Archives for 2009

A lot of productivity books give advice like this: “If cleaning out your garage (or closet, or some other organizing task) seems overwhelming to you, just do it for ten minutes a day. That way it’s not overwhelming, and since small things add up, after a few weeks it will be all done.”

It’s not likely that I’ll give that kind of advice very often.

I agree very much that small things add up. We should absolutely maximize that concept in our lives. For example, exercising just 30 minutes a day adds up and pretty soon you’re in shape and maintaining pretty good health. Reading 30 minutes every night before bed adds up and pretty soon you’ll find that you’re getting through almost two books a month. Being a decent person, day after day, makes a difference.

So small things, done consistently, make a big difference.

But you have to be very selective in applying that idea to things like organizing your garage or getting that closet cleaned out.

The reason is that things like trying to clean out your garage a little each day create a productivity complexity. When are you going to do it? How are you going to remember to do it? It’s hard enough to protect sufficient time to play with the kids after work. And you’re going to remember to spend 10 minutes cleaning out the garage every day as well. Really?

Maybe you would. The problem is this: Small things add up, and you can only have so many small things going on at once.

Many of the productivity books fail to take the second part of that truth into account, and as a result they start suggesting that you apply this principle to all sorts of non-routine projects. Are your files disorganized? Purge a little every day. Hate that closet? Do something to improve it every day. Desk cluttered? Find ways to improve the organization every day. Sock drawer messy? Fix it a bit every day. Pretty soon, you’ve got a thousand “small things” that you are trying to do every day.

That’s why I don’t give advice like that. If your sock drawer needs organized, do it in one shot. If your garage needs organized, the mental gear-shifting it would take to do a little every day would be extremely inefficient, given all the factors involved. So block off 2 hours and do that in one shot.

I think, when it comes to organizational tasks like these, the reason they seem overwhelming is not that they are large, but because we don’t know how. If you don’t have any idea how to organize your garage, you won’t want to do it. So a better approach than doing a little bit every day when you still don’t know what you’re really doing is to first learn how (by looking at a book like Organizing for Dummies) and then block off the time to do it in one shot. And I would apply this to all those other projects that the organization books recommend doing “a little at a time.”

The result will be that you have less “moving parts” going on in your life, and you can then truly apply the “small things done consistently” principle to the things that matter most. Be gracious to people, every day, in the small things as well as the large. Exercise every day. Read at least 30 minutes every day.

And, once that garage is picked up, keep it from getting disorganized again by putting things back where they belong right away and straightening it up as soon as you notice something out of order.

From Time Tactics of Very Successful People:

Don’t confuse busyness with efficiency. An organization’s best people sometimes spend their most productive time seemingly daydreaming.

Busyness may, in fact, be counterproductive. “It is necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant,” says James D. Watson. He is a Nobel laureate who shared the prize with Francis Crick for successfully discovering the genetic code of DNA. The story of how underemployed they were — the stories of their meanderings and long weekends, parties, visits, and other diversions — is told delightfully in The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, a human-side-of-science classic.

Watson and Crick had the luxury of being able to study all sorts of ideas, interact with scientists in many fields, attend conferences all over the world. But most of all, Watson and Crick had time to think about what they were reading and hearing and seeing. That’s what Watson means when he praises underemployment.

If these two researchers had not received generous research grants, if they had needed to hold down two jobs in order to make ends meet, they probably would not have made the discovery that revolutionized biological research. Thanks to generous support plus the British university tradition that emphasizes contemplation, Watson and Crick were sufficiently underemployed to do something significant.

People on treadmills don’t get very far [emphasis added]. If you’re so busy working that you have no time to think about what you’re working at, you’ll be unable to make full use of your accomplishments.

Underemployment provides the time between activities to reflect on what you’ve just finished and think, “What does this mean?” “How can I exploit what I have done?” Underemployment provides the time to figure out other ways than the obvious to use what you’re producing. And it provides time to consider how what you’ve done fits with what’s already been done.

