The next phase of Getting Things Done I want to cover is processing. Processing is the art of taking things out of your in-box, examining them, and then deciding what to do about them. For my initial round of processing, I decided I would look only at my notebook. In my notebook, for every other thing I have identified as an in-box, I have added a to-do such as "process work desk in-box". As far as I am concerned, "process work in-box" is a single task, although you are not allowed to remove if from your processing list until it is completely empty.
Step one:
look at the first item in your in-box. Determine if you need to do anything about it. If you do need to do anything about it soon, go to step three otherwise go to step two.
Step two:
If you can just throw it away, chuck it in the bin.
If you need to do it at a particular time future, file it in your tickler system (I'll talk about my tickler system in the future)
If you want to do it sometime, but have no immediate plans as for when, put it into a someday/oneday list
If you might need to reference it, chuck it in a file
And it is dealt with. Remove it from your in-box and return to step one
Step three:
Work out what you must do next, in order to complete this task.
If one action will complete the whole task, go to step five.
If it will take multiple actions to complete the whole task, go to step four.
Step four:
Congratulations, you have a project. Add this project to your project list
Think of the first action, and go to step five. If you can think of other actions that need to be added to the system, follow step five for each of these
Step five:
If the next action can be done in 2 minutes, do it.
If the next action can be delegated, delegate it
Otherwise, add the next action to a to-do list.
You should have a to-do list for each context in which you can carry out tasks (for example, on the telephone, at a computer, at the shops). Add the action to the most appropriate context.
You are finished. Remove the item from your in-box and start again.
Problems and solutions:
Q: In step one, I say "If you do need to do anything about it soon, go to step three". What is soon?
A: For me, the definition of soon is "possibly within the next two weeks". Why? Because I review my system every week, and so have at least a weeks notice of anything I need to do something about. In fact, soon is a bit more complicated than that. Essentially, it is a question of whether you need to begin implementing the task now or not, but anything that needs doing within two weeks must be on a list.
Q: In Step five, I talk about contexts. As an IT professional, I never find myself in a situation where I don't have a phone or a net connected computer (in fact, my mobile phone is a net connected computer). What contexts should I use?
A: Just because I don't ever find myself without a phone or a computer, I keep these as contexts. I currently use contexts to describe the type of activity, not the physical location. In fact I have three physical locations: work, home and at the shops. I have another location 'elsewhere' which I use to fit in anything that doesn't fall within one of those locations. 'At the shops' covers anything I want to buy in the immediate future, and keeps these shopping list items away from everything else I may have to do.
I keep the contexts 'computer' and 'phone' because I may want to do these actions either at work (during lunch hours), or home (or indeed at the shops... as I said, my phone is net connected).
My elsewhere context is for things I need to do at miscellaneous locations. Because I manage my to-do lists using rememberthemilk.com, I can use their location options to assign them to specific places (such as a friends house, or the hotel where I am getting married)
Q: Some of the items on my to-do list happen so frequently, that the moment I process them I think they ought to wind up in my in-box again.
A: I've noticed this too. All these things are part of my daily or weekly routine. Every morning, for instance I brush my teeth, add my weight to a spreadsheet and eat a nutritious, wholesome, breakfast. Every evening, I talk to Herself on the phone. Every Thursday morning, I put the bin out, and every Monday at work, I attend a status meeting.
How do I handle these? I don't put them on my to-do lists at all. Instead I have daily planner cards, one for work, one for home.
These cards (held in portrait mode) have 3 horizontal lines drawn across them, breaking them into 4 sections. The two central sections have 4 vertical lines down them, giving me 5 columns.
In the top and bottom sections I place tasks which need to be done in the morning and evening every day (top for morning, bottom for evening). In the middle two sections I put tasks specific to a particular day, morning and evening (Monday on the left, Friday on the right, top for morning, bottom for afternoon). My daily cards don't have any space for weekends (which I tend not to try to structure), but 6 lines would give you seven (possibly too thin) sections, should you need them.
My explanation of these daily cards has been a bit rushed here, so I'll give them a full treatment in a few days time, providing some blanks and some examples - including a top trick which has made Herself much happier about how tidy our house is, with hardly any work on my part.
