The Death Of The Deadline As We Know It

I was a big fan of deadlines. Chasing them. Crossing them off of my todo list. Striving to meet them. Spending countless hours just to prepare myself for this date with my deadline. Oh, the feeling of pride when I was there in time to make it. The inner power and fulfillment… Yes, that was a very interesting experience.

I’m not into deadlines anymore but I do remember the feeling of satisfaction I got from crossing my deadlines off. I still enjoy doing things, I’m just not into deadlines anymore. As simple as it seems, this is a fundamental difference.

The Word

Have you ever really thought what is the meaning of the word “deadline”? It has the word “death” in it. Never wondered why? Because a deadline is a line of death. Once you meet that line, you kill the task. You take its life away. You conquered it. You extended your presence onto its territory, occupied it and now you have the right to eliminate it from your system. That’s a highly motivating psychology. Also, it’s a very disempowering one.

Thinking in terms of “death” lines will make you assimilate the end of a task with its death. Doing things will mean kill one task after another. Slashing tasks over a to do list has this feeling of power: I killed 32 enemies today, I feel good. Tasks are not your enemy. Nobody is, in fact. You just pretend that they are, so you can use the “warrior” resources you already have deep down in your ancestral behavior. The pressure of doing more and more exalted our warrior style way over the safety level.

We position ourselves as conquerors of our own task land. What lies in front of our work day is a field filled with enemies that have to be eliminated. Every day is a battle. Many productivity techniques are using this subliminal approach. What you have to do is a burden. You have to take it away, to overcome it, to eliminate it. The more you eliminate, the better you’ll feel. Train yourself to become better at killing tasks.

At a certain level, this psychology is, as I already said, very motivating. Fighting for our survival is deeply wired in our unconscious memory. This is why we find it easy to understand this approach. Fear of our own death will push us to kill the “other”. And the “other” in this case, is clearly written on our daily to do list. If we don’t kill “them”, they will kill us, so we’d better jump off of our beds, rush into the subway and take position in our daily trenches, suitably camouflaged as desks.

But the downside of this approach, its disempowering part is that, by transforming your tasks into your personal enemies, you’ll eventually become so good at deadlines that life itself will look as a deadline. You’ll rush towards the biggest deadlines of all: your own death. Deadline by deadline, task killed by task killed, you’re going to eventually cross the final episode off of your to do list with great satisfaction. The ultimate project management victory: I crossed off my own death today.

For A Liveline Philosophy

Forget deadlines. Instead let’s have livelines. A liveline is different from a deadline in that it creates a new starting point. The point where you start something on the foundation you just finished, something alive. You restart the movement.

In Assess – Decide – Do, your tasks will always generate a new cycle. You’re not spending time only in Do. You’re also spending time in Assess or in Decide. Each time you finish a task in Do, you will have to feed your Assess realm with the results. You will evaluate feed-back. In this respect, a project is never “finished” in ADD. The graphical representation of a project in Assess – Decide – Do will look more like a spiral than like a Gantt diagram. I agree it’s a little difficult to understand this concept, especially if you’re coming from a long traditional task management experience.

A liveline will never ask you to cross a task over. You always have the possibility to re-start the liveline by sending it back to Decide, and, from there, back to Assess. A liveline will be met only if all its initial stages (Assess and Decide, namely) are completed and fulfilled. And every liveline will generate in turn several ideas, lessons or potential tasks.

A liveline means we’re taking the “death” out of the deadline. We’re taking the pressure out, we’re taking the urge of finishing it so we can get back to our regular life. Because there will be no dichotomy between what you “have” to do and your regular life. It will all take place in the same time/space continuum.

I hear you loud and clear: what about commitments? What about promises? What about our corporate life where we have to finish tasks before competition, otherwise we’re out of business? Well, if you do established a certain end date to a task, keep it. It means you Assessed it right and you also took the right Decision about it. If you spent enough time in those two realms, nothing can go wrong.

Every Do imbalance is in fact a liability you carry on from the previous realms. If you can’t finish a task in the specified time and space constraints, it means something went wrong on the Assess and Decide realms. Completing a task is not a function of the Do, is also a function of Assess and Decide. Until you won’t realize that, it will be really difficult to understand the benefits of the Assess – Decide – Do framework.

