GTD the Erica way

I've been sharpening up my systems for getting stuff done lately and thought I'd share a little bit of the latest iteration of my productivity system because I think it's cool, especially for people who, like me, have lots of thoughts and ideas and only a little teeny bit of RAM those thoughts in at any given second.

I like the bucket approach of GTD - essentially one bucket to rule all thoughts. That bucket, in my case, is a handy dandy voice recorder that avoids the little slips of paper that are a/my bane and b/my utter downfall. The voice recorder captures everything: phone numbers, ideas, books to read, grocery items, even the atta-girls I file in a list I refer to when I need a pick-me-up (lots of writers keep those lists. It can be a lonely, thankless profession). To make the voice recorder capture system work well, I download the notes every morning as I'm planning my day.

My to-dos (sorted by tags like @computer, @errands, @house) and someday/maybes live in .txt documents on my computer which I can open or reactivate with hotkeys. To that list, I've added, on a 'Let's see how this goes basis', a gotta-do list, which essentially holds the stuff that needs to happen today. Items on the gotta-do list need to have time-limits to a/create urgency and b/avoid the pitfalls of  Parkinson's Law which states that any task will expand to fill whatever time's allotted to it. Leave it open ended and you can find yourself spending all day on one stinking 300-word profile. For me, the most important attribute of the gotta-do list is that I actually plan it for the next day so I can hit the ground running, ideally with a writing project, before delving into email or other web-based delights.

The one challenge I'm finding right now is syncing my lists from my laptop to netbook and back. So far, I'm just being strict with myself and sticking to one computer or the other rather than moving back and forth. An online solution would fix this, but it wouldn't be as fast as calling up my .txt docs and I don't always have online access and am not anxious for my system to break down when I lack it.

For projects, I use system I developed while working at the South County Spotlight: a flip steno pad with the name of the project highlighted in the upper left corner of the page. The power of paper is that I can easily scan through projects for next tasks and write down ancillary notes and tasks and put x's next to the tasks I've completed and o's next to what I couldn't accomplish for whatever reason, , creating a record of what has and hasn't happened. When the project's done, I just tear out the paper, and stash it with whatever notes and paper the project generated. On my computer, meanwhile, I use the same project name on the associated folder so all project collateral is easy to locate for later reference.

What's your system? Drop a line/comment/tweet and let me know.

Living life out of buckets: Notes from the skinny front

A little over a year ago, I attended Money Camp in Santa Barbara. My stated goal was to be as savvy with one dollar (which was roughly what I had in my possession at the time) as I would be with a million.

The whole premise was that lottery-winners, inheritors, bubble home sellers and the like don't automatically know how to manage their money, and as a result often lose it. I figured if I knew how to manage my money like a true millionaire, I might by default end up there.

What I came away with, in part, was the idea of putting my money (at the time it was of the low-quality, sporadic variety) into buckets. No matter what comes in, it gets divided into the following accounts:

IRA/Healthcare Savings: 7.5 percent
I'm not saving a lot for retirement right now because my priority is paying down a few dollars of debt from my adventures with the magazine formerly known as Read It Here.

Giving: 5 percent
There's some serious happy happy to knowing that, no matter what your financial situation, you have something to give. My favorite place to give right now? Q2 Youth. By knowing there would always be money coming in my account, I was able to pledge $500 to their 2 to 1 matching grant. Which means I was able to give a leadership organization for a segment of at-risk youth the equivalent of $1,500. Bodacious.

Rent/Credit Cards/Extra Money Fund: 60 percent
I keep $1000 in an account at Arizona State Savings and Credit Union that pays 5% on up to $1000. Once I've funded that $1000 (if I've had to dip into it for necessary expenses, like shattered bones, car repair, etc) and I've covered rent, the rest goes to pay those tiny, little, infinitesimal credit card balances accrued by buying entire print runs for my diaphanous formerly-in-print magazine.

Daily Needs/Spending Money: 20 percent
Groceries, shampoo, cat food, $40/week walking around money. The basics we all need.

Sunny Day Fund (Mad Money): 7.5 percent
This was originally my savings fund for a motorcycle, but I decided that small treats like a decent stereo, beautiful original art, and of course, some new clothes (Yay!) might make my life a happier place to be than 8 months of enforced austerity so I could buy a dirt bike. But that bad boy's still in my future - just a matter of time.

If you feel yourself blanching at the thought of discussing money, you're not alone. Most parents would rather talk with their children about sex than money. I, however, am utterly fascinated with the dynamics of money, and sometimes run my budget through my head for self-entertainment. I'm so much into money these days, in fact, that I have been marketing a mutual fund and last week, scored my Series 65 license.

Oh so yay.

The Impulse Factor: Hacking the novelty-seeking brain

Maybe you can relate. I was raised by aliens and so I know little of social norms. I usually guess and then I beat myself up rather than consider that my equipment is more or less normal.

Or at least I assumed it was normal.

