From being depressed and burnt out to Being Who I Want To Be - Part 3

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

It’s not really true that being happy and balanced is sufficient for being productive in any way. While the states of happiness and balance are rather pleasant, they didn’t get me any closer to my real goals (making the world a better place, mostly). So, how did I fix that? One of the most important methods was to gamify my life!

Chore Wars
I started with testing the browsergame Chore Wars (my thanks for that link go to Peer Infinity ) which you need to customize to your needs. After finishing chores you can grant yourself a (random) reward in the form of experience points, gold, or items (which you have to define yourself). There are some “multiplayer” features, but I didn’t use them, because I didn’t know how to use them for my situation.

Because I wanted to increase my productivity, I granted myself points for blogging, learning, writing fiction, doing sports, and some minor useful activities. That worked surprisingly well and I quickly gained some levels – without cheating, of course. But after a while, I thought it would be a good idea to minimize the game system, so that I only wrote down my final score for each day.

Achievement Points
Inspired by the scoring system on Kongregate (if you stay on that site, you will experience the death of your productivity), I called the points I counted simply Achievement Points (APs for short). Soon, I decided only to get APs for really the important tasks of learning, blogging, and writing fiction.

For each quarter-hour of learning or blogging I would get 1 AP, and for each quarter-hour of writing fiction I would get 2 APs. Yeah, I had serious difficulties with doing the latter, so that scoring was surely justified. During the first week in which I used the system, I didn’t have to visit any university lectures, and collected 81 APs.

Since then, I used the AP system to measure my performance. Even though some modifications to that system make it difficult to compare today’s performance with my performance at the beginning, the numbers show a clear upwards trend. I’ve roughly tripled my productivity within just 5 months!

Getting Things Done

One day after I introduced the AP system, I started reading the exceedingly popular productivity book named Getting Things Done (abbreviated GTD) by David Allen. That book is s popular that it has virtually spawned an own productivity culture around the system it explains (see for example GTD Times).

Reading GTD had a huge impact on my life. Suddenly, I was much better organized, and got the feeling that I have full control over my life. Additionally, it also made it fun to be productive and efficient. It worked so well that I stopped wasting my time with unproductive activities almost completely! The best systems are those systems which are fun to use; and if you implement GTD the right way, it’s definitely fun!

So, how does the system described in the book work?
It all comes down to one important principle: Get all that stuff out of your head and into a trusted system, which you use to organize your workflow – or even your whole life! If there is one thought you need to take away from this book, then that’s it. Humans just aren’t good at keeping lots of important things in their working memory. Trying to do so uses up valuable mental resources quickly, which rather leads to chaos than to organization.

If you really want to get into the zone and experience smooth flow, then you need to clear your mind from distracting thoughts. That can be done by outsourcing them into an organization system. In other words: Leverage the Extended Mind theory, which states that your mind is not solely restricted to your brain, but actively uses parts of the environment to extend itself. Those objects might be sheets of papers, electronic documents, or simply items which remind you of certain actions you want to do.

Projects and Next Actions
To implement your “thought outsourcing”, GTD suggests to break down your work (and even your life) into distinct projects. The real key is to write down everything! Yeah, everything that is related to your job, or your life in general, needs to be collected by your organization system. For each project you need to have some file in which you store everything that is connected to your project. That makes it possible to clear your mind and concentrate on that what is really important this very moment.

But hey, what’s actually really important this moment? That’s one of the biggest problems that slows down workflow: Lacking clarity about what to do next. Here, the GTD system helps by training you to identify the next (physical) action required to move your project forward. For every project and every task within that project you identify and write down the next action you need to do. Once you have done that, you have gained clarity and can begin being productive immediately.

Electronic implementation
Mainly, GTD explains how to use physical objects for managing your projects and activities. I wanted to have something more up-to-date, so I decided to create my own interpretation of the system and used the cloud service Google Docs for managing my life. And this system still works very nicely for me. Basically, all important information is stored in my private online docs. A central “management document” lists all projects and links to further project management docs, if they exist.

These files are the places where I can outsource my thoughts and relevant information. It’s relatively convenient to manage my projects that way, as everything, even the tiniest note, has a place where it belongs to. Using that digital cloud service also has the advantage that it eliminates all the clutter that is caused by handling physical papers and files. Of course, handling dozens of different digital documents can be slightly confusing, sometimes, but it’s still much better than the alternative.

System of a Done
How do my documents help me to organize my workflow? The book mentions five separate steps:

1. Collecting stuff, ideas, and tasks.
2. Processing that stuff, which means, thinking about what it means and what to do about it.
3. Organizing everything in your trusted system.
4. Reviewing the organized information.
5. Doing the next actions which have been identified.

