VIII. Sayings, Leaders and Ideas

What are your social-political views?

I am skeptical of all political ideologies. I am liberal on some issues (e.g., the environment, population control, an economic safety net for the poor) and conservative on other issues (e.g., litigation/tort reform, vouchers and school choice). I don't care what your politics are unless they were extreme — if you were a Muslim terrorist or a white supremacist, that would be a problem. In high school and at Claremont I studied political philosophy political theory, which I still find fascinating.

I am intolerant of intellectual intolerance. I met a woman who insisted that men she dates agree with her on every conceivable political issue. Our first date consisted of her grilling me on my position on numerous issues. It was a short date.

Who is your favorite leader in the 20th Century?

Winston Churchill. I also admired Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

What are your favorite sayings?

Here are four of my favorite sayings, all of which are mine:

"You don't have to be the smartest person in the world on a subject. You just have to be smart enough to figure out who the smartest person in the world is, and then copy him."
"If you look at what people do, rather than what they say, you will have a clarity of insight that few people have ever achieved."
"What's the point of being intelligent if you act stupid?"
"Every prediction about artificial intelligence made, no matter how pessimistic, turns out in retrospect to be wildly optimistic."

As for other people's sayings:

"Some people learn from their mistakes. I prefer to learn from the mistakes of others." — Bismarck
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission."
"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." — Groucho Marx
"One should always aim at being interesting rather than exact." — Tadpole
"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The realist adjusts the sails." — William Arthur Ward
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you're stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." — Ranis Belson
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger." — Nietzsche
"Forecasting is hard, particularly when the future is involved." — Yogi Berra
"The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory." — Lawrence Summers
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." — John Maynard Keynes
"Tragedy is when I cut my little finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die." — Mel Brooks
"Well, I'm not gonna quit drinking, I'm not gonna quit smoking, and maybe you're not the doctor for me." — Frank Sinatra, reminding us that the customer is king.

There are some sayings in the software industry that I'm particularly fond of:

The Ninety-Ninety Rule — "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the time it takes to develop a software product. The remaining 10 percent accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." — Tom Cargill of Bell Labs
"The first release of Intuit's QuickBooks was supposed to be a nine-month project. We were correct in estimating that the development project would be the same as a gestation period, but we picked the wrong species: It took almost two-and-a-half years, the gestation period for the elephant." — Ridgely Evers of Intuit.
"The Paradox of Standards — Even though you may assume that rigid standards and flexibility are opposed to each other, sometimes rigid standards at one level of a system promote more freedom and flexibility at other levels of the system.

The best example of this is the Internet itself, where the IP protocol is an extremely rigid standard. It is absolutely the same everywhere in the world, anywhere anyone connects to the Internet. It's particularly because of the rigidity of the definition of that standard that all the other flexibility and all the other decentralization that we associate with the Internet are possible." — Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management

Have you written anything that I may want to read?

I've written my Statement of Mission, which started as a short statement of mission and has ballooned into a 500+ essay, covering my thoughts on life, business, economics, intellectual capital, and dozens of other topics.

What are your thoughts on time management?

There are three generations of thought on time management.

The first consists of the hundreds of books out there on time management, all of which read as if they were written by the same person — use an egg timer to time your phone calls, that kind of thing.

The second is Stephanie Winston's The Organized Executive. Just as Johann Sebastian Bach represents the culmination of the best of the Baroque era, Winston represents the culmination of the best of the first generation. But it's still simply a collection of tips and techniques; there's no theory behind it.

The third is David Allen, who combines Eastern/Zen philosophies with Western time management practices. Allen starts not with tips or techniques, but rather with a theory, namely that the goal is to have your mind completely free, so you can soar like an eagle. The aim is to get your mind like water. A body of water does not dwell on the past or the future, it is only in the present. When a disturbance happens — such as when someone throws a rock into the pond — it reacts appropriately, not too much and not too little. It quickly goes back to its contented state, as the waves rapidly dissipate.

