The effective executive

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. 
-- Peter F. Drucker

Focus

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape. -- proverb

Also known as First things first, the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, or focus. Concentrate your time and energy on the most important thing. Do one thing at a time, and do it right. This is the one recommendation that I have seen in practically every treatment of the matter.

One can not conentrate on many things, and one does not need to. A few important things usually dominate, in spite of a large number of unimportant ones. For example, 80% of the results stem from 20% of the effort. 80% of revenue come from 20% of customers. 80% of sick leave come from 20% of employees, and so on.

Spend your own time on what counts. Spend it on people hiring and development (more when building an organization). Spend it on operations, including improving productivity, reviewing performance against competition and the past. Spend a little on strategy and new initiatives. Spend some with customers to stay in the real world. Spend as little as possible on administrative overhead, although it will be hard avoid it entrirely. Spend at least a tenth in each area you are working on for learning, updating and and improving.

One corollary of this rule is that in many cases averages are useless or even harmful. Go after the fat rabbit.
Review your tasks from time to time, and cull of the ones that are not important any more. Ask youself, if I were not already doing this, would I start doing it now? Ideas are never limiting, resources are. When starting something new, also decide what old thing to stop to free resources. Don't postpone, decide -- later it will be even less right to do it, as things change. It's just a cowards way of saying you'll not do it.

Time is the one resource that is totally inflexible. That makes it the scarcest and most critical one. Record how you spend your time, to learn if you waste it on reacting to pressure like recurring crisis, meetings and busy work instead of sepending it on important tasks. Prune time wasters. Some things you can stop doing. Others you may be able to delegate.

Defragment your time so that you have at least chunks of an hour or two, in which you can get into flow and be productive. Starting on lots of things and breaking off after ten minutes achieves nothing.

Concentrate on opportunities, the future. Do not let pressure make you sacrifice the important things for problems and adminstrativa.

Use Strength

Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it. 
--Andrew Carnegie

Where you are strong, you can excel. Where you are weak, the best you can achieve is mediocrity. Imagine Tiger Woods working on theoretical physics, or Einstein focusing on Golf. You can not master everthing.

Apply your strengths. Identify people's strength and put it to use, never mind their weaknesses. Appraise for strength. Put your best people on new initiatives.

Identify areas of ignorance that stop you from being effective there. Remedy bad habits. Learn where you are such a failure, that you should leave it alone.

If you do not know what you are good at, find out. Ask others. Record decisions, and check back later on their outcome. Track your sucesses and failures.

[I have heard the exact opposite argument made: it is hard to improve where you already excel, and easy to improve in some problem that is holding you back. I think the synthesis is to remove weaknesses that hold you back, only if they hinder that in which you are strong.]

Help

Ability is of little account without opportunity. -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Think how you can contribute to the success of the enterprise. What does the enterprise need that you and only you can do well? What can you provide, and provide with distinction? If you are not able to make a contribution, because your strengths do not meet the needs of the company, then you are in the wrong place. Move on.

The advantage of a company is that people can focus on their strengths, and complement each other. So ordinary people together can produce excellence. Look at your contribution from the position of others. "Who needs my work?", "Why does he need it, why is it important for him?", "How does he use my work?". Ask people: "What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?"

"Warm feelings and pleasant words are meaningless, are indeed a false front for wretched attitudes, without achievement in what is after all, a work and task focused relationship." No matter how nice someone is, if he does not keep his commitments and does not do his work, you will develop resentments.

If everybody tries to contribute, you get communication and teamwork for free. Teams do not work because they try to "be a team". They work because people complement each others abilities, and try to work together to achieve a shared goal.

Decide

De minimis non curat praetor. (The magistrate does not consider trifles) -- Roman Proverb

The worst decision is no decision, if the matter is of importance. The best decision is no decision -- if the matter is insignificant, or it is unclear if a decision would improve anything. Act only if the benefits clearly outweigh the risks and costs. But if there is need to act, and you act, go all the way.

