Angelo Stavrow [dot] Blog

“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.

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.

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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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...