Resources on Productivity

From Seth Godin:

This is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there’s so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we’re stuffed.

Often, we’ll decide that something is full, stuffed, untouchable but then some Jello shows up, and suddenly there’s room.

Think about your schedule… is there room for an emergency, an SEC investigation, a server crash? If you took a day off because of the flu, is your business going to go bankrupt? Probably not.

So, if there’s time for an emergency (Jello), why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?

Good advice from Time Management from the Inside Out:

The worst thing to do is berate yourself for not getting everything done, for periodically procrastinating, and for slowing down from time to time. The time and energy you spend feeling guilty create a downward spiral of nonproductivity. Even the most productive people occasionally have off days. The thing that makes them good time managers is that they realize these things are a part of life, forgive themselves, make the necessary adjustments to their schedules, and move on.

Don’t kick yourself for your productivity failures. If you do, you might create a downward spiral that makes things worse. Besides, everyone has bad days.

From Time Management from the Inside Out:

Another reason people incorrectly estimate how long tasks take is that they overlook hidden time costs. Emily was a novelist whose goal was to write for three hours every morning. So she’d schedule three hours of writing time. That was logical enough; however, she consistently got only two hours of work done each day.

After paying attention to her habits, Emily realized it took her an hour to warm up. During this time, she read the newspaper, drank coffee, and gathered her thoughts. When she skipped this step, her writing was dreadful.

She had to accept that part of her process included warming up. For Emily to write productively for three hours, she needed to schedule four hours. To calculate how long it would take her to write a piece, she would have to allow for this transition time.

It is very interesting that this person spent one hour essentially doing other things in order to get “warmed up” for the writing she intended to do. It would be tempting to say, “that’s inefficient — she should just skip those things, and she’ll get more done in her day.” But, as she noted, if she skipped those “warm-up tasks,” her writing was horrible.

The lesson: Unproductive time is not necessarily unproductive. It may be an essential step in “tuning up” your mind for the high-level tasks it needs to do. If you cut it out, you may find that your productivity decreases rather than increases.

If you find this to be true in your case, embrace it. Don’t go overboard, but don’t try to change yourself. If you can get 4 hours of work done in 4 hours of straight work, that’s great. But if you “waste” the first hour, but then in the remaining 3 hours get the equivalent of 4 hours of tasks done, more power to you.

When I walked into my son’s kindergarten class last fall, I had the same reaction that I recently blogged about with Taco Bell. My thinking was: “These folks are more productive than I am!”

At Taco Bell, it stood out to me that they weren’t getting over-granular (that is, overly specific) in defining their next actions. The work units for the cooks were “make combo meal 4,” not “grab some cheese out of the bin….” For many people using the GTD approach, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making your next actions too specific. The result is that your next action list no longer tells you what you actually need to do — instead of identifying your next work units, it is only identifying the first step of what you actually will get you started into a more involved task. The Taco Bell cooks show us not to do this. Put on your next action list your next work unit, not your next literal, super-specific step (unless that super-specific step is the extent of your work unit).

At my son’s kindergarten class, the issue related to another common error when it comes to managing next actions.

In the short time that I was there, the kids in the class learned about the days of the week, the alphabet, and all sorts of other stuff. I also got a feel for how things go throughout the rest of the day, and most days in general. It was amazing to see everything that they were able to do in a day. And, how they were able to do it “stress-free.”

Which created a contrast in my mind. Here were a bunch of kindergartners basically implementing “stress-free” productivity without even knowing it, whereas I sometimes find that the GTD system — which promises “stress-free” productivity — sometimes creates more stress. What did this kindergarten class know that I didn’t?

The answer wasn’t hard to see. It came down to one fundamental, core concept: There was a place in their schedule for everything that they needed to do.

That’s it. Very simple.

We “get” this idea when it comes to organizing space: if you are organizing a closet, for example, you know how much stuff you have to put in the closet and how big it is. The stuff that you want to keep in the closet gets a spot. The other stuff doesn’t. And to the extent that you have stuff in your closet that doesn’t have a spot, your closet is disorganized.

But when it comes to organizing our time, we forget this. And — I hate to say this — GTD sometimes fuels this problem.

GTD can easily create a project-based mindset. It teaches you to have a list of projects, which you create next actions for, and those next actions go on your next action list. But it doesn’t train you to connect those actions with your actual schedule. And it, in part, seems to do this intentionally, because of the failure of so many systems that rely on a “daily to-do list.”

The problem that results is that you have a long list of next actions and no defined time to do them. The result is that you feel like you should always be doing them. Which is stressful. You are “always ready,” but your list often sits as you are unable to get to it.

Now, this is not necessarily an intrinsic to the GTD system. I doubt, for example, that David Allen has this problem. He’d probably say “nothing about GTD is contrary to defining a time to do your next actions.” And he’d be right. I’m simply speaking from experience of what I see tending to happen with people (including myself). It is easy for many of us to forget the fact that if you want to get your next actions done, it won’t happen magically. You have to define a time in your day to work on them.

Being intentional in this way does not eliminate the fact that we will do many of our next actions spontaneously, when we find ourselves right by Target, for example, when we have some Target items on our errands list. But this spontaneous component will actually happen more often if you also have a scheduled time to work on your next actions.

The other issue here — which, in my opinion, is even more significant — is this: What about ongoing, non-project stuff you need to be doing?

GTD can create a very project-based mindset. Your focus can be to get your projects done. But what about the ongoing things you want to be doing and advancing at?

This is where the kindergarten room was so brilliant. They had a defined time each day to work on the days of the week and alphabet. They also had defined times for reading and some other things. The teacher didn’t just have those things on a next action list to do “when we get the chance.” She was intentional about them.