How about “unexpected” events? Let’s say you did your best in Assess to anticipate every possible outcome and you properly allocated time and space resources in Decide.And still, some catastrophe happened. A power outage 2 hours before the client presentation or a traffic jam which delayed your presence at that important meeting. Well, things are happening. It doesn’t mean you’re off track. Back to Assess.

In a traditional approach, you would consider the undone task a liability. In the best case, you would have tried to reschedule or postpone. Meaning you would still keep yourself in the Do realm. Stuck on the deadline. And for as long as you’re stuck in the same mindset, the problem will never disappear.

Take a leap of faith. Go out. Make a lateral step. Transform that deadline into a liveline. A liveline will give you flexibility not only at the action level, but also at the perception level. Start assessing what went “wrong” and see what could you’ve done better. There are many reasons for what you can’t really Do a thing. Keeping yourself only in Do will hide those details, will lock you in the Do box. You can’t see the real picture if you’re not taking time to assess.

Perhaps the presentation wasn’t ready. Perhaps the client wasn’t ready to receive your message. Perhaps the meeting wasn’t very good for your career. There are so many things you should ponder about what’s happening around you and still, because you’re pressuring on Do, you skip them. Or you avoid them consciously because they won’t “help” you in any way.

Inject Some Life Into That Deadline

And make it a liveline. By now, you should have understand that there is a little bit of a word game here: dead versus alive. I deliberately pushed the comparison a little bit. Of course you will commit to doing things in Assess – Decide – Do too. Of course you will do the best to meet your own expectations, at least. What’s different, though, from the traditional productivity approach, is an unprecedented degree of flexibility.

In a traditional approach, if something went wrong, you would at best re-schedule and try to refill the Do realm with that task. Or lose it all together. In Assess- Decide – Do, you will reintroduce the task into your Assess realm. Of course you can just Re-Decide it, and in many day by day circumstances, that would be the expected reaction, but you also have another realm to work with, Assess.

I will avoid using a term like “planning” when it comes to Assess. You do much more than planning. You evaluate, you imagine, you wait, you dream about it, you play with the task as in a dream world. The degree of flexibility offered by the mere idea that you can be productive while Assessing is incredible.

And finally, one of the most important benefits of this bouncing back and forth is the organic rearrangement of your activity. Projects, tasks and events will start to fall into their places. The initial feeling will be one of melting, of losing control. But after this rather scary period, another feeling will come into place: the feeling of flow. There is an inner capacity of natural order, of simple flow from one project to another.

The deadline carries with it a threat. If you won’t do it, something or somebody must die. In 99,99% of the cases, the task will die, and you will actually kill it. But a liveline will not have any threat associated. It’s like “doing nothing” and yet “doing it”. A good deal of resistance to implementing Assess – Decide – Do will come, ironically, from the fact that you associate “doing” things with pressure. And when you’re not feeling pressure you’re going to feel like you’re doing nothing. If there’s no deadline it means there’s nothing to do, right? Wrong. you can do things in the absence of a deadline, just by knowing that the results of your work will not get lost in a to do planner, but they’ll be part of a bigger, flexible system that you can work with. I know, you associated doing with pressure. But no, with a liveline there is no pressure. And you can still do things.

Now, I hear you for the final question: are one going to do more using Assess – Decide – Do than using any other productivity framework? My answer to this question will always be: “more” is not automatically “better”. The consumerist obsession put a lot of weight on “more”. If you live in the deprivation of only one realm, spending your entire life in the Do realm, “more” becomes important. “More” is a way of measuring what you’re Doing. But once you get out of the prison of Doing, spending time in Assess and Decide, “more” will lose its meaning as a measurement tool. It will be only a choice, an assessment. I can Do more today, or I can spend more time Deciding or Assessing.

***

Ok, this was a teaser. What you just read is just a chapter from my upcoming ebook: “Assess – Decide – Do: Natural Productivity”. The ebook will be launched this Friday, on September 17th, but you will be able to pre-order it at a significant discount starting this Wednesday. Many concepts you read in this article and seemed a little foggy will come to life by reading the entire ebook. It’s a 150 pages text, grouped in 3 main parts. The last one is a very thorough guide of iAdd for iPhone, the app which puts the power of this framework literally in your hand.

