So, this weekend, I’m going to suspend the current chaotic processes I use to manage my information and my time, and start using Allen’s much more disciplined process. Here’s a quick overview of that process, which is illustrated in the truly ugly chart above. Note that this synopsis won’t save you reading the book — there’s a lot in the book, especially the arguments for doing things the way he recommends, which anticipate and explain why all the alternative ways of doing things don’t work. It’s in paperback and quite cheap, and if he gets enough royalties from the book maybe he’ll put the whole thing online free so those who can’t afford it can benefit from it too.

The process has five steps:

1. Collect all the information you need to manage in your life in a consistent streamlined way and place (“inbox”)
2. Process everything in your “inbox” quickly and efficiently to empty it
3. Organize everything into eight sets of buckets (shown around the outside of the chart above)
4. Review the contents of each bucket efficiently on a just-in-time basis, to keep the buckets emptying
5. Do the tasks that the workflow created by these eight sets of buckets direct you to do (more about this in a minute — the idea is that the decision on “what to do next” is automated, sort of, so you can get on with doing it

My “set-up weekend” will pull together all of the “stuff”, the lists and documents and other information that has some bearing on things I have to do, a lot of which is clanging around in my head being constantly forgotten, and reallocating it to a place in one of the eight sets of buckets. I have lots of lists, so much of the job is already done — the challenge will be getting down (clearing my head of) the “stuff” that isn’t on any lists.

The “What is it” step on the chart above is taking the time to understand the essence of each item that comes into your “inbox” (e-mails, documents, snail mail, phone messages, chores, lifelong ambitions etc.) so that you can decide (a) the outcome that this information should ultimately lead to, and (b) the next step that you need to do to work towards that outcome. The answers to these two questions determines which bucket the item should go into. If it’s actionable (i,e. is there some action needed now), then you decide what is the next action that needs to be done. If there’s more than one action needed, it becomes a Project — you put its outcome on the Project List (bucket #1) and enumerate the other actions that will be needed in the Project Plan (bucket #2). If the next action can be done in less than two minutes, you do it immediately, and you’re finished. If the next action is most effectively done by someone else, you delegate it (send a message and track it in the Waiting For file — bucket #3). Otherwise, you defer it. If this next action must be done on a particular day (deadline) or at a particular time (appointment), it goes on the Calendar (bucket #4). Otherwise it goes into a set of Next Action ASAP files (bucket #5), organized by context (i.e. the place or situation that lends itself to that action e.g. Calls, Errands, Staff Meeting, Meeting with X, Online, At Home).

For the “stuff” that does not require any short-term next action, there are three additional buckets: Tickler File (bucket #6) for longer-term items that you’d like to do someday, Reference Files (bucket #7) for information that may be useful in the future (we’ve all got tons of that), and Trash (bucket #8) for everything else. The book goes into how to organize and index each of the seven non-trash buckets. Several of the buckets are designed to prompt you by automatically “pushing forward” next actions to the top of the bucket as they become more urgent, or if they are particularly important.

So now you have these eight buckets, not of “stuff”, but of clearly articulated next actions. The fourth step is to review the contents of each bucket, just in time, in a disciplined way. Allen suggests reviewing your calendar each morning, and the other buckets (plus any “stuff” you haven’t got around to processing, to clear your mind again) early each Friday afternoon, moving next actions between buckets as appropriate. Then whenever you have openings in your calendar, you select from the next actions based on (a) context (are you in the right place with the right tools to do this), (b) time available (be able to finish what you start), (c) energy available (right frame of mind) and (d) priority (relative importance). Then just do it.

There’s more to the book. Allen talks about dealing with the urgent/important quandary, making time for longer-term goals and projects, effective project planning, and why bright people are the worst procrastinators, among other things. He stresses that this system is not a ‘time management’ system, but an information management system and more importantly an action management system. And he talks about how using the system not only makes you more productive, but makes you feel less stressed, more creative, and better about yourself. And one of the things I like about the process is that it doesn’t make any distinction between Getting Things Done in your personal and in your professional life. Those distinctions have blurred too much to be meaningful in the 21st century. Work/life balance is about learning to do both more productively.

