Angelo Stavrow [dot] Blog

Missives and musings on a variety of topics.

Years ago, as part of an engineering internship prep course, I had to do a Myers-Briggs personality test. The results indicated that I'm an ENFP type.

While the MBTI was proven to be mostly malarky, one thing that keeps coming up about ENFP types is that they have trouble with follow-through. From the profile I received as a result of the test:

“An ENFP needs to focus on following through with their projects. This can be a problem area for some of these individuals. Unlike other extraverted types, ENFPs need time alone to center themselves, and make sure they are moving in a direction which is in sync with their values. ENFPs who remain centered will usually be quite successful at their endeavours. Others may fall into the habit of dropping a project when they become excited about a new possibility, and thus they never achieve the great accomplishments which they are capable of achieving.” [emphasis mine]

Regardless of whether the test is BS or not, there's some truth to what they're saying.

It's not that I can't focus. I can sit and hack away at a problem for hours, unconsciously suppressing signals from my body telling me to eat or go to the bathroom. If the task at hand is interesting enough, I will become fully engrossed in doing it.

However—

I've identified some impediments to my own ability to focus and follow-through.

There's a lot of cool stuff to try out there. Off the top of my head, I have at least four app ideas in various stages of completion sitting in my Developer folder, and at least a couple more in a Someday/Maybe category in OmniFocus. Given that it can be a lot more fun to start a new project than to udpate and maintain an old one, a certain level of discipline—saying no, specifically—is important to keep things on track.

Not all projects are engrossing. Maybe the challenge isn't quite right for my level of competence, so rather than entering a state of flow, I end up either discouraged or bored. Maybe it's a clerical kind of task that I just don't feel like doing, even if the end goal would improve my life

Maybe the end goal just feels insurmountable.

Maybe I'm just trying to start a new habit, and I just don't remember to act on it because it's foreign to my daily routine.

For those kinds of projects, it helps me to keep my head in the game, and my eye on the prize, so to speak.

There's something satisfying about seeing yourself chip away a goal. Here, automation can actually be a source of failure, if it prevents you from getting the kind of feedback that keeps you moving in the right direction.

Instead, I try to use the dopamine hit of checking off a to-do item, and I like to provide myself with progress reports. That way, my focus is driven by the motivation to keep a streak going, which is infinitely more effective for me than just doing what I gotta do.

The GTD system uses the weekly review as one such measure, although sometimes that feels more like you're just making sure nothing's slipping through the cracks, rather than checking how far along you've gotten towards completing the project. I find it useful to track some numbers (but only when appropriate—be careful of the McNamara fallacy here) as a more quantitative measure of progress:

  • How many issues have I closed towards that milestone?
  • How am I doing on funding my Christmas expense budget?
  • How's my pace improving when I go jogging?

Periodic reminders are another good tool, especially for things like starting a new habit. I use a daily reminder to get myself to work on blog posts, and another to make sure I write in my journal.

(I really like Balanced for iOS as a way to track this, by the way.)

Setting tools aside, at the end of the day, getting to focus is about managing time and attention. Even with Someday/Maybe lists and reminders and weekly reviews, the one immutable law is that you'll only ever get 24 hours in a day. If you try to cram too many things into too little time, there's no opportunity to focus, because you're forcing yourself to switch contexts too often, or you're cutting back on sleep, or you're probably feeling too overwhelmed to stay on target.

One of the best things about a good task management system is that you don't have to feel committed to anything you throw in your inbox. It's just a staging area where you can try on an idea, let it percolate, and—if it doesn't fit—flush it down the toilet. Stop wasting mental bandwidth on it.

And if it does fit, and it's just on of a select few, then it's easier to keep on top it and follow through.

Discuss...

A short break from the usual posts for a bit of site news: by the end of February, I'm hoping to have completed the move of this site over to a static-site generator called Hugo.

There are a few reasons for this.