If you’re a blogger, your audience is revolving around productivity or lifestyle design and you feel like reviewing the ebook, you can have a chance to get a copy of it for free, as long as you commit to review it on your blog. It doesn’t have to be a positive review, just an honest one. I’ve done this before with other ebooks I wrote and I was positively surprised by the results. After the ebook launch, next week, I will also do a round up of the reviews and post links to the blogs who published them. So, you’re not only getting the ebook for free, you also get a link back to your blog from quite a popular site. So, if you’re into it, just hit me up with an email in which you’re telling me your blog address, a few words about yourself and why would you like to review it. You should also tell me if you want to become an affiliate (you may include affiliate links in your review, if you want).

Other than that, I’m really looking forward to this Friday, September 17th, this is one of the most interesting livelines I’ve set up lately .

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.

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.

***

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?

The Productivity Trap

No more than 2-3 years ago I was a productivity freak. At that time I was in charge of my own business, an online publishing company started 10 years ago. I was managing basically all the aspects of that company and that created a fantastic pressure on my health and time. I had to be more productive otherwise I would surely crack up.

About that time also I started to be involved in productivity techniques such as GTD and other personal improvement techniques like NLP or Transactional Analysis. Being a quite early GTDer made this blog moderately popular and that served as an encouragement to me. I continued on this path as it seemed the right one.

Why Become More Productive?

But as time passed I started to question myself more and more often: “What’s the point in being more productive? What’s the point in doing more in less time? What’s the point in doing more, anyway?”. Those questions emerged from a real state of frustration and sadness. Yes, I was way more productive each month, but other than really doing more stuff, nothing interesting happened.

Doing more in less time is a big trap. Doing more in less time makes you wanna do even more. Freeing your time by using productivity techniques, without having a proper life management system, makes you wanna use the free time in order to do even more. You get caught in your own treadmill.

I thought I was the only one caught in my own setup, but as I read other productivity blogs I started to see a hidden red strip going on. Almost everywhere, productivity was perceived as a technique to squeeze more stuff into your capacity of doing. Just do more. It was weird. And it still feels weird, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now.

Productivity in itself, without a steady and complete personal management solution is simply unhealthy. It’s a paradigm of greed disguised in a technique for self-improvement. Doing more in less time is as bad as not doing nothing at all, because it directs your energy into a dry land of meaningless numbers. (more…)

Staying GTD Over The Hype

Two or three years ago, a strange topic about organization skills, de-cluttering and mind like water exploded on the Internet. It was about GTD, or Getting Things Done, a methodology for boosting productivity invented and shared by David Alled in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity [aff link]. This phenomenon lead to a sudden surge of new blogs, with 43folders.com of Merlin Mann becoming the icon blog for this trend. Soon, other useful and very popular blogs appeared. At that time even yours truly was a GTD wannabee and one of my very first posts in this blog – and one of the most popular, I must say – was about GTD for people in transition countries. GTD posts and blogs where spreading over the internet at light speed. It was the Golden Era.

But now the hype is over. Merlin Mann has switched his 43folder.com and we must re-learn how to use what was once the Internet Bible of the common GTD’er. Icon GTD blogger Brett Kelly handed over his popular GTD property Cranking Widgets Blog to a new voice, Andy Parkinson and in recent posts claim he cured his addiction for this technique.

GTD hype is over for good. But the benefits are here to stay. In this post I’ll outline what was left from GTD in my productivity rituals after the drop of the hype.

GTD Leftovers

There are at least 4 different things that somehow survived the golden era of GTD in my organizational behavior. Let’s take them one at  time:

Emptying your RAM

And getting rid of  “open loops”. In GTD terminology an “open loop” is a thought that is not solved, hence keep popping up in your head all the time. Solving this “open loop” is a matter of taking it out of your head and storing it in a trusted system, for further processing. This is something I kept and found extremely useful.

