http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers

This is one of the best productivity articles I have ever read, and I read a LOT of them.

It's so awesome I felt compelled to share it here.

Highlights:
Deliberate practice >> practice
Elite's hours worked = average's hours worked
2 peak work sessions: morning and afternoon
Elite's relaxation >> average's relaxation
Longer sessions >> fragmented work sessions

This has numerous implications on how you should design your productivity workflow and work habits, which in turn has ramifications for the productivity tools you should select.

That's interesting, but I'm not entirely persuaded. I'm involved in education, and I take an interest in those who in the UK are sometimes called the "G and T's" (no, not gins and tonics, but gifted and talented). At a popular level, Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" did much to promote the "10,000-hour rule". The book isn't entirely satisfactory, but for me it did help to debunk the idea that G and T's somehow emerge from birth fully formed as geniuses. It seemed to suggest that for a whole range of different categories of achievers in Western society, from top sportsmen to Gates and Jobs to the Beatles to C19th capitalist barons, a number of factors were involved. And thousands of hours of hard work and experience at particular stages in their lives in particularly opportune circumstances were very important.

My conclusion: yes, one can work too hard in the wrong way at the wrong things, but for success in one's chosen path somewhere along the line many long hours of focussed hard work are going to be required. And where are the apps for that? ;)

Right, within the context of this article I meant that the notion that 1,000 hours of poorly directed practice = genius is false.

I would say that you need to pick your apps and design your workflow to allow long-term concentration and accumulation combined with continual prioritized deliberate action.

There are many apps that are too lightweight or clunky to achieve these objectives.

While I appreciate your level of interest in this subject, and I do not wish to debate this topic at any length, I have to say that after reading the article, the posted comments on the author's blog, and your comments above, I am not finding it all adding up to any definitive conclusion for me. Several people who commented on the author's blog post took him to task for misreading the data, and I am not at all clear how you are relating this article to "lightweight" apps not being able to achieve your stated objectives - long-term concentration and accumulation combined with continual prioritized deliberate action.

I am happy that the article called out to you, but for me, it left me with more questions than answers. And regarding "lightweight" apps, I would think that it could be just as easy to cite overly complicated apps that people end up spending too much time learning how to use, and getting too little productivity from their time invested. As much we use software as tools for productivity, I sometimes believe that there is no substitute for the productivity that can be gained by using the "Pomodoro technique", and it requires no software at all. For me, it's the right tool for the right job. With regards to concentration, that's a whole different matter. No software is going to help me concentrate if I my brain is preoccupied. That's a matter of discipline.

Respectfully,

--Ken

?At age 13 the award-winning musicians practiced 13.7 hr per
week (Ruoff, 1981), an amount close to the 12.2 hr estimated by our best group and higher than the 8.8 and 6.2 hr per week estimated by the good and music teacher groups, respectively. At age 17, the practice of the award-winning musicians averaged 15.5 hr per week (Kaminski et al., 1984) compared with the 19.2,16.8, and 9.1 hr per week estimated by the best, good, and music teacher groups. The agreement between the estimates of our best violinists and the award-winning violinists? diary data is reasonably close and is consistent with the hypothesis that the best violinists practice more than the good violinists during early adolescence and more than the music teachers during the ir entire developmental period.?

The adolescent angle is an interesting added dimension.

I agree, the questions raised in the comments are enough to cast the entire article into doubt. I'm not going to read the original paper so I'll leave it unresolved.

It's my feeling that the conclusions he reaches are sound, with regards to the need for deliberate over non-deliberate practice, and focused sessions, and the importance of relaxation.

With regard to app selection:

"I am not at all clear how you are relating this article to ?lightweight? apps not being able to achieve your stated objectives - long-term concentration and accumulation combined with continual prioritized deliberate action."

If one accepts that practice must be deliberate rather than spontaneous, then one needs to plan, track and store one's progress. This requires at the minimum a continually functional task prioritization system to give detailed direction to each day's practice.

More generally, since deliberate action beats random action, the more focus and prioritization one can bring to one's life, the better, which is an argument for a comprehensive info workflow. It seems also that relaxation is important to performance, which argues for elimination of all stress points. Whether a lightweight or clunky app can fit into the workflow depends on the spot it is intended to fill, but these are the criteria the overall system must meet.

