Some time management system gurus would argue that every task, however big or small, needs to be scheduled. But even critics of time management generally agree that activities requiring higher focus need long blocks of time set aside. But how long is long?

Parkinson’s Law

Even before Cyril Northcote Parkinson first postulated his “law” in an essay for The Economist in 1955, the notion that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion” has long been a popular assumption. It’s accepted as a given that if you give people eight hours to complete a six-hour task, they’ll take eight hours. Over time, Parkinson’s Law has been reformulated in quasi-scientific locutions that sound even more authoritative: “A task will swell in perceived importance and complexity in direct correlation to the time allotted to it.”

Like Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law was coined by a humorist. Parkinson wasn’t in the business of offering time management tips. While all responsible project managers will plan for contingencies, they wouldn’t seriously do so on the basis of Murphy’s Law. Everyone recognizes that Murphy’s Law is observational humor, an exaggeration for comic purposes.

Parkinson’s Law, on the other hand, is often taken quite seriously, sometimes with disastrous effects when managers attempt to increase productivity by shortening deadlines. With supervised manual labor, where wage earners are expected to look busy throughout their shifts, it’s no surprise that workers will pace their work as needed to remain conspicuously active. In those cases, shorter deadlines can actually expedite things if supervisors can tolerate the idleness that follows, which is unlikely. Shortening deadlines usually does little more than increase the display of activity, and often increases errors — which then have to be fixed, pushing completion back beyond the original deadlines.

Knowledge work is fundamentally different from manual work, but not because it carries more perceived importance or complexity. It’s different because people can move faster on demand but cannot think faster. Think rate is fixed, or at least controlled by factors other than willpower or coercion. I recently realized why I enjoy writing longhand over typing. I type much faster than my mental rate of composition, since I frequently deliberate over word choices, but longhand is a perfect match.

Like Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law isn’t a falsehood so much as an exaggeration. We’ve all seen it work from time to time, sometimes on the basis of luck; but there’s a actually a deep principle behind its occasional success: it forces people to think about their process as a whole instead of figuring it out as they’re going along.

You don’t need a boss breathing down your neck to apply the principle. You can simply take any task, pick a shorter time to completion and work backward. If you had to complete your most pressing project in half the time you now have available for it, and you didn’t have the option of taking longer, how would you do it? What would you do differently?

Concentration Threshold

Concentration Threshold is a theory of time allocation expressed by Julie Morgenstern, who states it as an observation rather than a law. If you give yourself too little time to complete a task, you won’t start because you implicitly know the time frame is unrealistic. If you give yourself too much time to complete a task, you won’t start because you implicitly know that your attention won’t last for the allotted block of time.

Concentration Threshold is specific to each individual and each task. We don’t procrastinate in general; we procrastinate on certain things more than others, depending on the level of focus required. Morgenstern describes a couple of examples in her commercial podcast, SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: The 4-Step Plan for Getting Unstuck:

Most writers that I know can only write for up to four hours a day, and if they give themselves eight hours, they’re going to spend four hours procrastinating until they’re inside that window of “I only have four hours left,” and all of a sudden they buckle down and get it done. And when it comes to paying bills it’s very similar. People procrastinate on that because what I call their concentration threshold for managing their finances is about 20 minutes. So they sit down for an hour and they procrastinate for 40 minutes until they’re up to their concentration threshold, and then they finally engage, because 20 minutes is their maximum time frame for finances.

Leveraging your concentration threshold is a three-step process:

1. Determine what specific activity is evoking procrastination. Resist the temptation to identify yourself as “a procrastinator.” Most people who think they procrastinate all of the time, on further analysis, come to realize that they only procrastinate on a very small, but important, number of things.
2. Determine how long it takes to complete a task including procrastination time. In other words, count the time to completion from the moment your scheduled yourself to start to the time you actually started, then from the time you actually started to the time you finished for the day.
3. The next time you schedule the task, only allot the amount to time that elapsed when you actually engaged from start to finish, which is very likely your concentration threshold.

Parkinson’s Law and Concentration Threshold look similar, since both call for shortening time allocations. But Parkinson’s Law always advocates time reduction, acting as a pressure valve, whereas Concentration Threshold requires sometimes reducing time, sometimes increasing it.

If you work in an environment where you’re required to put in a fixed number of hours, another way to apply the principle is to determine when your attention starts to wane (well, not yours or mine, but our friends and coworkers), then schedule your break periods right before those times. Learn to look for the natural ebbs and flows of your attention and work with them rather than against them.

