ADD stages – Decide

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 post.

Today will talk about the Decide realm.

What Is It?

The Decide realm is the place in which you intent to change your reality. You get in, put up the intention to modify your reality, and then you get out of it. You move immediately in the Do realm. The Decide realm nature is disruptive and powerful. It really challenges your current reality and it does this with a lot of force. It’s a hit and run approach. And it’s supposed to be like this.

As opposed to the Assess realm, where you can spend hours, days, weeks or months, the Decide realm is a very short one. You don’t live long in the Decide realm. Or, if you do, you have an ADD imbalance. And that would be the so called someday syndrome, a situation in which you allegedly took a decision, but never follow it. You remain stuck in this decision realm for ever.

The Decision Is In You

How do you know you actually took a decision and you’re not still in the Assess realm? How do you know it’s time to make a decision in the first place? How do you make that decision?

For many of us, decision seems to be driven by outside factors. We have to go to the job, we have to move out of the house for the errands, we have to pay our mortgage. We make these decisions in response to outside factors. Once the decision took, we move. Go to the job, to the grocery shop, we pay the bills. In fact, the decision is never driven by outside factors, it’s an internal process.

We take a decision after we can’t assess the facts anymore. If there’s nothing more to assess about our mortgage payment we make a decision: pay it. Or don’t pay it, of course. If we can’t assess anything more about the job, we go there, we immerse in the task. If it’s nothing more to add about our grocery shopping list, we go shopping. Or don’t and give room to other events in our life.

Decision Is A Reality Killer

Each decision you take will kill your current reality and will force you to replace it with another one, by going into the Do realm. You can recognize a decision by its level of reality destruction. If the decision will not change something in your reality, it’s not a decision, it’s still an assessment. If the decision will dramatically change your reality, you know it’s time to move on and create that reality.

For example, if you decide to go to your job, that will dramatically change your current environment: you’ll be in a different room, talking with different people and doing something different from what you’re doing now. If you’re going to the grocery shop, you’ll alter your reality by bringing in some more items. If you pay your mortgage, your reality will be modified also: you’ll have fewer money and you’ll be closer to completely pay your house.

So, the simplest and most accurate sign for recognizing a decision is its capacity of changing reality. If it’s not projecting a new reality, different from your current one, you’re not actually making a decision, you’re playing with your mind.

Choosing Your Personal Path

Taking the right decision is an art, so it’s living in the Assess realm, so it’s doing things in the Do realm. Identifying the best decision you can take at a certain point in your life it’s a key factor in your life management framework. In fact, your personal growth and evolution are dictated by your decision, not by your assessment, nor by doing. It’s what you decide that creates your reality, doing it is just an effect, not a cause.

You’re taking at least one decision each minute. You drive your focus and create your next reality all the time. Sadly, most of the time you’re doing it on auto-pilot. Without assessing. You’re just following old habits or established patterns. You’re living by reflex, not by miracle. Each decision you take is really a small miracle, because it reveals your creative powers. With each decision you actually modify your universe and create your desired world.

The core of your existence is in the Decision realm. The power of your self transformation is there, in the decision you take, in the realities your project for yourself, in the future you already see and embrace. So, instead of going to a job, assess more and see if that job really fits you. Instead of going to the grocery shop see if you can do something more interesting with your time. Instead of paying your mortgage see if you can pay it all in one leap.

Maybe the answer to all these will be: ok, I’ve assessed it and I can’t do anything about it right now. I’ll go to that job, I’ll go shopping and then I’ll pay my bill. But if you do this assessment constantly, something will change. Your decision will be influenced. Maybe after a while you’ll understand that your job is not fulfilling. Is something you’d like to change. And with this everything will change.

What you’ve just done is to broke an old, petrified flow in the Assess-Decide-Do pattern and create a new one. This is how life changes.

Small Decisions Or Big Decisions?

