You tip the pizza man, you don’t tip the Fed Ex driver. You tip the bartender at the pub, and you don’t tip the McDonald’s clerk; but you do tip the barrista at Starbuck’s. The US has ritualistic levels of tip etiquette, which admittedly don’t exist other places in the world but, the question remains; Why don’t we tip our IT service people?

Security companies PandaLabs and Kaspersky Lab have both identified new strains of Trojans that do the same thing: they encrypt users’ data and leave a ransom note on the hard drive demanding $300.. or else.

A scaffold is a temporary structure that supports tools, materials, and people while erecting or repairing a building.  A similar construct can be used to improve your personal productivity.  Much like wearing braces to reposition crooked teeth, a personal productivity scaffold is something you temporarily insert into your daily routine to help create and establish new habits.  Once those habits are conditioned, the scaffolding can be removed.

Suppose you’re having trouble staying focused at work.  Your days keep getting away from you.  You go to your desk and start checking email.  From there you visit your favorite web sites.  Then you check email again.  Before you know it, it’s already lunchtime.  After lunch you check email again.  Then it’s back to web surfing.  Perhaps you finally begin doing some real work, but only from boredom with email and web surfing.  Since you’ve wasted so much time, you can only address the urgent items with no time left for doing anything remotely significant.  You end your workday feeling disappointed and mildly depressed.  Your evening is no more exciting.  Then you repeat the process the next day.

If you don’t break such bad habits, before you know it, you’ll have wasted years of your life.  This is entirely preventable, but wishful thinking and broken personal promises aren’t the answer.

When you find yourself stuck in the undesirable pattern of wasting time, it’s similar to having crooked teeth.  Imagine if you kept promising over and over again, “I have to straighten my teeth!  This time I’ll really do it!”  Will that fix your teeth?  Of course not.  They’ll probably just get worse.  The solution is simple though.  Get yourself some braces.  It will require a small sacrifice, but it will fix the problem.  And it’s temporary — you won’t have to wear them forever.

A personal productivity scaffold is like wearing braces.  It’s a way to redirect your time and energy back onto the “straight” course and away from the crooked one.  Once you’ve set it up, it’s fairly easy to maintain, although you may still regard it as a small sacrifice.

Perhaps the most important function your scaffolding must perform is keeping your attention focused on what you want and off of what you don’t want.  Who wants to waste hours a day on email and web surfing?  No one that cares about having a life.  But it’s way too easy to fall into this pattern by mistake, just as it’s easy to get crooked teeth.

I had to wear braces for 3 years when I was a kid, but I’m glad I endured it because my teeth remained relatively straight from then on.  I’m even more grateful for the personal scaffolding that has helped me stay focused on my goals.

A sample scaffold

Perhaps the best way to understand a scaffold is to simply look at one, so I’ll share one I’ve used from time to time.  To keep myself focused each day, I insert a scaffold around my workday, one hour at the start of the workday and one hour at the end.  I don’t work longer hours — the scaffolding replaces what would otherwise be part of my workday.  Here’s what it looks like:

Start-of-workday scaffold (60 minutes)

1. Review and update long-term plans (25 minutes)
2. Write a journal entry about what I expect to accomplish today (10 minutes)
3. Review today’s task list, and visualize a successful and enjoyable day (5 minutes)
4. Meditate and listen to any guidance that comes through (15 minutes)
5. Breathe deeply to clear and focus my mind before beginning work (5 minutes)

End-of-workday scaffold (60 minutes)

1. Record my morning workout results in progress tracking spreadsheet, plan next day’s workout (5 minutes)
2. Process paper inbox, update project/action list and calendar (15 minutes)
3. Equalize office (decluttering, filing, organizing) (5 minutes)
4. Conduct a postmortem of the day in my journal using my assessment template (10 minutes)
5. Plan next day (15 minutes)
6. Water plants (< 5 minutes)
7. Breathe deeply to clear mind and release work for the day (5 minutes)

I normally insert the morning scaffold at 8-9am and the afternoon scaffold at 4-5pm.