Allen makes good arguments for the use of fairly rudimentary and old-fashioned manual tools for constructing the buckets — file folders with labels made with a label-maker, filing cabinets etc. As I started to plan my “set-up weekend”, I realized that I’m in a somewhat unique situation: I have no paper in my “inbox”. The only hard-copy I receive is books and magazines, which I quickly prÈcis and/or blog, and file on a shelf, probably never to be touched again. On projects for customers I always get soft-copy as well as printed copies of all project materials. And I only print stuff out for friends and customers, never for myself. That may allow me to create each of the eight buckets entirely on my laptop. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but I’m motivated — I have carried everything I need for work on my laptop for twenty years, the last time I was tied to a physical “office”. I’ll let you know if this works or not. If you’ve read the book and found PC-based tools that work for you for any of the buckets please point them out (Allen’s site sells and recommends some). Now that I have Google Desktop and Picasa and can find stuff on my laptop, this has a good chance of working.

Whether or not I become more productive and feel better about myself, I think this will be a useful learning experience both for making my Personal Productivity Improvement service better, and for articulating more clearly the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) meta-applications that I’ve been trying to talk the big software vendors into developing. Allen’s process really is an optimized PKM system that works whether you have a computer or not. Now if we could get Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo to design their tools around Allen’s PKM system, instead of having to try to make PKM work with these unintuitive and awkward tools, that would be something. I’m convinced the willingness of one of these big vendors to rethink and redesign tools around intuitive processes in this way, could make them the odds-on favourite to win the battle for the desktop, and at last bring the 80% of the population on the other side of the digital divide into the fold of power computer users.

The Take: Occupy. Resist. Produce. There have been several movies made about the anti-corporatism movement, but The Take, a new documentary from Naomi Klein (nologo) and Avi Lewis (son and grandson of the former NDP leaders, and producer of Counterspin), is different. Its heroes don’t just protest, they take charge. The website intro says it perfectly):

What they mean by “turning globalization on it’s head” is that, instead of striking, withholding services, the people’s best response to corporatism is insisting on working, not allowing the government-corporate hegemony, what Lewis’ grandfather called “the corporate welfare class”, to deprive workers of their right to decent jobs. Watch the trailer. And if you can’t see the movie in your theatres, you’ll soon be able to buy it on the website. Think of it as an investment in the movement, and in Canada’s venerable National Film Board, a wonderful example of the value of government support of independent media.

I’ve realized that this is what is missing from by book Natural Enterprise, perhaps the ‘hook’ it needs to attract a publisher: A manifesto for how taking the economy into our own hands, and wrenching it away from the conspiracy of thieves who run it today will benefit the vast majority, and perhaps save our world in the process. As Klein says puts it: “Argentina is supposedly this heavily indebted country that owes everything to the world. What people in Argentina are saying is ‘actually, you owe us, weíve been subsidizing you.’ And theyíre not just saying it, theyíre acting on it. And to me thatís the future of activism.”

On the Day the World Ends: Here’s a stunning example of poetry combined with film, brought to you by Adbusters. I’ve got to learn to do this. Just watch.

Free the Genie: Creative thinking from a small partnership of innovation consultants called Idea Champions. Fifty-five hints to stimulate creativity and lateral thinking are posted on cards. You can deal one out online (like the one pictured above). You can buy ($20) the whole deck and deal yourself a hand to provoke your thinking in real space. You can even have the deck installed on your corporate intranet so everyone can use it to get their right brains moving. I’ve read through quite a few of the cards and the quality is uniformly excellent. A great deal of thought and work has obviously gone into their development.

The Idea Champions website is one of the finest sites I have ever seen — cleverly designed, well laid out, aesthetically attractive, content-rich, stimulating, and it makes full use of the visual and interactive aspects on the online experience. I’ve been exchanging e-mails with Idea Champion Mitch Ditkoff, and I’m really hooked. There are hours of useful and fascinating guidance on their website, all of it smartly written. The free downloads are great fun, and having fun at work is clearly a hallmark of the group’s philosophy. The FAQ is hilarious, and you actually feel you’ve got to know the people at Idea Champions by the time you finish it. And one of their products, Innovator 2.0, includes a ‘collaboration space’ to allow shared creative activities. Readers will know I’m a skeptic about whether an ‘online collaboration tool’ is even possible, but if anyone can pull this off, they can. I’m also astonished that they can make ends meet in today’s anti-innovation business climate.

I’m hoping to get a peek into the inside workings of Idea Champions, and an opportunity to meet with their team. If I can, I’ll report more here on How to Save the World. Meanwhile, if your company recognizes the value of creative thinking and innovation, check these guys out.

