Getting Things Done

Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts

Merlin Mann — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:46:17 -0400

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.

”Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 12, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking

Merlin Mann — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:47:32 -0400

The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen’s GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years.

When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here’s how I’d summarize each:

Outcome-Based Thinking. Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. Or as I like to put it, “How will I know when I’m done with this?”
The Next Action. Knowing that you don’t need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project; you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion.
The Review. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you’re doing gets looked at once a week without fail.

While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people’s results change over time.

If you focus on trying to master these three things in the service of stuff you think is valuable, you’re going to accomplish some grand work.

Slightly related, I wanted to share a modest, GTD-esque idea for a fast way to identify the actual Project and Next Action from within a big bunch of “stuff.”

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Let’s say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it’s:

Slides for talk in Arizona

If I re-articulate that in the following format:

I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR

I get something like this:

I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.

Now I’ve said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).

This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you’re feeling adrift about what to do with a something.

Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then figure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.

”Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

James Fallows on GTD apps

Merlin Mann — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:20:11 -0400

Bright side #5: interesting GTD software, including for Mac

The Atlantic writer (and recent Mac convert) James Fallows covers three apps that have caught his attention, including OmniFocus, ThinkingRock, and MonkeyWiki. Fallows says:

The GTD Way mainly involves habits of mind and action, but it also places a lot of emphasis on having the right tools, gizmos, and gimmicks to support those habits. Over the years I’ve used a variety of software to set up GTD-based systems on my computer.

And, if you’re in a real “grab the shovel” mood, don’t miss his link to a metric buttload of GTD apps.

As ever, though, friends, just remember: GTD’s power is in what it does to your approach and to your thinking; it’s not about magic beans and doo-dahs. Never allow yourself to obsess over tools to the exclusion of actually completing tasks. This is about action.

”James Fallows on GTD apps” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 02, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Whining, Blue Smoke & the Mechanics of Getting Unstuck

Merlin Mann — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:40:00 -0400

I’ve been working on a bunch of (non-43 Folders-related) stuff lately, but I started feeling that hankering to come back and write something new here. To get the engine started, I went through some old posts and turned up a few (oddly self-inspiring) ideas that I want to re-share. The topic? “Getting unstuck.”

Hack your way out of writer’s block - “Literally. Put five completley random words on a piece of paper. Write five more words. Try a sentence. Could be about anything. A block ends when you start making words on a page.”
Solve problems by writing a note to yourself - “Seriously, open up your email program, type in your own email address, then choose a brilliant subject line that perfectly encapsulates your particular problem.”
Do a fast “mind-sweep” - “And as long as you let that stuff accumulate as chunky deposits on the edges of your perception, it’s very unlikely it’ll get done since — well — they won’t get done until they’re been captured and properly started, right?”
Cringe-Busting your TODO list - “Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)”
Patching your personal suck - “Every patch that fails teaches you a little something that might come in handy some day. Mistakes, as they say, can be a buddhist gift.”

I guess all I’d add — since it’s on my mind today — is that I’m learning how much it pays to listen whenever you hear yourself mentally whining.

First off, even when it’s yourself, nobody likes a whiner. So it’s worthwhile to be mindful about the extent to which your internal monologue is becoming personally insufferable. As with B.O. and a lack of flossing, the chances are good that others have already noticed things about you before you have, so — you know — congratulations on making it to the party.

But, second, and perhaps more importantly, that whining should be telling you something. Whining is the ~~white~~ blue smoke in your tailpipe that lets you know you’re burning mental oil. It means you’re unconsciously devoting cycles to something that you can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t be spending time thinking about. Otherwise, why would it be bothering you, right? You’d be either extricated or done with it.

Once you pinpoint where that whine’s coming from, that’s the perfect opportunity to decide what the hell the hang-up is. Because if it’s worth whining and fussing about, it’s worth deciding what obstacle (obstruction?) in either the Real World or your own mind is keeping something from happening.

And once that obstacle is identified and out there, ample methods exist for helping you execute in a way that’s sane and sensible. But you can’t complete a task you don’t understand, so grant yourself the personal luxury of unpacking the problem behind the problem.

Put automotively? Obsessively adding a new quart of oil every day not only doesn’t fix your smoke problem: it feeds it. Instead, just use the smoke as a warning that it’s nigh time to trace the cracks in your engine.

As for me? Yeah. Now I’m feeling unstuck and a little less whiny. So, thanks. Onward.

Edit 2008-04-12 11:07:28 - Reader wemerson was kind enough to correct me on my metaphor in this post. Turns out that my use of “white smoke” was inaccurate; the smoke would be blue. Many thanks — and I made the correction. Learn more about smoke…

”Whining, Blue Smoke & the Mechanics of Getting Unstuck” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 10, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43 Folders: Best of GTD

Merlin Mann — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:23:09 -0500

NPR: Tech Junkies Crazy About ‘Getting Things Done’

As an insufferably huge public broadcasting nerd, I was happy to hear (via our pal, Ryan) that 43 Folders was mentioned in tonight’s All Things Considered story about Getting Things Done.

Since this may be the first time some folks have visited the site, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite GTD posts from the past four years. We talk about lots more than GTD here, but it’s definitely a lot of my readers’ favorite topic.

