Stop Digging Yourself a Bigger Hole & Get Stuff Organized with Things

"If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." 

 -Will Rogers 

Things Interface. Image Source

For the past month I've been using Cultured Code's Things program for keeping track of tasks and stuff I want to remember.  I really liked it and have found it to be very helpful. As I've written about before, I find myself becoming more and more forgetful with and ever growing amount of information. (See Dementia of the Preoccupied) It seems I have all sorts of things I want to remember and ideas, questions, and to-do items that pop into my head at inopportune moments, and if I don't make a note of them, I will forget.

I've tried numerous systems over the years, everything from digital notes and Post-Its, the Reminders app on my phone, and other programs similar to Things. Most often I'd just send myself an email, resulting in an ever growing inbox of unorganized items that could not be sorted by importance or categorized. This resulted in major inefficiencies of re-reading the same items and missing important items that were buried. I was digging myself into a bigger hole. Things has changed this.

One of the best things about Things is the fact that it works across all my devices. The app is on my iPhone, iPad and also my Mac. Any item I add syncs across all of these locations. It sounds simple, but is wonderful. Thoughts occur anywhere; access to your lists and tasks should mirror this. It also integrates with Siri, which is super helpful. Anytime I think of something I don't want to forget, I only need to tell Siri to "Remind me to..." and the item is added to Things. I love the convenience of this compared to my past inefficient systems. 

The four buckets in Things. Image from Things.

The features within Things program itself make it so much better than just using the iPhone's Reminders app or Notes. Each item that you add can be categorized in one of four buckets:

1. Something that needs to be done Today
2. Items that are Next
3. Scheduled Items you assign a due date
4. Items that can be put into a Someday bucket

There are many other features in the program, most of which I haven't even tried out yet. The interface is simple and it was easy to get started. It has a two week trial period, which is a great way to get started. The week I bought the program it was half off the $50 retail price which was a nice plus. 

I first heard about Things in December at the TIES Conference from Mark Wallace. Mark's presentation was entitled, "Redeeming Time: Finding Freedom from Overload" and was one of the best I attended. Mark shared the Will Rogers quote above and it fit my current lack of an effective system. He also mentioned the book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard Swenson which I had read and liked, so I was hooked. (See a previous post on Crazy Busy: You Are Letting the Screen Strangle Your Soul.) 

Mark talked about the "stuff generators" in our lives: email, social media, family, students, home. He pointed out that research has proven we can only hold four to seven things in our short term memories. Capturing and offloading it into the least amount of places is therefore necessary. Then we need to clarify and organizing our stuff into actions and outcomes, which you can do with Things. I am thankful I was at his presentation and saw this solution. Hopefully you find it beneficial, too.

Techcognition in an Attention Economy

Sunset on Sawbill Lake in northern Minnesota, 

With three colleagues in Chicago for the
Schoology NEXT Conference.

Last week in less than a 24 hour period, I left the Schoology NEXT conference in downtown Chicago, flew home to Minneapolis, picked up my four kids and camping gear, and spent the next four days on Sawbill Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). It was quite a transition from a tech conference in the city filled with skyscrapers and millions of people to the remote wilderness completely off the grid!

The BWCA is a national forest campground with over a million acres of lakes and forests in northern Minnesota on the Canadian border. There is no electricity, no running water, no motorized vehicles, and no roads. You travel by canoe and portage (carry) your gear over the land between them, which can be a short path or very, very long hike.

I believe this was my 17th year camping in the BWCA: my dad first took me in high school and then nine years ago we started bringing my own kids. Dad "retired" from these trips about four years ago and my college roommate joined me, helping with all the gear, cooking, and work. (My wife stays home and enjoys her time alone for a few days.) My kids started going when they were between the ages of three and five, and starting last year all four were old enough to join in the fun. The BWCA is a great place to spend time together, relax, swim, explore, observe nature, fish, play cards, read books, and disconnect.  I only used my phone as a camera.

I spent a lot of time thinking about being off the grid and aware that I was not connected or on a screen over those four days in the BWCA. You can really notice how much time you spend on a screen when it suddenly is not available. There wasn't any technology prompting me for my attention. There was no way to check in and see if I'd missed anything, either. 

The day after I returned home, I heard yet another fascinating (and timely) WNYC's Note to Self podcast episode entitled, The Attention Economy: What is Our Attention Actually Worth? In the episode, Manoush Zomorodi interviews Tristan Harris, a tech entrepreneur and design ethicist, who explains that some tech companies design for and get paid by the amount of time they can hold our attention in an app/program/device. Tristan wants to change this, and I hope he (we) can. He tells an interesting background story about the original designers of AirBnB, who originally measured the success of their service based on the positive time/value add that hosts and guests collectively reported about their stays and time together. Imagine focusing on a positive metric like that... versus bottom line profits based on how much time you can just grab someone's attention, taking them away from those around them, their thoughts, or just some down time! It's encouraging to hear that someone in Silicon Valley is thinking about designing technology to not demand more of our attention, and I hope other developers will adopt this way of thinking.