(Photo credit: sfllaw)

The stress of heavy workloads doesn’t come from having too many things to do. We can all think of infinitely more worthy things to do that we’re not doing than think of the few things we are doing. If that was really the source of anxiety, every person on the planet would be in a permanent existential crisis. On the contrary. At any given moment, we have one of two choices: we can feel bad about all of the tasks we aren’t doing, or we can feel good about having made the right choice of the one task we are doing.

Workload induced stress comes from two sources: blurred priorities and overtaxed memory. The first is obvious. If you’re unclear that what you’re doing at the moment is the best use of your time and energy, you’ll feel anxious about that misuse. But attributing stress to overtaxed memory rather than too much work seems like a bit of a stretch.

The Limits of Mental RAM

Let’s first look at the notion that having too much to do creates stress. Do you get stressed about solving world hunger? Probably not. It’s clear that feeding the world is beyond your means, so you’ve taken that project off the table as a legitimate option. If you really have to much work, you’ll make an executive decision to delete, delegate or defer the excess — but you don’t stress out about it.

Stress comes from either explicitly accepting a commitment that you implicitly know is unrealistic, or implicitly accepting a commitment you haven’t made explicit. Thinking, “I should set up that Roth IRA” is an implicit commitment that will eddy in the psyche indefinitely until the loop is closed with a specific next action that can be viewed objectively and retrieved conveniently. If you’re near a phone and you have a list of calls you have to make, and one of them is “Bank Customer Service: request Roth IRA,” it’s far easier to manifest that intention.

The first step to relieving stress is to capture everything that has your attention. That goes beyond just making a short list of the loudest or most recent claims on your attention; it means everything — big or small, important or unimportant. Most people resist going that far, then in stopping short of everything, they end up with a large but incomplete list that makes them more stressed than an absolutely total inventory of everything that’s on their mind would.

Having everything out in front of you, and knowing that it’s everything creates a sense of relief, even if you haven’t yet made a decision about what to do with anything on the list. A long list that’s finite is much less troubling than an incomplete list for the same reason that knowing you have $15,000 in debt is less troubling than wondering how much you owe.

Working memory can only hold about seven bits of information, give or take a few depending on your source. It’s clear that the mind wasn’t designed to manage a large inventory of commitments. But with tools, we can extend our storage capacity, which is where a system of externalized task management like Getting Things Done (GTD) comes in.

Outboard Memory

Think of GTD as a set of shelves for storing your stuff, rather than trying to carry it all in your arms. If you had to do something with any one thing you were carrying yourself, you would risk dropping the rest of the load. So you spend all of your energy keeping things close to the vest, hesitating to take action.

Without that shelf space available, you’ll resist capturing new items, sometimes making premature judgements about whether or not those items are important enough to capture in the first place. When you give yourself the freedom to capture everything that has your attention, and have a full array of placeholders to shelve it, you give yourself the discretion to evaluate it at a more appropriate time, when you can give it the full, objective attention it requires.

Total capture isn’t enough to keep things off your mind. You still need to process, organize and review what you collect regularly enough to trust that your outboard memory. But total capture is the necessary entry point. Without a good capture protocol, having any systematic approach to task management will seem take more work than it saves, because you’re working to systems in parallel: one of written notes, and another of mental notes. The more you try to remember, the less inclined you’ll be to write things down, and the more you’ll overtax your working memory.

Barriers to Fluid Capturing

If writing things down when they first occur to us is so important, why do so many of us resist the process? A few reasons:

1. Lack of trusted system downstream. If your processing skills are weak, your brain already knows that whatever you capture will just pile up for nought. Being efficiently lazy, the brain will preempt the extra work by gradually short circuiting your motivation to write things down. Likewise, if your habit of regularly looking at your calendar, project and action lists at least weekly loses momentum, the brain will again disengage from the preliminary work of capturing — after all, why create content that won’t be reviewed?

If the problem lies downstream, so does the solution: become diligent about processing, organizing and reviewing what you’ve captured. Many people allocate too little time to processing their in-basket on the grounds that it doesn’t seem to qualify as “real” work. This is one of the areas where GTD contrasts sharply from traditional time management systems: it explicitly acknowledges defining work as an essential phase of work, over and above doing predefined work.

