43 Folders

A very simple guide to leaving here quickly so you can get back to making something awesome.

Ask yourself…

Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

This is not an insult or put-down. It’s a useful question. Please, think about it, then search the site to see if we have anything that might inspire you to make something awesome today.

What Sucks?

Looking for specific answers to what sucks for you today?

• “My email sucks.”
• “My attention management sucks.”
• “My compulsive web browsing sucks.”
• “My resolve to put my art first sucks.”
• “My procrastination sucks.”
• “No, seriously. My procrastination really sucks.”
• “My fiddling with ‘productivity systems’ sucks.”
• “My to-do list sucks.”
• “My blog sucks.”
• “My band’s stupid site sucks.”
• “My meetings suck.”
• “My PowerPoint presentation sucks.”
• “I suck.”

More ideas

Still sucking? No problem. Here’s more places to scratch around.

Popular now — Here are the hottest articles on our site (right this minute).

Title	Recent
"Right Now, What Are You Doing?"	1578
Getting started with "Getting Things Done"	722
Introducing the Hipster PDA	542
Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On	437
Recap: 43 Folders' Corvette Summer	403

Our Most Popular Posts — Okay, technically, it’s the most popular from Januay 2007 til now. But, you know. You get the gist.

Title	All-time
Getting started with "Getting Things Done"	666308
Introducing the Hipster PDA	523584
Writing sensible email messages	181239
How I made my presentations a little better	173121
Video for Merlin's "Inbox Zero" talk	164173

Still lost?

Try a mental sweep, do a shitty first draft, or consider a modest change.

Maybe just get away from the computer for a while by taking a nice walk. Without your phone. We’ll still be here when you come back. Promise.

Welcome back, friend. Per what I wrote in your yearbook back in June, I hope you had a nice summer and stayed sweet and cool. You look great. Did you lose weight or something?

Somewhere along the way over the past few weeks, I seem to have got my game on again here at 43 Folders. I wrote a few items that I’m proud of and that lots of people seemed to enjoy. I’m once again posting about stuff that means a lot to me, and I’m feeling good about the site and where it (and I) will be heading over the next year. (More on that soon)

But, if you were tanning on Ibiza or building houses with Jimmy Carter and missed out on my wordy comeback season, here’s a few articles I hope you will enjoy.

It’s nice to have you back; I found the Vette, and I’m pumped for Fall.

Making Time to Make Series

Link: Making Time to Make

One of the reasons I’ve started really enjoying writing for the site again is best summed up in my favorite thing I’ve written recently — a three-part series on public attention management for creative types that I called, “Making Time to Make.”

It’s been a while since I’ve had such clarity about what I need to do with myself (and, perhaps, more importantly, what I need to be okay with not doing with myself). And these three posts captured what I wanted to say.

If you’re in a big rush and only have time to read one thing out of all these links, jump to the third and final article in this series, Making Time to Make: One Clear Line; that’s got lots of tips and what have you.

Here’s links to all three:

• Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence - Aug 4 2008 - “As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), ‘I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I’ve made the decision, and now I live with it.’”
• Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have - Aug 5 2008 - “Thing is: if the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you’d originally thought you were.”
• Making Time to Make: One Clear Line - Aug 6 2008 - “For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us…”

Rest of the Best of the Summer

And here’s a few more of the posts that people seemed to like over the past few weeks.

• Free Books for your Amazon Kindle - Jun 6 2008 - My favorite places to find free material for Summer’s favorite new toy
• NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create - Jun 14 2008 - Big Companies are starting to get the email problem. Now they’re just trying to figure out what to do about it.
• Guide to Better Napping - Jun 17 2008 - Link post to a fantastic infographic on ad hoc snooze-taking.
• Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Better - Jul 14 2008 - Writing advice that’s as practical and down-to-earth as the guy who offers it - a humble man who obsessed over every page he ever wrote.
• On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving - Jul 24 2008 - A controlling metaphor that helps explain why I advise people not to save their peanut shells.
• Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking - Aug 08 2008 - Simple formula for distilling any mystery meat need into a Project + a Next Action.
• Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur - Aug 11 2008 - More thoughts on why ideas are just a multiplier of execution.
• What Makes for a Good Blog? - Aug 19 2008 - I still owe Six Apart a list of favorite blogs, but, weirdly enough, this list of things I look for in a good blog was the most popular thing I wrote this summer. Go figure.
• Social Networks: The Case for a “Pause” Button - Aug 26 2008 - I love you, but sometimes I need “me time.” And I need you not to know it.
• Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics - Aug 27 2008 - My snarky (but honest) shortcuts on quickly sussing out whether a book is worth your attention. (Hint: most don’t make the cut.)