Thanks for stopping by. Ton of links after the jump…

Getting started with ‘Getting Things Done’ - “So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Your ‘stuff’ has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?”
How does a geek hack GTD? - “So I wanted to start a conversation about how geeks handle their lists, their projects, and their agendas–not so much in terms of the tool they use to store the information, although that’s fair game–as with how they segment the information and decide when to break it into pieces.”
Next actions: Both physical and visible - “But, for me, turning anxieties into projects and projects into discrete physical behaviors has a lot of appeal. It takes all the pressure off your brain and puts it back where it belongs: on your eyes, on your hands, and on that fat ass you need to get into gear.”
Does this ‘next action’ belong someplace else? - “I’ve noticed that there are often items on my ‘next actions’ list that hang around a lot longer than they should. I scan and rescan and sort and add and delete, but there’s always a few stragglers who hang out there for a week or more. Eventually this starts to vex me, and I try to debug why things aren’t getting done.”
Mental dialogues, yak-shaving & the triumph of the ‘mini-review’ - “My mini-review falls somewhere between the glances I give my lists throughout the day and the comprehensive weekly review I do each weekend. It’s basically a 10-minute metamoment where I stop working and just try to re-focus on my goals, and the tactical adjustments needed to get them moved forward today.”
What are you ‘waiting on?’ - “The thread that runs through all of these is that the onus is on me to a) make sure these items represent part of a commitment I’ve made, and b) make sure they actually get done (even if it’s not my direct responsibility); otherwise, they should get moved onto my ‘Maybe/Later’ list, right?”
A Year of Getting Things Done - (3-part series: 1, 2, 3) - “I recently realized that this month marks one year since I started using Getting Things Done in earnest. With the calendar year closing, it seems like an apt time to look back at what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where I’d like to see GTD heading in the future.
Choosing a daily GTD action plan - “I employ an informal Getting Things Done action strategy that’s similar to the one Chris lays out in his post. I often have a theme for a given day, where I choose an approach that’s suited to my mood, my energy level, and the kind and amount of work on my TODO list. (I’m especially a fan of days where I knock down ‘mosquito tasks’ as Chris calls them.)”
Fractal Implementation, or, On the Dangers of David Allen’s Finger - “This is my stake in the ground about GTD: if you can stay focused on drawing from its best practices to get more of the important things in your life accomplished, then you’ll be a happy kid. For real. But if, like a seeming majority of people I encounter these days, you allow yourself to obsess endlessly over the minutest details of implementation and maintenance—well, you’re screwed. You’re wasting your time.”
Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “The more email you have been neglecting in your inbox, the more drastic and ruthless your processing must be.”
Do a fast “mind-sweep” - “By and large, you’ll discover, your head is flooded with this stuff that you aren’t or haven’t been doing anything about. Not coincidentally, this is almost always stuff that represents some kind of incompletion, functional fuzziness, or procrastination on your part.”
Simplify your contexts - “If you feel a gnaw about the loss of your old contexts, try to shunt some of the mental load into sub-projects and better verb choices in your tasks.”
Folders for organization and action - “But, as ever, if you’re fussing and thinking and fiddling and wondering about this stuff, you aren’t doing it, and dammit, that’s what this is all about.”
Priorities don’t exist in a vacuum - “Unless you can always satisfy the big red letter commitments you’ve created for yourself — as well as the ones that are constantly being generated for you by others — an obsession with priority alone is pointlessly stress-inducing, unhealthy, and unrealistic.”
6 powerful “look into” verbs (+ 1 to avoid) - “Decisions can only be delivered after you’ve nourished them with timely and thought-provoking information.”
Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD’s David Allen - “Hope you all enjoy hearing the whole series, in order, all in one place. There’s some nuggets of GTD gold in there, if I do say so myself.”

”43 Folders: Best of GTD” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 19, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)

Merlin Mann — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:49:12 -0400

Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper was recently released in a completed 1.0 version (previously), and if you’re the sort of person who casts about for a simple way to manage projects and tasks from a Mac, this just may be your app.

But, even more significantly, if you’re not looking for a simple action management system — if you’re that particularly pathetic sort of character who’s convinced that features like tagging, syncing, collaboration, graph paper generation, and the introduction of an onboard artisanal breadmaker are all that stands between you and getting your stuff done — well, you may need TaskPaper more than anybody. Because, friends, TaskPaper is just about fiddle-proof, and, frankly, I know a lot of people who could benefit from that today.

Here’s what a simple document looks like in TaskPaper:

There’s your projects, there’s your tasks, there’s your contexts, and there’s your ability to see what you’ve ticked off. THAT, as John Hodgman might say, IS ALL.

So, first off and best off, TaskPaper is just text. Although documents created with TaskPaper will have the “.taskpaper” suffix, you’ll find that you can open and edit the file with TextEdit, TextMate, or any other garden variety text app. Here’s what my test document looks like when opened in TextMate:

I like the clarity and simplicity of the document’s formatting, and how it virtually negates the ability to fiddle. Actually, on first glance, the magic of TaskPaper may look familiar to people who have used syntaxes like Chairman Gruber’s peerless Markdown. I mean it really is just endlessly portable and mungeable text; it’s TaskPaper’s li’l engine that turns that formatting into the hooks that let you “do stuff” like view by context or project, and so on. This latest cut adds tabs for doing this neato functional stuff, and I have to say it’s really appealing. The approach is similar to OmniFocus — but even more obsessively concerned with keeping the system focused solely on completing tasks (rather than grooming and feeding them for months while they grow long hair and learn how to drive a stick).

Yes: absolutely — TaskPaper will be way too simple for a lot of people’s needs (including mine). But, if you’re so overwhelmed with “flexibility” that you’re getting close to throwing in the towel on an electronic system and are considering going back to paper, (while I’d never be one to stand in your way) you might want to give TaskPaper a whirl. If you love text and could benefit from the portability of a simple electronic document, it’s definitely worth looking at.

TaskPaper is free to try, and it’ll only set you back $18.95 if you decide to buy a copy. Download ‘er now.

”TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 24, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 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 Mann — 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 ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Enlightened outsourcing Part 2: The practice

norbauer — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:11:03 -0400

Ryan Norbauer returns with the hotly-anticipated conclusion to his series on the psychology and practice of outsourcing your life. If you haven’t read it yet, be sure to start with part 1.
—Merlin.

Now that I’ve primed your pump for an outsourcing extravaganza, it’s time to turn our eyes towards the quotidian. Once you’re ready to hire help, there are two main challenges to face. Firstly, you have to identify portions of your daily work that can be outsourced, and then you have to find the right person to do that work for you.

