My history with Capture

Before we get into today's blog I want to make something clear. When it comes to capture and productivity I am only sharing what I find to be valuable for me in the hopes that others will be helped by that. There are tons of people out there that are better than I am, and I understand that. If you are one of those people and you read this, know that I want your feedback. I welcome any suggestions that could save me time and effort while not impacting the quality of what I do. Feel free to leave a comment or reach out on twitter (@minorleagueCEO) and lets figure some stuff out.

As I mentioned in my first blog, I have worked my way from an entry level employee to CEO in just under a decade. When I started I had very little experience with work email, calendars, or anything we traditionally associate with an office job. What I did have was a willingness to learn and the wiggle room to improve my personal work environment. We were issued laptops in those days, but that was it. First thing I did was bring in my 17" CRT monitor and use it as a second screen (that was a bigger deal in 2009). This helped me move from one program to the next while monitoring other systems and my email (I got 20 or so a day that I was responsible for reading and that was it). Those improvements got me noticed, and about 6 months in I was promoted to a client management role. In that role I would work with points of contact with our enterprise customers to communicate changes, deliver KPI (Key Performance Indicator) reporting, and ensure we were prepared for the client's roadmap. Work would come in via email, phone, messenger, and people walking up to my desk. That was a lot for me to handle especially when I got 3 more clients assigned to me and I was still doing the job I was originally hired for. I became so busy that it surpassed my ability. At one point I was letting too many things fall though the cracks so my manager took me to lunch one day and politely told me I needed to get it together or get out. That was it. Being told I was sucking and not being able to disagree was a very unsettling experience, and it was also one that changed the trajectory of my life.

What I took from that conversation was that I needed to get better, and it was up to me to do so (lots of times it works like that in small companies). I took to the internet searching any and everything I could about how to improve my organization, time management, and overall productivity. It was at that time I found Ubiquitous Capture, inbox zero and many other strategies to help improve my ability, and the great thing about it was I was able to see immediate improvement. Looking back on it, that was important because if it had taken months to see benefit, I probably would have quit. Instead I learned that effort equals results, which is a foundational principle of how I live my life today. The only difference being some things I do now will take years to mature, and I have the patience to be ok with that (most of the time).

Now lets get back to capture. In the first days I used Evernote to capture information. Back then it wasn’t nearly as robust as it is today, but it did the trick. I could have it on all my devices and access it from the web, so I used it for capture. I would write down daily tasks, and random things that I needed to do. It couldn’t capture tasks in a checkbox kind of way, and eventually everything got messy so I moved over to Google Keep. In keep I kept (ha) a separate task list for personal and work items as well as notes on any projects or larger tasks I was working on. I used it almost exclusively from 2013 (right at launch) to 2016. In that time I started capturing my thoughts on different ideas as well as things I wanted to remember in the future. I also kept a few lists for my standing meetings. Anything that was related to a meeting went into those lists so when I showed up, I was ready to go with my topics. It worked well as I progressed through the years to COO. For reference, I would get up to 300 emails a day as COO. 150 were auto filed, 100 were read only, and 50 were actionable in some way or another. I will get more into how I managed this when we talk about email management in the future, but that is the kind of jump I made and I was living in my email. 

In 2016 I took over as CEO and for the second time in my career I was in over my head (and still am). When you are COO just about everything can be black and white. You have an operational problem, you put your head down and work. As a CEO you have to look out and into the future. That along with the previous CEOs organization broke me. Imagine each responsibility of a CEO as a puzzle. When you put the pieces together you get the big picture which is critical for the position. Now imagine walking into a room that is supposed to be a bunch of puzzles waiting to be looked at, except for they are not. They are piles of puzzles that need to be put together, but it doesn’t stop there. I quickly realized that all the puzzle pieces were mixed in together and tons of pieces were missing, and the only way to figure out what was missing was to put the puzzles together. It was hard. I put in 70+ hour weeks doing that while trying to figure out where our company should  go while still holding a lot of the operational responsibility from my previous position. It took about 3 months, but I got good and burned out. Anyone that has dealt with burnout can tell you that it isn't pretty. All your drive flies out the window and I spent months just doing what I had to with little to no proactivity. The first thing out was capture. Capture was a part of work, and I would be damned if work followed me home during those times. I would work a full 8-10 hour day, drive home and eat with the family and then work from after the kids went to bed until I did.  Work did follow me though…..because I didn’t capture. Capturing releases the stress of having something you need to do in your brain. That constant itch in the back of your mind that you will forget and therefore are trying to carry. In my case, the thing I should have captured would stick with me until I needed the info, in which case I would promptly forget what it was that I was supposed to do/say. Over the next few months I tried many different tools like Microsoft Planner, To-Do, iOS reminders synced to my exchange reminders so I could still see them on my android devices, and many others. All of it was fruitless. I would improve slightly, and then the habit wouldn’t catch because some part of the process was too difficult for me to constantly do. Difficulty in this case would be the ability to capture something as quickly as possible. Then I tried Wunderlist.

Wunderlist was something I had heard about since it launched, but I was happy with Google Keep so I never tried it. I circled back to Wunderlist when I first started looking for a new tool, but they had recently been bought by Microsoft and I didn’t want to build processes in a platform whose future was uncertain. Microsoft has a history of consuming apps and "making" them fit when it comes to office add-ons so I thought for sure that would be case with Wunderlist. After a year, however, it seemed that Wunderlist was going to stay as is, and I have recently learned that the Wunderlist team is responsible for To-Do in the Office 365 world. At some point they will reach parity with Wunderlist and surpass it so I wouldn’t be surprised if I am using To-Do sometime in the coming years. Wunderlist has all the functionality I need in order to keep everything organized. It's not trying to be too fancy, and it is stupid easy to interact with on top of being customizable enough for my needs.

I had planned to put all of my capture process in one blog, but it appears that I had more to say about how I got to where I am than I realized. Next time, however, we are going to get to the meat of it. In a previous blog I mentioned it was important to know what you want to capture and why so we will be digging into that along with the habits I maintain to be successful by my own standards.