A little reverse psychology goes a long way. Too often we become so preoccupied with a project’s final outcome that we become blind to the incremental nature of completion. We think about what we haven’t done. But we can choose to either see the glass as 10% full or 90% empty. You can focus on, “I finally got started”, or, “Man, I’ve got so much to do”. I would suggest that one frame of mind leads to greater engagement than the other.

Forget Finishing. Forget Starting.

I don’t know about you, but advice like, “Just get started” has never been particularly helpful to me when trying to break a spell of procrastination. “Getting started” always seemed fairly abstract. So one day I asked myself, “What would getting started look like?” In my case, as a writer, it would look like some text on the screen as opposed to no text on the screen.

So I made my first course of action to not have a blank screen. That turned out to be way more actionable than asking myself, “What’s a good opening?”, or, “How do I get started?” Putting down a serviceable title filled that requirement. Then I would repeat the process, since the rest of the page was blank. I would fill in the page one unit at a time, sometimes with a paragraph, sometimes with a subheading. Instead of struggling with the creative process of “writing”, I turned it into the mechanical process of “whitespace reduction”.

The moment I have an idea for an article, instead of just jotting it down as a phrase, I open a blank document and create the title, any subheadings that come to mind, and at least one paragraph, forming the “stub” of a full article. I find it much easier to continue later with some copy on the page than none. With the stub in place, the article on some level already exists; the rest is just detail. I’m never starting cold.

If you have a quota of sales calls to make, put the quota aside. Make your only goal to not have no sales calls. As soon as you sit down at your desk in the morning, pick of the phone and eliminate “settling in” time. But what about the other calls you’re required to make? The time to ask that is after you’re past zero calls. Once you’re beyond zero, you’ve “lost your virginity”, so to speak. You’ve experienced doing, and now’s the time to repeat the process, just once. You only have to commit to one more call, not 29. You can’t make 29 calls at once anyway, so why think about them all at once?

The 10-Minute Dash

Since productivity is a ratio of output over time, we can either choose to focus on output or focus on time. A popular variation on the nonzero goal is the 10-Minute Dash. This is where you set a timer for 10 minutes and commit to working on your task for — you guessed it — 10 minutes. In both cases, you’re shifting the focus from intellectual process to mechanical process. There are only two inviolable rules: (1) You must either do nothing else but the task you’ve set, or nothing at all; (2) You must use a timer, not your head, to enforce the interval.

It’s perfectly fine to sit and do nothing for those 10 minutes. You can even daydream, as long as you don’t physically do anything that’s off-task. But naturally, your goal is to have something productive to show for your time, so within a couple of minutes, you’ll probably get started just to avoid the boredom of waiting for the timer to go off.

Allowing idleness might seem to contradict the principle of eliminating zero work done, but it breaks the scatterbrain procrastination mindset of not having enough time. Procrastinators typically (almost necessarily) presume to need larger blocks of time than they have, so they consequently put in no time. Putting in 10 minutes disrupts the self-induced loop of perceived time famine. The 10-minute length is somewhat arbitrary, but just long enough to induce more than idle contemplation.

Small quantities of work might not seem valuable, but they’re infinitely more valuable than no work. They break inertia, establish your direction, let you experience doing, demonstrate solid time management skills and give you material for reflection and revision. All you have to do is more than zero.

The Logic of the Two Minute Rule

According to the Two Minute Rule, if something occurs to you that you determine can be done in two minutes or less, do it immediately, even if it’s a low priority item. Putting it off means spending more time thinking about the something than doing it, since you’ll either have to mentally remind yourself about it, or enter it on a last, review it, and reevaluate whether or not to do it.

Cluttering your to do list with two minute actions increases the size of your list with each line item. That might seem trivially obvious, but consider that if half of the items on your to do list are two-minute tasks, your perceived workload when scanning your list appears twice as large, despite a vast disparity in time commitments. Items like “Complete April sales report” and “Confirm dinner with Amy” are given equal psychic weight, even though there’s probably a 10-20x difference in time to completion.

Does It Matter a Little or Matter at All?

I’ve seen plenty of critics resist the Two Minute Rule based on untested assumptions, the most common of which goes something like this: “If I spend all of my time doing two-minute items, when will I ever have time to get to the important items?” This question is loaded with two assumptions: (1) that there’s an infinite supply of two-minute tasks to be done, and (2) that short tasks are unimportant.

Completing an under-two-minute action (lest we forget that many will be 30-second or one-minute actions) either leads to another one or a longer task. If the subsequent task is longer, you can put it on your to do list and evaluate it against all of the other items you’ve written down. If, in fact, the subsequent action does take less than two minutes, then you’ve spend a maximum of four minutes completing two items that would have otherwise lingered. Even in the unlikely event that you would have five of these in a row, that would consume a whopping 10 minutes out of your work day.

