Bruce's Blog

The Cult of Productivity

When I first discovered the Remember the Milk tool a couple years ago I immediately dismissed it as being an convoluted bloated “Todo” tool. Why did such a thing need all this functionality and why was it so bland? I dismissed it as a tool for those who spend more time trying to be organized then getting crap done and moved on. A couple years later I now consider it an important part of both my professional and personal lives. I’m even a paying customer. Yep. I’m happily paying for a Todo list.

About two years ago I was experiencing a lot of stress in my work life. I was very forgetful about things that needed to be done and I felt like both work and life in general was overwhelming. I was becoming very stressed out and came close to having a breakdown a couple times. At work it felt like I had way too many responsibilities. I felt bad about not being able to give those responsibilities the time I felt they deserved. My work environment was very self-directed management wise (and still is). I felt that all the problems were with me and I internalized everything as a personal failing.

Stress ultimately causes pain. And any rational being should know that pain is something that should be avoided and often can be avoided. I started to look around. About two years ago I was a regular reader of LifeHacker and similar sites hoping for some insight on how to get things in my life done better. A popular book was mentioned often on these sites. David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) kept being mentioned over and over again. It looked like one of those “cult of productivity” books that drives all the middle managers wild. And it probably is.

I picked up a copy of a book, looked it over, then put it on my shelf at work for a few months. A co-worker and good friend noticed it once and we even made a few joke about it. There it sat until I got tired of looking at it at work and took it home. Why do things often not click at the first glance but make sense months later? I still don’t remember what made me take a second look but one night I picked it up again and re-read the first few chapters.

The book attempts to present a system with rules for you to organize and plan everything in your life. I found the first few chapters interesting. It presents a number of concepts and rules of thumb. Many of these look like common sense when you know them but when lost in a haze they can a good reminder. The later chapters then launch into this elaborate system of how to process flows of information and tasks that I never finished reading. I suppose those chapters were written for people who feel helpless and need some rigidly defined system to try. It’s my opinion that the value of the book is those first few chapters and the rest should be ignored.

Basic Concepts

My use of Remember The Milk is a personal version of concepts I picked up from the GTD book. The basic concepts are:

Every work day do a mental dump of everything you might need to do and put it in a task list. DUMP ALL THAT SHIT INTO THE LIST. The act of getting it all out decreases stress over time. Get it all out of your system. It’s a form of therapy. Having things pop into your head in the form of “Did I remember to do…?” causes stress. Now I tell myself “It’s in the list” and don’t give it a second thought. If the list isn’t in front of me being looked at then I don’t give a crap about it. If you ever find yourself forgetting to do something it’s because you didn’t put it in the list.

As part of that daily mental dump if you think of something that can be added that would take less than 10 minutes then DO IT then. Don’t leave it around as something to add to your stress level because you keep wanting to procrastinate on it. Procrastinating on small things means small things build up which is a source of stress.

Do NOT keep your work and personal life separate. What is this blasphemy? Work is a part of your life. You should have the ability to view ALL of your tasks together and have both work and personal events on a calendar TOGETHER. Keeping them separate ended up wasting me time and causing me stress. If putting your work side by side with your personal life depresses you then it’s because you hate your job. Be honest with yourself and deal with it. Trying to avoid picturing them together is lying to yourself. Nut up and embrace reality.

Split up large tasks into smaller parts. Something you can spend up to two hours on and have the satisfaction of checking it off and getting a sense of accomplishment. Viewing a large task as this monolithic entity just causes stress. Break it up into steps that can be done indepeendently. You want to check things off your list. Checking things off your list triggers a rewarding dopamine release. You’ll want as many of those as you can get as they fight the depression that is procrastination.

Isn’t putting everything in a list scary? Won’t the length of the list cause stress? At first it will. Then you’ll learn you need to shut the fuck up and man up. You are documenting everything you need to do in your life. EVERYTHING. If it’s short then you have a very simple boring life. Just because you refuse to put things on a list doesn’t mean you won’t have to do them.

Learn and accept that your productivity is highly variable. This is especially true if you work in an environment that can be very unstructured like mine. There will be days you’ll get nothing done. Either because of a steady stream of disruptive distractions at work or you just don’t have the ability to focus on a particular day. You’re going to have many days where your ability to focus is non-existent. Every day is going to be different. Every hour within a day is going to be different. You are going to have many days that will simply not be productive. Don’t stress out on it and accept it.

Don’t create deadlines. Deadlines are those things people try to impose on you. You should not be arbitrarily imposing them on yourself. Your list should be things you need to do, not a list of reasons to punish yourself. That is mental self mutilation. Stop it.

Now that you have your list you can think about all those things not worth doing. It’s bankruptcy time. Get rid of the bullshit. Give stuff off to other people that you shouldn’t be doing. Figure out how to get yourself out of the loop on things you shouldn’t be in the loop on. The world should be able to function without little old you being involved in everything. This is perhaps the hardest lesson. I’m still trying to figure out the right balance of how involved I need to be. Work requires me to poke things quite a bit to get the gears moving unfortunately. I’ve accepted it but continue to work on fixing situations I can fix.