In doing some additional research, I’ve been looking at the root causes of ‘personal unproductivity’, and concluded there seem to be three:

1. Poor worktools and resources (inadequate, hard to use, hard to find what you need, over-engineered, poorly filtered, poorly formatted, poorly indexed, poorly summarized, poorly explained, poorly organized, and not adequately updated or regularly cleaned out)
2. Poor training: It’s not always possible to make the tools intuitive and simple, and put the content out just when and where it’s needed, so some training is needed, and it should ideally be personalized training in the context of how each individual worker employs the available tools and resources
3. Poor work habits: Even with the best tools and the best training, some people are just disorganized, sloppy, forgetful, uncommunicative, procrastinating, or lazy

Being an optimist about people, I’ve always taken for granted that most of the productivity problems in the workplace are ‘process’ problems (stemming from doing inefficiently-designed work) or problems of unawareness or inadequate training, rather than ‘people’ problems (stemming from doing work inefficiently). Most of us do our best, and given enough time, I’ve always thought, people will figure out the most effective and efficient way to do something, regardless of the process obstacles (management edicts, unnecessary but mandatory practices, bureaucracy, dumb policies, bad ‘standard operating procedures’ etc.) in their way. Things always happen the way they do for a reason.

Well, usually. I think people are usually pretty good at finding ‘work-arounds’ for management-imposed foolishness. So when I designed the methodology for Personal Productivity Improvement, it was designed to do two things:

1. Learn what problems each individual is having using the tools and resources available to them, in the context of how they use these tools and resources (a function of both their job description and their personal workstyle or ‘information behaviour’), and then immediately teach them specifically what they need to know to use these resources more effectively (to address unproductivity cause ‘b.’ above), and
2. Observe and aggregate the systemic problems with the tools, resources and standard procedures, that hurt the productivity of a lot of people, and take them back to senior management to be fixed (to address unproductivity cause ‘a.’ above).

My design, therefore, failed to consider that a lot of workplace unproductivity may be the result of poor work habits, many of which the individual worker may not even be aware he’s trapped in.

Michael Seneadza a.k.a. Trader Mike pointed me to a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done, which attempts to help individual workers improve their poor work habits, and hence address unproductivity cause ‘c.’ above. I have not yet read the book (I’ve ordered it), but the author’s website contains enough to get me started. Allen has developed a whole toolkit of personal work-habit improvement aids, which go well beyond the ‘Time Management 101′ stuff we all learned early in our careers. One of the tools is the workflow management process illustrated above (he invites readers to make this chart their PC ‘wallpaper’).

On the one hand, I’m really intrigued by this. It could be the perfect addition to my Personal Productivity Improvement service, because Allen actually espouses teaching this one-on-one (his firm certifies Getting Things Done ‘coaches’ for that purpose). So while you’re helping the individual employee learn how to use his or her technology, information and learning resources more effectively, you could at the same time be teaching them how to improve their personal work habits to ‘get things done’. Two doses of productivity improvement in one shot.

But, on the other hand, I’m a little perturbed about the degree to which the various tools that map into each step of Allen’s workflow diagram seem to be fixed, ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions, the proverbial (and usually misnamed) ‘best practice’. I use a tickler file, for example, one of the tools referred to in the above chart, but it’s not at all like the one Allen suggests. For me, my way works just fine. Likewise, I don’t own a PDA and I don’t use Outlook — I find it more convenient and faster to note appointments in a manual diary, and I knowingly give up the electronic tie-in to my scheduling software, and the ability to sync my appointments with others and allow others to know when I’m not available. This way just works best for me, it’s part of my work style and fits my ‘information behaviour’. So rather than prescribe a set of universal tools to improve everyone’s work habits, or even just roll out a toolkit and let people pick and choose, I wonder if a better approach is to learn the individual’s personal information behaviour, their preferred style of managing information and their proclivity to use more complicated versus simpler tools, and use that behavioural profile to design a customized set of work-habit improvement tools and processes for each individual. More involved and costly, of course, but in my experience there is never one best answer.

OK, I’ve confessed I haven’t read the book, so if you have, tell me if I’m right or wrong in my concern about this. And while you’re at it, do you think it’s possible to figure out quickly, after a bit of experience, what work-habit improvement tools will (and won’t) work for each individual in a company? Are there other models and solution sets for improving work habits I should study? What tools and techniques work best for you, and why? And has anyone developed a schema (set) of different ‘information behaviour’ styles that might make this process a little more manageable? Or is it presumptuous to think we can improve ingrained work habits after only a few minutes of observation anyway? The stakes here, if we can find good answers to these questions, are huge.

