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Today I’m going to discuss , task list coherence, and internal coherence. Just as a drunk on a street can be babbling in a near foreign language, despite knowing enough english to ask for a dollar, task lists and thoughts too can be incoherent and in that state it’s about as effectual to achieving goals, as being drunk while driving. Coherence is also a type of light, lasers have coherent light, all the waves headed in the same direction, so that laser beam is still a spot even though being shown across a football field. A standard lightbulb on the other hand produces incoherent light that goes everywhere and bounces off everything. We are like that laser beam in that we can only do one thing well at a time, yet often instead of laser like focus on a particular problem we are diffuse and scattered trying to illuminate everything at once and not affecting anything. Tim Ferris has a great line “how would you do it, do it like your life depended on it”.

The real point of making lists

Lists, be it tasks goals or ideas, serve a few purposes, in the end the two most important is task coherence and internal coherence. Task coherence is the more common use, that the list and order of tasks is reflective of the work to be done, and ordered, prioritized and strategized so the velocity of achieving them is relatively smooth, be it putting on underwear before ones pants, or opting not to put on underwear if in a rush to get out the door . Internal coherence is that the same list of priorities and scheduling is held in ones head and accurately reflects the coherent task list, as ideally when out in the real world the subconscious is going to be looking for ways to make that list happen.

Take a grocery list for example: ice cream, bananas, tomatoes, milk, bread, pasta. A priority might be making sure the bread doesn’t get squashed, and ice cream doesn’t melt. Another priority might be making sure that we spend as little time in the store as possible so we can do other things, which leads to path optimization, so getting milk and ice cream when we are in the diary section and bananas and tomatoes in the fruit section, keeping it under 12 so we can get in the express checkout with one bag. This part of the path planning generally needs to happen before you get to the store, and if written down would be a well ordered coherent task list, with a decent memory or some memory tricks, you won’t need the shopping list at all. Contrast this with shopping with my Dad, having gotten a list from my stepmom, who assembled it out of 3 recipes for the eve, with quantities like “1/2 cup of flour”, or 2 eggs. and he generally goes sequentially through the list.. and it can take forever as we spend time criss crossing the store, converting into appropriate quantities, calling my stepmom for clarification (2% or skim?)

Task list/wikis that in particular exhaustive ones that cover ideas from first inception to final creation , or rapid idea storms become incoherent quickly. It’s entropy in action, and can be a full time job maintaining it (anybody who has worked with Microsoft Project is familar with this). However the real power is not in the list, or managing the list, but keeping the list in peoples head. Lists don’t do anything, they are just ideas, they need to be coupled with bodies that understand them to actually do useful work.

Keeping the list of ‘goals’ even if they are simple as shopping ingredients, is critical to smooth progression in goals. Just like in shopping, in searching for things on the list, sometimes you find things you need that never made it onto the list. Like that person in line who becomes your next business partner, after striking up a conversation on the kale salad you just bought. Or that half off Bailey’s for the upcoming holiday party.

Coherence via MindMapping with Pen and Paper

While task lists are useful, one of the best ways to build internal coherence is mind mapping/daisy chaining, this engages visual intelligence (which occupies much of our brain) on everyday problems and make connections in things that would be hidden when dealing with sequential outputs like voice recording and journalling. I’ve tried various mind mapping software, but I have always gone back to using free form paper. There is something about drawing that makes things solid. I usually do a second pass to Shadow Plan for things that need to be tracked that way.

Today I bought 2 paper black bound binders, some highlighters and 2 ballpoint pens, as I’ve filled one binder, used up my highlighters. At first, this completely goes against my ‘go digital’ paperless philosophy, especially since I do own a TabletPC which has several good drawing programs. However I’ve found that the size of surface allows me to connect more dots, a pen I have higher control to detail, and in the end this is more important. Highlighters are great at making some concepts that would be impossible to convey via shading or crosshatching. Keeping the binder to 9×11 and making sure I don’t put to fine of detail means it’s easy to take a digital picture and then rework it when/if that need arises. Frequently it doesn’t.

Just like drawing pictures, I’ve also found that there are 2 modes to approaching it. Sketching without regard to making it pretty or coherent is the way to start, as it’s arrogance unless you have a perfect vision to start with bold solid strokes and expecting them to come out. To reinforce this, I also use black ink so there isn’t the temptation to erase and rework. It amazes me when I do this, despite my ability to draw reasonably clearly, how near illegible my writing becomes, yet the energy conveyed in the strokes, but it doesn’t matter, I find even if I can barely read the writing I know what I meant (though it will be indecipherable to anybody looking over my shoulder). The act of getting it out onto paper, is like creating ripples that like zen like strokes, form ridges in the sand. After a bit and the thought stream dies down, I do a second pass I start with a new sheet and take my time, making it more ordered, and decorating it with more details, this often brings clarity and additional revelations. Overall it doesn’t really take that much time.

