Crazy Modern Life

Making Time to Make: One Clear Line

Merlin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:10:45 -0400

This article is Part 3 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence
Then: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have

Could an email recluse like Neal Stephenson just cowboy up by agreeing to a monthly chat session or the occasional visit to a fan forum? Sure, he could. Could a volunteer intern scan Neal’s email once a week for particularly wonderful notes? You bet. Could he even conceivably just drop all the blast shields, open a chat room, “livestream” from his desk, and then spend the rest of his life answering questions from people with nothing better to do? Maybe. Sure. But, probably not. He’s already told us as much, hasn’t he?

The point, from my perspective, is that Stephenson possesses the man-sized pant stones to declare precisely what the people who enjoy his work should expect from him. And, in so doing, he has drawn a clear line that some might find hard to love, but that is very easy to see, understand, and respect. No, he didn’t hire someone to answer his email, or get a kid to pretend to be him on Twitter, or install a Greasemonkey script that “autopokes” people on Facebook (I’ll leave you to guess which two of these I do).

Neal Stephenson essentially said, “Listen, gang, here’s what I’m going to make for you: novels.” And then, he went back to typing. To working. On work.

Get Ready for the First World

No, sir, no one that I know (including me, of course) could ever get away with such an ambitious opossum routine when his primary medium is the web — and, really, who’d want to?

It’s fun and gratifying to connect with people, to find common interests, and to make things as a group. That’s why the internet is so much more fun than reading the corkboard at your laundromat. Usually.

The challenge for each of us today — maker, worker, leader, or layabout — is to figure out where our own clear line should be drawn, and to determine how we effectively communicate where that line is in a way that’s useful, civil, and as open as we need for it to be. Again, though, all in the context of firewalling time to make things.

If this all strikes you as fancy, handlebar moustache talk from an old misanthrope who doesn’t get things like whatever the hell we’re calling “conversations” this week, maybe you’re on to something. You wouldn’t be the first to say so. And, if you’re honestly completely unburdened by doing the things that are important to you while staying in joyful personal contact with everyone who wants it from you — then, I do applaud you. I guess. Although, frankly, I think you’re probably fibbing at least a little.

Drawing Your Line

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, and here’s why: if you leave every channel open to everybody and anybody, all the time and without limit, you necessarily prevent yourself from ever stepping away from the fray for long enough to focus. You'll never make the time that it takes to produce the sort of good work that theoretically made you so appealing in the first place.

And, perhaps as importantly, you also can never devote your undivided attention to the biped mammals who are breathing air in the room with you. Here. People. With faces and hands. Not “friends,” but friends. Real people. Because, if total focus on the known important stuff in your life has to battle with a never-ending doorbell attached to your brain, it’s hard for me to imagine how your work, or your family, or your sense of who you are, alone in a room without the ringing, can possibly thrive. But, again, that’s really up to you to decide.

Balanced Patterns for Recovering Time to Make

If you’re determined to get back to work today — to start making more than SMTP queries — here are a few patterns for helping you find your way. Adapt as needed.

Clarify your needs

Think about what kind of environment you need to do your best work, and consider what you'd want to change today in order to make that environment more accessible to you for uninterrupted blocks of time.

Consider that the busy work, meta work, and stupid or boring monkey work in the life of a creative person should serve one purpose: clear the decks of distraction so you and your brain can work uninterrupted. To me, that is "Step 0."

Define “OFF”

Decide what it means to be “available” versus “not available” at a given time. How long can your world tolerate your absence, and what does it look like when you re-surface? What needs to change in order to minimize stress and drama? Remember, the time you make needs to be all yours to the greatest degree possible. If you can still hear the phone ring or the baby crying, you may not really be "OFF" yet.

Consider the equivalent of a safe word for when the really important stuff needs to punch through your firewall. This is a young field with blunt tools right now, so consider employing wetware; work with a partner, colleague, or friend to be your attention sentry during times when you need to go off the grid for half a day. Reciprocate.