I don’t know about your brain, but my brain is not a rolodex for sure. I prefer to use my brain for doing creative stuff like writing, coding or something like that. I also use it for learning, either by absorbing information, either by experiencing. I don’t want to be bothered in these processes by unsolved “open loops”.

Next actions

I kept the habit of breaking projects into “next actions”. In GTD jargon, a “next action” is the next physical action required to move forward a project and it doesn’t have nothing to do with the logical structure of the project, most of the time. For instance, if your project is to change your plumbing, the next action will be “look up phone number of the plumber in the agenda @phone” and not “call the plumber”.  “Call the plumber” comes next to “look up the phone number”. Pretty logical, of course.

Next actions are a fantastic glue to my flow. After I created and constantly sustained the habit of breaking my projects into next actions, something nice happened: I started doing stuff instead of organize my day all day long.  It’s not rocket science, but it’s effective. (more…)

Exclusive 25% Discount On Mariner Software Products For DragosRoua.com Readers

OK, this is a commercial announcement and I’ll be very open and direct: as of today, you have 25% off for any Mariner Software products until December 31st 2008 via DragosRoua.com. Yes, you read it well, it’s 25% off for ALL Mariner Software products, not only the flagship product MacJournal. I’m so happy that we – meaning me and Logan Ryan from Mariner – finally put this together. It took some time and then some more communication processes, but as of today we’ve completed the promotion.

How can I use the promotion?

Yes, right, let’s skip the clouds on this one: first of all, go to the Mariner Software shopping cart (it will open in a new window) and at the top of the page enter in the promotion code field the following code:

eDragonu

Yeap, right. I’ve put it a little bigger, in case you miss it . And then click on the “Go” button. You will have to see a text like: “Promotional Pricing has been applied to all products below.”. Now check the products and you’ll see the new, discounted price. That’s all you have to do. Select your products – it will be a shame to buy only one in this promotion – and then go checkout. And enjoy. That’s really all you have to do.

How did we came up this?

I am a regular user of MacJournal and Story Mill, both from Mariner Software and I am satisfied with them. I use them at the core of my activities every day and I just do what I have to do in a relaxed and productive way. I’m not going to use words like “thrilled” or “excited”. First of all, because I don’t believe these words when I see a commercial presentation. They’re not for real. People get excited in completely different situations, or at least I hope they do, for their health.

And second, because I don’t feel this way about those products. I’m not excited when I use those excellent applications. I’m just so focused to what I do, and, on some very deep level, so thankful that those applications are not standing in my way, bloating me with unnecessary features that would distract me from what I’m doing. They are just good, decent, honest value for money software. And yet that is so difficult to find nowadays.

Another reason for this promotion is my intention to recommend only products that I’ve tried and I found useful. I will not endorse or promote products that I’ve never tried, only to skim a buck or two. There will be other offers or recommendation here, but you can rest assured that they will be following the same principle: only stuff I use and find useful.

What’s in the bag anyway?

If you’re ready to buy, just go there and place your order. But if you’re not, maybe a little more information about what’s in this promotion anyway can change your thoughts…

So, Mariner has a 18 years long history in making software for the Mac. They have several packages that would be of interest and I’ll try to briefly outline the packages I know or use.

First of all, there is MacJournal. I extensively wrote about it in the post about power blogging with MacJournal – GTD style and I highly encourage you to take a look at that post. Especially if you’re into GTD, but it works like a charm even if you aren’t. That post outlines my personal setup for my everyday blogging and journaling activities.  But if you’re not familiar with what MacJournal is, I’ll tell you that MacJournal is arguably the most used journaling software on the Mac platform. It lets you create, edit and manage journals. It also lets you publish entries remotely on your blog, or add rich media content like audio or video. You can create nested journals, or you can build smart journals applying filters to your existing content. Despite the feature richness MacJournal is still one of the easiest to use piece of software I used.

Story Mill is a book writing tool. I used to think that all you have to do for writing a great book is an idea, talent and time. Basically, this is still true. But Story Mills gives you a far more easier way to tackle a book writing activity. Oh yes, now you know: I’m writing a book and I’m using Story Mill for that. I can’t tell you more now, but most likely I will distribute the book electronically – this will be an ebook, in that case – and it will be something in the personal development field. And oh, did I already tell that: I’m using Story Mill to write it.

