Mind like molasses

Journaling is an excellent way to track your activities, capture thoughts and ideas, and generally empty your head when necessary. Almost all of the popular productivity techniques involve some sort of “brain dump” or “mind like water” philosophy. The dilemma comes to separating work from home. I’ve heard it advocated to not separate them, but rather keep one journal for everything you do. Personally, growing up in the IT field I have a hard time with the “single point of failure” concept of that model. So how to proceed without carrying the Encyclopedia Britannica with you everywhere?

1. Use a PDA. I was an avid Sony Clie user for a number of years and relied on an application to capture my notes and synchronize them with my handheld and my PC. In concept, a sound idea. In practice not so much. I found that, even as fast as I am on the handheld, I was never as fast capturing information as I am with pen and paper. For others, I know this works well. For me, time to keep searching.
2. Keep everything online. I’m at a computer for the majority of my day, so it’s feasible for me to keep my journaling on the computer and work from there. Unfortunately, reality creeps in and I need some esoteric piece of trivia when I’m nowhere near my machine and my vaunted processes come tumbling down. (Well, maybe not tumbling down but frustrating none the less.)
3. Pen and paper. No question about it. Even as technology oriented as I am the pen is mightier than the microprocessor for this task. Your mileage may vary. (Now if we can just get over my pen hangups…but that’s for another posting.)

Now that I’ve settled on my capture tool of choice, how to capture things in a way that works for home and for work? Right now, and I do mean right now because Darwin is alive and well in my organizational processes, I’ve settled on a work journal and a non-work journal (submit a better name if you have one, please.) Working the work journal Each morning I start with a clean, fresh page in the work journal. It’s one of the Black n’ Red notebooks, roughly 8″ x 5″ and about 200 pages. I like the size and the appearance of the book since we all know it’s better to look good than to feel good. (Thank you Billy Crystal!) I capture a list of the meetings I have for the day and begin line iteming the tasks that absolutely, positively have to get done that day. Now, as with many of us, my day is riddled with and driven by interruptions. Each time I change to a new topic for the day I start a clean page in the journal and date it for that day. If I complete that activity and have to circle back to it for extra work later in the day I just add to that topic’s page. I also add a line on my first page of the day for each topic I address. Doing that gives me a table of contents for the day as well as an easy way to backtrack through everything I did at the end of the week when it comes time to submit status reports. Once the journal fills up it gets tagged with the date range it covers and filed up in the overhead bins for future reference if necessary. Simple and straightforward. Non-work. Is there such a thing? Balancing work and home can be the toughest management challenge of them all. Family members typically don’t take kindly to performance reviews and will nag the heck out of you if you don’t deliver on your promised commitments. (”But Dad…you said we’d go to the movies tomorrow! It is tomorrow!) I follow the same approach as I do with the work journal, but I’ve found some interesting natural variances between the two.

1. Interruptions are much fewer. Believe it or not but the number of interruptions you need to actually journal versus the ones that just need to be addressed (note to self: clean bubble gum off dog) are much fewer. The primary focus seems to be on task driven commitments, scheduling changes, and notes…lots and lots of notes.
2. Privacy concerns. A personal journal tends to collect information that you might not want to share with the rest of the world in case the book is lost. I’ve started “encrypting” my personal information in my non-work journal as well as in my work journal. For example: my passwords are usually a composite of four or five different prefixes and four or five different suffixes. Rather than writing the actual password I can just capture (1,5) which means prefix one and suffix five. Nice and confusing to everyone but me.
3. Term of service. I’ve discovered that my non-work journal has a much longer term of service than my work journals, since I can’t keep the archived non-work journals with me for reference I tend to keep more information in the current personal journal. Based on this…a bigger book is bought. Thicker at least.

Wow…that’s a lot to start with. Next time I’ll explain my choices in books and some recommendations I have for making them more useful when it comes to managing people and projects. (crossing off blog posting on my list…woohoo!)