Web Worker Daily |
| Envision Your Week for Productivity Posted: 08 Sep 2008 01:00 PM CDT
WWD: What’s wrong with traditional to-do lists? LF: My compliance with traditional to-do lists is patchy. Sometimes great, sometimes awful. It’s at its worst when the to-do list is too tactical, largely because projects and environments shift, and you can’t always predict in advance what the right mix of actions, efforts, conversations and relationships is. Breaking tasks down into manageable pieces is important too, but there’s a balance because the piece that seems important Monday might be irrelevant by Wednesday. I’ve also noticed that deferring tasks to a to-do list can be its own form of procrastination. WWD: So what did you come up with as a better way to keep yourself focused on the important things? LF: Out of the blue one day, I made a note to myself in TextEdit, named it FRIDAY and stuck it on my desktop. The note was a brief description of my Friday afternoon, and referred to a kind of “state of the company” as of mid afternoon on the coming Friday. I didn’t even really open the file that much that week, but I had written down the goals the way they always say you should - as done deals - and the file sat there in plain view all week. Even I was amazed on Friday at how much of it got done. It also cut down on the daily recriminations about to-do list “float” — that raft of items you keep never getting to. WWD: What benefits are you seeing from keeping a Friday File? LF: I need to be really attentive to results vs effort. This method helps me. You can do “the right things” all week long and merrily cross them off your task list, but not end up where you and your business need to be. I don’t do it every single week, but I am definitely more productive in the weeks that I do. This week I am staring down the barrel of a whole lot of urgent and important stuff, and I don’t want to get caught up in the details. WWD: Has this completely replaced your task list? LF: Nope, I still use RememberTheMilk, mainly to support processing my inbox, but for big picture strategy and focus I prefer my Friday lists. What the Friday file does for me is pull strategy out of the clouds and put it into my shorter-term working orders. Another relevant distinction is between “goals” and “direction” (for me this comes from Stephen Shapiro’s work on Goal Free Living). It’s important to understand where you want to get in terms that are versatile and flexible enough to take advantage of serendipitous opportunities as they come in. So while some items on my list will be tactics, they are generally supporting a place I want to get to. That’s an art, and while I don’t claim to have mastered it, my flexibility frequently opens doors I did not even know I should go knock on. That saying “if you don’t know where you’re going, any train will take you there” is double-edged. Being open to other destinations within a general vector/purpose of what you are trying to achieve is important. We no longer kid ourselves that we can taxonomize the world and set everything in stone. We recognize the need to tag and organize collectively in many spheres. I’m getting way off topic now, but there is a need for productivity and tasks and strategy to be a lot more fluid and nonlinear too. WWD: Can you share any tips about the actual form of the Friday file for you? Narrative style? Bullet lists? Present/past tense? Got a piece to share with readers? LF: Frankly, I’m not very formal about it. I write it in the present tense, with a positive tone and a combination of bullets and narrative: FRIDAY:
I’d also like to emphasize: it’s not that I am hitting all these objectives every week, it is that i am tremendously more productive working under this system than when i am clearing out tasks. Maybe it’s the confidence and clarity of knowing what needs to happen, not just what line items to poke at. WWD: Can you use a Friday file to keep a group focused? Or do you see it as strictly an individual endeavor? LF: Actually, I think it would be great for a group, because in the next team meeting all can keep their eyes on “net results generated” not devolve into a he said/she said about tasks & tactics. Also, I would think that if the group shared consensus on the result needed, they could be more versatile with adjusting their tactics on the fly. Great idea. WWD: Any final thoughts? LF: The things that I get the most “stuck-est” on… it frequently turns out I was not supposed to do. I’m not saying that everything I procrastinate turns out to be for a good reason, but there are a lot of times when I get stuck that I later find an infinitely better, different way to handle… By focusing on the Friday list, it gets a little easier to cut bait on the stilted tactics and approaches and push through to production and results. Readers: have you built your own techniques for staying focused on the “big picture”? How do you do it? Photo credit: stock.xchng user superdecor           |
| Posted: 08 Sep 2008 09:00 AM CDT Presence and availability information has been one of the key enabling technologies for web workers, providing signaling mechanisms for indicating the ability and willingness of users to communicate, whether by instant message, VoIP call, caller ID or even an email auto-responder. Together presence and status indicators weaved through our various communication channels make teleworking and telecommuting less painless and provide useful ’social signaling’ that would ordinarily take place in office environments. It’s arguable that time & distance are no longer useful measures of the value or cost of communication, but the richness of contextual signaling available in any one medium. Personally, I’ve found the most profound innovations in presence, latterly, to be Twitter and to a lesser extent Jaiku. Both provide important mechanisms for richly describing presence location - whether it’s location, activity or even mood…the latter perhaps signaling the solicitation of communication. In Jaiku’s case, it’s not difficult to imagine the universe of Google applications setting and utilizing presence through Jaiku. Recently, Anthony Townsend of Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future speculated on Telepresence as a Driver for Presence. Townsend writes about the correlation between new communication technologies and long-haul travel, speculating that the arrival of HD videoconferencing and the uptick in fuel prices should be a perfect storm, but improved fidelity is often applied to mundane communication with a premium still attached to in-person meetings when closing down important decisions. Certainly, HD sports channels are no substitute for watching your favourite team live at a stadium, though such media broadens the appeal and access to physically exclusive events. So despite living at the bleeding edges of human communication, we web workers do place a premium on ‘live’… Read more at Telepresence as a Driver for Presence and The Future of Presence…           |
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