There was an interesting thread over at David Allen Co’s GTD forum recently - it was focused on what contexts people were using. As the thread got longer, the topic got wider, until they were discussing Miller’s Theory of 7 (+/-2). Now, I don’t remember ever hearing it called such, but I do remember from my early leadership days that you could successfully lead/manage 5-9 people/projects/etc. Fascinating to think that there’s actually theory and experimentation behind this!

On the forum, Andersons pointed out the following:

There are gazillions of studies confirming Miller’s short-term memory limitation of 7 +/- 2 items, but yes, they are distinct items (not necessarily unrelated). “Chunking” is one way we increase our capacity to use information, by grouping related items into a single higher-order one. This is why hierarchical organization is so powerful. If you give someone a list already grouped, they will remember many more items than if the list were ungrouped and unsorted.In real life, the limit is probably more like 5. We can get people to expend extra effort and energy to do their best in lab tests, but in real life it’s too expensive to perform at our lab-best all the time. In our lab, we literally pay subjects bonuses for better performance. For short bursts of time they do their best, then head off to the pub when they’re done. :-)

Later, Andersons went on to cite the source for Miller’s Theory:

The oft-cited paper by Miller was published in Psychological Review in 1956, volume 63, pp. 81-97: “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits of our capacity for processing information.”

I was particularly fascinated by the concept of experimenting with such things, and how 5 really is the good number, because we can’t be expected to work at “experiment best” all the time.

It’s not like I want to have a hipster PDA - I’m too much in love with being able to put books to read on my palm to ever get rid of it. But I’m fascinated by the concept that you can organize your life, and get things done, using some index cards, a bulldog clip, and the writing implement of your choice. Duct tape case optional.

In case the world ever loses electricity, I’ll just hang onto this post from Slow Burn Productions that has a great list of links for everything you ever needed/wanted to know about the hipster PDA.

Categories: GTD, HPDA

The other day, when I was looking for a way to hide recurring tasks from my Palm, I stumbled upon the following page from Palm Support, called Synchronizing Tasks. It has the best explanation of how Outlook and Palm map to each other.

I’m copying over the main table, just for ease of reference:

I’m still having trouble with the weekly review, i.e., actually accomplishing a serious one. I find that I tend to review my project lists every 10 days or so, to see what needs to be added next. Other than that, I review my NAs daily, so see what I want to work on next. I brain dump all the time, i.e., when I have a thought, it is (usually) immediately processed into Outlook or Evernote. If I have a thought away from my computer, it gets scribbled down and then processed within a day.

But I feel bad about not doing a serious weekly review. There’s an excellent thread over at David Co’s GTD Forum called “Circling Around the Weekly Review“. Here are a few of the good tidbits that I’ve pulled out of it.

Katherine (kewms) has the following approach:

Mind dump. Fully process inbox. Review upper level goals if necessary. (Usually monthly or quarterly.)

Review projects. Decide which ones I want/need to tackle this week. Move the rest to Someday/Maybe, with an appropriate next review date.

Review Next Actions for current projects only. Verify that they all really are actionable. If this list is too long to review in a reasonable time, then you can’t do it all in a week anyway. Decide what won’t get done and move it to Someday/Maybe.

ActionGirl points out that David Allens’ GTD book may not be quite as detailed in its description of the weekly review as it could be:

I don’t mean it’s bad, just that it’s not as helpful as other sections of the book. For one thing, I find the lack of parallel structure distracting. Next actions seem to work best when they begin with a verb, why not each item in the weekly review as well? Even worse, the last item is “be creative and courageous.” That’s OK as an exhortation, but it’s not a specific action to take, unless he means go back and do the “empty your head” step or even the entire review again with a different attitude. It just doesn’t belong as the last step in the weekly review.

She also points out that the book implies the weekly review must be done at one sitting:

One thing that makes the weekly review difficult imo is that it asks you to do all the GTD steps in one sitting. The rest of the book walks you through collecting, processing, organizing, etc., and specifically instructs you to separate the steps, but then the weekly review tells you to essentially get caught up on all of these things at once. When I sat down to think through exactly what I needed to do and what order made sense for me, my checklist ended up being organized under the headings COLLECT loose stuff, PROCESS it all into my ORGANIZATIONAL buckets, and then REVIEW.

Dave (ddewees) has an awesome post on his weekly review checklist. He creates a separate Outlook Task folder outside of his Tasks and uses this, plus a weekly calendar reminder to do his weekly review. Here’s the checklist:

001. Clear My Mind
01. Loose Papers
02. Process Your Notes
03. Empty Your Head
04. Review Action Lists
05. Review Waiting-For List
06. Review Previous Calendar Data
07. Review Upcoming Calendar
08. Review Any Relevant Checklists
09. Review Someday/Maybe List
10. Review Roles and Responsibilities
11. Evaluate status of projects, goals and outcomes
12. Define succesful outcome of each project and spend time on vertical planning

Andersons points out that

the desired successful outcome of the weekly review is not clearly stated. Apparently it is to make sure your system is up to date. So if you keep your system up to date every day, there is no need for a weekly session to do so.

Categories: GTD, outlook

I love using EverNote. I use it for my research notes. It’s a great way for me to keep track of miscellaneous thoughts, web snippets, etc. etc. I also use it as my “deep” GTD, i.e., it holds the supporting material for my projects (Outlook holds my NAs).

However, I’ve recently come to the realization that regardless of how much I love a particular piece of software, I can’t fall into the trap. You know the one, where when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail? I’ve actually starting paring back my EN usage (just a tiny little bit). For example, I decided that it’s not that great to put my crochet patterns in there. Not because I can’t use EN to organize them, but the concept of the rolling tape isn’t really conducive to pattern reading. Something like page flipping (say OneNote) is more appropriate. I felt a bit treacherous deciding this, but it’s my system, so I can’t do what I want. I’ve also started using Onfolio more, especially to capture things that interest me, but which are not necessarily important. So, if I see something that I might want to blog about, I slap it into Onfolio. However, if I see something that I definitely want to keep, or that relates to a current project, I slap it into EN. As I use these various pieces of software more and more, I find I’m getting better value - use each software for the task it was specifically designed for. For example, if I really want to write some text and have it formatted/spell-check, I’m not going to use EN, I’ll use Latex or Word. If I want to draw a mindmap, I’ll use MindManager, etc.

This brings me to the title of my post. No, it has nothing to do with how big you make your database. But rather, how much functionality you put into it. There are people on the EN forums asking for address book functionality, calendar functionality, alarms for to dos functionality. Basically, it sounds like these people want the EN team to take Outlook (or whatever other productivity software you’re using) and morph it into EN (or vice versa). I say “stop the madness!” Let EN be good at what it does! Let it be super-duper perfect at categorization/filtering/automatic tags/multiple categorization/endless notepaper concept. Don’t make it do too much stuff and thereby water it down. Next, they’ll be asking for it to be a web browser and email client. Sigh.