But then I ran across a book, The Impulse Factor, which posits that about a quarter of us naked monkeys process dopamine poorly. That poor processing causes us to misbehave in search of the dopamine jolt we sorely need in order to feel normal. The book's author says the mutation behind the dopamine problem coincided with the diaspora of homo sapiens from Africa; in doing so, he joins a legion of non-fiction authors who claimed to find the one 'it' that drove the formation of human civilization. Earlier 'its' include coal and salt, so I'll let that pass.

What's especially intriguing for me, a poster child for those who bear the mutation (witness: can't sit through a meeting, pedalled cross country by myself, will try anything but heroin and meth once) is that short deadlines make our faulty little brains work really, really well. So all that procrastinating was actually just me biding time until my smart brain kicked in.

So now I'm toying with how to use the power of the smart brain without screwing myself on short deadline. There's a great essay on Structured Procrastination that meditates on how to use said downtime for good rather than for evil. Last night, I experimented with deliberate, structured procrastination by reading 200 pages of a friend's manuscript. I think the approach might be a winner. Instead of watching crappy ol' TV, or trying to play keyboard in my freezing garage apartment (don't ask) I could find inspiration by reading another human's work of art, rest my brain and prepare for a productive next day.

And the next day, when I did sit down to write, I knocked out 3,000 words of—get this—pleasurable prose. Incredible.

Now I'll be the first to admit that all these lifehacks work sort of OK some of the time. Productivity and flow, for me at least, are moving targets. Sometimes it's the bottom of the hour hack, sometimes it's the avoiding of all the evil timesucking web sites hack, and sometimes it's just reading late into the night and filling the proverbial well.

The end of FaceBook

Ok. Not really. But for me, yes. Three days ago, I decided to go cold-turkey from Internet surfing. That means no visiting my news stashes, MySpace, or Facebook at all. Nyet. Nix. Finis. So far, I can honestly say the results have been lovely. More time at work for social interactions and...well...productivity. More time in the evening for reading, music, being alone and content.

The bottom line is that life is really, really freaking short, and being here on earth is really, really freaking cool. Without the slightest doubt, when I'm on my deathbed I won't lament my lack of time-spent Internet surfing. But I will feel the satisfaction of having learned an instrument (when it happens), another language (Que suerte!), having taken walks and long naps outside, having spent time with friends, with kitties, with good books.

I will miss the plugged-in, hyper-aware media hound I was last week. But it's worth the sacrifice. I went to Walden, and it looked a lot like the world pre-1995.

My Last 15 Minute Lifehack

I've found something that works for the ever-common, ever-insidious Internet-itis. It's the Last 15 Minute Lifehack, wherein you wait till the bottom of the hour to succumb to such follies as Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, MyYahoo! and Nerve Scanner. And even then, you try to keep working if you can.

The way I see it, if you only really suck for a quarter hour every hour, you're doing pretty damned well.

Now the challenge is to set up a system to create targets during the other 45 so that I'm definitively rolling forward with my myriad writing projects. Call these targets artificial deadlines; they're still a work in progress.

Mountain biking is a laboratory for life process

In June, I told everyone that I was going on a roadtrip. Then I house-sat for three weeks and forgot I told everyone I was leaving. Fast forward through a bunch of surprised reactions at Prescott's coffee shops, stores and pubs and I've finally hit the road.

The framework: An open-ended (anywhere from a week until I draw my last breath) driving trip aimed at places I can ride my mountain bike.

I rode the Rocky Ridge trail in Flagstaff on Wednesday. Unlike the lonely trails of Prescott, this trail swarmed with people. I saw an 8-year-old kid going over technical terrain on a bmx. Impressive.

In any case, for a while now, I've pondered the similarities between mountain biking and navigating my way through life. Or at least the lessons mountain biking offers.

Disclaimer: Mountain biking, while fun, is a singularly selfish, self-serving sport, so don't imagine that I'm trying to elevate it in any way shape or form.

That being said, it comes down to this. When you mountain bike, you MUST look where you want to go. Choose to look where you don't want to go and you go there, typically with painful results. Even if you want to go elsewhere, you'll always go to the exact spot where you put your attention. I'm pretty sure this holds true in life as well, but it's less noticeable because you don't break a collar bone every time you focus on what you don't want.

Also, sometimes when you get into a hairy spot, the only way to avoid disaster is to not only keep pedaling, but pedal HARDER. Do that, and you often surprise yourself by getting over something you would earlier have told yourself was impossible.

I'm in Moab today, so I'll keep you posted on the life lessons of slickrock.

Chunks for Every Temporal Budget

I talked about hour-long chunks before, but I wanted to point out that I also use chunks of time between 5 minutes and 8 hours effectively. Today, I'm using half-hour chunks because after moving, I'm behind in EVERY area of my life, and need more chunks than there are hours in my work day. The biggest drain on my productivity (besides wanting to do ANYTHING besides write) is an anxiety that I won't have time for whatever it is that I need to make time for. But if I can convince myself that I'll only be doing it (it being folding clothes, cleaning out my dad's truck, blogging, whatever) for half an hour, then I don't have to feel guilty that I'm not billing (and therefore eating).

