I have a new coaching client. He’s an exceedingly bright and hard-working manager who sometimes gets into trouble because his structures for keeping track of everything he’s taken on aren’t quite up to the task. I’ve been hired by his company to help him upgrade his system.
In the interest of clarifying for myself how I will approach this assignment, I decided write out what I consider to be the key principles for optimizing one’s personal productivity.
Let me note that this is a long post. I’ve been working on it for days. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t particularly interested in this topic.
I also want to acknowledge that much of what follows is based on the work of David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, and Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
OK, here we go.
Objectives
Any system for managing our time and commitments needs to accomplish three things:
- Reliability: Nothing we’re responsible for slips through the cracks
- Prioritization: We’re always focused on the most appropriate thing at any given time
- Peace of Mind: We experience no stress or anxiety about everything there is to do
The Means to Those Ends
The structure for fulfilling those objectives is a trusted existence system — that is, a leak-proof system for keeping our commitments and intentions in existence outside of our memory.
(A simple illustration of existence outside of memory is the common practice of placing something one needs to take into the office the next morning at the front door. Once it’s there, we no longer need to remember it; we would literally trip over it before we could leave it behind. An existence system has to accomplish the same thing, but with everything we need to do and handle.)
Design Principles for Devising an Existence System
1. Eliminate a reliance on memory
The key to achieving the above objectives is devising a way of keeping track of our obligations, concerns, projects, and intentions (we’ll refer to all of these as “commitments”) without any reliance on our memory. There are two reasons for this.
First, our memories are unreliable. To the extent that we’re keeping track of things in our heads is the extent to which at least some things will fall through the cracks.
But second, and more important, whenever there’s something you’re committed to, the default behavior of your mind is to allocate some portion of your mental bandwidth to making sure that commitment does not go out of existence.
As a consequence, that portion of your mental bandwidth is not available for what your mind is actually good for: having and developing creative ideas.
What’s more, anything that reminds you of that commitment will cause your mind to burp it up regardless of whether it is relevant to your current circumstances. This takes the form of a sudden thought along the lines of “Oh, that reminds me…” This distraction briefly interrupts your attention and results in your being less than fully present to what you are currently engaged with.
Because of the way our brains are wired — they are insanely associative mechanisms — the trigger for such a distraction could literally be anything. And so thoughts like, “Oh, I need to buy milk on the way home” intrude constantly, like popcorn popping, unbidden and apropos of nothing.
I’m not talking here about having a new and useful idea pop into our head. That’s great. When that happens we need to pause what we’re doing just long enough to capture the idea (write it down), and then have a reliable way for transferring that idea into our larger system.
The problem occurs when things about which we’ve already made a decision pop into our head at a time when we can’t do anything about them. We’re sitting in an important meeting at work, someone drops something into the wastebasket, and we think, “Oh! I need to take the trash out tonight.”
Even when such thoughts don’t come entirely to the surface of our consciousness, the agglomeration of these “open loops,” as David Allen calls them, are a constant source of stress and distraction. We can only attend to one thing at a time, but we experience being overwhelmed by all the things we’re not doing. They keep us from being fully present and diminish our ability to engage deeply in cognitively challenging work.
As David Allen says, your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.
2. Combine serviceable tools with effective practices
There is no set of tools which, by themselves, will ensure our effectiveness. An existence system also requires a set of practices or disciplines to ensure that each of our commitments remains in existence, and comes back to us when we need to act on it. The second part is trickier to accomplish than the first.
The ideal system might be some kind of floating AI that followed us around and reminded us of everything we needed to remember at just the right moment. It would remind us of people’s names as they approached us in the hallway. As we were coming up on the hardware store it would murmur, “Remember that you need more three-way light bulbs.” Our memories are useless for this purpose; the point at which our mind notes that we need light bulbs is when we turn on the lamp and it doesn’t work . . . again. As we approach the hardware store, it is typically silent.
But even in the absence of a virtual AI assistant, we can accomplish something similar. If we have a practice of putting all our errands on one list (or within an “Errands” category on a larger list) and have a practice of consulting that list whenever we run an errand, we are much less likely to overlook the opportunity to duck into the hardware store when we run out to buy milk.
Likewise, keeping a list of our key priorities combined with a practice of checking that list first thing each morning will result in our spending more of our time doing high-value work.
3. Provide openings for action.
An existence system needs to provide not just reminders of what we’re committed to; it must call us into action.
For example, one component of an existence system is a list of actions we need to take. You’ll know you’ve articulated the items on this list as openings for action when your reaction to seeing one is not “Oh, right; I need to do that,” but rather, “Yes! I can do that right now.”
One key to making an item on our Actions list an opening for action is to ensure that it’s sufficiently granular — that it actually represents only a single action — and that it’s the very next action needed to move something forward. An item on our Actions list is not an opening for action if there’s something else we need to do first, or if it’s not really a single action but actually a mini-project comprising multiple actions that we need to summon from memory.
Another key is ensuring that the purpose of the action is made clear, so that there is not even a moment’s question about what the objective is. Thus, instead of “Call Tom,” it should be “Call Tom to answer his question about the kickoff meeting,” or “Call Tom and make sure he feels fully acknowledged.”
4. Design for efficiency
An existence system has to be efficient to use, a quality the personal productivity mavens call “low-friction.” Wherever your system slows you down — puts a virtual hitch in your step — that’s an improvement opportunity.
And aside from an efficient approach to accessing and updating our system, we must also optimize our access to any materials and information we might need as we work. Project-support materials, frequently accessed files, names and contact information all must be quickly accessible without any hunting, guesswork or effort.
5. Enable deep work
Knowledge workers need time to think, and time to do the kind of work that requires concentration and focus over an extended period of time. Our current culture of open offices, back-to back-meetings, email overwhelm, instant messaging, and a raft of other distractions are all obstacles to doing this kind of deep work.
This means we can’t just manage our day from a task list, as David Allen suggests — picking the next likely thing to do from our list and tackling it. We need to block time on our calendars for our highest priority objectives, especially those that require “going deep.”
6. Learn from the breakdowns
The key to optimizing our system over time is noticing what isn’t working — being alert to breakdowns — and then revising or adapting our system so that similar breakdowns won’t happen in the future. Breakdowns are inevitable. Rather than allowing them to invalidate us, we need to relate to them as information that illuminates how our system can be improved.
Obstacles to Success
1. The difficulty of changing multiple habits
Implementing and using a new existence system involves significantly changing one’s work habits — a lot of them: how we manage our time, plan and prioritize, keep track of what we need to do, even process our email.
It’s difficult to change even one habit — it takes focus and discipline over several weeks. Those who coach people on breaking bad habits or developing new ones advise against tackling more than one habit at a time.
So what are the chances that we’ll be able to entirely overhaul the myriad aspects of how we work in one fell swoop? Nil. Which is why adopting a new existence system is not an event but a journey. It involves implementing one or a few new practices at a time, fine-tuning our approach to them, and then taking on something else.
In many cases, implementing one new practice will illuminate what practice needs to be added next.
2. Allocating the time
When you’re already really busy, finding the time to implement a new system, and begin using it when doing so hasn’t yet become second nature, can be daunting. But it does take time; there’s no way around it. The time required is akin to the time a lumberjack allocates to sharpening his saw — it takes you away from your work, but it pays you back later in the form of greater effectiveness. (Thanks to Stephen Covey for that analogy.)
Of course, you can find time for anything if it’s important enough, so the question to be resolved is, how important is this?