Odds & Ends

I am pleased to be a part of the new 4-Hour Workweek Feedburner Network: A network of blogs devoted to the idea of living more while working less (but more effectively!). The discussions on this network are all about defining your dreams, liberating yourself from the 9-5 grind, eliminating low value work and automating the rest. If your blog is following these kinds of ideas and you would like to join the network, please leave a comment below.

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1. Important and Urgent activities reside in the Quadrant of Stress.
2. Activities that are important but not urgent reside in the Quadrant of Value.
3. Activities that are not important yet urgent reside in the Quadrant of Deception.
4. Activities that are not important and not urgent reside in the Quadrant of Regret.

I immediately started thinking that the quadrants in the Life Management Matrix needed catchy names as well! So here goes:

1. Essential and Unforgettable (EU): Items that have to get done and will make an impact on your life reside in the Quadrant of Transformation.
2. Essential but Forgettable (EF): Items that need to get done, but will not really have an impact on your life reside in the Quadrant of Automation.
3. Unessential but Unforgettable (UU): Items that don’t need to get done, but which may provide a great deal of fun or lasting memories reside in the Quadrant of Fun.
4. Unessential and Forgettable (UF): Items for which no one is depending on you, and that do not impact your health or happiness reside in the Quadrant of Elimination.

Of course, a picture (or chart!) says a thousand words:

I am not married to these particular names yet, so any opinions on these would be appreciated!

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I’ll let you watch it for yourself. And when you are done, ask yourself, isn’t achieving your childhood dreams not the very definition of fulfillment?

Remember brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to achieve their childhood dreams. Don’t bail. The best of the gold’s at the bottom of barrels of crap.

Source: Randy Pausch Last Lecture

While that lecture has become quite popular on the Internet, and in and of itself extremely relevant to the spirit of The 4-Hour Workweek, Pausch also gave another lecture that is worth mentioning here, especially considering the time management kick I have been on lately. The lecture is actually on the topic of effective time management. It was originally given back in 1998, but Pausch was asked to give it again (post cancer diagnosis) late last year. A lecture on time management from someone with probably not that much longer to live has a certain credibility:

Besides nailing the concepts of “time is money”, the Pareto principle, and planning & prioritizing, what I really like about this lecture are some of the absolutely practical tips (I’ll mention a few here, but you can really just watch the lecture for yourself!) he provides:

• Develop strategies to minimize the time spent on Telephone calls: consider using a speaker phone and/or a head set. Have, or insist on, an agenda for phone calls. Stand while you are on the phone. Batch phone calls to just before lunch or at the end of day - that way people you are talking with have a motivation to get off the phone.
• Email: batch the processing of email to a limited number of times each day. Process your inbox to zero. File, but never delete email.
• Journal you Time: It is hard to impossible to manage your time if you do not track where it is spent. At a minimum, track how much time you spend watching television. Consider getting rid of your television.
• When you delegate, be specific and empower that person to complete the job without further intervention from yourself.
• If you find yourself procrastinating, ask yourself why you are putting it off. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask someone else for help.
• When you have small children, exchange money for time at every opportunity.

As Pausch points out, unlike money, we can never get our time back.

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Premise of Time Management

So let’s start questioning some rules of thumb or so called best practices in the more mundane sphere of things. I think the use of a good time management system would be considered by most as a worthwhile practice. Several schools of thought, books, and systems have been developed to address the issue of time management. Some, such as Habit 3: Put First Things First of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Getting Things Done (GTD), are extremely popular. Getting Things Done in particular has recently developed an almost cult like following. Today I found myself very much inspired by an article at SaneLiving.org about common sense time management. Questioning the value of GTD leads to some interesting conclusions.