The notion that short tasks are unimportant is a curious one. Paying a bill online takes less than two minutes, but the consequences of not doing it can be quite serious. Yet many people will sit on a bill the moment it arrives, even when they know they have sufficient funds, because they inflate the task in their head. Sending a “thank you” email may not be serious, but if you’re going to send it at all, it would have more impact if you sent it the moment you thought of it than sending it four days later when you feel mentally pressured to do so.

The real question isn’t whether or not a short task is important enough to do now, but whether or not it should be done at all. If it should be done at all, and it takes essentially no time at all, do it now.

Does It Really Take Two Minutes?

One slightly less untested assumption is that many tasks end up taking longer than assumed. This is actually true, which highlights an important semantic distinction: we’re asking, not assuming. The object is not to assume that a relatively short task will take less than two minutes, then leap into indiscriminate action, but to consciously ask ourselves if it will, and actually think about whether or not it’s likely.

“Will this take two minutes or less?” is a disruptive question, designed not only to get you handle short actions immediately, but to prevent you from getting lured into potentially longer actions. Think of how many people check email without spending enough time to actually answer the messages they get. What’s the point in looking for email that can’t be answered? Why look at messages now that you’ll have to reexamine later? If it takes longer than two minutes, either schedule email processing for an appropriate block of time, or put it on your list.

Two minutes is actually arbitrary. When Acheson coached his early clients, he had them ask themselves, “Is it a short action?” After finding that “short” was too relative for some clients, he changed it to two minutes for clarity’s sake, but don’t get hung up on the length. The point is to discriminate between actions that are too short to put on a list and ones that are too long to start without becoming sidetracked from higher priorities.

During a busy weekday, the two-minute norm is probably ideal. If you happen to have more time — for instance, if you’ve come into the office on a Saturday, you might decide to immediately do anything that takes less than 10 minutes instead of two. The point of the rule is not to follow it blindly, but to make consciously question whether or not you actually have enough time. There’s usually more time available to do things than people assume.

The Flip Side of Interruptions

Interruptions may not be welcomed by the interrupted, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less avoidable. Holding up your palm in response to your boss and saying, “Not now, I’m working” isn’t exactly a best practice. Sometimes you have to roll with the punches. Sometimes, what I consider an interruption is what my boss likes to call “employment”. In a perfect world, we would only have new opportunities presented to us in between finished tasks, but since that utopian synchronicity still eludes us, let’s examine how to allow interruptions the smart way.

Bookmark Your Work

Interruptions are frustrating, not just because the interrupter is inconsiderate, but because we risk losing track of what we we’re doing. Much of that anxiety is magnified by trying to track what we’re doing mentally instead of physically. When we rely on our short term memory as a placeholder, there’s a heightened need to get back to that task as soon as possible to avoid forgetting it.

The easiest way to allow the interruption is to “bookmark” the current work in one of two ways. If there’s no paperwork involved with the task (like a phone call, or something you’re doing on the computer), just write the task and throw it into your in-basket. If there is paperwork, just throw that into the in-basket. This assumes that you regularly process the contents of your in-basket.

If you don’t have an in-basket, or let it pile up, then hold the paper in your hand until you’re done with the interruption (e.g., answer the interrupter’s question, scheduled a meeting, produced a requested document, etc.), and don’t let go of it until then. Once you have a consistent, physical place to park your interrupted work, your brain will stop trying to issue yourself reminders of what you’ve put aside while the other person is talking to you. You can give the person your undivided attention.

Rescheduling

Some ways to say “not now” are more elegant than others, such as , “That’s a good idea! I’d really like to go over this in detail once I get this purchase order out of the way. When’s a good time for you to discuss this?” You’ve pushed back by telling the interrupter (a) that he or she isn’t a nuisance (“That’s a good idea!”), (b) what you have something else to do at the moment (“this purchase order”), (c) that you’re committed to following up on the topic, and (d) that the discussion will happen later — all without being a jerk about it.

When a time is proposed, imply a suggested length for the meeting time: “So at 4:30, you’ll have 10 minutes to go over this?” Whether it’s 10 minutes or 30, it’s always a good idea when proposing a meeting to think for a couple of seconds about how long the meeting actually needs to take, rather than uttering an arbitrary or open-ended length. Shorter meetings are better to staying on topic.

The Two Minute Rule Revisited

You’ve probably heard of the Two Minute Rule: if you determine that an action will take less than two minutes, just do it now, even if it’s a low-priority item, assuming it needs to be done at all. These are items that would take longer to put on a to-do list and review later than they would to finish immediately.

