Google's Douglas Merrill

If you think you have a lot to do, consider what Douglas Merrill wakes up to every morning: As the 37-year-old chief information officer and vice-president of engineering for Google, he oversees “organization of the world’s data.”

Think about that job description for a minute. Overwhelmed yet?

Specifically, Merrill is in charge of developing and testing the company’s numerous organizational tools in order to make all existing information universally accessible and useful. To do this, he chairs about 60 meetings per week, travels 25% of the year, and manages about 1,000 people.

With such a vast, high-pressure mission, you’d expect him to have lost most of his hair, carry a bulging briefcase, be flanked by assistants, juggle multiple PDAs, have a tie that’s askew, talk to himself, and even have a twitch or two. But instead, Merrill has 3 earrings, 4 tattoos, and looks like he’s just ordered a second glass of merlot at a blues club. He has long black hair, which he likes to sweep back as he puts his feet up on chairs and closes his eyes in thought. He has just one assistant. He carries an iPhone but often travels without a laptop. He never wears a tie and generally looks well-rested and fit (6’4”, 183 pounds, 7 percent body fat). In meetings, he counters the geek speak (“we hacked the proto buffer directly”) with laid-back SoCal surfer lingo (“cool,” “dude,” “awesome,” “sweet” and “I’m so amazingly jazzed.”)

What’s almost disarming about Merrill—unlike other big-time execs—is that while he’s talking to you, he doesn’t glance at his email or eyeball his blinking phone. Instead, he looks you in the eye. He’s focused. He’s there.

That’s not just an impression; it’s his modus operandi.

“The whole point of organization for me is to clear my head in order to be in the moment,” he explains. “The less stuff that’s rattling around in my brain, the more I can focus on whatever I’m doing.”

And by the time the conversation ends, whether it has lasted 10 minutes or 2 hours, you want to inhabit his space, too.

Indeed, if Merrill can be organized, anyone can. He admits to being forgetful, partially deaf and also dyslexic. Because of these personal challenges, he’s had to discard traditional approaches to organization and innovate. “I’m not very good at filing things or writing in notebooks,” he admits. “If I had to use those tools to stay organized, I’d be in trouble. If I am the world’s most organized man, it’s because I manage to keep things together despite my situation and because I’ve learned to view organization in an entirely new way.”

And lord knows we need that.

According to Herbert Benson, M.D., the director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, 60 to 90 percent of visits to doctors are due to stress. “It’s the root cause of anxiety, depression, anger, insomnia, high blood pressure, heart attacks, infertility and legionnaire’s disease,” he says. In today’s hyper-paced world, better organization is not just a desirable skill; it’s the key to better health.

“Indulge me in a surfing analogy,” says Merrill, grinning. “I learned to surf on a traditional board that was short, single-fin and really hard to get up on. But nowadays people are using much longer boards that help them balance on the waves. I thought about that and said, okay, there must be similar things that will facilitate my ability to surf these waves of information that keep crashing over me.”

The New Rules of Organization

1. Empty your head. Research shows that your short-term memory can only hold about 7 items at any given time. (That’s why phone numbers have 7 digits, and Scrabble racks hold 7 tiles.) So if you have more than 7 things going on in your life (ha!), don’t even attempt to keep track of them in your head.

“Much of our stress comes from the fact that people are trying to manage a lot of their world in their psyches instead of in a system,” explains David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. “As a remember-and-reminder mechanism, the brain just isn’t very good.”

The brain’s other organizational flaw is its tendency to dwell on incompletion. This is called the Zeigarnik Effect, after the Russian psychologist who first noticed that people remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than finished ones. Worrying about what needs to be done puts the brain in a sort of subconscious reminder loop that instigates stress.

“I used to wake up at night worrying about things I had to do,” says Merrill. “For a while, I even took a notebook to bed with me. Now I don’t even attempt to store stuff in my head. It’s impossible given the ridiculous amount of information being created. The first step to organization is recognizing that you’re human, and you’re going to forget most things.”

2. Swap filing cabinets for scaffolds.The traditional approach to organization involves putting things in folders, either manila or electronic. Tax receipts go here, mortgage information goes there, investment advice gets put on that pile, vacation ideas on that stack, etc. While this works for a short time, eventually we end up with cluttered offices and hard-drives full of information that’s neither accessible nor useful.

“There’s a common perception that organization is innate and that it looks the same for everyone,” says Merrill, sipping from a bottle of—what else?—SmartWater. “Both of these assertions are false. Organization is learned, and it’s learned in a way that’s special to you. For me to cram you into the traditional filing-cabinet model is a disservice. A much richer way of helping organize someone is to give them a set of tools that can be personalized.”

Merrill calls these tools “scaffolds” and encourages us to think of the information we’re accumulating as an ever-expanding building. This scaffolding represents the means for quickly gaining access to any floor or room. It’s your network of virtual assistants or, to continue the analogy, ironworkers.

Merrill has wrapped 7 (that number again) scaffolds around his world. Naturally, they’re all Google products and include: Calendar, Notebook, Reader, Documents/Spreadsheets, Gmail, Gadgets and iGoogle. (If you want to scaffold your life similarly, they’re all available for free at google.com.)