Good decisions must be based on reality. You may be able to lie to yourself, and you will then fail. So, good decisions need a culture of candidness, that makes it possible to face the truth. Effective decisions are based on disagreement between different points of view, rather than on consensus. Decisions would ideally be based on fact, but in practice must be based on opinion. People have opinions first, then go get facts that support them. Disagreement highlights the weak points in each position. Disagreement provides alternatives, so that if the decision turns out to be wrong, there is already a fallback position. Disagreement protects the decision maker from giving in to special pleaders. And finally disagreement stimulates to come up with a creative solution.

It is important to understand the nature of the decision. Always assume that a problem is generic at first, or only the first incidence of a string of such problems, and try to solve it by fixing the fundamental conditions, not the individual incident. When a crisis repeats this is a sign that something is fundamentally wrong. Fix the underlying structure.

Many decisions that count are going to be unpleasant and unpopular, they need courage. Do not put them off because of the unpleasant consequences. When cowards ask for "another study", ask if there is any reason to believe that it will produce anything new? And is there reason to believe that the new is likely to be relevant? If the answer is no, do not permit another study. Do not waste the time of good people to cover up your own indecisiveness.

A decision is not made, until it is decied who will carry it out, until when, and everybody who needs to knwo about it is informed. For any decision, you should personally track how it pans out. Note down your expectation. Build in some feedback mechanism or followup checkpoint to see if it has been carried out and works.

Meetings

The least productive people are usually the ones most in favour of holding meetings. 

-- Thomas Sowell

An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization where nobody gets anything done. Many meetings are always a symptom that responsibilities are not clear, or there is overstaffing, too many people for the task. Instead of getting work done, they get in each other's way or need to exchange information. Healthy levels should be below a quarter of the time.

To make meetings effective, decide what the meetings purpose is: making an announcement, making a decision, discussion and brainstorming, one person presenting something, several people reporting on status, inform an executive. Stick to that purpose, do not start a discussion off topic.

Preparation is essential for productive meetings. For decision making and discussion someone has to prepare. Announce the purpose at the beginning. Sum up at the end. Create minutes of the meeting, that list the decision made, who has to carry them out and by when, and distribute it.

You can either direct a meeting and listen for important things being said, summing up at the end, or you can take part and talk, but you can not do both at the same time.

Plan

It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark. --Howard Ruff

When things are slow and there is no urgency, then is the time to implement improvements.

Source, mostly: Peter Drucker, The Effective executive 

The Seven Habits of highly Effective People

This is the book mocked in dozens of Dilbert strips. But in fact, most of what its author, Stephen R. Covey says is better than the usual self-hyping success books have to say. I sum it up here.

Introduction and PC/P

Learn and work. The basic premise is that lying to yourself and trying some
recipice for personal and public success won't work out. The only way to have a meaningful life is to put work into it, and to try and be a decent person. There are no free shots and cheap victories. If you want something good and valuable, you have to earnestly work for it. Private victory precedes public victory. You need to conquer yourself to be able to conquer the world. At the center of effectiveness is the balance between production capability (PC, learning, improvements, maintenance) and production (P, output, productive work). Most people only look at P and miss the point that, if you do not invest into PC, P will deteriorate. If you only improve PC, it is useless theory. The art is to find the right balance, producing as much good stuff as you can, while not losing the capability to do so.

Habit Seven: Sharpen the saw

This habit talks about the PC/P balance mentioned in the introduction. I'm not sure why it comes last in the book, it seems to fit better in the beginning, since this investing time in personal improvement is the base to make all the other habits work. So I put it here. Basically it says that you yourself are all you have, and you should care for your health and wellness. You should invest at least one hour per day for your personal "maintenance". There are four basic areas to cover:

• Physical. Keep fit, do some sports, do not neglect your bodies' health, since without it nothing will work. Stretch, do not eat unhealthy food too often, do not take drugs or smoke, clean yourself.
• Mental. Learn something, read something intellectually stimulating, plan your day, do not kill your time with TV.
• Cultural. Do something for your soul, be it reading novels, going to the theatre, pray, listen to music, take a long walk in nature.
• Social. Remember the ones you love, write them, call them, talk to them think about them and how you could make them happy.

