Kevin Hoyt

How I Get Things Done

I manage a team of technology evangelists as Adobe. This provides several unique challenges. The team is entirely remote (no office) and almost constantly on the go. In fact I may see my team in person only a few times a year. They are highly visible, influential, and public figures in the Adobe community. They are smart, independent and opinionated (classic Type A personalities). On top of this I also spend a significant amount of time evangelizing as well. You might be wondering then, how do I get it all done?

I’m a big fan of the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) philosophy, but have taken several liberties with the system to adapt it to my needs. Some of those adaptations are so subtle and second nature now, that I couldn’t recall them if I tried. There are however several software applications that play a considerable and visible role. This is an attempt to share those applications, and their place in my workflow such that others struggling to keep up with a barrage of requests can get things done.

Mail

Most actions come to me through email. I use Mail which ships with Mac OS X and connects to the Adobe Exchange system. The client itself is less important than how I deal with what comes into it. At a high level I use the GTD guidelines for dealing with new work: do it, defer it, delegate it, or delete it. The result is that my inbox stays near zero pretty much all the time.

If I am going to “do it” then that means I can deal with it in the next ten minutes. For those things that can’t be done now, or that require some other action first, I’ll defer it. You might be surprised to find however that “defer it” doesn’t mean put it in my calendar (for most things). More on that later. As a manager, there are things I must delegate. And quite frankly, many things get deleted after a cursory glance.

Yes, I know that GTD says “do it” falls into the two minute range, but for me ten minutes works better. One of the tweaks I’ve made to the system.

Mail can also subscribe to RSS feeds. I don’t try to subscribe to every feed out there. I obviously subscribe to the RSS feeds generated by my team. Beyond that I look for a few key influencers in the space I’m targeting. The number I’ve arrived at over the years is about a dozen feeds. Anything more is noise. The makes being laser focused on the mission very critical so that you choose the right feeds. I make time to read the feeds I’ve subscribed to once a week.

Things

Not everything that arrives via email can be done on the spot, in the next ten minutes. These things get deferred. I think the first instinct to deferring items is to put them into the calendar to be done later. While that certainly has merit, I’ve found that for me, over time, the calendar then becomes the disaster that would have otherwise been an overflowing inbox. To do lists are helpful but too unstructured for my tastes, so I use Things to manage whatever it is that comes next.

My use of Things is pretty basic. When I’m working through email, in a meeting, or talking with somebody, and a thing comes up that I can’t deal with right then, I create a new entry in my Things inbox.

Once or twice a day I’ll go through the things and file them. I’ll put due dates on some things, and put them into the “Next” folder. Some things require me to wait on another chain of events first, and those go into “Scheduled”. And of course there are things which are interesting ideas that I may never get to, and those go into “Someday.” The “Today” folder lets me see what I have to do today.

What goes in my calendar then? Usually just scheduled meetings.

You might be asking about when I check email, or filter my Things inbox. I used to schedule that time in my calendar, but found that didn’t work so well for me. As an example, I might schedule email for first thing in the morning – and that’s usually when I do it. But what if I have a flight in the morning? A presentation at a conference? If I’m relying on that block of time, and can’t respect it, then the system starts to break down.

The GTD system proper would suggest that by scheduling the time, you’d see the conflict and make another time to check email. The reality for me however was that this was simply too rigid. Email and filtering my Things inbox are actions that need to be done. They can be done whenever, at my leisure, throughout the day, or once a day. I don’t put a specific time on it, simply that I know I need to do them at some point. And realistically, so long as I’m sticking to the rest of the system, even missing a day or two entirely isn’t going to be a disaster.

iCal

You can imagine then that I’m not a power calendar user. I have concrete meetings that people arrange with me, or that I schedule with them, that show up there. If that’s all I have going on, then iCal hooked to the Adobe Exchange server works just fine for me. The one feature I really like with iCal (and that exists in other calendar programs) is the color coding feature.

When I’m not traveling, I am at home. The closest Adobe office is a two hour plane ride away. Since I travel a lot, I make it a point to “be at home” when I am home. That is to say that rather than report to my home office for work at 8 AM sharp, I’ll probably drive my daughter to school. When she comes home for lunch, I will probably also spend time eating and playing with her. Maybe a good wind rolled in, and we’ll spend the afternoon at the park with a kite.

When I’m at home though, I am not the driver of the calendar – my wife and daughter are. Yes, it’s true, the world does not revolve around me. They have their own schedules and activities ranging from school, to dance class, to bible study, to play dates, to time at the salon, and so on. The color coding in iCal lets me quickly and easily see the activities of my wife and daughter. At a glance I know if I’m going to duck out for some time with them, or if my spontaneous trip to the park will interfere.

The color coding also helps me see when I can reach out to them when I’m on the road. As an example, if my wife is taking my daughter to school, I know they’ll both be in the car at a certain time. The car has a Bluetooth phone system, so I might call and say good morning to them (especially if I’m on the East Coast).

TripIt and Flight Tracker Pro

The latest, and probably one of the more powerful arrivals into my system is TripIt. At Adobe we use a corporate designated travel agent. When you make travel plans, you get a PDF of the itinerary in your email. I fire that email off to TripIt, and it parses all the relevant data. When I leave the house, TripIt on my iPhone lets me see the week ahead. It’s partner program Flight Tracker Pro gives me up to the minute information for when I’m actually in the airport.

Just as I use the color coding in iCal to see my family activities, my wife and daughter pull the TripIt feed into iCal on their side and see what I’m doing. Of late I’ve actually been experimenting with even adding specific meetings to TripIt. This way my whole day doesn’t look blocked off to them, and I might get a call after one of my presentations to see how it went.

The downside to putting more meetings into TripIt is that while they show up in iCal, they don’t show up on the Adobe Exchange server. This creates some duplication of work I have yet to resolve, but the upside is more compelling to me than the downside, so for now the meetings remain.

Evernote

Not every thing is actionable, so for everything else I pretty much use Evernote. This is my clearinghouse.

If I get an email with an attachment I might want to reference, it lands in Evernote. If I see a web site I think is interesting or inspiring, I pull it into Evernote. If I’m at a conference and want to take notes on a presentation, I’ll do that with Evernote. If I’m pulling together research data for a project, I’ll do that with Evernote. I don’t have an iPhone 3GS (camera that can focus), but if I did, I’d even use Evernote for my receipts.

I have a few different folders in Evernote to keep things tidy, and I tag everything, every which way possible so that it is easy to locate. The largest notebook I have is my Adobe notebook, which is for all things work related. After that I have a personal notebook where I put things not work related.

I also have a “inspiration” notebook for things I find inspiring. This might be a web site screenshot, an image from Flickr, a picture of something from my iPhone, an advertisement in a newspaper – in general mostly visual things. Occasionally a Twitter message, chat conversation or newspaper article might get in there as well. I’ll refer back to this folder whenever I start a new project, or am just looking for an little dose of inspiration.

Conclusion

This is just a quick overview of some of the software I use to keep organized. There’s a lot of subtlety I’ve skipped over in the interest of brevity. There’s also the outbound communication/social aspect of my job which I haven’t mentioned at all. Larger projects themselves probably warrant some coverage in the future. If you have any input on my system, appreciate hearing about it, or want to hear more, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.