But you don’t have to go all Google, all the time. Just realize that your brain is only one storage option, and paper is just one way to record something. Open up to other options, and you free yourself from mental overload and paper at the same time.

3. Redefine organization as search. This is key. Rather than pack-ratting information in your head, home or computer, deposit it in “the cloud,” as Merrill refers to the Internet, where it can be retrieved when needed. In other words, rather than trying to anticipate answers beforehand and file information accordingly, let technology search your personal database later as important questions arise.

“How much easier is it to organize yourself if, instead of thinking of the world in terms of filing cabinets, we start thinking of the world in terms of search?” says Merrill. “For example, when I come across something interesting on the Internet, I don’t worry about whether or not I’ll ever use it. I just dump it into my personal cloud. Organization then becomes this big, long, loose pile of information that’s growing forever and you don’t care, because every time you ask a question, you get everything back that’s relevant.”

There are practical advantages to this. If your office catches fire, your system is hacked or your laptop is stolen, your life goes on with minimal interruption. You have neither the worry nor the stress involved with warehousing and protecting information the conventional way. However, like all forms of letting go, this approach entails trust—trust in technology, trust in security.

“There’s a common American expression: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Merrill continues. “It makes sense in some contexts, but not in this one. The most common sources of data loss are laptops and hardware being stolen and machines dying. There’s a huge benefit to not having to worry about that.”

“To me, search is the oxygen of life,” he adds. “I can’t live without oxygen, and I can’t live without search. I store everything I have in the cloud, because I know I can always find it later.”

4. Leverage other people and their ideas. One of the secrets to Google’s success is that it’s an exquisitely diverse company unafraid to attack problems from different perspectives. “My job is essentially to hire great people with fascinating, unusual backgrounds and facilitate their working together,” says Merrill. The result is a 10-year-old company with a market cap of $142 billion.

The organizational benefits of such a corporate strategy are twofold. First, once you recognize who you are and what you do best, you’re free to surround yourself with people who are not you and have different skills. This eases the pressure on you to do it all and simplifies life.

Just like that, you’re better organized.

Second, the same approach works for information management. When you come across great ideas or intriguing thoughts, don’t file them away. Instead, throw them together with other people’s great ideas and thoughts and see what percolates. Whether you do this via email, blog, website or search doesn’t matter; it’s the sharing that’s important.

“Value comes from the conjunction of multiple things,” explains Merrill, who has a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton. “Collaboration is cool. It allows you to leverage your strengths and the strengths of others. Different perspectives yield better answers and better people.”

How to Take Control

To prove that what he preaches is practical, Merrill permitted Men’s Health into the inner-sanctum that is Google’s New York City office. We shadowed him through meetings and receptions to see firsthand how the world’s most organized man applies these rules to different parts of his life – and, of course, how you can, too.

For business meetings… Most have a 30-minute time limit and are done via videoconference. To make them as productive as possible, Merrill prefers that all presentations be distributed beforehand. This insures that the meeting will be an active discussion rather than a passive slideshow, which better leverages the minds involved and yields faster progress.

For travel… Besides some surf stickers, the only other things on Merrill’s laptop are a browser and an operating system. No photos, no schedule, no top-secret information. That’s all stored in the cloud. Subsequently, he often travels without a computer, relying on online access when necessary. It’s convenient and less stressful.

“We had a situation once where we were visiting a company and on the way to the presentation someone broke into our rental car and took our laptop,” he recounts. “Normally, that’s a crisis. But for us, well, ‘Can we borrow a web browser?’”

For staying in shape on the road… When we met with Merrill, he hadn’t seen his personal trainer in 2½ weeks. But through Google Docs, they were still staying in touch. “Look here,” he says, pointing to a chart on his screen. “I whined about this cable row he had me doing yesterday, but instead of replying he just deleted my comments and increased the weight. So that would be my trainer reminding me to get to work.”

When he’s on the road and can’t find a gym, Merrill orders a set of 35-pound dumbbells from room service. (“All the better hotels have them.”) Then he does a 45-minute routine first thing in the morning. “Knowing that I have to wake up an hour early forces me not to sit in bars consuming needless calories.”

For daily to-do’s… Most guys keep a business calendar, a list of things they need to do around the house, plus tuck a sports schedule or two into their wallet. Not Merrill. “Life is a complicated mix of business and personal,” he says. “It makes more sense to manage everything at once.” For this, he uses Google Calendar, which allows him to overlay multiple agendas. Blue indicates his work-related tasks, green his personal stuff, red his speaking engagements and, during the 2006 World Cup, yellow represented TV broadcasts. Any or all of these schedules can be shared with other people. Overall, the approach showcases a basic tenet of organization: consolidate.

For staying current… Merrill acknowledges there’s too much information for him to digest the conventional way. So he doesn’t have stacks of newspapers on his desk or hundreds of bookmarks on his browser. Instead, he uses an online filter to capture pertinent info, continually scanning his favorite sites for relevant content.

For leaving work with a clear head and a sense of accomplishment… The more stuff you leave hanging at the end of the day, the more distracted and ornery you’ll be that evening. Although Merrill receives hundreds of emails and requests daily, he tries to do “a little processing on each.” This gives him a sense of completion, which enables his mind to let go.

Labels: Stuff