Resources on Productivity

That can be taken too far, but the point is: the things that are truly necessary are so important that you do not want to be distracted from them by the pursuit of less important things.

I agree entirely with the following section from Time Tactics of Very Successful People:

High achievers from many different fields speak of being able to regulate their intensity — of being able to phase in and out of an intense state. Some people call this intense state the “surge mode.”

Using the surge mode is a bit like using a passing gear in a car. Normally, when you’re driving, you don’t give a lot of conscious thought to putting your foot on the accelerator or on the brake. But sometimes you require an extra burst of power to get out of one lane and into another Then you need extra power, and you floor it. That’s what surge mode is.

There are may illustrations of high achievers using the surge mode. Mozart preferred to write music for an hour or so every morning when he got up. But when a piece was demanded, he would work day and night without sleep, sometimes seemingly mesmerized by the task.

Isaac Newton made three of his greatest discoveries during two years of virtually uninterrupted thought, study, and experimentation. Mark Twain wrote six of his best books — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Rough It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Life on the Mississippi, and The Prince and the Pauper — during only two summers. He would write an entire day at a time, day after day. His daughter, Claire, remembers that he would come out in a white linen suit, with a pile of pads of paper under his arm. He would joke with his family and then head off toward the study. There he would spend the entire day, sometimes eating only one meal.

The surge mode is especially important among creative people, such as scientists, writers musicians, and designers. They will gather all the parts of the project together — the notes, the rough ideas, the books the research, the sketches — and spread it all before them on a desk or table. Then they dive in and don’t stop until a major part or sometimes all of the project is done.

It is really much more efficient to do huge chunks of work at a time than it is to start and stop a hundred times. The quality of the finished product is better too because it is more cohesive and has fewer seems.

This is spot on, in my view. I have found that shifting into a period of surge mode has been critical to every large endeavor I’ve sought to accomplish. I recognize that this concept may not be for everyone. But if you are among those who incline to this approach when you have high-impact, large, and important initiatives, you have a very powerful tool at your disposal. Use it.

An interesting dilemma in blogging (at least for me) is the balance between posts that reflect a more settled position on things and posts that capture my in-process, very-much-in-development, top-of-mind reflections on various things. I think most of my posts fall into the former category.

This one falls into the latter category: a few random thoughts on daily to-do lists that aren’t necessarily settled positions, but reflect some tentative observations. So, take it in that light.

Here’s the issue: In Getting Things Done, David Allen says that GTD means “no more daily to-do lists.” (Since these are just rough thoughts, I won’t look up the page number.) Instead, you manage your day from an inventory of all of your next actions, most of which have “as soon as possible” status but which also includes “even the most time-sensitive actions.”

An inventory of non-scheduled, “as soon as possible” stuff is fine. But I have found that not having a daily list in addition to that is fantastically frustrating and unworkable for me. (I’d like to put that in stronger terms, but might regret it.)

As you know, I highly recommend Getting Things Done and find Allen’s approach very helpful and worthwhile. But I do think that some aspects of the approach need to be tweaked a bit, at least for me (and I think, probably, others).

Allen’s mindset on these things seems to be “if that works for you, go for it.” So, while there is an important core to GTD, it is also very adaptable and flexible. Thus, although my thoughts here are probably outside of conventional GTD wisdom, I don’t think that they are contrary to the spirit of the approach.

With that in mind: Some reasons I find it unworkable not to have some type of a daily to-do list are as follows.

Pacing

I find it impossible to pace myself without some version of a daily to-do list. I have found that there is no way to know when I am “done” for the day without some type of daily list, given that there are always more actions you can do.

Deadlines

I find it more complicated than it needs to be to keep up with deadlines without some version of a daily-to-do list. This is a corollary to not being able to pace myself without one.

The fact is that if I have 4 larger projects that need to be done over the next two weeks, I will not be able to focus my progress on those projects if I just let their next actions remain in a set of “as soon as possible” next actions. Keeping them in that kind of list gives them equal weight with the less time-sensitive actions. But they don’t have equal weight.