I believe that one of the essential skills we can teach our children as parents and educators is an awareness of how they spend their time with technology, how frequently, and the value of their interaction with it. As we see both them and ourselves being engaged and more dependent on screens and technology, it seems that it will be even more difficult in the future to recall life before this constant connection and screen presence. I wonder if future generations will even have times where they are just lost in their own thoughts in silence, or be with one another without technology present? I believe it is important to provide kids with experiences off the grid and/or away from technology so they know what it is like, as well as to frequently discuss an awareness of their use of and reliance on technology. 

Techcognition- an awareness and understanding
of one's own use of technology

Metacognition is the awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes. Perhaps now we need a term for the awareness and understanding of one's own use of technology. How about techcognition (or technognition)? I hope to help my own children and today's students with their techcognition skills. I want to help them learn balanced vs. addicted or distracted use. Technology is certainly here to stay. It is essential and beneficial in numerous ways. Helping today's kids learn to be cognizant of their interactions with it can only help prepare them for a future that will be even more connected than things are today.  

If you have never been to the BWCA, I highly recommend it. If you're fearful of what to pack or how to do it, there are plenty of outfitters and even guide services. I'd be happy to recommend something, just let me know. (Chicago is a great place to visit, too, but for different reasons.)

Related posts: 

• Technology & Relationships
• Crazy Busy: You Are Letting the Screen Strangle Your Soul
• New Year's Resolution: 3 Ways to Cut Back on Digital Distractions
• My First Apple Watch: Solution to Distraction?
• The Next Tech Thing: 10 Days Without Email
• KARE 11 News: Helping Kids Make Good Digital Decisions
• March Madness Boss Button: Adults Get Distracted, too!

10 Days Without Email- Only 20% Matters

In my continued efforts to cut back on digital distractions (see my 2015 New Year's Resolution and other past related posts), I recently had the opportunity to step away from my work email. I was on vacation for six work days, so I turned off work email on my devices and didn't open it until this morning. It's a simple as going to your settings for email as pictured and turning off the specific email account(s). I know some people even do this on the weekends. I haven't yet. I think turning off email and alerts on weekends/holidays would be a nice added feature in a future operating system.

In the past I've wondered how much email is truly important and needs my attention. This brief hiatus actually gave me the opportunity to tally up my inbox and discover that 20% of my emails really required my attention (31/157=19.7%). Below are the details.

If teachers and students were in school right now I realize that these numbers would look different. Also, my colleagues knew I was gone and didn't send me messages. I know I'd have more emails that mattered and required action/attention if I had run these numbers in September instead of the end of June. But I also know I would have received even more sales spam, newsletters, and would have been cc'd on many more messages. So perhaps the overall totals would all increase but the percent that truly matter wouldn't change much.  

As I look to ways to decrease distractions, I'm thinking of unsubscribing to even more newsletters and bloggers. I want to stay on top of some things and be aware of news and events, but each time these hit my inbox they become a potential distraction. I'm also considering setting up email-free times to focus because I know that even reading the subject line of a message takes away my attention from the tasks at hand. Knowing now that only 20% of the emails I receive really matter will help make this easier to do.

*Spam numbers listed only include emails that made it to my inbox. A review of our school's spam filter shows that I 
received an average of ten additional messages per day over the last week, bringing my total to an additional 100 emails if I were to include those. 

Out of Office this Week

Read related posts on #RealTime, Balance, Crazy Busy, Digital Distraction, Focus, Healthy Use of Technology, Out of Office, Relationships, Resolutions, Summer

New Year's Resolution: 3 Ways to Cut Back on Digital Distractions

Image Source

It's the end of 2014, and time to make your New Year's Resolutions. I've been making resolutions for years and use the annual event as a time to enact some personal changes. This year, one of my resolutions for 2015 is to cut back on digital distractions.

UPDATE 2018: Instead of the Moment and Checky apps mentioned in the next paragraph, use Apple Screen Time or Google Well Being instead.

Back in October George Couros tweeted out a link to a great blog in the NYTimes entitled Trying to Live in the Moment and Not on My iPhone by Jenna Wortham about using apps like Moment* and Checky to track one's personal iPhone use (total number of minutes per day and number of times per day). I found it intriguing and asked him if he was going to try it, because I was afraid to do so. He agreed.  

I can relate this Liam F. Walsh New Yorker cartoon!

It took me another two months to get around to giving it a try, but I finally have. It's been fascinating to see my own stats and compare my totals day to day. 

Data is powerful, especially when it's personal.

As an earlier article in Mashable by Seth Fiegerman stated, data is powerful, especially when it's personal. Being confronted with these daily totals about my screen time has caused me to reflect quite a bit lately. The totals that I'm confronted with from these two apps have also caused me to think about what I didn't do because I was looking at a screen. Time spent talking with others, being with my family, looking up, listening, being outside...  all things I used to do more of before having constant access to a screen and the Internet. I'm glad I finally took the time to install both of these apps, and encourage you to do so, too.  

