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Time Management is not First About Getting More Done in a Day

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From To Do Doing Done:

Successful time management is not about getting more done in a day; it’s about getting the things done that matter most. Just trying to get more done every day is life in a squirrel cage running faster and faster to nowhere. Getting done what matters most leads to a life of balance, personal satisfaction, and inner peace. Choosing the tasks to be done is more important than any system of completing random tasks. The tasks we manage on a daily basis need to flow up from the pyramid base of our values. If tasks aren’t related to our values, why would we devote our time to them? (p. 67)

I would tweak two things. First, I would not want to say that getting done what matters leads to inner peace. I don’t think it is possible to find inner peace through any form of productivity, even the right kind where we are genuinely getting the right things done. If our inner peace depends upon any productivity approach, or even just getting done what matters, we are still going to fail often and thus are just setting ourselves up for frustration. But if by “inner peace” she just means a life that is not chaotic, which is functioning well, and is aerodynamic and effective (and thus more pleasant), then I would definitely agree with that.

Second, I would add that it is not enough for our tasks to align with our values. For it is possible for our values to be wrong. Our values must align with correct principles in order to be truly useful.

There is a broad scope of values that align with correct principles, so there is much room for personal uniqueness. But values aren’t the end of the story when it comes to defining the right things to be doing. Values must be based on something deeper — namely, correct principles.

Being Organized is (in part) about Being Ready

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From Time Management from the Inside Out:

Being organized, whether with your space or time, is all about being ready. It’s about feeling in command so that you are prepared to handle all of the opportunities, distractions, and surprises life throws your way. We live in a complex, fast-paced world filled with infinite possibilities and opportunities. When you develop good time-management skills, instead of being overwhelmed by it all, you celebrate it. You know what to choose. You feel clear and focused, ready to take on life.

This observation on how organization is about being ready echoes the title of David Allen’s second book, Ready for Anything. When you are productive, you are ready for what comes your way.

I would add (and so would the author, Julie Morgenstern, but she just didn’t emphasize it as much here) that being organized is also about being able to execute on your priorities.

So their are two aims and benefits of organization: being ready to deal effectively with what comes your way, and being able to chart the course you want to take. There are both reactive and proactive components to productivity.

Ultimately, these two come together, for even in responding to the unexpected things that come our way, we want to do so in alignment with our priorities. Being organized means you know what those priorities are and that you are able to able to act on them, both in responding to the opportunities and surprises that come your way and in charting the course you want to take.

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?

Large Monitors: The Easiest Way to Increase White-Collar Productivity

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Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, makes a point about large monitors that I completely affirm:

Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you’ll recover the investment in less than a year. (The typical corporate overhead doubles the company’s per-employee cost; always remember to use loaded cost, not take-home salary, in any productivity calculation.)

Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don’t provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses. My experience shows estimated productivity gains of 5-10% when users do knowledge work on a big monitor. This translates into about an 0.5-1% increase in overall productivity for a person who does screen-focused knowledge work 10% of the day. There’s no doubt that big screens are worth the money.

I personally use a 2048×1536 display, and I wouldn’t even call that a really big screen. Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals.

Starting at 1600×1200, users rarely stretch their browser windows to the full screen because few websites work well on such a wide canvas. Big windows are magic for working on spreadsheets, graphic design, and many other tasks, but not for the current paradigm of Web pages. Today, big-screen Web users typically utilize their extra space for multiple windows and parallel browsing.

In sum: Get a big monitor — at least 1600×1200 resolution and 24 inches. It might cost a little more, but in a very real sense it may be wasteful not to.

As an aside, here is a very interesting comment that he makes on where the web may be going as monitor resolution grows even more. Very, very interesting:

To serve Web users with truly big screens in the future, we’ll probably need a different paradigm than individual pages. Perhaps a more newspaper-like metaphor or a different information dashboard will prove superior down the road.

5 Questions to Consider When Creating a Personal Mission Statement

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I recently came across a helpful article by Rick Warren on defining your life’s mission.

Warren, obviously, is most well-known for his book The Purpose Driven Life. Now, I would want to say that we should be promise-driven people rather than purpose-driven. (The promise is the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection for us. God acts on our behalf. Therefore we can work.)

I doubt Warren would disagree with that. I see it as very important for understanding the role of a mission statement correctly. In sum, a mission statement is not the ultimate motivating purpose in our life. God’s work on our behalf in Christ is. Our purpose — and motivation for it — flows from that.