PRIVATE VICTORY

Habit One: Be proactive

Terminator II - Judgement Day: The future is not set. Face it: You make your life. You decide what happens with your life, you alone are responsible for yourself. Many people hide away from this responsibility, blaming "the circumstances" on what their life is like. They let others decide for them, act on them. Try to fulfill other's image of their life. They feel they have no control. But this is not true. You are the master of your destiny. Of course, there are things you cannot control. There is is an area of concern, things which are important for your life, and an area of influence, things you can influence through your actions. And some of the things concerning you are beyond your influence. But this is no reason to despair and lose initiative. Go and work on that which you can influence, and you can dramatically change the course of your life. You can learn to work hard, even if you are lazy, you just have to want it. You can learn to be considerate, even if you are an antisocial brat, you just have to want it.

Habit Two: Begin With the End in Mind

The one thing that can stop you to lead the life you want, even if you are no coward an accept it's your fault if you do not, is that you do not know which life you want. So think about what your goals in life are, what you'd like your life to have been like at the end. Write this down in a document. If you have no goals, you can not reach any. Decide what is important for you. You need a goal. You then can break down this big goal into smaller ones, and work every day to achieve them.

Habit Three: Put First Things First

Time limits what you can do. Most people are weak and give in to every whim, satisfying direct desires, even if it doesn't help with their goals for life. And if you give in and devote time for unimportant things, you will have lost it for the important ones. Time is limited and easily squandered. Do important things first, even when they are unpleasant. This self-conquering is what separates successful people from others. Also, you should not let yourself be controlled by outside forces. He categorizes activities in 4 quadrants.
Basically spend your time on the important ones. Then you get something done, and you will have no time for unimportant ones. But spend it on the unimportant ones (which is often way easier), and you will not have time for important ones and get nowhere. Preferably spend it on Quadrant II activities, and the horrible Quadrant I things will vanish with time. Invest your time in improving your production capability. Do not let unimportant outside forces get in the way - say no.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	[Quadrant I] Crises Deadlines	[Quadrant II] Relationship building Planning Preparation Improvements Learning
Not Important	[Quadrant III] Calls Interruptions Reports Meetings	[Quadrant IV] Time Wasters Junk mail & calls Pleasant activities

PUBLIC VICTORY

Habit Four: Think Win/Win

When dealing with other people, make deals which benefit both of you. Do not exploit others, or they will not come back again. Obviously, do not let yourself be exploited. Trust is established only over time when you realize you deal with someone responsible and fair. Since everybodies interests are a bit different, you can find a solution which benfits both. Many people think nice and tough is mutually exclusive. No. Win/Win is both nice and tough.

Habit Five: Try to understand, then to be understood

If you earnestly try to understand someone, he feels you are valueing him and his opinion. This makes it possible for him to open up, instead of being defensive. To understand someone else, you have to listen emphatically to him. Try to understand what he feels and what he thinks. You restate his feelings and ideas to him, to make sure you have understood. If you truely understand, you will be able to see his side, too. It doesn't mean you have to give up your values. You can still have a different opinion, but you at least consider other opinions, and sometimes both of you will reach a new insight which surpasses what you thought before.

Habit Six: Synergize

This habit can be summarized as: appreciate and accept people as they are - there are no others. Synergy is just a bad word for the positive effect that comes from this sober view of the world. But if you think that there are only two opinions, your opinion and the wrong one, you will not get very far with other people. You will always feel you are right and they are wrong, that they should change. Which of course they won't and you'll get angry and frustrated in no time about how bad and unfair the world is to you. Lighten up: the world isn't here for you. It was here before and will be here after you are gone. It owes you nothing. So if you want to live in it, show a little respect. You can only change yourself.