Retrieving a requested document, find requested contact information, faxing or photocopying something, answering quick questions instead of offering to “think about” them later — these are all example of simple tasks that become more urgent if deferred. There’s less friction in handling a short request now than being nagged into it later. It’s also worth noting that just because a question or request is unexpected doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

The other advantage of consciously asking if something can be done in under two minutes is that prevents you from getting lured into vaguely longer actions. If someone asks you to set a meeting, you can pick a time and email the rest of your team in less than two minutes. If someone asks you to determine the agenda of the next meeting, you’re probably better off responding, “That’s a great idea! I’d really like to go over this in detail . . “, and set a time to discuss it. Or you may decide to bookmark your current work and discuss it now. The main principle to keep in mind is that how you decide to respond to interruptions is always under your control to some degree.

There are two main ways of making offers for your company’s products or services. You can use your experience to intuit what your customers want, or you can do actual market research. The usual tools for conducting market research are polls and focus groups. Unfortunately, these can be loaded methodologies, since polling makes it hard to avoid positing leading questions and answers, and focus groups tend to generate self-conscious feedback that’s not representative to real-world customers. Both approaches elicit reactive information.

So how can we find out what’s on customers’ minds without asking them? Welcome to the wonderful world of keyword research.

I’m going to create an example in real time without editing it later to prove a point. Suppose I’m a software developer interested in selling a product in the computer security niche. Most vendors like to create a product first, then figure out how to market it. It’s much more efficient to take the opposite approach. We want to find the best marketing angle, then create a product to fill it. That way we don’t have to spend weeks or months creating a product which, we discover in hindsight, nobody wants.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m limiting this example to two types of computer security products: firewall software and antivirus software. Instead of asking myself, “What’s the best way to market these?”, I ask myself a smarter question, “Which one is an easier sell?” The latter question breaks down into two further nuances: “Which one are more people looking for?” and “Which one is more commercial?”

Using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

To answer these questions, we’re going to use the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool, sometimes called the “Google Keyword Tool” or, less accurately, just “AdWords”. This is the tool advertisers use to determine what search keywords to bid on to trigger their ads. I’ll explain that later, but for now, let’s finish my hypothetical software marketing example.

Go to the Keyword Tool by hitting the link above, or just do a search for “keyword tool”, which usually brings it up as the first search result. If you found it by doing a search, click the “Get keyword ideas” link in the middle of the home page. Now, in the center field captioned, “Enter one keyword or phrase per line”, put in the first keyword, “firewall software”, hit Enter, and on the next line put in the second keyword, “antivirus software”. Now enter the CAPTCHA (a word rendered as a graphic to avoid automated queries) in the box below, and click the “Get keyword ideas” button.

We first need to configure the tool to show the information that’s relevant to what we’re doing, and hide the information that isn’t. In the Match Type dropdown menu, set the type to Exact. In the menu captioned, “Choose columns to display”, select “Show Estimated Avg. CPC”, then select “Hide Advertiser Competition” and “Hide Local Search Volume”. Click the header for Global Search Volume to sort the the data in descending order by this column. Now scroll down to the end of the first keyword list (there are two lists — we’re ignoring the second one in this context), and click “.csv (for excel)” to export the list to Excel.

In the top row of letters, double-click in the separator between the A and B columns to expand the cells of the keyword list. Now click in D2 and enter the following formula: “=b2*c2*.43″, hit Enter, click on D2 again, and double-click the lower right corner of the cell to auto-fill the rest of the column with the same calculation. With the values still highlighted, right-click on the column, select Sort from the context menu, then select Sort Largest to Smallest. This will bring up a Sort Warning that you’ll leave in the default option selected, “Expand the selection”, and click Sort. Then click D1 and type “KW Value” to create a header for keyword value.

The results will vary, since AdWords bids fluctuate like stock prices, but in my spreadsheet, a broad insight stands out: the market for the keyword “antivirus software” is 10 times bigger than the market for “firewall software”: $426K vs. $42K. We’re multiplying the number of searches per month by the cost per click — the amount of money advertisers are willing to pay to capture a reader who clicks on their ad with the respective keyword. The top search result on page 1 of Google statistically gets 43 percent of all of the search traffic, and since advertisers can buy a Sponsored Link directly above this spot, they’re getting roughly the same percentage.

An internet marketer would make further adjustments for clickthrough rates — if you got 43 percent of all search visits, only a tiny percentage of those would actually click on the ad — but that’s beyond the scope of what we’re doing here. We’re only trying to compare the relative size of the markets we’re considering. Between two keywords, the one with the bigger market is either more popular (higher search volume), more commercial (higher cost per click) or both.

