Sticking with what I’ve had has more and more often meant I run into technical problems.  My current theme is out of date in several ways–for example, it’s not widget-aware.  That means is that I can’t take advantage of simple ways to customize and control the appearance.

I’ve occasionally written several posts on a single topic (a series of posts).  At the time I used a WordPress addon (a plugin) that automatically added previous/next links so that a reader could work through a series without worrying about date or about intervening but unrelated posts.  That same plugin created a table of contents as well, so you could tell where you were in the series.

That plugin stopped working a few months back; I have no idea why.  The effort to manually input the links–to hard-wire them, so to speak–was more than I was ready to expend.  Still, I plan to write a series or two in the coming months, and I wanted to have a low-maintenance way to present all my series.

So this past weekend I started experimenting with the Organize Series plugin. I tested to see if it could link the three posts in my series about the book Improving Performance, by Rummler and Brache.

And it could.  What’s more, with a $15 add-on, I’m able to use a little bit of code and automatically generate a list of posts in a series, like this:

Improving Performance (the book)

Rummler and Brache: Improving Performance

Three levels of performance

Process is a verb, output is a noun

Dirt in the performance engine

I had to do some tinkering, and I had to purchase a $15 add-on for the plugin, but I’m content so far: I’ve accomplished my short-term goal of making each of my series work like a series again–without a lot of hand wiring.

That list of posts in the Improving Performance series, for instance: to make it appear here after installing the Organize Series plugin and the add-on, I inserted the following code into my post:

[ post_list_box series=65 ]

Enough WordPress mumbo-jumbo.  I’m going to revisit this from the perspective of learning on the job.  My hunch is that there’s a kind tradeoff that a person’s willing to make when he has a problem to solve (or an opportunity to seize).  What going into figuring worth is the amount of effort expended, and the value of the results… as seen by the person with the problem or opportunity.

CC-licensed photo by Craig Bennett / theclyde.

I believe that less and less of that improvement will come from the efforts of traditional, corporate training and development.  (Note that calling yourself “Organizational Learning” isn’t the same thing as having people in your organization learn.)  I do think there’s a role for planned, structured efforts to help people acquire and improve important skills — but it’s like the supporting role of the earl of Exeter in this clip, rather than the leading one of his nephew, King Henry (whom the king of France refers to as “our brother England”).

Some of the skills that learning professionals have specialized in — analysis, design, structuring, and so far — are moving out of their control, because other people need to apply those skills and can’t or won’t wait.  This is a topic I’ll pick up again  in 2012.  I’ve been considering what I know that’s effective and thinking about how to enable other people to be effective with that knowledge.  Like, for example, how to build job aids.

One way to look at a job aid:

• It’s information external to you (rather than inside your head)
• …that you apply on the job (rather than, say, reviewing beforehand)
• …to achieve acceptable results
• ….while reducing the need to memorize.

So in part this last post of 2011 looks ahead to what I’ll be working on in 2012.  And in part it’s a reason–as if I needed one–to (re)post my explanation of Robert Burns’s most famous song, one you’re likely to hear this weekend.  Auld lang syne is a Scots phrase. Literally, it’s “old long since;” it means “the days that are past,” and it has a sense of “the things that we shared.”

Even if you decide not to bother with my chart, you ought to take the time to listen to Eddi Reader’s singing.  The video is from the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building in 2004.  In the first half, she solos with a traditional melody.  In the second half, the attendees  join with a version you likely know better.

What I had wanted to do was:

• Reduce my paper clutter
• Reduce my digital clutter, which felt nearly as heavy
• Reclaim my workspace, both physical and virtual
• Seize more of the potential of electronic notes than I had so far

That sounds like mainly organization and housekeeping, but if you rise above the roadway, it’s managing.  I wanted to do better at managing both work and non-work projects.  I figured if I could accomplish any of those things in the list, and especially more than one at once, I’d be far more likely to get a project done.   Or at least get it moving.

What would matter?

At GE, we talked about CTQs: the critical-to-quality items that represent a customer’s view about what’s most important for a product or service.  My own CTQs for doing better included:

• Retention–whatever’s in the system is ultimately in my own custody, not solely a wisp in someone else’s cloud bank.
• Ubiquity–a system that I could use in my office, on a client site, or somewhere else.
• Dwell time–an increased ability for me to stay with the task at hand.

Was that a wrong note?

For some time, I’ve used Evernote, which modestly says you can capture anything, access it anywhere, and find things fast.  (Optional side trip: Evernote’s 90-second intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQP0gkPnEcY .)

Evernote lets you create individual notes, store them in virtual notebooks, and access them on your own computer, from any computer, or through a smartphone–hey, ubiquity!  The database with your notes is stored not only on their servers (which you don’t own) but also on your PC, with automatic synchronization. You can cloudify if you like, but having a local copy of the database helps satisfy my CTQ for retention.

I’ve used Evernote for more than two years, mainly in that unfocused, plunge-right-in, that’s-kind-of-cool way. (A particular favorite: because I sketch a lot of ideas on flipcharts, I love being able to snap a picture, transfer it to Evernote, and later search for text in the image.)

