The Email Game

The Email Game works only with Gmail and Google Apps. Once you type in your email address, The Email Game sucks in about 50 of your latest gmail messages and lets you process them rapidly — replying, archiving, labeling, and so on. There’s a timer counting down with each email, so that you don’t spend too long replying.

For email that I need to save and address later, I label it with the Next, Action, or Waiting On labels that come with ActiveInbox. ActiveInbox is a plugin for Gmail that incorporates some Getting Things Done philosophy into email.

Using The Email Game in combination with ActiveInbox works beautifully.

One limitation with The Email Game is the inability to log in and thereby save your email signature. However, if you bookmark an address like the following:

emailga.me/login?email=joe@gmail.com

then it logs you in automatically.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

First, a little background. I confess I have a bad habit of wanting to do everything myself. I like to do things my way, because I always do it best! I always hated group work in school, and I carried this idea forward into my career. When I receive projects, I produce the content, and everyone is happy.

Not really. Here’s what happens. When I take the whole world onto my shoulders, I don’t have much time for anything else. My output is relatively small, given that it’s the output of one person. Sure it’s great (in my eyes), but it’s not much.

The problem with this whole model is that it doesn’t scale. The amount of content and influence I can produce remains miniscule. As a result, and based on my manager’s advice, I have been looking for ways to get others working for me. Below are five ways I am trying to implement this advice.

Example 1

One of my projects involves getting regular content on tech.lds.org, which is a collaborative site for community projects that features a blog, wiki, and forum. I would normally write each blog article myself, but doing that takes a lot of time. I want to publish several new articles a week. Doing so would require me to devote all my time toward the task — while a handful of other projects get neglected. So here’s what I’m doing instead:

• I’m contacting each community project leader to write an article about their project (or to assign it to their technical writer, if they have one). The project team knows the project best, after all. I give them a few questions to answer and try to keep it short.
• Knowing that not everyone will respond, and knowing that not everyone who responds will write something, I’m soliciting three new people a day to write articles. We have 30+ community projects, so there is plenty of material to cover.
• When the project teams produce an article, it will no doubt need some editing. I could apply my editorial acumen to shape and hone these articles, but why not leverage the 60+ volunteer technical writers available on a listserv I run? (I haven’t done this yet, but it’s a possibility.)
• Once someone has edited the article, I need to submit it through our formal review and approval processes. I could surely do this myself, but why not rely on our approval process liaison to handle it?

In essence, I am no longer the content creator. I have enlisted a team of content creators to “work for me.” This frees me up to work on other tasks.

Granted, curating this content (to use a popular term) still requires effort. Sending out three emails a day takes about 20 minutes, and responding to other feedback, and lining up other editors, and so on, takes time. But none of the work is creatively exhausting, and that’s a key point.

Example 2

On another project I work on, I was initially planning to create a series of video tutorials to instruct users. I’m good at creating screencasts, I have the equipment, and I have the know-how to do it. So why would I enlist others to do the work for me?

It turns out that when you work for a large organization, lots of other people have skillsets comparable to your own or far exceeding your own. This is the case with my organization, where we have an impressive audiovisual department more than eager to create these screencasts (and also to translate them into 10 languages — phew!).

I finally gave in and passed the screencasting baton to Audiovisual. Now that I relinquished control, all I need to do is draft up some outlines for the scripts. A media specialist will flesh them out into conversational narratives for the voiceover professional. Someone else will create high fidelity prototypes for the screen interface. This frees me up to do something else I’ve been wanting to do: reduce user frustration with other applications.

Example 3

One of the interesting things about working for a large and very public organization is the amount of feedback that pours in when you put a simple “Feedback” email on a website. I try to provide documentation for several apps on this website, but I’ve been neglectful in monitoring and responding to the feedback. After all, isn’t that a role for Support? I thought the feedback would eventually go away, but so far it hasn’t.

