Getting Things Done’s Dirty Little Secret

I’ve been using Getting Things Done for six months or so. If it’s something you’ve not come across before, think of it as a cross between a dose of the bleedin’ obvious and a cult - but at its heart, it’s a process for managing the ever-increasing list of things that Have To Be Done that makes up the lives of most people. It’s about getting control back, and not trying to remember every single task that’s on your plate - instead you get them out of mental RAM and onto lists, and tackle the lists with a disciplined system. Steven Covey, but less nauseating.

So far, so good. It works. I’m more in control and less stressed, and fewer things have dropped through the cracks. For a project manager, I think it’s an incredibly effective system. But lingering at the back of the mind of every Getting Things Done devotee is a Dirty Little Secret.

There’s no such thing as the perfect system.

Part of the beauty of the process is that there are as many systems as there are users - you can take the basic process and tweak it to fit to your exact requirements. But that’s also the downfall, because it means that there is always a nagging doubt that there’s a Better Way to do things.

You can see this in the Getting Things Done forums, and the Flickr groups, and on blogs such as 43 Folders. There’s a constant stream of new ideas and suggestions, not to mention heated-to-the-point-of-religious debates about which software application is the Right One To Use.

I’m sure this is at least partly to do with the fact that your typical GTD acolyte is a Grade-A oven ready geek, who’s never happier than when he (because they’re usually hes) writing a shell script to dump an RSS feed of his @online context list into his wiki. (Actually, that’s not quite true - no self-respecting geek would have an @online context, because they’re always online) So it’s only natural that a constant search for True Application Perfection comes with the territory, I suppose. Despite being the most organised I’ve ever been, there’s still a quiet angst at the back of my mind that if I just did something just slightly different, I’d be a true GTD god and have the Perfect System.

And part of the problem is admitting to yourself that yes, it really is OK to use paper. Even though I have a selection of PDAs ranging from a Newton to an Axim at my disposal, if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that the most effective piece of technology I have to hand is a Moleskine notebook and a propelling pencil. Which belonged to my father, who is still able to work a slide rule faster than I can punch numbers into a calculator.

So consider this a belated New Year’s resolution - I’m not going to tweak any more. I’ve got my context lists set up in Devonthink, my index cards tucked away in the back of my Moleskine, a process flow on my pinboard and that’s the way it’s going to stay.

But then I did see an interesting idea on 43 Folders this morning…

Oblique Strategies

You either love or hate Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: it’s a simple enough idea, a set of memory joggers that can be used to help break through a mental block. If you’re of the opinion that Brian Peter St John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is a genius whose feet only lightly touch the earth, you’ll love ‘em - if not, well..

The original version came on 2″ x 3″ cards, which is a bit 20th century, let’s face it. So here’s a Flash version - click on the ‘take another Card’ button and another oblique strategy will appear before your very eyes.

10 Reasons Why Blogging Is Good For Your Career

From Tim Bray, who’s been practicing what he preaches for so long he was probably blogging by morse code - Ten Reasons Why Blogging Is Good For Your Career:

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

There really isn’t anything there to disagree with…

Another cool thing to do with a Shuffle and podcasting

Following on from our “business intelligence via podcasting” project, here’s something else we’ve done with an iPod Shuffle.

A client of a client of ours creates interactive exhibits for museums and galleries. In the past they’ve created exhibits that provide a commentary for visitors on a handheld device - as the visitor moves from area to area and display to display, the commentary fills them in with background details. For example, in one installation the owner of the stately home gave a running commentary on the paintings, sculpture and assorted ghosts in each room.

In the past they’ve used various types of hardware, ranging from walkman-style tape players to solid-state devices that pick up commentary through infra-red transmitters. All of them suffer from a number of drawbacks - whether it’s sound quality, battery life, size or cost, they’ve always been a sub-optimal solution.

The success of our business intelligence via podcasting project got us thinking - if an iPod Shuffle is simple enough for a business executive to use, surely they’d work for the British public? A quick experiment was called for.
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My budget is bigger than your budget

I’ve had a number of conversations with recruiters over the last few weeks where the subject of budget size has cropped up, and it’s got me thinking about whether there’s any correlation between budget size and effectiveness as a project manager. For some recruiters, it’s an obsession with absolute size - what’s the biggest budget you’ve ever worked with, and bigger is better. For others, there’s a more measured approach - although values are of interest, so are proportions and percentages.

The budget I learnt most from was also the smallest I’ve worked with for that type of project. The total amount would have been a rounding error on larger programs, but the impact on the organisation was disproportionately large precisely because their budget was so small. But to someone obsessed with absolute size, this situation would be dismissed as irrelevant as a result of falling below some arbitrary threshold.