I’m in approval. Here’s his summary, from a recent Newsweek article:

“I’m a night owl. My usual day [is]: I work out in the morning; I get to the office around 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.; work till about 6:30 p.m.; have dinner with the family, hang out with the kids and put them to bed about 8:30 p.m. And then I’ll probably read briefing papers or do paperwork or write stuff until about 11:30 p.m. and then I usually have about a half hour to read before I go to bed . . . about midnight, 12:30 a.m. — sometimes a little later.”

And here is a brief analysis drawing out key time management lessons.

Well said by Jim Loehr, author of The Power Of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is The Key To High Performance And Personal Renewal, in a recent interview:

Time only has value when it intersects with energy. We’ve been deluded into believing that if we’re home for dinner or present on a conference call, we’ve created value. But if you’re present but disengaged, you’re doing the exact opposite of your intention. If the first thing you do at a meeting is flip open your computer and work on e-mail, all of your energy is somewhere else, and you’re not giving it to the meeting.

But how do you shift from managing just time to managing energy?

It’s not how many hours you put in with a client or on a project. It’s the quantity and quality of your energy — your focus and force — that determine whether that time is valuable. We call that “full engagement.” It’s the acquired ability to intentionally invest your full and best energy right here and now.

Does multitasking help?

There’s no such thing as multitasking. If you have 15 balls in the air, 14 of them are in free fall. That’s why there are so many accidents when someone is texting while driving. It dumbs you down more than alcohol or marijuana. If your life is literally going from e-mail to Twitter to the next signal from cyberspace, you lose efficiency and sense of direction. But if you contain them, those things can add to your productivity. You do that by building barriers around them. Make calls at a certain time; check e-mail at a certain time.

A good point from Suzy Welch:

I actually hate the word “balance.” I think the term “work-life balance” suggests it’s possible to have a balance. 10-10-10 forces you to say not everything is equal, you have to make choices, and there are consequences to the decision you’re making. It helps you determine what your choices are so you can decide how to deploy your human capital.

I recently came across a very good article on Getting Things Done for College Students. While I don’t agree with all of it, it tweaks the GTD process in some very helpful ways to meet the unique demands of college students.

For More Than Just College Students

You don’t have to be a college student to benefit from its advice — these tactics would be equally beneficial to those in seminary, grad school, or Ph.D programs.

In fact, you don’t even have to be a student at all to benefit from the article. In my opinion, some variation on the key tweak that it makes to the GTD system is critical and necessary for everyone.

The Key Tweak to GTD

The key tweak to the GTD system that it makes is as follows. This is a long quote, but it is very worthwhile:

This brings us to a more complicated problem: how to handle weekly assignments. Under the traditional GTD system, a class assignment would be handled as a project. This follows from the fact that most assignments take a few actions to complete (e.g., work on first half of problem set problems, meet with problem set group, type up answers nicely…) The project scope, however, is insufficient for the needs of a student, as, typically, the first action for the project gets put on the next action list and the project itself isn’t visited again for another week. This doesn’t fly when the work is dues within a few days. First, the action floating around in your large next actions list is not guaranteed to be addressed in time — leading you to keep track of it in your head (e.g., “start this assignment soon!”), which defeats the purpose of full capture. Second, one action per week is not enough, we need *all* of the actions relevant to an assignment to be handled in the small number days you have before the next class. This brings us to the following student-centric addition:

The “Weekly Assignments” Project:

Add “Weekly Assignments” as a standing project on your projects list. This is a stake in the ground to remind you each Sunday, when you do your weekly review, that you need to deal with the class assignments due during the upcoming week. Here is the procedure to follow:

1. List out all of the work due for classes that week. This includes both traditional homework (e.g., reading assignments, problem sets), as well as studying for tests and writing papers.
2. Break up each of these assignments into specific actions, each requiring no more than 1 to 2 hours.
3. Assign arbitrary deadlines to each action for the upcoming week. Be smart about how you do this. If a day is already busy, don’t pile on too many assignment actions. Now that this work has become date-specific you must, following the GTD methodology, write the tasks on your calendar under the appropriate date.

