thoughtfront.com

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.

This is my first post. The purpose of this blog is to cover Thoughtfront(ing), a method and application for extending a broad range of ideas into physical reality, avoiding doublethink/recreation/working.

The word is similar to storm front, except instead of rain and lightning bolts, the spread of thoughts and building of new ideas, in a productive fashion.

This is somewhat related to GTD but for profusely creative people, where the 80/20 rule can sometimes lop off the head of the most innovative ideas, before they’ve been born.

Some Core Ideas on this blog

• New Ideas are fragile, capture them in the wild.
• Continual Clustering of ideas (prior to 80/20 when scheduling)
• Embrace and Extend Metaphors
• Thinking Tools

This is somewhat in contrast to GTD, and 4 hour workweek. But in actually thoughtfronting is a tool and strategy to be used at sometimes and avoided at others.

The goal of these posts for me is to capture the thoughts as real world reminds me, but eventually migrate into a wiki for better clarity, and software tools/games,  and ebooks to reach larger audiences.