Showing posts with label article. Show all posts
Showing posts with label article. Show all posts
Monday, February 5, 2007
Friday, February 2, 2007
How many inboxes do I have?
Too many.
The process of collection in Getting Things Done is filling your personal in-box with every task you might want to do (be it buying a nail, or selling a house). In an ideal world, we would have one in-box, put everything we wanted to do in one place, and then (when it came to processing) work through things one step at a time.
The world (as you may have noticed) is far from ideal.
The perfect world's in-box would be able to accept physical things: not just the excessive bills that have been stuffed wantonly through my letterbox by greedy utilities companies, but also the ball left untidily on the lawn and the new set of body building weights which I havn't figured out where to store yet. It would also be with me at all times, so I could add a new idea the moment it popped into my little mind.
I don't really fancy dragging my new set of weights around with me.
The solution then, is to have multiple in-boxes. The ones which fit into my life are:
An in-box for papers which sits near the front door, and accepts all those bills.
A notepad which I write things down in, and carry around with me
A section of my desk at work, which I pile all sorts of things into, promising I'll do something with them one day. It currently contains a box of business cards showing my companies old name and a telephone extension that won't reach me since our internal exchange changed. A plastic bottle I use for water (or would do - it hasn't been filled up since before Christmas), and an ethernet card which doesn't work (along with a index card attached to it which says "this ethernet card doesn't work).
But this too is insufficient. The weights wouldn't fit into my paper in-box. They would probably make it crack under their weight. It's almost ready to crack under the weight of the bills (I wonder if red ink is lighter...)
And other people keep giving me new in-boxes. My answering machine is an in-box. So is my email in-box (in fact, there is a clue in its name). As a software engineer, I have to handle fixing bugs and adding feature requests. We manage this with a piece of software. This software is an in-box (and also sends emails to my email in-box). At home, all the bookcases containing books I haven't read are, in their own way in-boxes. When I arrive home in the evening, my doormat is an in-box (for the bills, which get opened and placed in a new in-box), for the free paper, which gets placed in black recycling out-box, and for the pizza delivery menus, which tempt me away from my diet.
In truth, everything that is disorganised in your life is an in-box. Everything that is untidy is an in-box.
GTD recommends making a note of all things too big to fit into your in-box and then processing them one at a time. But in order to decide what gets put into your paper in-box, you are already processing. Maybe making a decision about where to put the weights goes into my notepad in-box, but deciding whether to throw away that empty crisp packet on my lawn is a processing action: do I really need to log it in my in-box, or would it be better just to say "my lawn is untidy, it has become an in-box" and add the task of processing new next in-box to the never-ending list of things to do.
I think the latter is the more reasonable system.
Sure, I should aim to keep things down to 3 in-boxes, but I should use my eyes to notice when other in-boxes exist, and need managing!
The process of collection in Getting Things Done is filling your personal in-box with every task you might want to do (be it buying a nail, or selling a house). In an ideal world, we would have one in-box, put everything we wanted to do in one place, and then (when it came to processing) work through things one step at a time.
The world (as you may have noticed) is far from ideal.
The perfect world's in-box would be able to accept physical things: not just the excessive bills that have been stuffed wantonly through my letterbox by greedy utilities companies, but also the ball left untidily on the lawn and the new set of body building weights which I havn't figured out where to store yet. It would also be with me at all times, so I could add a new idea the moment it popped into my little mind.
I don't really fancy dragging my new set of weights around with me.
The solution then, is to have multiple in-boxes. The ones which fit into my life are:
An in-box for papers which sits near the front door, and accepts all those bills.
A notepad which I write things down in, and carry around with me
A section of my desk at work, which I pile all sorts of things into, promising I'll do something with them one day. It currently contains a box of business cards showing my companies old name and a telephone extension that won't reach me since our internal exchange changed. A plastic bottle I use for water (or would do - it hasn't been filled up since before Christmas), and an ethernet card which doesn't work (along with a index card attached to it which says "this ethernet card doesn't work).
But this too is insufficient. The weights wouldn't fit into my paper in-box. They would probably make it crack under their weight. It's almost ready to crack under the weight of the bills (I wonder if red ink is lighter...)