2. Lack of preestablished capture tools. The time you need to capture something is not the time to decide what you’re going to capture it with, or how. In a moment where two decisions have to be made simultaneously — what to collect and how to collect it — the tendency will be to forgo the need to collect, and hope that whatever’s important enough will be remembered.

Capture tools needs to be thought through ahead of time, so that they’re available at a moment’s notice. Think through all situations throughout the day where you need to take notes:

• When you’re at you’re desk
• When you’re in a meeting
• When you wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea
• When you’re on your cell phone

Determine your preferred method and medium for dealing with each of these situations. Would you rather type your notes or jot them down by hand? Do you type notes with a specific application or a generic text editor? Do you handwrite notes better on large or small pads of paper? Where is the most strategic place to put them? Do you carry a ubiquitous capture tool like index cards in the back of your pocket, a Moleskine or a Notetaker Wallet. Five minutes spent on making decisions about how and where you’ll capture notes will save you from those future split seconds of indecision that make the difference between writing things down and hoping you’ll remember them.

3. The seduction of busyness. The act of capturing something demands hitting a pause button on whatever you were doing. In effect, it’s like a moment of instant meditation. For Type-A workers driven by latest-and-loudest, taking a moment to note something that could possibly be more important than whatever they’re doing (though perhaps less urgent), is something to be resolutely resisted. You’re smarter than that. You’d rather be productive than busy. The three seconds it takes to write something down is far more efficient than the 30 seconds it would take to remember what you didn’t capture, assuming it’s remembered at all. As always, the way things get done is one at a time.

4. Excessively formal notetaking. “Notetaking” is probably a misnomer here. Capturing needs to be agile: a few words or a few bullet points necessary to jog your memory when you process them. For instance, when I was driving I came up with the idea for this post; so I grabbed my voice recorder and said “getting things dumped” — and nothing else. I didn’t need to elaborate on the idea, because I knew that I would put the voice recorder in my in-basket later, and figure out the project and next action when I processed the voice note. Almost all of my voice notes last three to five seconds.

There are times when a lengthier capture process is preferable. A few minutes spent creating a mind map or an outline might be necessary to get a project off of your mind to an extent that a few words wouldn’t. But for general purpose capturing, shorter notes encourage more prolific collection.

5. Thinking through projects and next actions rather than capturing stuff. GTD users who get good at processing — looking at a note, deciding whether it’s actionable, and determining the specific project and action — are often tempted to process any new input right on the spot, essentially replacing capturing with collecting and organizing. That’s often more efficient, but it’s better to develop the skill of jotting raw notes rapidly so that you have the choice of whether to process now or later, depending on what’s appropriate give the time and attention you have available. I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t capturing until I got a notetaker wallet. Before that, I spent too much time trying to enter projects and next actions into my organizer instead of just capturing a short representative reminder.

You might, for instance, use a paper planner to manager your tasks. Assuming you don’t carry it with you at all times, it might make more sense to write a note like, “Meeting with Earl 7/12 at 3:00pm” on an index card when Earl first proposes it. Later, when you’re processing the note from the card into your planner, you have the leisure to determine if there’s a larger outcome involved that would go on your project list, any task to prepare for the meeting that would go on your next actions list, or any other considerations that might form a checklist.

It’s generally a good idea to keep capturing and processing as a two-step process, but skip capturing when the project and next action are obvious.

(Photo credit: World Economic Forum)

At the time I wrote:

It’s on my Someday/Maybe list to try the likes of Guru or AskSunday. At the moment I don’t have any tasks that seem onerous enough to dump on a developing country. Maybe I’ll brainstorm a list of tasks and outsource them just to be fashionable and say I’ve done it.

This year, my new schedule is a problem looking for a solution, so I began reexamining my assumptions about the value of a virtual assistant (VA) and looking for use cases that weren’t silly. In my research, I came across a couple of posts by personal development and productivity blogger Sid Savara that gave some of the most detailed examples of using personal outsourcing effectively. He generously agreed to answer some follow up questions I shot him.

Andre: In your post, The Price of My Dreams – $60 a Week, you discussed your experiments with outsourcing your cooking and laundry. Are you still maintaining your domestic outsourcing, or have you expanded the scope of it?

Sid: Yes, I am still outsourcing my cooking and I love it.  At this point it’s truly changed my lifestyle – I no longer shop, I no longer cook and I no longer even think about what I need to eat.

