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The Effectiveness of Your System is Inversely Proportional to Your Awareness of It

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From David Allen’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (p. 96):

When you have to focus on your system, you are detouring energy that could be used to create and produce with your system.

The objective of system installation, change, or enhancement is to get “system” off your mind again as soon as possible.

The better your systems, the more you don’t know you have them. The less attention you pay to them, the more functional they probably are. The only time you will notice them is when they don’t work or when you have to be too conscious about your use of them. You want to be working, doing, thinking, creating, and dealing with things — not focused on how you’re doing them.

You want to enjoy driving your car in the countryside without thinking about how to shift gears or work the climate control.

Creating smoothly running silent systems is often the greatest improvement opportunity for enhanced productivity.

Nine out of ten times, people have workflow systems that don’t work, because they are too much work.

Most of the organizing gear and software sold in the last twenty-five years makes sense conceptually but doesn’t function as fast as what people are trying to coordinate. When the amount of what has to be managed increases in speed and volume, a system will start to fall apart if its design is flawed or the habits of the operator are not grooved on “automatic.”

The Mental Price of Multitasking

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Stanford University News summarizes the findings from a recent study on multitasking. Here are some key excerpts:

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

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“We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,” said Ophir, the study’s lead author.

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“When they’re in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal,” said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. “That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.”

My Interview with Tim Challies

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I recently did an interview for Tim Challies’ blog on Desiring God, where my role is senior director of strategy.

I talk about how DG began, our core purpose, our philosophy of being here to serve rather than for how we can benefit, why we post everything online for free, and some thoughts on organizational effectiveness.

In regards to the latter, one of the things I talk about is how an organization should navigate the future in light of the fact that it cannot be known with clarity — and therefore detailed strategic blueprints become outdated almost right away. I discuss three ways that we do this:

  • Evolutionary progress, which happens incrementally and organically (rather than according to a predetermined plan) through the principle of “try a lot of stuff and keep what works.”
  • Building on the strengths of the staff.
  • Intentional and planned progress, through the concept of BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) that paint in broad strokes the envisioned future.

The core idea here is to combine incremental progress, which progresses organically in response to the environment and needs as you experience them, with intentional and bold goals (BHAGs) that paint in broad strokes but do not blueprint things out in detail. This provides intentionality about the future without attempting to script everything out, so that the organization can remain flexible according to reality as it actually is while still progressing toward a bold envisioned future.

There is a great quote in Built to Last on how Jack Welch utilized both of these concepts effectively at GE, which I think explains the concept very well:

Instead of directing a business according to a detailed … strategic plan, Welch believed in setting only a few clear, overarching goals. Then, on an ad hoc basis, his people were free to seize any opportunities they saw to further those goals. This crystallized in his mind after reading Johannes von Moltke, a nineteenth century Prussian general influenced by the renowned military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, who argued that detailed plans usually fail, because circumstances inevitably change.

Why Being Organized Matters

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Being organized matters because it reduces the friction in getting things done.

In other words:

Most people act when it’s easy to do so. The better organized you are, the easier it is to act and the greater the tendency for you to do those things that should be done when they should be done, whether you like to or not. (The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed and Win Back Control of Your Work, p 4.)

On Grasshoppers and Email

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When I go running, there is a field on my route that is filled with grasshoppers. The field looks ordinary from a distance. But once I get to it, grasshoppers start jumping out everywhere.

The first few times that I went through it I would speed up to try and get away from them. But I could never outrun the grasshoppers. They would just jump out as I went along, regardless of how fast or slow I was going. They jumped out where I was precisely because I was there. Going faster didn’t get me past the grasshoppers; it just made them jump out sooner.

So this immediately made me think of email. Email contains a paradox, like these grasshoppers: Going faster doesn’t mean you’ll get less. In fact, it might mean that you’ll get even more, because email responds to your presence, just like the grasshoppers.

So if you try to overcome email overload by doing email faster and more often, you won’t end up getting ahead. You’ll just end up with a lot more email to keep up with.

If you want more email, that’s fine. I’m not against email, and a lot of important work gets done through it. (And I probably don’t say that enough.) But if you want to preserve a good chunk of time for other responsibilities that you (hopefully) have, then the solution is to reduce your number of email cycles.

In other words, if you want to decrease the amount of email that you have to attend to, the main solution is not to go faster.

Yes, you should go faster and be more efficient at processing your email. But if that’s all you do, you’ll just see more email coming your way than you would have before. What you need to do is both become more efficient at processing email and at the same time decrease the number of times that you check email each day.

In other words, the way to create more time for other things is to decrease the number of email cycles in your routine.

Last of all, an objection. Someone will say “but if I check email less, then I’ll be less responsive.” Well, that’s probably true. I’m not saying that you have to do this. But realize that this trade-off exists on both sides of the equation. For if you choose to be almost immediately responsive with email, then you will get less long-term and important non-email stuff done. And that’s a problem, too.

It’s really up to you. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong here. It depends upon the nature of your responsibilities, your strengths, and what your organization needs you to be focusing on. Things may also fluctuate for the same person from season to season. (And, it’s worth pointing out that you can probably find a balance that preserves a good level of responsiveness even if it is less than you might initially default to.)

You make the call. Just be aware of the likely trade-off. If you end up doing less non-email work in order to give more time and attention to email, just make sure that you are doing that on purpose rather than automatically assuming that that is the way it has to be.