Draw your line

Make it clear how, when, where, and for how long people can expect to interact one-on-one with you. Don’t hesitate to point to community forums and mailing lists to which you contribute, FAQs you’ve answered a million times, or any other resource that liberates the previous use of your attention by exposing the fruit of its labors to the world.

How? Could be lots of ways, but whatever you use, try to find automation and economies of scale. That means:

add info on your Contact page explaining what people can expect from you
use auto-responses and email templates
where necessary send short responses to clarify when you'll be available again

Also? Google. Tell people about this amazing new thing called “Google.” Apparently, it’s a service that helps people find all kinds of information without sending a single email. Handy.

Be honest

In the case of email in particular, you quickly learn the irony that a short response — far from retiring a topic — often is regarded as confirmation that you "want to play," providing unintentional encouragement to send you lots more email. And, then come the growing expectations, now that you've unconsciously shown yourself to be an email punk.

Listen: if someone starts demanding a level of engagement with you that you can’t meet, just say so. And consider telling them why. You'd never hesitate to say "I have a doctor's appointment," so don't be embarassed to say, "I can't talk to you now, I'm in the studio all morning." If you can't work because you're distracted by someone who wants to argue about how you spelled "wookiee" (don't laugh — it's happened to me twice; once when I was wrong and again when I was right), you need to cut the cord.

Also, keep in mind that most time burglars eat excuses for lunch. There's an entire industry around shooting down excuses, and it's called “sales.” Give people the honest attentional equivalent of “I have no money, and I'm not interested.” And, if that doesn't work? Yes, lie. Tell them you're dying, and today you're going to SeaWorld with your church youth group for the last time.

Let bits drop

You'll need to decide for yourself where the floor is in terms of requests for your attention that don't require (or deserve) a response. V14g#RA spam clearly does not need a "No, thank you," but what about the guy with the terrible new book who suddenly wants to be your boon companion and wants to "keep in touch" thrice weekly? For me? Those emails maybe don't get answered so much. (Sorry, I Have a New Book Guy: at least I didn't use your name)

Remember: for a lot of people, your one-time attention and decency will instantly be melted down to base metals for shit like PR blasts, "funny joke lists" (aka 'blogging for old people'), and frequent help desk-style requests. If you've decided that this stuff is out of scope for your time on The Marble, systematically destroy it with brutally efficient filters that are the equivalent of Tachy Goes to Coventry.

To paraphrase the great Lucas Jackson:

Sometimes null can be a pretty cool response.

Be courageous

If someone cannot understand or accept why the judicious use of your attention — and its application in the service of making work for a broader audience than exactly them — takes precedence over their need to repeatedly monopolize your time, dump them. This is not a good person.

But! Also remember to be cool

I’ll never forget the time that Jonathan Richman answered my stupid fan mail. Those 2 sentences on a piece of paper with his return address on it meant the world to me in 1988.

Always remember that some contact is just about a human connection, and that’s such a great thing. Just be realistic about how much of it you can personally manage, and then make the effort to reach back to people who are awesome.

And, NO, the whole point of this is that you can’t ever answer them all (and I’m not saying you should try), but if you can respond to 5, 10, or 20 emails or forum posts per week, without stepping on your “make” time, you’ll also make some really nice new friends.

Hint¹: Given limited time, always favor contact with young people; they need the high-five, and it means an awful lot when you reach back to them. These are good people.
Hint²: PR people who want to “thank you” for your work and then sign you up for a “webinar” do not count. These are not good people.

Noted in passing: Outside of various record sites, I can't immediately find anything like an official anything for Jonathan Richman today. Don't know if this is symptomatic of his long-professed affection for simple, old-timey things, or if he's just decided to no longer field questions about The Velvet Underground from stoney liberal arts students.