And other people keep giving me new in-boxes. My answering machine is an in-box. So is my email in-box (in fact, there is a clue in its name). As a software engineer, I have to handle fixing bugs and adding feature requests. We manage this with a piece of software. This software is an in-box (and also sends emails to my email in-box). At home, all the bookcases containing books I haven't read are, in their own way in-boxes. When I arrive home in the evening, my doormat is an in-box (for the bills, which get opened and placed in a new in-box), for the free paper, which gets placed in black recycling out-box, and for the pizza delivery menus, which tempt me away from my diet.
In truth, everything that is disorganised in your life is an in-box. Everything that is untidy is an in-box.
GTD recommends making a note of all things too big to fit into your in-box and then processing them one at a time. But in order to decide what gets put into your paper in-box, you are already processing. Maybe making a decision about where to put the weights goes into my notepad in-box, but deciding whether to throw away that empty crisp packet on my lawn is a processing action: do I really need to log it in my in-box, or would it be better just to say "my lawn is untidy, it has become an in-box" and add the task of processing new next in-box to the never-ending list of things to do.
I think the latter is the more reasonable system.
Sure, I should aim to keep things down to 3 in-boxes, but I should use my eyes to notice when other in-boxes exist, and need managing!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Lose 22 pounds in 1 month, and take control of your eating by turning down your fat thermostat.
I began the Shangri-la diet on the 1st day of January 2007. I wanted to shed the extra pounds I gained over the Christmas holidays, and I wanted to shed a lot more weight I had put on over 28 years of eating. But most of all I wanted to test whether a seemingly impossible diet worked.
The diet has two simple rules:
Rule 1: Take between 1 and 4 tablespoons of flavourless oil (such as extra light olive oil or safflower oil) each day
Rule 2: Do not consume anything with any flavour for an hour before or after you take the the oil.
It shouldn't work. But over the last month I have followed it and had staggering results. As I followed the diet, I noticed it changing my appetite gradually, and blogged about the results. As the month came to a close, it seemed fitting that, rather than suggest people read my blog's day by day progress I try to summarize my discoveries and experiences. The weight loss isn't due to the diet, it is due to the fact I reduced the amount of food I eat. However, the Shangri-la diet, through reducing my appetite, has made dieting a cinch, and makes me feel full far sooner than I ever have before.
The Theory
The theory is that your body has a weight it wants to be, your set-point. If your body's weight falls below that set point, you get hungry. If your weight gets above the set point, you feel full. Its like a thermostat that keeps the room a set temperature by turning on and off radiators. What the diet does is lets you adjust the set point in a way which is almost as simple as twiddling a thermostat dial. If you eat food with a flavour your body associates with lots of calories, your body thinks 'food is plentiful, because I'm eating things I like. I had better stock up for the next time food is short' Your fat thermostat goes up, and you become hungrier until you have put on extra weight. If you eat food with low flavour, but still containing calories, you fill your body (because you provide it with enough food to keep it above the set-point), but your fat thermostat goes down because your body thinks 'there isn't much food around, no point in making me suffer, I'll just use the reserves I've built up'. For cavemen, with periods of plenty and periods of little, the fat thermostat works perfectly. but in the twenty-first century with McDonalds' burgers just waiting to cram themselves down your throat, periods of famine have become a distant memory. By drinking a few hundred calories of oil every day, you fool yourself into thinking there is less flavour, and thus less food around. Your fat thermostat gets turned down and you become less hungry. (This is an oversimplification, read the book and Seth Roberts' paper on what makes food fattening if you want to know the science behind the horribly mixed metaphor)
Whether this theory is correct or not, the effects I've experienced seem to fit in with what it predicts, each stage taking me a step closer to being thinner and healthier. It doesn't seem to work for everyone, but many people have had shocking results. It is so remarkable that if the diet works for you, you don't just want to lose more weight, you want to evangelize about it too!
Stage 1:
Each morning as soon as you wake up, take 2 tablespoons of safflower oil.
Do not consume any flavour for the next hour. In my case, this involved learning to wake up earlier on week days. Since toothpaste has flavour, there shall be no tooth brushing for an hour after consuming oil.
