GTD

The Problem with Ubiquitous Capture

wood.tang — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:51:34 -0400

Years ago when I started my first job out of college, my employer sent its new crop of computer consultants to South Bend, Indiana for a week-long training session. Typical stuff: we watched a hilariously inappropriate sexual harassment video, learned how to use the company’s timekeeping system (a thick client C++ program named, aptly, “Data Time Entry”), and generally got used to the idea of living out of a suitcase.

Late in the week, an entire day was devoted to a presentation by a FrankinCovey trainer who showed us how to use the fancy leather-bound, three-ring binder/planner/organizer that our company purchased for us, complete with a storage case for archiving calendar pages. She ran us through the whole Covey system. We watched a video of one of Stephen Covey’s motivational seminars-cum-religious revivals and made lists of our goals, hopes, and regrets. I raised my hand and told a story about how lousy I felt for saying something nasty to my mom before I left that week. “Call Mom to apologize” went onto my Weekly Compass, marked Priority A.

At one point, the trainer demonstrated a little pocket notebook that could be detached from the binder when you didn’t want to lug around the whole thing, “a satellite that always returns to the mothership,” she called it. We snickered while she pantomimed writing down someone’s phone number at a Bears game; she was crazier than the guy in suspenders from the day before who taught us about management with a modified version of Monopoly. Most of us were planning to buy Palm Pilots with our first paychecks anyway. But I didn’t realize then how prescient that moment was. Training class Matt would laugh Matt circa 2008 all the way down I-90 if he could see me now.

The Capture Obsession

Those of us who use GTD obsess over our little satellites for capturing “stuff” the second it pops into our heads. I’ve used all types: index cards, Moleskine notebooks, legal pads, PDAs, voice recorders, you name it. Lately I’ve taken to using a Field Notes memo book mainly because I like the way it fits in my back pocket. Coincidentally, the Field Notes motto also sums up the whole capturing idea well: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

We have this capture thing down pat. Not a stray thought floats by that doesn’t get recorded, sorted, and filed. The problem with this highly optimized process is that it tends to collect a lot of crap. That notebook sure is handy when I run out of orange juice, but it can also fill up with a lot of bad ideas, things I don’t need to buy, and books I’ll never have time to read. My classic capturing overkill happens when I’m monkeying around with my wireless network at home. I get a notion to do something simple like buy a new backup disk, and the next thing I know I’ve written a bill of materials to build a server farm in my coat closet.

The “What the hell was I thinking?” Moment

I concede the value of David Allen’s point that we have to get things out of our heads so they don’t bogart mental RAM, and he does account for some processing time to weed out the silly stuff. My point is that a lot of the detritus floating between our ears shouldn’t make it that far, and this obsession with perfect capture is at fault. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry writes himself a note in the middle of the night and can’t decipher it in the morning, because it was really about a B-movie he had been watching where Larry David is dressed like an astronaut.

Treating every little harebrained idea and irrelevant suggestion the same way you treat remembering to buy your wife a birthday present isn’t a wise use of time. If I had back some of the time I spent calling Jott to, I don’t know, play fetch with my dog, I’d be a much happier man. Actually, I live with someone else who acts on every impulse like that, and it’s not always pretty. He’s also three years old.

The real killer is that some of the bad stuff can filter through and land on one of your to-do lists. Most of us are smart enough to recognize bad ideas when we see them, so the danger isn’t that we’ll find ourselves doing things we shouldn’t simply because it managed to worm its way onto our list. But a lot of us do have issues dropping something once it’s reached that level of commitment. So we keep it on the list, taking up space and adding to the cumulative dread of a to-do list bloated with junk.

The Important Stuff Will Come Back

I don’t buy this theory that simply writing things down somehow reduces stress. All it means is that those things are now on a piece of paper or some kind of digital list, usually in our pocket at all hours of the day, mocking us for not being able to finish them. Maybe instead of optimizing our means of capturing ideas, we need to optimize our brain’s spam filter. Good ideas and important reminders will rise to the top, and if we think about them once we’ll think about them again.

Next time, try controlling that impulse to write something down the second you think of it, and save it for a time when it’s more convenient. If it’s worth your time, you’ll be able to think of it again. I often have ideas when I’m walking my dog, but I purposely don’t stop to record them. If they’re still on my mind once I get home, then they go into the inbox. Since I’ve started doing this, my real to-do list has shortened considerably, the bills still get paid, and the house hasn’t burned down. I may have cost myself a few router resets, but my dog and I are okay with that.