Another tasty piece of software included in this promotion is MacGourmet Deluxe. It’s a recipe and wine manager. I’ve used the demo version several weeks ago and it was a charm. I made a promise to myself that I will wait for the next promotion on Mariner website and then jump onto this one. Oh, but there is a promotion running as we speak, right? 25% off of ALL the Mariner Software products. Better hurry up . I’ve had a recipe website for years and I know how these things work and MacGourmet is a real asset. Seriously speaking, I think of using MacGourmet to write my raw food recipes and distribute them somehow. I don’t know when this will happen, but it’s in the plan anyway.

There’s plenty of other stuff to be included here, from Mariner Write to Mariner Calc, and also some great package value. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s also true: you can have now any piece of those simply great applications with a fantastic – yet time limited, so please hurry up – 25% off discount. The promotion last only until December 31st 2008, so just go there now and pick your choice. And, most important, don’t forget about the promo code:

eDragonu

Again, just in case you forgot it.

Why we’re doing this?

Because we both want to give more value, that’s the bottom line. I do write about productivity software and techniques, and Mariner Software makes software in that area. We both need to create better experiences for our users / customers. Putting together a special offer is one of the easiest and most direct ways to show this intention. Oh, you’re wondering if there’s something in it for me? Yes, of course it is. This is how a business works, everybody should win. So, every time you make a purchase with that promotion code I’ll be giving a part of sale. Keep that in mind if you decide to buy something from them.

Time Management For Mac OS: reviewing Slife

I’ve been a GTDer for more than 2 years but I have never ceased to look for new and better ways to improve my working process. The other day I received a comment from one of my readers on the post Manage Your Time As You Manage Your Money. It was something about a new time management application for Mac (and Windows, meanwhile) for time management, called Slife. It was a free download and I gave it a try.

The application is somewhere in the same league as time tracking services like Wakoopa, but there are some subtle differences that make Slife a very interesting baby. So, what is this Slife doing anyway?

Well, it basically tracks your time spent on your computer, with a higher granularity than other applications, letting you know not only with which applications you are spending the most of your time, but also which documents or web pages your are visiting most often (attention, twitter users ). So you will end up with some sort of report of the most used applications during your working sessions. The reporting is done in real time, with a clear, iCal-like interface (click for larger picture).

Time Management With Slife

Did you see those little points and dashes? That’s where the granularity I spoke above takes place, if you click on one of those spots you will see the exact document on which you spent time, in my case, of course, twitter . (more…)

Mind Mapping Online: Mind Meister at version 3

My first post about Mind Meister, an online mind mapping tool, was written more than one and a half year ago, and at the time the product was just about to be launched. In the last year Mind Meister has dramatically evolved from an experiment to a mature online collaborative suite. The other day I received an email from them announcing the new 3.0 version. They were sweet enough to call me a “key influencer” in that message and they also told me not to whisper a word before November 3rd, 14:00 UTC. How about that?

Well, it’s been well over November 3rd, the United States has it’s first Afro-American President, Barack Obama, things have settled, so to speak, so we can move on with our tiny little review.

Beforehand, you should know that Mind Meister has its own blog and that some of the new features are already outlined there, so if you are impatient, you can go directly to the related post on their mind mapping blog. But if you care to spend another 3-4 minutes around, here’s a quick list of what impressed me:

• very good support for tasks within mind maps – now tasks can have a priority, a start date, duration and an email reminder. Cool.
• new user interface with what they call “organic lines”, meaning the mind map will look a little more natural when you drag around the nodes
• export enhancements, especially in the export dialog area. Oh, you can export now in the MindManager format, the default format for all the mind mapping I do
• export related also, the ability to print the mind map via PDF integration
• there is an OpenId integration now, although I haven’t been able to sign up with my OpenId, I guess this is a temporary glitch
• new team admin interface (if you go for the business package, see pricing below)
• there is a new embed API, which, from what I could think right now, it would make a huge difference in the future. The ability to “script” my mind mapping is one of those things that make me think, you know…
• there were also a number of significant improvements in sharing – it’s a collaborative suite, after all, but I’ll be honest with you and confess that I haven’t used that feature yet. Although I think there is quite a market for such a feature…

All in all, this version 3.0 seems to bring important enhancements. More important, the price has been adjusted, so that a premium account is now 4 USD / month, and a business account is 6 USD / month. Worthy to note is the fact that there is also an academic package, at only 15 USD / year.