• Although we often have the preconditions for good collaboration (shared goal, sense of urgency and commitment, productive participation process, sense of belonging, open communication, trust, and complementary, diverse backgrounds), the inherent competitiveness that pervades everything we do in life tends to interfere and preclude true collaboration from occurring.
• We tend to collaborate very effectively in emergency situations (like helping each other out during a blackout), suggesting that good collaboration may be instinctive, an instinct we have tragically lost.
• When collaboration works well (in nature, in emergencies, and when the chemistry of the team is exceptional) we collaborate not because collaboration works, but because it’s fun.
• Hierarchy, our cult of leadership, and the inflated egos of managers, combine to make collaboration in most businesses almost impossible.
• Collaboration could be improved by (a) creating a lot more opportunities to practice it, (b) speaking out when supposedly or potentially collaborative activities aren’t, and fixing them so they are, and (c) ousting the egos and outing the wallflowers in collaborative groups so participation is equal.

Carolyn Allen, who lives and breathes this stuff, provides this additional wisdom:

• Infrastructure — support and facilitation services, coaching, technical resources — helps to keep collaborative efforts from going off the rails.
• Open communication and collegiality among participants, so that the work that needs to be done can be equitably apportioned, appreciated and respected, is essential to the process.
• Diversity of process — using different techniques to jump-start or enhance collaboration — is as important to effective collaboration as diversity of people.

A record proportion of today’s workforce, especially in North America, is self-employed. For them, collaboration is essential to doing projects at more than a subsistence level — pilot projects, subcontract work, and small, one-shot assignments. The jump from self-employment to entrepreneurship — and credibility with larger buyers of their services — requires collaborative partnership. So there’s a few million people who should be really motivated to get much better at this art.

In business, meanwhile, the term ‘collaboration’ has been misused, misappropriated and adulterated so much that it has become muddled with mere contracting, teamwork, and work allocation. Collaboration is much more than any of these things, but, sadly, because so many large business environments are so dysfunctional, it is almost impossible to find great examples of business collaboration anywhere. The best examples of collaboration are to be found outside the suffocating hierarchies of business — in scientific endeavor (many Nobel Prize-winning scientific endeavors have been global collaborations), in the arts (both in composition, like Lennon-McCartney’s work, and in performance, like jazz improvisation), and in sport (where the best teams work together so intuitively and seamlessly that their collective performance far exceeds the sum of their individual competencies, and where a strong captain, superstar or coach is an impediment rather than an advantage). And of course, in nature, where for most species collaboration, not competition, is the key to survival.

Business needs to raise the bar by which it assesses its collaborative performance to a comparable high level, and appreciate that many of the attributes (competitiveness, hierarchy, the cult of leadership, and sheer mind-boggling size) that are the hallmarks of the modern corporation work directly against the achievement of greatness in collaboration. It will be up to entrepreneurs, who don’t have these attributes, to show the way.

So I would define collaboration, as demonstrated in great scientific, artistic, athletic and natural endeavors, this way: Working together to produce a result far superior to that which any group of individuals working alone could ever produce. The whole, in other words, is greater than the sum of the parts. None of the Beatles, individually, could ever, in a lifetime with all the resources in the world at their disposal, produce anything of the calibre of Abbey Road.

Before we look at how collaboration could be enhanced and enabled, let’s look at some more examples:

• The Prayer Cycle – Jon Elias’ moving collaborative composition, involving a dozen of the world’s most diverse and creative songwriters, of a suite of nine adagios overlaid seamlessly with stunning music harmonies from different cultures
• Eliot & Pound – The back-and-forth, ruthless editing of TS Eliot’s work by Ezra Pound, to craft some of the world’s tightest and most powerful poetry
• Whitehead & Russell – The collaboration between mathematician Alfred North Whitehead and philosopher Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica, the groundbreaking book that bridged their two disciplines and laid the foundation for modern logic
• The Human Genome Project (or the Making of the Atomic Bomb) – International collaboration that fast-tracked scientific advances that would otherwise have taken at least a generation longer
• Open Source software – Like Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and nVu, the ‘best simple’ internet software, developed by parallel and sequential work of hundreds
• Van Gogh and Gauguin – Two artists, both coming late to their art after failing at other professions, who met and worked together and helped each other develop the technique and mastery that has endured ever since
• The New Jersey Devils – A hockey team built on a shoestring from players of unexceptional talent whose amazing chemistry, and ability to function almost as a single connected organism, has three times trounced the most expensive and superstar-laden teams in the sport. And who last year defeated the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, a team largely built on the same model, in a titanic struggle described by one leading commentator as “a great drama bereft of stars” in which the awarding of MVP to any individual was “a travesty”.

