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Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

What's the Next Inaction

Spring is in the air, and I'm up to some spring cleaning. Earlier this week, I mentioned that I felt the need to re-ground my self in the basics of GTD. I'm still listening to the Getting Things Fast audio and it's still helping.

As I emerge from my Stuck Place in the quicksand, I wanted to share a blinding flash I've had.

It seems that my kung fu has gotten rusty. I've drifted away from defining next actions crisply enough, and have been defining a bunch of near-actions instead. I'm now calling them 'next inactions' for lack of a better descriptor.

I'm sharing this because you may have some too.

What's a next inaction? An example from my list is "Make dentist appointment." Sounds remarkably 'next action-like' doesn't it? But, it wasn't on my @calls list, didn't have the phone number associated with it in any way, etc.

I've found quite a few of those. Along with ambiguous things like "John comp" - what am I supposed to do there?

The solution is easy, and once upon a time I did it pretty consistently. Just answer the questions:

  • What's the successful outcome?
  • What the physical next action with no dependencies?

Nothing to it, right? ... Back on the horse.

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Timeless leadership lessons

I've mentioned in the past that I'm a big fan of Audible, and I have been sprinkling audio books in with my 'normal' reading fare. As part of my 2-book-per-month credit as an Audible Premium Listener, I recently downloaded an audio book called "The 21 Most Powerful Minutes In A Leader's Day" by John Maxwell. It's available in audio via Audible, or in print form or on cassette from Powell's.

When I initially downloaded it, I thought it was going to be another take on the "start your day by planning what you want to do or you'll end up doing a bunch of random stuff." Boy, was I surprised, and pleasantly so.

If you have something against the Bible, this one may not be for you. Otherwise, read on.

This book is a series of short chapters that take stories from the Bible and relate them to leadership lessons that are very thought provoking, and quite poignant.  The "21 Minutes..." in the title refers to the suggestion that you listen to one chapter a day and reflect on it. That process should take about 21 minutes a day.

For the last week or so, I've been listening to one of these chapters each day during my morning commute (on my lovely iPod Shuffle, of course, which is connected to my car stereo). I really look forward to the chapter each morning now, and the thinking about the concepts have already helped me out at work. The first chapter, for example, is about courage and breaking through your current limitations as a leader, and uses the contrast between the leadership styles of David and Saul to illustrate its points.

If you don't mind getting a bit of business teaching from stories written thousands of years ago, I recommend this one. Even if the Bible isn't your thing, why not give it a try? After all, I'm not Hindu, but I have learned a lot from Ghandi.

One other thing I realized after the fact: this book is published by Michael Hyatt's company - if you haven't checked out his "Working Smart" blog, please do. He has some great productivity tips over there.

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Outsourcing my drudgery

Just reading a post on Open Loops where Bert talks about outsourcing your taxes to an accountant. I started doing that last year, and it was such a breeze this year to get my taxes in early. Having someone else prompt me for what to do and when was a lot easier than leaving it up to me to schedule time to sit down with TurboTax and do it myself.

Other areas I've outsourced that have added to my quality of life include:

  • I use "Dry Cleaning To Your Door" to handle my laundry and dry cleaning - they pick up my laundry every Monday morning, and deliver it back clean and pressed on Tuesday evening, and it costs the same as going to my local cleaners. When you travel as much as I do, it's easy to miss the pickup hours at the dry cleaners and end up with nothing to wear to a business meeting - that never happens to me any more.
  • I have a great yard guy that comes over every Thursday and cuts my grass, cleans our flower beds, trims trees, etc.
    • costs about $30 per week, and lets me spend my valuable home time with the family (as well as saving me a day of allergy hell every week)

What about you - any areas you are outsourcing to make life more liveable?

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A fresh take on the theory of constraints (TOC)

On my flight home yesterday, I wanted to reconnect with the Theory of Constraints (TOC) for a project I'm working on and decided to re-read "Critical Chain" by Eliyahu Goldrat.

A few days ago, I posted some thoughts about TOC along with a recommended reading list I built on Amazon. However, after revisiting Critical Chain, I've decided I want to modify my "first book to read" recommendation.

If you want to get indoctrinated into the Theory of Constraints, start with Critical Chain. It presents a concise, very readable, and very applicable primer on TOC and shows how the thinking processes of TOC can be applied to many different personal and business situations.

Essentially, it's about how productivity of an overall system is governed by its weakest link. It discusses how to systematically identify the weak link (the constraint), exploit the constraint to make it as efficient and productive as possible, subordinate all other activities so they never outpace the constraint, then elevating the constraint to improve its capacity.

As you continue to elevate the constraint, you reach a point where you see no top level system benefit from improving the constraint. This indicates that that particular process/activity is no longer the weakest link, so you start over again.

I got energized reading this - why not give it a whirl yourself?

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Dusting off a classic procrastinator's toolkit

I just re-read a book on how to fight procrastination. It's called "The Now Habit" and it is really cool. I think I started reading it back in the late 20th century, but never got through it (figures).

I was recently re-introduced to it by a friend of mine, and read it on my flight to Atlanta this morning. There are some very interesting variations on some of the other themes I've seen in other works on personal productivity, including some of the ones I commonly mention here.

I obviously can't do it justice in a short post, but here are some tasty morsels, by way of example:

The Unschedule (time logging with a twist)

The Unschedule involves time logging as a first step, often repeated. Just like all the other time logging techniques, this one is geared to help you become more aware of how you spend your time, so you can improve your effective use of time.

With the Unschedule, you start off by scheduling play time first, then you monitor how you work on projects. You only give yourself "credit" for 30 minute (or longer) blocks of uninterrupted work, and you build in rewards at the end of those blocks.

Another twist: If you complete something at the end of one of those blocks of work, don't stop there even if your 30 minute timer as dinged. Instead, start another task and work on it for 10 minutes so you a) make progress on another task, and b) create a sort of psychic "tension" that will bring you back for the next block of work.

Three Dimensional Thinking

This is a concept on using a "reverse calendar" which is similar to the 'break it down into smaller bites' approach, all the way back to next actions you can take today. Nothing new here, but it's very well-presented.

The Work of Worrying

This part was a lot of fun. You're taken through a process to tease out all the "well, ok, but something bad might happen" scenarios. You come up with all the worst-case scenarios on the nastiest projects on your list, then use those to build a plan to mitigate as much of the risk as possible.

And, of course, there is more. This book hits all of the demons of procrastination head-on: fear of failure, fear of success, no life balance, etc.

This one's worth checking out if, like me, you need tools and techniques for dealing with procrastination.

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Copyright 2005-2015 Dwayne A. Melancon, all rights reserved. Licensed under Creative Commons - see the "About the Author" page for details.