What about Competition?

Internet marketers will quickly point out that I’ve left out a key part of the equation: the amount of competition surrounding each keyword. An ideal keyword is one with a search search volume, a high CPC, and a low competition. In this context, “competition” is the number of pages indexed by Google for that keyword relative to the number of searches for it.

Competition is a worthwhile subject to cover in a later post, but I’m skipping it here because we’re not necessarily applying insights from keyword research to internet marketing.

Here’s an example. Suppose you had a law firm in Los Angeles that you wanted to promote with print advertising. Which wording in the Yellow Pages or in the Los Angeles Times’ classifieds would yield better results? Would a headline with “Los Angeles Lawyer” or “Los Angeles Attorney” perform better? Well, “Los Angeles Attorney” has a 20% higher keyword value. As a bonus of extracting our keyword list, we can also discern which niches of legal service are most in demand. “Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney” and “Personal Injury Attorney” ace out “Los Angeles DUI Attorney” and “Los Angeles Criminal Attorney” in keyword value by 25%.

Unlike online advertising, where paying for more valuable keywords costs more, there’s no cost difference whatsoever in print, and competition factors are less relevant. Keyword research has an enormous amount of leverage beyond applications to internet marketing. Spend some time experimenting with the Keyword Tool, and see if you can find new ways to create or position your products, your services, or yourself.

The principle is simple: it’s easier to increase our concentration by controlling our environment than controlling our attention. By setting the conditions in which we operate on the front end, we spare ourselves the order of having to make moment-to-moment decisions for staying on task. I kept trying to open GReader and Gmail, despite my conscious commitment to the low information diet. The problem isn’t changing a behavior, it’s changing a habit, and a habit is much more deep-seated and has more momentum than a single action.

Habit Handicapping

There are probably a million ways to change a habit, but I see three main ones. We can identify the psychological cause that drives the habit. I’m too much of a pragmatist to find much reassurance in that approach, at least when it comes to getting past procrastination. We can identify distractions and triggers that divert us from the critical path, like instant messages and phone calls. I think this is necessary but not sufficient. It’s one thing to know that a ringing cell phone is distracting, but trying to ignore it when it rings requires willpower, and exercising that willpower is itself a distraction — like consciously trying not to think of pink elephants.

The third way is habit handicapping: limiting your ability to engage in a unproductive habit. Returning to the GReader/Gmail example, I created a framework in which I didn’t have to tell myself not to check RSS feeds or email. I was free to check them, even if they yielded no results. For a few weeks, I still opened these sites reflexively, then my brain finally made the connection: opening these sites will just show an empty page. Break the causal connection between a habit and its effect by changing the effect. Disrupting that habit has since served its purpose, and now I’m using an RSS reader again, but in a unique way that I’ll explain in an upcoming post.

But surely you can cheat if you really want to indulge in the habit? Absolutely. The point isn’t necessarily to remove the possibility to succumbing to habit, but to put enough sand in the gears to make habitual behavior a conscious choice.. You can leave ice cream in the freezer and resolve to avoid eating it, or you can throw it out so that you have to drive to the store if your sweet tooth is really that strong. I prefer the latter. Imagine how much more fit employees would be in an office without vending machines or coffee makers.

Other examples:

• Increasing your writing output by composing on a legal pad instead of looking for a fancier writing tool with internet access
• Deleting your browser bookmarks so that you have to access your favorite time leeches by typing in their urls. Those who are apprehensive about losing their bookmarks permanently can always save them to a flash drive first
• Leaving cash at home to avoid the vending machine at work
• Installing a call filter app on your phone that blocks designated calls, or all calls, at designated times. I have mine automatically set to route calls to voice mail during work hours, so I never have to hear or attempt to ignore a ringing phone

Willpower is overrated. We know it, yet we pay lip service to it. Powerful CEOs get things done in large part because they have professional gatekeepers to control their environment, not because they have iron wills. In a world rife with interruption (including self-interruption), controlling our environment is an executive skill that we all need to master.

A couple of months later, when I felt that I had the habit under control, I started adding a feed or two — or six or eight — to the reader, until I realized that I was back where I started. Whenever I was bored or anxious, feed reading was my crutch activity. So I dumped the feeds again and recovered.

But then I started thinking about the root of the problem. What is it about RSS that makes it so addictive? Why do I find books so much more satisfying to read than blogs? Books obviously treat their subject matter in more depth, but perhaps there’s a better reason. Books provide closure. They have a beginning, middle and end. Using an RSS reader, that experience can be approximated with blogs.