I can’t claim to understand the magic of human interplay that makes these such stellar examples of collaboration. But I can tell you the story of a much more modest, personal collaboration that I’m working on right now. As many of you know, I’m intrigued with the potential business (and philanthropic, world-saving) applications of The Wisdom of Crowds. Through one of my readers (and now good friend) Jon Husband I met Mike McInerney and through Mike I met John Sutherland, with whom I am now working on the Wisdom of Crowds business model. John and I are cut from different cloth, with different strengths and weaknesses but a shared love of and belief in innovation.

When John and I developed the Wisdom of Crowds business model, it was pure collaboration. We had each tried, unsuccessfully, to develop the model separately. So we started with a clean slate, using John’s MindMapping documentation tool to capture what we agreed on. In ninety minutes of discussion, questioning, persuasion, give-and-take, trotting out of examples, objections, and ‘ahas’, we had overcome some huge obstacles in our individual preconceptions of how the model could and should work, and produced a remarkable collective work product, a modest but perfect example of great collaboration. Both John and I are quite strong-willed, so I tried to figure out why this exercise had worked so well.

We were motivated, which certainly helped. I’ve been asked to make proposals to a couple of businesses this week on the subject, so there was certainly a sense of urgency. And we were clear on the objective. But John and I had worked together, using the same tool, with an equal sense of urgency and an equally clear objective, on another project a month earlier, where three other people were also involved. Not only was the process in this earlier instance exasperating, like pulling teeth, it was an unproductive tug-of-war of different solution sets that almost deteriorated into feuding. What was documented using the tool was not what was presented to the client.

What was different in this earlier, failed attempt at collaboration? In my opinion, John and I exhibit what I would call intellectual agility, while our colleagues in the earlier session do not. Consultants as a whole necessarily have big egos and believe passionately that they have the best answers. They are successful because they can convince clients that their answers are unimpeachable and will achieve the desired result. In some cases as a result they get ‘locked in’ to certain solutions, processes and ways of thinking. Intellectual agility is the ability to allow yourself to fully understand, appreciate, adapt to and integrate others’ ideas and ways of thinking with your own, and, on occasion, to abandon your own preconceptions quickly and entirely when presented with compelling evidence of a better answer. In front of a client, such agility so might be seen as a sign of weakness. But working with a group of peers it is, I believe, the very essence of collaboration, and a skill that does not come easily to many.

After all, many of us were taught that the assembly line — that exemplar of mediocre and mind-numbing efficiency — was the first breakthrough business model of collaboration.

How could we make people, and entrepreneurial businesses, at least, more intellectually agile, and hence more collaborative? Here are my early thoughts on this — please jump in with your comments:

• We need to teach people the skill. When I was younger I would have been hopeless at this. John is a great role model, but it’s taken him almost as long as it took me to acquire the skill. I suspect some people are incapable of learning it. I also suspect it’s intuitive, so it may be more a case of teaching us to shut up and listen with an open mind and stop competing with and prejudging others. In other words to re-learn the skill that our culture has driven out of us. Expert facilitation of collaborative sessions would also help, but it won’t be enough by itself to make unskilled people skilled collaborators. Time to go back to school.
• We need to recognize and reward great collaborative successes (those that go far beyond mere coordination, cooperation, and sharing of information). What gets rewarded gets done, and copied by others.
• We need to self-assess, and assess in business, our collaborative ability. This is a core entrepreneurial competency, up there with critical thinking, creative thinking, and clear communication.
• We need to find more role models for it outside the arts, sciences and sports — especially in business and in the political arena (good collaboration skills could reinvent negotiation from an adversarial contest to a win-win art).

I would hazard a guess that excellent collaboration skill is almost entirely absent in those we call ‘leaders’ in all aspects of human endeavor. I’d also guess that women are inherently better at it than men.

I’m going to add a chapter to Natural Enterprise on the subject.