Notes on Living with Data: Attention Sinks & Time Burglars

These are my notes on Merlin Mann's excellent time and attention talk.

Please note that these are just my notes from the talk - all the thoughts are Merlin's send hate mail to him.

***INTRODUCTION***
IDEA: meeting tokens worth 15 person-minutes each
-hand out a new bag of tokens each Monday
-probably wouldn't work, but a good smartass idea


***You're a big bargain***
It's too easy to get your attention
-you're too free with it
-You don't know how valuable your time is
-The world doesn't care
Examples:
SPAM
Telemarketers

DEFINE: Knowledge Worker (originally coined by Peter Drucker in the 60s):
-Writers, artists, programmers, people whose value added is the thinking that they do.
-People with girly-smooth hands who can take lunch anytime they want
-Black Box career: input--> {stuff you do} -->output
-You never do exactly one thing for exactly one boss
-You have to schedule and monitor your own time
-Boss #7 doesn't care what Boss #3 asked you to do

Time and Attention are the only truly finite resources
-Like money, you don't notice Time or Attention until you don't have enough

EXAMPLE: you don't know how much your time is worth
-If douchey PR guy says "hey, give me $100" - you say um... no!
-If douchey PR guy comes up to you and says, "jump into this hour-long meeting"
you say - sure!

Don't lose sight of opportunity cost of your time

Joel Spolsky's time metaphor:
Time=a Box, Everything you spend your time on is a wooden block
--don't put bad blocks into your box

DEFINE: Lifehack: make the right thing the easy thing to do.

Learn how to drive defensively with your time
Don't harm anyone else,
But be ready for other people to come into your lane
>>Never base your decisions on what someone else is supposed to do

***Renegotiation and Culture***
Renegotiation (own your stuff)
If you have too many things to do, learn to renegotiate

Own that a lot of things in your life are there because you let them
-TiVO
-RSS
-YouTube
-> all there because we let them be there

We have all ceded WAAAY too much access to the people around us
Who has your AIM name?
Who has your cell phone #?
Who has your email address?

You can tell a lot about someone by how many people have access to them.

Ding! email alert
Problem: it's the same alert for:
your mom
your nigerian uncle who wants you to hold some money
your boss and coworkers
Bacn
Causes you to see things as "important"
>>Therefore, small things become big things

Calendar default meeting time: 1 hour
Therefore 30 second meetings become hour-long meetings
???why an hour???
--Should be 15 minutes

Instead of giving people a "yes," master the "qualified yes"
+kinda
+maybe
+maybe later
+Can you give me more info? -> ninja
+Can you give me a note about this in 6 weeks? -> very ninja
+I can give you ten hours over the next month, let's plan that in a 15 minute call
+Ask for a few bullet points on what the meeting is about

Culture Shift:
We need culture shift to get this to work:
Start small
Find the big problems with small solutions

Start @ the squad/platoon level w/small changes and team standards
Foster Team Standards (and teach new people):
email
top/bottom quoting
subject line mastery
wiki
RSS
AIM
phone
"radio silence"
office hours / reverse meetings
-the team sits in a room for an hour and works
-people can stop by and interact with the whole team
Spread the culture

***Q&A***
awesome email filters that no one talks about:
-message that contains "for immediate release" anywhere
-immediately send to trash
-message in which you are not the sole "TO" recipient
-send to a folder that gets checked once a day
-removes messages sent with CYA CCs, etc
WARNING: this ideas may get you fired


Below is his slides and audio from the premiere of this talk (at MacWorld 2008):

The Road Not Taken

When he landed in Mexico in 1519 (against the direct orders of the Governor of Cuba), Hernan Cortes burned his ships to remove the possibility of return before accomplishing their mission.

Until last night I had no idea that, in addition to being the brutal conqueror of the Mayans, Cortes was also unoriginal. The first recorded instance of this motivational tactic was by Chinese General Xiang Yu in the 3rd century. To motivate his (invading) army, he burned his ships.

This style of motivation is something that has played a large role in my life lately. When making a decision, it is always tempting to keep the alternative choice open and available, in case you might want to double back and try the path you left behind.

Robert Frost captured the sense of indecision and sadness that results from thinking about losing one promising opportunity to pursue another:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
-Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1916

The New York Times has just published this article that discusses research conducted at MIT by Professor Dan Ariely on decision making that illustrates that people will irrationally hang on to unchosen opportunities as long as possible, even at the expense of exploiting both the unchosen and the chosen opportunities.

