I’m very fortunate to work in a job where it is not tied to my physical location. I’m a manager, and I need to spend most of my time in the office so that I can interact both with my team and with other teams. This does not preclude working from home a day a week, which is a perk that my department has maintained for everyone for many years now, or working from other places when appropriate. Originally, I took advantage of this to escape on Friday afternoons to perform my GTD weekly reviews so that I would not be distracted. Now I’ll often spend an afternoon a week working from a coffee shop just so I can focus on some of the more creative tasks that I don’t tend to attack when I’m at my desk. I was doing this before I even knew there was a name for it.

A third place is usually defined as a social space separate from the two traditional environments (home and work) where people can go either to interact or just to be around other people while they work. Coffee shops are a very common version of this, as most provide the traits of a third place: free or inexpensive, close by, food and drink, regulars, and an environment that is comfortable to spend time in. They are also my third place of choice, as I can generally count on wireless access for free or with purchase, and there’s always another one around if my chosen location begins to get too crowded. I get a coffee, put my headphones on, and get down to the business of writing posts, or crafting policies or plans, or researching topics that I just need a little time for.

I’ve also been developing some interest in the idea of coworking, but not just the basic shared environment where you can be around others while you work. I look at it more for the ability for like-minded folks to collaborate on an idea. Some of this is what we’ve been working on in the space tweep community: someone comes up with an idea and a few of us “gather around” to discuss and create it. There’s a problem with it, in that we don’t have a decent place to collaborate except for 140 characters at a time on Twitter (hence my previous post about a Spacepoints collaboration space). I look at places like NASA’s sp.ace and I wonder what an environment like that could accomplish at my company.

Of course, what did they do? The new office in Reston will have an open floor plan. The cubes, if you can even call them that, are 6 foot square, with very low glass walls (only about 3′ high). Everyone has a cube except for directors and above, who will have some of the very few offices. This is going to be a huge change for a company where most people are in offices right now, and those who are not are in full-height cubes. I look at this design and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to make phone calls, how I’m going to concentrate when other people are making phone calls, how I’m going to have private conversations with my team, and who’s going to be looking over my shoulder while I’m working. It allows for almost no personalization of our workspace, and I really don’t think it’s going to be conducive as a primary workspace for most people.

So it comes down to the fact that I want to spend time in a coworking space, but I want it to be a limited amount of time and I want to actually have a second place (work) to come back to. As much as I am trying to approach the new office with an open mind (I like the huge gym, and the cafeteria, and the collaborative spaces), I just can’t see how the actual desk space is going to work. I think it will actually force me to a third place more.

What I need is something along the lines of a virtual thirdplace, an incubator, and coworking, all mashed up. It’s no secret that most of what has been inspiring me lately is space related. And as I said in my previous post about Spacepoints, there’s a need to coordinate the resources available to the community so that you don’t need to know people to be able to get something done. Additionally, I’m a practicioner of Getting Things Done, which says that you should only have a thought once (in an ideal world), at which point you capture it and decide what to do with it. Roll all this together and it’s a pretty interesting concept for enabling people interested in STEM outreach to do, without worrying as much about the “how”. Not to mention the multiplicative effect of putting lots of ideas out there.

We’ll start with users signing up. As part of connecting to the system, they will fill out a profile that lets them specify what their skills are. This can be hobbies (like an amateur photographer, or a woodworker), professional (e.g. a lawyer), or anything in between (someone who used to do graphic design professionally but is now writing books). They can also add in resources they can reach within 1 degree (someone they know directly). This would be along the lines of they have a relative who is a publisher, for example. By doing this we build up a resource database that can be used when working on a project later.

Now we add in the ability for users to quickly capture ideas. Whenever someone has an idea about something to do, no matter how small the idea is, how impossible they think it is, how ill-defined it is at the moment of conception, the person should be able to quickly save it in the system. They can send it by logging into the site and writing it down, by emailing it in, by sending an SMS or a tweet, or any other way we can think of. Reliable capture is an important GTD concept, and here it will let all the possible ideas be captured. Additionally, as soon as an idea is captured, it should be open to the rest of the community for comment. This lets everyone start fleshing out the idea, expanding on it, spinning off of it, and most importantly, turning it into a reality. It will be important to treat this as brainstorming, and keep it positive and constructive.

Once we have an idea and comments on it, we’re ready to start executing. This is where things start to get tricky, because there’s a big difference between talking and doing. For any project, leadership could be collaborative, or it could be coordinated by a single person. If it’s a single person, it could be the person who originally came up with the idea, or it could be someone else who wants to run with it. Regardless, this is where the database of resources comes in. Users should be able to search what’s available, contact folks to find out if they can help, and attach people to the project. Much like an incubator, there should probably be some amount of common resources available to use, such as web hosting or database servers, for those projects that will exist online.

There are a lot of gaps in this idea right now. For example, how do you handle projects that you want to keep somewhat closed? And how do you track credit for a project? That’s less important than a lot of technical details, but it’s critical for continued engagement that people have their contributions recognized. And when an idea really takes off, the people who made it happen should be identified and celebrated. We’ll figure out the details along the way.

This is, of course, a well known phenomenon. It has something to do with creating multiple pathways in your brain to the same information. It’s the core of the GTD system: get it out of your head and into your system. It still amazes me that it works, and that your brain will relax when you do actually put things down on paper.

Something has been eating at me for the last week or so. I’ve had a hard time focusing on most of my information-based tasks (i.e. not things like “Go get milk”, but rather things that require actual thought). I know that something has taken up residence in my head, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. Even after completing my weekly review, it was still hanging around.

