Brain Freeze

Yeah…(10+2)*5. I0 minutes of work, 2 minutes of break repeated for 5 cycles.  This is Merlin Mann’s system to beat procrastination which he first wrote about back in 2005.  I had read about this ages ago on 43 Folders (the article is pretty old already) but never tried it.  Today I started.

I’ve had feats of concentration so heroic there should be epic stories (you know…like the Odyssey) written about them.  Those are few and far between though Normally I have a real problem getting things going.  I can procrastinate with the best of them and I’ve been that way my whole life.  I’m not sure what it is but it seems that I have two problems: being able to break tasks down into manageable pieces and, these days,  being too attracted to the many distractions that is the internet.  Overall it hasn’t hurt my effectiveness because I get things done on time.  I just don’t like how I get there so it was time to give anything a shot that might help.  That is where (10+2)*5 comes in.

I was reading the other day about an application for Windows called Instant Boss that was designed specifically to time the dashes.  It actually isn’t limited to (10+2)*5, you can set the values to whatever you want.  The default is (10+2)*5 and that’s what I’ve started with.  So far it is working great.

One of the things all of these dashes seem to do (at least according to the authors) is get you to the point of working to where you start to skip the breaks.  This was true for me even on this first day of trying it.  The 10 minutes go by, you get the signal from the application to take a break, but you are in the middle of something and don’t want to stop so you hit the “skip break” button and go on for another 10 minutes.   This whole thing is fantastic because I’m moving towards a goal, sometimes in 10 minute chunks, sometimes longer, with what seems like little effort.   I suppose the knowledge that after 10 minutes you are free to let your mind wander for a bit is the key.

There is also another dash from Jeff Covey called The Progressive Dash which also sounds fascinating but again leads to the same thing as the other dashes:

By the end of that time, I wish I could continue and get more done. Pretty soon, I’m wanting to get back to it and finish it instead of procrastinating about it.

Exactly how the (10+2)*5 thing worked for me.  Amazing in it’s simplicity.  Limitless in its power for Good. 

Had a conversation with a coworker the other day about the sorry state of our “intranet” at work. Drupal was set up prior to my having started there and to date nothing has been done to make it worth using. I mentioned that we should just get Confluence in and try it out. I’ve had lots of experience with it at my past employer and it’s fantastic software. The out-of-the-box functionality is great. Also, given that the plug-in architecture makes it very easy to add plug-ins, expanding the capabilities is very easy. Oh, and it isn’t expensive. Not free, but not expensive.

The response I received was basically that well, we had installed Drupal but we haven’t really done much with it. Ummm…yeah. That is exactly my point and why I mentioned Confluence. We don’t have the time to be dinking around with Drupal and, given that we also use JIRA it might be a good idea to give Confluence a look. Yet we keep adding documents and attachments to Drupal with no real guidelines and it’s already a mess.

I’m all for a content repository but if you’re not going to give it some love then it really isn’t any better than a shared network drive. Out of the box Confluence will index Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc. so searching for stuff is really easy. Drupal? Nope. Charting of data (which we do all the time via Excel files either emailed or attached to a Drupal page)? Confluence: you bet. With a plug-in it will even chart Excel and CSV data (or SQL queries for that matter). Drupal? Nope. JasperReports (which we are starting to use for a product)? Confluence: yep. Drupal? Nope.

I guess I just don’t get it. In *my* opinion the answer is staring us in the face and its about $2,200 with source code

I read a comment in a forum (think it was in the RTM forums but can’t find it again) that there really was no difference between Lists and saved searches (AKA: Smart Lists).  I have to take exception to that because there is a huge difference:  you can’t move items to a Smart List.   One of the ideas of GTD is getting your Inbox to empty.   In RTM you can’t do that if you are simply relying on tags. 

The Inbox

There is one work-around which is creating a Smart List Inbox which you can set to only have those items that haven’t been tagged yet.  If you’re using Smart Lists and tags as your way of organizing things you’d be tagging everything with a context when you process your inbox.   You would set up your Inbox Smart List to only show those items that haven’t been tagged yet.  I’ve been experimenting with this and it seems to work well since you can set that new Inbox as the default tab when you log in.

The biggest issue here is that you can’t get rid of the RTM-provided Inbox.  It would certainly be nice if there were an option to hide it.

Project Lists

I’ve also set up two Smart Lists for projects. One shows work-related projects and the other shows personal projects.  At work all of my projects are tagged with a bug ticket so I can use that in the project’s tag ie: p-alpha-456.  I also set up the main project task with a priority level of 1.  I then set up my Smart List for work like ‘tagContains: p-alpha AND priority:1′.  This insures that the Smart List only shows the high-level projects I’m currently working on.  

I do the same thing for personal projects.  The Smart List is set up along the lines of: ‘tagContains: p- NOT tagContains:p-alpha AND priority:1′.  Again this shows me the current high-level personal projects.

Contexts

My contexts are also set up as Smart Lists with a simple ‘tag: <context name>’.  Not much else to say here since every task will eventually get tagged with a context and show up on the appropriate Smart List.

Conclusion

So far this system is working well in the all of 3 days or so I’ve been trying it I’m sure it will get tweaker further but things seem to be flowing nicely.