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Too Controlled is Out of Control

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Good point from David Allen in Ready for Anything:

In golf and tennis, too firm a grip can cause you to “choke” a shot. Hanging on too tightly can limit your ability to deal with things from the most productive perspective. Micromanaging — getting too wrapped around the axles of life and work — can be a seductive trap in getting things done. Fine points are fine, as long as there’s a point. (p. 122)

In other words, if you try to control too much, you actually lose control. As in tennis, so also in productivity: too tight of a grip will cause you to choke.

Allen touches on this in his latest book, Making It All Work, as well:

If your grip is too tight on a golf club, you will lose control of your swing. If your rules are too strict for your kids, they will rebel. A boxer or karate master will attempt to coax his opponent to fear losing control, which causes the opponent to tense up and overreact. (The tactic is called a “fake.”) If your policies and procedures are draconian, you will wind up only stifling creativity, flexibility, and momentum in your environment. (p. 65)

A key part of the solution is to realize that utilizing a disciplined approach to productivity, such as GTD, doesn’t relieve you of the work of having to think about your work. As Allen writes:

Once people catch on to the power of organization per se, they sometimes go too far and try to microorganize everything: “Let’s create a system so you won’t have to think at all!” But it can’t be done. My systems do indeed relieve the mind of the tasks of remembering and reminding as much as I can, but they don’t replace the need for regular executive thinking about my stuff. … You must still engage your mind, your intelligence, and your vision to integrate those moving parts into the whole of how you interact with your world.

Interestingly, the concept of being over controlled has implications for organizational and management productivity as well. For, as Allen alludes to in one of the above quotes, if an organization tries to tie everything up with very detailed policies, the result is often that creativity and momentum are killed.

In this regard, Marcus Buckingham gets at the solution in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently: Good managers define the right outcomes, but leave it up to each employee to find the best way there. That brings together both the need for clear expectations with the equally important need for freedom and empowerment.

In both the realms of managing others and managing yourself, too controlled is out of control. When managing others, work with people to define the right outcomes, but leave the methods to them. When managing yourself, define your outcomes (projects) and the best next steps to carry them forward (next actions), but once you’ve done this, don’t think that you’re on autopilot. Rather, that is when another level of thinking needs to begin about how to integrate what you have to do into the reality of your ongoing, ever-changing daily environment.

These Obstacles Are Part of Your Life (or, Don't Wait to Start Your Life)

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From Alfred D’Souza, quoted in David Allen’s book Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life:

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin — real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

Is it Ever Wasteful to Save Money?

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Even though we are in the midst of a recession, I’m going to have to say yes.

Last month I bought some neat-looking letter holders from IKEA to maybe serve as our new in boxes upstairs. However, my wife graciously pointed out to me that they simply will not go with our decor.

So I put it on my errands list to return them. One month later, they are still there. I think I am going to have to delete the errand throw away the bins.

IKEA is about 24 miles away from our house. Not too far, but returning them will be an investment of at least an hour round trip, plus an additional 15 minutes of lost time on each side. I think the total cost for the bins was about $12.

If I had other things to do over at IKEA or the Mall of America, it would make sense to group this with those other things, thus making the trip worth it.

But at this point I don’t have other things that will take me to the area. I would argue that making a special trip — taking 1.5 hours out of my life (plus gas) in order to get that $12 back — would actually be the wasteful thing.

Time is scarce, and the true cost of that trip is in the things I wouldn’t be able to do with that 1.5 hours instead. I can think of a whole host of more valuable things to do than spend 1.5 hours to save $12. I’m not saying that $12 is inconsequential; I’m saying that returning them would take away from things of even greater consequence, which are worth more than $12.

More than this, there is simply the sheer complexity of life. It will simplify my life to stop having to pay attention to whether I have a reason to head over to IKEA. That’s worth $12 to me as well. In an age where we are pulled in so many directions, a major guiding principle needs to be: minimize complexity.

So, into the trash can these in boxes will go. Actually, for those who were slightly horrified that I suggested throwing them away, what I’ll actually do is put them into our “to give” box, so that they’ll end up at the local Goodwill.

But I mention the possibility of throwing them away to underscore the importance of minimizing the complexity of life. Reducing complexity in your life is more important than a $12 physical good.

Anyway, they’re off to Goodwill. And next time, I won’t make this mistake. Always learning…

Productivity Tips from Tim Ferris

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Here is a helpful four minute video clip of Tim Ferris (author of The 4-Hour Workweek) touching on a few of his top productivity tips. The video selections include some of his thoughts on:

  • Single tasking
  • Selective ignorance
  • Parkinson’s Law (a task will swell in perceived importance and complexity in direct proportion to the time that you allot to it)
  • Decreasing input and increasing output
  • How he can spend only 5 minutes a day on email in spite of receiving 550+ emails per day

Memorize Your Goals

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Here is an off the cuff thought that I think may be fairly promising.