GTD One Liners: Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

Well, it’s been quite a while since I haven’t touched my GTD one liners folder. Yes, I do have a GTD one liners folder, which is in fact a part of a journal. As you already may know that, I use Mac Journal to blog and, sometimes, to implement some GTD techniques for blogging. Today it’s time to talk about another GTD one liner, and that should be: under-promise and over-deliver. If you haven’t read any of my GTD one liners posts, you can always start by browsing the GTD category on the blog, find them on the top posts page, or just read my last GTD one liner post.

And, now, about under-promise, and over-deliver. I found this simple 5 words statement extremely rewarding over the years. As you already understand, this might not be at all GTD related, if you think a little bit. It might be applied wherever you feel you have to stretch your personal capacities. In business, in relationships, in creative writing. Every time I managed to keep up with it, meaning every time when I under-promised and over-delivered, I created something out of the ordinary.  Here’s what I learned by trying to apply this simple statement in business and in personal development.

Don’t Create False Expectations

First of all, by following this simple rule, you achieve something extremely valuable, and that is related to expectations. You won’t create false expectations to those who you relate, and that’s already a huge advantage. Because most of the people are driven by expectations. They create an inner universe, and then they try to adjust the reality to what’s inside. They have expectations that needs to meet, in order to maintain an inner feeling of security. The more expectations they meet, the more secure they feel.

If you don’t push your words too far, and keep your promises under what you actually deliver, you will directly influence other people expectations. You will help yourself to adjust to what they expect from you, and help them enjoy the results of your work more. Not to mention the fact that, from my experience, you always work in a less stressful environment when other people expectations are on the moderate scale.

Don’t Play for Less, Be Generous

Most of the people which whom I discussed this approach had a question regarding faking. If you’re promising less, then why do more? It’s not something you fake here? If you know from the beginning that you can do more, why settle for less? Just to impress the other guy?

Well, you don’t know from the beginning you can do more, that’s the trick, and this is how the statement should be applied. It’s not about faking, it’s about a sense of commitment and support. You know what has to be done, you know you can do it, and you communicate that in a very transparent way. But you keep the game on the safe side. You take only 75% of the job and grant for it. And then you deliver 100%.

Deliver over your promise it’s not playing for less than you can do, it’s about being generous. Every time you go over what you can promise you add some more energy to your actions, you influence in a very subtle way the energy field between you and the receiver. It’s like making little presents that people doesn’t expect. It’s about the simple fact that you can bring not only effectiveness in a dry and business related sense, but some joy and happiness.

Go Over Your Limits

Another interesting consequence of this statement, is that it can push you beyond your personal limits. Let’s say you’re in a context where you can’t settle for less. You’re somehow forced to take all the 100% of the job and to vouch for it. But then, stretch over your limits and deliver 110%. That’s where the beauty and power of this statement is. It makes you do more and more, in a generous and growing way.

Even if you promise 100% of something, take it internally as only 90%. You might not know from the beginning if you can do more, but somehow on the path of doing you’ll find a way, I assure you. Even if the current environment only gives you room for the initial promise, go over your limits and try to do even more than that. Even if you go over the promise with only one tiny percent, it will make a huge difference.

Don’t Lie

Telling lies doesn’t work. Never. Hiding your real capacity from other people will eventually lead to diminish your capacity for real. This is not about lying, is about being transparent. To you, and to the one for whom you’re delivering. It’s like saying: ok, I know I could do more, but under this circumstances I can only grant for this amount. And then just do more. That doesn’t mean you’re lying, and I assure you it will not be perceived by the other part as a lie, It will be received, most of the time, as gift. And valued like this.