The Case Against Serial Content

Blogs manage our expectations in ways that can be counterproductive. Content that’s automatically delivered to an inbox on a daily or hourly basis conditions readers to live in a state of constant anticipation, contributing to what’s usually referred to as Continuous Partial Attention (CPA). As long as something is waiting for us in one of our inboxes, we feel compelled to keep up with the flow of information.

The alternative is to catch up rather than keep up. Catching up is the default mode of consuming information in books. All the information is sitting out there in a bundle that you can read from start to finish in one or more sittings, providing a sense of closure. If you feel the need to read more of a book after finishing it, it’s usually to fill in gaps in understanding; it’s not just a ritual behavior of checking for more information.

Keeping up is the default mode of consuming information in blogs. There’s always something new to read, so there’s never a sense of closure. While blogs are almost never structured to have a beginning-middle-end lifecycle, it’s pretty easy to set them up so they can be read in one or a few sittings without the need to “follow” them indefinitely.

Setting up Your Blog in Google Reader

You can probably use any RSS reader for this, but Google Reader is familiar enough. Since we want to move from keeping up with blogs to catching up (with the exception of WorkAwesome, of course), the first step is to dump all of your RSS feeds. There’s no need to freak out about permanently losing the dozens of feeds you’ve curated for yourself over time. Just export them as an OMPL file that you can re-import if necessary. Go to Settings | Reader Settings | Import and Export, click on “Export your subscriptions as an OMPL file”, and save to your desired location.

You’ll notice above that I mentioned setting up your “blog” rather than “blogs”. There’s nothing to stop you from performing the following operation on multiple blogs at once, but I highly recommend reading one blog at a time from beginning to end, removing that blog from the reader, then moving on to the next one rather than scrambling your brains with a bunch of disparate content.

Add the first blog to your GReader as you would any other blog: either by clicking on the site’s RSS chicklet or by hitting the a key for “Add a subscription” and adding the feed’s URL. The reader will populate with all of the feed’s new items. If you’re not already in List View, switch to it now by hitting the 2 key. Now we want to delete the current feed’s contents by hitting Shift-a for “Mark all as read”.

Now click the “View all items” link in the view pane, which will show you a complete list of all the blog’s posts. You can move the focus up and down through the list using the n key for Next and the p key for Previous. You can open the current header in focus with the o key, and close it by hitting the o key again. If you happen to be stuck with partial feeds that require you to click through to the site, you can use the v key without the need to open the header with the o key first; this will open the post in a new tab or window, depending on your browser settings. For more efficient reading, check to see whether the site offers a full feed. To skip the a post, mark it as read with the m key.

What’s nice about processing the full feed in list view is that you can glance at the headers without getting lured into the post contents unless you deliberately open them. Now you can run through an entire blog from beginning to end (or end to beginning, as is the default) by highlighting the next header with the n key, opening and closing the article with the o key, or marking it read with the m key. When you’ve completed the entire feed, refresh the view with the r key. The feed with now either be empty or have any posts that have arrived since you began reader. Process these the way to do with the initial batch, refresh, and repeat until you’re at inbox zero.

Then remove the feed from your reader. You’ve caught up, you don’t need to keep up. Rinse and repeat with your other feeds. This doesn’t have to be done in one sitting. It takes as long as it takes. I’ve found that the easiest way to complete all of feeds is to abandon as many as possible. I noticed that many of the blogs I was reading were simply regurgitating information from a much smaller set of authority blogs, so there wasn’t much point to rereading the same content with a slightly different spin.

Don’t Keep the Feeds

But what if you want to keep up with new posts? I recommend two approaches. Either go to the blogs manually occasionally (not daily) and quickly scan for new updates, or add them back into GReader long enough to process any new posts, then dump the feed again. The principle is to prevent automating the delivery of new content, so that you can maintain more conscious control of what you consume. You’ll find that it’s psychologically healthier to expose yourself to new content on an as-needed basis than to keep yourself running on the information treadmill.

Editor’s Note: Oops! I published these posts out of sequence, and you can expect the precursor to this piece, titled Don’t Increase Your Willpower — Reduce Your Options, shortly.

Move Your Files into Your Main Directory

OK, I’ll be honest. We’re doing most of the work in the Windows command prompt, not Excel per se; but a post title like “How to Do X in DOS” doesn’t have the same sex appeal. Ultimately, though, your CSVs are going to be opened and edited in Excel.

For most people, their main directory is their C: drive, as opposed to My Documents or another folder further down your PC’s hierarchy. You can actually perform the following operation on any folder, but since we’re going to change directories in the command prompt, you’ll have less typing to do if you paste them directly into C: using Windows Explorer. If you want to use another drive, like E: or F: or whatever you’ve mounted for an external drive, that’s fine too.

