Sanity Check

Concluding my series exploring the intersection of Getting Things Done and Lotus Notes, here's a summary of my experience using the GTD-enabled  eProductivity template as my production Lotus Notes mail file.

I'm no GTD newbie, but I'm no GTD blackbelt either by any stretch.  A couple years ago I read (or more accurately heard via audible.com) David Allen's book Getting Things Done and implemented many of the GTD principles using the vanilla Notes mail file as I documented in this previous post. I was doing well, but I realized there were significant holes in my system, particularly my inconsistent use of ToDo's vs Calendar Reminder vs flagging emails for Follow Up. But the most significant hole in my system was the lack of completing the cycle by performing a GTD Weekly Review. This lack was probably because the Weekly Review forces you to look at all your lists (except the Someday Maybe list) and quite frankly there were things in my lists I preferred to forget about. I never really did fully clean up the accumulation of emails flagged for Follow Up, some going back a couple years. Ploughing through those once, never mind weekly, seemed to high a hill to climb. But with a new tool comes new energy and inspiration.

The goals I hoped to reach with the help of eProductivity were:

(1) save time creating Next Actions that I could use in Notes or my BlackBerry
(2) track projects and their associated Next Actions in a more integrated way
(3) make the Weekly Review bearable, if not fun.

Installation was as simple as replacing  the design of my mail file with the eProductivity template. By the way, going back to vanilla Notes is just a matter of returning to the standard Notes mail template. eProductivity works within the standard Notes fields and forms  so there are no interoperability issues with your co-workers.

After the replace, opening the mail file launched a wizard that walked through the basic eProductivity setup steps starting with entering the free trial license key. Next, the wizard presented a list of suggested Contexts for categorizing Next Actions. "Contexts" are general locations or situations where you can execute a Next Action. I went with the typical ones related to places where I'll typically be: Work, Home, Errands/Car, & Church. I didn't choose At Phone or At Computer because I find those contexts redundant since I have a computer at home, at work, and carry a BlackBerry. But then again, others might think differently, so its nice eProductivity provides the ability to customize contexts.

Next, the wizard brought up a list of my existing Notes ToDo documents (37 of them) for the purpose of mapping them to the contexts I selected. Using a simple and intuitive drag n' drop interface I recategorized all of them in no time. Next wizard steps involved selecting which Project categories I wish to work with (e.g Projects - Home, Projects - Work, Projects - Pending) as well as to choose what other GTD lists I wanted to use like "Waiting For", "Someday Maybe", Agendas, if you wanted to use the Tickler Calendar, and so on. I personally think it helps to already be familiar with GTD terminology and concepts before using eProductivity, but you can probably grow into it and learn as you go.

Warning: If you have a local replica of you mail file, after running the wizard you should fully replicate before opening the other replica. Otherwise, you will most likely experience replication conflicts, particularly with your ToDo's. This happened to me...no biggie.

With eProductivity all configured, I went through all my Next Action documents (formerly referred to as Notes' ToDo's) and edited the subject field to begin with an action verbs e.g. "Read linked article about DAOS", "Verify Photo Credits agent ran correctly" and so on. If I discovered that a Next Actions was actually a single step in a larger project (In GTD-speak a Project is defined as any objective that requires more than one Next Action to complete it), I associated the Next Action with a new Project document.

At this point I was a little lost about how to proceed, so I watched the eProductivity Video Tour. Its about 20 minutes or so and walks through all the essential features, demonstrating how they work and explaining the GTD principles behind them. That really was when I "got it" and felt energized and prepared to tackle my Inbox and the dreaded Follow Up flagged emails. 

Newly inspired and with confidence, I started to process my Inbox which had grown to 155 emails. My Inbox wasn't that bad because about 5 months prior, in a good GTD moment, I had my Inbox down to zero, but I had fallen off the GTD wagon since. Here's where I suspect many of you will be challenged. Most people have hundreds if not thousands of messages in the Inbox...my co-workers definitely do. Its strange that there was a time when most people understood the concept that an Inbox was a temporary repository for  Incoming until it was processed. Office workers in the pre-email days understood the essential nature of a paper Inbox where whatever goes in IN was eventually moved to OUT. I am glad our accounts receivable clerk who processes my expense reports doesn't use her paper Inbox in the way people manage their email Inbox or I would never get paid. Really, its ludicrous when you think about it.  One practical hint for tackling a bloated Inbox is to sort it by sender. Now you will quickly find a huge amount of stuff you can purge right away...newsletters, advertisements, closed support tickets and other non-actionable emails. Alternatively, you could do what I did when I first started GTD a couple years ago and just move all read email older than _x_ months old into a folder called Inbox Overflow and then just focus on processing your relatively current emails or those you marked as unread because you knew they were important. If it makes you feel better, after you're done with your current mail, you can make yourself a goal of spending 5 minutes a day processing the backlog in your Overflow folder until its completely purged.