Identifying work someone else can do

Finding ways to outsource your work requires a surprising amount of vigilance and creativity. You have to spend a few days watching yourself work and repeatedly asking: if this task isn’t something I can eliminate entirely, could someone else possibly do it? Don’t worry: after a while, the heuristic becomes a reflex. But you have to start out by scrutinizing everything you do and seriously thinking about asking for help with all of it.

Unfortunately, you’ll find that some of the most tedious and annoying parts of our lives actually do demand our personal presence: stuff like sitting on the phone with credit card companies (which often refuse to speak to an agent over the phone,) standing in line at the DMV to get some piece of bureaucratic ephemera, and, alas, even going to the gym. Some other tasks, particularly of the one-off variety, require more time to outsource than to do ourselves, merely because of the overhead of explanation and coordination.

The kind of multi-step projects that comprise most of our working lives often seem as if they would fall into this latter category. It’s easy to tell yourself that it would take too long to figure out how to explain a project to someone else than to do it on your own. After all, you’re the only person who has the grand picture, understands the purpose of the work, and is familiar with the details. But with a bit of pluck and a capacity for seeing projects for what they truly are (collections of discrete actions,) you’ll be astonished at how much you can rid yourself of. I have often found that what at first seemed daunting to explain to someone else actually just required a few moments thinking about how the problem needed to be approached—which is a process I was going to have to go through anyway if I were ever going to complete the task in the first place.

Ethan Schoonover recently wrote a fabulous piece here at 43folders about the value of formulating your GTD next-action lists as if they were written for someone else to do. If one of your projects isn’t moving forward, as the theory goes, you probably haven’t sufficiently clarified precisely what physical, visible actions need to be done in order to complete it. When approached with an eye toward outsourcing, it becomes clear how important and powerful this strategy can be. Not only have you figured out precisely how the thing needs to be done, you’ve already packaged it up to outsource to someone else with no (or little) additional work.

Admittedly, some sets of instructions take longer to prepare than others. Spending ten minutes to write an email can seem like a lot of work to ask a person to do a thirty-minute task, but there are a couple things to bear in mind here. Firstly, you’ve tripled the amount of work you can do even if just those numbers are correct. But also consider that, especially if most of your daily tasks could be classified as “thought work,” there are tremendous psychological costs to burying yourself in each additional task in your workday. For one, if you’re banging through your email all at once each morning and assigning outsourcing tasks, you’re working only in one context and you can do them all in one batch. But if you did all those tasks yourself at the appropriate moments throughout the day, you’d have to deal with the overhead of the associated context-switching and the burdens of additional stress that the responsibility for each task incurs. I have found that the drain on my productivity inflicted by being responsible for lots of “little” tasks far exceeds the actual time it takes to perform them. I have therefore taken to doubling the amount of time a task will take to complete when estimating whether it’s worth my time writing it up for someone else to do. Ten minutes compared to an hour-long task suddenly sounds more reasonable, and it’s probably closer to the true cost of doing a thirty-minute task myself.

It’s important to remember that you don’t necessarily have to outsource whole projects. To cite an interesting example, we do occasional podcasts at my company. The editing process is enormously tedious and used to take me many hours to turn a two-hour interview into just 30-40 minutes of talk and music. Sure, I’m slow and a total amateur when it comes to audio editing, but that’s really my point. There was clearly someone better suited to doing this work than me.

Since I have embraced outsourcing, I now send the raw audio to my man Ashish at Tech-Synergy, who promptly sends me back a flawless time-indexed transcript in text form. I then mark up that transcript by hand in red ink, which takes about 10 minutes, and scan it rapidly to PDF using my trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap (Amazon: PC|Mac). I send the edits along with the raw audio to a firm in Argentina who edit it all together as a seamless podcast according to my marks. The whole process costs us less than $75 and saves me many painful hours of work. We’re just getting ready to post the first podcast produced under this new arrangement, and I have to say that the process has been so effortless that it has greatly reduced my psychological resistance to going out and recording new interviews.

The reason for breaking the project up in this piecemeal fashion is that I wasn’t able to find a firm at an affordable rate that was comfortable making editing decisions for me about what to cut and what to leave in the interview audio. It still seems a little batty to me to have a single podcast be worked on by various people from Bangalore to Buenos Aires in small little chunks, but the firms are happy to have the work; they cost very little; the whole thing greatly bolsters my ability to generate creative product; and I can be sure I’m only spending time on the one tiny little piece of the whole work-flow that actually requires my personal judgment and intervention. Hard to argue with all that.

The combinatorial potential of next-action outsourcing is obvious once we approach it as a sort of grammar for assembling the larger language of projects. But we must also examine a bit of that language’s vocabulary. What follows is an enumeration of things for which I have found outsourcing to be the most useful.

A virtual assistant
Design
Fulfillment
Audio/video editing
Scanning
Transcription
Artificial artificial intelligence
Software development
Domestic work

A virtual assistant

It took a lot of experimentation to find a good one, but I now rely heavily on my virtual assistant. She checks and responds to all support emails for my companies, forwarding the ones to me that I must personally handle; she scans and tabulates expense receipts; she helps me draft blog posts; she scours the internet for interesting links to post on our company blog; she handles refunds and complaints; she researches things for me; she even made us a MySpace page. VAs are also great as “attention gatekeepers,” who can screen through things like your voicemail, email, or even RSS feeds to bring important things to your attention, based on criteria you specify, without your having to be distracted by all the chaff.

Design

I enjoy doing web design myself, but sometimes having an outside person come in to add an extra layer of polish or to handle the odd arcane CSS problem can be quite valuable. The Internet is replete with freelance designers with wildly varying aesthetics and fees. Most designers can layer a lovely front-end onto your existing website without your ever having to change the back-end implementation. If you’re the sort of person who, like me, can blow an entire day vacillating between various minute changes in page layout, you might find it worth hiring someone who has the experience to be more decisive.