The goal is to have your mind completely free, not to get organized. Getting organized is simply a necessarily evil in order to get your mind free. If your mind is free without being organized, great! Who the heck wants to be organized? Unfortunately, there's no way to get your mind free without getting organized.

David argues that one of your goals in life is be completely present at all times, what he calls "in your zone." This is an athletic term for when an athlete is completely focused on the task at hand. If you're playing tennis at Wimbledon and you're about to receive a serve from your opponent, you probably aren't thinking about when you next need to buy toothpaste. Rather, you are completely focused on what your opponent is doing.

There are six primary ways to get organized:

Develop a leak-proof system.
Group tasks by where you want to perform them (e.g., at the computer, supermarket, vacation home)
Make no distinction between work and personal tasks.
Follow the two-minute rule.
Process all of your paper through your In Box.
Conduct a Weekly Review.

First, everything must be written down in a leak proof system, one that tracks all of your to do items, all of your commitments, and presents them to you as you need them. Your mind is a terrible storage facility; it should be used to think, rather than store things to do.

The actual system you use does not matter. It can be a paper notebook, a purchased system (such as Daytimers or Filofax), a Palm Pilot, the Tasks component of Microsoft Outlook, or a Microsoft Word file. I recommend against a paper system only because it's so easy to lose. If you're a road warrior, a PDA would make a lot of sense, provided that you synchronize with your desktop PC, in case you lose your PDA. (This is what Allen uses, because he travels so much. I use a database I wrote, which is described below.)

Whichever system you use, it has to be leak proof, everything has to be tracked, from "I need to buy eggs the next time I'm at the supermarket" to "I want to travel to India next year." If there are things that you are not tracking, they will clutter up your mind, your mind will not be like water, and then what's the point in having a system?

Second, in listing your uncompleted tasks, they should be grouped not by project (i.e., fix dinner, write article, finish leveraged buyout), but rather by the place or location where they need to be performed. Assume you have ten projects, each with 5 tasks that you have to do in the next week. Assume that each project has one task that should be done when you are at the supermarket. Allen argues you should have a category "Supermarket" (or perhaps more generically, "Errands") and then have these tasks listed in that category, so that when you are at the supermarket, you'll have in one list everything you need to purchase. Other tasks might be broken down by "Home," "Computer," "Internet," "Phone," "Office," depending on where you spend your time and what tools are available to you at these various places. The point is to organize your tasks according to where you can do them, not according to the larger project you want to pursue.

Third, Allen says you should make no distinction between work tasks and personal tasks. Whether you have to purchase a book at the bookstore, have your coat mended, hire a new secretary, or write a report for your boss, it's all stuff you have to worry about. All of it needs to be entered into your leak-proof system and then tracked. Many people make the mistake of only tracking their work tasks, with the result that their personal tasks are clogging up their brain, and thus their mind is not free. As Allen says:

"I consider 'work,' in its universal sense, as meaning anything that you want or need to be different than it currently is. Many people make a distinction between 'work' and 'personal life,' but I don't: to me, weeding the garden or updating my will is just as much 'work' as writing this book or coaching a client. All the methods and techniques in this book are applicable across that life/work spectrum — to be effective, they need to be."

Fourth, Allen argues for a two minute rule — If something can be done in two minutes or less, simply do it now and get it out of the way, rather than putting it on your To Do list.

Fifth, you need an In Box, into which all paper is placed and then processed. Most of the paper in your office should be thrown away, now — you simply don't need it. Most of the rest is reference material, and should be filed in an intelligently-designed filing system that you understand. The remaining paper has to be processed, in many cases creating an entry in your leak proof system.

Sixth, you should conduct a Weekly Review, where you review your life priorities and all of your activities the previous week, process them, and plan your next week. He recommends Sunday evening as an optimal time to do this.

One of the most interesting aspect of David's system is that there is a substantial difference between following it 99 percent of the time and following it 100 percent. If you follow it 99 percent, then the other 1 percent is still cluttering up your mind and your mind is not free. In some case, you could have the worst of all worlds — your mind is still cluttered but you've got the overhead of an organization system. For some people, if you can't get to 100 percent, you're better off with no system at all, because at least you don't have the overhead.

