to decide what to do with all the information that you gathered so far. All you do is crunching information, in the hope that at some point that information will be useful to you.

Another common assessing imbalance is the “I didn’t know” excuse. You didn’t know that your business was entering a crowded market so you went bankrupt in the first 6 months. Or you didn’t know you’re approaching an aggressive or lazy partner and your relationship is a mess now. If only you took some time to assess…

Deciding Stage Imbalances

The most common deciding imbalance is the “one day I’ll have my own business” syndrome. In this case you took the decision but you aren’t really doing anything to move further. Your decision is strong, you trust yourself and your hopes are high. But you’re not doing anything, you just took a decision and never moved from there.

Another deciding imbalance is very close to shyness: I’m not going to do this, because it won’t matter or because I will feel terribly bad if everybody will look at me. Your assessment was complete, you moved to the point where you can actually start doing it, but you decide to quit.

Doing Stage Imbalances

The most common doing imbalance is the obsessed productivity freak. The guy that does stuff without thinking, just to be able to check some tasks done. This is the biggest productivity trap you can ever hit, and I saw quite often many promising careers falling down because of this. Just doing, without assessing and making the right decisions is a sure path to the underground world of the “still smiling but completely burned down inside” people.

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That was the introductory article about my life management framework. There will be more, because I am just scratching the surface with this one. But until then, I would love to hear your opinions, comments and suggestions. Do you believe in a life management framework? Do you recognize those 3 fundamental states in your activity: assessing, deciding, doing? Do you experience imbalances in any of the stages?