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Beware of Momentum Killers

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Momentum is one of the keys to accomplishing your priorities. If you always have to start and stop, not only will things take longer, but you might get thrown out of the mental state that is required for various complex and high-level tasks that you need to accomplish.

The result is that a one hour divergence can actually destroy four hours of productivity (or more).

The most well known (but certainly not only) momentum killer is email. The thing about email is that you never know what you are going to get. You could have had your email clear at 10:00 am, but then at 1:00 some complex emails come in that present a series of tasks that may take an hour to complete. Simply knowing about this can be distracting, but more than that it can be tempting to diverge from your course to accomplish the more important task.

So let’s say you have the afternoon blocked off for a large and complex task. But when you get back from lunch you decide to check email before digging in — and the above scenario happens. A series of complicated emails comes in that require about an hour to complete.

Because you now know about these tasks, your mind starts going down that road a bit. You find this distracting. So you say to yourself, “it sure would be nice to get my email all clear again before heading into this big and complicated project I need to work on.” Then you move ahead on getting those emails and the tasks they contain out of the way.

At the end of this hour, more emails have come in — in part because people are responding back to you from some other smaller emails that you also decided to get out of the way — and you are now on a completely different course.

Now, this is not bad in itself. Email is not the enemy, and there are many instances when it is useful and productive to follow your email for a period of time. The issue here, though, is that you have a different, non-email, high priority task that you need to accomplish. And email derailed you from it.

The real problem, though, is worse: Email didn’t simply cost you the 1-2 hours that you spent away from this high priority task. For by the time you have your email wrapped up again where you want, it’s 3:00 in the afternoon. Half the afternoon is gone. Further, your momentum has been going towards email for the last two hours, making it hard to shift gears into this complex task.

As a result, you are “out of the mindset” needed to generate the focus you need to make progress on the task. So even though you have two hours left before you planned to head home, you cannot use that two hours for the original task you had planned. You’ve lost your momentum. Two hours on email destroyed four hours of productivity on your more important task.

And, it gets even worse. Because, unfortunately, the following day is all booked, you have some other things you need to get done in the middle of the week and, of course, more email will be coming in over that time as well. So it looks like it will be a few days before you can get back to this task. And even then, it is going to be a fight to make it happen.

This is how the loss of momentum makes important things take forever and makes us less satisfied with our days. There is no perfect solution here, but it can make a huge difference to pause and reflect before taking a “small and temporary detour” in a different direction.

By being aware of the potential consequences of losing momentum, we can become more disciplined at putting first things first, and letting other things be crowded out rather than those first things.

The One Skill Necessary for Thriving in a World of Excess Access

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In his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, Marcus Buckingham has a great section on how the most fundamental and critical skill necessary to thriving in this new world of “excess access” is focus. This reality, in turn, has the surprising implication that we should not seek balance, but rather should seek intentional unbalance.

Here’s what he has to say (from pages 25-26):

We live in a world of excess access. We can find whatever we want, whenever we want it, as soon as we want it. This can be wonderfully helpful if we are trying to track down last month’s sales data, an errant bank statement, or a misplaced mother-in-law, but if we are not quite careful, this instant, constant access can overwhelm us.

To thrive in this world will require of us a new skill. Not drive, not sheer intelligence, not creativity, but focus [emphasis added]. The word “focus” has two primary meanings. It can refer either to your ability to sort through many factors and identify those that are most critical — to be able to focus well is to be able to filter well. Or it can refer to your ability to bring sustained pressure to bear once you’ve identified these factors — this is the laser-like quality of focus.

Today you must excel at filtering the world. You must be able to cut through the clutter and zero in on the emotions or facts or events that really matter. You must learn to distinguish between what is merely important and what is imperative. You must learn to place less value on all that you can remember and more on those few things that you must never forget.

This “filtering” component of focus is critical if we are going to avoid drowning in our world of “excess access” and are going to be able to truly benefit from the abundance of access that we have. It allows us to identify what is most important among everything out there.

That is critical all on its own. But its when we come to the second dimension of focus — laser-like precision — that we come to the big implication of these things. Buckingham continues:

But you must also learn the discipline of applying yourself with laser-like precision. As we will see, … [effectiveness] does not come to those who aspire to well-roundedness, breadth, and balance. The reverse is true. Success comes most readily to those who reject balance, who instead pursue strategies that are intentionally imbalanced.

This focus, this willingness to apply disproportionate pressure in a few selected areas of your working life, won’t leave you brittle and narrow. Counterintuitively, this kind of lopsided focus actually increases your capacity and fuels your resilience.

That is exactly right. The world of “excess access” means not only that there is an over-abundance of information and detail to sort through. It also means that there is an over-abundance of choices we have to make in regard to where to spend our time and how to focus our efforts. How do we make this choice?

We make it on the basis of our strengths. Seek to build your life around what you are good at and are energized by, and apply yourself with laser-like precision to those things. The more you can stay on this path, the more effective you will be.

Because none of us are strong in everything, this of necessity means that we must give up pursuing the myth of balance and instead pursue strategic imbalance. We should be “imbalanced” in that the things we choose to do should disproportionately come from areas of our strengths. But this is strategic — not haphazard — because we do this intentionally because we know that we will be most effective when operating in the realm of our strengths rather than our weaknesses.

This leads to two practical questions and applications:

  1. What things do you do best and find most energizing? Seek to craft your role (and your personal life) in a way that will enable you to do more of those things.
  2. Which things do you find depleting — even if you are good at them? Seek to carve those out of your role, or if you can’t do that, find ways to tweak how you do them so that they can be done in a way that calls upon your strengths more fully.

Operate from Lists, Not Stacks

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From To Do Doing Done: A Creative Approach to Managing Projects and Effectively Finishing What Matters Most:

Think about what happens when you try to deal with a stack of paper. You take the first piece of paper off the stack, read it over, realize you can’t do anything about it right now, and put it back on one corner of your desk.

The next item, the same thing. The next item, you do what needs to be done and then realize that you may need the original piece of paper later, so you put it in a different stack on another corner of your desk.

You are just rearranging the stacks!

It’s impossible to prioritize a stack of paper. When you’re dealing with the stack, the most important item in that stack may be on the bottom … where you may never get to it.

The principle to overcome this is: Operate from lists, not stacks.

If you have any stacks, go through each item in them one at a time. Do what can be done in two minutes or less. When anything can’t be done in two minutes, then put it down as an action item on your next action list and then either toss the paper or, if you’ll need it when you do the action, put it in an action file and pull it out when you get to that action on your list.

If everything in the stack pertains to the same thing and it won’t fit in a file — for example, it’s a set of papers to be graded (let’s say you are a teacher) or the stack is really a big manuscript you have to read (let’s say you are an editor), then put the action which the stack represents on your next action list and put the stack on a shelf — off of your desktop. If desired, put in parentheses after the action item the location of the stack (which is really just “support material” for the action) to remind you that stack exists.

When you choose to do the action on your list, pull the stack off the shelf and do the work. When you are done with it for the day, put it back on the shelf and bring it back out the next time you work on that action.

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.”

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.

How Many Hours a Day do you Spend on Email?

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I would be really interested in knowing how many hours a day everyone out there spends doing email.

How much time do you spend on email each day?

How many emails a day do you get?

And, if desired: How do you feel about that?