Most of the time, though, I was also making multiple notebooks and creating a myriad of tags.  When it comes to tagging, some people believe that enough is enough and too much is plenty, but for me there’s a real problem with diminishing returns.  (We’ll skip over the issue of typos, as well as the pluralization dilemma: Is the tag finance or finances?)

I’d been cruising a predictable arc, from an initial everything-fits enthusiasm to a distressing suspicion that I’d reinvented the junk drawer.

To be is to be done?

On a separate track, I’d been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  I approached this book with hesitation, or more accurately evangeloskepticism, because of the… well, let’s say, the ardor of some GTD adherents.  The people who always say “GTD.” If they were Apple users, they’d be the ones who care about the code name for the next operating system.

Messy and distractable I may be, but I appreciate the advantages of a system, even if I sometimes appreciate it from afar.  Allen’s approach is more about thinking systematically than about particular tools–though you can, if you desire, buy a set of 43 plastic file folders for only $39.95 (plus shipping).  So I’ve been applying elements of that system, and adjusting the way I work with my paper files and with Evernote, and I’m happy with how the results look so far.

Different ways to see your project

Two useful, intertwined concepts: first, a task is something you can complete in a single chunk of time. ”Peel the carrots” is a task.  If you’re like me, “do the grocery shopping” is also a task; I may have a big list of items, but I get them in one trip.

At my house, we have a cluster of grocery-related tasks: plan dinner  for the week, check the ingredients we need, build a grocery list, shop (ideally, with the list).  Getting Things Done calls such a cluster a project: “any desired result that requires more than one action step.”

Which leads to the second useful concept: you don’t do a project, you do the next step.  From a manage-your-work perspective, think of the project as the goal you want to achieve (groceries purchased, workshop delivered, kitchen remodeled).  You revisit the project to generate thoughts about what the next steps might be.  When you don’t have any more steps, the project’s done.

So I create what I call a project page, which is a highfalutin name for a note on which I put a short description of the goal of the project, along with a timeframe (however nebulous) and the tag I’ve chose for that project.  I’ll also use the project page to jot notes about ideas related to the project.  That means the project page becomes a kind of greenhouse where idea seedlings can germinate until they turn into action steps.

Action steps (things I can do) become separate notes, each tagged as part of the project.  So do reference items, like email that I forward to Evernote, making the contents of the email more readily searchable.  So do things like PDF documents, which can be dragged into their own note.

Now I have a Projects notebook.  I use Evernote’s filtering tools to control what I see when I click the Projects notebook, like this:

Previously, I had more than a dozen project-specific notebooks in that sidebar. And if I create a new notebook for any multi-step effort I have (even small one with long duration, like “get a digital copy of the LP that Mom has no turntable for”), I could easy have three or four dozen.

This works better.  And I can do the same sort of selective display across multiple notebooks.

If it’s not a step, it might be a reference

David Allen suggests putting all your project-support material (things that don’t require an action but that you want to retain) into a reference file.  He leaves the form of that file up to you, though he’s quite the fan of a single, alphabetical-order, paper filing system.  I have those, but I prefer keeping digital (i.e., searchable) copies, which now go into a Reference notebook.

Allen might be less in favor of a separate location for the work-specific diaries that I call project logs, so if you see him, don’t tell him that’s what I have.  I tend to make the logs for large projects; for small ones, I’ll jot ongoing notes on the project page.  Not necessarily consistent, but, oh, well.

More than a third of my Evernote items are in the REFERENCE notebook.  To me, this makes sense.  For active projects, a lot of the relevant material isn’t a trigger for action; it’s project support.  It’s reference material.

If an item appears useful to more than one project, I apply multiple project tags.  That way it’ll show up in project-specific searches.

I also have a Project Archive notebook.  When I complete a project, I select all its items from the Projects notebook and move them to the archive.  Why?  Because that’s what I’ve always done.

In my corporate, cubicle-based days, the bottom of my four-drawer file was labeled Attic. It became a combination of historical record, reference room, and security blanket.  (I’m no hoarder, though;  every year or two, when it got full, I’d weed it back by a third or so.)

The Projects notebook and the Project Archive account for another 20% of my notes, which means that together with Reference, half of what I keep in Evernote is in just three notebooks.

Not that there’s a prize for Fewest Notebooks Used–though if there were, Ruud Hein would be a real contender.  He wrote an Evernote GTD How To that inspired me to experiment and adapt.  (I also like his tone and his pragmatism.)

Speaking of pragmatism, this post is long enough.  I have a follow-up underway with some more examples of what I’ve tried and what results I’ve gotten.

Evernote examples are my own.
CC-licensed images: dwell time by Owen Blacker.
Junk drawer by windsordi / Di Bédard.
Archive of papers by Ben McLeod.

Recently someone asked whether I’d be interested in working on a project as a “user experience strategist.”  I don’t think I have the necessary qualifications, whatever they might be, but I do have a growing collection of items that fall into the intersection of user experience and curse of knowledge.