As I was rifling through some feedback for an app, one of my colleagues (who created the initial documentation for the app) asked if I wanted his help. Bingo. I’m now setting up an automated workflow of feedback for this particular app to be sent directly to my colleague, who can tackle it himself. I’ll still monitor things and check in, but I don’t need to be the guy who does everything.

I noticed another group tackling responses to another app. I’ll monitor their responses and glean them for answers to add to the wiki too, rather than trying filter through the feedback first.

Example 4

I have yet another example of enlisting others to work for me. We have a large SharePoint infrastructure, and are just rolling out SharePoint 2010. Not many people understand how to use it. I volunteered to create a screencast last week explaining how to complete a profile and locate interesting content on a newsfeed. I liked the screencast. It took me a couple of days to produce. I was hoping that I could produce these screencasts on a weekly basis, until I started to calculate all the time it would require.

And then I remembered that on this SharePoint team, there’s a guy who is a former trainer. He’s already a subject matter expert on SharePoint, and he enjoys training. The only drawback is that he’s busy, but it makes more sense to free up some of his time rather bring in an outsider (me) to the team. So voila, rather than producing these myself, I plan to help identify and designate a better person to do it instead.

Example 5

I also have a side job at home doing WordPress consulting. By far the most popular request I get is to convert a regular website into a WordPress theme. This process is time consuming and sometimes tricky. I’m decent with CSS, but I’m more of a content person than a designer, so I learned long ago that subcontracting these projects out to an inexpensive designer in China was much more practical than doing them myself.

Now I mostly manage the projects, scoping the work, defining expectations, interacting with the customer, checking over the work, making it live, and so on. I would not be able to do a quarter of the work if I hadn’t enlisted someone else to work for me.

So What Do You Do?

At this point, you may wonder exactly what I do all day. If I get everyone working for me, at some point doesn’t this become somewhat of a joke? Am I sitting back, emailing people all day with requests and updates? Maybe. Theoretically, as you get more and more people working for you, you take on more of an interactive management role. It takes a lot of work to make sure the pistons in the content engine are firing properly.

And now that I have some people working for me, I have more time to focus on …. you guessed it, the strategy behind all of this content. I suddenly understand why content strategists don’t produce content themselves — because if you spend heads-down time creating content, you have little time to do the meta-content tasks that the content strategy discipline focuses on.

I confess that I do have some projects where I am still the primary content producer. It will probably stay that way, too. But I am trying to avoid that where possible, in part because I work in a non-profit organization with tons of volunteers, and also because the model simply does not scale.

Eventually, if I get good at this, I could get others working for me to manage those who are already working for me. In other words, I could add another layer of management between levels. In that theoretical world, I would no longer contact the community teams asking for articles. Instead, I would designate an intern to make these inquiries and track the progress. The intern could report on a weekly basis to me. I’m not yet to this point, and I’m not sure I want to move toward that. But you get the idea. The model scales.

Overall, I’m excited about this model. It may not be right for every organization. I’m in a bit of unique position, working for a church with a large volunteer force. But as I learn to perfect this model, I hope to magnify my output tenfold.

Now, there’s one more realm where I can enlist others: my blog. Anyone interested in writing a guest post?

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

The Documentation Scenario

The help scenario starts out innocently enough. As a technical writer, I document the main tasks users can do in an application. I describe core features and how-to information.

But as times goes by, and I get deeper and deeper into the application, I learn more and more about it — the not-so-intuitive processes, the workarounds, the edge cases, the unresolvable bugs, the usability problems. I transfer this information into the help file because information is my game.

When the app is released, I start to hear feedback from users through various means — calls to the support center, questions during training, emails and conversations. I add much of this information to the help. In the back of my mind, I envision a day when all users can search the help for even the most arcane questions, the most unique situations, and they will find — to their surprise — the answer.

In fact, during one project, I even played a support role for the application. I made it my goal to never answer users’ questions without pointing them to the answer in the help file. This would accomplish two things: (1) it would require me to supplement the help file with possibly missing information; (2) it would increase the user’s confidence in the help. So phone call by phone call, email by email, I added more and more information to the help file until something strange started to happen.