Then next day, or if it’s a new subject, or behavioral change a few hours later, I start from a blank page again! A binder with just these drawings is a great way to journal ones progress.

The Morning and Evening Coherence Exercise

Internal coherence means that we KNOW the subject AND the connections/order. This is tricky, everything on that page/list is in our head somewhere, but like that phone number for that first boy/girlfriend sometimes it’s in there but not immediately accessible when we need it, when we are out in the world. In the background while we work, sleep, our subconscious is constantly working out solutions to problems from everything to that shopping list to what we want to eat, and who we want to be in a year. Especially on new problems, tasks, and worse on novel ones like new ideas, or new behaviors, it’s very easy to forget. Especially in ideas, if it were common then it would already be done! So the act of starting from a new blank page is a way to see how much you remember. That you check against the previous page as the ‘answer key’.

For this phase/exercise often I use a combination of LiveJournal and MindMapping. I will start out with a blank page, give myself 5-15 minutes and tell myself to start typing/writing with no regards to order. Sometimes I will seed the thoughstream with nodes like

• self
• work
• finances
• love
• friends
• family
• health
• questions
• todo

asking leading questions as what I’m thinking about in each of those categories, at the end I will check it against the previous entry. And in the case of daily todos mark it done or put a note as to what happened with it.

As a separate exercise (which Peter Drucker recommends) , it’s useful to do something similar to predict ahead what you think you will get done in a day, week, month, year, and then tag it, then after that time period has passed review. Spend some time figuring out what went right, what got you, and why etc.

Tim Ferris among others advocate batching tasks to improve efficiency, as a large amount of time is spent ’shifting gears’. Sometimes literally, like the countless shifts between 1 and 2nd gear going back and forth to the office. People often fail to include the amount of time, wear and tear on the car and sanity into the allure of a high paying job, and how that high paying job once calculated hourly might not be better off than a fast food worker.

My Example (back in 2000):

• 100K startup job in Sunnyvale, frequent meetings and late nightss
• Lived in Pacifica because Sunnyvale was boring.
• Girlfriend in Oakland only place she could afford a house.

Which if your familiar with Bay Area traffic forms a bermuda triangle of
life suckage. What would be 20 minutes on a good day could turn into 4 hours of red lights. The draining aspect is it’s unpredictability, you can never tell, which makes planning on getting to work on time difficult (should I get up at 4am or 6 am?)

Measuring the pain

I got out my trusty stopwatch (if you can’t measure you can’t manage) and averaged times
over a few weeks. I was spending 20hrs in commute (commuting is a shitty
part time job!) and 45-65 hrs at work, sometimes 6 days a week. Which when averaged into the ‘high’ income calculated hourly rate between UPS delivery boy and McDonald’s Chef, and I’m sure
the UPS guy was in better shape. Needless to say I was quite astounded finishing the calculation.

On Friday’s I would go visit my girlfriend and get so frazzled from the commute, that when faced with another commute into the city to go ‘out’, coupled with 20-45 minutes finding parking (sometimes coupled with stresses of showtimes), any enjoyment to be had was quickly offset by the road-rage and unknowns, this frequently took it’s toll on the relationship in the form of arguments.

Getting to a Zero Commute

So ever since then I’ve never lived more than 30 minutes away from work, either structuring where I live, or where/how I work, here’s the steps I followed.

1. Negotiated (both work and girlfriend) for flex time, avoiding traffic.
   Savings of 5-7 hours a week.
2. Second was switching to 4 day in office, 1 day telecommuting, showing
   productivity enhancements.
3. 3rd was going to 3 day 10 hour days (keeping an eye out for how to go
   independent), networking and building credibility: started presenting at user meetings, conferences, tech edited books
4. having enough in savings and enough contacts I could go without stress
   solo.

Interestingly since going solo, my hourly rate in the last year has gone from 1.5 to 4 times
what I was making working for others. The projects (I develop in flash) are smoother as there are less people in the pipeline and less that can go wrong. My commute can be zero if I choose, yet I can travel way more. Right now my girlfriend and I are planning a full month trip to Chicago and Hawaii.

This is not to say that one has to work out of ones home,. Increasingly I’m entirely laptop based so I can work while visiting/travelling a higher percentage of the time, etc. While Cafe’s are obvious, there are lots of other avenues. Some highlights of my work:

• in a quiet sunny grassy/tree park that connects to the cities free wireless,
• a free concert at the city of Pasadena that I wouldn’t have paid that much attention to just watching.
• at the Getty museum on the lawn.

It’s easy to make a goal of eating at one new place and seeing one new street. I was amazed at how little I knew the area around me. I might spend now 45 minutes a day commuting, but this is zero-stress walking and sightseeing, and at least in a decent city it’s amazing how much is accessible via foot and bus distance.