Like I say, welcome back. In case it fell out of your pocket on the train to Paris, here’s our site’s free RSS feed.

See you in study hall.

Right Now: What Are You Doing?

I’ve started to become a lot pickier about where my attention goes as I observe what it means to my work when it drifts. But, I still have a long way to go. Long way.

Like a lot of people I have a bad habit of CMD-Clicking tab sets in my browser, which then spawns a dozen or more new panes of potential distraction, pointless horseshit, and 10,000 excuses not to focus on what I really want to be making right now.

I whipped up this (rather plain and inefficiently coded) page this morning, and stuck it into every tab set that I tend to abuse: as the first tab I see.

It’s not a new idea, it’s not particularly interesting or sophisticated, and it’s certainly not anything you couldn’t whip up for yourself (and better) in about 30 seconds. So, why share it?

Because, your brain needs a Dad. If this can help you, awesome. If your immediate reaction is to think, “Oooo…I know how I can add way more features like a social network and procrastination stats!” hang it up; you’re already screwed.

Catch the drifting as it happens, refocus, then repeat as necessary. That’s it.

Happy Labor Day, friends, and may you find yourself seeing that little page as seldom as possible.

People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading.

On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I’m not familiar with.

It does not matter whether you agree with these; that’s how you know they’re personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.

For each question, my preferred answer would be “No.” Few of these are dealkillers, but they do quickly aggregate to make the decision easy and obvious for me.

• At the highest level, is this book’s topic based on the typical “zeitgeist” product that gets greenlit by someone who watches lots of golf on TV and who seldom finishes reading the 1,000-word “features” found in in-flight magazines?
• Does the book have one of those irksome, “Everything You Know About Everything is Completely WRONG!” titles?
• Is the author’s large, whitish face the primary feature of the cover?
• Does the cover art contain high heels, Mistral, or any reference to either Oprah Winrey, Joel Osteen, or “Dr. Phil?”
• Can you find the word “secret” anywhere on the cover of the book?
• Is the book published by a company that you’ve never heard of — or, far worse, does that company appear to share the last name of the author or his yacht?
• In the event that this is a book by a “famous” person: if the book were written by someone you’d never heard of, would your interest in the book or its topic wane significantly?
• Are there a very large number of “intentionally blank” white pages at the beginning and end of the book? Are there an astonishingly large number of pages that have been provided for “Notes?”
• Does the Table of Contents lack at least 10% stuff that sounds kind of familiar to you (and at least 30% stuff that does not)?
• Does the first non-front-matter material in the book (often a “Preface” or “Introduction”) seem like a damp hotel room towel that’s matted with the author’s self-congratulation? Is it primarily a sales tool for persons who will never read any further? Does the author seem more arrogant than confident?
• Does the book’s body or heading text suffer from careless or illegible typesetting? Does the book look like an unfinished government manual? Should the designer be horse-whipped for choosing a bold display face for body text?
• Does the book suffer from the overlarge margins, giant type, two-paragraph pages, and “inspiring quotations” that often suggest a rushed, shoddy, or lazy manuscript?
• Have you already found erors and misspelings?
• Does the book’s index seem weak or does it not contain entries for the topic or person whom you most associate with the book’s theme or title?
• Does page 69 bore, vex, or annoy you?
• Can you imagine a future in which closing this book on the last page will make you angry that you didn’t just go back and re-read A Confederacy of Dunces instead?
• Now that you know about this book and have thought about all these horribly petty little things, can you imagine not reading it this week?

No on all counts? Good! You’ve found your book. Happy reading.

And, a propos of nothing, here’s my current non-fiction pile. If you wanted your book to earn a spot, you’d need to beat this competition (some of which do break at least one of these rules, but all trump on quality and great writing).

• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
  • This is the second-best non-fiction book I’ve read this year, after the amazing On Writing
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert Mckee
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fari Amini
• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Noted in passing: all the books on the list were purchased by me with actual money. One data point on how many freebies currently make my cut.

Aza’s Thoughts » Ubiquity In Depth

Take a few minutes this week to look at the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. So far, I’ve spent just enough time with it to have my mind blown by the Quicksilver-like interface it wants to bring to web browsing.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

And, like our favorite OS X launcher, Ubiquity also has an ambitious mission: to move beyond onesie-twosie key shortcuts by using user-extensible commands to intuitively hooked together bits of information like model train cars:

Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do.

[…]

We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.

Install it, try it for yourself, and, as you get started, do make liberal use of the Key Commands page (only available after install). There’s also tutorials (that I have not looked at much yet) that show how to make and share new commands.

Every quarter or so I’m sorely tempted to experiment with The Big Move from Safari to Firefox. It’s never stuck before, but Ubiquity makes it damned clear that the latest experiment starts right now. This looks amazing.

[Ubiquity link via: Waxy]

Jason Kottke (via Rex, via TechCrunch) points to a new feature on FriendFeed that allows users to “fake follow” people:

That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that you’re paying attention to them when you’re really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity.

As duplicitous and sad as “fake following” sounds — and let’s be honest: the whole idea’s pathetic on a number of levels — for a certain kind of user, I can see why there’s a desire for this functionality. Especially on a site like FriendFeed, which has quickly become the platform of choice for the web’s least interesting narcissists — and the slow-witted woodland creatures who enjoy grooming their fur — this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve friendship space. Yes, primate culture may be primitive, but it is not without its evolving needs.

Thing is, “fake following” is also not so far off from a more wholesome feature that I’ve been begging for on social networks for years now:

Any application that lets you “friend,” “follow,” or otherwise observe another user should include a prominent (and silent) “PAUSE” button.

I think users of apps like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Delicious, and, yes, FriendFeed, would benefit from an easy and undramatic way to take a little break from a “friend” — without inducing the grand mal meltdown that “unfriending” causes the web’s more delicately-composed publishers.

Here’s how it would work.

• “Friends.” There are entities in the world that, for whatever reason, do or make things that theoretically interest you. Let’s call them “friends.”
• “I need a break.” Occasionally, for any variety of reasons (new baby, SxSW, flight delays, adjustment to mood meds), your theoretical interest in the friend wanes, and you dread their next update. Perhaps you even find yourself wishing them some sort of non-permanent physical harm. Such as a hangnail or a bad haircut.
• “Hit ‘Pause.’” You visit the temporarily-annoying friend’s profile or home page for the service, and hit their “Pause” button.
• Break time. For the next n [hours|days|weeks] (would be great if this were configurable), you will not see items from this friend. Nothing new, nothing old, no comments, no nothing. It’s like they’re on the moon.
• “Sssssshh!” No notification of the change is ever shown to the user whom you paused, and there’s no way for anyone to detect your pausing; you’re still “friends.” Yay. “Friendship.”
• “On second thought…” If, at any time before the end of the pausing, you decide you’re interested again, you could choose to “UNPAUSE” (“PLAY?”) the friend. Or, of course, you might find you love the break too much, so you can fully “unfriend” them any time as usual.
• “Hi, again.” After the pausing ends, any items you missed would be available to view in whatever location functions as an archive on that given service. But, you and your “friend” have a fresh start with minimal unnecessary drama. Now you can enjoy them again.

You can pause your newspaper delivery, and the newspaper never complains. Unfortunately most people online haven’t figured out that they’re just another publisher in a crowded space. Which is kind of a shame, because I think accepting that mantle of “publisher” might improve many peoples’ contributions as well as add a useful layer or two to their epidermis.

If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, either publishers or their readers just aren’t hitting on all cylinders, and a flight delay’s a terrible reason to lose a real, non-air-quoted friend.

Plus, everybody hates hangnails.

My quote of the week comes from a comment by Eideteker in this Metafilter thread on multitasking:

Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.

And, for what it’s worth, here’s what I had to say about the myth of multitasking a few years back:

powered by ODEO

We’ve added a footer to items that appear in the 43 Folders RSS feed. Here’s why.