I included criticism of overly complicated apps in the adjective "clunky". I disagree that software plus workflow cannot assist single-session focus, or focus over weeks and years. In my view, the Pomodoro technique is a way of enhancing willpower and focus by creating artificial barriers. Good workflow and software selection can mimic this barrier-creating effect, and do so even more effectively, rendering Pomodoros a superfluous willpower and attention drain, and needlessly limiting.

Ken wrote:

With regards to concentration,
that's a whole different matter. No software is going to help me concentrate if I my
brain is preoccupied. That's a matter of discipline.

I wonder if something still could be done about helping concentration and facilitating eureka moments at the level of software. Quite often the most productive aspects of software are the particular practices people have developed in using them, however that is rarely codified or put into manuals and help files. That is why these sorts of forums are important because once in a while people may share such productivity gems.

E.g. the other day I had to move from data to an outline and I was experiencing a writer's block because the task just felt overwhelming. Even after several attempts to distill things, I still had about a 20,000 word chunky outline in Scrivener, when my final paper can only be 10,000 words. Eventually the breakthrough came by using concept mapping with VUE. Instead of trying to read through the 20k outline again, I decided to visually represent the main themes and relationships on a single concept map. That still ended up very complex, so I opened another VUE document on another monitor, and created a distilled version of the complex one. The two monitors and the two VUE maps allowed for a particular type of reflexivity, which helped me break my productivity problem. I could then use the final VUE map to start a skinny outline in Bonsai. Then I realised, I better create a third VUE map where I actually model the process I used to break my writer's block (from analysis to outline), so I can remember it the next time I'm in trouble.

It would have been nice if something at the level of software could have prompted this reflexivity. E.g. a "Stuck?" button in Scrivener, which could ask a few simple questions and then suggest "Have you tried creating a visual model of your outline? Try using two monitors. Don't forget to model the process that helped you overcome your writer's block and save it here." Stuff like that...

Dr Andus wrote:

It would have
been nice if something at the level of software could have prompted this reflexivity.
E.g. a "Stuck?" button in Scrivener, which could ask a few simple questions and then
suggest "Have you tried creating a visual model of your outline? Try using two
monitors. Don't forget to model the process that helped you overcome your writer's
block and save it here." Stuff like that...

I suppose what I'm advocating is some kind of an intelligent innovation model where users' experiences are directly fed back into some kind of a knowledge base that is fully integrated with the software itself, so interesting ideas about how to use the software productively are readily available, rather than having to wade through online knowledge databases or lurk in user forums (not that I don't enjoy lurking here :). It would be just quicker if the software offered some intelligent solutions that are specific to the problem.

Playing a musical instrument also involves physical dexterity and coordination that is absent from knowledge work (assuming you can already type extremely fast).

Deliberate practice doesn't just mean the opposite of random - it means consciously working at the edge of one's abilities to increase the failure rate (and therefore the learning rate). This seems more applicable to acquiring skills than productivity in general. While you need some time to learn and stretch yourself in any endeavor, in most settings a daily, several-hour morning and afternoon session of that is going to be the opposite of productive, because your output is going to be greater from skills you already have than from ones you are still learning.

I think focusing is pretty much an act of the will. Software may make it easier once you've decided, by hiding distractions or providing a function like hoisting, for example. But you still had to decide in the first place to hoist that particular topic or start that minimalist editor instead of checking email, reading feeds, etc. Of course, you can set up your environment and workflow to make that choice easier, and being consistent over time can make it a habit. But I think it's still willpower and habits rather than specific software that make that work.

Chris

Interesting points, Chris. I suppose I linked concentration to productivity in my post because I find that the two are related in some complicated ways. Yes, if you don't concentrate (because you lack the discipline or the software and hardware setup makes it easy to be distracted), your productivity will suffer. However, in my example I was talking about the opposite experience: I hit the wall productivity-wise and couldn't find a way of moving ahead, therefore I was more likely to be distracted and lose my concentration (as that was less painful).

But I'm all for software offering distraction-free environment options (such as the excellent full-screen view in Scrivener) or easy hoisting in Bonsai.

Yes, I do agree that concentration is a key to productivity. I was just reacting to the initially posted article and the fact that "practice" may not translate directly to productivity in general (although considering the possible parallels is interesting).

In my own case, I think I've given up a bit on info management software ever becoming exponentially or profoundly more useful in my lifetime, so I've tried to refocus my efforts on improving my own ability to focus in spite of technology rather than due to technology. Similarly with managing tasks - I can spend my time fiddling around with myriad algorithms and sorting to get software to present the right task at the right time (and one that I just happen to feel like doing right when it is presented), or I can use my judgment, intuition, and willpower in the moment to decide what to do and then do it. Software is still in the mix, but I have lower expectations of it. I guess I am going through a CRIMP rehab phase.