Each evening, you must not consume any flavour for the hour before you go to bed
Shortly before you go to bed, take one tablespoon of oil
Stage 2:
Return to work after a restful holiday
Substitute your regular lunch of a sandwich and peanuts with 3 chopped carrots, chopped celery or pepper, maybe a slice of ham and 4 Ryvitas
Continue with the oil. In the evenings, and weekends (outside of the flavourless hours which surround taking the oil) you may eat what you want
Stage 3:
Your appetite is reducing.
You begin to notice two new sensations: a sensation of warmth after eating (this can be uncomfortable, it is much like a hot flush, but it subsides into a nicer feeling after a week or so), and having an empty stomach without wanting to eat.
You decide the big meals you were having in the evening to counteract your hunger are now too much for you to eat. You cut them down in size, and start eating things with fewer calories.
I particularly like steamed vegetables on boiled brown rice, dowsed in soy sauce.
You also cut down the size of your breakfast, until it is more a symbolic gesture than a meal.
Continue with the oil
Stage 4:
At the weekends you find eating what you used to eat to be far too much.
Snacks you left in the fridge to fill a gap in your stomach go untouched and begin to pass their best by dates.
You realise you now have control over your appetite. It feels strange, supernatural almost, since it is something you have never before experienced.
Continue with the oil
Stage 5:
Your weight loss slows and plateaus for a few days, causing you concern.
You recall that a pint of water will add a pound to your weight.
You also notice a trend that your weight stays still for longer after eating starchy foods like white bread.
Your weight loss recovers after a few days
As you plateau, you find yourself getting hungrier. As you begin to descend again, the hunger decreases.
Continue with the oil
Stage 6:
Your weight loss is continuing. Taking the oil and eating less is integrated into your life. You notice more and more often how you are eating so much less than you did even one month before.
There is no reason not to stop the diet. It takes almost no effort and has fantastic results. The diet may well throw up more surprises, but you are ready for them!
Continue with the oil.
Tips and Tricks:
If I knew I was going somewhere where there would be food I didn't want to eat, I made sure I had my oil beforehand. Firstly, to give me a reason not to start eating, and secondly, so I would feel slightly more satisfied as the evening continued.
It is really comforting to cook a meal the size you would have eaten before the diet, and to realise there is no way you can finish it. Bonus points if you can't even bring yourself to serve the whole meal.
I chose my diet food to fit in with my lifestyle. I used to like to sit at work and munch my way through the packet of peanuts I bought for my lunch. These days instead I have a lunch of chopped carrots, peppers and celery. It allows my to nibble for the same length of time, but doesn't give me the calories.
As you see above, I take my oil first thing in the morning and last thing at night. This means I am asleep for two of my four flavourless hours.
Keep a blog where you track your progress, that way you'll have to think about the diet once a day, which means you won't forget about it or let it slip.
The diet has two simple rules:
Rule 1: Take between 1 and 4 tablespoons of flavourless oil (such as extra light olive oil or safflower oil) each day
Rule 2: Do not consume anything with any flavour for an hour before or after you take the the oil.
It shouldn't work. But over the last month I have followed it and had staggering results. As I followed the diet, I noticed it changing my appetite gradually, and blogged about the results. As the month came to a close, it seemed fitting that, rather than suggest people read my blog's day by day progress I try to summarize my discoveries and experiences. The weight loss isn't due to the diet, it is due to the fact I reduced the amount of food I eat. However, the Shangri-la diet, through reducing my appetite, has made dieting a cinch, and makes me feel full far sooner than I ever have before.