The 43 Folders feed is a popular way for people to keep up with what’s happening on our site.

If you’re not sure what we mean by “feed,” we’re talking about things like “Atom” and “RSS,” which are open standards that allow you to subscribe to a syndication feed that displays the headline and full content of every story that appears on our site. And, then, you can use apps like Google Reader or NetNewsWire to read lots of sites, quickly, conveniently, and in one handy place. Pretty neato, right? Totally.

We are very happy to provide this free service at our own expense, since it’s a convenient way to let our readers decide how, where, and when they want to read what we have to say.

Our site’s RSS feed is inarguably one of the things that helped to make 43 Folders as popular as it is today: a time when the feed loads somewhere in the world over 100,000 times each day. For example, yesterday? Here’s the count, according to FeedBurner:

Pretty neat, huh? Yeah, I know!

Okay, so what’s the problem?

Problem is: there are unsavory types out there who abuse the openness and flexibility of website feeds like ours to do all kinds of annoying and nasty stuff that’s way outside the generous BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License that we have chosen to provide legally-binding guidance on how others may reuse or republish our copyrighted work. And, for any variety of reasons, that abuse is just not cricket.

So, to help readers understand where the feed items came from — and, yes, to remind would-be scrapers and charlatans whom the purloined words legally belong to — we’ve added a modest footer to the bottom of feed items that directs people to the originating post, as well as underscoring the copyright and licensing information. It also directs people to this page in the event that they want to learn more about why the footer exists. Guessing that’s how you ended up here. Hi.

Anyhow, here’s what the footer for this article’s feed item looks like:

Questions, comments, or abuse reports?

We hope that the footer is not a distraction to your enjoyment of the articles; it’s something we’ve been reluctant to add, but, unfortunately, the large-scale, programmatic abuse of our stuff has made this footer advisable and necessary.

If you have questions, comments, or wish to report having seen this footer show up in places that seem to break the terms of our licensing (such as a spam site or any other place that wraps our stuff in frames, other peoples’ ads, or some such webcockery), please contact us. Upon your notice, we will dispatch our army of douche-starved goons to pummel these people within an inch of their lives. (Well, not really. But we probably will nicely ask them to please stop.)

And, no matter how, where, when, or even why you’ve chosen to read our site, we are very grateful that you read it all. So, you know: thanks.

— Merlin

Known Issues

(removed as they’re fixed)

• Footer currently (incorrectly) shows Merlin as author of some posts that were written by other people (2008-08-21 06:17:20 EDT)
• 43f Icon png has weird alpha color (black) on some browsers (2008-08-21 06:14:12 EDT)

Psychology Today: The Creative Personality

[via delicious.com/huxant, w/a reminder by Jack Shedd]

Some days, I can’t decide how I feel about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say: “chick SENT me high”). He’s written some great stuff, but, sometimes, he mixes Big-Word academicspeak with anecdotal observation in a way that smells a little hokey to me.

So, although I’m trying not to audibly roll my eyes at a pop-psychology Top 10 list about creativity’s “dialectical tension,” I definitely am interested in one of his observations about the “paradox” of creative people.

Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility

This is a theme that comes up again and again when professional artists and writers talk about how they approach their work. I’m thinking in particular of things I’ve read recently by Stephen King, Anne Lamott, and Twyla Tharp.

Most all makers with longevity talk about a process that involves regular, scheduled work periods that allow generous time for warmups and getting into what Csikszentmihalyi himself has called, “Flow.” For as long as he or she can stay in that Flow state, a good artist is capable of synthesizing unbelievably disparate material and ideas in a way that’s often satisfying and productive. For those who cannot, it means another morning of video games, Facebook, and binge eating.

Artists who are in the early draft stage of a given project tend to adopt a generative attitude about capturing and accepting whatever shows up without judgment or self-editing — having a gentle attitude about imperfection that gives “bad” or “incomplete” ideas the same wide berth as the the apparently-great ones.

This is not stressful for the gifted artist who knows the dirty little secret that nobody shits a masterpiece; it’s all about editing, re-writing, and shaping the raw materials into something that will eventually become whole, polished, and cohesive. Eventually. But, first, you have to get something down. And that’s where that supposed “paradox” sure comes in handy.