Addiction to Cars

The Killer Commute and addiction to cars, is also really sad, it reminds me of the invisible efficiency epidemic mentioned in the 4hourworkweek.com. While confused initially, I now know why people put ‘home theaters’ (and refrigerators, beds, alarm clocks, garages for mopeds etc) in cars, people are increasingly living in them. The costs of financing a car aside, the amount of man hours that are spent sitting in a car not adding to anybodies quality of life is staggering (I know because I tended to start doing calculations when I’m stuck). Staggering as in the same number of hours
could have built the Panama canal…several times over, or sent somebody to the moon. The hidden causalities in relationships, jobs, due to the stress has never been measured, but I’m sure it’s high. It’s hard to be present for the
nice dinner/evening in front of you when your already stressed out about the morning commute and the important meeting.

Make sure your car commutes you to your goals

I have a super cheap econo car, that’s paid for, I don’t spend time on it, if it get’s totaled it’s easy to replace. I don’t wash it very often, as gets as my goal in life is to drive as little as possible. I don’t associate my identity with it. I structure my life that I can get most of what I need by walking. To confound things, I live in LA and my girlfriend lives in SD, so here I batch our time together so we always spend a few days together of high quality time, and given my flexibilty I can visit for a few days if so desired.

I have friends with $600/monthly leases that Love their car, like people Love their abusive jobs/relationships, while I respect their decision, it saddens me when the car +house payment are the anchors keeping them from pursuing their passions. Despite being a geek with a love of high tech, hybrids and new cars fail to be cost effective. I have friends with 2 year old vehicles that spend more time in the shop on scheduled maintenance, than my car is worth. It was really simple for me, which would I rather have $300-$500 a month for a car or the same towards developing muses? Which will I get more enjoyment and mileage out of in 2 years from now?

Zero Commute..yet Travel 500% more

The amount I save not paying interest or insurance can be used for other things. That said I love flying when I travel, and $400 I’m not spending on a car is easily a flights a month (perhaps more if your using the Platinum AMEX card). Renting car and a hostel together can be $50/day in the US.

Another example: A few years ago, a good friend and I wanted to drive from Vegas to Marin, up the beautiful California coastal highway for a friends wedding, so we rented a convertable Mustang for a 7 days and came back through Yosemite. It was a blast! Cost $240 + $140 in gas, split 2 ways All the experiences, none of the maintenance or interest. The car we rented had a dragging brake caliper, which I’m sure cost at least what we spent that week to fix.

Part of the importance to adhering to the 80/20 rule and repeatedly moving inbound tasks into ’someday’ and ‘never’ categories is to take advantage of  the ‘out of sight- out of mind’ help.

The mind is a bit like a highway, if every idea that requires thinking were a car.   There are an optimal number of thoughts it can deal with before, like a traffic jam, no movement happens at all.

Information overload (including task overload) is a mental traffic jam.  There are multiple paralysis that can simultaneously contribute,  and multiple solutions to get out of them.

Possibility paralysis occurs

• when the number of options being evaluated exceeds conscious ability to bring closure.
• when the options being evaluated have strong bipolarness (for every kiss you’ll get a punch in the face)
• when the options being evaluated are equally weighted, (like trying to decide where to eat when you’re not hungry)

When these occur, thoughts take on similar behavior to a spinning top.  The internal engine is moving so fast over the same thoughts, it stands almost perfectly still.

It’s a bit like eating a whale with a spoon, the brain is turning the puzzle every which way, looking for an least cost solution…yet not finding one, so it puts down everything down than tries it again, frequently forgetting where it started.

We can see a similar thing in computers where we run out of RAM, and large files are being constantly paged to disk. Imagine trying to make sense of this post, if you could only read 7 letters at a time…

Perfection Paralysis is the repeated attempt to find an 95-100% optimal solution when suboptimal (say 80% good) may be all that’s possible. Some examples:

• calculating a winning game move (e.g. chess, vectoids), where significant short term losses/sacrifices required for long term victory.  This is especially visible in interactives and creative endeavors, where exploring resulting in 30%-93% unfruitful paths.
• diminishing returns: mastering real world Tetris. Like when moving, trying to packing everything into one container, when 2 trips or a container 1.5-2x the size would be cheaper, especially considering time.
• Scheduling conflicts, trying to get everyone to the meeting, flying them in from mars, when either another meeting, recording/relaying information, or just not having them come might be equally viable options.

Priority Paralysis is the when everything is a priority one.  This is especially visible in startups where everyday is a forest fire after forest fire, and no time/money is allocated on how to address the root cause.  In people abused as children, the priority towards basic survival  can push out growing up and self actualization till much later in life.