By treating weekly assignment work as date-specific you rescue you it from your overwhelming next actions list and put it in a place where you are sure to execute. Furthermore, by planning the full week in advance you are able to spread out your work intelligably — avoiding work pile-ups when multiple deadlines coincide.

A final note: for long-term assignments, such as term papers, that require more than a week to complete, you should introduce them originally as a traditional project, allowing you to make progress on them in advance. When you enter the last week before their due date you can then treat the remaining work as a weekly assignment and schedule as above.

In Other Words…

That was a long quote. So let me restate the idea in a briefer form. The problem is this: When you have a project (assignment) due in a few days, having it on your project list and then a task on your next action list is not enough. For you are unlikely to revisit your next action list frequently enough to keep the project in motion and, beyond that, a next action list is often so full that the critical stuff gets lots.

The solution, then, is to create a list of all the specific projects and pieces of longer projects that has to be attended to this week. That list becomes your critical work for the week. Then, you slot the doing of that work into your calendar (or some special next action context for time-sensitive, most important actions) to ensure that it gets done.

This is Really Just a Form of Stephen Covey’s “Big Rocks” Concept

This is really just a form of time blocking or Stephen Covey’s concept of “big rocks” from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective PeopleFirst Things First and First Things First.

If You Don’t Do Something Like This, You Will Not Get the Right Things Done

There are several different variations on how to implement this practice. But if you don’t do this in some form, I find that it becomes impossible to get the right things done — which is the purpose of any productivity approach.

The reason is that, with so many things getting captured on project and next action lists via GTD, it becomes easy for the most important items to get clouded over. So you have to have an approach for keeping the focus on them so that you don’t waste your time on the “trivial many” versus the “vital few.”

An Objection — And a Critical Flaw in How Many People Implement GTD

Now, an objection. A comment on the Getting Things Done for College Students post asserts that the article is misrepresenting GTD when it says that, after putting the next action for a project on the next action list, “typically … the project itself isn’t visited again for another week.”

The article, in other words, implies that in the GTD approach, you only do “one action per week.” That is, that once you do a next action for a project, you don’t create a new one until the following weekly review — thus locking yourself into a horrible cycle of making only one forward step on a project per week.

The objector is correct that GTD does not advocate or require that you just do “one action per week” on each project. Very good point. But I don’t think the article was claiming that.

The article, instead, was pointing out that, even though the GTD approach does not advocate merely doing “one action per week,” this is very often the behavior that it inadvertently creates. It’s not intentional or part of the design of GTD, but it is in fact what often ends up happening.

I think this is because of the fact that GTD does not have any form of prioritization baked into it and the fact that the next actions are listed separately from projects. The idea is that you will intuitively know what is best to do next when you can see all of your actions.

But in reality, what often tends to happen is you get a bit overwhelmed by the size of your next action lists. Related to that, the fact that projects and next actions are on separate lists makes it easy to “forget” to create a new next action after you’ve completed one on a project.

Thus, once you’ve done a next action on a project, you tend to go on to another next action pertaining to something else because you hate having your list so long or because there is no cue in the next action list itself that creating another next action for the project is more important than doing anything else that is already on the list.

As a result, projects often do “stall” for a week (or more, if you don’t do a weekly review), when you finally revisit your project list again. Although this approach is not an intended part of the GTD process (there is no rule saying you can only look at your project list once a week), the fault is not entirely on the user. The prevalence of this behavior indicates that the system itself inclines people to do this. Systems create behaviors — often contrary to the best of intentions.

In Conclusion: The Importance of Integrating Covey and Allen

As explained above, the solution to this problem is a synthesize of Stephen Covey and David Allen. That is, the solution is to utilize project and next action lists (GTD) while governing them through the use of “big rocks” (see above) and other things such as roles, goals, and values (not talked about here).

The Getting Things Done for College Students article does a service for everyone, not just college students, by pointing out a central deficiency (intended or not) of how the GTD method is often applied and outlining a critical solution.