”The Problem with Ubiquitous Capture” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 22, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

Merlin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:01:55 -0500

Although the first priority in ubiquitous capture is getting it down, the red-headed stepchild trailing in at number two is providing context. And I don't mean the GTD kind of contexts, but the kind of context that minimally explains what this information means, where and when you collected it, why it matters, or anything else that will help you find a meaningful place for it in your life later on.

Example? Sure. Here's one from my real and recent world. Index card with one word on it:

Once

Okay, there you go! "Once." Good night, everybody!

Just a tiny bit more information would have made that note a lot more useful to me. How about:

"Once"
- movie KK likes
- Irish band "The Frames"
- DVD -> 12/18

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Now I know that this is that movie my friend Kristine likes with music from that band she told me about. Without that bit of context, the word "Once" will mean nothing to me later on.

Think you're immune to the need for this kind of frippery? Try this handy home test.

Ever find a scrap of paper in your life that looked something like this?

408
996
1010

Ah, the classic 10 digit problem.

While a nutritious breakfast and a sound public school education can help me to deduce that this is very likely a phone number, the paucity of contextual data on whose number it is or why I wrote it down leaves me with a problem. It also suggests that my current system for capturing information ubiquitously is either incomplete or badly implemented. And, I have about 30 years of 10-digit scraps to prove it.

You don't need to go nuts with extra data, but just remember: you may really need this information later on to take some kind of action or just to decide whether and where it fits in your world.

If it's worth capturing, it's worth capturing well, so take the extra couple seconds to remind yourself what the hell you were thinking about.

”Provide context for better ubiquitous capture” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 17, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Using GTD To Tame The Beast Inside Of Me

Derrick Bostrom — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:28:27 -0500

It's the central contradiction at the heart of our all-too-finite existence that we cannot reconcile the uncontainability of our dreams with the futile limitation of our resources. It's no wonder we've come rely on strategies to get through the day. In David Allen's world, the metaphor is the overloaded information-driven workplace. For Merlin, it's the in-box. Much like baseball, which employs elaborate rules to "score" the uncontrollable moment when pine touches horse-hide, or Civil War reenactments, which apply a comforting tactical grid to our nation's most chaotic psychic trauma, GTD derives its power from our need to impose our will on random events. No matter what fate has in store, all we have to do is write it down and throw it in a box.

But some situations require us to think outside the box.

I've never been very good at handling demands from the outside world. I haven't answered my telephone in decades. When it comes to something like getting a haircut, visiting the dentist or changing the oil in my car, I'll either lie awake all night worrying about it or forget about it altogether. So I desperately wanted to believe in any strategy that could help me dispatch unpleasant tasks without the need to obsess over them. Once I made that initial leap of faith, the rest came surprisingly easy. Sure enough, I was amazed to discover how quickly I could swat down those hated chores with my very first trusted system.

As self-loathing abated, I looked forward to the promise of projects that might actually cause me personal satisfaction upon completion, and not merely relief. But external obligations sprout all by themselves, like weeds. I found myself spending far too much time whacking tedious projects off my plate and not nearly enough on the ones I truly loved. I came to understand that if my only motivation was avoidance of the pain from open loops, I'd do nothing but battle these impositions for the rest of my life. I knew I'd have to rethink my system.

Some stubborn projects defy the equation: the pain of doing them far outweighs the pain of leaving them undone. For these tasks, I've created an entirely new type of context, which I've set just above and slightly to the right of "deferred." I call it "punishment." Tasks falling into this category include certain home plumbing repairs, financial drudgery which I haven't figured out how to automate yet, or anything that tends to remind me of my inevitable demise (such as pruning photo albums of recently deceased pets or trying to read anything set below 12-point type). In other words, this context would include any task that would tend to ruin my day if attempted.

I save those tasks for when my day is already ruined. Whether I've overplayed my hand somehow and allowed my demons to surface, or just simply made the colossal miscalculation of allowing myself to "believe" (whatever that means), that's when I pull out the punishment list. Suddenly, the tasks on this list don't look so foreboding -- that's when I know its time to jump on them. The benefits to this approach are threefold: first, I receive my self-administered comeuppance, second, I move a dreaded project forward, and third, if the project truly belonged on the list in the first place, then it 's likely I've banged my knuckles against the pipes hard enough to restore emotional equilibrium.

This may sound a little extreme, but it works. The last time I tried this method, I was hoarse from screaming at my tools and there was a pile of broken pipes and kitchen paneling out behind the house. But my newly-installed under-the-sink reverse osmosis unit worked like a charm! Furthermore, I'd completely forgotten whatever was bothering me in the first place.

Give it a try, but make sure you have plenty of band-aids on hand.

”Using GTD To Tame The Beast Inside Of Me” was written by Derrick Bostrom for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"