My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Selfe, introduced the concept of the paradox by saying it was something that “contradicts itself…or seems to contradict itself.” I recall my 14-year-old self thinking both my teacher and this recursive concept were very profound and deep. But, really, that second part is entirely appropriate here.

The artistic combining of “playfulness and discipline” only seems contradictory to the aspiring artist who believes creativity means buying a beret and playing a Miles Davis record while you shoot black-tar heroin. The truth is that creativity is much more about combining the self-discipline to tolerate ambiguity with the will to transform the results into something meaningful. It’s not really contradictory; it’s largely an issue of intentionality and attention.

If you can find a regular time and place where you feel safe to let all your ideas sit naked for a while, you’re much more likely to produce work you can be proud of. Granted, in the editing process, you’ll adopt a schizophrenic alternation between openness and judgment, but it’s still not really a paradox at all — no more than “heads” and “tails” make a coin paradoxical.

Sure: you can call this, “dialectical tension” if you like. But, from a tactical standpoint, this stuff comes down to basic attention management — finding a way to shut out everything that’s not the thing that requires your focus to get made.

And, yeah, “talent” doesn’t hurt either, but there’s no way to even discover if you have talent until you’ve made a lot of crap and an occasional good thing, and find a way for that all to be okay. Plus, anyone can tell you, “talent” is like having a nice ass or a rich father; it helps open doors, but the actual work on the other side of the door is all on you.

Donate your beret to Goodwill, clear a Saturday morning, and maybe brew a pot of coffee. You have a lot of work to do, and the paradox is that you can’t work on it while you’re reading about the non-paradox of creative paradoxes.

How you like that one, Mr. Selfe?

My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they’re planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I’m late getting it to them (typical), but if it’s still useful, I’ll post it here in a day or four.

As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog.

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their specific trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.
6. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.
8. Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

Coming soon: the blogs I read, enjoy, envy, and admire.

Last night, I got home from a lovely one-day trip to do some speaking, and I was catching up on a couple emails before I went to bed. One of the messages was a thoughtful note from someone who works in the US Government (and whose name, job, and identifying elements I’m changing to protect his or her privacy).

“Sally,” I’ll call her, likes the 43 Folders stuff, but has legitimate concerns about how all this “attention management” stuff might send a wrong or hostile message to her colleagues. It’s a great point.

As is so often the case, I ended up realizing I had a lot to say in the response, and, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share what I had to say to Sally with you, as well. Especially since it’s a question that’s been coming up a lot, and I’m happy to have had the chance to address it at length.

A Nice Exchange with “Sally”

“Sally Griffith” wrote:

Heya, Merlin - big fan of all your talks and trying to figure out a way to get the [BIG US GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT] to hire you to speak to we [KNOWLEDGE WORKERS] who really produce nothing but knowledge - and then only occasionally.

I just looked at your new slide deck. The one thing I didn’t see (but you may have covered it in your patter) are the intangible “costs” of working in this way. An open door policy gets you interrupted, but pays off in morale and people thinking that you care. Walling yourself off from distractions, you project a nasty image: if I ever were to give anybody a token that says “don’t waste my time,” instant loathing and mockery would ensue. So might be a topic for a future MM talk: How do you do Inbox Zero w/o sacrificing the intangibles?

Then I replied:

To me, what’s important is to make yourself accessible to the people who need you when they need you, but within reason — this is really different from ceding 100% access to anyone anytime. That…is insane, and it does favors only for the people who can’t be bothered to get their shit together and honor a reasonable schedule. (IMHO)

This is all about managing expectations.

Today I learned about a guy who’s one of the most respected and admired people in his company; and everybody in the company knows that his door is closed (really closed — no interruptions, no exceptions) all morning every morning. That? That is when he works. Then after lunch, through the end of the day, his door never closes — yes, come in and “interrupt” all you want. That’s the whole idea. And it works great.

He’s hugely successful, not because he says, “Sure! Squander my time whenever it occurs to you,” but because he essentially tells the world, “Look: both of our time is valuable; I will make time for you, but never for a minute think that I’m your Mommy.”

He’s created an expectation people understand and respect. So they get their shit together before they ever consider asking for his attention. That’s some Batman-level shit, if you ask me.