Learning

"10. Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference (!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary. " -Alan Perlis


Thinking about how you spend your time is worthwhile. As a legitimation for this document, this is the first rule. Just like Paracelsus said, though, "The dose makes the poison". Spend too much time just planning how to become efficient, and there will not be enough time left to really be efficient.

Stay open

To expand your knowledge and understanding, you need to do three things. If you do not even know of a solution, you cannot learn how to use it. Therefore, it is important to snoop around and widen your horizon. Stay informed. The most effective way to do this I know of is reading domain journals like c't. Journals have lots of staff, who do nothing else than look around for new products, methods and technologies, and filter the interesting ones for easy consumption. Of course formal training like visiting a university, can be very helpful here, too. There you are fed preselected information to give you an overview. Conferences are another good way to learn about new developments. As are twitter feeds of eminent people in the field. The limiting resource here as everywhere is time. Getting informed and snooping around can usually be done as a spare time activity, but will take more then half a day per week.

There may be some solution that is so far out that nobody else in the world before tried to apply it to your problem, like it was the case at some time with Markov models, or the application of genetics to programming in genetic algorithms. To be able to discover something like that, you have to think laterally and also have interests different from your problem field.

Learn from masters

Any first idea you get on how to solve something you do not know anything about, will be naive. There you go, programming a bubblesort, since you never heard of quicksort or heapsort. You can save lots of time, get better results and deepen your insights by looking on how some wizard did that stuff. It helps immensely if you have masterful works to inspire you and help direct you in your practice. One has to stand upon the shoulders of giants to achieve something in a field that is complicated and large. And contrary to Perlis' epigramm, you should sometimes try to change your behaviour patterns if there is a better way to do it.

Practice

Then you have to practice, practice, practice, to understand why he did things that way and not another way. All real understanding comes from practice. There's a German proverb: "Übung macht den Meister." (Practice makes perfect.)

You learn best by solving problems. You learn programming by programming and examining how good programmers program. Another excellent review on learning to learn is Peter Norvig's page. The bottom line is, that you are learning the best if what you do is fun and if you learn to solve a direct problem - problem oriented learning. When you are working on a project you'll experience problems. Since you want to solve the direct problem, you understand the problem, and you are highly motivated to learn and understand what to do to tackle it.

I read through general Unix books several times, and still I do not really have a good grasp on Unix. Because without really working much on Unix I never knew what of all this stuff was really of practical use for me in my day to day work, what to watch out for. Also without a direct application, the urge to really understand something complex was not big enough - I just skimmed over the difficult parts, never gaining real insight. The mind is not so easily fooled and protests to remember lots of probably irrelevant detail. I learned much more about Unix just by looking over the shoulder of my co-worker, the great INGMAR, for two hours. Because what he did and used was the stuff that you really needed.

Focus

You cannot learn everything. Just poring through books and more books doesn't give you real knowledge. There is much more knowledge printed than you ever could read, much less remember. I still sometimes fall into the book trap, losing touch with my actual work and thereby learning less, slower and wasting time. That's not to say books are bad, they help you get started on a subject, and help you look things up, when you need them. But you need something to help you focus. You cannot learn everything. You have to select the important stuff and concentrate on that. Having a goal helps you to select.

There is a saying from Goethe, the great German writer: "Ein Mann, der recht zu wirken denkt, muss auf das beste Werkzeug halten." ("A man that wants to be effective, has to use the best tools.") It is often worth to invest the time and learn using a good tool, since the tool will make you much more productive. How to find the best tools? Just look what the gurus are using. In hacker culture, these are to a large extent open source free software tools.

One of the problems is that the tools on Windows and Unix are so different. When I switched from NT, Java, Textpad/VisualCafe to Unix, Perl, Emacs to write a small script, it took me a whole day, since suddenly I had to use other key bindings, other language syntax etc. Again, focus on one set of tools, get used to it.

Play

Creativity and fun are important. Half of your brain is concerned with associative, wholistic thinking. Normally in school you are taught to use only the other, logical, analytic half. But memory doesn't work analytically, it works by connecting and associating things, thus giving them a relation to live in. Just think about how much easier it is to remember emotionally important stuff than technical facts. Just observe how much faster you learn by playing around and having fun with what you do. Actually, enjoying your work should always be the highest priority on your list.