First, I'm ready to leave Squarespace. It's not that there's anything really wrong with their service. It's pretty reliable, their customer service is great, and it's generally pretty easy to use. It's just that it's overkill for what I need (a simple blog), and while they're constantly bringing out new features, those features aren't really of interest to me—the features I would be interested in paying for just don't seem to be rolling out.

Second, while some basic customization is available to base-plan users, it just can't compare to the level of customization available to a roll-your-own, hackable, static-site generator.

Third, Hugo will be the basis for another project I'm slowly putting together, so this will be good practice.

While I will probably be re-architecting the way URLs are set up, Hugo has an awesome built-in feature for handling redirects, so all the old links should continue working. Comment will probably go away, which is fine, because there really aren't many. Going back to Disqus is an option, but I'm really interested in Civil Comments too.

I'll follow up when the move is complete.

Discuss...

Two weeks ago, I wrote that I wanted to write more—primarily by posting to the blog once a week, and by writing in a journal daily.

So far, the journal has been a success. I haven't missed a day, because it's easy: I launch Day One on a device, and just write. I don't limit myself to certain topics, I don't use any tags, I don't add photos, and I certainly don't worry about length. Four words, four sentences, four paragraphs—it doesn't matter.

Easy wins. Much happy.

Writing here on a regular basis, however, has been more stress than success. It's not for a lack of things to say: as it stands, I've got four files in various stages of completion sitting in my drafts folder.

So what's making it so hard for me to get those done and uploaded?

Sure, part of it is that it's a bit more involved to write and post to the blog. I do it from my computer, at my desk, rather than from wherever I might have a web-connected device.

But more importantly, I think I feel more pressure to write for an audience, rather than just for me. And that imagined audience has expectations.

And so I try to push myself to meet those imagined expectations. Because THINKPIECES.

And then there's that weekly deadline.

Which means that by 6:30AM Friday morning, I found myself posting something that just didn't feel quite done. I mean, it was okay, and it meant that I could check off the task as completed, but I wasn't really satisfied with it.

Side note: I've been using Balanced as a motivator for new habits that I want to cultivate. It's been working well for me, and I like that those little habits live outside of my GTD workflow.

I haven't set any kind of length objective for these posts, so I'm going to start pushing back against the feeling that I need to get 500+ words out every week. The longer drafts that I have, I'll work on periodically, and post them when they're ready, rather than forcing them to be done.

And while they're getting ready, I'll write short(er)-but-sweet posts on something I've been thinking about, or that take the place of a tweetstorm.

Because quality over quantity is more than just a platitude, but showing up every week is important too.

Discuss...

We're now a week in to the new year. As I've mentioned before, I'm not really one for resolutions, but here's something that's been on my mind lately. A proposal, of sorts, in two parts.

  1. Be the person that makes you happy.
  2. Be the person that makes other people happy.

Here's the how and why of it, as I see it.

Part 1 Part 2 Situation
❌ ❌ This is the worst-case scenario. You're not happy. You're surrounded by people who aren't happy, which can perpetuate a downward spiral. It gets dark here, but on the bright side, there's lots of room for improvement too.
❌ ✔️ You're making others happy at the expense of your own happiness. Maybe even acting as an enabler. Who knows? Alternatively, your friends may be jerks. One way or the other, this is a huge energy sink. It's a bit clichéd and simplistic, I know, but ultimately, you have to be okay with who you are before you can really make things better for others.
✔️ ❌ You're happy, but no one else is. You might be a jerk, but probably you're caught up in something and you're maybe a little less mindful than you want to be. Alternatively, you may be surrounded by people who need your help. A word of caution here, though: it's possible that you're just not equipped for this task. Take care that this situation doesn't change into the one described above.
✔️ ✔️ This is the best place to be. You're making strides towards being the person you want to be, and you're helping others win too. Good on ya.

The tricky part is that these scenarios are fluid. Some days everyone's happy, and some days no one's happy; on most days, though, it's one of those mutually-exclusive-happiness situations.

