What I’ve Learned So Far

With thanks to Chris, here’s a nifty item about Jerry Seinfeld’s grand technique for building his joke-writing effectiveness, back in the day:

Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret

Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…

Worth reading — and then doing.

My first Daily Review — carried out early this morning — was lovely, and halfway through my working day I seem to be much more focused than I usually am. There may be other reasons for this, including several can’t-miss deadlines in today’s schedule, but in general I feel better about having a grip on my work today.

Check out last night’s post on this for more details on what a full review contains, but here’s the simple, high-level way for carrying out a Daily Review:

• In terms of Big Goals A, B, C, etc. — am I better off now than I was 24 hours ago? Have I progressed? How could I progress in the next 24 hours?
• Is my M.O. better than it was 24 hours ago? How could it get better in the next 24 hours?
• [For each projects or task on your list:] Does this help me achieve Big Goal A? Or B? Or C? Or anything? Bueller? Should I do it at all?
• What are the few most valuable things to do on my list? Could I do more of them than I think? More of them than would be obvious? More of them to the expense of the less valuable items?
• What are the least valuable things to do on my list? Will anything dire — dire, mind you — happen if I just don’t do them at all?

Never claimed it was rocket science. The point is to keep driving yourself back to basic principles: Where do I want to go, and is what I’m doing getting me there?

As I mentioned last week, I found myself slowing way down as I approached the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. After such a long time spent in the world of Hogwarts and The Boy Who Lived, I didn’t want the story to end. It’s a sign of a good story when you feel the competing urges to finish it quickly and to linger over its conclusion.

But now it’s done. So what to read next?

The short answer for me is: “Books on the list for my comprehensives exams,” since I’m gonna have to finish this nagging Ph.D. sooner rather than later — at least if I want to keep my sanity. But in those quiet minutes at bedtime when I’m looking to lose myself in a book — and preferably not something about the Cold War or the oil business — I’m planning to turn to these stories.

First, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick. This one has received all kinds of good publicity and reviews, and delighted me as soon as I picked it up in this amazing bookstore when I was on vacation. My daughter reports that she was underwhelmed by it, but she read it (as she does everything) very quickly, and anyway I take her judgments with a grain of salt since she and I often agree (e.g. about the awesomeness of the Great Brain books) but also often disagree (e.g. about the awesomeness of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series). Hugo Cabret is an amazing, cinematic mixture of words and pictures in novel format. I can hardly wait.

While The Chronicles of Prydain are justly famous, it was Alexander’s Westmark trilogy that had a greater effect on me, back when I first read it in junior high. As the cover of the first book might suggest, it’s a period fantasy-adventure with a motley cast of characters. It’s been at least twenty years since I re-read this, and when it occurred to me that a copy was probably no further away than my local branch library, all the melancholy of finishing Harry Potter left me at once. We’ll see if the experience of reading it now lives up the memory I have of it.

This is the granddaddy, and it occurs to me that it’s probably also been twenty years since I cracked it open. I did read some of The Hobbit to my kids a couple of years ago, but that’s nothing like the experience of diving into The Lord of the Rings. For this one, I may just buy myself a deluxe boxed set that I can share with the children when I’m done. It’s probably going to be a few months at least before I get around to this, and in fact I may hold off on LotR until I’ve finished my comprehensives. I figure every little bit of inspiration helps.

What about you? What are you reading now that Harry Potter is done?

~

Addendum, Tuesday night:  When I first posted this, I forgot to include the link behind “this amazing bookstore”.  I was referring to the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, which is well worth a visit for any bibliophile anywhere in the area.  Stay for lunch in the cafe.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen stresses the importance of the “Weekly Review”, a dedicated time when you can sweep through all the parts of the GTD system to ensure that you’re staying on track and actually, you know, getting things . . . accomplished.

There’s only so closely I’ve ever been able to follow Allen’s system, but I recognize that this sort of conscientious and regularly scheduled review of goals, priorities, projects, and tasks is vital for the success of any system. Which is not to say that I do it. Before giving my thoughts on how I’m going to attack this, here are some references to tell you more about what the Weekly Review is and how it can be done well.

Here’s a good basic overview of why the Weekly Review is important. Key thoughts:

David Allen says that if you are not doing your weekly review, you are not doing GTD.

The weekly review clears your head and leaves you feeling calm and satisfied. Mmmm!

You have to have a regular review of your goals on a weekly basis in order to keep that focus.

Here’s a fuller description of how one dedicated GTDer does the Weekly Review.
And here’s a handy flow chart of another GTDer’s Weekly Review method. (And you thought I was a productivity geek!)

