Disruption is evil!

aka the turn of a friendly 3x5 card

It just hit me! For ages, I have been disrupting myself. Let me explain. My mind is volatile; it tends to fly after every other crazy idea... and to let important ideas fall through the cracks. I might as well have some kind of attention disorder. But a system should cover for this problem, shouldn't it?

So, for some years now I have been using alarms. Being that Palm's default task list app cannot set an alarm to a task, after trying every piece of software alarm, I eventualy settled with Chapura Key Suite, which is the closest you can get to Outlook (and believe me, it's really close) within Palm OS realms. And of course, it includes alarms for tasks and not only for calendar dates.

Now that I've made the move to Windows Mobile (more on that later; hold your fire and flames, Palm fans), alarms come with the package, but the native tasks app sucks big time on the Smartphone version of WM5, so I got myself eXtreme Agenda which, albeit a few inconsistencies here and there, rocks.

Here is how my system works: let's say while driving back home, I must pass by the store and get some coffee. I know I should be already driving at around 19:30. So I set an alarm to fire at that time: coffee! When the time comes I will be close to the store and will be remembered to stop and buy some coffee. Once, I read that a proactive person is nothing but a reactive person who happens to react on time. So, I set myself to react to the alarm.

What's the problem with that? Well, imagine I have an unscheduled meeting. At 19:30, during an intense work session with the customer, an alarm will fire, setting me momentarily out of context. I know I must snooze it, but for how long? I just tap one of the options provided by the software, knowing it might be either too soon (again during the meeting) or too late (already at home).

A minor problem will arise if I am already driving, but still far from the store: as I'm usually using my phone for music, the song will be muted to let the alarm play. So I snooze it. Two songs later, off it goes again. I might receive a phone call, and bipbip! it would be interupted too.

Besides, unless the phone is in vibrating mode, everyone around can be a victim of this "unflushable alarm effect"; as I am out of the required context for the task, I keep on snoozing, and it keeps on beeping once and again. My wife simply hates this.

Since I am no guru, let's turn to a real one. David Allen says there are no interuptions: only inputs. The productivity ninja must be ready to face an interruption and ka-blam! instantly process it, defer it, convert it into next actions, everything without sweating.

But this is no interruption. Interruption is your boss wanting to check some ideas with you just now. Interruption is your kid crying for his bottle when you were finally ready to start watching that movie. These alarms of mine are disruption, and self-inflicted! I can define contexts in my PDA, but my PDA doesn't know when do I switch contexts. It just fires an alarm at a time I thought I might eventually be in the appropriate context to act. But change happens, and my estimation isn't that useful most of the time. And having some piece of hardware reminding me of things I haven't done (because the context is not right, or because I don't want to do them just now) isn't exactly stress-freeing.

Stress leaves when control comes. There are interruptions I won't be able to avoid, but hey! they are just inputs, right? I'll Train and deal with them. But I must take control of what I can do at every context; not leave it to my PDA. So, beginning today:

• I will clean my task lists, and make sure every action is listed in the right context. 3x5 cards are my choice, for they fit in my shirt's pocket and in my car's "card-holding device" (more on this later).
• I will discard the alarms. I don't know how many are left yet, so I will check each against my lists, and turn them off.
• Use alarms strictly for deferred, time specific dates, or for situations I am pretty sure it will go off at the right moment (not many, but there are some).
• Review, review, review! I know here lies the main problem in my productivity system implementation: I don't review enough. This goal is really a project in itself, so I'm delimiting to this: review my 3x5s and conciently avoid numbing them down.

Why not use my PDA for these lists? Well, for one, the PDA's task list needs some deep cleansing and I can't afford to wait until I'm done with it. But most of all because in this case, lo-fi is more immediate. I don't want to quit the media player to check my tasks and try to read an LCD display while on a moving vehicle (that I am driving!) My "card-holding device" displaying the right @Car card should do.

Now that I think it, before this "card-holding device" I used another disruptive method: post-its on the rearview mirror. They were intentionally disruptive because I get so distracted that I will only remember if they disturb me. And disruptive also because they tend to fall down. Dangerously disruptive!

In the end, self-inflicted disruption is self-punishment, originated from the assumption that I can't do it and I need some sort of whip to do it. Today I believe I can change the paradigm and decide that I can indeed do it, and finally stop the punishment to start taking control.