Identify and engage your high-value targets

Embrace the disingenuous charge of elitism (or, as I prefer to call it, maturity) by not pretending that everyone is equally “special” to you. Remind the people who matter to you that you’re always available for them, then tell them how to do that, including specific instructions (n.b. this is important for relatives who think the internet is just eBay, urban myths, and Joel Osteen). Get a friends-only email address. Get a friends-only GrandCentral number. Do whatever it takes to provide a backchannel for your super-secret network.

Widen the channels to the people you adore, and never make them suffer by your weird compulsion to wave at strangers. You have plenty of time to make new friends, but for God’s sake, don’t neglect the ones you already have and enjoy. These are good people.

Respect others

In the interest of sharing the aloha with all the makers and consumers in your world, consider making it excruciatingly easy to deal with you. Especially when it comes to email. Everything goes both ways, so remember that anyone you contact today could be having the best or worst week of his life; choose your ultimatums with care and context.

Work. work, work.

The hard work of a creative life is a topic that I’ll be returning to often over the next few weeks, but here’s my one pro tip for you today: once you’ve stolen back your time and wrangled your attention, put it to good use by making awesome stuff that everyone you want to delight can enjoy. Throw a giant tent party for the world and show off what you can do when you stop compulsively typing for an audience of one. Get your awesome out where we can all see it.

Make it, release it, and make more. And never apologize to anyone for demanding the respect for your attention that you, your work, and the people who enjoy it each deserves. Make the time.

”Making Time to Make: One Clear Line” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 07, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have

Merlin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:00:22 -0400

This article is Part 2 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence
Finally: Part 3, One Clear Line

If you're a publisher, journalist, author, blogger, musician, artist, designer, cartoonist, or any other sort of person whose job it is to connect with people by communicating ideas, it's natural and wholesome for people who are interested in what you do (and many of whom are certainly makers-of-stuff in their own right) to develop a relationship with your work and to want a way to participate in it, add to it, and build upon it. It's equally great to reciprocate in a way that's collaborative, fun, and useful. God knows, it's anybody's dream to have people interested enough in what you do to find that they want to reach out to you. Talk about a first-world problem.

But, it can still be a big challenge, and in my estimation, it's a multi-faceted problem that involves scale, resource constraint, and old-fashioned scarcity. It's a disparity that confronts anyone who tries to exhaustively participate in every request for his or her attention with equally unrestrained brio -- especially if you ever hope to make the time to do strong, creative work constituting anything but perfunctory meta-communication.

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. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But if you're feeling off your game, it might be a good time to ask yourself whether you're primarily a writer of novels or of email messages. Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you're taking more meetings than photos these days?

What is it that you really do? What's the last thing you made that really excited you? Where are you and your work in all that "communication?"

The Connected Maker

The notion of the lone scribe, isolated in his garret and toiling away at an illuminated text, is an image that's as cliche as it is romantic. In fact, it's a hilariously quaint idea for those artists and makers who use social media and online communities to create, distribute, and expand upon their work.

You could even argue (and I'd happen to agree) that talented people like Jonathan Coulton, Ze Frank, and The Ninja have fashioned an enviable career largely out of making something delightful and by actively participating in projects that folks who've enjoyed their work are driving. Clearly, this is an emerging model for anyone who wants to take their act online, and it's generally great and very enjoyable for everyone involved. Except.

What happens at the theoretical point where Jonathan has to respond to so much personal email that it starts cutting into his songwriting time? Or, what if Ze were compelled to stop using forums and embedded video to communicate en masse, forced instead to conduct all his projects via one-on-one video IM sessions? And what about The Ninja? Well, imagine if, instead of appearing in a wildly-popular podcast, he were suddenly expected to visit every viewer's home to personally threaten to kill them. That's a lot of traveling. Even for a deadly ninja.

