There’s No Place Like Home: My Long and Winding Road Back to Kansas

I recently wrote a post (see here ) about the importance of taking notes in meetings and then using those note to improve organizational accountability. Note-taking is hardly a core area of focus for my blog… but improving organizational accountability sure is, so here goes with another article on the same theme.

I had a very powerful experience early on in my career that, in many ways, set me on a path (ok, I'll say it... a yellow brick road) trying to repeat it. After getting my graduate degree, I landed a job at one of the big accounting firms as a health care consultant. I was one of the first (maybe the first) staff member with microcomputer skills as I had become quite adept at using Lotus 1-2-3 to handle spreadsheet tasks. Consultants at the firm had developed mysteriously long calculations to support the creation of the various funds and cash flows associated with tax exempt bond financings… all by hand. OK kids, this was a thing.

During my first week there, one of the senior staff members grabbed a gigantic pad of accounting paper and then sat me down for what would be the first of many sessions to show me just how such a thing was done. Early on, I asked if they could do this with Lotus 1-2-3 and he looked at me as though I was speaking Mandarin. Yeah, never-mind, I thought to myself.

When the time came for me to fly solo, I built a proper working model in Lotus. The higher ups thought that I had whipped up some type of magical charm, a whipper-snapper’s witchcraft they figured. Well, once it was built and I showed them how it worked and what you could do with it… let’s just say that was a pretty good day.

The ability to make modification minus the pencils, erasers, and stacks of paper was a revelation. And what used to take many, many weeks to complete (and rather poorly, I might add) now took just days. Oh, and it was awesome. And transformative.

To say that this helped launch my career as a consultant would be a quantum understatement. Word spread of the alchemist wunderkind who could perform magic with numbers. Within a year or so, more spreadsheeters showed up and in no time, the consulting practice was radically transformed. We began developing sophisticated financial projection models, what-if analyses, and all sorts of other wildly useful concoctions for our clients.

In the end, I was not a genius. I was just a little more genius and a little earlier than anybody else.

And so this then set the stage for my unending quest to always be cutting edge, always paying attention to what was coming down the pike to see if that might have the same kind of turbo mode impact on whatever it was that I was doing at the time.

I was the first guy with a Palm Pilot. I was even the first one with a Palm Treo, which was a Blackberry competitor. Imagine that, managing your schedule and tasks on a small device you could put in your pocket? And then email became prevalent and I appreciated the ability to write and respond to them untethered from a computer. Of course, we take all this for granted now but at that point, this was game changing.

Part of this automation quest flowed over to note-taking and to do list management. I was (and am) an avid note-taker. Writing is how I think, process, and remember so I write a lot. I do this in meetings, when reading books, and when alone. And I tend toward the steam of consciousness style whereby I write and annotate as I go. The markings provide clues for later processing and parsing of information into buckets such as: reminders, follow-up items, and tidbits of information that should go elsewhere for storage and archival purposes.

The computerization of these tasks felt like a godsend many years ago and given my desire to repeat the tax-exempt financing automation miracle, I was convinced that this was my second chance. Various note-taking software programs emerged, as did to do list management apps. Some were simple, some were extremely sophisticated. Some were highly integrated (notes and tasks all in one) and others were dedicated one trick ponies. No matter, I tried them all. And I mastered most.

They were awesome… yet still I searched. Searched for something that worked even better. It seems that there was always something missing from the functionality or I felt as though I was going to collapse under the weight of managing the system itself. Each program had its own syntax, methodology, and infrastructure. Oftentimes, I found that I had become adept in creating a library of information, objectives, and directives… all just sitting there screaming for my attention. My system was awesome, but I don’t know that my productive ever improved one iota. This was not a second miracle.

A quick aside related to my quest to become a better photographer. Cameras have become mini-computers allowing for the near instantaneous progression from capture to transfer-to-the-cloud to consumption. Super fast autofocus engines coupled with machine gun frame rates allow you to capture the decisive moment in stunning detail. The sophistication of modern cameras is stunning. Yet none of that made me any better. In fact, moving on from all that has made me better… because now I am spending more time thinking than doing. And I don’t collapse under the weight of all the technology.

Instead, I look into the scene more intently. I focus on composing the canvas. I consider depth of field and symmetry, flow, texture… you know, all the art stuff. All the important stuff. How? By slowing down.

Back to personal information management. There’s still a place for automation. I wouldn’t want to store lots of information on paper as sorting and retrieving is a drag. But there are ways for analogue and digital to coexist.

Which brings me to the main point here. I’m using paper again. And a pen. And writing things down. Slowly. And thinking. And not spending time managing all the time saving automation. Time saving in air quotes.

I think there’s a lot of this in the air these days as many of us begin to confront the fact that we are addicted to tech, especially our phones. And sadly, we seem to be increasingly addicted to distractions, diversions, and other ways of avoiding deeper focus.

I’m starting to fight back.

By slowing down.