The lesson? Learn when it's important to burn the ships. Sometimes even looking down the other path sucks away valuable resources and time better spent on the opportunities at hand.
[link] [via lifehacker]

Introduction to Lifehackery

I'm building a company around the lifehack meme. This post is my attempt to explain the lifehack movement in a way that most anyone can understand. I'll expound further on these thoughts (and discuss books and articles) in the coming weeks.

What do I mean by the term lifehack?
The term comes from the sometimes messy and hastily created short programs (scripts) that programmers sometimes make to automate tedious, repetitive, and/or boring tasks. These short programs are commonly known as hacks.

Created in 2004 by technology writer Danny O'Brien, the term lifehack was originally used to describe productivity tricks that programmers used to handle their information overload and organize their lives. That is, a hack that deals with a real life problem.

Since 2004, the term lifehack has grown to encompass any trick that solves an everyday problem in an elegant or non-obvious way.

OK, what is a lifehack?
Let's start with my favorite example of a lifehack:
You're visiting a good friend's house to watch the game. To be considerate of your friend's floors, you remove your shoes. If you're a woman, you place your purse on top of your shoes. If you're a man, after a few minutes of sitting on the couch, you realize that your Costanza-wallet, phone and and keys hurt, so you get up and place them inside your shoes.

When it's time to say goodbye, you won't leave without your shoes, and you can't put your shoes on until you gather your purse, keys, and/or wallet. There's no way you've forgotten something at your friend's house. The correct thing to do was also the easy thing.

If you hadn't employed that little lifehack, you might have forgotten something important, or wasted time searching for your keys.

My 5 criteria for a lifehack:
1. Simple.
The best lifehacks are as simple as putting your wallet in your shoe. It is a small change in habit that saves you large amounts of time and frustration.

2. Remove obstacles. A life hack that removes obstacles (mental and physical) from perfomring a task. Lifehacks can make dreary tasks more fun by removing common frustrations and distractions.

3. Lets your brain be a brain. Most problems come from trying to use your brain as storage, a todo list, an alarm clock, or a memo pad. Your brain evolved from neanderthals. It's realy good at making decisions regarding that charging mammoth (or, whatever task is at hand). It's terrible at remembering to buy milk (until after you return from the store, of course). If you stop trying to force your brain to act unnaturally, it will make better decisions. My favorite lifehacks enable my brain to be free of clutter and allow me to make informed decisions.

4. Makes the right thing easier to do than the (usual) wrong thing.
In my example, it is much easier to find your keys when they're in your shoe than when you put them on the counter in an unfamiliar house. If you forget your keys are in your shoes, you'll (ouch) find them very quickly.

This is how the best lifehacks are: what you want to happen, happens because the alternative (bad) result is much more difficult.

5. Transparent.
The best lifehacks work in the background, without you putting much conscious effort into them. One you know the wallet-in-your-shoes trick, it's really easy to just do it each time you visit a friend's house.

In Summary: Work smarter, not harder
This is the overall goal of lifehacking. It's also Scrooge McDuck's favorite saying (and look how well he did for himself). If you approach your daily tasks with the aim of removing the useless and dreary, automating the repetitive, and expanding on the joyful, you'll work fewer hours, feel more refreshed by your work, make more money, and be more able to focus on that which makes you happy. This is the aim of the lifehack movement.

More examples: My three favorite lifehacks:
Change the new message check on your email program from 5 minutes to 45 minutes. Research shows that it takes about 90 seconds to recover from an email interruption. Leaving the new message check at 5 minutes means you spend 2.4 hours each 8 hour work day recovering from new message alerts. (96 interruptions x 90 seconds = 2.4 hours). Changing it to 45 minutes drops your email recovery time to 16 minutes per day. Saving about 2.2 hours each day.

Ubiquitous Capture. Keep a 3x5 card and a pen in your pocket all the time. You never know when a great idea will strike, or (more likely) when a new task will jump into your lap. How many times have you walked down the hall and had a boss or coworker ask you to do something? If you don't write it down, you'll forget it.

The 4 Ds
There are only 4 verbs that apply to any input in your life:
Do
Defer
Delete/Archive
Delegate
Knowing the Universal Actions makes figuring out what to do next much easier.