First Things First

... second things never. You get work done fast by doing the work that has to be done. IT'S THAT SIMPLE. It is very easy to get distracted by all the marvellous toys that are out there, and many of which probably are even worth looking at, like compiler compilers, how compilers work, metadata, grammars etc. All of these, if mastered might make it possible to do your work in a much better way - but mastering them, or even grasping the concepts, takes time. Time you will not spend on your actual work, which won't progress. And without the feedback of work, what you look at cannot be truly understood. So it comes down to this simple phrase (which I saw in the film "My name is Joe", pinned to the kitchen cupboard of an alcoholic). Spend too much time on learning, and there will be no time to be productive. Spend too much time on production, and you will waste it because there would be a better way. (See PC/P balance.)

Here is an interesting story by a real programmer, jwz, about working. What I learned from checking his site is something I realised also from reading Feynman's "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman": these guys were or are great because of a) their huge minds and b) working on their stuff, instead of reading educated articles about how one should work, or reading biographies about other great men (or women) and how they did it. I can try that, too. Knowledge is personal, so is thinking. You have to find your own way. The only way to learn programming is programming. I also get the impression that jwz separates his work strictly from his other activities, like private hacks, writing etc. Good idea.

Get organized*

Structure your work processes and data. You can sort all of your working activities into three domains: productive work, learning, and administrative work. I think it is best to try to go into batch mode (to borrow that idea from Don Knuth) and do only one of those at the time. Of course this is often not easy, but improves productivity. Start with productive work until you get tired. Then it might be a good time to browse a bit, read up on news and when you are a bit refreshed, go on to learning (about the things you encountered during the working part). Don't do the administrative stuff early in the morning "to get it out of the way", do it in the evening, or it will eat up your whole day (downloading, communication, planning). The meta stuff (reflecting on what you do) can be in between but updating documents such as this should be done on the weekend.

Try to structure your data and work processes, so you do not have to spend time re-thinking stuff you thought about before. Organise your information, so you do not have to search for that address again etc.

When I was back in school I thought people that used index cards were idiots. I just wrote everything neatly down into my notebook, at the end of the year I'd have a nice book on linear algebra for example. If I wanted to look something up later, I just got the book and there it was. Right at my fingertips. Others wrote everything into one big binder, to "sort it out" later, and of course, most of the time nothing got sorted, everything was mixed up, and you couldn't find anything anymore.

Unfortunately I had to discover, that this plan only works while in school: there you get all the information pre-ordered. In real life, you work on a lot of things and piece stuff together all the time. The order of incoming information is not well structured, and so you are often forced to restructure your notes later. You always should try to reuse your notes, on the principle that if you don't, what were they good for in the first place. You will just write that same stuff down again? Because of that, it is much better to use ring binders, where you can resort the sheets or even better yet, computer files. Also, even if you have all the information reorganisable, you should create a central repository.

I tried several planning systems (a la filofax) and none of them worked for me. I'd start out with a burst of filled days, then nothing else follows. I thought that probably I'm just too undisciplined to use them, until I discovered Getting Things Done. I also learned that if it's bigger than my pocket, I won't take it everywhere and it will be useless. Now, in the age of smartphones, you can always have your calendar and contacts and notes with you.

When working with the computer, look out for repetitive tasks that eat up time. It might be worth to automate them with a small shell or perl script, if possible.

Example work distribution during my Ph.D.:

PRODUCTIVE	LEARNING	ADMINISTRATIVE
programming, debugging documenting and application design	staying up-to-date on news, products, technology discussions learning usage of tools, protocols, programming techniques	communicating with programmers, collegues, vendors ordering stuff, filling out forms meta-work, planning and reflection like this downloading stuff meetings

Learn from mistakes

Do not repeat useless actions. To learn the right things, you first have to understand what the problem is. You have to ask yourself the right question, have to limit the options. Maybe in the very beginning when you do not have enough information to see what is important at all, you have to just skim around, looking here and there, until some kind of map builds up in your mind. It will do this automatically, don't worry about it. Your brain will do this for you. Then, when you recognise the crucial points, you look there.

