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When Michael and I started the Simplicity Habit, we were initially focused on task and project management, but in the evolution of the site and lots of thinking, I have found the second leg of the Simplicity Habit.

Clutter.

Merlin Mann, GTD guru and author of 43folders.com, started writing about clutter a year ago, mentioning heavily the book It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh. Walsh, host/clutter-buster on TLC’s Clean Sweep, writes very elegantly about how clutter is destroying us and if we don’t take control, it will consume us completely.

“People hold onto stuff like their kids’ old clothing as a way of holding onto the past. Or they keep things they think they might need someday as a way to control the future.”

The definition of “simple”, root of simplicity: having few parts; not complex or complicated or involved. Also, dim-witted: lacking mental capacity and devoid of subtlety, but don’t mind that.

How many times have piles of stuff stopped us from leading a simple life? How many projects get started, stopped and then sit on the corner of a desk, gathering dust? How much stuff makes your life difficult? How many times have going into your closet felt like a task?

Most of the posts at the Simplicity Habit have focused on tasks, for the second act, welcome discussion about clutter.

“People’s homes are a reflection of their lives. It is no accident that people have a huge weight problem in this country, and clutter is the same thing. Homes are an orgy of consumption.”

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For a birthday present a few years ago, my wife got me a gift certificate for a sushi making class. It was incredible, firstly because I love sushi and secondly because it was incredibly insightful in the realm of productivity.

David Allen has an axiom “Mind Like Water” to show how you should react to changes and inputs. Throw a pebble into a still lake and the ripples will be appropriate for the size and weight, throw in a boulder, again, the water responds to the stimulus.

How are sushi and GTD alike, you ask?

When an Itamae, sushi chef, is preparing a Norimake, a traditional sushi roll, his goal is uniformity through out the larger roll. Each piece, when cut, should look exactly like every other piece from that roll.

This is how any productivity system should work. Every project or speed bump, no matter it’s size or intensity, should be uniformly treated. It should be treated the same as every other project. If you have some cucumber in every piece of sushi, and by cucumber you mean effective project planning, it shouldn’t change if it is a huge gnarly project or a little spicy tuna roll, er, small personal project.

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The goals of kaizen include the elimination of waste (defined by [Joshua Isaac Walters] as “activities that add cost but do not add value”), just-in-time delivery, production load leveling of amount and types, standardized work, paced moving lines, right-sized equipment, etc. In this aspect it describes something very similar to the assembly line used in mass production. A closer definition of the Japanese usage of Kaizen is “to take it apart and put back together in a better way.” What is taken apart is usually a process, system, product, or service.

This is the perfect way to view the start of a personal productivity system, which may leave you wondering, what “If I’m going to get all productive, shouldn’t it be a radical departure from my previous way of doing business?”

Importantly, kaizen must operate with three principles in place: process and results (not results-only); systemic thinking (i.e. big picture, not solely the narrow view); and non-judgmental, non-blaming (because blaming is wasteful).

Kaizen is often a series of small steps, but “radical changes for the sake of goals” is perfectly okay. Make a big change to get yourself on track and then make small changes to get to the perfect system. The workers at Toyota rely on small experimental changes rather than large pre-planned command-and-control changes.

So in the discussion of personal productivity systems, remember incremental change can go a long way, especially after a large wholesale change. After all the psychic RAM can only take so many major paradigm shifts.

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Evernote has made it past the 3 week tech trial and is now a car in my productivity garage. I am dumping a lot of information into it, via the web, desktop and email interfaces. Most of the notes I am adding are personal, but the ability tag and search are excellent. My wife and I have added questions for the doctors visits, blog post ideas, software I want to try, webpages I want to be able to keep and search.

