Pen and paper may be hovering somewhere between retro and extinct these days, but Kevin Purdy, for one, feels that there is still a place for ballpoints and notepads in our lives. Writing on Fast Company, Purdy highlights tasks he believes are better suited to exercising your (probably rapidly deteriorating) handwriting:

• Lightning-strike ideas. “Carrying a notebook with you at all times is cheap and easy,” writes Purdy, and, according to Marina Martin, a business efficiency consultant quoted in the article, “even the most fluid, thoughtful electronics introduce too much friction into the process of thinking, writing down, then thinking further out.” Pen and paper is better for recall as well. “By committing your thought to paper, you’re also doing more to lock it into place,” writes Purdy. “Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, has the brain scans to prove it.”
• Better to-do lists. “The role of paper is ‘changing from information recording and archiving, to a more temporary role of containing transient information,’ says Jenny Englert, senior cognitive engineer at Xerox,” writes Purdy, who continues, “In other words, paper still makes for a great to-do list.”
• Jobs and events that seem overwhelming. “One thing that reliably helped very smart students with major test anxiety was writing about their anxieties to ‘off-load’ them. And that was very specifically noted as ‘writing,’” says Purdy, citing the work of psychologist Sian Beilock, an expert on choking under pressure.

Purdy’s article is lengthy and well worth a read, going into much more detail about why these situations are best handled with old-fashioned tools, but a rough outline of his argument is a great spark to get gadget lovers thinking about what situations, if any, still call for a pen.

Personally, my to-do lists have long ago gone electronic and I’m perfectly happy with that, but I agree that handwriting still channels emotions better, whether as a diary-like anxiety-control exercise or in that supremely old school gesture, the personal note or letter.

When, if ever, do you still reach for a pen?

At Net:Work 2011 this week we will discuss how the way we work is being transformed by breakthrough tools. The event will be held in San Francisco on Thursday, Dec. 8. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user ElvertBarnes

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Sometimes, however, we don’t meet all of the goals we set. I’m guilty of this. Every month there’s at least one goal I don’t accomplish. In fact, if I miss just one goal, I count myself lucky. These mistakes were the hard way for me to learn about goal-setting. But is there any other way to learn?

I believe there is. You can learn from how I’ve handled my own mistakes. Perhaps you can learn something that will keep you working on those New Year’s resolutions and goals you’ve set, and deal with the ones you were unable to meet.

Focus on your success. It’s easy to sink into disappointment, or even depression, if you don’t accomplish your goals. The more important your goal was, the more disappointed you’ll feel.  But sometimes, if you look at the list of things you’ve accomplished, you’ll discover that you’ve achieved some things that weren’t in your list of daily, weekly, or monthly goals.

For example, you might not have met the deadline of the application for the freelance gig of your dreams, but you did finish an outline for a book idea you suddenly had. You might have been slow in one of your big projects, but you were able to finish ten minor projects earlier than expected. Don’t let your mistakes occupy your mind so much that you prevent yourself from finding long-term solutions for them.

Find out what went wrong. The inability to accomplish a goal means that something went wrong. The mistake might be found in the process you set, the time available to you, or the other people you’re working with.  Here are some of the common mistakes I’ve made when setting goals:

• Vague phrasing. “Become a better writer” or “Learn more about social media” is not a goal.  Your goals must be concrete and specific enough that it’ll be easy for you to identify whether you’ve accomplished it or not.  Instead, set something like “Write at least three blog posts that don’t get modified by the editor” or “Finish reading the free social media ebook I downloaded”.
• Lack of time. It’s also possible that you underestimated the time it would take to accomplish your goal.  I’ve learned to double or triple my expected time of completion for some projects, because I know that I’ll be underestimating it if I don’t.
• Lack of communication. If you’re working with a team on a specific goal, examine why you weren’t able to deliver the results you wanted. Was the schedule of deliverables clear from the beginning? Is there a proper venue for group discussions?
• Too ambitious. The problem with ambitious goals is that they tend to be large in scope.  Break down the project into smaller milestones and next actions. Schedule these appropriately. You might take 30 minutes or more to do this for large projects, but you’ll be saving time in the long run.
• Too simple. The opposite of ambitious goals are the ones that seem too simple – they’ll take only two to five minutes of your time. Sounds easy, right? But sometimes, the fact that they’re too simple makes them easy to avoid. “Oh that’s easy, I can do that later.” Until later becomes tomorrow, then next week, then next month. David Allen has a solution for this known as “the two-minute rule”. If there’s an item on your to-do list that takes less than two minutes to do, then just do it the second you think of it.

Know why you want to set this goal in the first place. Did you just set this goal because it’s on a list you made six months ago and it’s embarrassing to erase it? Or did you set it because you think it’s a goal you should have, but not necessarily a goal you want? By knowing why you set certain goals, especially personal ones, you can find the initial motivation you had and use it as your continuing inspiration.

Let’s face it – even if I wrote all of this down and you spent fifteen precious minutes reading it, goal setting will still be a trial-and-error experience for everyone.  But with a little warning and by learning through another person’s mistakes, we’ll be more aware of what we’re doing the next time we sit down and write our goals.

Do you always accomplish the goals on your list?  If not, how do you deal with missed goals?  If you always manage to accomplish your goals, what contributes to your success?

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Google attempts to compete almost point-for-point against major Microsoft Office features on nearly every note except for task and project management. What are they waiting for? It’s wonderful that we have so many on and offline ways of managing personal and group tasks whether they are directly tied to projects or not. Yet we’re still sorely missing tight integration between email, documents and tasks for those of us who use Google tools in our businesses. The inability to assign and track simple tasks and lists through Google Apps is a glaring omission that may very well be the reason some small businesses and groups are hesitant to give up their Outlook-based workflows with its handy task pane.

Clearly, we’re ready for Google to make some sort of announcement in this area, aren’t we? Should Google take the GrandCentral/Jot route and acquire a company like Remember the Milk, which already does an outstanding job of integrating tasks with Gmail, or should they develop something from scratch once and for all?

How do you think Google should respond to those of us who are clammoring for to-do/task management baked into their products?

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In other words, what are your priorities? It doesn’t matter how much you get done if you’re doing the wrong stuff. Along with a to do list, you need a way of prioritizing that helps you decide what should be done.

I like the prioritization scheme that Susan L. Reid offers in her book Discovering Your Inner Samurai. She suggests you pick two top priorities and commit to them for one month:

Two priorities; one-month commitment. That’s all. Of course, if you can, you might narrow that priority down to one. Most of us, though, unless we are in an extreme situation, will have two.

Does having only two priorities mean you completely ignore other things you need to get done — work assignments, chores at home, or your taxes, for example? No. It just means when you’re scheduling your time and picking things to do you first look to tasks having to do with one of your two top priorities.

This may not work for your individual situation of course — two priorities may be far too few; a month may be too long. But it has the benefit of radically simplifying and intensifying your commitments for a duration that seems totally doable yet is long enough that it should produce some real results.

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