And here's the other, more important part of the equation. Those of you out there who are into productivity writing (generally the same people who, like me, are procrastinating by reading all the really good stuff at lifehack.org) have heard of Pareto's principle, or commonly, the 80/20 rule. F'rinstance, I got 80 percent of my writing done today in 20 percent of the time I spent doing it. Twenty percent of the people control eighty percent of the world's wealth. Only 20 percent of all you all out there have well-thought-out goals, and of that 20 percent, only 20 percent (or 4 percent total) write them puppies down.

That sort of thing.

So if I know that I only have one hour (or even a half an hour) to write that press release for my client, my time's going to be spent more productively than if I give myself four hours. It'll take an hour either way, but in the second scenario, the hour will come after three hours of inwardly howling about my crap luck to be writing a press release.

So there you are. Hour chunks. Or half-hour chunks. Or even five-minute chunks (as when I had a house and would spend five minutes straightening each room first thing every morning). Or, if you must, eight hour sleepy chunks so you awaken dewy fresh each morning.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 1

It's been an interesting couple of months. I stopped my magazine for awhile and now with the help of a new partner, I'm fixing to restart it. I got invited by my landlordette to be homeless. I stopped a relationship and had a not-so-shiny rebound. I didn't even know what a rebound was until this year. Seriously. I thought rebounding was the province of effete goth people who listened to minor key electro-pop music. You know, music like Dido, a chanteuse with great skills at song-writing and bad skills at love.

I've been listening to Dido for weeks.

And so, what with my life falling down around my ears and all, you can imagine that maintaining my productivity and creativity has been a challenge. Oh, I'm writing really bad love songs and journaling my ass off, but the most important bits, the bits where I take authentic action towards driving my career as a publishing writer, sometimes fall prey to these depressed tetris-playing, Dido-blasting jags that go on for far, far too long.

And so, since I've been sucking a little, I figure I can ALSO find a way to suck it up.

In the past, when I was teaching school and had to be 'on' – broken heart or no (and there were a few) – I discovered that feeling like dookie didn't mean that my output was going to be any better or worse than it would normally. Simply put, creative/social juice or the lack thereof determines the level of fun I'll have but not the quality of output.

Based on that bit of hard-earned wisdom, I knew I just had to find a way to 1) think my day through and 2) follow through, regardless of my level of pain or distress. In my next post, I'll tell you what I came up with.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 2

In PART 1, I described my emo-roller coaster rides and how I wanted to manage them with regard to my creativity and productivity. Here's what I've come up with.

Hour-long chunks. See, there's 8 of them in a day, so if you allot an hour or so to all active projects, you can get a heck of a lot done in one working day. For example, Saturday I scheduled one hour for journalism, one hour for http://www.readitnews.com/ and one hour for my commercial work (Accounting for the limited hours: I had a wedding that afternoon - in fact, I'm typed a draft of this entry out at the Juniper Well Ranch).

Starting to work wasn't easy. For some reason, when I sit down to commence my day, I often feel a paralyzing anxiety wherein I become terrified to make a decision of what to start. The one hour chunks mandate I do something, and since none of the chunks are long enough to actually create a protracted suck experience, I'm finding that I can actually start and then subsequently don't need to procrastinate too much.

The other part of it is that the the short intervals demand that I pick the most important thing to attack and then stick with it for the duration. It actually forces a bit of unconscious prioritization. I'll never get it all done in one sitting, so I have to chose the the things with the most juice to get to.

While this is a new experiment whose success is uncertain, quite a few of my old experiments have worked, and so I have hope. This is, in fact, an expansion on a old approach wherein I spent .5 - 1 hour writing and playing music in the morning. And about the same amount of time cleaning beforehand. I've been doing that routine for months now with wonderful success.

I'll keep you posted on how well it works.

Vivan art and creativity, but don't confuse them

I was going through my old email account when I rediscovered one of signature lines, a quote:

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." The quote has everything to do with my morning practice.

In the last 5 months, I've begun my day by cleaning my soon-to-be ex-casa and then sit down for 1/2 hour to be creative - a prescribed period of time when it's ok to make mistakes. After brewing a cup of tea, I sit down to my Pocket PC to write (I use my Pocket PC because it's so much easier to be creative with a computer lacking Internet). I take solace in this scheduled time; there's nothing in all the world that I'm supposed to be doing besides creating and that takes the pressure off.

For me, it's super important to create a scheduled practice to make sure my writing, that thing that's so important that I've made countless sacrifices to keep doing it, actually happens. And I've found that doing the important stuff first thing is the key to making sure it doesn't slip through the cracks.

The practice worked very well while I was creating - I could write anywhere from 300-1000 words depending on how easily the writing was flowing. But then I finished the story I was working on, and I faced a conundrum. Do I start creating something else, or do I spend that 1/2 hour doing art, the deciding what to keep?

For the time being, I've decided to do what inspires me, which means I've spent the last two days doing art - cleaning up my mistakes and creations from last week and turning them into something that I'd be willing to show my friends, and eventually, if all goes well, the world.