For collecting stuff I have an “Inbox” part in my main management document, into which I put all ideas, thoughts, and links I’m not sure about what I want to do with them. That’s pretty useful, because it helps clearing my mind quickly. Thinking about how to categorize an idea can take too much time and disturb the current workflow.

For processing your “stuff” there’s a nice flowchart in the book, which can be used to streamline the process of processing. I don’t want to describe that system here, but there’s a very useful rule for the processing part, which says that everything which needs less than 2 minutes to be done, should be done immediately. That way, small actions get done quickly, so that they don’t fill up your mind and your lists needlessly. Essentially it’s fun to follow the rule, because it allows for rapid action and numerous experiences of success within a short period of time. And only if it’s fun, it works really well.

Organizing is a bit tricky, if you want to get a clear overview over everything. For my projects I use a color code which describes the category to which a project or a task belongs (learning, blogging, writing, useful, fun, …). Additionally, I have different lists for different locations, like “university”, “at home”, “general” (everywhere), and “quests” (go to a specific location and do something there). GTD also describes how to organize e-mail properly, so that you can actually get an empty inbox after cleaning up, which I found quite useful.

On weekends I (try to) review my projects and think about what I want to do next week. It helps to combine this with the City of Lights subagent dialogue, which I described in part 2 of this series. When it comes to reviewing, I choose some of the projects in my lists I want to act upon, and do so. That’s a pretty good system for gaining an overview over available options, and deciding what to do with a significant part of my spare time. Especially when I come to the “fun” projects, this system pays off quite nicely.

Fun organizer
My GTD implementation with Google Docs was pretty good, but I only had my PC to get access to my files, so I thought a mobile computer would be a nice and fun add-on. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I want a laptop, a smart phone, or one of those fancy tablet computers. Finally, I settled for a smart phone, because it’s the most portable solution. Of course, I wanted to have a really good phone, so that I wouldn’t miss out any useful features of contemporary phones.

The phone I’ve chosen was the Samsung Galaxy S (Techradar review), which had nearly all features you could find in an Android smart phone at that time. Some of its highlights are the 800×480 pixel Super AMOLED display, and the front facing camera. And it makes videos in 720p resolution. To use a smart phone properly, a plan with a data flat-rate is highly recommended. I was amazed that there was a good plan that only cost 10€ per month!

After I got the phone and the plan, my productivity was replaced by an addiction to apps and games, at least partially. After a while, I have collected so many good apps that I decided to share my finds in a series of blog posts. That decision resulted in the myAndroid series. Part 1 compares some phones, and shows some really nice system apps. For raising productivity, part 2 reveals pretty good utility apps. For increasing fun (and possibly diminishing productivity), part 3 hints at some quite addictive games.

Mobile life management
At the time of writing this post I use some pretty useful apps and cloud services for being completely organized everywhere:

• Business Calendar is an app, which I use together with the Google Calendar, to organize time-critical activities.
• GTasks connects to Google Tasks. I use it to manage my tasks and next actions, complementary to the project management in Google Docs (which I access with Documents To Go).
• Evernote helps a lot for collecting all the spontaneous ideas I sometimes get.
• Dropbox can be used for storing and accessing generic files in the cloud.
• Executive Assistant is an app that provides an impressive overview over emails, tasks, messages, RSS feeds, tweets and Facebook posts.
• anTimeLog is a simple time logging app, but it’s not connected with any cloud service.
• TweetCaster connects to Twitter and is one of the best apps for that purpose.

So, I’m not using a pure Google Docs based system anymore, but utilize a couple of different applications for different purposes. The main reason for doing that is the increased speed with which I can access and use my system, as it takes some time to load Google Docs on my phone. Working with the calendar, task lists, and Evernote on my phone is sufficient in most occasions.

Zen To Done
It may be a bit difficult to implement the GTD system well, so if you want additional help, besides the original book, and my own implementation, you can check out Zen To Done by Leo Babauta. It’s an e-book that promises to deliver “The Ultimate Simple Productivity System“. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds really good, and Leo Babauta is a real productivity guru, so I will do so soon.

The road goes on and on…
Yeah, I have become happy, balanced, and organized. I also wasted significantly less time by using the GTD system. Still, there was the problem that I didn’t focus on the most important things to a sufficient degree. Also, my new smart phone has quite distracted me for a while, which lead to a temporary decrease in my weekly AP scores.

How did I fix those problems? The answer to that question bears the key to the most impressive increase of my productivity I’ve ever experienced! Part 4 of this series will explain the clever hack I used to overcome my gaming addiction. That hack turned out to be the solution for problems that bothered me for almost my whole life!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4