The Theory
The theory is that your body has a weight it wants to be, your set-point. If your body's weight falls below that set point, you get hungry. If your weight gets above the set point, you feel full. Its like a thermostat that keeps the room a set temperature by turning on and off radiators. What the diet does is lets you adjust the set point in a way which is almost as simple as twiddling a thermostat dial. If you eat food with a flavour your body associates with lots of calories, your body thinks 'food is plentiful, because I'm eating things I like. I had better stock up for the next time food is short' Your fat thermostat goes up, and you become hungrier until you have put on extra weight. If you eat food with low flavour, but still containing calories, you fill your body (because you provide it with enough food to keep it above the set-point), but your fat thermostat goes down because your body thinks 'there isn't much food around, no point in making me suffer, I'll just use the reserves I've built up'. For cavemen, with periods of plenty and periods of little, the fat thermostat works perfectly. but in the twenty-first century with McDonalds' burgers just waiting to cram themselves down your throat, periods of famine have become a distant memory. By drinking a few hundred calories of oil every day, you fool yourself into thinking there is less flavour, and thus less food around. Your fat thermostat gets turned down and you become less hungry. (This is an oversimplification, read the book and Seth Roberts' paper on what makes food fattening if you want to know the science behind the horribly mixed metaphor)
Whether this theory is correct or not, the effects I've experienced seem to fit in with what it predicts, each stage taking me a step closer to being thinner and healthier. It doesn't seem to work for everyone, but many people have had shocking results. It is so remarkable that if the diet works for you, you don't just want to lose more weight, you want to evangelize about it too!
Stage 1:
Each morning as soon as you wake up, take 2 tablespoons of safflower oil.
Do not consume any flavour for the next hour. In my case, this involved learning to wake up earlier on week days. Since toothpaste has flavour, there shall be no tooth brushing for an hour after consuming oil.
Each evening, you must not consume any flavour for the hour before you go to bed
Shortly before you go to bed, take one tablespoon of oil
Stage 2:
Return to work after a restful holiday
Substitute your regular lunch of a sandwich and peanuts with 3 chopped carrots, chopped celery or pepper, maybe a slice of ham and 4 Ryvitas
Continue with the oil. In the evenings, and weekends (outside of the flavourless hours which surround taking the oil) you may eat what you want
Stage 3:
Your appetite is reducing.
You begin to notice two new sensations: a sensation of warmth after eating (this can be uncomfortable, it is much like a hot flush, but it subsides into a nicer feeling after a week or so), and having an empty stomach without wanting to eat.
You decide the big meals you were having in the evening to counteract your hunger are now too much for you to eat. You cut them down in size, and start eating things with fewer calories.
I particularly like steamed vegetables on boiled brown rice, dowsed in soy sauce.
You also cut down the size of your breakfast, until it is more a symbolic gesture than a meal.
Continue with the oil
Stage 4:
At the weekends you find eating what you used to eat to be far too much.
Snacks you left in the fridge to fill a gap in your stomach go untouched and begin to pass their best by dates.
You realise you now have control over your appetite. It feels strange, supernatural almost, since it is something you have never before experienced.
Continue with the oil
Stage 5:
Your weight loss slows and plateaus for a few days, causing you concern.
You recall that a pint of water will add a pound to your weight.
You also notice a trend that your weight stays still for longer after eating starchy foods like white bread.
Your weight loss recovers after a few days
As you plateau, you find yourself getting hungrier. As you begin to descend again, the hunger decreases.
Continue with the oil
Stage 6:
Your weight loss is continuing. Taking the oil and eating less is integrated into your life. You notice more and more often how you are eating so much less than you did even one month before.
There is no reason not to stop the diet. It takes almost no effort and has fantastic results. The diet may well throw up more surprises, but you are ready for them!
Continue with the oil.
Tips and Tricks:
If I knew I was going somewhere where there would be food I didn't want to eat, I made sure I had my oil beforehand. Firstly, to give me a reason not to start eating, and secondly, so I would feel slightly more satisfied as the evening continued.
It is really comforting to cook a meal the size you would have eaten before the diet, and to realise there is no way you can finish it. Bonus points if you can't even bring yourself to serve the whole meal.
I chose my diet food to fit in with my lifestyle. I used to like to sit at work and munch my way through the packet of peanuts I bought for my lunch. These days instead I have a lunch of chopped carrots, peppers and celery. It allows my to nibble for the same length of time, but doesn't give me the calories.
As you see above, I take my oil first thing in the morning and last thing at night. This means I am asleep for two of my four flavourless hours.
Keep a blog where you track your progress, that way you'll have to think about the diet once a day, which means you won't forget about it or let it slip.
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