Open the Command Prompt and Change Directories

From the Start menu, type cmd into the search box and hit Enter. From the command prompt (where the cursor is blinking), type cd c:\:, with a space between “cd” and “c:\”, and hit Enter. The prompt will change from whatever its previous directory was to — you guessed it — C:\. Naturally, if you put your files in another drive, substitute the appropriate drive letter.

Copy Your CSVs into a Single File

This is where the magic happens. Type copy c:\*.csv c:\filename.csv, with a space between “copy:\*.csv” and “c:\filename.csv” (substituting filename with your new file name) and hit Enter. This takes all of the CSV files in the drive and merges them, so you’ll want to make sure that if you do this more than once, don’t leave older CSV files in that directory if you don’t want them to be merged.

Dedupe Repeat Headers

Fire up Excel and open up the  file (you might have to select All Files instead of All Excel Files). Assuming you generated the original files from the same source, it’s likely that each of those worksheets had the same headers, which will repeat themselves in your new aggregate file. If the source files have slightly different headers, like “Sales for January” and “Sales for February”, you may or may not want to remove the additional headers. If you do decide to remove near-identical headers, you’ll have to do a Find-and-Replace for the unique substring (e.g. “January”) to make the them completely identical.

Note that we are going to remove all duplicate rows, not just the headers. For most people, duplicate rows are redundant information. If that’s not the case for you, you’ll have to remove the header rows by hand.

To remove duplicate rows, hit Ctrl-A to Select All, then in the Data tab (Excel 2007 and 2010), select Remove Duplicates in the Data Tools group, uncheck “My data has headers” (your top header will remain intact), click OK, and voila — a single header for all of your rows.

That’s basically it. Give you new file a good scan to make sure your data is formatted correctly, and if everything checks out, go ahead and remove the source CSV files from your C:\ drive.

A Goal is Not a Project

When people talk about goals, they’re usually talking about aspired outcomes that aren’t under their immediate influence. Having a specific income target is an example of a goal. The way to manifest that goal is with projects, moving from the broad to the particular. “Launch Blue Widget Central” is what you’ve decided to be the vehicle, or project, that will achieve your income goal. Until you’ve got a project, your goal isn’t actionable; it’s just an aspiration.

The broad project, in almost every case, can’t move forward without it least one more project at a lower level of detail, such as “Create BlueWidgetCentral.com” — the actual website as opposed to the business. At that point you’re no longer concerned with your income goal. You’re focused on the project that will generate that income.

Of course, you still need to drill down further levels of detail. “Create BlueWidgetCentral.com” is specific enough if you intend to design and code it yourself; otherwise you’ll need a more granular project like, “Hire designer for BlueWidgetCentral.com”. If you choose the former option, you’ll need to determine the next physical action step to take, which might be, “Review Wordpress themes designed for e-commerce”. If you choose the latter option, the next action might be, “Submit RFP to Rentacoder for designer”.

Once you have your projects clearly identified, and each one has at least one specific task that you can physically perform, your mind no longer wanders in a cloud of “all the stuff” you need to do. You’re now looking at a very finite set of action steps that can simply be done without spending additional time clarifying what needs to be done whenever you need to take action. You don’t even have to think about goals and projects until you’ve actually done the action steps.

Thinking Hard

Being able to think operationally from a goal down to a specific next action isn’t a natural skill. Neither are using multiplication tables or long division. Creating and working within institutions is inherently artificial — you’re building something, so there’s a limit to how far the seat-of-the-pants approach can take you.

The cliche “Work smarter, not harder” should be replaced with “Think harder, work smarter”. Having high standards of performance means nothing without the ability to clarify the specific work that needs to be done, and the work that doesn’t, which underscores the difference between being productive and being busy. Many of us are willing to work hard, which is an important faculty. Far fewer of us are willing to think hard — that is, to reverse engineer the projects and action steps necessary to get started. Most people freeze on taking action due to lack of clarity, not lack of initiative.

Identifying the Black Boxes

When people fail to take action due to lack of clarity, they often have much of the work the need to do figured out, but have left of at least one level of detail. If someone’s goal is to “Lose 10 pounds,” and the next action is to “Install calorie tracker on phone,” the actual project is missing from the equation, e.g. “Begin diet”. What identifying the project does is provide a reference point for next actions. Once you’ve installed the calorie tracker, you’re not necessarily any closer to losing weight, but “Begin diet” allows to you ask yourself, after you’ve checked off the initial task, if there’s anything else that need to be done in order to check “Being diet” off of your project list, such as, “Get calorie counts for my routine meals”.