The findability of help topics started breaking down. I reached the point where the help information transitioned from somewhat straightforward to definitely complicated. Each folder had a lot of topics, and some folders had subfolders and subfolders with a lot of topics. I began to forget where some topics were, since they overlapped topically with other folders. I knew that if I forgot where content was, users would have even less of an idea where to look. At this point, I clearly had a problem that I didn’t have when everything was simple.

The Information Paradox

There’s a point at which help files reach a threshold of findability. It doesn’t happen with simple applications — it’s more a problem with semi-large help systems. And it’s also more common when you have a post-release documentation methodology (in which you continue to add the help content after release).

Passing this threshold leads to a paradox that I call the information paradox: The more information you add to a help file, the more informative it becomes because it contains more information. However, as you add more information to your help file, it also becomes less informative because it’s harder for users to find that information.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you just bought a new smart phone. In a weird hypothetical scenario, the store clerk gives you two options for help: you can either have a 5 page quick reference guide, or you can have a 500 page reference manual. But you cannot have both. Which do you choose?

If you choose the quick reference guide, you’ll be able to easily read the information and understand the core tasks, but your advanced questions and tough scenarios might not be addressed. If you take the 500 page manual, it will probably address all your questions, but the process of finding the answers may be too burdensome and tedious to be worth the effort.

The information paradox comes into play here. The more information you add to a help file (in this case, the reference manual), the more informative it becomes because it contains more information. However, the reverse is simultaneously true: the more information you add to a help file, the less informative it becomes, because users can’t find the information. It gets buried among the hundreds of pages.

Here’s an analogy that expresses the same paradox. Let’s say you have a friend who talks your ear off. The more the person talks, the more information is available; with more information, the more potentially informative the conversation is. However, the more a person talks (and yaks on and on and on, talking your ear off), he actually communicates less information, because you start tuning him out. Each new word (or paragraph and topic in a help file) gets diluted in a sea of information until you arrive at the conclusion that he “talked about everything and nothing.”

Document Everything?

Let’s come back to the help situation. My assumption is that there’s a point at which help topics start to break down under a mass of information. When help reaches this threshold, going beyond it actually becomes detrimental to the user because the information starts to lack continuity and focus. It gets sidelined by a myriad of notes, tips, gotchas, quirks, exceptions, side notes, references, extended explanations, details, notices, and other information. A simple process sinks under the albatross of TMI (too much information).

The activity that often pushes help over the edge is the effort to document everything. When I played a support role and tried to answer every user question by pointing users to a link in the help that answered their questions (even if I had to write it before responding), I had an idea of documenting everything. I envisioned a day when I would have a sort of omniscient manual.

But documenting everything is a controversial strategy in technical communication. Some point it out as a myth. Alistair Christie and Graham Campbell had an extended exchange on this topic in one of their podcasts. Let’s suppose they’re right. If you abandon the desire to document everything, and instead only focus on main questions from users, looking at the trends of questions only, do you still run into the information paradox?

If you stay behind that threshold where help still remains relatively findable, are you better off in the long run, and does the whole problem of findability go away? This is a key assumption that begins my discussion on organizing content, because if you don’t document everything, if you only document selectively, chances are your users won’t bang their heads in frustration looking for buried answers. You won’t need to implement advanced techniques for organizing content, and your topic-based folders may not pose any issues with findability.

Expansion and Influence

This isn’t merely a theoretical speculation. I am seriously considering that my strategy for comprehensive documentation is flawed. A couple of years ago, I used to carpool to work with a quality engineer named Kevin. During this time, I operated under the idea that my online help would be a comprehensive source of information for the application I was documenting. It would be the omniscient manual that I was striving for, answering every user’s question. But in our organization, technical writers are scarce resources. Four technical writers try to serve the needs of an 800-person IT department.