Nowhere, Man

In each instance, the dedicated attention might be fabulous for the individual who demands and receives the modern equivalent of face time. And, for a while anyway, it'd probably be a lot of fun for the makers to do. But, is this a sane, scalable, and sustainable way to do your work? I'd say no. No, it is not.

The power of connecting with people in an authentic way (no, not in that cheesy, half-assed, internet "friends" way) falls apart at the point where its resource consumption curtails your ability to keep making new stuff. It's a twisted paradox, for sure. But, in essence, it'd be a little like the Beatles skipping the writing and recording of Rubber Soul in order to catch up on 1964's fan mail.

Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.

”Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence

Merlin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:31:08 -0400

This article is Part 1 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Next: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have
Finally: Part 3, One Clear Line

Over the years, novelist Neal Stephenson (wiki), has had at least a couple different pages where he's explained why he's chosen to limit the access he provides via email, interviews, and phone calls. It appears to be something he's given a lot of thought to.

Via Jessamyn, here's an Archive.org mirror of an older version of his page where he explains his introversion and need to stay focused on his work, alongside FAQs that answer many of the questions he typically has to field. Read it all though. It's pretty good. Stephenson's bottom line?

I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don't wish to retire at this time.

And here's another well known piece, Stephenson's "Why I am a Bad Correspondent", in which he lays out more details about why he's chosen to create an expectation based on guarding his attention so slavishly:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can't concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can't do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

He closes with a practical summation of why he's made the decisions he has:

I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered as a result. It is never my intention to be rude or to give well-meaning readers the cold shoulder. If I were a commercial best-seller, I would have enough money to hire a staff to look after my correspondence. As it is, my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees, and so I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.

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."

Like it or hate it, Neal Stephenson's position is clear and well-articulated. If a bit pitched, it's a stance I admire, and frankly I think it's an only slightly more extreme version of a position every maker needs to define if he or she expects to create the time to keep making anything.

”Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 05, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge

Merlin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:11:46 -0400

Via a Toot by Jeff Atwood comes this thoughtful post by Tantek Çelik on how email is no longer working for him. His first reason is a biggie:

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.)

This is one reason I'm getting attracted to using Get Satisfaction as a way to expose help issues to a large group of helpers and helpees (BTW, we're just getting started on GS -- FAQs and more will be coming soon). I'm also realizing that this is why I (and Jonathan Coulton and probably you) struggle with holding up dozens of one-on-one conversations -- it locks up your attention and its fruits in thousands of inaccessible alcoves. And truly, that does not and will not scale.

But, y'know, as I read Tantek's post, alongside his "Communication Protocols" notes, I found myself returning to a pet theory that I've been too embarrassed to lay out in a real post. But what the heck, I'll capture some notes and you can tell me what you think:

I suspect that email encourages people to act insane.

Right this minute, you can create an email of unlimited length covering topics of unlimited scope and then send it to unlimited numbers of people -- whom you may or may not even know -- all at absolutely no cost to you. There is also no prohibition or boundary of any kind on how you phrase that email. There's no formal penalty or even feedback for when you're using email inappropriately (e.g. the dirty look that you'd get if you said something this weird to someone's face). Plus, of course, YOU get to decide (at least in your own head) exactly how quickly all those people should be getting back to you about whatever it is you emailed them about. And you can do this pretty much any time you want and as many times a day as it suits you. No Limits.

An optimist would say this indicates what a wonderfully flexible tool email is. But, a pessimist with 1500 unread emails will point out that this Wild West of Communication seems to bring out the nut in people.

As I say, there must be something about email's unusual combination of intimacy and distance that can get people very emotionally engaged in hammering out demands in an email message. And not just flames -- I'm talking about people whose de facto style is borne out of an uninhibited conduit between thoughts, emotions, or desires and the email medium that helps them convert that into some kind of request.

How and why this is related to Tantek's post, I'm not entirely sure. But I think there's some common ground here. Especially as this relates to that one-on-one idea and why it doesn't scale.

