How many times have you been out to dinner/coffee/whatever with someone and tussled over the bill? Sometimes a perfectly nice get together can be spoiled at the end by two people insisting upon bestowing their generosity upon their friend, and neither stopping for a moment to gracefully accept the gift. Such a bummer. And notice I’m talking about simply being graceful rather than grateful. Being graceful is an outward expression; being grateful is an internal posture (though can often be gracefully expressed).

It happened again to me today. Went out for lunch with relatives for one person’s birthday, and the birthday person insisted on at least paying for some of the lunches. I told them, there are 364 other days during the year where you’re welcome to buy me lunch; please let me give you this gift. To no avail. Sometimes you just have to shrug and let the steamroller do it’s thing.

It got me thinking about when I’m on the receiving end of that kind of proposition. I like giving gifts as much as the next person, but sometimes it is good to be a receiver. It’s not as natural, though. Givers are in control, receivers not so much. I think resistance to a gift is probably the receiver’s attempt at wresting back a little bit of control from the giver. Anyway, I’ve got some rules that I try real hard to follow:

1. If someone insists on treating me, and I’m not expecting it, I’ll politely decline. If they insist, I’ll ask whether they’re sure (the answer is always yes by this time), then I will thank them and accept.
2. If it’s a larger ticket item, like lunch or dinner, I’ll accept with the caveat that they allow me to get the tip. This almost always works, and we both leave feeling good.
3. If the deal is scheduled in advance, ie, someone says, “I’d like to take you out for coffee” then there’s no demurring and only an honest “thank you.”

Not to beat a dead horse here, but I really do think there’s a difference between being grateful and graceful. We can be graceful through practice, without a grateful heart it’s a hollow discipline. Learning to be grateful makes it easier to be graceful.

Nice short, pointed post over at A. King in Society about being being productive and tweaking productivity systems. I sometimes get sucked into the trap of tweaking systems and it’s definitely a game of diminishing returns. And, after all this time of trying stuff out, being on the GTD bandwagon, and falling off, and getting back on, I still can’t really put my finger on when it’s really necessary to tweak the system.

For my own part, I’ve been very happy for quite a long time with Taskpaper on my Mac and iPhone. It’s simple, fast, and synchronized. I saw that Notational Velocity allows a basic strikeout using an @done tag, and I checked it out to see if it could do strikeouts with something like @done(2011-03-30) which it can’t. I could’ve spent more time hacking up a workaround just to get my task list into NV, but I didn’t. That’s where I’m different today than I was even just a couple of years ago.

I don’t really have any groundbreaking information that hasn’t been shared by others. I guess I’ll just leave you (myself, really) with the encouragement to be mindful about the work at hand. Keep an eye on the 80/20 and aim for the 80% to be actually getting stuff done, and not just moving deck chairs on the Titanic. That is all.

We all make a lot of decisions, big and small. Most of the time we don’t need to over-think the process, right? I mean, if the printer is out of paper, just get more paper. No need to construct a T-chart with pros and cons. Sometimes, though, the effort it takes to build out a structured decision process totally pays off.

Here’s a method I’ve used a bunch of times, in a bunch of situations. Though I’ve used it in many contexts, I find it to be particularly helpful during a hiring process, especially with a group. It takes time to set up, and it takes even more time when you’re working toward consensus with a group (a whole different blog post), but if the decision is important, it’s time well spent.

Step One
Brainstorm criteria: whatever your decision is about, brainstorm a list of no more than a dozen criteria by which to judge your alternatives. So, if you’re looking at painting your living room, you might have a list like this: low VOC, high coverage, low carbon footprint, low cost, easy to source.

Step Two
Pair rank your criteria. Take your list of criteria, and compare each one to all others. Decide, one at a time, which is more important to you. So, between low VOC, or high coverage…which is more important? Now compare low VOC against low carbon footprint: if you could only choose one, which would it be? As you run through the list, put a hash mark next to the criteria that “wins” each comparison. By the end of the exercise, you’ll have a clear view of which criteria is most important to you.

Step Three
Weight your criteria. If you initially brainstormed a list of 12 criteria, you’ll see that some criteria didn’t get any “votes.” You can eliminate these from consideration. You might only want to consider criteria which gathered 3 or more hashmarks, or “votes.” So of the original 12 brainstormed criteria, maybe you’ve got 5 remaining criteria with at least 3 hashmarks. Add up all the hashmarks for all remaining criteria. Let’s say there are 18 hashmarks. If “low VOC” has 5 of 18 hashmarks, then it’s weight will be 5/18, or 27% (5 divided by 18, multiplied by 100). Do this calculation for each remaining criteria, rounding as needed so that your final percentages add up to 100%.

Step Four
Evaluate alternatives against criteria. Now this gets a little technical. A spreadsheet is probably best for this step, since you’ll be arranging stuff vertically and horizontally. Since you’re usually more limited along the horizontal view, use whatever you’ve got the least amount of, criteria or alternatives, along the top row. Whatever there’s more of should be arranged vertically along the left side. Now you want to compare each alternative against each criteria. So, looking at Paint A and Paint B against the “low VOC” criteria, which would you choose: Paint A or Paint B? Now compare both against the next criteria, and so on. When done, move to Paint B against Paint C for low VOC: which would you choose? As before, as you make your choices, place a hashmark in the intersection of alternative and criteria to indicate your “vote.”

Step Five
Calculate results. Now that you’ve brainstormed your criteria, pair ranked them, then pair ranked your alternatives against your criteria, you should start to see a decision emerging. At this stage you’ll need to multiply each alternative’s total hashmark count by the weight of each criteria. When finished, add up all the numbers accumulated for each alternative. You should see a clear “winner.”

Step Six
Gut check. Once you’ve done all the math and you see where it leads you, how do you feel about it? As much work as this entails, it is an imprecise method. There are plenty of opportunities to make pair ranked selections based on emotion, rather than fact, and that can lead the entire process astray. Take a look at your results. Does it feel about right to you? If you or your team have any unresolvable reservations about the outcome, scratch it and start over. It’s a pain, but if the outcome is important, it’s worth the investment of time.

I know this looks like a lot of stuff. And for run of the mill decisions, it’s too much overhead. But if a decision matters, and you want to be able to justify your process down the line, this kind of process is pure gold.