When I was small, I lived in a room under the roof. The window above my bed was set into the roof and thus was not vertical, but tilted at about 45°. To open it, you tilted it a bit more about a horizontal axis. It also had the glass pane set into a wooden frame, so that the frame worked like a small rim around the window. Now, under that roof we also had a wasp-nest, and every now and then, when the window was open a wasp would err into the room. Once inside it would see the big blue sky through the window, whereas the room was dark and shady. So in a futile attempt to get out again, the wasps bumped their head against the glass pane. Again and again, hours on end. In the end the wasps fell down into my bed, exhausted, and died there. Some of them checked all of the pane, until they reached the rim, but they couldn't see an exit there, either, so they went on along the rim or back inside the pane.

So all the wasps died, because they were too dumb to learn. They just repeated the same mistake over and over. It would have been so easy to escape and survive. All they had to do was understand that what they had done didn't work and back up a bit. Freedom was just a few inches away.

I have seen the same behaviour many times later on, but not with wasps, which can hold up to their defense that they are only small insects with even smaller brains, but with people, including myself. They try something, it doesn't work, they try it again. Then again. If something doesn't work, try doing it differently. Just repeating it over and over will get you nowhere. You have to change some parameters.

As an aside, there is the story of the two frogs in a bowl of milk, drowning, where one gives up and drowns, while the other struggles, trying again and again to jump out, until finally the milk changes to cream and he escapes. There also is an variation on this: "I'm so deep in sh*t, I can struggle all I want, it just won't turn to cream."

Also, if you want to eliminate a problem, first you have to find out what the problem really is in a complex system like a computer. If something won't work, there can be lots of reasons. Check out the different levels from low to high with elementary tests, to find out where things go wrong. This goes along with finding out what to learn.

*Meetings

Writing this nearly 20 years later in life, the challenges on my time have changed. Back then I was a single contributor, and had the freedom to of having most of my time to myself. I listed meetings and communications as a subitem of administrative. Now with a leadership role in a larger organisation, most of my time is eaten up by meetings, often meetings that I did not put on the agenda. 

In this situation, it becomes even more important to batch and compartmentalise time. As outlined in Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule by Paul Graham, it helps to block at least half-days for immersive work, thinking and learning, and to batch meetings. And I learned via Tim Ferris, "Your inbox is everybody else's agenda for your time." Control your own priorities and time, and do not let others dictate it to you.

Getting Things Done

Whatever stuff you allow into your life by adding it to your tasks and responsibilities will burden you. Even if you forget about it superficially, it will linger on in the back of your mind. Unfortunately, the way your brain works, you do not only remember tasks when you are able to do them. They come to your mind when you can do nothing about them -- under the shower, during grocery shopping, at lunch, on a vacation trip, when half asleep in bed. So you never feel relaxed and serene of mind. You know there is something, that you still have to do.

Getting organized is all about getting things off your mind, by feeling sure that they are tracked, and will be attended to as soon as it becomes possible. You can enjoy your free time, instead of feeling guilty. You can clear your mind.

Any system for organizing yourself needs to be simple enough that you can follow it with a few basic rules. Elaborate schemes just do not work in the daily rough of things. Getting Things Done (GTD) is such a simple system, and works OK for me. I wrote this without having the book around. There are three basic elements:

First, you must make a conscious decision what to let into your life, and what not. Learn to say no, and control which tasks you accept. The easiest way of keeping your word is by not giving it. If a task can be done within two minutes, just do it right way, and get it out of the way.