Also? People will always despise you if you end up doing less stupid BS than they choose to suffer. If you start to firewall your time, it makes you look like a “snob,” right? Meh. I understand and acknowledge your point — it’s up to each of us how to decide the most civil way to get what we need. And, certainly, jokey stuff like Mike’s meeting tokens don’t necessarily need to govern the way you choose to treat actual people. I should make that clearer, but I guess I hope that’s always understood: this all has to be adjusted to what works for you.

But I reject the idea that we should sweat those people who refuse to understand why attention is worth being picky about in the first place. If they can’t respect that in themselves, of course they won’t respect that in you. They aren’t capable. And, if you ask me, it’s time to stop positively reinforcing that kind of execrable behavior.

Then Sally responded:

Point taken. I’m shocked that you took the time to reply. You are a mensch.

Thanks!

Then I said:

For you, Sally? Anything! :-)

Because here’s the real (REAL) secret of attention management: once you stop doing all the stuff you don’t care about, you get an extraordinary amount of time to do the stuff you DO care about. Like making a connection with nice, thoughtful people like Sally Griffith.

Make sense?

your new internet friend,
Merlin

Odd Man Out

Here’s the thing. It’s like being able to see The Matrix; once you realize the control you can choose to exercise regarding your attention, you’ll start to see all the unnecessary waste that everybody else thinks is unavoidable, natural, and even healthy (“I NEVER shut off my BlackBerry!”). See? Now, you are the weird one. Weirdo.

But, man, what a difference it makes to see (but ignore) all those things that you used to allow in. Things that now just bounce off you like raindrops. While everybody else is walking around wearing sponges.

Guy on the Soap Box

Also? Yeah. I understand that I have a really strong personality and know how to push a button until it breaks. That doesn’t mean you have to love me or try to emulate me — you know what you need to do to be the person you want to be.

But, I also tend to shrug my shoulders at folks who charge that this kind of attitude is too aggressive. Maybe. Maybe not.

I believe this is a message that needs to reach everyone, and I’m entirely willing to risk people disagreeing with or actively disliking what I have to say if it means that people who feel they’ve lost control of their life may get to hear it and realize for themselves why this stuff matters. Today.

Why We Fight

As with any revolution, the attention management coup will not be without its (metaphorical) blood, toil, sweat, and tears. C’est la guerre.

Today, you can find 10,000 reasons to keep letting people, institutions, and media noise continue to waste your life. I have only one reason you should not, so I say it over and over again. Often loudly:

Your attention needs a defender. And the people who want you to apologize for that are precisely the reason you need a stronger and more unapologetic defense.

Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner. I had a pot on the stove and a fire going on the grill outside. I was fumbling with a bag of frozen peas when my three-year-old started shouting at me to fix one of his toys. “Hold on a second, son,” I said. “I can’t do two things at once.” He looked me, dead serious, and said, “But you have two hands, Daddy.”

Too Many Pots on the Stove

My life usually feels like this. I set out to do make something nice, and I end up with a scorched side dish, charred burgers, and crunchy peas. The output barely resembles that delicious-looking picture in Cooking Light, but hey, the toy trains are running on time!

My immediate solution has been to limit the inputs and not try to do so much at once. If I can’t cook a nice meal with a preschooler underfoot, then I won’t even try. Chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for everyone, and you’ll like it, thank you very much. While this approach to dinner fulfills various statutes regarding child neglect, it’s also not very satisfying. Apply this approach to work and it certainly creates more time to do Important Things, but it makes for soggy, microwaved output as well.

For example, around the same time my son was questioning my competency with opposable thumbs, I was going through a phase where I had stripped by my daily routine down to the bare bones. I wasn’t happy with my word count, and I blamed it on the internet. I unsubscribed from RSS feeds right and left. I shuttered my blog. I quit visiting forums. I stopped following half the people on my Twitter list. And it worked, for a while. In the first few weeks of this monastic regimen, I wrote a 20-page essay—with footnotes—about my childhood baseball hero that was accepted by the first publication to which I sent it. Score. I thought I was on to something.

Then my ideas ran out.

