I’ve been wondering what the difference is between a task and a habit.

Just to make things more interesting, how about the difference between a recurring task and a habit?

One might think that the signal thing about a habit is that it’s… well, habitual.

“Habitual” means, among other things, that you don’t have to be reminded of it by your PIM, I would guess. When the trigger for your habit hits, you do the habit (Charles Duhigg wrote the book on habits, literally; see his Power of Habit for more on triggers, etc.)

I have a morning routine that’s pretty much a habit by now, but I still go through a checklist every morning even though I probably have it by heart and it’s probably triggered just by getting up. (Atul Gawande wrote the book on checklists, the Checklist Manifesto)

Maybe my morning routine isn’t as habitual as I would like, or I wouldn’t need the checklist.

But I have a bunch of things in my PIM that are essentially habits or habit wannabes. Strength training twice a week. Blog postings for this blog.

And just to complicate things, I have a habit tracker, HabitHub, which I use only on my phone and tablet (not for any good reason; HabitHub only runs on Android)

What do I track in HabitHub? “Move the bod” (which is any exercise every day), “Only Connect” (which is some connection with someone every day) and “Deep Work” (which is some Deep Work every day). I do this just to keep a Seinfeld-like chain of virtue.

But then isn’t my “goal” then to move the bod, connect, and do deep work every day?

I feel like there’s some difference among these things, but I’m not sure I can put my finger on it.

I lavish attention on my PIM.

I’ve written here about a lot of it: my task-management software, my note-taking software, my Pomodoro timer gear, even my wall calendar.

But there’s one humble-but-vital set of gear I haven’t talked about: my pen and pocket notebook.

I use gel pens. I used to use only 0.7mm Sarasa pens until they started routinely jamming on me. I switched over to 1.0mm Pilot G-2 pens; I like them fine, except those silly extra 0.3mm, which make the mark a little thick for me. (Given how often the Sarasa pens were jamming on me, I don’t think I’m going to go back.)

I use any thin notebook that fits in my shirt pocket. I especially like the “Field Notes” notebooks because of the cool name and the witty implications. But I’ve used the Moleskine “Cahier books” as well.

The major point is to have something that’s always with you and allows rapid data entry.

The dirty secret about electronic stuff is it’s unbelievably slow for data entry.

Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, called his software “Quicken” because he wanted it to be quicker than writing checks with a pen. He succeeded, but modern smart phones do not. By the time you’ve got the phone out, woken it up, corrected a few typos, fired up Evernote, and made a note I could have ten notes filled out in my notebook with my pen. 10:1. (I’ve never tried it, but I just bet it’s so!)

When I can’t put the notebook in my shirt pocket (would you believe the nerve of these shirt companies making so many men’s shirts without a breast pocket?) I stick it in a back pocket of my pants. It shortens the life of the notebook — the binding gets worn out more quickly in that position — but it’s worth it to have it ever-ready.

And then part of my morning routine is to move any notes from the notebook to my PIM (or to Evernote for things that don’t have an action). I do that (it’s pretty quick) every morning, or almost every morning.

That’s it. A humble, but a key link.

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to “not be ashamed of what I like.”

For example, I kind of like country music, although my peeps are mostly alt-rock. I should let the country-music side of me unfold and stop just hoping a country tune will come on the radio. There is no radio anymore in any case…

But as I teed up this Pimcraft blog today I felt shame. Shame that I was such a deep-dish nerd that I care about the distinction between Whirlwind and WIG. Not only that, I even use those names for them.

I first read about Whirlwind and WIG in 4 Disciplines of Execution, by McChesney, Covey, and Huling.

(Ever notice how life uses the same “magic numbers” over and over? 3, 4, 7, 12)

The problem addressed by 4DX is this: even when you know the right thing to do, people have a hell of a time doing it.  The reason is they don’t pay attention to the 4 disciplines.

I’m not going to recap the whole book — it’s a good book, you might want to check it out — but discipline #1 has to do with distinguishing between “the Whirlwind”, which is the chaos of ordinary life in all its bewildering plethora of things to do, and the New Thing.

You have to respect the Whirlwind. After all, it pays your bills, educates your children, etc. etc. But unless you respect the New Thing as well, it’s never going to happen.

You do that by setting one special goal, a Wildly Important Goal or WIG. A WIG is a goal, but it’s also a formulation of the New Thing. Without the right WIG, the New Thing probably won’t happen either.

I decided that I wanted to put the distinction between Whirlwind and WIG right into the heart of my Weekly Review.

GTD-heads will know that this is like introducing a new section into the weekly church service. It doesn’t happen very often.

And what I did was split up the work into two days. I used to do everything for my Weekly Review on Saturday. Now I put the Whirlwind part — the “normal” analysis of the normal stuff for the week — on Saturday and then Sunday morning, after 24 hours living with the new weekly goals, I create a WIG for the week.

As I slog through the 7 Hard Problems draft my WIG has generally had something to do with the book. This current week the WIG is vomit out the chapter on “Local vs. Global”. And while I’m in the midst of the 7Hard push — the WIG for the year is essentially to finish draft 1 of the book — the weekly (and monthly) WIGs will probably devolve from that. But not necessarily.