Second, you must have an inbox where you record all tasks that you accept, all stuff, as it comes in. It is of paramount importance that you really record everything there, because otherwise you can not trust that all will, be taken care of, and your ease of mind is lost. For things that do not fit directly (like an old fridge you want to get rid of), you put in a note as a place holder. What nature this inbox is is not so important. It can be a notebook, or a shoebox where you collect scrap notes and letters, or a PDA. You also need a system where you record and track open tasks, so you do not have to weigh your mind with them. Again, this can range from simple like a paper planner and pocket calendar or some file folders and a wall calendar to elaborate like a PDA. In the age of electronic communication, probably your email inbox and lists and the calendar in your smartphone work best.

Third, you must make regular review of your inbox and your tasks. Fail to do that, and your trust will be lost. When going through the inbox, for every item, come to an actual decision what needs to be done. Don't just go over it and think you will decide later. Clear it. It only needs a little conscious effort.

• Is it not necessary any more? Scrap it.
• Is it not actionable? Some things can not be acted on, like ideas that you might want to revisit, or reference material that may be of use at a later time. If it is not actionable, just file it away in an idea folder, or a reference libary.
• Can it be done within two minutes? Do it right away -- it would take more time to track it. Otherwise, if it is a task that can be resolved as one action, put it on a to do list. It may be useful to make those lists according to environments like office, home, out and about, internet, phone: that way, when you are in the office you can quickly check for tasks you can do there. Review all of the lists, when you review your inbox. It may be even easier with just one list.
• Some things are items where you have to wait for something, like the outcome of tasks you delegated, or an appointment at a given date. Dates are best put in a calendar. I find agenda lists for people I interact with useful, where I can put discussion issues, and follow-up checks. You also can have a wait-for list to review.
• Some things are larger projects that can not be done in a single session. For these, you can keep a list and separate notes, breaking them down into tasks. Make sure you also go over the project list and files regularily. Identify the next step, and deal with it as with other items, by doing it right way, delegating, making appointments, or putting it on your to do list.

I have not a single inbox, because a lot of things come by email, other in paper mail or personally, and I have no fancy system to merge those streams. So I deal with my inbox in email, as a to-do list in itself. I use a smartphone to manage the other lists, because it comes with a nicely integrated calendar. A paper planner has better haptics, especially if it's a nice leather one, but unfortunately once you get in all the contact adressess, calendar and lists, the small ones get too full, and the large ones are too bulky. Also, you can read ebooks on your smartphone.

References

Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Three Welch Ideas

1. Tell people the truth because they know the truth anyways. (About evaluating your employees. Does not mean you cannot do it in a friendly manner.)

2. If you are working 90 hours a week, make a list of the top 20 things that take your time. 10 of them can either be scrapped or delegated. (Works only if your have someone to delegate. Well at least you can scrap some.)

3. Bullet train. You can add ten mph by optimizing existing trains, but, if you want to double the speed, you need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a whole new idea.

Speed reading

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. -- Woody Allen

Unfortunately it seems that speed reading is just so much snake oil. In practical terms, speed reading is just skimming.

There are two limitations to how fast you can read: first, the physical limitation of how fast you can move your eyes and how much text you can recognise with each time you fixate your gaze. Second, the cognitive limitation of how fast you can understand ideas.

Your normal reading rate should be somewhere between 200 and 300 words per minute (wpm). Mine is about 230 wpm. At this speed comprehension and recall should be near 100%, although apparently most people fall short and do only get about 75%.

Speed reading proponents claim you can improve that rate up to 1000 wpm and more without significant loss of comprehension. What techniques do they propose to improve speed?

First, improve the physical limit by training to fixate on larger groups of words, and avoid jumping back to words already looked at. This will cut down the time your eyes need to move and focus, which is time spent not actually recognising and parsing words. Holding the text at a moderate distance helps to see more than holding it close up. Good light and concentration helps. You also can use a reading aid to help you guide your eyes - a thin pen seems to work better than a finger. I believe these techniques are reasonable, and may allow you to speed up to somewhat above 300 wpm. Even without training you can achieve this rate if you just work concentrated.