I think your idea of having other users' feedback and workflows fed back into the program somehow and presented as guidelines or tips based on the current task would be great. Or an app could just embed this forum. ;-) The problem is associating a bunch of forum threads to a specific real-time use case... but I do find the "here's how I use software X to accomplish task Y" to be very illuminating and useful. And I think as your particular insight on a particular workflow problem illustrates, you have to be able to capture your personal insights somehow in a way that will let you take advantage of the lesson learned if a similar situation comes up in the future. Maybe a personal procedures document/outline that actually gets updated and referred to as one works... And perhaps a community resource of specific workflow recipes?

Chris

First, a big thank you to JB for not taking offense at my earlier post. The topic he raises is quite interesting, and the discussion that has followed has made for great thought. As I am stretched for time, I will sum up my feelings by saying that while good software can enhance a person's focus, I really feel that the discipline and desire need to be there to really obtain maximum benefit. And, to just touch on the issue raised by Dr. Andrus, what I would really like is not better software, but an editor. Sometimes I find that there is no substitute for talking an idea out with another person. Technology can be useful towards this solution by allowing a person to work closely with somebody who is not physically present (e.g. Skype or Google+), but for me, there is often no substitute for discussion.

I will say one thing, as time has gone on my ability to concentrate has become harder and harder. I do not know if it is related to age, or to having 24/7 access to the world through the internet, or some combination of these and other factors, but my concentration habits have gone from those of a long distance runner to that of a sprinter. Not that it was ever that easy for me, but it's just that much harder now, and my desire to focus is that much greater.

--Ken

"Playing a musical instrument also involves physical dexterity and coordination that is absent from knowledge work (assuming you can already type extremely fast)."

Perhaps. Or perhaps it's all about the myelin, baby: http://www.viperchill.com/productivity/

"it means consciously working at the edge of one?s abilities to increase the failure rate (and therefore the learning rate)."

One can do the same in knowledge work, by working at the edges of one's knowledge base instead of repeating the known. Think boring vs. learning jobs. It doesn't have to be a new skill, it can be a deeper application. The violinists are not learning a new instrument every practice session.

I disagree that an initial decision is required for focus. Tight integration of habit with workflow with software affordance can lead one insensibly into focused productivity.

It happens to me every morning. I wake up blearily, check email and RSS for a stimulation hit because I'm just completely lazy, find something interesting and start writing a response in a (highly-focused) Emacs scratch file (out of sheer laziness, so I can get it out of my head, because thinking requires effort), run out of new RSS entries, and then I'm off to the races because I'm already in my workflow environment, and the next step is as habitual as "left foot after right foot".

I would say that the defining minimum is not so much FOCUS as ENERGY. Below a certain energy level the brain cannot actively engage stuff, and is forced to passively consume mindless entertainment.

Focus is much more involuntary than I think most people credit it. What most people consider to be "focusing" is to me just burning energy to compensate for poor passive barriers against emotional and informational distractions. This can work but is fatiguing. But if you have good passive barriers, you don't need to burn energy to focus. If you've ever stared at a wall for hours in a stupor, that much is obvious.

So yeah, to return to my morning example, by the time I've exhausted the RSS and gotten my first cigarette and meditation going, I already have so much momentum that it would take a serious effort not to continue working in a focused productive way. As long as I'm not sick, this holds true.

Sure, there are super-challenging cognitive tasks I may not feel like tackling right away, but that's more a function of energy level. Trying to take them on before energy levels are sufficiently high would induce a spike in cortisol, which would require deliberate "focus" to push through. There's no need, since I can just wait till later in the day, when I'll be bored with the easy stuff.

Which brings up a related point - it's good not to micro-manage task sequencing, but just select areas of work. That way you can pick subtasks by available energy. Also, it's good to have a workflow that allows pedantic plodding with predefined baby steps, or complex leaps of genius, so that you can tackle topics in either a low-energy or high-energy way.

Yep, that got me through half a morning cigarette. Thanks guys!

JBfrom wrote:

It
happens to me every morning. I wake up blearily, check email and RSS for a stimulation
hit because I'm just completely lazy, find something interesting and start writing a
response in a (highly-focused) Emacs scratch file (out of sheer laziness, so I can get
it out of my head, because thinking requires effort), run out of new RSS entries, and
then I'm off to the races because I'm already in my workflow environment, and the next
step is as habitual as "left foot after right foot".

