“Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline.”

Image courtesy of flickr, picture by vambo25

I’ve lived a significant part of my life on this basis. There are things that I love to do and they get done immediately, regardless of how important or urgent they are. There are other things that get done only because they’ve become urgent. While I suspect it has been true through the ages, the modern world seems to throw up ever increasing numbers of things that we don’t like to do. We even coined a word for them. Chores. The very mention of the word makes one catatonic. Bills, taxes, groceries dishes to load, dishes to unload, trash to take out, groceries again because you forgot some things the first time, servicing the car, getting your tooth drilled and on and on and on. And a single category like bills hides the horror of the sheer number of them: auto insurance, credit card for each spouse, home insurance, land line, cell phone, website annual fee, garbage, electricity, mortgage.  The sheer ennui in just thinking of all of this makes me want to stop writing.

For a long time, I managed the list in my head and usually managed to avoid dropping the ball and forgetting to pay. But, occasionally I did forget to pay the credit card bill on time. When that happened, I’d call and wheedle customer support with statements such as my mostly impeccable payment history, my credit rating, my loyalty with the number of years of being with them to cancel the late fee and finance charges. Usually I won, but I did pay a late fee a couple of times in these past fifteen years or so. And when Maya was born, I forgot to pay the property tax on time and paid a hefty $300 penalty for missing the deadline by a day. I avoided using autopay on things like credit cards because I wanted to stay on top of our expenses and to eyeball the expense list to make sure that there were no fake charges. Overwhelmed eventually, I switched to autopay on most of them  (and I shudder to think of all the stamps I licked in the days before paying via the web).

Every now and then, I’d invest a little time in maintaining a todo list. In the days before laptops became more commonplace, I attempted the task with a notebook. I liked the way people carried notebooks or diaries and wrote in them. They looked important, professional, coherent and what they put down seemed vital. I wanted that. A diary full of vital stuff. But I didn’t carry the notebook or diary with me everywhere and even when I did, I often didn’t write them down because it seemed more work. “How could I forget about them, if they were important ?”, was my thinking.

Then the novelty of computers kicked in and I started using the computer to maintain todo lists. This had to be a superior solution to the paper. The computer could even popup reminders of an impending doom. So, I ran with this for a short time. And by short time, I mean not even a month. Very soon, I found myself ignoring things on my todo list and instead doing whatever it was that pleased me. The main problem seemed to be that I didn’t take my computer everywhere and quickly found myself reprioritizing my tasks based on things that were not present in the computer’s todo list. I didn’t get around to adding them to the list when I got to the computer because I was doing the next thing and it felt cumbersome to type up stuff that I could easily remember anyway.

I scouted for of books on time management and finally purchased the two classics in the genre, Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and Hyrum Smith’s  “10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management“. The only thing I still remember from Smith’s book is that everything comes with an invisible price tag, time. Every time we buy a new thing, be it a book, a CD, a gadget or a house, the thing we don’t seem to realize is that it takes time to deal with this new thing and time is what we seem to lack in this modern world. From the time I read the book, I still mostly remember to account for the time the new stuff will take. What I couldn’t figure out well enough was to get better at predicting accurately my estimate of the time a task would take. From Covey’s book, I took away the classic 4 quadrant method of deciding how to prioritize activities. But even the simple task of deciding what tasks went into what quadrant seemed onerous. I continued to sporadically attempt to use a todo program on the computer (which involved spending time looking at new tools to do the job), but it continued to go nowhere.

Next came the Palm handheld. I even invested some money in a software (called Datebk3) specially designed for the Palm that did a bunch of things that were better than the default diary application that came with the Palm. The Palm seemed to solve the problem of ubiquity. It was small enough to carry everywhere and data entry wasn’t too cumbersome. It could popup reminders and even show me the tasks and appointments in a single page. But a month later, I was back to doing things the old way. The todo list was languishing again.

Disappointed and clueless was I. I tried to analyze why I failed so repeatedly at setting up and maintaining a todo list, but couldn’t come up with a single good reason. Maybe it required practice and I couldn’t devote time to mastering it, maybe the list was for people with poor memory, maybe the list was for people with too many things to do, maybe there was no getting around the fact that these were chores and that I’d never get around to enjoying them. But I also didn’t seem to be doing badly, after all it was a rare occasion that I failed to pay a bill or my taxes.

So, the state remained. Things got dropped, they were not things that punished me for being late such as bills or taxes, or things that nagged or screamed at me, but were nevertheless important things. For example, I forgot to get myself a new Ecopass when the year dawned and had to make time to go collect it from the office instead of having it delivered to me. Before Maya was born, I usually forgot to get a flu shot. I still haven’t managed to schedule an appointment for an annual physical exam, I forget to schedule my eye exam for over six months. Or I’d race to beat the deadline and in the process drop the ball on a few things or blow up on Shanthala or stress myself out in finishing. And the things I thought were really important: a long list of writing ideas that I want to add to the blog but haven’t even started, a list of stuff that I started, but couldn’t get around to constructing a coherent narrative, books that I want to read, websites that I want to visit, news articles that merited a longer time with them. I noted all this in the corner of my mind, tried new tools every year or so and continued to dump them with the speed of a new year resolution.

One day, I came across an article on GTD rather accidentally. What caught my eye was this idea of open loops. According to David Allen, the inventor of GTD, recording the information is vital. Instead of merely remembering that I need to schedule an annual physical exam, if I could record the task in some tool, be it a software or even a piece of paper, I could go on to being more productive and even have a good chance of achieving the goal of scheduling a physical. In other words, scheduling was not as important as capturing the piece of information and eliminating the open loop of distraction that comes from having the thought continuously pop up in our mind like an out of whack alarm.

In that one fundamental idea of capturing information some place safe and outside our brain, I realized that the chief reason no todo list worked for me was that I relied too much on my memory to keep track of things. Internally, I still prided myself for remembering complex pieces of disconnected information (such as all my credit card numbers, the telephone numbers of all my friends, all kinds of trivia about movies and books, pieces of writing ideas and ideas and quotes from books). In India, people honored the ability to recite scripture from memory as much, if not more, than applying that knowledge. I remember Shanthala telling me how surprised she was in her residency program to hear world experts that she worked with claim their ignorance on some detail and look it up in a book without feeling they were somehow lesser mortals for doing so. In India, we almost never saw people who didn’t wince for forgetting some piece of information and needing to look it up. I grew up being patted on my back for my almost photographic memory. I was wedded to that image of myself.

The key to why I forgot to do so many things was not that I needed a system to prioritize and remind me as much as a system to capture the things to do. I had to get rid of the open loops.

N.B: The website 43folders (which may have been where I first encountered this idea) has an interesting speculation on why GTD appeals to geeks so much (I resist labels, but couldn’t help but see the geek in me when I read this list) :

• geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
• geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
• geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
• geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
• geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
• geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
• geeks like fixing things on their own terms
• geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

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