Deadlock Paralysis  when two things are dependent on each other, and in a holding pattern, frequently because there hasn’t been coordination. This frequently shows up in teams when one person is waiting on another person for something they need to complete, and the other ironically may be doing the same thing, each assuming that the other knows that they are waiting on them.  This happens in increasing frequency as people get busier and lack time to sync, despite when not busy working just fine. This is where project managers or task managers can help break the gordian knot,

SOLUTIONS
As for solving them.

• Break Ties and Conflicts: Using spreadsheets to help break value conflicts, and value ties. This is a focus exercise, write the title of what your trying to solve, then divide the page into 2 columns for pros and cons. Give yourself 1 minute to list all the pros you can think of, then cover up that column and give yourself 1 minute to list all the cons you can think of. Then another minute to assign points to the pros (1-10) and another for assigning points to the cons. Then add them up. Choose the one that has more points. Sometimes elements will need a second pass as they have their own pros/cons.
• Scenario plan: Aggressively writing down all the possible options, to eliminate the mental re-rehearsing paging effect, sometimes getting everything out can take days. This can often lead to many refactorings as scenarios overlap in a grid like fashion with others scenarios. Using a word processor it’s okay to duplicate! just copy and paste.
• Triage 80/20 Go through the list of uncategorized and now, and someday and ask “can this wait 1 month?”. If so then move it to the ‘later’ someday bin. The goal here is to get them out of sight and and out of mind. Get the list down to 3-7 items, which is all you can consciously focus on with any intensity. If it’s larger than that, assign points of importance, then move anything not above the 80% cut into the soon or someday.
• Timetrack and use a task timer. Especially on writing/architecting projects and purchases I find that the amount of time I spend optimizing can easily overshadow the worth/cost of the item. Say I spend 4 hours researching and finding the best deal, saving me $100, when I found a $50 off retail in about 15 minutes..given an hourly rate of $50, I have actually lost $100 relative to spending that time working, and the opportunity costs are even larger given most work projects tend to pay back.

One of the challenges in the 80/20 rule, keeping the important few versus the trivial many, is that the trivial many at least for people like myself tend to collect in ones head, as just walking around the house, and reviewing the idea/todo list, there is a constant stream of perceptions which frequently require further actions (the thoughtfront). Reality being what it is, frequently the 80/20 rule lops off the majority of things, just not enough time or resources in a day. So instead of being marked as done, they are all categorized as ‘not now’…and frequently by the constant influx of things more important ‘not ever’. Worse, re-remembering that one can’t do it, is a constant reminder putting things from short term memory into long term memory, so I find that even once I’ve actually done it, there is a loop reminding me running in my head. Here are some examples.

• The toilet in our apartment doesn’t stop filling itself. I don’t have to fix it, but filling out a maintenance form, getting a hold of the manager is tedious, especially with deadlnes.
• There is a bank finance charge of $35 I shouldn’t be charged. I can’t really outsource tracking this down easily.
• Taking some furniture to get shipped, it’s not important but the furniture sits in my room collecting dust/space both physicallly and mentally.
• writing a post/wiki about this subject, it’s not important but it is interesting

Deadlocks
To top that off, many of these are deadlocks, I can’t outsource it because either it’s a ‘me’ task, or that take time and funds better spent elsewhere, but I can’t do it myself because that energy per my priority list, should be spent somewhere else, and I can’t forget or ignore it. These deadlocks are gordian knots in the psyche, they take up far more energy than their diminutive size might imply as they are a puzzles for the brain to constantly turn from different directions looking for a new way to solve (or get out of) it, only to find that’s not possible.

Parasitic Drag

Many of these together add up as is parasitic drag, and equally in that the viscosity of the mental world we move through, turns from air, to water then to maple syrup. This drag takes a toll on the ego, as one constantly running through a check-list of things one can’t do, is about as much fun as wading waist deep through buckshot…and subconsciously this is how things end up appearing (dread, fear) because somewhere every paper scratch and calorie spent moving is talled up.

We are motivated by what we can do, what we’d like to do but can’t eats into ones energy stores. Processing all these ‘not now’s below a certain threshold, I find myself, not wanting to move at all, and engage in escapism (overeating, oversleeping, depression, etc), which of course is horrible for productivity.

Detecting when this is happening isn’t always straighforward. For me, introspection won’t work, as gradual emotional changes at the time seem like ‘it’s always been and will always be this way’ even though I know logically that that’s not true. Journalling helps, doing the freeform ‘what’s in my head’ during the morning and evening, anything that last on their longer than 3 days I tend to reprioirtize to get it done, and allocate/batch a few hours or a day just to clear out as much as I can which is enough to clean the slate so I can focus again.

So even though it’s not the MOST important thing, sometimes budgeting some time and clearing out trivials is great for productivity. This is application of the rule doing what actually works instead of what should work.