In my conversations with Kevin, many times I expressed frustrations with the lack of user assistance on projects in our organization. On many projects, project managers either omitted help or wrote it themselves. Kevin pointed out that if I really felt this way, I should begin a crusade of quick reference guides for as many applications as I could lay my hands on. The information I produce would be short, just a couple of pages, but my reach would be widespread. Not only could I provide the missing user assistance needed for so many applications, he said, with this approach I would also provide users with a form of documentation they would actually read. Like many people, Kevin believed long manuals were unread dinosaur relics that no one used or wanted. My time would be better spent keeping documentation short and sweet. Lots of quick reference guides, lots of projects, lots of influence.

I never followed Kevin’s advice because I couldn’t bring myself to work on a project where my deliverable was only a superficial two-pager with brief information. I couldn’t forego addressing what I felt were the true needs in a help file — those difficult questions that surface from power users and edge-case scenarios. After all, this was my own frustration as a software user: the instructions never seemed to have the answers I needed. But looking back, maybe I should have listened to Kevin.

Kevin’s advice follows a rule know as the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. The idea is that “80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.” Let’s say that it takes me 20 percent of my time to create a quick reference guide for an application. Despite only expending 1/5 of my time, the quick reference guide’s effect might influence 80 percent of the users.

This sounds improportional at first, but if you think about it, the idea has merit. Imagine a scenario where you hand out both a quick reference guide and a reference manual to 100 people in a crowd. Assume everyone reads something. About 80 of them would read the quick reference guide , and only 20 would read the reference manual. Right?

Are we technical writers so ethically obtuse that we can’t triage a documentation situation? We end up so bent on writing the all-encompassing reference manual, expending a lot of effort (80 percent of our effort) chasing down answers to arcane questions and edge cases that almost no one needs. Our time would be better spent focusing on the core ideas/tasks and then moving on, leaving the straggling few oddball users to make do without (you know, those users who ask for the full printed manual or who ask about running the app remotely on Ubuntu through a proxy.) Sacrifice a few for the good of the whole. This isn’t murder we’re talking about — just the unfortunate circumstances of time and information. Our influence could be enormous, if we followed logic.

The result of not documenting everything invariably leads to less information. With less information, the help file is smaller and topics are more findable. A quick reference guide that is between 2 and 20 pages in length does not have a findability problem, and the whole information paradox becomes somewhat of a moot point.

In a world of 4 technical writers for 800 IT professionals, the 80-20 rule makes sense. But I also admit that it isn’t ideal. In an ideal world, information is complete; all users’ needs are addressed. Ultimately we continue on with the old model believing that some day, when project managers see our omniscient help systems, which reduce customer support, improve the user experience, and help user productivity soar, they’ll recognize our value and hire more technical writers to document their application. That scenario, however, seems like a day on the horizon that never fully dawns. Maybe we should change our perspective.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

I get that last remark a lot, actually. I don’t feel it’s deserved. I don’t do it all … not at all. I let so many important activities slip through the cracks. But let me indulge in a fantasy where that remark is actually true. How do I “do it all” — even just a little?

First, a little background. I started thinking about this issue while reading Clay Shirky’s book on Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky argues that we have a surplus of free time, but we often waste this time watching television. In fact, if we were to change our TV habits just 1% and devote them toward a productive endeavor, rather than slumping in front of the TV, we could create 100 new Wikipedias each year.

I’m not going to say that my secret is not watching television, because I’m guilty of TV sloth too. For example, tonight I admit I was checking to see if the new episode of V had been posted to Hulu yet.

But Shirky goes deeper than merely slamming TV as a timesink. He compares the situation to a gin-drinking phase that accompanied industrialization. As lives changed from farms to factories, the shift broke social structures; people turned to gin for escape and coping.

TV is a coping mechanism for a greater underlying problem.

