Too busy organizing to be productive
Below is a feature I wrote for The Globe And Mail (link) about the exploding productivity industry.
Too busy organizing to be productive
The quest to find better ways to manage work and life may slow people down in a flood of paperwork, e-mails, blogs and books
CRAIG SILVERMAN
The Globe and Mail
September 24, 2007
Colin McKay begins most meetings by taking out two of his essential productivity tools: first, his BlackBerry; second, a Moleskine notebook he has divided into sections using coloured tabs.
To anyone in the know, that heavily tagged notebook is a dead giveaway: Mr. McKay is GTD.
"That's the calling card," says Mr. McKay, 38, director of communications for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in Ottawa.
GTD stands for Getting Things Done, a personal productivity system created by David Allen, whose bestselling book of the same name was first published in 2001.
Today, Mr. Allen's company employs 32 people and expects to earn $6-million (U.S.) in revenue this year from book sales, public seminars, corporate training sessions and a variety of GTD organizational accessories, including wallets.
At a time when stressed, overwhelmed and unproductive workers are grasping for better ways to manage their work and lives, a whole industry of productivity systems, websites, blogs, newsletters, books and experts has sprung up, focusing on major issues in time and workload management right down to ridiculously minute and basic activities.
"GTD helps me create checklists for myself," Mr. McKay says of the method, which uses tools such as e-mail and paper file folders, index cards and notebooks to organize commitments and workflow. "It has given me that little bit of a sense of order."
But as the productivity-obsessed swap tips online and around the office about filing systems, checklists and time management, advice often moves from the practical to the arcane. And the glut of suggestions and systems can actually cause people to become less productive while trying to master a constant barrage of new methods.
"Some people are system junkies," says Janet Barclay, who runs Organized Assistant, a productivity and organization consultancy in Hamilton.
"They try something and say, 'This is the greatest!' Then next year they spend all their time learning a new system."
On Lifehacker.com, a popular productivity site, a tip about managing e-mail or running a more effective meeting can be followed by a link to "15 awesome uses for aluminum foil." (Hint: You can sharpen scissors with it.)
Gina Trapani, the site's editor, says she's surprised by some of the tricks and tips sent in by productivity-obsessed readers.
"We've run some tips about incredibly mundane everyday activities that people put a lot of thought into speeding up or making easier," she wrote in an e-mail. (Ms. Trapani preferred an e-mail interview because, she wrote, "the telephone can be an inefficient way to communicate.")
One writer for the Productivity501 website is on a mission to achieve the elusive goal of a paperless office.
At 43 Folders, another well-known productivity site, the editor declared a "War on Clutter" around U.S. Independence Day this year after reading It's All Too Much, an anti-clutter book.
Mr. McKay says he follows the productivity websites but "draws the line where people describe in detail how they made a pen holder for their Moleskine and then get into a debate about which pen they use."
Mr. McKay confessed his own moment of system overload on his blog, CanuckFlack.com, when he wrote about "staring at a desk covered in GTD flowcharts, Covey checklists, coloured folders, varying sizes of Moleskine notebooks, and the latest DIYPlanner."
While some find it hard to stick to one system, others profess an almost cult-like devotion to their chosen approach. A dedicated GTD practitioner recently created a series of GTD fan buttons for sale online. One features a picture of Mr. Allen inside a pink heart with the words, "gtd 4-ever."
"David Allen said it, I believe it, that's the end of it," reads the product description. "This is a set of three buttons that celebrate the bliss of being organized."
And it's not just adults getting carried away with the productivity craze. In January, Geoff Ruddock, a 15-year-old student in Grade 10 at St. Andrew's College in Aurora, Ont., teamed up with some friends to launch Gearfire.net, a productivity blog for students. He can now talk the GTD talk with the best of them.
"I wanted to get on the headmaster's honour roll, so I looked for tools and ways to work smarter, not harder," he says.
"I see some people that really try hard but are always run down, and others who have a lot of initiative but don't have the time-management skills. I wanted to do well and wanted to make my time more efficient."
Is this something he picked up from his parents?
"Yeah, they get a lot done," he says.
19th Century UK newspapers to be digitized, searchable
Media links master Martin Stabe today pointed to an article in the Press Gazette that has newsophiles like me jumping for joy:
The British Library is putting the finishing touches to a website
that will give journalists and academics access to two million pages of
newspapers from the 19th century.
The library will launch its
newspaper digitisation project next month, which will give readers free
electronic versions of every national, regional and locally important
newspaper from 1800 to 1900...
While writing my book about media errors and accuracy, I plumbed the digital archives of papers like The New York Times and Chicago Tribune and often used the wonderful NewspaperArchive.com to locate old corrections and examine famous press errors of history.
Though there have been some excellent books written about the early British press, I longed for a digital archive that could make my research easier. My book will be hitting shelves in a matter of weeks, but I plan to make use of this new archive to find even more gems of history. Can't wait.
Teachings from a Monck
Adrian Monck, the head of the journalism and publishing program at City University in London, has recently been blogging some wonderful things. In particular, he's taken a couple of pieces of writing about topics that are seemingly unrelated to journalism and showed how they in fact do apply. Now I propose to take those same items and make them apply specifically to accuracy. It's a fun game.
Monck's most recent post quotes from the "conclusion to the report on the disaster which destroyed the space shuttle Challenger in 1986." There's one line in particular that I love:
NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks
support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens
can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.
Substitute in "the press" for "NASA" and it works just as well. In my upcoming book, I write about the need for the press to be frank and honest about its level of accuracy, and also more honest about correcting and publicizing its errors.
The other post of Monck's that caught my eye had him quoting from a report in The Washington Post about some recent scientific research. From the Post:
...the mind's bias does affect many people, especially
those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who
are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time
and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts...
The research also highlights the disturbing reality
that once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be
difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad
information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce
it.
This is interesting in terms of corrections. I support the idea that a correction should make clear what the initial error was, but is repeating the error a bad idea? I imagine this research doesn't exactly apply to a correction, but the point is interesting. Overall, this passage and the one below show just how hard it can be for the press to do its job of informing the public. Put aside the challenges of newsgathering and verification and there is still an inherent challenge in overcoming the biases hard wired into people's minds. Our brains play some funny tricks on us. More:
Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that
are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the
brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are
true.
Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one's
birthday or a pet's name, are indeed true. But someone trying to
manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain
functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes
the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone
who denies it later.
Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee
Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing
the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same
effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain
gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from
multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study was
published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Fascinating stuff. But here's the key conclusion:
...People are not good at keeping track of
which information came from credible sources and which came from less
trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from
the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person
recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated
assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information
more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true, said Schwarz.
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
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