Email culture and etiquette -- if there is such a thing -- occurs when people have a sense of how their behavior will be seen and evaluated by anyone who is not themselves. The reason most of us wear pants to the grocery store is the same reason that some people think very hard about every word that goes into their email messages and what it will mean when people read them. They understand that the message should be more about the recipient than themselves. And the Great Ones will take the time to get the tone right too -- to phrase things so that misunderstandings and unintentional emotional provocations don't occur.

But if -- even without realizing it -- you see email primarily as a one-on-one medium for venting some...thing that's on your mind, you're going to produce a lot of electronic madness. Especially if you think no one is watching.

I'm going to think on this some more, but I'll close with a related thought on why this all goes straight back to Time & Attention 101.

Any system without scarcity or limitation will eventually suffer at the hands of people who aren't overtly aware of boundaries -- or who actively choose to break those boundaries because they can. Limitations in a communication medium not only make you think a little harder about what you have to say, they also encourage you to focus on what you and your recipient really need out of the exchange.

While I'm not suggesting anything as extreme as the five-sentence email, I wonder if this might be a fun exercise to try for a day:

The 0.001 Challenge

Imagine that the person receiving the email you’re composing receives 1,000 other message each day more or less identical to yours. What would you do to distinguish yours from the others? What change would make your email amazingly easy to deal with and not insane? Does the content of your email belong someplace else? Like an SMS, a face-to-face meeting — or maybe even in an angry, venting screed that you never send.

”Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments

wood.tang — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:34:27 -0500

This is the time of the year for everybody to make lame, half-hearted resolutions about how they’re going to lead a better life in the new year: lose weight, stop smoking, eat less fried cheese, take a ceramics class, etc. My gym is already full of flabby, confused-looking people who spend more time adjusting their iPod cases and checking out their new track suits in the mirror than actually doing reps. I usually treat January as my month to be lazy; I stay away from the gym for a few weeks until the interlopers poop out.

But it is a new year, and it’s not a bad idea to at least try to alter some of your bad habits, pick up a new skill, or do something to make yourself happier. My suggestion for this year addresses a problem I suspect many of the people who read this site have: the sheer number of online commitments--that is, blogs, social networks, message groups, IM accounts, Flickr, Twitter, and any other online time sink that ends with an R--that we try to maintain.

Consume vs. Produce

A couple of my posts in the past few weeks dealt with the problem of trying to consume too much information. What about how much we try to produce? At one point last fall, I realized I was trying to run five blogs, two Flickr accounts, and a del.icio.us page, all the while keeping up a constant patter on Twitter, IM, and email. Only two of those things were strictly necessary for my work; the rest just made their way into my life somehow. Sure, I was doing a lot of it because it was fun, but I knew I had to scale back or else I was going to end up speaking only in 140-character, hyperlinked sentences.

I knew I had to scale back or else I was going to end up speaking only in 140-character, hyperlinked sentences.

And I fear I may be a lightweight in this arena. I won’t touch MySpace or Facebook with a ten-foot pole, mainly because I’m afraid if I do I might stop sleeping. Many of those sites and services crept into my attention span through slow accretion: first I had a blog, then another, then I started sharing photos on Flickr, then I started bookmarking at del.icio.us, etc. After a while, I just hung on to everything out of habit.

My problem, and I suspect this will resonate with many of you, is that I felt like I needed to do many of these things to keep up with the techno-jonses. “All the cool kids have a blog, and I want to be a cool online guy, so I should too. I don’t know anyone on Twitter personally, but everyone says it’s fun, so I should try it too. Hey, what’s your IM handle? Did you see that link I put up on del.icio.us?” As a self-styled writer, I also felt this constant tug to promote myself, to put my work out there for everyone to see, to network and make connections and hope I could stumble into a break (nevermind that my best opportunities have always come from good old fashioned resume passing and phone calls).