In the same way, I think after eight hours of typing and clicking in an office cubicle, with very little drama, interaction, or significance, we’re inclined to seek some escape and excitement through larger-than-life Hollywood media. In other words, TV isn’t the problem, just as gin wasn’t the problem. TV is just our coping mechanism to deal with the real problem.

And what exactly is the real problem, besides the humdrum boredrum of an office life?

I’m not sure. But last summer my wife tried an interesting experiment that shed light on the issue: an electricity fast. Forty days without electricity (mostly). For me, this meant I gave up television and light. I couldn’t quite tear myself from my laptop, though my wife did do it (and has never really been addicted since).

During those 40 days of candlelight and living in the basement, with our kids stretched out in sleeping bags on the floor, I woke up earlier than ever. For the first time in years, I was up at 6 am every morning.

But as the electricity fast neared its end, I grew grumpy for television. I seemed to need it, those moments of escape in front of the television. Even a couple of hours of World Cup soccer, listening to the vuvuzelas blowing and the spanish announcer saying “goal, goal, goal” in a flat voice on a poorly rendered Internet stream seemed to provide the relief I needed.

But relief from what? I’m not sure. Could not this grumpiness have been relieved in some other way, before television? Surely this problem is not symptomatic solely of 21st century society.

Let’s flip back a couple of millennia. What did the ancient Greeks do for escape? They flourished with unparalleled cultural and human achievement in every field, from philosophy to science, art, mathematics, and more. Some feel it was their political democracy, the first on the scene, that contributed to this achievement. But the Greeks also spent a lot of time playing athletic games naked in their gymnasiums and shouting at overly melodramatic soap-opera theater. In other words, they had their entertainment too, but they still managed achievement.

It’s clear that if you survey world cultures, cultures without television aren’t necessarily productive and brilliant societies. If you take away mindless TV, people find another mindless activity to fill the gap.

Given this conundrum, and the impressive hours of TV watching in America, we still have plenty of achievement to boast about. The amount of technical innovation and Internet entrepreneurship are mind-boggling. Both the masses and elite write about a million new posts a day on blogs. Information is expanding so much that in one year alone, you could fill 237 billion Kindles. And yet even despite this, many of us still drink away our time on hulu, netflix, and youtube — morally flagellating ourselves for our sloth as we slouch.

For me, while I would be more productive, perhaps, by banning television, I don’t think it’s the principal cause that dilutes human achievement, nor my achievement. Include or exclude TV from the productivity equation and the outcome is mostly the same.

What’s the real cause behind the failure to do it all? Precisely lack of cause.

Without a cause, time isn’t so meaningful. And with surplus time and no purpose, we will easily trade it away for mindless TV.  What allowed me to write about 150 posts last year is the inner drive to write. I feel it as a compulsion. The topic doesn’t matter — just write. I’m honing my craft, preparing for something more, something in the future. Exactly what, I don’t know yet. But one day it will hit me. I’ll find myself in a certain situation and just know — that all the promptings to keep writing, something every day, wasn’t a vain imagination without purpose. It was carefully leading me toward a meaningful end. That is my secret.

Others may have similar causes that push them toward productivity — a cause to create art, or to build a family, or to understand engines, or maybe even to perfect la dolce far niente (the joy of doing nothing). It doesn’t matter. What matters is having a cause.

I still watch television. Embarrassingly, I recently made it through three seasons of Prison Break. And I keep up with Nikita, and Fringe, and Burn Notice. I’m sure my time could be better spent. But usually after a bit of relief, I navigate away from the mindless entertainment and focus on something that matters.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

My friend asked how I have time to do all of this, because given her contract work, her side job, caring for her parents and other obligations, she didn’t have time for practically anything.

I’m not going to pretend that I have time for it all. If I somehow give away that idea, don’t believe it. For example, in the Ricardo Amigo podcast, I said I was learning Flash. Well, I’m still learning Flash. I had to postpone my learning of Flash for a while to focus on another project. Also, my side projects have suffered, and I’ve let other things also deteriorate. My constant stream of posts is only because of a priority I’ve set.