Now, within this context, I think that personal mission statements are useful and important. They help guide your direction in life so that you are not aimless, but rather focused on what is most important for you to be doing.

In this regard, I’ve found that Warren’s article provides very helpful insight into creating an effective mission statement. He points out that there are really five questions to address:

  1. What will be the center of my life?
  2. What will be the character of my life?
  3. What will be the contribution of my life?
  4. What will be the communication of my life?
  5. What will be the community of my life?

What is so unique and helpful about this is that we often think of a mission statement simply in terms of what we should do — the ultimate, overriding aim that we are to achieve in our life.

But Warren points out that our mission involves more than just what we are to accomplish. It involves what we say through our lives — the overriding message we communicate in all we do — and, further, our mission should not be conceived apart from a context of relationships with others.

His thoughts on the center of your life echo what Covey has to say about that in The Seven Habits. Covey speaks of the problems that come from being possession-centered, or career-centered, or self-centered, or person-centered, and advocates being principle-centered. I think that the true and ultimate expression of that is to be God-centered, and Warren hits that well here also.

Anyway, enough commentary. Read the whole thing.

GTD Agenda

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I’ve mentioned often that GTD is very good at the lower altitudes (projects and actions) but not as developed at the higher levels (goals and roles). Within the proliferation of online task management tools in the last couple of years, many of them also reflect this same strength at the lower levels, but less developed approach to the higher levels.

Recently an online service named GTD Agenda was pointed out to me. It is a productivity tool that was designed for implementing GTD with both the higher levels and lower levels in mind. So — after having this on my project list for far too long! — I’ve given it a quick spin to see how well it does.

As I talk about what I think it does well and what its gaps seem to be, this post might also give you a small window into the big picture of my own productivity approach.

[Read more…]

Where Does Work Come From? Some Unexpected Places

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I recently came across the outline of a presentation I did a few years ago and found these six principles that I listed as type of appendix at the end.

I don’t know exactly what to call them. They are definitely not comprehensive philosophy of work — far, far from it. They seem to focus on unexpected places where work comes from. I think I originally wrote them down after a particularly busy and frustrating week when new work just kept showing up, no matter how much I got done.

If I were to summarize their main point of these six insights, it would be: Don’t be fooled into thinking that the way to get all your work done is simply to do your work. That’s a necessary component, but it will not lead you to the sometimes very elusive sate of being all caught up.

I find these principles helpful to keep in mind. At some point, maybe it will be worthwhile to craft them into a more systematic article. Here they are:

  1. People create work. For example, even if you go on vacation in order to do no work, the maid still needs to come to make the bed, take out the trash, and clean the room each day.
  2. Work creates work.  Doing one task often triggers, leads to, uncovers, or requires another. And then another…
  3. Work takes work to manage.
  4. Greater efficiency does not necessarily mean less work, but rather usually means that more work will be attempted — which is greater in volume than the slice of time saved by the efficiency. This has been the case with increased energy efficiency through the twentieth century, and it is no different with increased time efficiency.
  5. The larger the number of dependencies among your tasks and in your life, the less lean you are and the more complicated your life is. Seek to minimize dependencies.
  6. You will never reach the end of your lists.

If It's Urgent, Ignore It

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That’s the title of an article I recently came across again in my files, from a couple years ago in Fast Company. Sure, that’s a bit of an overstatement, but it’s actually a pretty good principle.

Here’s what it says:

Smart organizations ignore the urgent and focus on the important.

Is it realistic to ignore the urgent, though? Well, here’s the problem: Focusing on the urgent just causes more urgent things to come up. The only way to really minimize the appearance of the urgent is to focus on the important:

Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

Ignore the urgent so that you can do the important things that are necessary to make the urgent fires stop happening in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

The Action-Priority Matrix

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Mindtools has a good overview of the Action-Priority Matrix.

The Action Priority Matrix is a simple diagramming technique that helps you choose which activities to prioritize (and which ones you should drop) if you want to make the most of your time and opportunities.

It’s useful because most of us have many more activities on our “wish lists” — whether these are bright ideas to pursue, exciting opportunities or interesting possibilities — than we have time available. By choosing activities intelligently, you can make the very most of your time and opportunities.

You unfortunately have to register to read the whole thing (What’s Not Best!), but you still get to see the four quadrants, which are:

  1. High impact, low effort: Quick wins
  2. Low impact, low effort: Fill-ins
  3. High impact, high effort: Major projects
  4. Low impact, high effort: Hard slogs (now called “thankless tasks” in the article, but I like “hard slogs” much better)