I am also experimenting with a maid service (The Maids). Full disclosure, my parents own The Maids franchise in Honolulu.  One cleaning takes them about 1.5 hours, and saves me a total of about 6-8 hours.  They also do a far better job than I do, but if we’re just talking about time saved, it saves me about 6 hours every two weeks.

I’m interested in outsourcing my event planning (calling friends, organizing potlucks, etc) but so far my friends have done an admirable job picking up the slack, and I use Socializr to send out on email and then handle the RSVPs.  I had my TimeSvr aides send out the invitations for me, which saved me a few minutes of work each time as well.

Andre: You’re on record of having used Craig’s List and TimeSvr. Have you tried any other outsourcing resources, like Elance or Guru?

I have used Elance, but never Guru. My understanding of Guru is they are focused more towards heavily technical projects. As a software engineer myself, if I have something especially technical I want done, I tend to write it myself or collaborate with friends.

I have had a good experience with Elance.  I’ve hired a couple people to do minor, fairly mundane tasks (analyzing values in a spreadsheet for example) and it was always well worth the money.  My single virtual assistant that I used for much of my blog set up and research I also found from Elance. I asked Prabhu to find the best posts for me out of the mounds I read, cull my RSS feeds, look up names and contact info for various blogs and moderate comments. In addition, I had him do some minor proofreading etc of posts.

The most important thing is to find a good assistant.  I am sure there are bad ones out there, but I tend to be ruthless in my questions. If someone doesn’t show enough drive, or sounds to me like they’re trying to fool me into believing they are something they are not, I reject them.

Andre: What’s your judgment process for deciding to offload a task rather than doing it yourself?

Sid: I would love to offload more tasks.  I think the main issue is finding someone capable of doing it for a reasonable price, and looking at whether it is worth the effort to give the job to someone else. Any outsourcing requires a certain level of management or trust, and that’s the biggest issue I’ve had.

For example, I’d like to outsource more of my email responses as I get hundreds a day. I’ve discovered though that with judicious GMail filtering I can get it down to a manageable 30 or so “real” emails a day – and the responses tend to be customized.  If I was running a mail order business, perhaps I could outsource more, but as a software engineer and writer, most of my replies tend to be based on my experience and judgment calls.

Cooking, laundry, cleaning, car service, car washing etc are all activities that are solid candidates to outsource because I am sure I can get someone who can do it at least as well as me, and at a price that saves me enough time to make it worth my while.  Similarly, event planning (calling my friends) doesn’t require a lot of skill – but perhaps requires my personality,

Andre: What are the biggest mistakes to avoid when delegating tasks and projects?

Sid: I think there are two main mistakes people make (and by this I mean, these are the two main mistakes I made).

The first is assuming that the person who has been delegated the task knows as much as you do about it.  Knowledge that I take for granted and skills that I find basic may be foreign to my assistant.   Assume that your assistant has no skills, and that you’ll need to explain each step in plain english – the first time they do it.

The second is assuming that you know how to delegate. Most people are great at delegating tasks to one person: themselves. In order to effectively delegate, instructions need to be laid out very clearly with all the decision points explained. The type of results expected, the format of documents, etc should be specified in advance so that the assistant knows end to end what the process should entail.

Finally, one cautionary note – don’t assume silence is a good sign.  If you tell your assistant “I’ll expect it Monday, email me if you have questions”, and then don’t follow up by Monday, you may be in for a rude shock.  Oftentimes silence can indicate your assistant does not even know what questions to ask. Come Monday, you’ll either have a confused assistant asking for more time, or worse, the completely wrong task completed because they were too proud or too ashamed to ask for better direction.

Andre: What are some common assumptions made about outsourcing that you’ve found through experience to be exaggerated or false?

Sid: I think one large misconception is that foreign assistants are of inferior quality.  From my (admittedly narrow) experience, foreign assistants are skilled enough to handle data entry and analysis tasks given accurate instructions. Their command of the English language is strong enough, even though some may have accents.  So while they may not be suitable for speaking on your behalf at a keynote, they can certainly put together the excel spreadsheet and pie chart you present.

Another misconception that I had was that it would be difficult to get started.  I thought it would take weeks to find someone, to bring them up to speed, etc.  This is false – in all my experiences outsourcing, finding a provider was the easy part. My assistants were ready to help the same day – they are hungry for work.  The hard part is the delegation, and learning how to effectively get the most out of your assistant for mutual benefit.