Fulfillment

If your business sells physical goods (like my t-shirt shop) or regularly sends out printed matter, then fulfillment houses like Shipwire and Sprocket Express will save you a tremendous amount of time and hassle. If the cost of those services seems steep, keep your eyes on Fulfillment by Amazon. I can’t recommend it yet due to the immature state of its API and wonky web interface, but FBA promises to become one of the best (and by far cheapest) options out there as they evolve through their beta and fix their funkyness.

Audio/video editing

Like most tasks that involve a human being going through digital media and performing some operation on it, audio and video editing are perfect for outsourcing. However, remember my podcasting example. If you’re fussy about style and nuance, you’ll want to find a way to give specific instructions on the sorts of edits you want to have done. Unless you’re hiring a very esteemed consultant or firm, leaving subjective decisions about editing up to outsourced help is a bit of a gamble.

Scanning

Document scanning can be one of the most irksome office chores. Although the aforelinked Fujitsu ScanSnap does a laudable job, sometimes you need a real human to babysit the scanning of each item in a huge pile of irregularly shaped or specialized documents. For example, I had an old set of bound color catalogs that I wanted in digital form. Because the pages were bound together (and I didn’t want to unbind them because they were somewhat valuable,) digitizing them meant painstakingly placing them page after page on a flatbed scanner. I bid out this task on Elance and was able to find someone to do it quite professionally and cheaply. The great thing about this is that I now have searchable PDFs of these old catalogs, which I consult fairly frequently. I can now sell, give away, or recycle the originals. By converting paper documents to searchable PDFs in this way over the past few months, I have reduced the size of my physical reference filing system by 75% (!), and significantly boosted the efficiency with which I use those files.

As a part of this outsourcing-enabled move away from paper, I have also used ScanCafe. You send them your photos and negatives, which they ship on to India to be scanned and hand color-corrected, cropped, etc. Rather than spending hours organizing and labeling the backlog in my physical photo library, I sent all my negatives to ScanCafe, stored the resulting digital versions on S3 along with all the newer images I’ve taken with my digital camera, and I threw away the paper originals. They charge $0.19 an image.

Transcription

As mentioned, transcription is a great way to transmit instructions on how to edit A/V media. It’s also great for quickly digesting TV or radio interviews you don’t have time to watch or listen to. (Humans can read much faster than we can listen to the spoken word.)

Having random phone calls come through at all hours of the day greatly saps and impurifies my concentration. To get around this, I have found another great use for outsourced transcription: voicemail. I hardly answer my phone anymore. Instead, I purchased a SimulScribe account but never associated it with an actual phone number (just select “other” as your provider when signing up). I now give that phone number out to most of my contacts (especially sales people,) so when they call, it goes straight through to my recorded message, transcribes the message they leave, and then e-mails me the text. This set-up forces callers to get the point, and allows me to reply at a time that doesn’t disrupt my work-flow.

Artificial artificial intelligence

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service is pure genius. It commodifies and automates the outsourcing of very small intellectual tasks. Here’s how they describe it:

For businesses and entrepreneurs who want tasks completed, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of getting work done in a cost-effective manner by people who have the skill to do the work. The service provides access to a vast network of human intelligence with the efficiencies and cost-effectiveness of computers. Oftentimes, the cost of establishing a network of skilled people to do the work outweighs the value of completing it. By turning the fixed costs into variable costs that scale with business needs, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service eliminates this barrier and allows work to be completed that before was not economical.

At our online dating site, we use Mechanical Turk to outsource what used to be one of the most maddeningly annoying and boring tasks of my day: approving photos. We don’t want people to upload inappropriate photos into their profiles, so uploads have to be manually inspected by a human. (There is no easy way to train a computer to identify an “inappropriate” photo.) Whereas I used to look over every uploaded photograph personally, our site now automatically uploads a task to Mechanical Turk asking whether each new photo meets our approval criteria. Each photo gets checked by a live human being, and costs us only a few cents per approval. I don’t have to spend any time thinking about this chore anymore, and as a bonus, our photo approval latency has gone from several hours to only a couple minutes on average.

Other tasks to which Mechanical Turk is well suited: tagging images, searching images for certain features, transcription, translation, checking for duplicate data (album covers, listings, images, etc.)

Software development

One of the downsides of Mechanical Turk is that it requires a bit of programming if you’re going to integrate it seriously into your business. So you may wish to hire a software developer to help you create a custom application to make use of the service.

I use software consulting heavily in my various businesses because much of my business is itself software. However, you don’t have to run a web company to use the assistance of a good team of developers. An example might be hiring a developer to create a task to do batch work that you normally do manually on your computer—work like resizing groups of photos and then converting them to black-and-white, or uploading certain files on your hard drive to a back-up service every day. If, for example, you regularly have to turn a big pile of data into some other format manually, or enter data from one piece of software to another, a custom software script could greatly speed up your daily productivity. Obviously, you don’t want to spend the time to learn a programming language just to speed up one of your daily tasks, but if you could hire a developer cheaply to create a script that would do the repetitive data work for you in a fraction of the time each day, it could certainly be worth it. Try posting a task on Elance, asking for your dream piece of software. You might be surprised by how affordable the bids are. Software development is one of the most competitive areas among offshore outsourcing services, so you can usually get a great deal. Quality naturally varies greatly.

Domestic work

This is where we stumble into the uncomfortable Jeeves-and-Wooster realm of outsourcing, but I find that domestic work, because it requires skills that almost anyone can acquire, has the highest price-to-payoff ratio for outsourcing. Geo-arbitrage notwithstanding, it’s hard to find a skilled Ruby developer (and thus you must pay for the privilege,) but it’s not so hard to find someone who knows how to make dinner or sweep the floor.

