What's Best Next

In the last post (actually, two posts ago now), we saw that it can be very helpful and clarifying to define the deliverables on your projects.

This leads to the reason knowledge work can be so hard. Not hard in the sense of heavy lifting, but in the sense of — for lack of a better word — “mystifying.”

The challenge of knowledge work is that, usually, we have to define our own projects and deliverables. I often find myself looking back fondly to when I was in school, and all of the “deliverables” were handed to me on a silver platter (= syllabus).

You didn’t even really need to keep a project list — all of your “projects” were defined for you, with detail, right there in the syllabus. (Although if I had it to do over, I would keep a project list now.)

I didn’t know about David Allen back then. Yet, “knowing what you were not doing” was simple. I kept on top of things by simply saying to myself every once in a while “Hmm, I wonder what I’m supposed to be doing? Better look at the syllabi from my classes.” (That’s very GTD-ish, by the way.) This worked very well, and I actually think that there are some lessons to be learned from this (more on that down the road, hopefully).

The challenge in the world of work (and business of life, even if you are in school) is that you don’t have people defining all your projects for you. You do have people assigning you things, such as your boss. But you also have people “requesting” things. And then, for the most part, you are responsible to know what you need to do in order to accomplish the purpose of your position (or life at home — parenting, keeping up the house, etc.).

There is variation here, of course. For example, some positions might indeed largely consist of work that is defined very clearly and assigned by a boss or customer workflow or etc.

But regardless, my point is that we all have an ever-changing “syllabus,” most of which we have to create. And we have to create it in real-time.

The result is that, in addition to being skilled in actually doing our work, we also have to be skilled in defining our work. And there are some interesting trade-offs there: define your work poorly or inadequately, and the doing of your work will suffer. Additionally, time spent defining your work takes away time from doing it. On the other hand, define your work well, and that will pay off rich dividends in the doing of your work, in terms of both time savings and quality improvements.

Figuring this all out is, possibly, one of the greatest opportunities for increasing knowledge worker productivity on a large scale — and bringing more sanity to life at the individual level as well.

David Allen has a good article in Businessweek on Time Management in the Age of Social Media.

Here is an especially interesting observation:

The challenge is that each of those social media involvements can represent another virtual in box, with an implicit assumption that you should think about and deal with what lands there. If “processing” those additional streams of input is simply a matter of scanning to see what’s of interest to you, that may not take much time; and you can simply drop in and out on a whim. That’s no different than channel surfing, other than the added seductiveness of interactive rabbit trails to pursue.

But if you are expected—by yourself or others—to be more familiar with the content, or to contribute and respond to content directly, you’re going to have to be judicious in how you manage your social media commitments. It’s not as innocuous as another cable station, unless you have specifically downgraded your expectations of how you’re going to be involved.

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.

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.