Finally, here’s a candid look at why the Weekly Review is so hard. Prime reasons: it requires actual thought, and conscientious decisions, and it demands that you really focus on what’s important to you, not just right now, but in the scheme of, like, your whole life. Most of us, when confronted with stiff tasks like these, would rather seek out distrac– Look! New e-mail in my inbox! And hey, look out the window! Is that a Bachman’s Warbler on that branch?

As I was saying, most of us would rather distract ourselves with anything, whether simple tasks (time to fold the laundry!) or elaborate diversions (World of Warcraft, anyone?), rather than confront these gnarly realities head-on. Especially when we don’t have a lot of practice doing it.

So, back to me and my non-Weekly-Review-doin’ self: what am I going to do? Well, because I’m so scatterbrained, and because the review process is so hard . . . I’m starting myself on a course of Daily Reviews.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Y’all, uh, remind me, okay?

Yesterday Jim Fallows was nice enough to point to this blog in a post of his own. (You should see the spike in visitors I got!) He talked about being a sucker for productivity gimmicks — as am I — and also referred to an article he wrote three years ago in The Atlantic about David Allen. (Actually, I’m probably required by law somewhere to phrase that as “productivity guru David Allen.”) I remember the article, and I’ve long been a devotee of Allen’s Getting Things Done system myself. Or, well, I try to be a devotee, but my short attention span and other failings continue to get in the way.

(Sample posts referring to Allen here, here, here, and here.)

So Jim’s post put me in mind of GTD. And then yesterday afternoon I had one of those moments of overwhelm when you stare at your mess, your junk, your paper-based chaos and just shudder. I started purging, and the process is still going strong. This morning it has expanded beyond papers to e-mails, browser bookmarks, laundry, the recycling, clothes for Goodwill, et cetera. In each case, what I’m doing is closing loops, one of the key principles of Allen’s organizational system. His grand antidote for closing loops is to record everything you need or want to do into a single, trusted capture system. I’m doing this now, for the nth time since I first read Getting Things Done several years ago. But more than that, I’m closing loops by getting rid of things, by completing things, by doing things.

The relief is palpable. Honestly, it could be something as simple as brushing your teeth, clearing three mystery containers from the refrigerator, and carrying the recycling to the curb. You’ll feel better when it’s done. Answer three e-mails, delete a folder of useless documents from your laptop, remove five feeds from your RSS reader — whatever. Just attack all the open loops around you and start dealing with them.

Nothing profound here. But I personally don’t need profundity — I need reminding. So I thought I’d remind you, too, so you can join me in lowering your blood pressure.

The right time to do this, by the way, is now.

I’ve talked before about my liking for cricket, which is probably natural given my twin obsessions with baseball and international history. If you want a good aural exposure to the game, tune in tomorrow morning (in the U.S.) to listen to the BBC’s Test Match Special radio broadcast of the Test series between India and England.

The situation at the end of the third day (of five) is shown by the scorecard here: host England scored poorly (198 runs) in their first turn at bat (i.e. the first innings), then the visitors came out thumping (481 runs) in their turn, led by 91 runs from Sachin Tendulkar, the Indian legend who is one of the few greatest batsman in the history of the sport.

Each team gets two turns at bat, so England must now try to pile up the runs before India either (a) get their second turn at bat or (b) bowl England out. England must score 283 runs to make up the first-inning deficit, then tack on as many more runs as they can. India’s goal, conversely, will be to get all of England’s batsmen out. If they can do that for less than 283 runs, India’s batsmen won’t even need to come out again. (In which case we would say that India won “by an innings,” and England would hang its head in shame.) All of this will be decided in the next two days, during which time England will have their work cut out for them.

So, if you’d like to hear some tense cricket, tune into Test Match Special tomorrow morning as England tries to battle its way back into contention against one of its great rivals in the cricketing world.

Bonus: The estimable author and blogger Justine Larbalestier has a useful primer on cricket for the uninitiated here. She’s an Australian native, and Australia has the best cricket team in the world, so she would know.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman often frustrates me with his breathless pronouncements, but in this long article, published back in April, he offers more than enough cogent points to make up for it.

The Power of Green

The whole piece is well worth reading, but I’ll summarize it briefly. Friedman’s principal goal here is to show how assertive U.S. action toward environmental sustainability will help the United States not just to combat global warming, but to improve the U.S. and global economy, and combat terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t take that the wrong way: I’m not saying you have personal problems that affect me. I’m asking for my own enlightenment: What is the big problem that you’re working on to change yourself and the world?