The guiding principle is that if you have a goal without a project to move it forward, or a project without a task to move it forward, or a task without the project it moves forward, there’s a gap in the thinking process that can result in continual distraction. Instead of filling in these gaps on the front end, then spending the rest of your time just doing, you may find yourself preoccupied, worrying indefinitely about what to do next or why you need to do it. Do the hard thinking through of your projects and actions on the front end, and you’ll find that executing them flows with far less resistance.

It really doesn’t matter. No, really, it doesn’t. I’ve spent most of my organized years using an electronic setup with a smartphone synced with a desktop PIM — initially the Palm Desktop. Then I briefly defected to a paper organizer, which I swore by for a few weeks until the novelty and its placebo effect wore off, then I returned to an electronic system. Due to the reduced administrative overhead of my current work situation (less email, less customer interaction), I’ve recent been flirting with the idea of just dumping everything on a legal pad, keeping all of my lists on a single sheet.

The difference is that this time around, I’m not emotionally invested in the change because it’s only a matter of determining which system yields the greater drag reduction in my workflow. It’s not the medium that doesn’t the heavy lifting. Task management is a mental game. The system that works best is the one you review most frequently.

So pick a tool, whether it’s Outlook, a paper tablet, an Apple tablet or a DayRunner, and get everything into the system. If you find flipping through pages to find the right task entry is inefficient after a few weeks, jump ship into an electronic system. If not having your task list persistently visible makes it easy to “forget” what you have to do, hello paper. Don’t use the “wrong” tool as an excuse not to get your full inventory of work out of your head an into a place where you can just look at what to do next instead of having to continually rethink it.

Any System Is Better than No System

Whether you use paper or plastic (computers or electronics), you something other than your head to store your tasks. Using a tool doesn’t make you a tool. List and calendar management isn’t as fashionable as it was a few years ago. These days it’s sexier to complain about mounting email and tasks and simply declare “bankruptcy”. But it’s an illusion that trimming down your to do list, in itself, enables you to get more done.

In reality, you can never “do” your list; you can only ever do one thing at a time. Any one thing you do involves choosing dozens of things not to do, and there’s no difference between not doing 10 tasks and not doing 100. So if you have any intention of doing them at all, put them on a list — even if it’s a “Deferred” or “Someday/Maybe” list that gives you permission to review it later without committing to acting on it now.

Some people argue that maintaining an external system is conductive for certain personality types and detrimental for others. So-called “creatives” are usually cited as unsystematic workers. I’d argue that on closer inspection, the difference is in the type of work that needs to be done, not the type of person doing it. Just as a hot dog vendor can calculate change in his head while an engineer needs an electronic calculator get work done, some jobs don’t have enough detail to require calendars or to do lists. If you get more than a screenful of email each day and go to meetings, you’re probably in the latter group.

How your work is structured can determine to a large extent whether you’ll be more efficient with paper or digital systems. In a previous job where I had to process a ton or orders that came in by phone and email, it was much simpler to drag and drop email orders into an Action folder and handle phone orders by copying and pasting information from an inventory lookup to an action list. One of my favorite features or digital systems is the ability to copy and paste notes to appointments and task entries as attachments.

Some jobs require more face-to-face interaction, or longer spans of creative focus (writing, graphic design, programming), and there’s less to be gained by copying and pasting information back and forth. Instead of a long list of tasks, you have a short list of long tasks. If you’re a full-time singer-songwriting, for instance, you don’t need a list to tell you to “Write next song” or “Rehearse”. The work is self-evident.

Most office workers, on the other hand, have more to do than can be responsibly managed without external reminders. Using a list instead of your memory is like storing books on a shelf instead of in your arms. Once you’ve set the burden outside of yourself, you’ll free up mental energy that can be applied toward doing your work instead of remembering it.

So pick a medium and get started, but always treat it as an experiment instead of a permanent commitment. You can always move the contents of your paper organizer to an electronic one, or vice versa.

How Spaced Repetition Works

The spaced repetition system (SRS) is a advanced form of rote memorization that uses electronic flash cards in an algorithmically determined sequence. With traditional flash cards, you work through a deck, one card at a time, until you reach the end. More astute learners will sort through the cards at the beginning of each session to eliminate the items they already know well, so they can focus their studying on the material that needs it most. A spaced repetition program automates this elimination process, but that’s only one advantage.

One of the most important findings in memory research is that forgetting happens exponentially, following a predictable curve that varies from item to item. An item that you remember well has a flatter forgetting curve than an item you remember tenuously.

