Busyness

At some point juggling exams, work, writing, relationships and relaxation will come crashing down. I’m a bit busy dealing keeping as many balls in the air as a I can but I would recommend popping into Zen Habits. Not only is there some great productivity and GTD resources there, Leo might remind you why you want to be productive and organized in the first place. And any productivity blog that has a Happiness Day can’t be bad!

Goals: worth the paper they are written on?

Rob in 7Breaths: Written Goals – Another Self Help Myth? has exposed some famous anecdotal evidence for”writing down your goals brings success” as completely made up.

But that doesn’t mean that writing down your goals is not a good to do. Writing down your goals forces you to clarify your goals. And if you don’t know what you’re goals are, how can you achieve them? You might, by good luck or the force of your own unconscious, get there in the end. But why make it hard for yourself?

Writing down your goals is not a magic formula that gets you what you want. It is not enough in itself but it can be a useful tool in helping you get what you want. A shopping list helps you get you what you want from a supermarket. Writing it doesn’t magically put food in the fridge.

So even if writing down our goals helps us to achieve them, will this give us “success”? In the story told about the Yale graduates success was defined purely in monetary terms. The richest = the most successful. If money is your only object in life that might be true. But for most sane people it isn’t. Our relationships, creativity, personal growth, making a positive difference to people around us. These are all important goals.

Don’t let someone else define success for you. Write your own goals – the things that matter to you. Achieving those. That is success.

Congratulations

to all those who passed (CT level) UK actuarial exams this session! You know who you are. And you probably have a hangover this morning.

Or if you’re the kind of person who passed the exams you’re probably studying for the next ones, right?

Results Day

Exam results for the first tier of Actuarial exams in the UK (and NZ, Oz and SA) are published tomorrow. But they will be available from 10 pm tonight on the Actuarial Professions website. Look out for me on the Faculty list. One small clue. I won’t be known as Cranky.

What this is all about

I’ve just updated the blog’s About page. As you might expect it tells you what this blog is about.

There may be one or two of you out there who haven’t discovered Getting Things Done yet. Just for you: take a look at Merlin Mann’s excellent introduction to the subject.

Productivity vs Information

Ever feel like your head is so full you can’t think? Ever find yourself unable to move because you have too many choices to make? Then you know what Information Overload is.

Gordon R. Vaughan over on All Things has a post all about Overload and that new Web Phenomenon, Twitter. I have yet to try Twitter. I am a little wary of it. I am someone who can spend hours being bombarded with info and when I come round I discover I have got nothing done.

One of the powerful ideas in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is this: Focus on you goals. This is completely unoriginal but needs to be repeated over and over again (at least to me!). Ask yourself: Does what you are doing get you where you want to go?

This question is a great way to decide if a project or action is worth doing at all (so long as you remember that relaxing, having fun, and being with people you care about are themselves important goals).

I have been trying to apply this to my relationship with information and the net. All too often I have done “research” on the web where I have looked at a mountain of information and got nothing to show for it. I am always convinced that if I just look a little longer I will find the answer/product/GTD system somewhere out there. Looking for the best means I never find (or accept) the good.

Now I limit myself. I will go with the best answer I can find in set amount of time (eg 15 minutes) or by a certain date. I keep notes. I clip weblinks. I even write things down.

The only way to get things done when faced with more opportunities and possibilities than any one person can explore is to accept that you may miss something, silence your inner perfectionist and just get on with it.

If it’s not something immediately mission critical (and how many things are?) get started with a Shitty First Draft.

This is one of the “Things I wish I’d learned in school”:
The first draft will be awful. So will the second. Good writers/productive people are those you keep drafting not those who wait until they are perfect before they start.

Every day I try to remember this lesson. Every day I forget.

The sooner you accept that you will continue to fail but you mustn’t fail to continue the happier and more productive you will be.

Getting Things Done vs Getting Things Organized

Lifemuncher has posted part 4 of her notes on David Allen’s recent book Ready For Anything. She has summarized and commented on each section of the book.

This particular paragraph stuck out for me:

41. Too controlled is out of control.
Don’t get caught up in the minutiae your organizational system and become an “organizing groupie.” You still need to work and think. “[I]t’s really about capturing, catalyzing, and executing creative thinking, not about ‘getting organized.’”

David faces one of the most common complaints about his system of Getting Things Done head on; he doesn’t want it to be yet another form of procrastination, a way of feeling productive while getting nothing done. The system should be used to exactly the extent that it works for the individual.

In my opinion this is where the power of Getting Things Done lies. It is scalable. I can track different aspects of my life with different levels of granularity as required (eg at work I may have a list of every calculation needed for a piece of work, at home the next action “write blog post” might be enough). GTD helps you work and think. It doesn’t replace the need to work and think.

I am still getting fully set up with GTD. This idea is especially important for novices like me – the system is not the point. If you’re not getting things done you’re not Getting Things Done.

Multiple Inboxes: GTD Heresy?

I am still not fullblown GTD. Still working out exactly what I’ll need to make it work and more importantly keep it working. I think I’m a heretic; I think I need three inboxes. This may be heresy to the GTD purist but I don’t process the different kinds of tasks and inputs in the three different areas of my life in the same time or in the same way.

My work stuff stays at work – I am sure that when I have greater responsibility at work this may change but for now I don’t need to carry all my work lists around with me.  Since we aren’t allowed to install anything at work without a long and painful negotiation with IT I use Vitalist to manage my work tasks. I also use this as a capture tool – any non work open loops which are distracting me get dumped in its inbox to be processed later.

At home I have started using FusionDesk to track all the bits and pieces you need to keep yourself organised.

I also track all my writing and submissions separately in a creaking combination of paper, spreadsheet and grey matter. All writing ideas and snippets from my notebooks (online or paper)  go into their own inbox and get processed um… occasionally.  This will be the next bit of the system to be overhauled! And I should get some submissions out there again so I can track them.

I think this could work. In think this is the only way this will work for me. The three areas are so distinct that it would a waste  to try and shoehorn them into one.  What will hold it together is having a Ubiquitous Capture Device and one hard landscape (calendar). I think I’m going to buy that mini Filofax.

Capture Devices

One of the fundamental concepts in Getting Things Done is capturing whatever is in your head – all the to-dos and brilliant creative ideas that are clogging up your mental machine. Get them out. Get them down. Put them in a trusted system.

This is fine when I am sitting at the computer with Vitalist up in a browser or FusionDesk. Sending an email to myself works just as well. But when I’m not at my desk?

I have index cards clipped together to make a notebook. A poor man’s Hipster PDA. This goes everywhere my bag goes. Unfortunately my bag doesn’t go everywhere.

It may be time to buy a filofax. It’s a terrible admission I know. I could make a capture device at home for next to nothing. But I can’t make one that I would be happy to carry everywhere in a pocket and pull out and use any time, any place. The mini format is so compact it can go in any pocket and…

Basically they just look good.

Actuary, actually.

Actuaries don’t have a reputation for an easygoing lighthearted approach to life. This is not necessarily a bad thing. No one wants a slapdash “it’ll be all right… probably” kind of actuary but it doesn’t help conversations at parties.

If, like me, you have gone in search of the actuarial sense of humour you will inevitably come across Actuarial Jokes. Many of the jokes are old, many are simply the same old joke you have heard a hundred times before told about accountants or lawyers, most are not really funny. But all this only makes it that much more appropriate.

And just occasionally it gets it right:

123. The classic party misunderstanding:

• “What do you do for a living?”
• “I’m an actor”
• “Really!! Have you valued any pension funds that I may have heard of?” (submitted by David Harrup)