Don’t micromanage yourself. I view things in a weekly timescale. I very rarely think of activities being bound to a particular day unless they need to be. And those tend up to be in both the list and the calendar. Quite a few things get bumped to the following weeks or months as situations change. The vast majority of your list is going to be in the “what could I be doing” category and not “what I must do next”. What about next month? It’s important to keep in mind the needs of projects and their timing but I find that planning out more than a week in advance to be a waste. Being mindful of large overarching projects and timing while doing an end of week review for next week is enough in the vast majority of cases.

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is a website and mobile application combination. It provides the concept of lists of tasks combined with metadata such as tags, dates (with repeating events available), notes, urls, and priorities. When entering a new task in the entry text field you can add all the metadata you using special characters. An example would be for the following input:

“Call reseller about status of support contract renewal #work ^monday”

In this example a task is created that is tagged as “Work” and is “due” on Monday. This can lead to some rapid fire mental dumps. The input it accepts is quite permissive and the you can just type in natural language phrases like “2 weeks” in the due field and it generally gets them right. Thanks to the awesome input field it takes only a few minutes a week to get everything out. The website also makes it trivial to make changes to multiple tasks at once. It looks dull but there is a lot of hidden power.

There is an Android app that syncs with the website and offers similar functionality. If I’m standing in someones office and I have to add something I do it right then and there to get it out of my head immediately. The Android app makes the experience much more powerful as it allows my cellphone to become a functional part of my subconscious. This is what made the yearly cost worth it.

Remember The Milk sports a powerful search implementation. In fact you can create virtual task lists in the web and mobile UIs that are in fact nothing more than a series of search results. This means you can build arbitrary task lists based on the contents of other lists defined by very flexible search terms.

My RTM System

I use the following lists:

• Tasks – ALL work and personal todos and tasks go here, ALL of them, together.
• Grocery Shopping – I’m standing in the store. What do I need to pickup? (Don’t try to remember this yourself!)
• Online Shopping – I’m on Amazon. What should I think about buying?
• Media – A friend mentioned a cool book or movie. It goes in this list immediately.

In addition to the above actual lists I have two Search backed virtual lists:

• Work – All tasks from “Tasks” tagged as being “work”.
• Personal – All tasks from “Tasks” tagged as being “personal”.

Remember The Milk provides a sortable Task display and a day by day overview on the website and in the Android app.

Abuse Due Dates, Don’t Let Them Abuse You

I don’t use priorities or due dates as Remember The Milk intended. I do the following:

At the end of week I do a review. I start with a mental dump into the list. I try to squeeze every little thing out. I look through the list. I consider what shouldn’t be done and throw those out. (Don’t underestimate the value of the feeling you get from choosing NOT to do things.) Then I think about what I want to attempt next week. Tasks that are short things like phone calls, followup conversations, and double checking on a co-workers progress get assigned as due on Monday. I try to get those done towards the beginning of the week. It’s not that I consider them DUE on Monday. It’s just things assigned on Monday tend to be very short tasks not really linked to other tasks and I can bang them out at the start of the week and feel good about getting stupid little things out of the way.

The tasks I want to attempt that week that are more involved and will take a couple hours are assigned as being due on Friday. I’ll try to get those things done throughout the week as conditions allow but I won’t be afraid at ALL to say “fuck it” and bump them to next week. After all this is my list. This has the function of always having something to grab on to when I’m feeling productive instead of wasting time trying to figure out what I should be working on.

Personal things tend to get set as due on a weekend. And I’m even more likely to bump them back if I’m not in the mood. At least I now keep track of the things that will need to be done. This helps keep the procrastination down to serviceable levels though of course it never eliminates it. If I keep bumping something on the list then that tells me I need to reconsider if I’ll ever want to do it and make a required change.

Things that need to be done once a month get assigned to the final day of the month. I’m not afraid to use repeat events here.

For those few things that REALLY must happen by a certain date then I’ll use priority tagging with a real due day. The only reason I use the priority tagging is all it does is make it a different color to make it stand out. I hate the concept of priority tagging in general.

Events should go in the calendar too. Your task list and your calendar should be used side by side and complement each other. Things that require a specific date and time should go on your calendar also. Use calendar reminders religiously. Get your calendar synced to your cellphone. Get your task lists synced to your cellphone. Now you’re one tap and a couple swipes away from being reminded of everything you need to worry about. The cellphone is now part of your brain. It’s a beautiful thing.

Once a day (or less on the weekend) look at your list and the calendar. This reminds you of things you need to or can do within the next 24 hours and gives you an opportunity to add things. Add things throughout the day as they occur to you but DO NOT obsess over the list and keep looking it over again and again. You’ll just waste time.

What Did This Buy Me?

The first couple weeks this process took a quite a bit of time. After all, how easy is it to think of EVERYTHING going on in your life and getting it all written down? Today this process only takes a few minutes a day. The time required is trivial and well worth it.

This system has noticeably decreased the stress in my life. I’m more realistic about how productive I can be. It has helped me learn what I shouldn’t blame myself for and what is unrealistic. This process is of course still ongoing. I don’t stress out over forgetting things as much any more. It has pinpointed some sources of stress in my life. And while I can’t eliminate it all I can at least be honest about it and try to mitigate it. It didn’t magically make things in my life stop sucking but it has provided me with tools to cope.

The biggest thing I found that is if you feel a sense of pain or apprehension at the idea of writing down everything going on your life then it’s a huge warning flag. If the idea seems painful to you it’s probably because you don’t want to be honest with yourself. I’m not advocating this system or this tool or this book. I’m just advocating finding some system that works for you. It’s important.