Specifically, what I liked about this article was an implied classification of the supposed things we need “to get done”, each of which can be organized into one of the following four categories:

1. Essential and Unforgettable (EU): Items that have to get done and will make an impact on your life. An example of this sort of thing might be a meeting with a new business partner or investor that has the potential to transform your life’s work. These sorts of things are of the highest personal importance and really deserve mind space.
2. Essential but Forgettable (EF): Items that need to get done, but will not really have an impact on your life. Changing the oil in your car probably falls into this category. These items ideally should not, but often do, consume mind space. All you really need for these is a reminder to do them at an appropriate time and place - nothing more, nothing less.
3. Unessential but Unforgettable (UU): Items that don’t need to get done, but which may provide a great deal of fun or lasting memories. These could be a family trip to a decidedly local destination, going out on a date, or playing a sport.
4. Unessential and Forgettable (UF): Items for which no one is depending on you, and that do not impact your health or happiness. This sort of thing could be steam cleaning your carpets or dusting your bookshelves.

When you think about it, only the first two really warrant any attention from a “I need to get this done” perspective. However, it is also worth pointing out that the third category of “unessential but unforgettable” is often the stuff of happiness and deserves special attention - just not necessarily on a to-do list. 

Four Quadrants of Life Management

The idea behind capture in GTD was developed so that items that needed to get done are logged externally so that they do not have to take up mind space. The problem is two-fold:

1. Often, implementing GTD results in everything, from all four of the categories mentioned above, being captured.
2. What do we do when we have freed up all this mind space we were “wasting” on mentally keeping track of our to-do’s? After all, we have to think about something!

Let’s visualize the four categories of things we supposedly need to “get done” as described above:

Why do we categorize our activities this way? Because we can relieve ourselves of the responsibility of capturing and managing anything unessential! That effectively cuts the time management effort in half. That is also why I have called it the four quadrants of life management as opposed to time management - only the “essential” quadrants truly need to be captured and time managed. You don’t need to capture and manage everything. I like to call this the basis for Getting Essential Things Done (GETD), a sort of GTD “lite” if you will. It also suggests that we spend the freed up mind space on the essential.

The astute will notice that this looks a lot like the Time Management Matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but it is different in one key aspect: urgency is not one of the coordinates. Only the essential could potentially be an urgent matter in the Seven Habits sense, and that is why you are capturing and managing them. The urgency is more a matter of where they end up on your calendar!

Eliminate & Automate

The above classification system is also crucial to followers of The 4-Hour Workweek. Specifically, you can start looking at things this way:

• Anything unessential and forgettable presents a pretty good opportunity for elimination. If no one is counting on you for it, and it doesn’t mean anything to you, why are you doing it in the first place?
• Anything essential but forgettable should be automated as much as possible. These are the things, for example, that we want to outsource, delegate, or deal with using the least amount of time and effort, usually via a reminder to act immediately at the right time and place.
• Anything unforgettable deserves some attention and mind space. But unless it is essential, we don’t have to capture it in our time management system (maybe you want to - hey it’s a free country, and that’s certainly ok! - all I’m suggesting is you don’t have to time manage these).

Hopefully, this frees up a lot of time to have fun and basically do a lot more of the unessential yet unforgettable. As I proposed: we probably shouldn’t bother spending a lot of time planning these sorts of things - it is almost the definition of spontaneity!

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• Scheduling and setting reminders for my appointments.
• Sharing my calendar with others.
• Keeping track of all the things I do when I feel the need to “audit” how I am spending my time.

There are all kinds of useful features available with Google Calendar, such as integration with Gmail, Managing invitations and reminders, supporting multiple calendars (e.g. one calendar for work, another for home), sharing calendars, etc. These benefits have been described elsewhere. Instead I wanted to discuss how I have synchronized my Google Calendar with my desktop calendar.

For my desktop calendar I use Lightning, which is a Thunderbird add-on. The Lightning extension basically integrates Sunbird, Mozilla’s calendar application, into Thunderbird which is my desktop email client. To synch my Google calendars with Lightning, I use another Thunderbird add-on: Provider. The Provider extension allows Thunderbird/Lightning to read and write events in your Google calendars. A great tutorial on how to set this up can be found here. GCALDaemon can also be used to synch desktop calendars with your Google calendars. Besides Thunderbird/Sunbird, it also supports synching with other email clients such as Evolution and Apple’s iCal. I just find the Provider add-on easier to install and use.

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