One example of my following his system — I never let my In Box fill up in my e-mail package. Most of the e-mails can be quickly read and filed. (Rather than filing these messages right away, I move them to a folder called "E-mails to File.") Those that need a response I just respond now, rather than wait. Those for which I'm waiting for a response, I file in a folder "Waiting for a Response" and then check it once a week, sending reminders to those that haven't responded. As for the occasional e-mail that does require thought, I print it out and pick it in my Daily To Do folder. I used to have over 500 e-mails in my In Box, which caused me to feel anxious.

Another tip Allen mention is how to condition yourself to do something you should. For example, some days I just don't feel like exercising. I know that if I put on my gym clothes, subconsciously my mind is going to be saying, "You're already dressed, you're half way there, if you don't exercise you will have wasted your time putting on your gym clothes, so go exercise, otherwise you'll feel like an idiot." And I'm then more likely to go exercise.

I've been following Allen's system on and off since 1999 and when I follow it, it has changed my life. There is no greater freedom than having your mind free. At his Website you can sign up for his free electronic newsletter. I highly recommend his book, Getting Things Done. He used to give public seminars but no longer does.

James Fallows in the July/August, 2004 issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" (p. 171) wrote a very favorable review of Allen.

(Allen is a good example of my first saying. I'm not smart enough to have come up with Allen's approach, but I am smart enough to recognize he is the best thinker in the world in his field and smart enough to copy/follow him.)

Do you have any ideas on time management that you haven't copied from David Allen?

I practice what I call radical simplification — breaking tasks down into very small, bite size, quite manageable subtasks, which allow you to focus on one small task at a time. And I mean small — often I'll break things into 2-or 5-minute tasks. Completion of the task is a psychic win, which spurns you on to then complete the next task.

How have you implemented Allen's system?

Allen says you should organize your To Do items by content — i.e., where they should be performed (thus, all of your tasks that require access to Internet should be kept on one list, all of your tasks that are errands should be kept on another list). In terms of implementation, that makes a lot of sense. At the same time, conceptually one often groups tasks in one's mind by the project they are a part of. While attending his seminar for the second time, it dawned on me that what I really wanted was a database that would allow me to slice and dice my tasks in several different ways. I spent most of the second day designing such a system, and probably a month of my time writing and further designing such a system.

The system I developed is a database system written in Microsoft Access. There are approximately 20 projects, and 3 to 5 subprojects within each project. Each task is a separate record and is assigned to a project. I can display or print by project, subproject, where the task should be performed (errand, office, at home, at night, etc). I can display or print only the Most Immediate tasks, and I can print out only the tasks that I have delegated to my secretary. I can also list only those tasks are intellectual work that I can do outside the office, such as enhancing this profile. I can also put assign a tickler date to any task, and then print out all the tasks that have a tickler date before today's date.

With this system, I've got everything tracked. If I think of something while I'm driving, I write it down on a piece of paper and then enter it into this system. Thus, my scarce brainpower (some would say incredibly scarce brainpower) is not consumed worrying about things that I have already thought of.

I've discussed this system with Allen and he says he is not aware of any system (whether custom developed or a software package one can purchase) that provides for as much sophisticated control as my system does. (One downside, however, is that my system is a real database and requires a PC (desktop or notebook) to run. Thus, it can not be used on a PDA and thus probably would not be appropriate for someone who is highly mobile.)

How do you choose what to do and not to do?

I'll do something if:

I enjoy it (e.g., I don't delegate kissing my girlfriend).
I can learn something by doing it.
It can't be delegated (sometimes it would be great if you could pay someone to exercise for you, but I haven't figured that one out yet).
I'm better at it than the person I would delegate it to and it's important (e.g., negotiating a deal, strategizing).
You can teach someone else something and then they are capable of doing it.
I can do something good for someone else.

If not any of these, then I don't do it.