Hmm, I guess it might depend on what's in your email. Email is stimulating to me, but it's negative stimulation about 90% of the time. I get a lot of stressful things constantly coming in through email. I've found if I can just put off checking mail for as long as possible each morning, I can make a lot more progress on more demanding tasks that require an hour or two of complete focus. Also, there is something satisfying about starting out in a cocoon of self-directed work rather than turning on the external world first thing - at least for me.
RSS is less stressful to me and sometimes worthwhile, but it also just feels like noise most of the time, so I tend to only do that on my phone when I'm waiting somewhere.

Focus is much more involuntary than I think most people credit it. What most people
consider to be "focusing" is to me just burning energy to compensate for poor passive
barriers against emotional and informational distractions. This can work but is
fatiguing. But if you have good passive barriers, you don't need to burn energy to
focus. If you've ever stared at a wall for hours in a stupor, that much is obvious.

How is it burning energy to decide not to check email? Or really whatever happens to constitute focus at the moment? It's just an up-front decision (and assume you already have enough glucose for decision-making), and really a micro-decision. Once that one-second decision is made, all the energy can go to the task at hand.

In any case, it's really just a matter of whatever works.

Chris

Yeah, infrequent checking is what Tim Ferriss recommends.

I don't find it's a problem. Yes, sometimes stressful things come through. But I have pretty good passive meditation barriers to stress.

And there are benefits. At the initial read, I will just scan and star if it requires real actual work.to answer. That way I know if anything urgent comes up, which allows me to mostly cut off the phone and chat channels, which are more interruptive, and yet I'm still reachable for urgent matters.

As far as stress, I find that it can be eustress, in that it gets the right brain working on the new problem, which you then dump into a scratch file, as a resource for later when you deal with teh problem. The longer I let a problem like this sit, the better my solution tends to be. I don't like answering difficult emails without the benefit of a percolation period - I think this is a downside of Tim's methodology, in addition to it forcing you to be reachable by phone or chat interruption.

Focusing requires energy if you have to push out mental fragmentation, distraction, worry etc

It can be quite draining to force yourself to work on something under difficult circumstances, as I'm sure everyone has experienced. Difficult circumstances can include a poor state of info organization or a choppy workflow.

Better to spend that energy without stress on work, so that you feel refreshed by the positive energy of work, rather than drained by it.

Some thoughts after reading through this fascinating discussion:

- Sometime ago Daly wrote a post on getting up early http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2817 I believe in circadian body/mind rhythms and know that, regardless of the tools, I will be best at doing different things at different times of the day: 5:00-8:00 for texts, 8:00-11:00 for organisation, 11:00-14:00 for focused discussions, 14:00- 16:00 for physical exercise, 16:00-18:00 for social communication, 18:00-... for delving on technical problems (whose solutions will probably be manifest after a good night's sleep) etc. These are indicative times but for me they work. Many of my productivity problems have to do with doing the wrong thing at the wrong time...

- Re focus / concentration: it may indeed be a matter of discipline, but the surrounding conditions can facilitate it or make it more difficult. Is it surprising that many of us look back to DOS days, JB swears by Emacs Org-mode and full text editors like ZenWriter, Q10, WriteMonkey etc. abound? I only switched from WordPerfect 5.1's 'darkroom' environment to Windows editors when I could no longer run it... When working on texts early in the morning I will disable PopPeeper's auto-checking of mails, because I find even its tiny static flag notification distracting.

- I believe that software can indeed help as Dr Andus suggested, even without AI; much of the software we discussed here offers specific views to our data. IMHO, the ideal tool would provide (a) different representations of structured relationships, i.e. concept mapping, tabular, outline etc. and (b) zoomable views to those representations. The latter is very important and surprisingly missing from most offerings. Even more, when zoomable views are provided e.g. in TreeSheets, they treat all info at a certain level as of equal value. Yet just as on a geographical map there are landmarks and we will often visualise France with an out-of-proportion Eiffel Tower at its centre, so we may need to have such 'landmarks' in our data too.

Hit 'post' too soon.