Things always come back to centre, but it's important to keep in mind that we define where that centre is. And when we're having a hard time in a tough situation, centre can feel like the worst of these scenarios.

Screw it all, I don't give a crap.

Or: I'm burning out, but at least I'm making other people happy, and they probably appreciate that, right?

Most of the time, we define where we live, emotionally-speaking, without even thinking about it. We fixate on an argument we had with a loved one, or a project we really can't be arsed about at work, and the feelings we have about that particular thing spread to other areas of our life.

Happiness is a fleeting thing, and always will be.

Turns out, though, that if you listen hard enough, there's always a little voice that's providing real-time metrics on your progress towards becoming the person that makes you happy. That internal director's commentary takes the form of a great night's sleep, or a bout of heart palpitations, or a morning of inexplicable crankiness, or even a day of insufferable boredom.

This is mindfulness. It lets us step in and interrupt the signal chain between what's happening to us and how we feel about it, and make the appropriate course corrections. It's the compass you need, to guide you back to a centre that makes you feel like the person you want to be.

I struggle with this, but the more thought I put into these goals—the more mindful I am of them—the better I do.

Discuss...

A lot of people seem to think that New Year's resolutions are a waste of time. While I agree that any day is a good day to make changes, I also know that I like things in neat and tidy little parcels, and a year is a very nice little short- to medium-term period of time for setting goals, and revisiting them to see how you did.

I didn't try anything like that for 2015. While I feel the year was pretty good on the whole, this year I'd like to make it a little more official, make some of those goals (and their results) public record here.

So, in no particular order, here are some goals for this year:

  1. Post something here every Friday. I'm not setting any kind of length for now—it'll be hard enough to get back into the habit of writing regularly.
  2. Post to a journal at least once every day. Again, no stated length; even a sentence will do. Thankfully, DayOne makes this really easy.
  3. Make real progress towards my Mac app. I've been kicking around an idea for years now, and by year end I'd really like to have at least a first beta available.
  4. Contribute to open-source projects. Without setting a goal for a number or frequency of pull requests, I'd like to participate more in some OSS projects.
  5. Get in better shape. I'm not overweight, I'm not underweight, and I'm generally in good shape, but there's always room for improvement—in my case, that'll come from discipline in getting to the gym. To that end, I'm really thinking about making some of my fitness-tracker profiles public.

This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, as I have some personal and private goals that I'd also like to aim for, but it's a good start. I'll revisit this list every quarter and see how I'm doing.

That said, I hope that the next 366 days are happy, healthy, and fruitful for you. On with the show.

Discuss...

I'm a firm believer in automation.

Computers are great environments for this—scripting languages (and convenient utilities that leverage them, like Hazel, TextExpander, or If This Then That) make it trivial to organize, queue, and execute all kinds of tasks that otherwise time away from more enjoyable things.

• • •

Life can be a bit harder to automate. It can get expensive, too, because automating real-life tasks tends to require both hardware and software, working in concert, to manipulate the physical world.

On top of that, a lot of the automation we look at isn't really something that saves us any significant amount of time, because what's being automated isn't real work. Probably the most obvious example of this are home-automation tasks like lighting schemes, motorized blinds, and auto-adjusting thermostats. Sure, they're convenient, but they're luxuries. They don't have a meaningful impact in the quality of our lives.

I love my universal remote, but it's not a time- or work-saver. Not really.

• • •

There are automation technologies, however, that do provide real savings on time and work. Here, however, it's easy to fall into the trap of automating work that would otherwise be beneficial to do manually.

As an example: I own a Roomba, but not a dishwasher.

We've got a long-haired cat whose contributions to the household mainly consists of bundles of fur that roll down hallways like tumbleweed in the desert. My wife is pretty allergic to it, so we need to keep on top of the vacuuming or things go south quickly for her. Given that it's an otherwise hated chore, we got ourselves a Roomba to patrol our flat for dander and dust bunnies on a daily basis.