There is something luxurious (and, yes, a little weird) in having your household needs seen to by someone else. You feel spoiled and silly for hiring someone to do work that you could so easily do yourself. But outsourcing is about freeing your time and psyche for your most important work, if you can afford to do so.

In my case, I decided to outsource meal preparation, which I used to spend about 5-8 hours on each week. My solution came from an idea in Tim Ferriss’s blog. I posted an ad on Craigslist asking for a local cook who would be willing to prepare food in bulk for our household of three on a weekly basis. I got about 15 impressive responses to my ad and ended up settling on a fellow who was willing to make four or five dishes for us in large quantity (more than enough for the three of us to have great food for each meal of the week.) He charges us $120-140 per week, which is less than I sometimes used to spend on groceries when I did the cooking myself, and delivery is included! To be fair, I ask that he prepares vegetarian food, which often costs less to make than meat, but I’m sure the cost of meat dishes would be in the same order of magnitude. This works out on average to cost us about $2.00-3.50 per meal per person (depending on how many times we eat each day,) or about $45 per person per week. Under this splendid arrangement, I’ve freed up several hours each week; we’re hardly spending any more money than we used to on food; and we’re helping a local cook make some extra money.

It never hurts to post a task just to see how cheaply you can get it done. Grouping tasks into one bulk job and sharing the service with your neighbors helps. When you look into it, what may seem like the sole province of the wealthy can prove far more accessible than you’d think.

Identifying someone else to do the work

Take a quick look at the number and variety of providers on Elance, OffshoreExperts, and Guru, or make a post on Craigslist and you’ll quickly see that when you’re ready to set up an outsourcing relationship, finding people willing to do the work isn’t going to be a problem. What you will also find, however, is that discerning among them is.

The great thing about most forms of outsourcing is that the barrier to entry is usually rather low. To take one typical project I posted on Elance (scanning those catalogs I mentioned,) I got bids ranging from $50 to $695. If I decided to go with one of the cheaper providers, the money at risk was pretty minimal. And if I found that I liked their work, I could hire them for bigger tasks in future. To save on international shipping, I decided to hire a stay-at-home mom in the Chicago area to do the scanning for me at $100, which was on the low end of the US bids. It took her a bit longer than promised to complete them, but I ultimately decided to use her for further work later on because she was friendly and had no trouble understanding complicated tasks. I’ve done this many times. Sometimes, I’ve gotten awful work, and I just leave it at the initial task. Other times I’ve met providers whom I’ve loved, and I still work with them today.

Feedback on sites like Elance is sometimes helpful, but I find that only the satisfied customers leave feedback. People who are unsatisfied tend not to leave unambiguously negative feedback for fear of a retaliatory strike (rather like eBay.) Sometimes you have to read between the lines.

There are, however, other clues to whether a provider is worth trying out. Beware providers who over-promise in hyperbolic terms. If the bid is worded to make it sound like the provider has been waiting his whole life to do this one task for you, I would look elsewhere. I get these breezy copy-and-paste bids all the time, and close inspection usually reveals that this marketing copy (usually in awkward, broken English) was written by someone who didn’t even spend a second looking at the task I posted. There are a few providers on Elance who will more or less bid on everything, low-balling their fee to win and only then will they spend time to figure out how to do the task.

There remains the touchy issue of nationality. To be sure, there are plenty of cheap offshore providers available to do “business process outsourcing” of the sort I’ve been discussing in this article. Having worked with outsourcing companies across the globe, I have developed a few rules of thumb about when to go offshore and when to find a domestic contractor.

I’ve long been a fervent proponent of Free Trade and global competition for services. (If you have any hesitations, politically or otherwise, about the issue, I recommend this illuminating article from Foreign Affairs.) So my decision-making when it comes to outsourcing is always about value; jingoism doesn’t factor into it. I hope the same will hold true for you.

There is an unfortunate sentiment among many folks in the US that with the cost savings of offshoring comes a decrease in quality. Sometimes it’s true—as I have recently learned in the case of t-shirt manufacture, American-made items are much better quality than their Chinese counterparts—but often it’s not true, particularly in the case of knowledge work. As with firms within the US, there is a wide diversity in quality among companies abroad. But when Americans encounter bad foreign companies they are too eager to blame it on the company’s country rather than on natural variations in quality among all firms in that country, which is what they would likely attribute bad work to if they were dealing with a sub-par American firm. Don’t extrapolate an ill judgment against a whole country based on one or two bad experiences.

I have hired many software consultancies, for example, in the past two years, both domestic and abroad. Interestingly, all of the American firms I hired were both expensive and inattentive. I finally decided to give an Indian team of Ruby on Rails consultants a try, and they were so efficient, smart, friendly, and attentive by comparison that I actually ended up going into business with them. This has been my experience with several foreign outsourcing providers. They are oftentimes more motivated and available than domestic contractors, and very much worth their (relatively palatable) fees.

I’ve had some bad offshoring experiences too. One company of Chinese illustrators on Elance was so inept at English that they couldn’t understand the simply-worded instructions for the project they enthusiastically bid on, so we had to switch to something more straightforward. However, after I simplified the task, I ended up with a sensational end-result for a trivial sum of money. Other providers have sounded great in their bids but proved to be utterly incapable of communicating or delivering even a shadow of what they promised.

If you’re going to go abroad, it’s worth using an offshoring firm with some physical basis in the US if possible. I used one Asian firm with a local representative here in Boston who was a native English speaker. This made the whole process go much more smoothly than, for example, those Chinese illustrators who couldn’t understand what I was asking them to do. If you’re of a litigious bent, you’ll also appreciate having a local legal entity with which to sign a domestic contract.

