This past month has been a hard one for me. My mother is in hospice care at an assisted-living home.
Along with waves of grief about my mother’s approaching death and guilt for not being a better son, I’ve been struggling with anger at “the system.” The people within this system are kind, ethical, caring, and professional. And yet, time and again, they perform functions that reveal a sort of death industrial complex that is bent on extracting money and minimizing care, even if it shortens your loved one’s life.
I don’t believe in burdening others with my hardships. Instead, I want to give you advice that will hopefully be useful if you find yourself in a similar situation.
“Where do you get your ideas?” The thing is, everyone has ideas. All the time, every day. Having ideas is part of the human condition. The right questions might be: Are you exposing yourself to new inputs and new situations, and challenging yourself to find more interesting ideas? Are you pushing the ideas you have further, making them more complete, turning them from hunches to notions to ideas to theories? Are you publishing your theories, sharing your reasoning and having your ideas collide with the real world in service of making things better?
That might not be the right question | Seth’s Blog
Gmail does a pretty good job of categorizing your messages. You can train it to do better.
Move messages that you must review, respond to, or take action upon to the Primary tab.
Routinely unsubscribe from notifications and newsletters you don’t read. Some senders let you cut the frequency from daily to weekly or monthly.
Just as wild animals follow patterns that allow them to find adequate nutrition with the minimum expenditure of calories, information seekers follow patterns that allow them to find adequate information with the minimum expenditure of mental energy.
Mark baker, Every Page is Page One
Stop using your email as a holding pen for I should do’s and somedays.
Me, thinking to myself 🙂
My email inbox was a bottomless pile of messages seen and considered but not resolved. Having so many small choices increased my stress and reduced my ability to get things done.
Then, about a month or so ago, I heard “inbox zero” mentioned. I intuitively grasped the concept and set about finding a better way to process my email that reduces my effort, stress, and mess. It’s most obvious feature is that you have zero emails in you inbox.
Now (Feb 20th) I’ve been doing this for over a month and have gotten faster and better at it. Here’s my updated system, which I call zero inbox.
Before you practice zero inbox, train Gmail to sort your messages.
When you’re done every message should be deleted or archive. Your inbox should be empty.
It helps to know what your focus/responsibilities/goals/interests are. Don’t waste time on messages that fall outside of these. Don’t get sucked into email threads that don’t concern you or your work.
Recently, I explained how I implemented zero inbox and started capturing tasks in todoist. By pushing all of my tasks to one place, I cut down on the burden context-switching.
However, this new approach has created a new problem: a ballooning to-do list. Now, I must find a better way manage these tasks.
Fortunately, this article in the Harvard Business Review reminded me of the classic Eisenhower/Covey matrix for prioritizing tasks.
More urgent | Less Urgent | |
More important | Do it now | Schedule it soon |
Less important | Divide & conquer, or delegate | Delete it, say “No,” or toss it in the “someday” folder |
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Recently, I wrote about zero inbox, my hack for getting rid of email stress and mess. I also mentioned that it depends on having a to-do list that can link back to your email messages.
A few years ago, I started using the free version of Todoist, an elegant and dependable app developed by a Germany-based software company. I was so pleased that I upgraded a year or so ago to their Premium version for $3/mo, billed annually.
Getting the most out of my to-do list requires a little skill and effort. Here’s how I add tasks to todoist:
Recently, I started practicing zero inbox. I didn’t read any specific how-to articles or books, I just implemented it based on these two principles:
A quick search for “zero inbox” turned up this article and a 2007 Google TechTalks video on YouTube featuring Merlin Mann:
Merlin’s approach is a more nuanced (and probably more efficient) than mine. My approach is simpler:
This system works for me. It reduces my stress, mess, and effort.
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher.
…perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away…
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERY, Terre des Hommes, 1939
As technical communicators, how do we ensure that our user instantly gets what the topic is about?
Here are the answers to that question, based on my reading of “Simple,” the central chapter of Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick.
Making something simple does not mean dumbing it down.
To make our content simple, we must:
To illustrate this, Made to Stick describes a problem the US Army had a with orders: By the time commanders in the field received the order, it was outdated and the commanders had to choose between ignoring the order or implementing an order that no longer made sense.
To solve this problem, the US Army improved its communication protocols in 1980 by adding a commander’s intent (CI) to each order. The CI is “a crisp plain-talk statement, [to] the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation.” As a result, field commanders could act on the intention of the order, its core idea, despite changing circumstances in the field.
The CI sounds a lot like the DITA shortdesc element writers put at the beginning of their topic, just below the heading.
I know some of you feel ill when you hear DITA mentioned in tech writing discussions. Even if you’re not using DITA, you can’t deny that it makes sense to give your readers a clear statement of the core idea at the beginning of your topic.
Doing this helps your reader to quickly “sniff” whether this is the information they are seeking so they can decide to read more or continue looking.
The opposite of identify the core idea and putting it at the top is:
We don’t do these things on purpose. They happen because we are either blind to them or lack the time and energy to revise them out of existence.
For me, words are like stepping stones that mark a path through a garden of information. When I revise a topic I’m working on, I reread the words and retrace the path I laid out earlier.
As I do this, I notice odd spots:
Usually, these changes create new odd spots in the path. So, with each move or fill, I spend a bit of time working it into place and reworking the surrounding material. I keep doing this, developing my thoughts and moving them around until I feel like I’m done.
Then I come back the next day and see a whole new set of things that are out of place. This is more of a problem with blog posts like this one than with technical content, whose structure is more defined.
The trouble with “eliminating everything else” is that I’m still generating new ideas (stones) when I’m revising. To solve this, I have to force myself to stop creating and focus only on removal. This isn’t easy if I’m attached to interesting by irrelevant ideas in the content. The solution is to save off a copy of the document before I start cutting away the excess. That way, when I finish the current topic, I can review the copy and use the interesting bits to generate new topics.