Why do we saddle ourselves with so many unnecessary commitments? It’s one thing to sign up for a bunch of accounts then never use them, but I was actively participating in all of those things. And like any time you spread yourself too thin, I was turning out half-assed, unimaginative slop most of the time. This may be a unique problem for me because I want to put a lot of care into what I write everywhere, all the time, but it’s as if constantly jabbering in all those places was using up all my words. If you can pull it off, or if you’re just doing it for fun, then more power to you. I just crossed a threshold of diminishing returns, probably not long after I branched out from a simple personal site.

Cutting Ties

Eventually, I dropped a few of the side-project blogs and toned down the bookmarking. So where do you start trimming the online fat?

Take baby steps - Chances are there’s one online outlet that you know you just don’t have the heart to maintain anymore, be it a blog, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Drop one of them, then see if any other candidates fall to the bottom by attrition.
Don’t be sentimental - Consider it a mercy killing, you may even be relieved to let it go. Personally, I’m eyeing my eponymous blog too; it’s long past it’s expiration date, and I’ve kept it up all these years simply out of a sense of loyalty because it was my first real stake in the online ground. But I’m not really enjoying it anymore.
Be realistic - Not to be mean, but are there really that many people reading your blog about six-fingered chimpanzees who learned how to reprogram discarded vibrators to hum college fight songs*? Will your social life crumble if you dump MySpace? Like I said before about spreading yourself too thin, dropping a few online activities may actually improve your following elsewhere, because you’ll be more focused and do better work.

I’m not suggesting you try to make a lot of deep, metaphysical decisions about who you are and how you want to represent yourself, but if you’re doing something online that you just don’t like anymore, or can’t understand why, drop it. Just like one of those knuckle-cracking, tobacco–stained, whiskey-breath real world vices, the new year is as good a time as any to let it go.

*-On second thought, if you have a blog about this, by all means, keep it.

”Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 01, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Merlin at IDEO: "Know How" Talk with Scott Underwood

Merlin — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:06:47 -0400

Scott Underwood from IDEO was kind enough to invite me down to their Palo Alto HQ for a tour of the renowned design group (they designed Apple’s first mouse!) and to participate with him in one of the company's internal "Know How" talks. It was very informal (and -- because this was during my recent "100-year sinus infection" -- I was completely high on cold medicine).

We talked about Getting Things Done, life hacks, knowledge work, nostalgia for scarcity, and the problem of getting addicted to productivity advice, among many other topics. This one's a tour de force.

Video runs about an hour, and yes: I am wearing a handsome Big Lebowski tshirt. Abide.

Click To Play

Mea culpa -- this was an intimate little gathering held for the benefit of those in the room and wasn't intended as a for-video talk show shoot. So audience members' questions were not recorded on-mic. Apologies for you not being able to hear them, but I think you'll mostly catch the gist.

Many thanks to Scott Underwood for inviting me in and for hosting the talk, and thanks also to Eric Stangarone, who shot the video and who was kind enough to permit me to share this with you guys, as well. Awesome company. Great people.

Update 2007-10-09 08:14:45 PST

Oooo...almost forgot -- alternative media formats (thanks, Blip!)

”Merlin at IDEO: "Know How" Talk with Scott Underwood” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 09, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Field Reports: Guerrilla Office Tactics

Merlin — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:45:04 -0400

I've started collecting stories -- some of which may be entirely apocryphal tall tales -- of the purported lengths to which people are going to filter noise and to ensure that their time and attention aren't ceded to bad ideas, thoughtless people, or garden-variety time burglars.

Here's a few of the more novel ones I've picked up. I'd also love to hear your favorites from amongst the cheats, tricks, and squirrely rules you've heard about:

Before you flame me

I’m not saying I necessarily promote or recommend any of these for you (or anyone, for that matter) — I just think they’re a fascinating snapshot of the lengths people need to go to today in order to get a semblance of order in their environment.

