African proverb

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.

It struk me so damn hard when I read it in David Allen’s newsletter I actually sat back in my chair and “saw the light” … albeigth just for a second, but it was there … cristal clear. It is not that I fell (or am falling), but that I was not looking where I was going (in my life)!

Greetings, again. Been a busy spring in my world, and whoosh, here comes summer (or winter, as the hemisphere may be). Now that I’m in my sixties, each year is an even smaller percentage of my personal history. That’s my theory, anyway, about why they seem to continue to go by faster!

Some happenings: For those who have lusted after my trusty, functional set of plastic traveling file folders, and couldn’t find just the right kind anywhere – rejoice! We’ve made our own! Check them out. And if you’ve always wondered how long an e-mail you could read and dispatch in two minutes, or how long it really takes to scan that catalog and recycle it, wait no more – we’ve now created a digital two-minute timer that can float resident on your screen! It’s a great built-in trainer for implementing the powerful GTD Two-Minute Rule.

Not many public RoadMap seminars left on my schedule for 2006, so if Atlanta or London are possible destinations for you, they’re coming soon. Click here for dates and details.

A reminder, too, for those who are interested in what’s latest and greatest in the arena of organizational culture and executive excellence, I’ll be participating in Linkage’s GILD Conference (Global Institute for Leadership Development) in Palm Desert in October. Get their brochure here. Given the faculty and the content, this one promises to further its reputation as a premier, high-energy event.

Productivity Principle no. 89

Perfection and productivity are mutually exclusive.

One of the most powerful forces promoting procrastination is not necessarily the desire for perfection, but its evil twin: the fear of imperfection. If you don’t engage with something, you can maintain the illusion that you’re capable of its flawless execution. But if something must be right before you express it, you hold back in repression. If it must be faultless before you get involved, you will become a master of avoidance. If you’re waiting to know something before you do something, you’ll remain in ignorant inactivity. A willingness to be as vulnerable as you are, risking the void of putting yourself out there and getting yourself going without the security of total perfection, is the essence of productive living. You may achieve perfection, which is most easily found in the realization, not the creation, of it. But not if you worry about its absence.

Quotes

“Nothing would be done at all if a man waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.”
– Cardinal Newman

“I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”
– Rabindranath Tagore

Food For Thought

“COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND GTD”

Watching a good friend getting her first golf lesson, I learned why the most effective method for processing in-baskets and “stuff” in general is rare to see demonstrated. It’s the same reason most people have trouble hitting a golf ball well. The right way to do it feels like the wrong way to do it.

The golf coach put it this way: “Your instincts are to hit the ball as if you’re trying to hit something hard with a club. In truth, maximum power is generated through a perfectly smooth centrifugal swing, which happens to connect with a ball at the bottom of it.” It’s a simple idea, sure. But ask any ambitious golfer how easy it is to take “hitting the ball” out of your mind, when it’s right there in front of you and more than anything you want it to make it go straight and far! You mean, pretend the ball doesn’t exist, simply executing an excellent swing, in the correct stance, and letting the ball go wherever it goes? What an unnatural act!

Something struck me as strangely familiar about that syndrome, pointed out by our golf pro. As I thought about it I began to realize why people so deeply resist processing their in-basket (and all the other stuff that should be in their in-basket). Their instincts tell them that if they pick up anything and engage with it at all, they must handle it perfectly and finish it. If they pick up a piece of paper or an e-mail, they feel they have to “hit the ball,” more focused on the object of their swing and where it’s going than the swing itself.

But that’s not the path to the knowledge-worker pro tour, any more than a novice golfer who tries harder and harder to hit the ball harder and harder. At some point, sooner or later, the resulting frustration can cause the golfer to give up his or her progress, if not the game itself.

Similarly, people develop an allergy to tackling their “stuff” on the front end – there’s too much ineffectiveness experienced in their gut in trying to master everything about the thing when we first encounter it. Either there is no perfect answer right away, and the item is tossed back into the pending piles, or they try to achieve perfection and completion with it, running down a rabbit trail that very likely is not what they should be doing with themselves at that time.

We need to learn to “just swing”, not getting too concerned about the content. It’s the power of the GTD process – simply putting stuff in the top of the funnel, and following through with the simple moves of work flow (Is it actionable? What’s the next action? Etc.), and let the results go where they may (projects lists, action lists, trash, reference, etc.) You don’t need to finish something, or even to make much effective progress. You do need to know a couple of basic things to decide about it, and how to put placeholders and bookmarks in a systematically managed inventory of commitments. You can even decide not to decide about something, as long as you can park it in an appropriate home.

This correlation with workflow processing and “just swinging” was validated very shortly after my golf instruction “aha”, when someone came up to me at the end of a RoadMap seminar, excitedly saying, “this is just like teaching people to hit a baseball!” Turns out this fellow is a pro baseball coach, and he made the same connection himself in the seminar as he began to understand the GTD process. “The biggest mistake the young hitters make is thinking that they’re going to win the game on that one pitch. They’re so focused on the ball and where it’s going, they lose the power of their swing. They haven’t learned yet that real success is simply getting a better and better swing, and letting the balls go where they go!”

I suppose the good news for people who make their living teaching golf, baseball, and workflow processing is that the secret to stress-free productivity is still for the most part a secret, guarded by a smooth-talking serpent who says, “if you touch it, you have to understand it, know what to do with it, deal with it, and finish it, perfectly.”

“Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.”
– African proverb