Your initial reaction might be, “This is way too much.  I can’t take two hours out of my day for this, especially not for weeks on end.”  I’m not saying you have to use my particular scaffold — this is something I created for myself, and it may not make sense for you at all.  But you’d be amazed at how productive your days can be when you create your own daily startup and shutdown routine as a wrapper around your day.

The intent of the scaffolding above is to help me stay focused.  I don’t always use it, but when I find my focus drifting and notice I’m spending way too much time on minor things, I return to my scaffolding and effectively straighten myself out.

The startup process gets me focused on my long-term goals and plans, so at 9am I’m jumping straight into my most important task.  I feel relaxed, alert, and highly motivated.

The shutdown process is where I close out my workday, so at 5pm I’m totally done with work and ready to spend time with my family, attend a Toastmasters meeting or a kempo class, or go out with Erin.

Together these two pieces of scaffolding create a productive wrapper around my workday.  In the morning I enter “work mode.”  I get my work done, starting with the most important tasks for the day.  Then I get out of work mode and into family mode.  This works very well, and the two hours it takes doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice at all.

If two hours seems like too much to you, you can certainly shorten it.  Just a few minutes on each end can make a difference, even if you do nothing but breathing exercises.  Through trial-and-error, I learned I get great results with the hour-long brackets.  I am in fact getting some work done during those scaffolding periods, including planning, processing my inbox, doing record-keeping, evaluating results, and of course keeping my plants from dying.  These are daily tasks anyway, so I find it useful to include them in the scaffolding.

How to create a personal productivity scaffold

To create your own scaffold, you need to identify where you’ve become “crooked” and what needs to be done to straighten yourself out.  Almost always this will require crafting a process to refocus your attention.  For example, you may want a morning scaffold that puts in the state of mind where you’re so focused on your goals that you wouldn’t even consider wasting your time on idle web surfing.

Design simple activities to funnel your attention towards a particular state of mind.  Do you want to be motivated?  Relaxed?  Creative?  Whatever state you want to induce should be addressed by your scaffolding.

Scaffolds work best when they’re naturally attractive to you… perhaps even fun.  Think of them as bait.  Ideally they should be inviting enough that you feel inclined to do them without too much resistance.  By the time you come out the other end, you’re immersed in your desired state of mind, feeling you could sustain it for hours.

The best scaffolding components are those which yield an additional benefit beyond their temporary focusing effect.  For example, daily meditation can help you clear and focus your mind, but it’s also known to have long-term health benefits, including a 30% reduction in the rate of death from cardiovascular disease and a 49% reduction in the rate of death from cancer (figures are from a study of transcendental meditation practitioners).  Regular journaling can be hugely beneficial as well, helping you avoid problems and gain greater clarity.

Creating good scaffolding is largely a trial-and-error process.  Take a stab, try something, and observe how it works for you.  Every time you run through your scaffold, see if you can improve it.  Was it attractive enough for you to actually complete the steps?  When you came out the back end, were you in the desired state?  If you do this every day, will it make enough of a difference to compensate for the time it takes?

Even when you come up with a good scaffold that works for you, it’s a good idea to mix it up every once in a while to keep it from growing stale.  Reorder the steps, or insert a new activity now and then.

You can use scaffolds for just about anything, so don’t limit yourself to work-related productivity.  You can use scaffolding to motivate yourself to exercise, eat healthier foods, or to psyche yourself up for selling door to door.  The main idea is to create very simple, easy-to-establish habits that serve as the framework for installing much more significant habits.

Once your new habit is established, try reducing or eliminating your scaffolding, and see if you can still maintain that habit.  Keep whatever scaffolding continues to be effective, but feel free to drop it when it’s no longer necessary.  I frequently find myself returning to productivity-related scaffolding, but when it comes to exercising regularly, I don’t seem to need it.

Scaffolding and 30-day trials

Scaffolding is a terrific fit for the 30-day trial concept.  Once you design a basic scaffold for yourself, commit to testing it for 30 days.  At the end of each day, tweak your scaffolding based on your results.  Consider sharing your scaffolding in the forums, and invite feedback and suggestions from others to help you improve it.

A typical scaffold used in building construction can be a rickety, ugly, paint-splattered structure, but it gets the job done.  Similarly, your personal productivity scaffolding can be equally ugly to the naked eye, but if it helps you get where you want to go, you’re golden.

