Tools for Thought

Work is a cycle of thinking and doing. When we want to bring about something new in the world, we spend some time thinking about what needs to be done, then spend some time doing it. Some ways of thinking and doing are more efficient and less stressful than others. One way is to batch thinking tasks apart from doing tasks.

The weekly review is one of the best approaches to streamlining the cycle of thinking and doing. Once each week, everything that needs to get done is collected, processed and reviewed as a batch process. During the rest of the week, we can focus on working off the results of the thinking we’ve already done. The question, “What do I need to do now?” is answered by simply looking at a calendar and a list, instead of having to rethink everything we possibly could be doing. Prioritizing is a simple matter of comparing line items, something that can be done in a few seconds.

Without having that thinking externalized, we would have to mentally reconstruct the list, then keep its contents in our head long enough to compare them against each other. Since short-term memory does a poor job of holding more the a half-dozen items, most people’s tendency is to leave most options unexamined, especially during a busy time, when the perceived need to examine all options is almost nonexistent.

Predefined work

There are three ways to spend your time in relation to work:

• You can do predefined work
• You can define your work
• You can respond to incoming work

The more predefined work you have to do, the easier it is to execute it. Employees at McDonald’s don’t have to spend their work day figuring out what to do; they just do it. All of their actions are explicitly spelled out in an operations manual: from what wording they use for greeting customers to how long to leave french fries in the deep fryer. Since their work is so explicitly defined, they get to experience completion more concretely and continuously than most knowledge workers. When they leave work, it’s no longer on their minds.

Having predefined work to execute requires defining work. The art of the weekly review is turning knowledge work into a McJob, relatively speaking. At the end of the review, you wind up with a list of calls to make, errands to run, emails to send, facts to look up, questions to ask coworkers, software tools to download, support material to file, and so on. In other words, you’ve turned an amorphous network of “stuff” into a concrete set tasks to check off, widgets to crank, between now and your next review.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Knowledge work requires real thinking to be done during the week, but now the thinking tasks have been defined. New work, new information and new opportunities come in between weekly reviews. The new inputs have to be collected and processed as well, but it’s much easier to do so when they don’t sit on top of a backlog of unprocessed inputs. You begin the week from zero base, with relatively nothing in your collection buckets (your email inbox, in-basket, voice mail, etc.), motivating you to maintain that standard. Over time, you find that weekly reviews become easier, since you become more vigilant about collecting and processing incoming work — there’s less to clean up during the review.

Having as much of your work predefined as possible also elevates your perspective when evaluating incoming work. If most of the thinking about your work is behind you, then the importance of an interruption can be seen more objectively. Many time management books have the (sometimes implicit) premise that any work that isn’t predefined is necessarily of lower priority than the tasks on your calendar. On the contrary, having the bulk of your work predefined gives you the freedom to make a conscious priority choice in real time. If you choose to stick to your original task, it will be for a better reason than having thought of it first.

(Photo credit: Vince Chan)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity