Life Transformation - Organizing Habits

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is organizing habits. One thing I really have trouble with is setting priorities when it comes to consuming information. I suppose many people with a healthy curiosity about a wide variety of topics have this problem. However, when there is essentially an unlimited amount of free information available on the World Wide Web, the tendency to attempt to consume everything of interest has to be resisted. Otherwise, as in my case, your email inbox will continue to grow without bounds with all the things “you plan to get to as soon as you have more time”. Same with the ever growing stack of magazines on the desk.

The overall habit must be to become more selective in what you try to drink from the fire hose of information coming at us each day. We can’t possibly take it all in, or even any reasonable fraction of it, so there needs to be prioritization about what is important to further your top one or two goals, what is really worth the time spent on it, and be willing to ignore the rest.

So my goals in this area for the coming year are (this is where things get more radical):

• On Jan 1st, I will zero out my email inbox (actually archive the roughly 1900 emails currently in there, ugh!) and start out fresh. I will completely clear out my inbox again each night before going to bed.
  
• The first time I open an email, I will remove it from my inbox. If I can deal with in 2 minutes or less I will handle it right then. Otherwise I will put it in a “To Do” folder, file it in a folder where I save useful information on that topic, or delete it. I will not leave it in the inbox with the intention of coming back to it later.
  
• Many web browsers let you open multiple windows, with multiple tabs per window. This is great for opening articles that you intend to read “later when you have more time”, but it also invites a great deal of abuse. On Jan 1st I will close all the windows and tabs on my web browsers, and do so again each night before going to bed.
  
• I will have at most 3 magazines on my pile of “magazines to read as soon as I have time”. If a new magazine comes in the mail, I will get the pile of magazines back down to 3 before going to bed.
  
• Decluttering: Vertical places (desk tops, table tops, floors…) are not meant to be places to store things. To discourage clutter and accumulation of useless stuff, and encourage focusing on those things I prioritize, I will clear off key vertical spaces each night before going to bed.
  
• To encourage more productive days, I will get up at 5am on a regular basis. The exception is when doing so would result in a severe lack of sleep because I had to stay up late the previous night.
  

That sounds just radical enough to be exciting.

New Year's Resolutions, or Alternatives

Most of productivity experts seem to have little enthusiasm for New Year’s Resolutions. In large part that’s because they are often just wishes (“I want to loose some weight”) and not really goals. To be an effective goal, there should be a clear description of what success is (“I will loose 20 pounds by June 1st”), and a plan for how to get there (“Starting today I will eat 3 healthy meals a day, avoid all other snacks, and I will avoid completely the following foods and drinks …..”).

Some people suggest picking your most important single goal for the year and just focusing on that to maximize the chances of success. A variation on this that works well with setting new habits is to set a single goal of establishing a new habit each month and focus on that. If you’re successful you’ll set 12 new good habits in a year, which is actually quite an accomplishment.

So after giving this a fair amount of though over the holidays, here’s what I would like to publicly declare. After completing several exercises to examine my strengths and interests, my single big goal for the year is to:

Use my insights and leadership abilities to inform people and inspire them to promote a cooperative, sustainable and peaceful society.

That high level description is too general to be an effective goal, so I’m developing a description of what being successful would look like and a plan to get there.

In terms of a monthly habit I’d like to establish, I came up with the following cluster of related habits for January:

Establish a habit of being better organized, uncluttered, and focused on my important goals. This includes:

• Write current life goals on a wallet sized card. Every project must follow from these.
  
• Unclutter: nothing is to be stored on horizontal surfaces - desk, table tops, floors. Regularly discard unused items.
  
• Email inbox: reduce to less than one screen every evening. When a response is called for, do so within 24 hours.
  
• Web browser: shut down every evening (i.e. no long list of unread articles in tabs)
  
• Simplify activities by applying the 80/20 rule - focus on that 20% of work that produces most of the benefits and start eliminating the rest.
  
• Awake at 5am for daily reflection and planning of the day’s activities. Focus on the most important thing I can accomplish that day to achieve my long term goals.
  
• Regular weekly / monthly / yearly review of goals, projects, progress, plans

Practices specific to work:

• Write current work goals on a wallet sized card. Every project must follow from these.
  
• Keep track of time spent at work to see how well I'm focusing on the important projects.
  
• No personal email or web reading until 4 hours of work is accomplished, then only 30 minutes until work day is done (at least 8 hours).

That’s quite a challenge for establishing new habits in one month, but if successful it could have a big impact on my daily life.

The 80-20 Rule of New Projects vs Maintenance

I was reading a recent article about people managing large computer departments. The main point of the article was:

IT business priority #1 - free up money for new projects.

Basically, too many companies spend 80% of their computer department's programming budget on maintenance of old programs, and only 20% of their budget on new projects. The article suggest that this ratio needs to be inverted to realize the full benefit of the computer department.

That got me wondering. Consider my "discretionary time", that which is left after my job, sleeping, eating, etc. Shouldn't I ideally be spending 80% of that time on new projects, learning, preparing for a 2nd career, or doing something else to improve myself? And should the remaining 20% be on maintenance activities? I'm sure that the amount of my discretionary time spent on routine chores around the house, running errands, going through my email, and taking care of assorted other ongoing obligations adds up to much more the 20%. In fact, it's often more than 80%.

So the question for the day is - how do I reverse that ratio? Obviously it means cutting down the time spent on maintenance chores. This summer for the first time in many years I paid a local high school student to mow my lawn. That's one example, one which I've decided was well worth the money. I'm searching for others now.

One of the big time consumers of my evenings is email. Sometimes it seems that getting that down to 20 minutes a day would be wonderful (for non-work email). I'm not sure how to accomplish this yet though.

The 100 Possession Challenge

I've been interested in decluttering my life for a while, and in spurts I give it a try (though often not getting beyond one room). It turns out that some people are willing to try taking this to the extreme in the "Olympics of decluttering" and reducing their personal possessions to 100 items. Gulp! My family had an interesting conversation about it over lunch today, and decided that it would have to be 100 items per person, and jointly owned family-stuff wouldn't count. But still, getting down to even 200-300 items would be an extreme challenge. I'm not sure if I'll give it a try, but at least it give me great inspiration to work on decluttering my life more. By the way, did you know that ancient Buddhist Law of Possessions allowed a monk to have only 8 possessions? Interesting.... I believe that is roughly what Gandhi owned when he died.

If you want to read more, try the Zen Habits web site article here. ( The Zen Habits site is an incredibly wonderful site in general when it comes to decluttering you possessions, your mind, and examining your priorities.) There is also a guy blogging about his efforts. And finally, surprise, there was even a recent Time magazine article about this movement.

5 Months of "Most Important Tasks" (MITs)

It's been 5 months now since my 50th birthday, and 5 months that I've been practicing writing down my Most Important Things (MITs) to do each morning. Here's what I've found out so far:

(1) It's not too hard to get into this habit provided you do it early each morning before staring to work on various tasks for the day, and rate yourself at the end of each day (example - finished 2 out of 3)

(2) It helps if you keep a running score for the week. For example, completing 15 out of 21 at the end of the week. This gives you additional incentive to write them down and complete them. If you fail to write down any for the day, then give yourself a score of 0 out of 3.

(3) Writing down the MITs for a day only provides minimal help if you don't actually schedule any time to do them. You also need to plan when you are going to do them. This usually means doing them before other routine tasks. Remember, they are the most important tasks for you to accomplish that day. Plan them with that attitude in mind.

(4) Choosing your MITs is a learned skill. You need to balance being realistic, pushing yourself, and being flexible. Ideally most MITs should have something to do with your long term plans, but not always. Sometimes the priority for a day has a more immediate focus. For example, for Dec 25th the single MIT for that day could be "connecting with and appreciating family members".

Handling an overflowing eMail inbox

When I read my email for the day, I often follow these steps: 1) browse through it quickly, deleting anything uninteresting and saving for later anything that requires some time to respond to. 2) Read anything interesting, or that has a pointer to an interesting article worth reading. 3) Get tired, go do something else, or go to bed.

Unfortunately the most important actions - responding to email that needs a response, especially from family or friends, was getting shoved to the bottom of the list of actions. In fact it was too often falling off the bottom of that list. In reality it should be the first thing I do. If other things get left undone with the email when I run out of time, such as reading interesting articles, well then so be it. The important thing is to make sure the important things get done.

So now I have a confession to make. I have a hard time resisting subscribing to a large assortment of email lists. So much potentially useful information, all sent to your inbox for free. I have a hard time resisting the thought that I might miss something worthwhile if I don't subscribe. Of course I often can't get through everything that comes into my inbox each day, so I put it off to tomorrow. You can guess where that leads. My inbox just topped 3000 messages, sigh. Time for some drastic action.

Here's what I did. I copied my entire inbox to a new folder, which I intend to slowly work my way through in the coming weeks. In the mean time, I have a fresh new clean inbox to work with. The goal is to keep the size of my new inbox down to about 1/2 page by the time I go to bed each night. So far, I've been successful for the first few days. It requires deleting a bunch of potentially interesting articles at times, but I'm putting priority at responding to messages that need a response first.

I haven't gotten around to unsubscribing to any of the email list though... I just don't want to missing something potentially important on any of them. I'm too much of an information junkie to make some needed changes here.

If you have any thoughts, or pointers to how to handle email, especially dealing with an overflowing email inbox, I'd love to hear about them. I think this is becoming one of the great new challenges of our times.