When it comes to productivity, there are several levels going on. In GTD they are called “horizons of focus.” They are:

  1. Mission
  2. Goals
  3. Roles
  4. Projects
  5. Actions

I know a lot of people have a hard enough time just keeping a current project list, and that’s OK. For those that have attained to the level of setting specific goals and writing them down, my suggestion is this: memorize them.

In other words, David Allen’s counsel to have everything “outside your mind” so that your mind doesn’t have to use up its RAM to remember what it has to do does not apply to the higher levels. It is a great principle for the level of projects and actions. But since the higher levels are more big picture by definition, there is not as much to have to remember up there.

In fact, if you want the higher levels (your goals and mission) to govern your choice of projects and actions — which you should — then really there is almost no choice other than to have your goals down cold. It is important to write them down, but if you are actually going to be using them and guiding your actions by them, they have to be in your head as well.

This is possible because you shouldn’t have very many goals. Or, better, each quarter you should identify the most important 3-5 goals for you that quarter. You might have many more longer-term goals. But these quarterly goals need to be kept very few, because otherwise you will not be able to focus on them.

Since they are few, they can be memorized. And since they can be memorized, you can actually be acting on them. If you don’t memorize them, you’ll have the cumbersome step of always having to look back at them whenever you are deciding which projects and actions to focus on. Either that, or you’ll just ignore them.

Just some thoughts. I know that this post actually raises whole fields of issues, such as how to do goals, where to keep them, how to organize them, the nature of long-term goals versus shorter-term goals, and so forth. Thus, I run the risk here of getting a bit out of order, and discussing particulars before having given the larger framework. But, for those who utilize the 30k foot horizon of goals, this is an idea that might be worth considering.

What's at Stake with Multitasking?

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The Lifehacker book notes that:

It takes 15 minutes of uninterrupted time to get into “the zone,” that wonderfully productive place where you lose all sense of time and space and get a job done.

So what happens if you multitask? You will never get into the zone. And if you never get into the zone, you will miss out on the best and most productive experience in work.

The experience of being in the zone is the same thing that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. “Flow” is the state (citing Lifehacker here) when “you’re fully immersed in your task, effortlessly successful, and oblivious to time and external factors.”

You get way more done — and it is far more enjoyable — when you are in this state of mind called flow. Csikszentmihalyi calls it optimal experience and actually regards it as a central feature of happiness:

The best moments of our lives usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary moment to achieve something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen…

Multitasking prevents you from getting into this state of optimal experience because the state of flow comes when you are fully immersed in something difficult and worthwhile. That is, it comes through involved mental (or physical) tasks. Multitasking keeps you from being immersed and fully involved in your task, and thus is contrary to the state of flow.

We should engineer our work days to enable us to get into the zone as much as possible. This increases your productivity (I would say, at least by a factor of 4 — but that’s just a guess) and your enjoyment. To do this, “block out irrelevant distractions and let in only the information you need to get the job done” (Lifehacker, p. 140). Chapter 5 of Lifehacker gives lots of strategies for this. One of the biggest, which I’ve blogged about previously, is not to check email continuously.

Now, let me say one more thing. There may be an impression out there that those who choose to focus on one thing at a time are somehow “less capable” than those who pride themselves on multitasking. So let me address that.

If we want to get technical, the reason you can’t multitask with highly difficult and complex tasks is because the single tasks themselves involve so many components that you are really doing something like multitasking within that task. Therefore, you have no room for multitasking with outside factors which are beyond the scope of the task.

Let me give an example using my favorite quarterback, Kurt Warner. When he is on the field and drops back to pass, he has to keep a hundred different things in view. He has to know where his receivers are (and should be), where the defenders are, what the defenders may be planning to do, how significant the threat of a sack is, and so forth. The task of completing a pass is so complex that it is, in a sense, a form of multitasking within itself. Keeping all factors in view involves one’s whole attention.

Therefore, there is no room for Warner to check his Blackberry or iPhone when he is out on the field. Further, there is not even room for him to look up in the stands and wave to his wife during the middle of a play. The task requires 100% concentration.

The world of knowledge work is no different. If it is different for you… how do I say this? If it is different for you — that is, if as a rule you never feel the need to get into the zone — you are probably doing something wrong.

Set up a Morning Dash

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Here’s a helpful tip from the Lifehacker book I mentioned in the previous post. Hack number 23 is “Set up a Morning Dash.”

Some days (most days?) it can seems almost impossible to get to anything on your next action list. Now, one of the very reasons that you have a next action list is to have some lines in the sand that enable you to say “no” to less important things that come up, so that you can focus on what you’ve determined to be most important.

But unexpected gear shifts will happen — which leads to another beauty of having a next action list: it enables you to re-evaluate and re-prioritize at a moment’s notice.

However, it remains true that we often feel that we have been unable to make the progress on things that we think we should. That’s where the morning dash comes in.

Gina Trapani writes:

There is one way to ensure that you’ll knock at least one thing off your list: dedicate the first hour of your day to your most important task before you check your email, or your paper inbox, or go to any meetings. …

Choose one task — even a small one — and tackle it first thing. Accomplishing something out of the gate sets the tone for the rest of your day and guarantees that no matter how many fires you’re tasked with putting out the minute you open your email client, you still can say you got something done.

