What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I was talking with my wife over morning coffee today. She said, “I’ve got all these piles of things I need to get put away and organized. They’re driving me nuts. I wake up in the night and these worries invite themselves into my mind.” She and I are both horizontally organized, so we have at least one stack of things to organize.

I mentioned the interesting thoughts that Terri, at From the Belly of the Beast among others, about the Ready for Anything notes that Buzz Brugman posted on his blog.

Her eyes lit up when I described the concept that your mind is always working at some level on any unfinished task. That eats up time and attention better spent somewhere else.

She’s decided to implement the concepts David Allen describes in his book “Getting Things Done” in a novel way. She works around the house, either caring for our grand children and caring for three girls (sisters) with special needs, or taking care of the house. She’s decided that the “contexts” that work for her are the rooms. She’s going to put a small spiral notebook in each room with the projects and next actions (she hasn’t digested all the koolaid yet, so she’s not calling them that…yet) listed for that room.

She’s also one of those people who doesn’t like to finish a task/project without having another task/project lined up, and preferrably started. This will give her mind the “tactile feedback” of having proects started all over the house, so that won’t upset her. By the way, for those of you in management school, her type in Myers-Briggs-speak is ISFP. The —P says she likes the idea of doing things, not completing things. —Js like to get done with things.

Well, the long awaited DIY Planner website, spun off from A Million Monkeys Typing, is finally up! This site promises to be a great boon to those who’ve overdosed on digital planning and want to regroup around analog methods. Of course, for those of us adictive personalities, we’ll be able to OD on the creative variety we will surely find on this site. But the first step in any recovery program is to admit the problem is mine, not the sites. I can quit any time too…

This will be fun to watch. I can’t wait until the PocketMod guy gets together with the DIY Planners and comes up with some nifty new tricks that none of us has thought of.

I just found a fascinating web app through Lifehack.org. It’s called a PocketMod. The website is at PocketMod.com. It’s still in beta, so there are a few glitches, but it’s fascinating to try out and create a pocket sized folded, multi-page organizer. The next step should be to enable dropping or entering text into the app before printing. How creative!

I came across an interesting set of posts by Dave Gray on “http://communicationnation.blogspot.com”. The post is called ” The craftsman-to-manager paradox”

That discussion of the differing tools needed for different types of work reminded me of both the Peter Principle and some thoughts I’ve had about management and productivity.

My ideas came from an experience where I managed a team of people. A legal issue came up that halted all the work they were doing, but increased significantly the amount of work my boss and I had to do to set things back right. I think in pictures more than words, so this appeared to me as an “X-shaped” chart with the declining leg showing the amount of production work our organization did and the increasing leg showing the amount of management work needed to set things straight.

Then, I thought, you could use this chart to describe a job by making a verticle slice through any part of the x axis. Each job has varying amounts of production work and management work, but one must decline if you are doing more of the other. This also helps me understand the adverse impact of micromanagement - when I’m stepping in to do someone else’s job at the production level, I shift the intersecting point of my “job line” to the left. That necessarily means I cannot focus as much on the management part of my job and my effectiveness is therefore reduced. If less attention to my job doesn’t reduce my effectiveness in it, what does that say about my job or my performance in it?