The couple of reasons I would recommend Evernote include:

• The text search with in images is amazingly good. even cellphone camera shots are searchable, which means I can snap a photo of a business card and then search for it later
• The tagging feature lets me apply my personal taxonomy to my notes, which increases the chance that I will find what I want when I need it.
• The multiple vectors of entry are amazing! Being able to email notes and retrieve them on my iPhone (now in a fabulous iPhone interface) takes care of me on the road, while the desktop client lets me get everything the mobile does and then some. Adding check boxes and encrypting notes are slick features. The added ability to search on those check boxes, checked or otherwise, allows Evernote to be come a idea manager (checked for ideas I have blogged about).

Michael asked the question: “How may tags are too many tags?” I don’t think there can be too many tags. I don’t keep the tag sidebar expanded, I only do so when I am looking for something. The search is much more effective, and does the image search.

Pardon me while I go a fill up my Evernote car, I’ve got some more thoughts to capture.

Rescue Time allows you to rate each activity you do on a scale from -2 to +2, setting how productive each task is. Surfing wikipedia is a -2 in my book, checking my email (as little as I might) is a +2. Rescue Time records only the “active” application, meaning if you have multiple applications open, it will not add time for each application open, only the one you are working on.

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This productivity tallying is shown off in pretty charts and graphs allow you to see over time what you are spending wasting time on. But this comes with a price.

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Having Rescue Time installed at work and at home really makes giving each Web site I visit a score difficult. The scores are needed in order to show your Efficiency and Productivity quotients. But the time it takes to classify, tag and score each Web site I visit, could be enormous.

So does Rescue Time define the term craphack?

Yes and no, if you plan on living and dying by Rescue Time, you are most certainly going to become tied up in the management, but if you use it as a background tool, checking in occasionally, noticing how much time you have spent on digg or wikipedia, it may be a refresh to get back to work.

Most of us make To Do lists that really aren’t so much about doing things, as they are lists of stuff without definition or context. We feel better knowing that we put everything on a big To Do list, but if my experience is any indication, I think many of us get “deer in the headlights” after we realize just how much “stuff” we have and no idea how to get it all done. In a 2003 interview by Management Consulting News, David Allen, states:

…what most people call a to-do list is incomplete and unclear, which is highly unattractive. Everything on your list is either attracting or repelling you psychologically. There is no neutral response: it’s either, oh boy, when can I mark that off or, get out of my face. If there are still a lot of decisions you need to make about items on your list, your brain glances at the list and says, I don’t have the energy to do all that thinking, go away. 

Even if we can get out of the headlights and across the road, we’re still left wondering what to do next. This is a crucial moment of decision about whether to move forward (decide on next action) or stagnate / procrastinate / panic / etc. In his post, Andre Kibbe suggests that a common form of procrastination is what he calls “serial digression,” and he offers us the following example to illustrate his point:

Many To Do items that people write down are multiaction tasks, like “Set up Dell,” as opposed to a genuine next action like “Read Dell Quick Start Guide.” The aim of a next action is to keep your attention on the most immediate physical task instead of the outcome. A To Do like the one in the example is overloaded, conflating what needs to be accomplished with what needs to be done.  Any project, no matter how large or complex, can be parsed into at least one next action that’s simple to do. Not everyone can get into Harvard, but anyone can download the admission form.

Put another way, David Allen remarks in the MCNews interview that, “You don’t usually see specific actions on to-do lists because most people haven’t forced themselves to sit down and finish their thinking about what has their attention. They collect items in their in-basket or think they have made a list, but there is another level of thinking that is required to move forward.”

What we’re left with are what Andre Kibbe defines as “Next Distractions” noting that, “Procrastination is more than not doing priority tasks; it’s doing non-priority tasks.” In terms of what Kibbe calls “Crutch Activities,” he argues that, “No task exists in isolation. A key consideration of any activity is not what the activity is, but what it leads to.”

So, whenever we go to check our RSS readers just before starting a project, fire-up our browser to find something on Wikipedia, or even write that next blog post (ahem…), be sure to remember the suggestions and quick tips that Andre Kibbe offers in his post. And watch out for the deer.

What’s the Next Distraction?