The same thought process also seems to hold true for team sizes - again, bigger is better in some eyes. I’d argue that the reverse can equally well be the case - a manager with some insight is likely to realise that there’s a finite number of direct reports that they can manage, and sub-divide the team down accordingly. The clueless ones are those who will try to split their attention between an impossible number, and reap the consequences.

Recently I read an article where an experienced recruiter of project managers said that he’d never recruit someone unless they could give him a detailed explanation of why one of their projects had failed. I’d add another rule of thumb to that one - if your candidate insists that their biggest was their best, perhaps that’s a sign that they haven’t thought it through…

Quorum visual workspace

The recent BPPM show in London was fairly predictably skewed towards software and training providers - but there were one or two notable exceptions. One of the most interesting products on show was Quorum - positioned as a tool to improve the effectiveness of meetings, it’s a device that allows multiple participants to annotate documents displayed on a projector or large screen using pen tablets.

It’s one of those ideas that’s incredibly simple, yet deceptively powerful. The device sits on your network, and acts as a virtual printer - you simply print your file to it, whether it’s a presentation, spreadsheet, photo, graphic or whatever - and it can then be displayed and annotated as if it were pinned to a flip chart. There’s a built-in webserver, and each participant has a pen tablet which they can use to draw in their own colour on the screen or projector.

What makes the Quorum particularly useful is the way that several boxes can work together across a wide area network - so it can bring another dimension to video conferences by enabling documents to be viewed and annotated across locations. The demonstration examples were a good indication of how useful it could potentially be - marking out an area on an aerial photograph, for example, or jotting down bullet points. The old saying that a picture’s worth a thousand words is often true - and Quorum enables users to point at and highlight exactly what they’re talking about. “No, not that one - this one.” You could also get participants to literally sign off the finished document, which can then be downloaded directly from the Quorum box as a PDF file.

I think that could be a particularly powerful tool in the project manager’s arsenal - getting commitment to stick after the meeting has finished can sometimes be a problem, particularly if there’s a significant interval between the meeting itself and the minutes and actions being issued. Signing off on a document during the meeting can be a good way of creating a psychological contract with the participants, and this could be a neat way of achieving that.

The units don’t come cheap at around £4,000 a time, but that has to be set against the very real cost of the participants in a meeting - it doesn’t need too many people to be involved before a few minutes saved here and there starts to add up to a significant amount. While digital whiteboards have been around for a while, the combination of the ease of use, virtual printing and downloads adds up to something which could be of real use in a live project situation.

Full details, specs and case studies are available online at www.quorumtools.com.

Project In A Box

By dint of sheer numbers, the most popular methodology at the recent Business Performance & Project Management show in London was Prince 2 - there were a number of companies offering Prince-specific training and products, not to mention the OGC themselves promoting their services.

One of the more interesting Prince products was Project In A Box - it’s aimed specifically at new Prince practitioners to help them with the sometimes daunting process of using the methodology for real. It provides document management functions within a Prince process context - the idea being that the diagrams guide you through the process while the application provides the right template at the right time and manages document control.

Although it’s hardly revolutionary, it’s been neatly done - licensing the Prince diagrams and process flows from the OGC has paid off in terms of making it familiar to anyone who’s gone through the training. The document control functions work intuitively, and it can handle a wide variety of document types.

In a very shrewd move, it’s available in two versions - the Community edition is a standalone system which lacks the networked functionality of the Professional version. The Community edition is available for free download from the Project In A Box website, so it’s easy to try before you buy, or even just use as a personal aide-memoire. This is likely to make it popular as a personal tool for PMs using Prince, so it’s easy to imagine a situation where it could become the logical choice for an enterprise-wide system.

LinkedIn Jobs goes pro, but there’s a catch

According to a report on C|Net News, LinkedIn is about to start charging for job listings, as the service comes out of its beta phase. The listings show job openings and potential contacts within the hiring organisation, enabling subscribers to leverage their network as part of the job-search process.

On the face of it, LinkedIn could add a great deal of value to that process - as the site points out in its blurb, “you’re 10 times more likely to get a job through someone you know”. That’s partly true - the research actually found that you’re most likely to get a job through your weak social ties - but LinkedIn’s model of connections radiating out from your immediate acquaintances is a close approximation to the sort of social ties that the original research considered.

However, I think the reality - in the UK at least - is actually going to be a bit different. In a highly unscientific test this morning, I scanned the UK job listings, and found about 750 or so. Of these, at least 85% were listings placed by recruitment firms, rather the the hiring company themselves. Whether this is something unique to the UK market I’m not sure, but within professions such as IT and accountancy, recruitment is heavily geared towards working through intermediaries

The problem this could potentially cause are two-fold.
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