Another potential down-side to foreign firms concerns cultural sensitivity. I tried three different assistants at the Indian VA firm GetFriday, but was never able to find one who understood American culture and language well enough for me to feel comfortable letting him represent my company. They somehow always managed to make their emails read like florid Nigerian spam. GetFriday charges about $10 an hour now ($15 without a monthly contract). Since switching from GetFriday, I hired my delightful remote assistant in Texas, whom I found on Elance, at $15 an hour. Not only is she perfectly versed in English and American culture (so that she can actually do things like help me draft blog articles), but she happens to have a higher level college degree than I do. I am much happier with a slightly more expensive remote assistant in the US, because there is so much more I can ask her to do.

GetFriday was great for rote tasks that didn’t require too much independent thinking or cultural awareness. Some good examples: sitting on the phone to Costco to ask if they carry a certain type of rice, removing ads from the PDF of a scanned magazine, calling every Starbucks in Boston to see which one is open latest, and simple research (“when is the best time of the year to go whale-watching off the coast of New England?”) I could never have expected them, however, convincingly to pull off creating a MySpace page for my company, or to draft blog articles.

If most of your work involves spreadsheets and other brainless enterprisey bullshit (I mean that lovingly,) then go with a cheap offshore VA. If, on the other hand, you’re something like a writer, a creative, or a researcher, you’re going to want an assistant in the US (or, to save a little cash, you can usually get a bargain by working with someone in a remote part of Canada or the Antipodes.)

A different aspect of cultural awareness is design. I would be very reticent about hiring a web designer in India, for example, because their national design aesthetic seems to be stuck in the stock-arty world of 1995. If you’re looking for offshore design, go to countries that have low costs of living but close ties to European culture: Argentina, Brazil, or the Czech Republic, for example. If you don’t mind paying the big bucks, Brooklyn and Portland are gathering places for our country’s best hipster designers. The best place place to find illustrators in any country is IllustrationMundo.

Above all else, pay attention to the provider’s ability to communicate. Since your instructions must be transmitted largely through an indirect written medium, the ability to understand your contractor and have him understand you is of the utmost importance. Without good communication, you’ll just waste your money and time. If it takes you twice as long to explain yourself to your provider (or worse, it takes two tries to get anything right) you might as well use one who is charging twice as much. If you get a weird feeling in the initial e-mail back-and-forth, a sense that the provider doesn’t quite get what you’re talking about, run the other direction and find somebody else. If you can’t understand each other, no matter what the contractor’s fee, I guarantee you’re not getting any bargain.

Homework

Good outsourcing requires earnest experimentation. Now that I’ve given you a thoroughgoing tour of the periodic table of providers, it’s time to do some of your own outsourcing alchemy. Do let us know in the comments what blows up in your face, and what turns to gold.

”Enlightened outsourcing Part 2: The practice” was written by Ryan Norbauer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 08, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Enlightened outsourcing, Part 1: The psychology

norbauer — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:00:02 -0400

Yesterday, Ethan talked about delegating to yourself. Today, Ryan Norbauer discusses what it takes to delegate well to others. Part one of a two-part series.
Update 2007-10-08: Part 2 of this series is now available. »

I’m Ryan, and you can usually find me in the midst of my workday by following the trail of naked yaks. I fear that I’m drawn to arcane tasks not in spite of the fact that they are tangential to my ultimate goals, but precisely because they give me an excuse to avoid them. I don’t need to grapple with the big anxiety-evoking issues of how to make a new one of my companies make more money, for example, if I can instead focus on creating an elaborate triply-redundant, auto-rotating archival filing system for our Apache server logs (which we never look at.)

However, I recently encountered a weirdly tantalizing idea in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which would ultimately disrupt my addiction to the extraneous. The book advocates farming out the more mundane tasks of your existence to outside firms and consultants, which Ferriss calls “outsourcing your life.” Probably because it would give me an excuse not to do something else more pressing, I decided to give this a go a few months ago. While I did learn quite a lot about outsourcing in the process, my experiments led me to a far grander epiphany about the way I approach life and work generally and helped me form a new set of habits that have utterly rocked my workaday world. I’m about to introduce you to the theory and practice of what I believe to be the forgotten Prime Minister of All Productivity Hacks: asking for help.

In a matter of a few months, I’ve gone from being an obsessively micro-managing perfectionist entrepreneur who reserved even the most miniscule tasks for himself, to someone who gets assistance on an almost daily basis from no fewer than fourteen outside sources, from New Delhi to New York. And a wonderful thing has happened. I find myself robbed of all those enticing excuses to avoid doing what I ought to do, and I’m actually spending time on things that matter instead. I can honestly report that nothing I’ve ever tried, including GTD, has so radically transformed my ability to bring the big plans I have for my little universe actually to bear upon reality.

Oh, and as a nice ancillary point, it costs surprisingly little money.

Outsourcing and resistance

Outsourcing has become something of a fad in the past few months, thanks to Mr. Ferris. I think this is in part because many people hadn’t realized that they could do just what American and British corporations have been doing for years: hire workers in the developing world at rates that would make any domestic contractor laugh. I was already well aware of this fact, however, and indeed my interest is not solely in the possibility of hiring folks in Bangalore to make spreadsheets for me at three dollars and hour. For my purposes here outsourcing will instead encompass all forms of outside help, whether it be hiring a Brooklyn designer at $100 an hour, a New Delhi developer at $50, or a Pakistani personal assistant at $5.

The 4-Hour Workweek
by Timothy Ferriss

To me, the far more interesting aspect of my recent embrace of outsourcing is why it took me reading Tim’s book to get to the point where I was willing to start looking for people to help me get stuff done. If I could multiply my productivity by several orders of magnitude merely by hiring help from time to time (which seems obvious,) why did it take me so long to even consider doing it?

The reason, I think, is that that the biggest barriers to truly taking advantage of outsourcing are not cost or logistics (the details of which I’ll address in Part II of this article,) but psychology. Making good use of outsourced help requires being able truly to open yourself to the possibility of asking for help, getting over your delusions of importance, surmounting any weird hang-ups you might have about entitlement or your worthiness to get assistance, and having the creativity necessary to identify the ways in which you can open your workflow up to external aid. Before you get on the phone to GetFriday, these are issues worth confronting.

