Tools for Thought

As the public fascination with productivity keeps increasing, the backlash against it grows in proportion. The continual focus with getting more done in a day is suspect. Is it even a healthy or worthwhile endeavor?

It depends on what people mean by “more,” and how productivity and accomplishment are measured. A to-do list with many as many items crossed or checked off as possible is a popular image of a productive day. Some of us characterize productivity by constant activity.

I define and measure productivity by impact, a change of state in oneself or others. Reading a life-changing book can be more productive than running a week of errands. Taking a 20-minute nap in the middle of a marathon writing session can accomplish more than applying the same 20 minutes toward more, fatigued, writing. Spending an hour thinking about the critical path of a project might accomplish more than proceeding in a less mindful way for weeks.

The lynchpin question that quides my own priorities is: What impact do would I like to have on the world? If the work I’m doing this very moment does not contribute to an improved change of state on some level, I know that I need to find a new line of work; or what I’m doing needs to somehow enable the transition to that new line of work. As a rule, any job I take needs to work for me rather than against me.

Without alignment to a higher purpose, the results-by-volume standard of productivity can be counterproductive. The more tasks we complete that run against our values and our vision of an improved world, the more drudgery and angst we experience. We end up chasing rewards that have social currency—prestige, possessions, money—but are devoid of any lasting satisfaction.

Horizontal and vertical focus

GTD involves two axes of focus: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal focus refers to the fundamental control elements of accomplishment: next actions. The full inventory of the very next physical, visible actions we need to take defines the extent of our horizontal focus. Any intention lacking at least one next action to take toward its realization is an incompletion in our psyche, an “open loop” in GTD parlance. The next actions lists are our reality check, ensuring that we’ve clarified in concrete terms what we specifically need to do to bring our projects to completion. The definition and management of next actions is our horizontal focus.

Vertical focus refers to several horizons of perspective, with GTD applying an aeronautical metaphors for each. Where the actions that make up horizontal focus would be our “runway” level, the “10,000 feet” level of focus is a view of our projects. GTD defines a “project” as any outcome that takes more than one action step to accomplish. As a result, while some projects are what we would normally call projects (starting a blog, trying a legal case, financing a home), other outcomes that GTD refers to as projects are more mundane than what most people would refer to as projects. “Get desk lamp” might wind up on a project list if the specific lamp had not yet been selected, or the venue to purchase it from was unknown. The specific physical, visible next action might be something like “Browse L.L. Bean catalogue,” or “Browse desk lamps on Amazon.” What winds up on the action list are only the tasks that have no prerequisites or require further thought; they’re “intelligently dumbed down.”

Farther up the horizons of vertical focus is the 20,000 foot level, otherwise known as “areas of focus.” These are the various categories and lifestyle factors that all projects fall into: health, finance, family, recreation, career, and other self-defined domains. Someone can have as many or few as needed. Having these categories explicitly identified into a checklist is useful for making sure that you have active projects for any area that’s on your mind. It can be easy to miss an area of focus by keeping your attention at the project list level. A well-defined list of focus areas can serve as a reality check on the project list.

The 30,000 foot level is the perspective on short-term goals that reach out into the 1-2 year future. The 40,000 foot level deals with lifestyle goals on a roughly 5-year time frame.

Finally, there’s the 50,000 foot level, which deals with life purpose: What is my purpose on the planet?

Personally, I’ve always found the latter question unanswerable beyond platitudes characteristic of mission statements, so I never took it seriously. I realized that the question’s intransitive wording never provoked more than glib answers. Once I replaced it with “What impact would I like to have on the planet?”, I knew I wanted to upgrade our understanding of and processes for thought and action. That, to me, is productivity—or what Goethe would call wisdom:

“Once one knows what really matters, one ceases to be voluble. And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking—and these are the sum of all wisdom. . . . Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out. Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.”