My creative beast is restless and hungry, and I’ve learned that if I starve it by arbitrarily limiting its routine, it’s not happy. It’s all well and good to cut the fat out of your life to make time for what’s important, but you can take it too far. By turning off the internet, I turned off my source of inspiration. I was trying to write in a vacuum.

Apparently this works for some people. I was in a workshop recently with a guy who has a cabin in the New Mexico desert where he holes up with four dogs, smokes pot, and writes novels. He said it was the only way he could get any work done, but that wouldn’t work for me. Not yet.

Batting Practice

I’m learning, slowly, that creative work requires both inspiration and a certain amount of warm up. Fooling around online gets my creative juices flowing and helps jump start more important work. The benefit doesn’t come from the sheer volume of information I consume; it comes from redirecting some of that stream and trying to synthesize it into a blog post or a pithy comment, none of which may be things I’ll put on my CV at the end of the day. But one-off, frivolous activities like that keep my brain working, and help me warm up to create things that will make me proud. I’ve cautiously reintroduced some of my old online haunts back into the routine since the summer drought, and sure enough it’s helped shake more ideas loose.

To torture another metaphor, it’s like baseball players taking batting practice. It’s fun for them to crank balls into the cheap seats to make the crowd ooh and ahh. It doesn’t count in the standings, and yet it’s serious work. They’re sharpening their eye, loosening muscles, working on hitting balls to the opposite field. If they went a week without launching a few crowd-pleasers into the stands, their performance in the real games would suffer because they’d be wasting their first few at bats working out the kinks that should have been worked out in practice.

The same goes for writing, or any other creative work. You need to let yourself practice with blogging, journals, or throwaway poems and work under less than perfect circumstances, the same way a guitarist noodles around with chords while watching TV, or an artist scribbles on a sketchpad while riding the bus. You can’t be too precious with your words or your notes or your brushstrokes. Believe me, someone will be there to trash your work anyway, no matter how long you petted it and brushed its hair. It’s more important to keep your brain switched on than trying to preserve every last bit of inspiration.

Distraction as a Role Player

Blaming your failures on wide distractions like the internet is just an advanced form of procrastination anyway. I’d gotten so used to blaming the amount of time I spent online for why I couldn’t get anything done that it became an all-or-nothing proposition: work or the internet. Dedication or distraction. The distraction became an excuse for why I avoided putting in time on things that matter.

But the trick isn’t cutting out that distraction completely, it’s acknowledging it, admitting its power over you, then drawing lines and finding its proper role in your life. There is a big difference between surrendering your attention to the demands of someone else and simply letting your brain wander off and play on the swings for a while.

Your boogeyman may be Guitar Hero, or fantasy football, or long phone conversations with your friends. This isn’t permission to mainline RSS feeds or wire Wikipedia straight into your brain. We all know where that leads. But you’ll find that in responsible portions, your creative side feeds off those rejuvenating distractions. It can’t live on chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for long.

Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time & Attention (slideshare.net)

Thanks to my pals, Dara and Shawn, I’ve been preparing for a return visit with the folks at GoDaddy to deliver a couple talks on Inbox Zero and Time and Attention.

As I’ve been going over my slides for the Time & Attention talk, I realized I hadn’t shared how the material has evolved since it premiered at Macworld in January. Which is to say, “Kind of a lot.” So, I’ve posted the updated deck.

Of course, the irony of making cool, unbulleted slides is that the decks you create won’t make a lick of sense without the accompanying audio and — you know — human presence. So, I’ve made a special version of this for you to view online, adding slide notes at the bottom that can help give you the flavor for what’s happening as I wave my hands around on-stage like a huge dork.

I’m proud of this work, and I really hope you find it useful. The 5th to the last slide makes me teary. Partly because I really do believe this stuff is important. It’s about more than email and “productivity.” It comes down to how you decide to spend your life and, on some level, what kind of human being you want to be.

Many thanks to Mike Monteiro, Joel on Software, iStockPhoto, and Futura (the unofficial type family of Mssrs. Anderson and Kubrick.)

And, yes, here’s the minor pimp (I mean, it is what I do for a living). You can hire me to deliver this talk to the time- and attention-addled people you work with. Drop a note if you have an upcoming event where you think this might be a good fit. And, yeah, unless I know you really well or your company is giant, awesome, and MUNI-accessible: it costs money. Yep. So. You know. Serious inquiries only, and what have you.