Andre: In Can Virtual Assistants Make You More Productive?, you talked about your experiences with your individual VA, Prabhu, and with the team of VAs at TimeSvr. In the comments, you mentioned that you would be keeping Pradhu after your trial of TimeSvr lapsed. Was that out of loyalty, better rapport or better results? Which approach would you recommend to others: an individual VA or a team?

Sid: It certainly wasn’t out of loyalty – if I had a superior experience with TimeSvr that blew Prabhu away, I would likely have given him a couple weeks notice, perhaps tried to find someone else to take his services, and leave.  The main issue was that Prabhu was a well oiled machine by the time I found TimeSvr.  I had been with Prabhu and we had settled on a process to handle my tasks.  While TimeSvr benefits from economies of scale and can offer a large number of tasks (with specialized assistants for each tasks), Prabhu handled a few tasks that were especially time consuming and did it well – for minimum expense.  TimeSvr is a fantastic service for someone who wants a general purpose virtual assistant, or who wants solid reporting on individual, discrete tasks.

In my case, I had a few tasks that I needed done, that Prabhu did well.  The prices for both would be approximately the same to me (since I was likely paying Prabhu a rate similar to what TimeSvr assistants make).

I would recommend TimeSvr (or another VA team) to people who want a variety of tasks and a variety of different aides to do them, or if you are not sure what you are going to outsource just yet.  On the other hand, for a long term relationship with a few specific tasks an individual assistant and the teamwork that comes with that may be superior.  I believe that firms with VA Teams, such as TimeSvr, offer this dedicated assistant service as well. If I recall, the pricing was very comparable to what I was paying Prabhu – I just had no compelling reason to switch since he already performed efficiently.

Andre: Can you illustrate how outsourcing saved you time or effort with one or two of the most graphic examples?

Sid: I think cooking is still probably the best example.  Cooking is a process that requires so much more than simply frying up something in a pan – it involves looking up a recipe, driving to the store, purchasing ingredients, storing those ingredients until I have time to cook, cooking, and finally cleaning the pots and pans.  Compare that with just going outside and having food dropped off in tupperware, and it turns out to be a monstrous saving.

Having my apartment cleaned by the Maids is another great example.  They sent a team of 4 people, who are all trained to clean, with tools specifically made to clean.  My shower looks cleaner than it has in months, and my kitchen is spotless.  My friend remarked that to get his bathroom to look the way it did after they cleaned it would have taken him 3 hours of scrubbing.  I think part of this is because it’s their job, they work harder and faster than we would if we were unmotivated and cleaning it on our leisure time.  I will gladly trade some of my hours earning money developing software for a few of their hours spent cleaning and sanitizing my home.

Andre: In the latter post you mentioned “better parallelization of tasks” as one of the advantages of outsourcing. Will a VA team actually work of multiple tasks you assign simultaneously?

Sid: This depends on the VA firm, so it would be best to check with whoever you are going with to ensure your expectations are appropriate.  I gave TimeSvr so much work during my initial test that I don’t think they could do anything but parallelize if they wanted to give me good service.  I also emailed for status updates and heard back from different VAs on each task, which leads me to believe they had multiple people working on my account at the same time.

Andre: You documented how you dispatched a couple of research tasks: one for comparing e-commerce solutions, and another for comparing subnotebooks you were interested in purchasing. What would be your top tips for assigning tasks right the first time?

Sid: If it’s a research task, I absolutely recommend specifying exactly what format you want your research in. If you want a spreadsheet, tell them you want a spreadsheet. If you are interested in 5 specific features, ask for those columns to be listed.  This was a slight misstep I made with the e-commerce solution task, though the results still turned out fine. In the subnotebook task, I was much more specific with my request and ended up getting results that matched well with what I requested.

Bottom line, if you don’t ask for it – you won’t get it.

I would also caution against tasks that require some implicit cultural knowledge. For example, rather than saying get me the biographies of 10 popular US basketball stars, I would name the basketball stars by name – or risk having a few on that list that may not be popular anymore.  Another reader commented to me they assigned task similar to this asking for popular groups in a specific niche and their assistant ended up misunderstanding and providing them with useless information.

Andre: What’s the most fun experiment you’ve conducted with outsourcing?