In any case, the distinction is interesting. 4DX is a good read if you need more detail.

And let me know what you think.

First off, let me say that I’ve taken New Year’s resolutions seriously for as long as I’ve taken Personal Information Management seriously, which is getting on forty years.

People have two peculiar reasons for dissing New Years’ resolutions:

1. They’re “arbitrary” (meaning, I guess, that New Year’s Day is an arbitrary time to make a resolution, or perhaps that the annual cycle is an arbitrary time scale for goal-setting). Well, I agree that they’re arbitrary, but so what? If you tell me you want to make resolutions on the Summer Solstice, or on the closing day of every calendar quarter, I’m not going to tell you that you must do them on New Year’s day.  That said, there is an argument for doing them at a relative down time (New Year’s Day is a holiday without an event, if, like me, you don’t watch Bowl games).  Said down time closely follows a time of great excess (Thanksgiving through Xmas).  So maybe it’s a good time to reflect in tranquility and set aspirations.
2. People break them, so they’re useless. Well, Eisenhower said that “plans are useless, planning is priceless”.  I think the thought applies here.

So, OK, let’s stipulate that we want to make New Year’s resolutions. How many? What kind?

I’ve gone from “Make a small number and be sincere about them” to the other extreme: “Make a few for each major life area” (like Health, Work, Fun, Love). I’ve found that I didn’t gain very much by keeping the number small (in particular, it didn’t make them any more likely to succeed :-)) and that I gained a lot by being comprehensive, by having a goal for most of the important things I want to do during the year. 7 Hard Problems book? Goal 1: finish a draft. Goal 2: build up the core of a community. Body? Goal 1: Hit 185 pounds. Goal 2: Hit 15% body fat. Goal 3: try a team sport or group fitness class.

I don’t generally share my goals much. I’m a little ashamed of how much they matter to me, and I basically want to keep them private. Baring the details of my work on 7 Hard Problems is about as much transparency as I can manage. I have zero desire to discuss my goals on family or feelings or fun.

Porting over from MLO to Todoist has forced me to think about the distinction between a multi-step task and a project.

The distinction is forced upon us in Todoist because Projects and Tasks are two different entities in Todoist although each may have up to three levels of sub-<X> (either sub-project or sub-task).

On the one hand, this is a slap in the face to orthodox GTD.  David Allen is pretty clear that any multi-step process should be considered a project.

But being forced to partition my PIM into projects and sub-projects on the one hand and tasks and sub-tasks on the other got me thinking.  And thinking is the mother of More Refactoring Work On The PIM.

There’s a lot of things I do now in MLO that hardly merit the title of Project.  A mundane (and degenerate in the mathematical sense) example is reading a book.  This is a multi-step process for the most part, in that you read some every day until you’re finished.  But it’s really stretching things to call it a project.

Slightly less degenerate is getting together with a friend.  This is a multi-step process, but it doesn’t really involve much ingenuity to do it; it just requires tracking the steps so I know where I am in the process.

You know:

1. Propose some dates
2. Hear back from your friend
3. Close on one date
4. Book a venue
5. Go to the get-together

I include the last because it ends up as a calendar entry as opposed to a task, but it’s all part of the same PIM.

Again, this is a multi-step process, but it’s pretty stereotyped.  You could almost have a template for it.

Which is a good rubric for what’s a project and what’s a multi-step task.  If you can gen up a template for it, it’s a multi-step task.  If you can’t, then it’s a project.

So what are some projects?

Projects have several moving parts.  A project — for example, building traffic to my blog — may involve:

1. Measuring traffic, which is a multi-step task
2. Pinging influencers, where each influencer ping is a multi-step task
3. Buying traffic (I’m not there yet, but Facebook, for one, is always urging me to buy traffic for my page, and they have my best interests at heart, no?  :-))
4. Brainstorming how to get to “1000 True Fans”.
5. etc.

This kind of multi-step process naturally decomposes into a set of subsidiary multi-step processes until you get to the point where you’re basically dealing with multi-step tasks.

(Sorry to belabor this. I can’t help myself :-))

What happens as we travel up the tree?

The projects become more and more:

• General
• Long-term
• Goal-like

So the first four levels of the tree are essentially goals and projects.  The bottom four levels are essentially tasks and sub-tasks.

One might have a goal of Health whose subgoals are Control Weight, Strength training, Feel Better, etc.  Strength Training may go directly to a multi-step task of finding time to lift and lifting (since I already have a lifting routine in place).  But Feel Better is still pretty abstract, and its subs may be:

1. Control Fear
2. Master Pouting
3. Feel what you actually feel
4. etc.

These sub-projects are in turn complicated, and may consist of still further sub-projects or may go directly to a multi-step task.

Well, so the next step for figuring out the port from MLO to Todoist is mapping my multi-step things to either projects or tasks.

I thought at first I would do it automatically, but that began to seem like more elegance.  So I’m just going through my PIM and marking up multi-step things manually, some as projects, some as multi-part tasks.

It’s a good exercise in any case, since it forces me to look at a lot of projects I’ve become numb to in my daily and weekly grind.

And, in my book, no amount of effort spent on PIMCraft is too much.