Bozo filter - Filter into a "holding" folder every email message for which you are not the sole "TO:" recipient. This filter includes lists, "CC:"s, "BCC:"s, and any number of other bulk-y messages that were never destined for you alone. Then you check that folder once a day, and create compensating rules as needed.
Smoking the bacn - Similar to my "no press releases" trick, filter any email that contains the string "to unsubscribe." Although many of these certainly will be valuable (sign-ups, Google lists), that string means there's a good chance they're also bulk messages that are being generated automatically. And some folks want to only see those sorts of emails, again, once or twice a day -- and only when they have extra time (read as: don't interrupt me whenever someone on Facebook wants me to be a zombie, or whatever).
Trusted (and lazy) filter - For a very noisy, high-volume list, filter all messages except those by 2-3 people whom you really respect. When those people chime in, catch up with what they're responding to -- chances are good you haven't missed much and can use their appearance to get up to speed.
Lessons from Mr. Hand - One minute after a designated meeting time, the door to the meeting room closes, and latecomers ain't welcome. (I'd also note that this can have unintended consequences if you're the "late" guy and you happen to hate going to meetings)
No gadgets - Put a table by the door to the meeting room. If you want to come in to the meeting, any electronic device you brought with you stays there, powered-off. No grazing until a break or when the meeting is over. The thinking: if you have time to fiddle with your iPhone, you're clearly not needed in that part of the meeting, so why are you and your device even there?
Remove the comfort - Related to the "no gadgets" rule, some groups are reportedly trying to reduce meeting time by making it less fun and comfortable to sit around for an hour or two. This can range from no longer "catering" meetings with food and water, to shutting off wi-fi, to more extreme measures, such as no-chair meetings.

Yeah, sure, some of these are extreme, and some may get you fired or punched in the nose. But you have to admit, people are conducting some fascinating evolutionary experiments. Tempting stuff.

The Question to You

Have you heard of any tricks that teams and individuals are trying to keep the madness at bay? Any that you can verify are being used in your own group — and are they succeeding or failing? For the mentioned tricks you find abhorrent, what solutions do you think might work better?

”Field Reports: Guerrilla Office Tactics” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 01, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Merlin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:37:00 -0400

These are posts from a special 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. You can visit each of the posts by clicking the title.

And don’t miss the “Related Articles” for our all-time popular posts on productively dealing with email.

**Looking for the Inbox Zero video?**

The full 1-hour video for Merlin’s Inbox Zero presentation at Google is available for free down here — or check out this post about the video and slideshow.

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”
Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I first suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying. But I was using a definition of “empty” that may not square with your current conception of the email world. So let’s start with a few of my own articles of faith to ensure we’re on the same page going forward.”
Inbox Zero: Five sneaky email cheats - “In the words of the great Lucas Jackson: ‘Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.’”
Inbox Zero: Where filters will and won’t help - “[F]ocus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later. ”
Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) - “Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today.”
Inbox Zero: Schedule email dashes - “If you can get away from being driven by email’s motor and find a way to deal with your work mindfully and on your own terms, you may be startled to see how much easier it is to keep that inbox at zero.”
Inbox Zero: What’s the action here? - “Focus on finding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.”
Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “You’ll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don’t recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”
Inbox Zero: What have you learned? - “Try to learn from what you’ve just experienced, and reapply your new wisdom to the way you treat email every day — nay, every time that little “new mail” chime sounds. You’ve just come out the other side of productivity bankruptcy and have, perhaps for the first time, a clean record and a fresh start.”
Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero - “As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).”

These are, to date (2006-03-13), our most popular posts on email and were recently collected in a recap article, “Becoming an Email Ninja.”