On the other hand, doing dishes—while not exactly pleasant—is a chore that allows me to settle into my thoughts, and has been shown to reduce stress levels in studies. I'll concede that it's not that hard to deal with, as we're only two people, but nonetheless this feels like work that's worth making time for. It's not uncommon for me to come up with ideas, or solve problems that I've been working on, while wrist-deep in suds.

It's sort of a mandated creative-thinking time, if you will. Given how hectic our lives can be, why would you want to automate that away?

Discuss...

“Make haste slowly.”

Or, if we forsake brevity for clarity: get it done quickly, but not so urgently that thoroughness is sacrificed for speed.

Once committed to action, it is desirable to move swiftly, decisively; but to do so without having completed one's due diligence1 is foolhardy at best, and dangerous at worst.

  1. The hard part in all of this, of course, is know when the diligence is done and the planning can begin. Look too hard for the perils and pitfalls, and you'll never get the thing underway. Don't look hard enough, and you might find yourself starting from scratch—or abandoning the project completely. ↩

Discuss...

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

I'm not sure to whom the above quote is attributed, but I don't buy it.

The only way to do great work is to put in 100% of your attention and your effort, follow a thorough PDCA1 methodology, and understand that the quality of your work depends entirely on your will.

I get that this quote is supposed to be an inspirational call to action, but thinking that you can only excel at things that you love is equal parts reductive and defeatist.

I'll concede that it's easier to mail it in when you don't especially care for the work you're doing, but that doesn't mean you're forced to be mediocre about it.

Don't make excuses. Make great things—regardless of your passion for them.

  1. Plan → Do → Check → Act: one of the tenets of a quality management system. ↩

Discuss...

A calendar is, at its essence, just a list. But how effectively that list is used can transform your calendar from a mostly-neglected application to a finely-tuned productivity tool.

The key to this transformation is the proper care and feeding of your calendar. It is a garbage-in-garbage-out system, so it's crucial that we make sure that we only add items to our calendar that belong there.

For GTD acolytes like myself, it feels like we rise and fall by the quality of our lists. After all, these various context lists pretty act like an outboard brain, telling us what we're supposed to be doing at the given moment, so if we throw action items onto them willy-nilly, and if they're not tended to regularly, it all falls apart, becoming a system that you don't use because you can't trust it. Specifically, this means that anything you place on your calendar, you should treat as a promise.

But—and this is the key—don’t use your calendar for task management, as it’s really meant for time management1. I really like an idea Merlin Mann2 has discussed, where he suggests that productivity is not just about managing your time, but also about managing your attention. Let Omnifocus (or whatever) handle your tasks, and let your calendar handle your time.

There was a good Mac Power Users episode on calendar management that got me thinking about how I use mine, and how I deal with time management in general.

Due Dates

It feels like including this field in a task-management system is probably one of the most polarizing conversation in GTD-Land3. I go back and forth on it, myself (a time required field makes more sense, maybe, because you can then sort your context lists according to how much free time you have).

For most tasks, however, adding due dates

  • makes little sense in the real world;
  • clutters your calendar needlessly (it's no longer a “hard landscape” of real appointments);
  • undermines the flexibility of your workflows if you strictly follow these due dates;
  • undermines the reliability of your system if you don’t; and
  • adds busywork that would probably be unnecessary if you were doing better reviews of your projects and lists.

Still, sometimes a date of some sort makes sense for a particular task. So I tend to use the due-date field as one of two things: a do date, or a die date.

Do Dates

Do dates are for tasks that absolutely need to get done on a certain day or by a certain time. Should these go on your calendar? Renewing your driver's license, for example, is just such a thing, but you'll get a notice ahead of time reminding you of this, so you probably don't need another reminder in your calendar.

What about your wife's birthday? Sure, that may be on your calendar, but did you give yourself a heads-up early enough to shop for her present, or will she be getting another six-pack of premium carwashes and a box of four-year-old chocolates that you had to pick up at the gas station on the way home because it was a long day at the office and it was the only place still open?4 Maybe that's a good candidate for a do date.