Yesterday, finally, I decided to take a stab at what could be cluttering up my brain. I started a mind map for an as yet undisclosed project (Sorry, I just can’t talk about it yet – hopefully soon I can) that has a wide impact and that I have little control over at present. While definitely helpful for that project, it did not release the tension. This morning, while in my favorite thinking room (guess), a few small tasks came to me that needed to be taken care of. As the iPhone does not play nice with the shower, I did not write them down immediately.

I went through my morning routine, realizing at one point that we needed to pick up more diapers from Costco very soon. Out comes the iPhone, and in goes the note “Costco – diapers”. I also remembered to write down the other thing, and suddenly it was as if the clouds cleared and the sun came out.

“Review horizons of focus”

Yes, that’s right. My upper horizons are out of whack after the mess that has been the past year, and while I had an action to review and update them a while ago, it got sidetracked shortly after I started by an interruption. Especially given the projects I am working on presently, I cannot think clearly about the longer term because I don’t have it down on paper. But just writing it down, putting it in my inbox, and knowing that I will address it on Friday at the latest now is sufficient for me to stop worrying about it.

I would not call myself a black belt with GTD by any stretch of the imagination. After almost a year, I’m just now getting to the point where I am very granular about my actions for computer projects. Where I used to have actions that were essentially “Write all the code for this project”, there are now a dozen actions in a project that are “Add this single function.” Despite that, even when I started up again last summer I had enough written down that I was able to keep track of most of what needed to be done. Especially considering how I was trying to bounce between being a business owner, a homeowner, a father, and a full-time systems engineer, if I didn’t have a single list I would have dropped the ball on everything.

I put off setting up my upper horizons for a while. Actually, until I attended one of David Allen’s excellent Making It All Work seminars. Shame is a powerful motivator, and I spent the train ride into DC doing my weekly review because I knew that I couldn’t face David if I didn’t have that done. That prepared me for setting up my horizons during and immediately after the seminar. At the time, I didn’t think about the horizons that much after I set them up.

It’s surprising to me now that when I sat down to look at the business finances that Friday night in October, how I didn’t think about the horizons directly, but just knew what fit with them. I wanted to be able to spend time with my girls, explore my hobbies, and not spend as much time thinking about work. Dream Dinners was never going to bring in enough money to allow me to quit my job, at least not alone. And the time required was making it such that I had no time for Bella. Not only that, but I was getting short with her far too often. We were pouring every dime we didn’t have into this business, and it wasn’t taking us where we wanted to be. The house was a little less clear, because I know it was a good place to raise the girls. At the same time, we needed to spend so much time on maintenance that there was hardly time for anything else. My daily drive was 90 minutes each way, which meant that when I got home all I wanted to do was go to sleep. And the finances just didn’t add up.

There’s a kind of comfort that comes with making that big a decision and knowing with absolute certainty that you are right. It doesn’t make it easy, but it does mean that there is no second-guessing. The only way to get there is to have a clear map of what is important to you. What your principles are, and a vision of where you want to be down the road in 5 years, 10 years, and beyond.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go review my horizons of focus.

For those not familiar, Getting Things Done (aka GTD) is a methodology for capturing, defining, organizing, and reviewing every aspect of your life, from where you want to be in 10 years to what you need to pick up at the grocery on the way home.  It’s not tied to a specific tool, and the concepts involved are generally things you already do, just not with enough regularity.  If you want to know more, there are dozens of people out there who can explain GTD better than I can.

This is actually my third time trying to implement GTD. The last two times I lost control of my system and then just stopped trying because I was not doing regular weekly reviews and I was disregarding the “hard edges” of my calendar by trying to plan out when I was going to do things, rather than keeping my calendar to the “must do” things for a particular day and working from my context lists. But both times taught me the joy of clarity. Do you have any idea how amazing it is for someone like myself, who works in computers, to be confronted with a completely empty inbox?

It’s very easy to remember when I started working on GTD this time around, because it was two days before I registered this website. Like the previous times, I took a work day and went to Starbucks instead of the office. For the serious brain dump I needed to do, I have to get out of the office where I can be interrupted, and I can’t be at home where I’m distracted. But once I got everything that was on my mind down into the computer, I decided I wanted to start writing. I quickly came up with the site name and several topics that I wanted to write about. Which, of course, created new projects in my GTD system. A very clear example of how the human brain is made for having ideas, not holding them. Once you relieve it of having to hold onto things, it can get back to what it’s good at.

So why did I just take over a month between posts, if I’m so organized and clear? Life, that’s why. The whole reason I started up again is because things were getting out of control. I have a full time job, a full time retail business, a house, and a 3 year old. I got myself together, but June and July threw a few curve balls. I felt like I had to let a few things on my list slide while I dealt with whatever the current crisis was. Everything was still in my system, though, so I was able to look at those things and say “not today.” I actually came up with the topic for this post a month ago, but I wasn’t in the right place to write it until now.

OK, so why write it now? I realized this past week that I’ve caught up on many of my stalled projects at work, simply because I had clarified them and had discrete actions available for each. Meetings that I had been putting off scheduling suddenly got on the calendar because I put an action on my list first to write an agenda for them. When I was in a mood to take care of things that I had been ignoring, I was able to because I was adhering to the GTD concepts and I knew what all the actions that were required were.

It doesn’t stop there. I’m picking back up on projects around the house, and around the business as well. It feels so good to check the actions and projects off my list that I want more of that. Clarity is addictive, and I wonder what else is going to flood in to fill the void when my head is clear.