In asking this, I’m drawing upon a lecture that I’ve quoted here repeatedly: Richard Hamming on the subject of “You and Your Research”. I read this again today, ergo I was blown away by it again. You should read it, too — even if you’ve read it before, even if you’re no kind of scientist — and really think about how it can change your approach to your working life.

There are almost too many good quotes and ideas to pull from this essay to list them all: my advice is that, if you care about doing really first-class work, you print out Hamming’s lecture and annotate it thoroughly. His real subject, rather than science generally or computer science in particular, is how you can go about doing better, deeper work during your career. It’s about becoming someone who really does important things, versus being someone who could have done important things. Hamming’s prescriptions are very simple but very hard:

• focus on big problems, so that even when you’re working on something small and immediate, it bears on something big and enduring;
• give yourself to work that means something to you emotionally, not just intellectually, because this will engage both your conscious and your subconscious mind on the big problems you’ve set for yourself;
• be willing to put in a little more time and effort each day than the norm, because doing so has disproportionate effects in the mode of compound interest;
• neglect things that aren’t connected to your big work, and, in particular, avoid needless distractions from office (or laboratory etc.) politics; by extension, don’t go into administration unless that’s where your real contribution lies;
• have the courage to put yourself in ambiguous, edgy areas of endeavor, where outcomes are uncertain and where you’re likely to be working more or less on your own;
• be willing to “continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow” — especially after you’ve already experienced success;
• keep mutating your areas of interest, such that every several years you start over as a baby attacking a new problem, because this is the best way to keep yourself doing fresh and provocative work over the course of your career;
• pay attention to how you present yourself and your work, because poor presentation will undermine recognition of what you’ve done;
• channel your energy into a deep drive and commitment to doing important work;
• take the opportunities and circumstances at hand and make something of them, such that you don’t offer alibis or excuses for not doing better work, and you don’t wait around for conditions or resources to improve before getting on with your big work; and,
• in sum, manage yourself to do great work, because a laissez-faire approach won’t get you there.

Please, folks, do yourself the favor and read the lecture so that you can take advantage of Hamming’s fine insights. He was a man who lived out all of the things he prescribes, and he did it with good humor. The lecture is enjoyable to read and will richly reward you for any time you spend studying it.

Yet to come: my own explicit thoughts about what my big work is. But don’t wait for me: tell me, what’s the big thing you are working on?

You won’t be surprised to hear that I take a dim view of the Bush Administration’s treatment of the Constitution. But I can’t give credence to the conspiracy theories floating around about how Bush & Co. are secretly planning to take over the country.

The conspiracy view.

The sensible view.

Now, could such a thing happen? Sure. Is it likely to happen? No, no, no.

Let’s focus on the real problems facing us, not on the remotest possibilities that feed our worst fever-dreams.

Last week I took Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow to task for blaming Mr. Rogers for the sense of unearned entitlement that infects too many younger Americans. Turns out I wasn’t alone:

The Entitlement Epidemic: Who’s Really to Blame?

. . . more than 1,000 psychologists, educators and observant readers contacted me in response to my recent column headlined “Blame It on Mr. Rogers.” That column included a premise some found too provocative*: Did TV icon Fred Rogers contribute to our entitlement epidemic by telling children they were “special”?

Many readers appreciated the arguments. But others felt the column was unfair to target Mr. Rogers, who was such a positive influence. I hadn’t expected that column to be taken so literally, and I should have articulated the fact that Mr. Rogers also encouraged hard work and mutual respect. It’s not his fault if others now misinterpret the “special” language he popularized.

So, kudos to Zaslow for clarifying what he means, and for putting a big chunk of the burden right where it belongs — with parents, consumer culture, and “the self-esteem movement”. Especially if you read the earlier column and my comments on it, you should certainly give this one a look. I particularly liked the homey quote that Zaslow uses to wrap up the piece, taken from Florida schoolteacher Syd Corbett: “Self-esteem comes from the self doing something worthy of esteem.” Just so.

~

* One little quibble here: Whether Zaslow meant it this way or not, “a premise some found too provocative” is weasel-ish. It can be read as putting the burden on readers for being too squeamish, as when you don’t-really-apologize for being unkind by saying “I’m sorry your feelings got hurt” rather than saying “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.” Speaking just of my own reaction, I didn’t find Zaslow’s original premise “too provocative” — I thought it was flatly incorrect. But anyway, good for him for following up and giving more nuance to this subject.