A better one is passport renewal. For myself, it's on a five-year renewal period, but I don't get any kind of reminder, and if it has expired, I've only got six months to get it done if I want the “simplified” renewal option. But it still requires a few things, like getting a photo taken, locating my old passport, completing a form, and mailing it out, so it's a project, and I really don't want to find myself with an expired passport two weeks before a business trip. So while I'll have a 5-year review cycle for my “renew passport” project, I'll go ahead and add some do dates to those tasks that are more time sensitive.

Die Dates

Die dates are for tasks that are far less important—optional, even—but that still have some kind of time sensitivity to them. While it's not paramount that you actually complete the task (like an item on your Someday/Maybe list), you may only have a limited amount of time to do it.

Looking into concert tickets, for example, is just such a thing. Popping into a store that's having a sale on iTunes cards is yet another. It's okay if these things get skipped, but they are in your system for a reason, and if you don't give yourself a reminder, you're likely to miss the opportunity because of its limited-time availability.

  1. There are more good tips [here][6] and [here][7]. ↩

  2. Don't call him a productivity guru. But do listen to his [podcast, Back To Work, with Dan Benjamin][8]. ↩

  3. GTD-Land is a magical place where apparently everyone is so fantastically efficient at getting things done that they can sit back and nitpick the minutia of every GTD tool out there. For 18 hours per day. Every day. Weekends and holidays included. ↩

  4. Bonus points may be awarded if she doesn't own a car and/or you forgot that she's allergic to chocolate. ↩

Discuss...

Remember Mortal Combat?

It was (and I guess still is) a fighting game whose claim to fame, when it was released in arcades back in the 90s, was the idea of a “finishing move”—if you beat your opponent, you had the opportunity to do a special attack, sending them off to meet their maker in a rather bloody fashion.

While I don't condone violence, the idea of a “finishing move” made me think a little bit about how I tend to deal with recurring tasks.

Here are some examples.

  • Task:Vacuuming
  • Type:Chore

  • Overview:

    1. Pull tiny Dyson City vacuum cleaner out of its cramped storage space
    2. Give the flat a good once-over
    3. Replace vacuum cleaner in aforementioned cramped storage space

  • Comment: Older apartments have next to no storage space, which means that we needed a small but effective vacuum cleaner. The Dyson City is positively lilliputian, but with this space-saving design comes an equally tiny cannister to hold all the cat-hair tumbleweeds that our remarkably-fluffy cat can produce at an alarming rate.

  • Finishing Move: Always empty cannister just before putting the vacuum cleaner back into storage. This way, it's always ready for the next round of a chore we both hate.

  • Task:Getting a haircut
  • Type:Errand

  • Overview:

    1. Arrive at purveyors of fine haircuts
    2. Enjoy the courtesy massage
    3. Engage in banter about comic books and movies with hairdresser while getting haircut
    4. Pay for services rendered
    5. Leave purveyors of fine haircuts

  • Comment: My hair grows like a weed. Coarse, wavy, rebellios weeds, to be specific. Given that my appearance needs all the help it can get, I go in for a haircut every three to four weeks.

  • Finishing Move: So that I don't have to give it a second though, I always schedule my next appointment while paying on my way out, and put it into my calendar immediately. This way, I don't have to set any reminders to make an appointment, nor do I have to worry about looking like a sheepdog.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

The key is that when I've got some kind of task that I know will pop back up on my to-do list at some point in the future, I ensure that I build into my workflow some kind of finishing move that makes my life a little bit easier the next time around.

Sure, it's not a big deal to call up and make a haircut appointment, but my brain is put to much better use doing creative and enjoyable things, like solving problems at work or focusing on the people that are special to me.

It's also no big deal to empty a vacuum cleaner before you start vacuuming, but it's such an unpleasant thing to do in the first place that I don't want to give myself any reason to stall. It's friction, when it comes to productivity, friction is failure.

Discuss...

Enter your email to subscribe to updates.