Now that I again have a coaching client with whom I’m working to improve his productivity, I’ve had occasion to revisit the key principles for designing a personal productivity system. (I wrote at length about those recently.)
I refer to the collection of tools and practices we use to keep track of our tasks and projects as an “existence system” because it needs to allow us to keep our commitments in existence outside of our memory.
An existence system has to accomplish three things:
- Make us reliable, so that nothing slips through the cracks;
- Help us prioritize, so that we never realize that we’ve just spent a couple of hours doing something other than the thing we should have been doing;
- Provide peace of mind — that is, reduce the stress and anxiety that can come from having a lot of stuff on our plate.
The key to all three goals is to stop keeping track of anything in our heads. Unless we have all our commitments externalized — tracked and managed outside of our memories — we will be less than completely reliable (because we’ll forget things), we’ll prioritize poorly (because we’ll tend to do what’s easiest or what we’re most worried about, neither of which is likely to be the most important thing), and we’ll experience stress and anxiety (because our attention will always be divided between what we’re doing and all those things we’re not doing but can’t afford to forget about.)
One of the conclusions I’ve come to in helping people get themselves organized is that if you design your existence system with an eye to maximizing your productivity, you can in fact incrementally increase your productivity, but if you design your system with an eye to maximizing your peace of mind, you’ll not only obtain more peace of mind, you’ll actually achieve a greater improvement in productivity than if you had made that your primary objective.
The key to a stress-free existence is having nothing on your mind as you go through your work and your life other whatever you’re doing at the moment. And the only way to accomplish that is to have all your commitments stored in a system that you review on a regular basis. That’s what will allow your mind to relax, knowing that everything is accounted for and nothing will end up being overlooked.
I’ll write about what such a system looks like tomorrow.