And making gifts is one powerful way to express your generosity, your joy of life and your conscious growing to happiness. Getting Things Done is not always about business and closing the door to your office after a busy, although completely processed day. Most of the time, Getting Things Done will help you keep your promises to your closest ones. And, if you’re following this simple one-liner, go beyond your promises and over-deliver.

Power Blogging With Mac Journal – GTD Style

I started to use Mac Journal 2 years ago. Initially I was using it only for my journaling activities. I needed something a little more versatile than my plain text file structure, and with some searching facilities integrated. Fortunately, Mac Journal proved to have all this, and even more. I soon discovered that I can remotely publish to my blogs from within Journal, download posts into it (for backup or just convenience) and brainstorm my future posts.

During the past few months, since I decided to make from blogging my main activity – after selling my online publishing business – I started to use Journal intensively. In this post I’ll share how I use Mac Journal for blogging, how I set up my blogging environment and how I applied, using Mac Journal’s powerful “smart journals” feature, a GTD-like blogging scaffold.

Setting Up A Remote Blog From Within Mac Journal

This is not a mandatory step, as you can always use your online blogging admin interface, but it might be of interest. You can add a blog to your journal by selecting the option “Edit blog server” from the “Journal” menu. A pop-up with some simple options will appear. If you’re on a wordpress set up, as most of the people, you should check the “Movable Type” type of your publishing method. A good idea is to add “xmlrpc.php” to your post URL and the admin username. That’s it, you’re now connected to your blog and can start publish remotely. You can even download the entries from your blog into Mac Journal, by choosing “Download entires from blog…” from the same “Journal” menu. Of course, you can have more than one blog set up, if you have more than one.

Establish Your Blogging Habits

Mac Journal lets you apply some sort of meta data to your posts. That will not be transferred to your blog, but it’s a convenient way to organize your blogging habits. Some of that meta data is: status, priority and ranking. There are also others like: tags, annotations or even colored label, if you want, which can be used for some neat visual effects. Let’s see how we can use this meta data in order to set up a more productive blogging environment.

First of all, you need a congruent blog routine for this to work. If you’re going to use this on a daily basis, you have to establish some rules for your idea brainstorming or future posts. My data input set up is like this: whenever I add an idea for a post, I also add the status, which is most of the time “Not Started”, for ideas that are just popping out of my head, the priority, which can be any number from 1 to 5, and a rating and color label (this is only for internal auditing purposes).

The priority number is used for slipping up posts into “Next Posts” and “Someday / Maybe” posts and it uses a 3/4 threshold. Meaning any priority between 1 and 3 (inclusive) will go on the “Someday / Maybe” posts, and any priority between 4 (inclusive) and 5 will go into “Next Posts”. “Someday /Maybe” and “Next Posts” are smart journals. And they can get really smart, you’ll see. The rating and label are just metrics for auditing my blog activity. With a color label I can see at a glance how many working post I have, how many published, and so on. (more…)

Mind Mapping For iPhone: iBlueSky

After my last GTD software review, the article about OmniFocus for iPhone, I received a lot of positive feed-back. But among all the messages, there was a specific email which intrigued me. It was an email from a United Kingdom based software company called Tenero, in which the main developer announced the availability of a mind mapping software for iPhone. Are you kidding? A mind mapping application for an iPhone? That would be really something.

Minutes after I received the message from the developer, I checked AppStore, search for an application called iBlueSky, and installed it. And started to play with it. And continued to play with it. And played with it even more. And, if I wouldn’t have to write this post, I assure that I would play with it even now .

How to mind map with your iPhone

The first thing you notice when you use iBlueSky is the extreme simplicity of the interface. You only have 3 buttons on the lower bar and this is actually all you need.

Adding child items is as easy as hitting the “+” icon in the lower bar. Before that, you have to select the item which will contain the child branch. If you want to delete an item, or even an entire branch, you hit the recycle bin icon. Easy as pie. And if you want to edit the content of an item, double click it:

And yes, this is actually an iPhone in landscape mode, and we all know that this is the best mode for text input, since the keyboard will spread over much more space. I personally think that the lack of a landscape mode in the Mail of iPhone is a serious drawback, by the way… (more…)