Opening yourself to help

One of the reasons I’ve always recoiled at the notion of getting help from other people has to do with my simple desire not to be an ass. I’ve always been the sort of egalitarian-minded fellow who has trouble letting someone carry his bags at a hotel, not because I mind paying the tip but because who do I think I am. I was raised among earnest hard-working Appalachians whose prime directive was not to put other people to any trouble. The thought of hiring someone to cook every meal for me—which I incidentally do now at the cost of $45 a week—would have been unthinkable in the world in which I grew up, whether one could afford it or not.

When I first began experimenting with outsourcing, I had to confront this previously unexamined reflex. I had real trouble asking my first assistant, Suresh, to do several tasks merely because I hated to put him to the trouble of doing something tedious that I could do myself. I was literally embarrassed to ask him to do a lot of what I had originally hired him to do.

The irrationality of this is manifest. Suresh was literally hired to do boring work and was actively asking me to give him more. I wasn’t doing him any favors by depriving him of billable hours. And the whole point of hiring an assistant is to get some of the tedious, time-consuming stuff out of one’s face and onto the desk of someone who is more suited to doing it.

I’ve watched enough people scream at blameless airport ticketing agents and well-meaning waitresses to know that making one’s expectations known isn’t a problem for a lot of people. But if you share this problem with me, even just a little, you can’t expect any real benefits from outsourcing until you realize that it’s totally irrational and try to overcome it. You’re not a character in an E.M. Forster novel: getting a little help in life doesn’t turn you into an elitist tea-sipping toff. Nobody’s going to be working for you out of a sense of deference or duty. It’s capitalism. The people whom you’re going to hire are your equals (no matter where they live or how much you’re paying them,) and so long as you treat them that way, there’s no reason to cringe at fully taking advantage of the labor which they are willingly proffering.

Once I recognized and worked to get over this daft hang-up, I was ready to start optimizing.

Delusions of importance

Ferriss makes quite a rational argument for the utility of outsourcing, and I think this is what actually pushed me over the edge of trying out an assistant in the first place. One of the themes of his book is the Pareto principle (or the “80/20” law). This is a concept with dubious empirical support, but as a sort of thought-game it’s nonetheless useful. The idea is that a common pattern emerges among economic distributions whereby 20% of causes lead to 80% of consequences. In terms of personal productivity, it was easy for me to extend the metaphor.

Before I began outsourcing, a normal day would go something like this:

Wake up. Check and reply to stress-inducing customer support emails. (1 hour)
Check and reply to business development emails. (2-3 hours)
Programming: new feature development and bug fixes (2 hours)
Make lunch. Do a bit of cleaning. (1 hour)
Chase some random pointless, unfinishable project, like cutting apart my back issues of Martha Stewart Living, removing the ads, and filing the pages thematically. (2 hours)
An ad hoc mix of programming, more email checking, and taking phone calls. (2 hours)
Start making dinner (1-2 hours)
BONUS Zoning out while wishing I were spending more time promoting my companies and clarifying our business objectives (1 hour in sporadic 5-second sporadic increments all through the day)

A few things stand out about this. Firstly, there is no time when I’m actually not working in some form or another. I’m constantly busy. Yet, if you asked me which task was the one that gave me those 80% of gains whenever I spent time on it, it’s that nebulous last one, which gets almost none of my “busy time.” Whenever I have spent time evaluating and tweaking our business models or working on publicity, the gains far outweigh any incremental improvement in a product feature could give us, or any handful of super-friendly and helpful support emails. But I was so accustomed to the behavioral inertia of the busy-work like programming and answering support emails, that I never quite got around to focusing on that far more important “bonus” task.

I’ve often found GTD to be an enabler in this regard. It allows us to keep on top of our mountain of next actions very efficiently, but rarely does it encourage us to stop doing 80% of them.

So, when I set about finding spots in my daily workflow where outsourcing might be able to help, I realized that the 80% of my work that led to minimal incremental benefits could either be entirely abandoned or easily outsourced. My main company gets basically the same 10 support requests over and over again; responding is a pretty brainless job. And I’m not the only guy in the world who can code Ruby well. However, I am the only guy in the world who can do interviews with the press about the company I started, or plan our strategy for the next year.

This all took me admitting a harsh fact to myself. For most of our day-to-day operations, my company could get on just fine without me. I’m simply not that important.

And I suspect that neither are you, no matter what your business or your role in it. Very few businesses have such special internal processes that there isn’t some outside firm experienced in and willing to do that work, oftentimes more cost-effectively. Are you clinging to some of those straight-forward widget-cranking tasks merely to be able feel useful—so you can point to some concrete bit of “work” at the end of the day, rather than those bigger issues that are so often impossible to quantify? I certainly was.

What is the part of your work (whether personal or professional) that only you can do? And what if you could somehow force yourself to do only that work? In my case, doing precisely this with the help of outsourcing has radically improved my effectiveness. I’ve essentially cut out steps 1-7 of my daily routine above, so I’m freed to focus exclusively on what was previously just a bonus—even though it was actually my most important work.

Try to be as smart as a pigeon

“It allows me to identify ratholes from the outset of a project and assign them to someone else…”

In the 1970s two behavioral researchers, Howie Rachlin and Len Green, studied self-control in pigeons. They found that, when given a choice between a small reward delivered immediately and a larger reward delivered after a 4-second delay, the pigeons invariably chose the smaller immediate reward. In other words pigeons, like people, can be impulsive. In the same way, we often sabotage ourselves by impulsively choosing small immediate rewards over larger more temporally distant ones—like I did when I went out to Starbucks earlier this evening rather than working on this article. Although in the grand scheme of things, I’d rather rather have this article done than have drunk a cup of mint tea, in the moment of my choice the tea just seemed more compelling.