Second, you can use typical browsing techniques like first reading the table of contents, quickly leafing through or glancing over the pages to get a general idea about the structure and content, or skimming the text to pick out important ideas. This also works quite well and allows you to see the larger patterns of organisation which you might miss when mired in the details of reading word for word. But you pay for it by missing a lot of these details and possibly some of the important ideas.

I'm not sure how far this actually speeds you up if you want to parse everything. But in cases like a newspaper or scientific journal, where you do not want to read every article, this can significantly cut down the time you need, by allowing you to just read those parts which are of interest. Again, these techniques do not really require training.

Finally, there are techniques that speed reading vendors promise will enable you to read thousands of words a minute without loss of comprehension: You train reading at speeds faster than your comprehension to train your ability of absorbing ideas, just as running repeatedly would train your endurance or pushing weights would train your strength. You use a pointer to swipe over pages reading text in both directions and several lines at a time, until you're gobbling up whole paragraphs at a glance. You're supposed to train like this for several minutes every day. I read the eponymous "Speed Reading" book by Tony Buzan, which is all pseudo-scientific gibberish, anecdotal hearsay evidence and promotional hyperbole both for speed reading and his various other endeavours. Disgusting.

Logging

Review is a powerful tool in getting better -- what did work, what did not. For review, reflection or reconstruction how something came to be, it is useful to have a log, because your memory is error-prone.

If you work in a laboratory, your laboratory journal is one of the most essential tools, and if you work installing computers, logging the process and what worked can be very useful, too.

On the other hand, recording things takes time, and time is the most valuable thing you have. So, how should one go about this? Getting Things Done is one of the more useful frameworks I came across.

The way I do it today is as follows:

• I just have one single private diary.
• I use this blog for essays, learnings and thoughts that might be of interest or use to someone else, or that I want to refer back to as a reference, a notepad for little interesting tidbits of information that fit nowhere else. Since entries can be edited from anywhere and updated, this is much more flexible than my old homepage that was in a master copy on one specific machine (which is the reason I put in the time to move it all to a blog).
• In work, I use old-fashioned paper sheets to make dated meeting notes, because one can jot down things much faster (although they are harder to share later) in a life meeting, especially if it is face-to-face.
• I do not do extra time-logging any more, but I schedule meetings, or block time for tasks in Outlook calendar, which therefore is a kind of log. I color time that I feel I spent productively green, so I can see my ratio of wasted admin time vs performance time visually.
• I track product improvement ideas in one product backlog document (currently on Google docs but it does not really matter that much, as long as it is visible), and from those we make sprint documents. For larger developments, there is no logging. I am better when writing things in organizing my thoughts, so long-term developments solidify when I write up strategics plans.
• I use a paper sheet at work for the TODOs, both for the physical satisfaction of crossing them off, and also because it is just much more visible. And my email inbox works as a todo, as long as a mail is in there, it is not done. I have not found a good solution for logging TODOs. The list in iPhone sucks, just as do the notes, as it does not correctly sync with outlook, and the smartphone clearly is replacing all kinds of calendars, notebooks and other gadgets. But I think this should be virtualized -- maybe send myself todo mails?

I use evenings and weekends to reflect and go over the backlogs and tasks, and prioritize things for the next day or week. Just pick only two or three things that you really want to get done, and then work like hell to get them done in spite of all distractions, is the best I have come up with. Setting yourself strict time boxes for how long you work is the best way I found so far.

That's it.

In the past, I used to have too many logs. Based on recommendation from Peter Drucker, I ran a worklog, where I logged down my dayly working time slices, which really was unproductive, as I never gained much from analyzing it. I think most of the time when you waste your time on something unimportant or unproductive, you know that you are doing it. There is no need for logging to find out.

Some times in my life I had to fill an offical time-tracking tool. This is pretty much a waste of everyone's time, unless some project manager or billing really makes use of it. If they do not, people tend to fill it afterwards, pure excise.

During my PhD I noted down what I produced, learned and administered (meta-work) in a work diary. Things I learned about a certain topic, ended up on their own cheat sheet, what is now on this blog.