Sid: I enjoyed having my assistants call friends and restaurants to make reservations “on behalf of Mr. Savara.”  I always felt like the restaurants treated me a little better because my assistant had called, though that could also just have been the enjoyment I got from having someone else call to make the reservation =).

(Photo credit: miss_rogue)

Since Julie Morgenstern’s book on decluttering, When Organizing Isn’t Enough, was easily the most useful book I read last year, I decided to go back and read some of her material on time management I overlooked in the past. I’ve written about time management in a few times, usually contrasting it to task management, but now that more of my time is externally claimed, I’m more receptive to focusing on ways to master the time that remains under my control.

While Never Check E-Mail in the Morning and especially Time Management from the Inside Out are rewarding reads, it’s clear that studying time management is a like going to church — the people who need to be there the most are the ones who aren’t. Those who most urgently need to manage their time are the ones who (think they) lack the time to read books on the subject. A much faster introduction to Julie’s time management principles can be found in her Time Management for the New Year seminar, recorded last month and hosted on Hay House’s site (the streaming version is $4.95, the downloadable version is $20.00). The two-hour talk covers her six main time management tools, interspersed with insightful listener Q and A.

Organizing Time = Managing Time

Morgenstern began her consulting career as a professional organizer. As she became proficient at organizing physical spaces like living rooms and closets, organizing her time was the last frontier — until she realized that organizing time is exactly like organizing space. A day has so many hours or minutes, just as a closet has so many feet or inches. The trick is knowing what fits. A day crammed with arbitrary activity is as discouraging as fitting clothes into a packed closet.

Here are here six tools for aligning time commitments with time available:

Tool #1: Self-assessment. For anyone frustrated by the inability to get to the most important priorities, the first question to ask is, “What’s keeping me from getting to them?” Julie outlines three kinds of mistakes:

• Technical errors: mismanaged time that can be addressed by simple, mechanical fixes. Tackling high-focus projects too early or late in the day for one’s personal energy cycle, answering the phone before leaving for appointments, and misgauging the time necessary to complete a task can all be resolved by reversing those faulty habits (like ignoring the phone before leaving)
• External realities: disruptive environments, unrealistic schedules, and obligations to others that need to be accounted for consciously. For instance, I’ve been so accustomed to virtual freelance work without commuting that it didn’t occur to me that my new commute consumes 20 percent of my waking hours — obvious in hindsight
• Psychological obstacles: internal resistance or complications. Some people who are chronically late may be (1) calling attending to themselves, (2) avoiding arriving early to avoid having nothing to preoccupy them in the interim, or (3) artificially inducing a crisis situation for them to come to its “rescue” — what Julie calls a “Conquistador of Chaos” complex

Tool #2: Estimating how long a task will take. Julie recounts how she used to constantly procrastinate on washing the dishes, until she decided one day to time herself, only to find that it took seven minutes. From that point forward, washing the dishes was an easy chore, too short to be intimidating.

She notes that over 90 percent of her clients’ To Do lists lack time estimates next to the items. She recommends writing down a time estimate for every task. For the next week, time how long each task takes, or at least the ones you find yourself procrastinating on the most. Some will take surprisingly less time than imagined, while others will take surprisingly more. This one principle made me realize how much of my previous morning and evening routines were unrealistic in light of my new work schedule, mainly due to not factoring in the commute.

Tool #3: The 4 D’s. If you can’t do a task, you have four alternatives, which Morgenstern calls the “4 D’s”:

1. Delete. Just because something isn’t worth doing now doesn’t mean it’s worth doing later. Many things aren’t worth doing at all. Don’t create schedule clutter by postponing unqualified activities. Get rid of them
2. Delay. Consciously deferring lower-priority tasks isn’t procrastination; it’s triage. Procrastination is avoiding making decisions on when or if to do something, where “later” becomes default by definition
3. Delegate. Enlist the help of others: employees, family members or friends. Many hands make light work. Sometimes resistance to delegation stems from an underdeveloped or overdeveloped ego, but often it’s simply the lack of a trusted technique of tracking external dependencies with a Waiting For list.
4. Diminish. Exercise your “enough” muscle, and reexamine the assumption that more is better. A five-sentence email might accomplish 90 percent of what a five-paragraph email would. Shorter meetings might better leverage shorter attention spans. Identify the point of diminishing returns before investing unwarranted time and effort

Tool #4: Develop a big-picture view. So much information and so many opportunities are thrown at us every day that we need a vantage point to see the big picture that throws minutiae into perspective. In GTD these vantage points are life categories — like “Finance,” “Friendship” or “Fitness” — called areas of focus, which we clarify or review as a checklist or a mind map. Julie just calls them categories. Every activity, task and project worth attending to fulfills some meaningful category (even if it’s genuine recreation). Otherwise, it’s clutter that can be pared away.