However, last week I listened to a podcast that made a lot of sense to me, especially about the question of making time. In Everything Creative, Robin Pedersen, a professional organizer (yes, that’s really her title), explains that she helps people with cluttered houses learn to organize their things (for example, their overflowing closets) to bring order and peace back into their lives.

The podcast made me want to clean my own house and start organizing all the loose papers and junk I have floating around. But while the topic of organization has merit on its own, Pedersen opened up a parallel for me, from tips to organizing my house to tips to organizing my life.

Asked about organization strategies, Pedersen explained that one of the first things you must do is “make a space for everything.” If you have a lot of papers floating around, you need a filing cabinet. If you have junk on the table, you need a little bin or basket for them somewhere. You can’t organize your house if you don’t have a place to put things. That makes sense.

Jane likes to say more or less the same thing when she cleans: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” I hadn’t thought much about the first line — a place for everything, but it’s key, because the same holds true in life. We need a place for all our activities to fit. If we don’t have a place for them, we shouldn’t allow them into our lives. If we do, we end up with a cluttered-filled house — and as a result, we’re always misplacing things and boxing ourselves in with junk in every direction, so that we can hardly breathe.

My life is often like the cluttered house that Pedersen describes. Only instead of papers on the desk, miscellaneous junk in a bowl, a book next to a toothbrush next to a diaper on the counter, with my life what I have laying around is my full-time job, my three daughters, my witty wife Jane, my calling with scouts and Sunday school, my WordPress projects, my involvement with the STC, books I’m reading, blogs I’m commenting on, podcasts I’ve scheduled, blog posts I’m writing, my Writer River project, my basketball nights and other exercise, camping excursions, budget goals,  favorite TV programs such as the X Files, and so on.

If you were to figuratively draw the clutter of my life, it would look somewhat like the order of the house I described. Things here, things there. Some of it put away, clean, and organized. Other things loosely scattered about, messy, and mixed together with absolutely no organization at all.

Putting Pedersen’s advice to practice, step one is to make a place for everything in our lives. Figure out where it belongs. Just as you can’t organize a house if you have no where to put things, you can’t organize your life if you have no way space for the activities. If something doesn’t fit, it’s time for a trip to the figurative Salvation Army (we call them Deseret Industries here). In other words, simplify.

We’re used to stripping away excess words in our prose, right? In “Omit Needless Words,” Leo Babauta applies Strunk and White’s minimalism philosophy to life. He explains several ways to omit needless things from our lives:

Doing: Do less. Make everything you do count. Look at your to-do list and see what’s really important. In fact, examine your work life in general and see whether you’re really making every day count. Omit needless activity.

Goals: Do we really need 101 goals? Can we do with just a few, or even one? By focusing on less, you can really pour yourself into it.

What you produce: If you produce something, whether it’s writing or music or software or clothing, see if you can simplify and keep it more focused. If you create a website, can you give it one single purpose, with one call to action? Can you do that with your writing or music? Figure out what that purpose is, and edit ruthlessly so that everything that remains counts.

In the same way that our houses get messy because we don’t have places for all our things, our lives get messy because we crowd them without thinking about whether we have space for the activity. When we start thinking from this analogy, we’re less likely to try to allow so much in. (And yes, I have found that writing this post is much easier than actually living it.)

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

When I finish a task, I move the task's representative paper square to the pile on the right

The paper squares help me focus on the task at hand. My world is one of increasing distraction. Not ten minutes goes by that I’m not distracted by incoming email messages, phone calls, instant messages, team blog posts, RSS feeds, Twitter posts and replies, ping pong, and more. Having a little piece of paper in front of me (e.g., #6) helps me remember what my task is and keeps me motivated to work through all ten.

In numbering the tasks, avoid writing anything that can’t be accomplished in an hour. For example, if you’re working on a brochure, which could easily take you all day, break down the tasks into one hour increments. For example, #1 Insert Images, #2 Write First Paragraph Copy, #3 Format Print Layout, #4 Finish Copy for Second Column, and so on. By keeping the tasks finishable, it keeps you motivated.