Say No to Nocializing 

Back in July at the Minnesota iPad Palooza, keynote speaker Carl Hooker mentioned an urban dictionary term called Nocializing and something he called the Digital Yawn, both which stuck with me.  Simply put, nocializing spending time on your mobile device rather then paying attention to the people around you. A digital yawn is the moment in a group when one person pulls out a device to look at it's screen, resulting in the rest doing the same. Carl mentioned that at restaurants with friends, they often stack their phones facedown in a pile to see who can go the longest without using their phone and whoever gives in has to pay the bill.  He mentioned another version of this where the phones remain face up and whichever one dings/vibrates first with a notification has to pay the bill...  I still haven't tried either of these techniques...

Image Source

App badges create a FOMO.

Another one of the changes I made was to turn off almost all notifications on my iPhone and iPad, two of the devices I spend a lot of time on daily. I've turned off badges and all push notifications for email, Twitter, Facebook, Weather, NHL, and every other app on my device except iMessage and Phone. I actually did this a couple months ago.  I had found that the badges, such as those pictured above, tempted me to open each app and see what I was missing, which is exactly what I suppose they are designed to do. They create a FOMO I suppose. But I've discovered that each of these badges became a distraction and added stress to my life. They added pressure that is unnecessary, and I'm guessing I'm not alone in feeling this way.  

I'd encourage you to try this out, too. Your new emails, Tweets, sports scores, Facebook notifications, and everything else will still be there. But now you can access them on your schedule when you want, versus having them disrupt your life and distract you every time you turn on your device! (Just the number of times I used to unlock my phone for one task and instantly get distracted by some other app, often even forgetting what I had unlocked my phone for in the first place has decreased greatly.) I've been noticing how my own children get distracted by their notifications on devices, and hope to help them learn early how to manage their digital distractions, too.  I think balancing and managing digital distraction and learning to focus are valuable new life skills that we can help our children and students acquire.

I'd love to hear your ideas for cutting back on digital distraction, too, so please share!

For more reflections on digital distractions, please see an earlier post on Crazy Busy: You Are Letting the Screen Strangle Your Soul, a great read by Kevin DeYoung.  

A recent article about Albert Einstein's need for space for solitude and self-reflection by Paul Halpern is intriguing.  Einstein knew the value of time free of distractions. 

*I saw some reviews about Moment burning up your battery since it uses GPS location services, but so far haven't seen this become too big of a problem.  The creator, Kevin Holesh, was quick to respond to my email inquiry for a free family account which I will try out.

Crazy Busy: You Are Letting the Screen Strangle Your Soul

This fall as things have become busier than ever, I have been reflecting on my hectic schedule balancing work and family.  With four kids in elementary, middle, and high school, and my wife's return to full time teaching, the past few months have been a bit crazy to say the least.  Our family Google calendar often has so many simultaneous appointments that you have to view it by the day just to read what each one is.  My wife is a master at organizing things, but often we feel like two passing ships- or carpool drivers.  Like many other parents, we multitask and use technology to try to keep on top of things.  I often find myself answering the question, "How are you?" with a one word reply, "Busy."  

I am especially interested in the role I see technology playing in all of this.  I also have been noticing the distraction I see technology becoming for me, sometimes consuming up time I may have had to connect with family and friends or just to relax. A couple weeks ago on a plane, I read Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem by Kevin DeYoung.  What follows are some highlights from a chapter entitled, "You Are Letting the Screen Strangle Your Soul."  If you're too busy to read the book yourself, you may find these excerpts enlightening: 

• It’s easy to think the best answer for technology overload is to rage against the machines. And yet, it does no good to pine for a world that isn’t coming back and probably wasn’t as rosy as we remember it.

• In the Shallows, Nicholas Carr reflects on how his attitude toward the Web has changed. “At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected.”
• ...the Web had “scattered their attention, parched their memory, or turned them into compulsive nibblers of info-snacks.”

• For too many of us, the hustle and bustle of electronic activity is a sad expression of a deeper acedia. We feel busy, but not with a hobby or recreation or play. We are busy with busyness. Rather than figure out what to do with our spare minutes and hours, we are content to swim in the shallows and pass our time with passing the time.

• We are always engaged with our thumbs, but rarely engaged with our thoughts. We keep downloading information, but rarely get down into the depths of our hearts. That’s acedia—purposelessness disguised as constant commotion.
• We are never alone.

• “We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”

• We are in a “non-stop festival of human interaction.”

• Our digital age gives new relevance to Pascal’s famous line: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

• Neil Postman’s admonition is wise: technology “must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things.” We must understand that “every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.”

• The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. We cannot be any of these things. We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choose wisely. The sooner we embrace this finitude, the sooner we can be free.

I'm still reflecting on my reading, but plan to focus more time learning about this as well as taking action on some of the tips and ideas I've learned about from this reading.  I also recently have read Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard Swenson. I would love to hear from you about other resources and ideas you have for dealing with technology's role in contributing to our crazy busy lives!