Here’s the lesson: Don’t just define a time to do your next actions in general, although that alone is helpful. You should also define about 2-5 key ongoing priorities to you and schedule slots of time each week in your calendar to work on them.

You don’t need to create next actions for these areas. That’s part of the point — if HR is one of your many responsibilities in your job, for example, there is a lot of value in saying “from 3-5 every Thursday afternoon I’m going to think about HR strategy.” You don’t want to have to rely only on HR-related projects to keep your HR responsibility in motion; define some operational time for giving focused thought to the area and then work on the most important things that come to mind then.

More can be said on this — lots more. Lots, lots, lots more. What I need to do is define the time to pull that set of posts together …

A few weeks ago I posted on how slack work is a cousin to vandalism because both create unnecessary work for others. I used a hose box I had recently purchased as an example because its low quality made it almost impossible to hook up.

Now the story has taken a new turn, and right on cue: the hose box has broken. I don’t know the right terms for everything, but the gist is that the hook-up valve came out and won’t go back together.

So now the hose box has officially cost me both time and money.

But it gets even worse.

I had bought two of these things, because we have two hoses (I thought I’d be a good neighbor). The second one is now broke as well. I can’t even remember what happened to it. All I know is that it started leaking, and the leak would not go away.

If someone had deliberately taken a sledge hammer to these things and vandalized them, the outcome would not have been any worse. Making cheap, shoddy products that break is just as bad as taking a sledge hammer to your neighbor’s stuff because the end result is the same: broken items that need to be fixed or replaced.

And here’s the worst part of all, though I hesitate to mention this: Both of these hose boxes proudly display a “Made in the USA” sticker.

CJ Mahaney’s 17-part series on biblical productivity is now available all together in pdf format. He takes an approach similar to Covey’s roles > goals > schedule model, which I bake into my GTD-Covey synthesis (with some modifications).

Proverbs 18:9 says “one who is slack in work is close kin to a vandal.” The above hose box is a good example of this.

From the outside, it looks great. But when it came time to hook up my hose to it, I found the task almost impossible.

The valve that you hook the hose up to was positioned at a really odd angle. This made it very difficult to maneuver the hose into a position where it could actually make the connection. On top of that, they apparently used very cheap material, making the connection even more difficult (and risking a break — if I ever need to unhook it, I don’t know if it will be able to take it).

The result? A lot of wasted time. It was later that day or weekend, I think, when I came across the above proverb. Suddenly, the lights went on and I started seeing this everywhere: poor workmanship is akin to vandalism because both create unnecessary work — and expense — for others.

Therefore, if you are against vandalism (and I hope you are!), then you should also be against shoddy work.

But here’s the thing: shoddy work often disguises itself in an attempt to save money. So we don’t realize that we are being shoddy; we think we’re being frugal.

This hose box is the perfect example. I doubt that the company which made it was intentionally trying to be shoddy. They were just trying to make it really, really cheap.

I admire the attempt to save money — and pass on a lower priced product to the customer — but in this case, they were just shifting the bill. Instead of incurring the cost to themselves of using better materials and creating a better design, they used a sub-par design and shoddy materials which, in turn, passed on to me a greater expense in terms of my time. They saved money, but they cost me time.

I would have much preferred that they had spent a little more designing and building the product and just charged me a bit more for it.

I have a hundred more examples to give. There is the carpet in my basement, for example. The people who lived here before finished off the basement — thanks! — but apparently put down the cheapest possible carpet that they could. The result is that if you walk down here with socks, thread from the carpet will collect all over them.

And although I don’t want to say that they themselves thought this way, we do know that a lot of people who are getting ready to sell a house do think like this: “Well, we just need to finish off this basement [or do whatever] so we can sell the house. So let’s just do this as cheaply as possible.”

I’m glad to have the carpet, and I grant that this problem isn’t huge, but let’s serve the next people that will live in our homes by doing things with a little more quality. This doesn’t require extravagance. But just don’t do things in a way that you’d want to redo yourself if you had to live with the consequences. And if you have a very, very frugal bent, then do things better than you’d do just for yourself.

Which brings us back to the main productivity lesson here: don’t save your own money, time, or effort when it is simply going to cost someone else more money, time, or trouble. That’s a cousin to vandalism, because both end up placing an unnecessary burden on another person.

Great article over at the 37 Signals blog on the true cost of watching TV.

Chapter 1 of David Allen’s Ready for Anything is called “Cleaning Up Creates New Directions.” Great point. Here’s what he says:

Completion of open loops, whether they be major projects or boxes of old stuff we’ve yet to purge and organize, prepares the ground for cleaner, clearer, and more complete energy for whatever shows up. We’re often not sure what’s next or what to tackle. At that point, just clean or complete something — something obvious and in front of you, right away. Soon you’ll have the energy and clarity to know what’s next, and you’ll have cleared the decks for more effective responsiveness on every front. Process your in-basket, purge your e-mails, or clean your center desk drawer. You’ve got to do it sometime anyway.

In other words, there are two reasons that you need to close up your open loops.

First, because not having them closed up and cleared out is keeping other great ideas from coming. It is strange but true — when we feel like we have a lot of incompletes, we have an unconscious resistance to great new ideas. Finish up your incompletes and open up the channel for bigger ideas.

Second, because when we’re not sure what to do next, the most important thing is often to just do something. We often gain clarity on what we should be doing through the actual act of doing something.

So, what’s the next action on this? If you need more ideas and/or you aren’t sure what’s best next, maybe you need to just knock down your inventory of unfinished projects and actions. This will spark new ideas, and you’ll have room for them.

But keep in mind that this will also bring new challenges of it’s own, because the better you get, the better you better get.