The power of a life management framework resides in its flexibility, in its power to adapt and adjust. You can apply this pattern to all processes, from your lifetime destiny and fulfillment to your day to day activities. As long as you correctly identify each stage in which you are acting, you have the power to rewrite those patterns.

There are no small or big decisions. Each decision is important and each decision has the power to change your world.

Maybe this post was a little bit on the emotional, not-so-factual, side, but I did it on purpose: I wanted to emphasize the importance of the decision realm as the core of your potential. ADD is just a framework and it supports any implementation you like, so I’ll be writing in the near future about specific usages of it, like ADD for relationships, ADD for career or ADD for a healthy lifestyle, so expect a more practical and day to day approach of the decision process in those posts.

Until then, be sure to create your reality carefully.

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.

Training Your Focus

How is your focus? Do you find it easy to concentrate for longer chunks of time or are you easily distracted? Do you enjoy doing the same thing at the same focus level over and over again, or are you easily bored?

I used to think that focus is a function of pleasure: I can concentrate on this because I like it. I do some stuff better than other because I like it. While loving what you do can keep your concentration high, at least in the beginning, maintaining a constant, high focus is not a function of pleasure at all. It’s a function of will.

Focus can be trained. It can be enhanced, it can be shaped the way you want. It can serve you well, if you treat it well. In today’s post I’ll share some of my observations regarding focus and how one can work this tool the same way you work your muscles in your daily workout.

Detach From Pleasure

To like something is a great “do” igniter. It really puts you on the road. Starting something you don’t like is usually slower and less energizing. But after the initial thrill, even if you do like what you’re doing, keeping yourself in the flow requires a lot of effort. Your focus will start to weaken.

The best way to ensure a constant flow of focus is to detach from pleasure. To treat every single task emotionally equal. Might sounds “robotish” and totally not fun, but in fact it’s just a way to trick your focus into a better approaching method.

If you’re constantly doing only things you like, your focus will develop a sort of addiction. It will unconsciously start looking for nice stuff, and will ignore difficult, or boring things. It will not discard it and put it aside for later, the boring stuff will simply disappear from the radar. You’ll end up as a hedonistic prisoner of “only nice stuff, please”.

Detaching from pleasure doesn’t mean you will refrain from enjoying what you’re doing. Detaching from pleasure means you’ll start doing things regardless of their niceness level. You’ll just do them. Detaching from pleasure means you’re also detaching from boredom. If you can observe yourself doing stuff, pleasure and boredom are just choices. You’re doing that thing anyway, so you can chose how you feel about it.

Assess Results

Whenever you keep your focus on something for longer chunks, take your time to assess results every once in a while. Take your time to see how were you at the beginning of the task and how are you now. Especially in difficult tasks, assessing results is a great focus enhancer.

It does this by progress showing. If you’re caught in solving a longer problem, you might forget where you started. You start circling and stumbling. You get caught in a pattern of “I’m getting nowhere with this” and your focus will start weaken. The hedonistic part of you will ask for something nice to hang on, and you’ll step away form the problem and go grab a cookie, for instance.

If after the cookie your focus will be higher, it would be great, but your focus is usually thinner. You didn’t assess any results, you just tried to escape a difficult task. Your focus will want again to the cookie.

Assessing results is easy, is a matter of saying: “I started this journey 15 minutes ago, and I’m doing ok, regardless of the fact I’ve done only one single step. I’m ok. I’m on it.”. Your focus will be forced to stay there until you solve the problem. You assessed your position, you acknowledged the fact that you’re making progress.

This works regardless of the focus time span. You can assess results of a 15 minutes cooking session, or of a 5 years goal. Maintaining your focus is equally important in both.

One More Second

I took this habit from my fitness session. Whenever I do pushups or abs, I establish some goal, let’s say 50 abs. When I’m close to 49, I stretch myself out and go over 50, usually 51, or 52. I do the this all the time. The goal is clear but I always try to stay in there for one more second.