Five fast email productivity tips “There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.”
Quick tips on processing your email inbox - “The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.”
Writing sensible email messages - “As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with. ”
Five email tics I’d love for you to lose - “For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these?”
My email diet - “Gmail’s made me see the value of having very few actual folders for storing new and archived mail. It makes it much easier to track and organize your mail on the fly, plus Google’s search and labeling tools let you confidently shunt items out of your inbox constantly without fear of having stuff disappear. So I decided to try a little experiment.”
Fresh Start: The Email DMZ - “Think about it: how much stuff in your life has gotten unmanageable simply because you decided at some point that you were too behind to ever make a difference? More than anything you need a way to recover these projects from the brink — to find the handle that lets you stop making it worse and start seeing a way back toward daylight.”
4-1/2 tiny ways to master Mail.app - “Seriously, though, suck it up and just check for new mail as seldom as your job and your patience will possibly permit. Really push the envelope on this, even just for half a day, and see if you don’t notice a difference. The world actually can spin without you for a while (but just a little while).”
Open Thread: The value and quality of email at work - “If I ran a company and learned that most of my employees were spending that much time touching internal email, I’d ask my managers: ‘For how many and which employees is six hours of email each day adding value to the company?’ Maybe that’s just me.”

New: Merlin’s Inbox Zero Presentation

Merlin does a live presentation on Inbox Zero from time to time. The latest version of the presentation was delivered on July 23, 2007 at a Google Tech Talk in Mountain View, CA. You can download a PDF of the slides for the presentation and can watch the 58-minute video of the talk and Q&A right here:

Get Inbox Zero -- Live and in Person

Bring Inbox Zero to your company by inviting Merlin to speak at your next event. It’s fast and painless to book Merlin through Premiere. »

”43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Naps: Endangered species in modern life?

Merlin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:22:25 -0500

TheStar.com - The modern world killed off the nap

What a bouquet of coincidence.

My Make column on napping is overdue, and yet right before dashing off to steal a rejuvenating 20-minute nap, I take a spin past del.icio.us/popular to find this little gem:

A good nap is one of life's great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old.

A nap distils the sweetness of a whole night's sleep down to a few minutes. Ideally, it starts on a soft bed, in a dark room, with a warm blanket. At first your mind lingers on what you've done that day, and what you still need to do. Then your thoughts start to unravel a little, become less coherent, more dreamlike. You feel your breathing deepen, your body relax. You lose yourself; you're asleep. After a few minutes you gradually become aware again of the bed, the room. You open your eyes, gather your thoughts, throw off the blankets. You're a new person.

So nicely put. And, with that, Pzizz and I will say night night for now.

”Naps: Endangered species in modern life?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 31, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

iCal hack to automatically add alarms

Merlin — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 12:56:20 -0500

Groby Unplugged » Blog Archive » Making a better iCal

Robert Blum has come to my rescue with this handy little iCal hack -- it automatically adds an alarm to new events. It's currently hard-wired with a "one day before" alarm (happily, also my preferred default from Entourage), but Robert plans to add some flexibility in the 0.2 release next month.

(It still kind of amazes me that this feature isn't baked right in to iCal, but I'm wildly grateful to Groby for picking up the slack.)

”iCal hack to automatically add alarms” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 27, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Crazy Modern Life

Making Time to Make: One Clear Line

Get Ready for the First World

Drawing Your Line

Balanced Patterns for Recovering Time to Make

Clarify your needs

Define “OFF”

Draw your line

Be honest

Let bits drop

Be courageous

But! Also remember to be cool

Identify and engage your high-value targets

Respect others

Work. work, work.

Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have

The Connected Maker

Nowhere, Man

Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence

Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge

The 0.001 Challenge

Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments

Merlin at IDEO: "Know How" Talk with Scott Underwood

Field Reports: Guerrilla Office Tactics

Before you flame me

The Question to You

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Looking for the Inbox Zero video?

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

Related articles

New: Merlin’s Inbox Zero Presentation

Get Inbox Zero -- Live and in Person

Naps: Endangered species in modern life?

iCal hack to automatically add alarms

**Looking for the Inbox Zero video?**