---

Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum.

© 2007 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

Password strength meters are becoming more and more popular amongst web services. Google uses one when creating a Google account. One can argue how useful these meters really are, but non-the-less they are fairly cool for users. So how does one go about making one of these meters? Well it’s fairly straight forward.

Sometimes we procrastinate on projects because we don’t know where to begin.  A goal like “write a book” might seem straightforward enough when first set, but when it’s time to act, the goal becomes this huge, amorphous blob.  Procrastination soon follows.

A popular suggestion is to define the immediate next action that must be taken, and then focus on that.  Once that’s done the next action after that should become clear.  I’ve had mixed results with this approach.  It helps in some cases, but sometimes it isn’t enough to get things moving.  Even when the next action is simple and achievable, I’ll still sometimes avoid getting started because I know it’s only going to lead straight into that enormous blob of complexity again.

A solution I’ve found more effective is to break a large project down into a lengthy list of “microtasks,” planning it all the way from beginning to end if possible.  A microtask is a very basic action item, so small that you’d be hard pressed to break it down any further without it being ridiculous to do so.  An example of a microtask is to make a 5-minute phone call.  If you have to break it down into dialing the phone number, you’re going too far.

A typical microtask can be completed in less than 30 minutes, ideally in less than 10 minutes.  Again, these are very small, well-defined actions.

You may be thinking that it isn’t always possible to break a large project down into microtasks before you’ve gotten started.  Sometimes, however, another person has already done most of the work for you.  For example, if you want to know how to write a book, you can find books with step-by-step instructions on how to do that.  I wouldn’t say they break it down all the way to the level of microtasks, but they do come close.

There are indeed situations where there’s simply too much uncertainty to plan a project from beginning to end at microtask granularity.  A good example is software development, which often works best with an iterative development process.  In such situations, you can still use microtasks to plan out as far as you can reasonably see.  Then when you reach a certain milestone, update your plan for the next stretch ahead.

Microtask outlines

For many tasks it can be helpful to create a microtask outline showing all the steps you’ll need to complete from start to finish.

Here’s an example 20-step microtask breakdown for the task of writing a new blog article.  The steps are in sequential order:

1. Define a primary objective for the article (inform, persuade, entertain, or inspire).
2. Brainstorm topic ideas, or review the list of reader-submitted topic suggestions.
3. Select a topic.
4. Do a quick and dirty, free-form writing session to get ideas down without regard to structure.
5. Decide how to organize the ideas for clarity (chronological, topical, hierarchical, sequential, etc).
6. Sort the output of #4 based on the desired structure.  Define the main sections and subsections.
7. Identify supporting material to include (examples, analogies, quotes, statistics, images, stories, etc), and add it to the outline.
8. Refine the outline from #6 and #7 for completeness and balance.
9. Expand each section of the outline into paragraphs (and bullet lists if appropriate).
10. Insert meaningful subheadings into the article.
11. Write the opening.
12. Write the closing.
13. Edit the article for content, clarity, and conciseness.
14. Spell-check the article.
15. Brainstorm possible titles for the article (clear, interesting, keyword-rich).
16. Select a title.
17. Select blog categories for the article.
18. Decide when to post the article (now or future-post).
19. Publish the article.
20. After the article has been online for several hours, evaluate reader feedback and fix any reported typos.

Notice that every item begins with a verb.  OK, so #20 starts with a preposition, but it gets to the verb soon enough.  The verbs are important because these are physical actions to be taken, not just ideas to ponder.  The more clear and concise your verbs, the better your outline.

To an experienced blogger, the list above may seem excessively anal.  I don’t need such a list myself because after writing about 600 articles, the process is deeply internalized.  However, for a new and inexperienced blogger just starting out, such a list can be very valuable.  It helps you avoid getting stuck.  Most steps are simple enough that they can be completed in minutes.  The two main exceptions are #4, which involves getting your ideas down any way you can, and #9, which is where you expand the outline into paragraphs.  For anyone capable of writing an article, however, these steps are straightforward enough that they shouldn’t induce the desire to procrastinate (but if they do, you can always break them down further).

