Day: September 7, 2006

And You Thought Americans Were Obese

Researchers in Utah recently discovered what is believed to be the heaviest species of dinosaur — the heavily armored specimen weighed in at an estimated 10,000+ pounds.

The dinosaur had numerous spikes and 2-inch thick armor, and probably fended off predators with turtle like maneuvers. According to College of Eastern Utah’s Dr. Reese Barrick,

So it’s best defense is just to stand there or even kneel down, so there’s no way an animal can get to where the soft underbelly would be.

I wonder how fast that sucker could move?

Source:

World’s heaviest dinosaur found in Utah. Local6.Com, May 30, 2006.

Treo + My Life Organized = Productive Bliss

For the past few months I’ve been using a Treo 700W and running the Windows Mobile version of My Life Organized on it. The result has been as close to productivity bliss as I’ve ever been.

Back in April, I lauded My Life Organized by complained about the price — $59.95 for the desktop version and $29.95 for the Windows Mobile companion version. But it was the only thing that came close to meeting my needs, and after several months of using both I can readily attest that the software has been more than worth the price.

My Life Organized is essentially a hybrid outline/database program. Like most outlining programs, you can view all of the tasks you need to do in an outline format. Create parent, sibling and child tasks, reorganize them, etc.

Like a database program, My Life Organized lets the user enter a great deal of data about each individual task. For the Getting Things Done crowd, it lets the user define and then assign contexts to each task. There are also fields for date when the task is to be started, when it is due, how important it is, and a text field for any notes.

Where this all pays off is My Life Organized’s ability to let me then view subsets of my outline based on my criteria. For example, when I have an hour to devote to updating my website I can have it show a list of all of the tasks that are assigned to the web category sorted by their due date. Or I could have it show by the importance or urgency I’ve assigned. That might sound fairly trivial, but My Life Organized is the only Windows app I found that came anywhere close to being able to do this.

Putting that capability on the Treo is just killer. I probably go to My Life Organized on the Treo a dozen times a day looking for what I need to do next. The program nicely keeps track of the number of things I’ve finished so far that day, giving me motivation to get that number as high as possible.

I haven’t exactly turned into Superman, but the program has definitely improved my productivity and aided greatly in tracking everything I have to do.

I’ve also definitely used it to get everything I need to do into the program and out of my head. At the moment there are 1006 tasks in my My Life Organized to do list. Since I’ve got the program on the Treo, I simply make a habit of adding a task to the list the second it enters my head that I need to do it and it’s not yet on the list.

Continuous Partial Attention

Linda Stone does a nice job of summarizing the dilemma many of us face with her brief essay Continuous Partial Attention. Stone writes,

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. . . We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized and to matter.

We have focused on managing our time. Our opportunity is to focus on how we manage our attention. We are evolving beyond an always-on lifestyle. As we make choices to turn the technology OFF, to give full attention to others in interactions, to block out interruption-free time, and to use the full range of communication tools more appropriately, we will re-orient our trek toward a path of more engaged attention . . .

This, to me, is the key insight of David Allen’s much-lauded Getting Things Done. I’ve always felt I was fairly productive, but definitely had attention issues that left me stressed and was inefficient. Allen’s idea of getting everything you need to do out of your head and into some sort of system so you can focus on accomplishing one task at a time really changed how I approached all of the things I need to get done.

Which is not to say that I never do the ADHD five things at a time. I do that a lot and it is often psychologically pleasurable. But I no longer fool myself into thinking that I can be very productive doing that.