Suppose you tested yourself on two facts you learned five minutes ago. You recall the first fact without any effort, and give yourself an “A”. You recall the second fact, but only after putting in some effort, so you give yourself a “C”. The forgetting curve would predict that you would completely forget the “C” fact days before you would completely forget the “A” fact.

That seems like common sense, but it points to a huge improvement opportunity in traditional flash card drills. Repetition spacing schedules an item for review right before the forgetting curve predicts you would have less-than-perfect recall, and deliberately avoids scheduling a review in the interim. This not only minimizes the number of items you need to review, but also minimizes the number of reviews for each item.

SRS programs ask you to score your recall of each card on an A-F or 1-5 scale. Items you recall with no effort get the top score, items you miss completely get the bottom score, and the scores in between correspond to ease or difficulty. The higher you score each item, the less frequently it appears in your daily flash card sessions. The review schedule varies for each item, based on the recall score assigned to it. You only spend time reinforcing the items that actually need reinforcement.

If I were learning Spanish vocabulary, and “inteligente” for “intelligent” came up, and I graded my recall for it “A” on first two or three exposures, it might literally be years before the system queued it for review again. An item with consistently high scores has a flat forgetting curve, and needs virtually no reinforcement. It’s already part of my long term memory. A word I’m less familiar with, like “aburrido” for “boring,” would receive a “B” or “C”, and I might be tested on it again in the next day or two.

Actually using a spaced repetition program instead of conventional flash cards can be strange at first. You have items to review every day, but only a fraction of the topic database. When you complete a session, you might think to yourself, “Is that it?” You don’t get to decide which items you’re going to review in a session. The algorithm determines the schedule.

Here’s the cool part. Because you only review a fraction of the database each day, you can add more items if you feel insufficiently challenged. Instead of accelerating how fast you learn individual items, spaced repetition accelerates the number of items you can learn at once. You can organize your material into topic specific databases if you want to isolate the content of each study session, or you can throw all items into a single database.

I have a catch-all database full of information I find in articles I read. If I read an article on using Google’s search operators, I might create a new card for each operator (Question: “What is the operator finds a term in a domain name?”; Answer: “indomain:”) and add it to the database. Some articles only have one or two items worth remembering. others have more. Any articles with no facts worth remembering probably aren’t worth reading in the first place.

Using Spaced Repetition Software

Most software for repetition spacing works in a similar fashion, despite differences in layout and terminology. You create a database for each topic, like “Spanish Vocabulary,” create optional categories for each database, like “Adjectives,” then create Question/Answer pairs for each item you want to learn. Q/A pairs can use yes/no questions, open-ended questions or fill-in-the-blank statements.

After you create your items, you need to “commit” them. Some programs have a “drill” mode that will test you on each item and repeat the items you answer incorrectly until all of them are answered correctly. Drills don’t offer grading on how well you’ve learned each item; they’re only designed to ensure initial exposure to all items. Then you commit them to the algorithm. The first time you use “test” mode, you’ll be tested on and grade all items. The next day you’ll only see some of the items, the next day you’ll see other items, and so on.

In most cases you’ll create Q/A pairs directly in the program, but most programs have other methods of creating these items: flat text files with line items beginning with “Q:” and “A:”; spreadsheet files with the questions in the first column and the answers in the second column; clipboard utilities that let you copy and paste questions and/or answers from web pages. Many developers of these apps will have free libraries of preexisting databases on their website: periodic tables, foreign vocabulary, MS Office shortcuts, and dozens of other topics.

The first SRS software I used was SuperMemo for Palm PDAs, which was limited to text files. Most current apps, on the desktop at least, allow you to import image and sound files. If you’re learning to recognize anatomy or spoken vocabulary, support for these files is essential.

The desktop version of SuperMemo is the most famous SRS app available, but many of its once-unique features, like support for richer media files, have been duplicated by commercial equivalents, like FullRecall, and free/open source ones like Anki and Mnemosyne. I actually prefer the simplicity of Mnemosyne and use it regularly, even though I paid for SuperMemo, which has rather dated and cluttered interface.

Incremental Reading

The one feature SuperMemo does have, which I have yet to use enthusiastically, is support for incremental reading, a superset of the spaced repetition concept. In incremental reading, you import an entire article into the program and read it through once. Then you grey out sections of text that you don’t need to learn and commit the remaining sections for reviewing individually, according to SRS scheduling.

As with traditional SRS, incremental reading doesn’t allow you to read material faster, but it does allow you study and memorize more material at once. Obviously, you would only want to do this with material you were going to study anyway, not casual reading. Personally, I’d rather take notes, distill them into Q/A pairs, and use the flash card method of SRS than repeat larger blocks of text.

Have you tried any SRS software? What has your experience been like?