This, for instance, is a message I encountered while waiting for some online animation to start:

I actually don’t remember what the animation was about.  I do remember that the entire load took perhaps 25 seconds, a span of time for which ten-thousandths of one percent rarely matter.  Even if the load took 25 minutes, 1% of that time would be 15 seconds.  Two decimal places (0.01%) would be 0.15 seconds.  Close enough.

The next example is from a local government authority in Scotland.  ”Council” here means something like the town or county government in the U.S., with responsibility for things like public safety, roads, and schools.  While the page does have a sidebar for “quick links,” what you see in the box below is the entire text for frequently asked questions.

Not only are questions frequently asked, they’re frequently anticipated, which may explain this FAQ example from a long-distance phone service:

And as we turn to the last example–I know peeves are often kept as pets, but this one I think has gone feral: I don’t understand why so many websites and blogs fail to include a preview button for comments.

So, in this next example (from an advertising-industry publication), the upper section shows what you see when you want to make a comment.  The lower section shows a result that isn’t all that surprising.

Behind all of these, I think, is likely someone whose assumption was “people will know what this means” or “this will help them do X.”

The loose sense of inbox zero is an email counterpart to the Cleared-Off Desk.  Either of these things can be ripped from context, turned from a possible indicator of progress  into the Talisman of Virtue.

Recently I spent a distressing  amount of time mucking around with my email, especially the rules I’ve created to initially process stuff.  This felt a lot like work (in the “chores you need to get around to” sense), which had me musing yet again on training versus learning.

I had this idea: training is about YOU; learning is about ME.

To generalize energetically, one of the most common meanings for “training” in organizations is:

A planned, focused, structured approach…
over a limited amount of time…
for novices, especially in groups…
to develop competence they currently lack…
in applying mainly procedural skills…
in a limited amount of time.

That’s what’s behind how to use the email system, how to manufacture ceramic heaters, how to write a flood insurance policy” or how to open savings accounts.  Those are examples of predominantly procedural tasks from projects I’ve worked on, either for newly hired employees or people needing to learn a  process significantly different from the old one.

“Training is for you” is shorthand for saying that someone’s delineated this cluster of skill.  Yes, I know that often the delineation isn’t that great–but for now assume  somebody did sufficient analysis to say:

• These people can’t do these things
• They can’t because they don’t know how
• Knowing how will enable them to produce these results to this level of quality.

At the risk of seeming to lowball, I’m thinking about that end-of-training level of quality as competence.  Competence, as opposed to mastery.  In that highly-conditional context in the box above, you develop training for others (“training is for you”) to help them become competent–to perform adequately in a new environment.

Remember, though, they’re the people doing the learning (“learning is for me”).  What’s more, as on-the-job performance moves from the relatively narrow context of isolated procedural skills (how to complete a mortgage application) to more complex situations (how to help clients understand and choose a mortgage option), you can’t help people achieve competence, let alone mastery, through traditional training and development approaches.

Even in the small area of dealing with email, I noticed the value of clusters of skills, not all of which would fit easily into a cookbook-style job aid. *

Like understanding and applying tools.  Not just to create email rules in Outlook (in my case), but to apply options that mark, sort, auto-delete incoming mail–and to handle my replies, a harder task when you’re not on a corporate server. Or like periodically perform maintenance, like tracking down the causes of persistent problems, or like reviewing, editing, and pruning existing rules.

Or like knowing when to stop doing more of what you’ve been doing. On that last point, I’m thinking of GE’s Jack Welch.  He talked once about inventory turns, a way to measure how you’re controlling inventory costs.  If you try to keep 100 niblicks on hand, and you sell 500 a year, you have 5 inventory turns.  In general, a lower number of turns means higher cost.

If the niblick group tries to improve from 10 to 11 turns a year, they’ll probably do the same things, only faster.  To go from 10 to 15 turns  in one year, “faster” won’t work.  They’ll have to rethink assumptions, re-examine givens, see the parts and the whole.  As as Welch saw, even if they don’t hit 15, they’re likely to far surpass what they would have done incrementally.

If you focus simply on getting your inbox to zero, there’s a risk that you’re just moving and deleting stuff faster.  You’re dealing with procedural specifics at a task level.  If instead you focus on processing information that comes to you, you’re do this right now, put this on the afternoon’s schedule, file this with that project, route these to the keep-for-now-but-autodelete-in-a-month folder.

Part of Merlin Mann’s approach is to route incoming items to logical next steps.  In other words, inbox zero doesn’t mean you’re done; it means you’re ready to start with things that matter.

That more complex cluster of skills isn’t something that traditional training will achieve.  It’s a performance improvement that depends on individuals learning and on various kinds of collaborative work that’s encouraged and supported by the workplace.  The kind of better practice that surpasses “best practice.”

* How clever of you to notice that I was happy to stop editing email rules for a while so I could sit back and philosophize analyze at a higher level.