When you push through five of your tasks before noon, you feel on top of the world. Conversely, if it’s 3 p.m. and you’re only on task #4, you can feel that your day hasn’t been productive. (This is why you need to keep the tasks relatively small.)

The core idea behind the two piles of paper here, besides breaking down large tasks into small ones (which, when completed, makes you feel good), is to provide a visual object to focus your attention, so that even after a brief distraction, you look down, see #6, and know exactly what you should be working on.

Every time you complete a task and move a piece of paper to the pile on the right, it feels like you’re truly getting things done. Conversely, if you consistently can’t work through even half of the ten tasks, it makes you feel slow, behind, and inefficient. It’s kind of a polarizing pat-on-the-back or slap-in-the-face effect.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Have you ever thought of tearing up your to-do list?

A couple of weeks ago I started listing all of my to-do’s in Outlook. Soon the list grew so long that I felt I would never be able to do it all. We all lead extremely busy lives. We have goals, commitments, and an almost endless amount of tasks to complete. Are there any productivity tips that work for you?

Here’s how my friends on Twitter responded:

DeeElling: Take the work and go elsewhere — a park, cafe, or any place where no one you know will interrupt you. Planes are good too!

krug95: Take down the Internet.

okeefe_scr : Stay away from Twitter.

michelleschoen: My biggest tip for being productive is creating Project Plans with milestones and deadlines. Do with both clients and partners.

DrChaos: Be an inspiration to those you work with. The synergies created will benefit all!

Kristil: Before bed, list the 6 most important tasks for the next day. Identify the most important one. Even if you only do that 1, in a year you have accomplished 365 important things. Got this from Michael Clouse, and it really helps me focus: http://twurl.nl/0juvjf

rjhoughton My biggest tip? Get a good night’s sleep.

heidilhansen: Productivity things I do: headphones with classical music to drown out voices, email closed, some meetings skipped, and big mug of water handy.

Whataboutmom I start a list, prioritize the list, and then start on the first items. If I think of additional things while I’m working on the first, I add the new items to my list rather than giving my attention to them at the moment.

I don’t have any earth-shattering advice for being productive. For me, good sleep is probably what makes me most productive. I listen to music when I want to write and skip meetings when I think my presence isn’t needed. I focus my energies on one task at a time rather than trying to do five at once. I usually tackle priority items first, going along with the big-rocks-little-rocks metaphor. I also alternate tasks so that I stay fresh.

But sometimes I think we clutter up our lives with things that, in the end, don’t matter. A few weeks ago while cleaning I came across a list of a dozen or so old tasks that I’d written months ago. Everything that was important had eventually been done, without my crossing them off one by one.

It amazes me that the truly important activities I need to accomplish often never make it on to my to-do list. For example, time spent with my kids, dates with my wife, the slow walk along the countryside on a sunny day. These are things that matter, yet they are often written out of my schedule with errands and other to-do’s.

This weekend I ignored my growing to-do list, and did what I wanted. On Saturday I attached a child carrier on the back of my bike, put my two youngest in there, and then rode alongside Avery, my oldest daughter, five miles out to Eagle Mountain’s City Center and back. We stopped at her school playground, the library, and walked our bikes up the steep hills. It was wonderful, and not on my to-do list.

However, as a result, I skipped working on a project that I needed to start on. Now Monday morning approaches, and I have nothing to show for it.

My feeling is that the best productivity tip is not a neat way of organizing yourself, or waking up early, or making sure the lights are fully dark while you sleep. The best productivity tip is desire. For example, when I woke up, I did what I naturally desired to do. I know this sounds odd, since I didn’t finish what I thought I needed to do. Instead, I finished what I really should have done.