Pigeons, however, are not as dumb as they look—or, for that matter, as dumb as we humans often are. In the second part of the aforementioned study, the pigeons were offered basically three options:

Small reward now
Large reward after a delay, with the option to “defect” to the small any time
Large reward after a delay, with no option for the pigeon to change its mind during the delay.

Interestingly, the pigeons tended to choose option 3. They knew starting out that they wanted the bigger reward, and that they would be tempted to sabotage that goal by defecting to the smaller reward during the delay. So instead they decided at the outset to commit themselves to the larger reward, by robbing themselves of the impulsive option later on.

That’s exactly what outsourcing has become to me. It allows me to identify ratholes from the outset of a project and assign them to someone else (if I’m not willing to let go of them entirely,) so I won’t have the opportunity to defect from the important work towards those yak-shaving tasks later on. I no longer have the excuse of checking our support inbox a hundred times a day when I don’t want to confront the bigger issues that have to be confronted for things truly to progress.

David Allen, when defining productivity “tricks” puts it this way: “the smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part of us responds to almost automatically.” And philosopher John Perry suggests something very similar in his structured procrastination, which involves taking on ever more grandiose projects so that you’ll work on the projects you’re actually supposed to do as a way of avoiding those bigger projects. I’ve merely taken this one step further (or flipped it on its head, depending on how you look at it.) By outsourcing the means of avoidance, I’ve committed myself to working on the grandiose.

Now, of course, you have to be honest with yourself. You can’t just fill up your life with a whole host of new tangential tasks to replace the ones you’ve farmed out. The good outsourcer learns to develop a healthy reflex of either immediately deflecting any time-consuming side task to outside help or abandoning it on the spot. It’s taken me a while, but this is becoming second nature to me now. And I try always to bear the 80/20 concept in mind before tucking into any task that might take more than a few moments. If it’s not in the 20%, I simply refuse to do it myself. And, much to my surprise, nothing ill has come of it.

Once you’ve properly embraced an outsourcing world-view in the ways I suggest, you’ll begin to see a universe of possibilities opening that might never have occurred to you previously. And, like GTD, you’ll find it giving you a radical new calculus for the sort of commitments you’re willing to take on. You’ll begin to see tasks falling into two natural categories: those which can be delegated, and those which you must do yourself. And you’ll find yourself taking the latter far more seriously.

Check back soon for Part 2 of Ryan’s outsourcing series, coming soon to 43 Folders.

”Enlightened outsourcing, Part 1: The psychology” was written by Ryan Norbauer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 25, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dear Me: Get to work

Ethan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:32:09 -0400

The Problem

GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.

For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I’d scan through my context lists and I’d see things like:

Pack box up

Ask Bob about meeting

Review new design book

Send Cherry income information

Scanning down a list of actions in a context list should be like running your hand across a silk sheet. Scanning through these tasks felt less like silk and more like sand paper. Pack what into the box? What did I need to know about the meeting? Review the book for what, specifically?

With a moment’s thought I could remember what I meant when I wrote most of these tasks, but they were difficult (if not impossible) to scan through, select rapidly and then act on. I was losing speed. Mind less like water, more like ketchup.

Insight

Looking back, it’s not hard to see what the problem was: unclear writing. I simply wasn’t being descriptive enough. Yet for the longest time I didn’t see this. The actions were “understandable enough” with a bit of work. That “bit of work”, of course, is the silent killer of GTD. Anytime you are putting in work to decipher your system, your energy and productivity are being slowly siphoned away.

Tasks must be immediately clear without needing interpretation. To use a geeky metaphor, they are precompiled instructions waiting for execution, not a script that’s interpreted at run time.

After I realized this, I tried to address it, but I ended up with excessive detail (and thus wasted time in the planning stage) or fell back into old habits of too little information.

Then I started using a hack: I stopped deferring my tasks and started getting someone else to do them for me.

Solution: Write your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.

Ok, back to reality: it would be nice if there was someone willing to actually do all my tasks, but that’s not the case. None the less, I stopped writing my tasks down as if I was going to do them later, and I started to literally write as if I was delegating them to someone else.

To make this trick work, you need a delegatee firmly in mind:

Someone real. It doesn’t help if, every time you are going to faux-delegate, you have to re-imagine some fictional character.
Ideally someone a bit outside your knowledge domain. This prevents a certain laziness in phrasing tasks.
Someone that you don’t normally delegate a lot of tasks to. Again, avoiding the “common knowledge” problem.

Every time I draft a task, I am mentally writing it as if I will be handing my context list over to someone else (in this case, it’s my wife Bee since she’s at least twice as clever as I am but whose work has little overlap with mine). These are, of course, all my tasks, but I am quite literally delegating (not simply deferring) when I’m writing them down.

Example

Revisiting the poorly written task in my example above, I keep my delegatee firmly in mind and tell them to:

Pack winter clothes in corner of bedroom into airmail box

Ask Bob for the date of the next website revamp meeting

Review “Page Design” book for three examples of three column page layout

Send Cherry second quarter income statements (doc link in notes)

Why this works

The secret to all this is that, when you are writing down your deferred tasks “normally”, in truth you’re actually delegating but you just don’t realize it. You are simply delegating to your future self. The problem is that, in our present-self state of mind when planning tasks, we are filling in the gaps in our writing with present-knowledge. This knowledge fades quickly and by the time our future-self picks up the work, the mortar of that transient information has dissolved, turning what seemed to be a solid, actionable task into an unclear jumble of words. By shifting our mindset from “I’ll do this later” to “I need to assign this to so-and-so”, we hack around this problem.

So tighten up the descriptiveness of your tasks today: defer as if you delegate. And when you finally have an army of minions that you really can delegate your every whim to, you’ll be ready with tasks in hand.

”Dear Me: Get to work” was written by Ethan Schoonover for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 24, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"