Sunday Musings - Get Things Done, AI is Smarter, Say "No"
November 27th 2022
Welcome to another Sunday Friends!
Here is your Sunday Musings, a quick dose of what I’m exploring and thinking about. Please feel free to forward this along to friends.
I’m getting ready for 2 weeks of work travel. Next week I’ll be at I/ITSEC where I’ve been invited to sit on two panels (new thing for me) to discuss cybersecurity and technology. The following week I’ll be at my last planning session and dev sprint for my current position. My replacement will be there, and I’ll be introducing them around to all the players while working through the sessions. As I said in our last musing, I’m coming off of a week of vacation and travel.
So why do I say all that? (Great, you live a jet sitting lifestyle Eric… bravo?) No, I say that to get to my point; Sometimes we find ourselves with a mountain of tasks, chores, opportunities, communications, and the like piled up in our inboxes and to-do lists because we have prioritized other things. Here are two productivity tricks I use that are very simple but extremely effective
Ask yourself this:
What’s the one thing I can do right now to take the largest load off my plate?
OR
What is the easiest/quickest thing I can do right now to clear the way?
I find that just by getting one of these two questions answered accomplished, I generate the motivation (or maybe the coffee kicks in?) to tackle a few more items.
Triaging my to-do list focused on the one-thing principle helps be get moving and smash though blockers. Sometimes I just get that one-thing done per day and I still get the important tasks knocked out. I feel better because I know I’m getting the important things done and sometimes it starts a productivity session.
So that’s your challenge as you prepare for this week - take a look at the tasks you have on your to-do list, don’t try to be a multi-tasking master, and identify just one thing you need to get done each day. Either start with the thing that is causing you the most anxiety or start with the thing that you can smash in a couple minutes to get your creativity and productivity fuel going!
Have an amazing week!
-e
If you or someone you know is going to be in Orlando and around the Orange County Convention center (I/ITSEC) then shoot me a line! I’d love to meet up!
This Week’s Recommendation
Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-free Productivity by David Allen
Building off my vignette above, it often feels like days should have a few more hours to get things done… or we should have a few less things. David Allen designed his Getting Things Done (GTD) system to help you do the things you have to do, but spend less time, effort, and energy so that you have more of those left over to do the things you want to do.
At its core, GTD is meant to store every task, reminder, and note vibrating in your mind in an external organization system to let you focus on the task you need to accomplish now.
As David Allen says, and I’ll paraphrase, your brain is meant to create and process things, not to remember them. So that’s why we need a system to keep remembering and tracking everything from draining your brainpower and keeping you from doing what it does best.
He lays out five steps to the GTD System:
Capture all the problems and ideas consuming your attention
Clarify what each one means to you and what you need to do about it.
Organize the decisions and actions you’ve just clarified.
Reflect on everything in front of you and choose what to tackle next.
Engage the task (get it done).
When I stated this process, it was quite the task to get through my mental (and mess of notes) backlog. Once I got through it the first time, maintaining became pretty routine.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
Technology I’m Looking At
Artificial Intelligence is Expanding
I know the title sounds click-baity/hyperbolic, it’s the best way I can describe the inflection point we’re at, and I’m excited.
You’ve likely seen in the news around the web that AI Art Generators like Dall-E, Midjourney, etc. are becoming more sophisticated. Instead of having to create long intricate prompts to generate what you want, we’re able to now give more basic instructions and refinements to make just about anything from art, to using language models with Rytr and Smart Copy to generate emails, customer engagement analysis, and marketing copy (…hmm… an AI writing a technology blog?). The results of these AIs are something close to witchcraft!
John Mcdonnel says we can make agents that can perform nearly anything now on the basis of natural language questions or instructions right now, with off-the-shelf tools.
I’ve been playing with GPT-3 for a while now. It’s great (expensive) fun and the ability to feed it raw data give me the five w’s (who, what, where, when, why, how) of a story, an article, a book, even attack write ups. Daniel Miessler is also using this and contrasts these LLMs with AGIs.
He predicts that “we’re about to get the benefits of AGI without it needing to be self-aware.”
That’s game-changing folks. In the industrial revolution we created machines that could out work us. In the information age, we’re creating machines that can outthink and out work humans. What a time to be alive.
Quote I’m Musing
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
-Steve Jobs
I’ve reused this quote many times as I work though sprints, project timelines, vision statements, and identity management. As leaders, you absolutely must maintain the vision and way forward that takes your team, your organization, your company to the goal. You are surrounded by brilliant professionals who are experts. Their ideas will be sound and exemplary. They are not all going to be “Yes” material right now. Only you, the leader, get to make the hard decision on what will get done now. If the decision were easy, it wouldn’t have made it up to you.
Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.
Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
-e
Good stuff - as always! I've also been thinking a lot about everything on my plate, coming off my own travel, vacation, illness, etc. that has put me behind in just about everything. For me, just getting started is the hardest part. Once I get going, the snowball effect takes over.
I've also been reading about ice baths and studies showing that doing 10-15 minutes in an ice bath/week, 2-3 minutes at a time, first thing in the morning, boosts productivity, alertness, focus, and a bunch of other things. Some thoughts behind that are, it's likely the hardest thing (physically at least) you'll do that day, so it gets the "snowball" started first thing. I may give it a shot, I'll let you know!