I also did this in business. Whenever I was close to finish a project, I did something extra, a feature or an addition of some kind. It was not in the specs from the beginning but I felt the need to put it there.

Staying “one more second” in a project, in a workout, or in a relationship is a fantastic focus enhancer. I always know that I can do more abs after that second and I always know that my project will be a success, after that last feature. I am in there, I know it, I stay focused.

“One more second” is also good for assessing wrong paths. Even if you feel it’s wrong, take one more second to assess that and let your focus decide. If it’s a bad relationship, stay one more second in it and make sure it’s really bad for you. Next time, your focus will warn you from the beginning, and you won’t have to go through tough times again.

Balance Your Senses

Your focus is channeling the reality by using your senses. Each person have a specific distribution of these senses in their focus. Some are visual, some are functioning well by really touching stuff, some are reacting better to voices. Your senses are the gates and your focus is the gate opener.

Focus likes diversity. If you’re a visual guy, try using some sounds in the next working session. Put some music on, tap the table from time to time. If you’re doing something related to sounds (you’re a musician for instance, or working on a movie soundtrack) try to balance this by using some new lights around you. Change your seat, light a candle. It will instantly make you focus better.

Your focus will always appreciate a new balance in your senses. It’s not about boredom, we talked about that already. What you’re doing is sending a complementary signal that will make your focus trying to recompose the big picture. And that will keep it on the current task.

Your Focus Is Your Reality

Ok, I cheated a bit. I started with all those tips about focus enhancement and kept the focus definition aside. And I did this for a reason.

I strongly believe that your focus is in fact your reality. You cannot experience something outside your focus. Everything you do is driven by focus, it’s like a handle to keep and master your environment. It’s the only way you actively experience your life: whenever you’re not focused, you’re drifting away, whenever you’re focused you’re sailing.

Let’s make a short experiment now. Take a look at the wall in front of you. Yes, like right now. Take a look, I said, don’t cheat. After several seconds come back here and read on.

Where was your focus while you looked at the wall? Outside this blog post, of course, what a silly question. But where was the blog post during this period? You’ll answer that it was there, right in front of you, waiting for your to get back. It was in your mind. But I will say this blog post was completely outside your reality.

You might have think it was there, but it was on a virtual space and time. Your real space and time was filled with the wall. You were focused on the wall, and the wall took precedence of everything else in your life, including your thoughts. You might have think you were thinking at the post, but instead you were focused on the wall.

Everything in your life works like this. You might think you’re doing something, but your real focus is somewhere else. You think you’re happy, but instead of real happiness, your focus is in useless, shallow thoughts. You give to your thinking mind the benefit of reality, instead to give this to your focus. You might spend your entire life thinking you’re doing just fine, but your focus will be on a wall. You’ll be in fact experiencing a wall, not a happy life.

This is why training your focus is far more than a productivity technique. At a certain level, focus mastering is a magical endeavor, is an esoteric, almost secret art.

The one who masters his focus will master his own world.

Are you with me here? Or are your drifting away?

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…)

Starting To Coach

Yesterday I had my first session as a coach. It started at 10:00 AM in the morning and lasted about 70 minutes. I just felt great during the whole session and from the feed-back I got from the person being coached, the feeling was shared. What is this coaching about? And why and how am I doing it? Well, let’s take it one step at a time…

After several weeks of discussions and alternative scenarios, Diana and I decided it’s time to slow down the move to New Zealand for a few months. It doesn’t make any sense to pursue it on this economical context. The destination is still the same, but we delayed the date of departure. It’s the same thing as looking through the mirror and decide to postpone your hiking because it is so raining outside. We both agreed this is the best move we can make now.

So, after waking up with a buffer of few more months ahead me I had to face a challenge. What am I going to do? A part from this blogging on eDragonu, of course. While being a very fulfilling activity for myself, this blog – and the business behind it – doesn’t necessarily have to be the only activity. I had to do a short analyze and sketch the short term schedule for the next period.