The 3 pane layout of eProductivity (Contexts | Email | Folders) made processing the remaining emails easy. Drag reference emails to the right and drop into reference folders. Drag actionable emails to the left and drop onto a Context which triggers a prepopulated Next Actions form to open. I went over the basics for creating Next Actions from email in my last post.

The following couple of days gave me time to go through the dreaded emails I had flagged for Follow Up. About half of these turned out to be obsolete (I just had to unflag them) and the others were converted into Next Actions and then unflagged. Here is where I discovered what an immense benefit is the Linking feature in eProductivity. Linking takes advantage of Lotus Notes main/response document functionality. With two clicks you can link any Notes document in your mailbox to a Project or Next Action document. These linked documents are conveniently displayed in an embedded view inside the the key document. This enables you to work with all your related documents in context. Its very much like a personal version of Activities in Lotus Connections.

Of course, email does not contain the sum total of all the things I need to do. Next Actions and Projects can be added directly via an action button. This was natural for me because, due to the influence of David Allen's GTD, I already had developed a strong healthy aversion to keeping things to do in my head. If something pops into my head that requires an action, present or future, I naturally write it down, and then get it into my system as soon as its convenient. Most of the time, if I am away from my laptop, I just add a quick task using my BlackBerry (not so good when I'm driving). With eProductivity, when I open the mail file, all those newly added tasks (captured via BlackBerry) are magically rounded up and presented to me for further processing like categorizing by context, setting due dates if required, and fine-tuning the Next Action description.

The only thing I found a bit disconcerting was that all the Next Actions that I added and scheduled for a particular due date show up on my Blackberry at 12:01 PM. But this is a Notes problem, not an eProductivity problem. There is a solution: Notes needs to expose the time fields for tasks and display these inline on the calendar. If this bugs you too, consider voting for my IdeaJam suggestion here. More details about this issue can be found in this post.

Did I achieve my goals. Most definitely YES. My first goal was to savie time inputting Next Actions by context. The interface and automation accomplished this goal. You can't beat eProductivity's automated workflow.

My second goal, better integration of Projects with Next Actions, was achieved as well. Project documents display the Next Action in an embedded view as well as any future Next Actions you've queued up. Once the current Next Action is complete, the next Next Action is promoted. Further integration is achieved through the powerful Linking feature which brings together all the pertinent documents for a project.

My third goal, to actually perform a Weekly Review and not hate it, was surprisingly achieved and is the lynch pin to making this implemention of GTD a success. This is where the eProductivity team deserves high accolades. A mentor-like wizard leads you through the process step by step. Its like having David Allen with you, coaching you through the process. You check your lists, your paper mail, do a mind sweep, and so on. If you're interrupted, it remembers where you left off so you can come back and carry on. I found the review painless and eye-opening. I think I shortchanged myself by not paying as much attention to the benefits of the Weekly Review in my previous GTD implementation. I was able complete my review in about 25 minutes the first time. I even went through that eternal stack of mail sitting in a wall folder at my front door. Its hard to describe the feeling you experience after completing the Weekly Review except to say you gain a calm, satisfied sense of control...like all is well in the Youniverse. Allen calls it "Mind Like Water".

No review of any software product would be complete without pointing out some areas that need improvement. I found two and they are most likely only temporary annoyances:

First, the current eProductivity template is based on a Notes 7 template. Unfortunately, being an early adopter, I've already grown accustomed to the improvements in the Notes 8 and 8.5 mail templates, particularly the calendar form. I am using the Eclipse standard client which sports cool new Java views for the InBox and Calendar. I also miss the new 8.5 calendar federation feature that enable overlaying other calendars from the web or other Notes applications onto your personal calendar. This is only a temporary concern. On the eProductivity website there is a statement that a Notes 8+ version is in the works. I wonder how feasible it would be to componentize eProductivity and make it a mail file add-on component that would work with a range of email templates rather than a complete all-in-one mail template which includes both the standard vanilla Notes mail file design elements plus the eProductivity design?

The second issue is that that it can be a little slow to open and work with the mail file directly on the server over a wireless VPN connection at  home. I noticed in the status bar it does a license check everytime you open the file. I'm not sure how much overhead this adds to opening your mail. Clearly there's a lot more code executing over the wire than in a standard mail file. A contributing factor could be that I'm using an ancient slow laptop due to current financial constraints at my work. The best workaround I found for this issue was to "work locally". That is, set up Notes to use a local mail replica and replicate in the background. See further on this technique in this IBM article.

In conclusion, I am clearly hooked on phonics eProductivity. My roadmap is to continue to use it for another month then approach key users at my company, especially those who have shown interest in GTD. I'll post a follow up here and there as I get more established in eProductivity. A few features I'd like to understand better are the Tickler Calendar and the Reference database add-on.

Thanks for coming along this journey with me. The exercise of writing this blog series has helped discipline me in learning eProductivity and better crystalize in my mind the GTD principles.