- Ken, I will fully agree with your praise for discussion as an invaluable means to get concepts further.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

- Sometime ago
Daly wrote a post on getting up early
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2817 I believe in circadian
body/mind rhythms and know that, regardless of the tools, I will be best at doing
different things at different times of the day: 5:00-8:00 for texts, 8:00-11:00 for
organisation, 11:00-14:00 for focused discussions, 14:00- 16:00 for physical
exercise, 16:00-18:00 for social communication, 18:00-... for delving on
technical problems (whose solutions will probably be manifest after a good night's
sleep) etc. These are indicative times but for me they work. Many of my productivity
problems have to do with doing the wrong thing at the wrong time...

Investing in this sort of self-awareness and self-management is exactly the type of thing that seems to have a higher payoff for me currently than any specific tool, because I have mostly ignored it in the past, just trying to plow through things with no regard for it. Like Dr Andus, I hit a wall in terms of productivity, and the bottleneck for me was not a software issue.

- I
believe that software can indeed help as Dr Andus suggested, even without AI; much of
the software we discussed here offers specific views to our data. IMHO, the ideal tool
would provide (a) different representations of structured relationships, i.e.
concept mapping, tabular, outline etc. and (b) zoomable views to those
representations. The latter is very important and surprisingly missing from most
offerings. Even more, when zoomable views are provided e.g. in TreeSheets, they
treat all info at a certain level as of equal value. Yet just as on a geographical map
there are landmarks and we will often visualise France with an out-of-proportion
Eiffel Tower at its centre, so we may need to have such 'landmarks' in our data too.

I agree completely - it seems that it would be possible to have one underlying data store of atomic items that is then viewed and manipulated in different ways (calendars, network graphs, timelines, outlines, pin boards, concept maps, spreadsheets, checklists, et al.). I think Evernote is on the right track here, by providing a ubiquitous storage and synchronizing mechanism and then an API where anyone can build different views on top of that data (there is a tool in beta called TuskTools that allows displaying your Evernote notes on a calendar, for example). Unfortunately, it's really still in its infancy when compared to the speed and power most of us are used to from dedicated info apps. Evernote is already great for having certain info automatically accessible on all of your devices, but I wish the native desktop client was much speedier and that more innovative third-party tools for it would develop more rapidly.

Chris

On the deliberate practice issue, here is another excellent post:

http://supermanpua.blogspot.com/2011/11/talent-is-overrated-book-review-notes.html

It's a review of the book "Talent is Overrated," and covers the same topics as the original post's linked article. The conclusions fit nicely with Tim Ferriss' strategy of achieving rapid talent acquisition.

Key quotes:

"What really makes the difference is a highly specific kind of effort-"deliberate practice"-that few of us pursue when we're practicing golf or piano or stockpicking."

"Deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved."

"One needs to work on skills and abilities that are just out of reach (learning zone) rather than those that are already mastered (comfort zone) or those that are too hard (panic zone). High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real."

"Deliberate practice requires focus and concentration, which makes it mentally taxing and not likely to be a lot of fun. A finding across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit. ?If you?re practicing with your mind, you couldn?t possibly keep it up all day.?"


"Before-During-After
Before the work: Set goals that are attainable in the near future and make a specific plan for getting there. ...

During the work: You need to focus on what you are doing. This is called metacognition. ...

After the work: Practice is worthless without feedback. Try to compare your performance to your previous efforts and appropriate established standards. ... After you do this, decide how you are going to adapt your actions the next time you do the work."

Chris Murtland wrote:

Investing in this sort of self-awareness and self-management is exactly
the type of thing that seems to have a higher payoff for me currently than any specific
tool, because I have mostly ignored it in the past, just trying to plow through things
with no regard for it. Like Dr Andus, I hit a wall in terms of productivity, and the
bottleneck for me was not a software issue.

Since we are at it, Bits du Jour will offer within the week a significant discount on the Get Focused Multimedia Course http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/get-focused-multimedia-course/ by Roger Constandse, developer of Achieve Planner, discussed positively here in the past.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

?Deliberate practice requires focus and concentration, which makes it mentally taxing and not likely to be a lot of fun. A finding across disciplines > is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit. ?If you?re practicing with your mind, you couldn?t possibly keep it up all day.??

In the last couple of months I've been tracking my pure productive time (when I'm actually focusing and working on my project sitting at the PC) with a manual stopwatch and a spreadsheet. I found that my average productive time is 4.5 hrs per day. I've now restructured my daily schedule to make sure I achieve no less and no more (overachieving in one week led to underachieving in the following week).

Alexander, thanks for referencing my post on benefits of getting an early start. Indeed, I believe many, if not most of us, may have times of days which are better suited to some tasks more than to others.