When I’m kicking off a really big project, I often like to create a microtask outline from start to finish.  Sometimes these lists can be several pages long and may take days to create.  But I usually find the effort worthwhile.  Once the list is complete, it makes the implementation go much more smoothly.  It also makes it possible to create decent estimates of when a project will be done.  I’m really bad at estimating a project’s length until I’ve created a microtask outline for it.

Microtask outlines are especially useful for repeatable projects.  When I was actively publishing downloadable computer games several years ago, I had to go through a similar launch process for each game.  This included testing and fixing bugs, creating the game installers (license agreement, order form, readme file, etc.), preparing the final gold master builds, creating the game sales pages, updating the web site and online database with the new game info, writing and sending out a press release, creating a support FAQ for the game, creating a hints and solutions page (for puzzle games), creating a shipping package for the game (CD, instruction sheet), submitting the game demo to dozens of shareware download sites, soliciting reviews from shareware game reviewers, announcing the game to the newsletter and customer lists, following up on PR inquiries, and so on.  For a simple shareware game, this process normally took several days, even when I had a full-time producer helping me.  It also cost about $2000 for the contractors and services used.  But because I’d created a two-page microtask outline of the whole process, it normally went very smoothly.  I was able to focus on the task at hand and didn’t have to worry about forgetting a key step.

A microtask day – your daily 50

You might find it worthwhile to experiment with planning a whole day in microtask fashion.  If you work about 8 hours a day (hopefully not for an evil bovine master), and your average microtask is 10 minutes, you’ll have a to-do list of about 50 microtasks.  I’ve done this a few times, but in most cases I find that level of granularity to be overkill.  Nevertheless, I encourage you to try this at least one day to see how it works for you.  Be sure to create your daily 50 list the day before you’re going to implement it.  You can use it for just your workday or for your entire day, including personal time.  (Sadly for some of you overworked minions, there isn’t much difference between the two.)

What works best for me is a hybrid approach, blending microtasks with longer tasks on my daily task list.  For example, on today’s to-do list, my morning (9a-noon) has just two tasks:  write this article on microtasks and future-post it for Tuesday (I’m writing this on Monday), and write a second article to future-post for Wednesday.  My afternoon includes mostly microtasks.  Since Erin and I moved recently, I have to update my mailing address with a couple dozen entities, so I have a long list of short phone calls to make.  While I’m doing that, I’ll be multi-tasking.  Whenever I’m on hold, I’ll be filling out various pieces of government and insurance paperwork… in crayon of course. 

Managing complexity

How do I decide whether to break a larger task down into microtasks?  I make this decision based on the task’s perceived complexity.  If the task seems clear enough, and it doesn’t freak me out to put it on my daily list, I’ll add it as-is.  But if it’s new, unfamiliar, or complicated, I’ll break it down into microtasks when I plan my day.  This keeps me from hitting resistance when it’s time for action.  I like my work periods to flow smoothly from one task to the next without having to stop and think so much about what to do next.

Experiment to learn what works best for you.  You may be the kind of person who can put “launch a new web business” on your to-do list and know that you’ll get it done.  I’m not that kind of person.  I hate working in the dark.  I need to see where my actions will lead; otherwise, I’ll hit a snag and end up procrastinating.  A proper plan with the right level of subdivision can be very motivating.  It’s nice to see that if I just follow the steps, I’ll generate the intended result (or at least something close to it).

From intention to action

It’s perfectly fine to set a goal or intention without having a clue as to how it will manifest.  But once you do have a clue, it becomes your job to pull it down into physical form.  You have to meet the cosmos halfway.  If you lack the clarity to take action, then focus on your intentions.  But once those first few steps present themselves, it’s your turn to cooperate with the manifestation process and prove you’re really serious.  Otherwise, those action steps will just keep staring you in the face until you get off your behind and get to work.

A microtask outline is like a recipe.  When you follow a recipe, you’re able to focus on the process of doing without having to worry about how you’re going to do it.  You just need to follow the steps exactly as they’re written.  Similarly, when you create a microtask outline for a project, you separate planning from doing.  This helps the action phase go more smoothly, and it’s easier to slide into a productive flow.  You know that if you follow your outline, you’re going to get a result.  It may not be perfect, but it will get done.

---

Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum.

© 2007 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.