See you soon, GoDaddy! I crave your hell-like climate right now.

Overcoming Bias: Planning Fallacy

Via The Guardian, via Chairman Gruber, comes this post from the new-to-me blog, Overcoming Bias. It discusses the research behind a common cognitive bias known as The Planning Fallacy, which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to “underestimate task-completion times.”

It’s summed up nicely by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter’s Law regarding the time it takes to do anything:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Sounds familiar. From the Overcoming Bias post:

People tend to generate their predictions by thinking about the particular, unique features of the task at hand, and constructing a scenario for how they intend to complete the task - which is just what we usually think of as planning.

[…]

But experiment has shown that the more detailed subjects’ visualization, the more optimistic (and less accurate) they become.

Cf: The Optimism Bias.

In my days as a project manager (and in another life as a freelance designer), I got into a habit that has served me well to this day: get the best estimate of both job requirements and time-to-completion that you can find. Then add 20%. Then, when nobody is looking, add another 20%. Then pray.

Although it’s no inoculation against the (apparently immutable nature of) Hofstadter’s Law — and you’ll still end up short most of the time — it can help you do one thing much better: manage expectations. Because you’re a project manager, not a magician. Magicians get cooler hats.

I think planning a project is ultimately a little like throwing a donut at the moon. You can never actually hit the target, plus you’ll be lucky if you aren’t hit in the face on the way down.

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail’s unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

Now, as a user, polemicist, and nemesis of Apple’s MobileMe problems, I’m not here to criticize the frustration about a broken cloud service; I know that feeling all too well and have the dents in my wall to prove it. But, I do want to talk about some strategies you can choose to employ whenever a change in access to anything unexpectedly rearranges your day. Because things do break, and there’s no reason you have to break with them.

One of the things that’s most helpful about a system like GTD is the way you learn to think of your work as something that can and should be viewed from multiple angles.

A 90-second GTD primer:

• Project. Any desirable outcome that requires more than one physical action in order to be considered complete.
  • “Present a persuasive pitch to Henderson’s group on 2008-10-03” is a Project.
• Next Action. The next physical activity I could perform that moves a Project nearer to the outcome I want.
  • “Call Henderson to schedule time and location for 10/3 presentation” is the next action for my Project.
• Context. Any limitation, opportunity, tool, or resource that lets me do one of the physical actions in my Project.
  • “@calls” is the Context for my Next Action
  • in this case, “@calls” serves as a list of all items I could do on any Project, so long as I have access to a phone.
  • (See? Different angle.)
• The Four Criteria Model. The notion that Priority is only one of four criteria in deciding what to do at a given moment.
  • The other three are “Time Available,” “Energy Available,” and (you guessed it) “Context.”

Got it? Contexts are a way to horizontally slice across all of your Projects in a way that lets you do what you can do at a given moment — even if it’s not the thing you want to do or most need to do. Because that’s life. And, sometimes, life is a huge dick.

Like a famous religion and a handy bit of Psychology, Getting Things Done acknowledges that, while you have little or no control over the interruptions and unexpected change in your life, you DO have the power to decide what you want to do about it right now. So, while you can’t run your life by Priority alone, you always have plenty to do. If you’ve learned to think in terms of Contexts. Get it?

So if you forgot your phone, skip “@calls,” and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip “@Boss,” and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip @web, and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You’ve already guessed it! Skip “@email” and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.

Sure it’s insanely frustrating and annoying to not have access to something you depend on. And, yes, it’s natural to whine about it and even burn a few cycles on a fast, cathartic tantrum. But, friends, if you’re so mad about an uncontrollable change in your life that it takes you off all your work for half a day, then you’re still playing in the minor leagues of GTD. And you’re not doing yourselves and the people you produce work for any favor in the bargain.

Plan in Projects, work in Contexts, and strive to not let anything stick to you more than you’d like it to.

And, seriously. Guys. When one door closes, just open a freaking window. An hour without email is a great time to dive into sixty guilt-free minutes of writing, reading, or even pencil-sharpening. Work the time.

Because it ends up being a lot more fun and useful to ride the wave than to yell obscenities at it for four hours.