And the reality is that my intuition does not function to make me always pick those time-sensitive actions out of the mix of all the others at the right time. Instead, I find that my tendency is to want to get rid of the smaller actions because they feel like they are “clogging things up.” Then more smaller things come up (I think Merlin Mann calls these “mosquito tasks”), creating a cycle of frustration.

Hence, because of the role that systems play in influencing behavior even contrary to the best intentions, I’ve found that I need to bake it right into my productivity system to focus my attention on the most important and/or time-sensitive actions.

The Ambiguity in Truly Defining What Must Be Done Today

David Allen writes that “if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do.”

It seems to me this concept, however, very quickly runs into unhelpful ambiguity: How do you define what truly has to be done today?

Is it defined by what your boss tells you that you have to do? By deadlines others have set and want you to comply with? By contextual realities (Fred is going out of town Saturday, so you have to call him on Friday)?

I think the reality is that there are very few things that absolutely have to be done on any given day. But there are many things which, if not done this week, will simply make your life a lot more complicated and put you behind on your projects. Hence, if you only put on your calendar (or a daily to-do list) things that absolutely have to get done that day, you will get out of step with things. And you might find that all of a sudden, you have a large number of actions that “suddenly” need to get done today — but now you don’t have enough space in the day to do them.

Further, if it is OK to regard action A as something that has to be done today because someone else (such as your boss or manager) said it needs to be done by that time, why isn’t the fact that you yourself simply want something done today enough of a reason as well?

In other words, I think that more important than deadlines other people give us are the time frames that we want to meet simply because we want to. Or, to put it differently, the mere fact that you think it will work best to get action A done today is sufficient reason to make it a “have to do today” item. And without a daily section of your next action list, the decision to do that item today will not be reflected in your list, and so it will be easy to end up overlooking.

List, Not Calendar

Some people block off time on their calendar to do very important tasks. I think that is a great practice. It does not scale to every important or time sensitive action you have, however.

The reason it doesn’t scale is that there may be, for example, five 10-minute actions that you need to get done today. Add those to your calendar would be cumbersome. Slotting them into specific times would assume greater precision than is likely possible. But creating them as “all day events” in your calendar program also quickly gets cumbersome as well. Calendar programs are not designed for holding a bunch of all-day events — it quickly starts to feel cluttered.

Hence, while I do recommend blocking off time on your calendar for sizable tasks, an actual list is still necessary when you have multiple smaller actions that you need to accomplish in a day.

But What About Re-Writing?

The idea that those who create daily to-do lists always end up having to recopy a ton of items that they didn’t get done to the next day is, in my view, an incorrect stereotype. Sure, that may be the case for some people. But it doesn’t have to be the case.

First, many people have the discipline to actually do what they decide they will do. You can develop this discipline. Second, it’s really a matter of being realistic with yourself and not over-scheduling. Third, in the age of copy and paste, it is not hard if you do have to revise things every day, even significantly.

Fourth, if you do find yourself having to carry over a bunch of items from one day to the next, regard that as a learning process. That is showing you that you are over estimating what you are able to do. So stop planning so many things for your day. This realization is one of the central uses of doing this — it forces you to start being realistic about what you can get done, so that you can then become more selective in deciding what you really will do, and what should be eliminated because, while nice, it’s less important and needs to give way.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, this concept is not as foreign to GTD as may at first seem. For Allen does say in Getting Things Done that “having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment.”

That’s really what I’m advocating here: creating a working game plan for your day. I just see this as implying a bit more than what seems to be contemplated in the standard GTD approach.

A key to making this work is to remain flexible. This doesn’t mean regarding the items on the list as mere “hopes” of what you will do that day. Rather, it means not outlining literally everything you will do that day. Keep it as basic as possible and to the most important things. Two hours of work is probably enough. Preserve lots of time for being able to do things not on your list that fit the flow of the day, and for being able to meet the needs of others that arise.

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.