If you truly want something, you find a way to do it. Nothing can substitute for this inner drive. If you feel yourself moving in a natural direction, based on your inner compass, I say follow that, and not your to-do list. The important to-do errands will get done without a detailed strategy for them. But if you let a list of to-do’s drive you, they can smother inner movement and exploration that may ultimately be more productive in the long run.

I found a similar expression of this strategy on The Lazy Man’s Guide to Getting Things Done. In a list of unconventional wisdom, the author writes,

Allow things to happen: Trying to force things to go your way is not only stressful, it’s not very intelligent. It’s better to guide things along, than trying to marshal them in like a dictator. Try to let things happen, instead of making them happen. Remember that a small rudder directs even the most giant ship.

I love his advice — let things happen, instead of forcing them to happen. I know this doesn’t fully address the subject. There are tomes of books written on productivity. But time and again I find myself shackled down with a list of to-do items that become burdensome and frustrating. Many of the tasks don’t reflect what I truly want to do. When I remove the list and move in a natural direction, I often end up using my time in a more personally productive way.

Dawn -- The day is just beginning!

Ever since I moved to Eagle Mountain, I’ve been carpooling with a colleague who picks me up at 5:30 a.m. This means I wake up at 4:45 a.m. to start getting ready. We roll in to work at 6:30 a.m. — long before the secretary comes in to turn on the lights.

In the early morning, I enjoy watching the sun rise slowly over the mountains. It gradually changes the dark scenery outside to gray and then blue. I’ve never been a morning person, so the daily experience of watching dawn break is somewhat new for me.

However, last Friday my carpooling buddy was out of town, so I had to drive in alone. Why wake up at five in the morning, I thought? Instead I woke up late and drove in late, getting to work at around 9 a.m., long after the sun had already peered over the ridge. The entire landscape was already light, alive, and bustling.

Dusk -- What! The day is already gone?

Throughout the day I felt alert and productive, but around 5 p.m., the sun dipped behind the mountains. The sky turned gray, and only grew darker as I watched the time pass. It felt depressing to know that the day was ending before I could enjoy the daylight outside.

These two experiences caused me to reflect on whether it’s better to be a morning or night person. My father-in-law, a doctor, tells me no one is locked into being a morning or night person. Your preference is merely the result of your sleeping habits. If you’re a night owl and want to become a morning person, you could.

Fewer distractions occur in the early morning. TV has fewer shows (and is less likely to even be on). Fewer events take place that might be distracting. Crime is less common. It’s quieter, and you get to watch the sun rise while everyone else sleeps.

On the other hand, night has its advantages. You don’t have a time limit for your activities — you work until you finish, whether that’s 11 p.m. or 2 a.m. The kids are either asleep or resigned to their rooms (whereas in the morning they’re welcome to come out anytime). At night I tend to be more alert and loosened up.

When I lived in Florida, I knew a lady who woke up every morning at 3:30 a.m. She worked for the post office, so I assumed she had an early route, but not really. At 3:30 a.m., she went to a local gym and worked out (she’d made a special deal with the owner to let her in at that hour). After that she sorted mail, at 9 a.m. delivered her route, and by 7 in the evenings she went to sleep.

I find that extremely early schedule a little unworkable — she didn’t have a family. Still, she was the cheery, alert type, always full of energy, perhaps because of her morning routine.

Overall, there seems to be an overwhelming case for getting up early. Yet it is so difficult. It’s hard to walk up those stairs to bed, turn off the computer, the lights, the TV, to say good night to loved ones, tucking in children. In a way, I feel like I’m going home before the game is over, leaving during the third quarter while the score is tied. I want to enjoy every last minute, stay up and squeeze every ounce of life out of my day. As a result, I sometimes stay up until my mind goes numb and my body absolutely compels me to sleep. This of course makes it painful to wake up the next morning.

Regardless of my decision, I’ll be carpooling in the early morning hour until April of next year, so for now I’m trying out the early bird routine.

Are you a morning or night person, and does it matter?

————

Photos from Flickr (Dawn, Dusk)