More recently I wrote another blog post which may also have relevance to this discussion - it looks at the notion of conscious awareness being beneficial, especially when we face the experience of overwhelm. I suggest that mindfulness practice enables the kind of conscious awareness which enables us to experience and react in a useful manner to those thoughts which interfere with our ability to be focused, and to work in an optimal manner.

This blog post may be found here: http://www.exuberanteclectic.com/2011/10/conscious-awareness-key-to-getting.html

The operative words in the article Dr Andus introduced may be in its title: If You?re Busy, You?re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers - and those words are "surprisingly relaxed."

We think of relaxation as something we do when we are not working, as the antithesis of work - but my experience, distorted as it often has been with issues related to ADHD and executive dysfunction, is that my best intellectual activity, or my best work as a chaplain or therapist, has occurred in the so-called flow state, which to me is very similar to being relaxed.

I think as research accumulates with regard to mindfulness practice, it may be said our best chance of achieving that kind of state may be through regular practice. It may not make us gifted in what we do, but it will perhaps shift our relationship to the stuff of our life in a way which enables a more relaxed approach. And with that go notions such as being focused, have greater awareness, being able to learn and understand without "friction," and so on. Having said that, I need to emphasize one does not practice mindfulness for any "goal" or "purpose" other than the practice. So while it is true certain contexts of our life - stress, overwhelm, chronic pain, grief - may lead to our taking up the practice, we do not do so with a specific goal.

Daly




Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Some thoughts after reading through this fascinating discussion:

- Sometime ago
Daly wrote a post on getting up early
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2817 I believe in circadian
body/mind rhythms and know that, regardless of the tools, I will be best at doing
different things at different times of the day: 5:00-8:00 for texts, 8:00-11:00 for
organisation, 11:00-14:00 for focused discussions, 14:00- 16:00 for physical
exercise, 16:00-18:00 for social communication, 18:00-... for delving on
technical problems (whose solutions will probably be manifest after a good night's
sleep) etc. These are indicative times but for me they work. Many of my productivity
problems have to do with doing the wrong thing at the wrong time...

- Re focus /
concentration: it may indeed be a matter of discipline, but the surrounding
conditions can facilitate it or make it more difficult. Is it surprising that many of
us look back to DOS days, JB swears by Emacs Org-mode and full text editors like
ZenWriter, Q10, WriteMonkey etc. abound? I only switched from WordPerfect 5.1's
'darkroom' environment to Windows editors when I could no longer run it... When
working on texts early in the morning I will disable PopPeeper's auto-checking of
mails, because I find even its tiny static flag notification distracting.

- I
believe that software can indeed help as Dr Andus suggested, even without AI; much of
the software we discussed here offers specific views to our data. IMHO, the ideal tool
would provide (a) different representations of structured relationships, i.e.
concept mapping, tabular, outline etc. and (b) zoomable views to those
representations. The latter is very important and surprisingly missing from most
offerings. Even more, when zoomable views are provided e.g. in TreeSheets, they
treat all info at a certain level as of equal value. Yet just as on a geographical map
there are landmarks and we will often visualise France with an out-of-proportion
Eiffel Tower at its centre, so we may need to have such 'landmarks' in our data too.

Correct. Conscious outcome orientation removes one from flow, because it precipitates a cascade of conscious attempts to take control from the subconscious.

Attachment to conscious outcome is not a useful outcome orientation.

Conscious awareness of what one's desired outcome is at the time one needs to be aware of it can be very useful.

In the context of mindfulness one can be aware of something in a manner which does not precipitate a struggle between the conscious and subconscious. If a sense of struggle arises, then it can be recognized as such, and observed. The sense of struggle will dissolve.

Mindfulness may allow one to be aware of that which normally is not part of conscious awareness.

When that awareness is of, for example, a thought about our work, or the way we are feeling, of about the future, that is not helpful, we then have an opportunity to accept it as it is, and to look at alternate ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Daly

JBfrom wrote:

Correct. Conscious outcome orientation removes one from flow, because it
precipitates a cascade of conscious attempts to take control from the subconscious.

I believe that flow is a useful concept. Kitchen timers can be useful! The various Pomodoro applications have been mentioned. For Mac users there are also Concentrate and Vitamin R among others. A book has been written entitled 'Creating Flow with Omnifocus'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology
http://getconcentrating.com/
http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/index.html
http://usingomnifocus.com/