Julie Morgenstern, author of Never Check E-Mail In the Morning, makes the same point, which Trapani also quotes:

Change the rhythm of the workday by starting out with your own drumbeat….When you devote your first hour to concentrated work — a dash — the day starts with you in charge of it rather than the other way around. It’s a bold statement to the world (and yourself) that you can take control, pull away from the frenetic pace, and create the time for quiet work when you need it. In reality, if you don’t consciously create the space for the dashes, they won’t get done.

This is good advice. Peter Drucker himself suggests something similar, counseling us in The Effective Executive to “consolidate your time” into as large of chunks as possible. He writes:

The effective executive executive knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there. (p. 49)

I’m on hour 3 of my morning dash right now — and I still feel like I need more time. But, time to get on with the rest of the day.

Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better

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Last week I was finally able to spend a good chunk of time reading through Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, by Gina Trapani.

Gina is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the very helpful blog on software and productivity. I found the book to be just as helpful — and enjoyable — as the website. It is filled with 166 brief but very helpful “hacks” for making technology work for you more effectively.

If you get a chance, the book is worth checking out. If I get the chance, I’ll be doing some posts on it as well.

The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline

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Steven DeMaio has a helpful article on The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline.

Before you check that out, it’s worth asking how self-imposed deadlines relate to GTD. For, on the face of it, self-imposed deadlines actually seem contrary to the “getting things done” approach. Here’s a quick word on that.

One of the principles of GTD is that you should only put deadlines on stuff that really has a deadline. This preserves your “hard landscape” so that you can make effective decisions, knowing what really is on a timeline and what isn’t.

It would be easy to take that counsel and then conclude that, therefore, we should never have self-imposed deadlines — that somehow self-imposed deadlines “don’t count” or “aren’t real,” but deadlines imposed by others somehow are.

But this would be a mistake. It would be a mistake to think that self-imposed deadlines aren’t valid, but deadlines imposed by others are.

The reason it is so easy to fall think that self-imposed deadlines aren’t real is that we tend to think that a self-imposed deadline is arbitrary. After all, we’re the one setting it. So why does it have to be Friday rather than next Wednesday?

But if you think about it, the same charge of arbitrariness could be made for deadlines that are assigned to us as well. After all, some person decided on that deadline as well. Why does that make it any less arbitrary than when we set the deadline ourselves?

The fact is that deadlines are a convention for keeping your work going along at the right clip. It is true that sometimes a deadline is an indication that things will completely fall apart if it is not made (for ex: I have to be at the airport in 1 hour, and here I am typing this blog post — better get this wrapped up!).

But the main value of deadlines is that they are a way to keep all your work from hitting at once, and to coordinate your work with the expectations of others so that they can fit your deliverables into their own consequent work in an orderly way. When this framework is behind your deadlines, they are not “arbitrary” but are in fact quite useful — and necessary.

In fact, without some manner of self-imposed deadlines on your work, you’ll either never get anything done, or you will never get any rest (because when nothing has a due date, your mind tends to feel like everything is always due right away — so you’ll feel like you should always be working).

The trick is, just don’t set too many deadlines. Use this tool, but use it wisely.

Well, with this said, go take a look at Steven DeMaio’s four tips for learning The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline.

Estimate the Time on Your Projects

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It can be useful to do a quick estimate of the time it will take to accomplish each of the projects on your project list.

I’ve never really done that before. I used to think that doing so would be an unnecessary exercise that would only serves to take time away from actually getting my projects done. And, beyond that, something that would evoke stares of disbelief from any who heard about it (“you actually do that?? what a waste of time! I just get everything done without any effort, and certainly without wasting in time in trivia like that!).

But I just did it (took less than 2 minutes) and discovered that I have about 63 hours of work staring at me simply from my list of current projects.

That’s very useful to know!

Assuming that I could devote 6 hours a day simply to project work (no email, no new tasks that come up, no meetings), it would take me just over two work weeks to finish that (assuming working only 40 hour weeks). And then, after that, there are a bunch of upcoming projects waiting in the wings.

When I factor in the doing of operational and routine things, that’s probably about a month’s worth of work.

It might be easy to conclude, then, that I have too much work on my current list.

But that’s not necessary too much — it just says that I am looking out about a month at a time on my projects list (not in due dates — many of the due dates are farther out — but in terms of work length). Having about a month active at a time is probably not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, I do try to keep my projects list as short as possible, and so maybe a month’s worth is to much to have on there. I do have more projects than normal active right now.

But the main issue is: Without having done this estimate, I wouldn’t know what quantity of work my projects list really represents.

But now that I know that, I can ask the next question: Is this what I really want to get done over the next month? If I did no other projects over the next month, would I be happy with the result? If not, what should I take off the list, and what should go on in its place?

The payoff in those questions is very high. But if I had not estimated the length of my current projects, my default would have been simply to try to cram new stuff in when it came up — without really knowing the trade-off in time delays it would cause.

Now, I can be more informed about those decisions and make sure I really am getting the right things done over the next month.