It took no more than a few days and I came up with two main goals: teaching and coaching. The teaching will involve live training sessions on topics that I’ve been writing about in the last few years, like time management, personal development, productivity and effectiveness, and, of course, GTD. Coaching will have the same underlying fundament, it will only have a different, one to one approach.

Why Am I Coaching?

The short answer is: because somebody asked me to. The long answer has some more subtle reasons, of course. (more…)

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…)

Manage Your Time As You Manage Your Money

Time is money, that’s one of the oldest English sentences I learned. I guess I wasn’t even in school, and I remember I knew the meaning of this. And keep in mind that English is not my primary language, I was born and raised Romanian. Years after, I still surprise myself thinking in these terms. There is a common understanding that your time is one of your most precious assets, so you should take good care of it. Interestingly enough, this happens mostly in Western cultures, Eastern cultures seems to have a more relaxed attitude towards time.

But even more interesting is the fact that, despite the ubiquity of this saying, almost everybody tries to avoid its message. Don’t get me wrong, people are still putting a high value on time, making it a very precious asset, but almost nobody really treats time the same way they treats their money. People are eager for free time, they are making a lot of effort to gain some extra time, but once they get it, they are wasting it instantly, in a way they will never do to their money. In this post I’ll try to share a few simple and easy ideas for really keeping your time safely in your wallet, the same way you do with your finances.

Keep it clean

If you are a person moderately rich, I bet your wallet looks like a pharmacy. It’s clean and ordered and you know in less than a second where to find the ten dollar bill, as well as the Mastercard you use for shopping only. And even if you are not a moderately rich person, but you have a positive attitude towards money, I bet your wallet is clean and ordered. I know mine is. And I know I have quite a positive attitude towards money.

So why don’t we do the same with our time? For me, that translates in a very clean and ordered working routine. If time will be sliced into ten, twenty and fifty dollars bills, I would know instantly how much do I have left, and where I find the needed bill every time I need it. Slicing my time in ordered pieces, the same way I did with bills and cards in my wallet helped me a lot. And is such a simple yet powerful analogy: keep your time as your wallet.

(more…)

iPhone productivity application reviewed: WhatTasks

The GTD galore is spreading along quite nicely, not only in a vertical direction, by reaching more and more adepts in its traditional western cultural space, but also in new spaces, some of them well over the Atlantic Ocean. One of these days I found the first Brasilian iPhone application which claims to implement the core GTD rules. The application is called WhatTasks and it costs 3,99 USD at the Apple AppStore (on the WhatTasks web page they are advertising a 4,99 USD price, but they also say that “international pricing is available”, so I guess I’ve been included in some kind of discount…). I’ve been contacted directly by the developer, Felipe Belo, a few weeks ago, with a polite request to tell my opinion about this. So, after I finally set up my new 3g iPhone – a white one, you can imagine that? – I thought I should give it a try.

The first thing to know about WhatTasks is that it comes in 2 flavors, a free, limited version, and a full featured version at the price of 3,99 USD. The limited version is called WhatTasks Lite and I installed it on my iPhone 2 weeks ago. What this application is doing is basically a list management. You can create as many lists as you want and add items to them. Once an item is done you can check it out. That’s basically all. It manages the “what” in your everyday activities.

But the real power of the application comes in the paid version (this is somehow predictable, if you ask me). The paid version also gives you access to the “when” and “where” of your activities. This is one of the core principles of GTD: you are doing actions in contexts and at specific dates. You are not just a robot which does everything as it comes, regardless of the specific time or place: you can group your spaces of action into contexts, and you can also group your doing intervals in time chunks: right now, tomorrow or even someday / maybe, if you are not sure of the exact schedule. By adding the “when” and “where” dimensions to the “what” of an action, WhatTasks really comes close to the GTD aware user.

(more…)