Go with the Flow to get into the zone

I was chatting with my friend Matt the other day about productivity and how hard it was to get started on some tasks.  He pointed me to a model called “Flow,” which was developed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.  According to Csíkszentmihályi, “Flow” happens when you are engaged in a highly challenging activity, which is also an activity at which you are highly skilled.

When I read about “Flow” it seems analogous to the feeling you get when you are “in the zone” and performing in what seems to be an effortless way.

Diagnose what’s happening

I’ve printed out a copy of the “Flow” diagram at right and have been using it to help diagnose why I’m avoiding certain tasks.  For example, I don’t really like doing my expense reports.  I find them to be time-consuming and tedious, so I procrastinate like crazy.

There is no “tedious” zone on the diagram, but my feelings most closely match the “boredom” part of the diagram.  That makes sense, since that indicates an unchallenging task that I have a reasonable ability to do.

In a case like filing expenses, there isn’t much I can do to make the task more exciting, so I just batch them together and get them done through sheer force of will (combined with threats from our Finance team that I’d better get them in by quarter end if I want to get reimbursed).

In other cases, when I’m avoiding tasks because I don’t have sufficient skills to be competent at a challenging task, I have two dominant paths I can take:

1. Increase my skill level (which could be through practice, study, or asking for help from someone more skilled), or
2. Alter the task in some way to make it seem less challenging.

Intersection with productivity best practices

In the past, I’ve often gone for option one, but that can be time consuming. 

In my recent “meditations” on the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, I’ve found that option 2 is more achievable than it seems at first glance.  By breaking the difficult challenges down into less daunting subprojects, then translating those into discreet next actions, I can take some of the difficulty out of the work.

I’ve tried this with a number of challenging projects lately, and I’ve managed to get them unstuck through this method.

If you’re interested in more thoughts on this topic, there are a couple of good resources that I know of:

• An excellent book, “Find Your Focus Zone,” that takes best practices from performance coaches (athletes, artists, etc.) and enables anyone to get better at getting “into the zone.”
• An interesting article by Kevin Chiu, discussing how the Flow model integrates with GTD to solve procrastination.

Category sprawl and GTD

I’m in the process of doing a “reset” on my GTD system.  Basically, I ripped out all of my categories, printed out all my list and deleted them, and am starting from scratch.

Why? I found that I let my lists turn into “junk drawers” which meant that I was a) afraid to open some of them, and b) couldn’t find anything useful when I did force myself to open them.

One of the culprits was what I call “category sprawl,” which meant that I created so many granular categories for my tasks, and so many goofy ‘contexts’ that my lists really weren’t all that useful any more.

Basically, I acted like I was “special” and made a bunch of changes to the recommended GTD method.  It was fun for a while but turned out to be not such a great idea.  And now I’m paying the price.

Preventing the sprawl – my strategy

I’ve taken a number of steps to try to get back into a clean place with GTD:

1. I have reverted to the recommended, default contexts as recommended by David Allen (those shown in the screen grab at right). [Note:  I am about to add one additional category called @ONLINE but will try not to add any more].
2. I turned of automatic categorization in ClearContext so that I have to manually assign categories to tasks.  (This wasn’t an issue for the GTD Outlook Add-In)
3. I am “forcing” all of my next actions to fit into one of these categories.

There are (obviously) a lot of other tweaks I’m doing to my process, like getting back into the discipline of truly identifying physical next actions, moving all projects I’m not actively working on to SOMEDAY/MAYBE, and more.

If you’re a GTD person and you find yourself with category sprawl, this kind of a clean-slate approach might help.  Let me know if this resonates with you, or if you’ve got any best practices for a GTD reset.

That’s a great question…

If you’ve ever read my profile on the blog, you will know that the very essence of “genuine curiosity” as a concept is that you change your interactions with the world by asking open-ended, evocative questions.

Yes/No is a no-no

The main thing to remember with the genuine curiosity concept is that the questions should not be answerable with a yes/no response (unlike my daughter’s unusual questionnaire, at right). 

The idea is to get people to talk and see where the conversation goes.

I’ve heard some great questions since I’ve started listening for them.  Back in 2005, I wrote about a few general purpose “discovery questions,” best used on others – especially people you don’t know very well.

Going deeper

I have started a list of the really great questions I hear, and my favorites are those that cause really deep thinking.  These can be used on others as coaching exercises or, in many cases, on yourself to get to a deeper level of introspection.

One guy that has Great questions is Michael Bungay Stanier from Box of Crayons.  I’ve heard a number of his questions from interviews he’s done with David Allen (the “GTD Guy”) and have enjoyed them immensely.

I finally got around to watching an awesome, 5 minute film that Michael has created called “The 5.75 Questions You’ve Been Avoiding.”  This is an entertaining way to get to some really insightful questions – ones that can really help you improve yourself if you’re willing to put in the time to think about them.

After watching the video, if you like how he thinks be sure & check out the “Great Work Blog.” 

Google Voice – the new Newton?

Back in the day, I had an Apple Newton PDA which was an early, stylus-based (and quite large, by today’s standards) handheld computer.  It was pretty cool but one of the love/hate attributes was its handwriting recognition.  You’d write clearly (or so you thought) but the Newton would mangle the words, creating a nonsense sentence.  This became a joke that was featured in the Doonesbury comic strip and other pop culture outlets.  A classic Newton joke:

Q: How many Newtons does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Farm.

Google Voice

I’ve been using Google Voice for a while now, which is a great, free service that lets you use one, central phone number that can be dynamically routed to whatever other number you like.  One of the most interesting features is that it will allow you to “screen” incoming calls and choose whether to accept them, send them to voice mail, or send them to voice mail while you listen in to what they are saying (you can press a key to take the call if what they say is interesting).

Additionally, you can make long distance calls through Google Voice for “free” (you make a call via Google’s site and it “patches you in” so you don’t incur long distance charges).

Promises unfulfilled

One other feature that holds great promise is one in which Google Voice will transcribe your voice mails to text and email them to you.  This makes it easier to About this feature, I say “holds great promise” because it doesn’t quite have the transcription accuracy that makes this a killer app.  For example, consider this Newton-esque transcription of one of my voice mails:

Pretty hard to tell what this means.  To be fair, the bold text is the part of the transcription they had high confidence in, while the gray text is lower-confidence transcription (and they got the phone number right).

I’m hoping this feature improves – this is one promise I’d love to see them fulfill!  I’d love to be able to route all of my voice mail into my inbox for processing along with my emails.