Developing a big-picture view involves three steps:

1. Define your life categories. Julie recommends no more than six, to avoid diffusing your efforts
2. Ask, “What’s my big-picture goal?” for each category. “Finance” is a category. “Save $1.3 million for retirement” is a goal
3. Decide what two or three activities will get you to these goals — three maximum

Having a big-picture perspective reconnects you to the purpose that drives each activity, giving you the motivation to stay engaged with it. We don’t exercise to exercise, but to achieve or maintain health and fitness.

Tool #5: Time maps. Unlike an actual schedule, a time map is a template of how we generally allocate our time during each day of a normal week. You can see some sample maps Julie created for some of her clients, or check out Lifehacker’s “Map your time” article, which has a downloadable spreadsheet of a time map template.

Where a schedule would have a specific task assigned to a time, like “1:00-3:00 PM: Edit Chapter 6,” a time map would simply denote the more general, regular activity like, “1:00-3:00 pm: Editing.” Identifying and creating spaces for general routines does two things: (1) it allows you to see whether or not you’ve actually made sufficient time available for all categories and (2) it allows you to see the cyclical nature of your time, and realize that it’s much less erratic than you might otherwise assume. For those with more varied schedules, like teachers or consultants, it’s easy to design updated time maps as needed.

Tool #6: Planner. Whether you use a paper or electronic system, your planner is the landscape that holds everything you intend to do, and when you intend to do it. Unlike Dave Allen’s hard landscape approach to getting things done, where only non-discretionary time is scheduled, Julie recommends scheduling every To Do, arguing that tasks not connected to a “when” tend not to get done. As mentioned earlier, she makes no distinction between organizing time and organizing space; so she applies the SPACE method she outlined in Organizing from the Inside Out:

• Sort things and group similar items: also known as batching
• Purge unessentials
• Assign a place for everything
• Containerize: use time maps to define the parameters of each meaningful activity
• Equalize: periodically reassess the effectiveness of your system

Two hours of time well spent

Time Management for the New Year is much more extensive seminar than I would have expected in such a short length. The Q-and-A, which I didn’t cover in the six tools above, goes into advice on how to use commute time more productively, how to stick to taking personal time off, and factoring in daily interruptions when scheduling high-focus projects. After being completely overrun with work for weeks, I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to much of the material in Time Management.

But I gradually added some back in anyway. Then, one day while reading yet another “Top N” post, that little voice amplified: “Is this really the best use of your time?”

I like information. And that’s the problem — I can consume it indefinitely. It’s not a case of information overload, but of information porn: gratuitous reading used to alleviate boredom or anxiety rather than enable positive change or solve a problem. In his recent Lifehack article on information overload, Dustin Wax astutely observes:

I’ve come to believe that when people talk about “information overload” they’re not really talking about identifying information they can act on, but something entirely different. They’re talking about recreational information – information as entertainment.

Instead of just categorically renouncing information. I decided a few weeks ago that I needed to modify my Low Info Diet.

Sunday reading

The new rule: No discretionary nonfiction reading during the week. Instead of reading a book for an hour or two each day during the week, I would read the entire book on Sunday, from start to finish, in one sitting. I would read and comment on blogs finishing the book. Instead of toggling to news sites between Monday and Saturday, trying to stay in the loop, I’d buy a copy of one weekly news magazine, The Economist, and read it in one fell swoop (minus the articles deemed unimportant), opting to catch up rather than keep up (I ordinarily would’ve spent dozens of hours following the Gaza incursion alone). If something occurred to me during the week that would be interesting to read up on, I’d look it up and bookmark it for Sunday.

That’s a lot of reading for one day, a least without some serious triage. Last Sunday I dumped more than half of the reading I accumulated during the week. Aside from the obvious benefit of eliminating task switching, having all of the reading visible in one block — rather than distributed throughout the week (10 minutes here, 15 minutes there) — makes your reading commitments extremely conscious.

Reading is no longer an involuntary response to casual stimulation. When you know how much reading you have to look forward to consuming, each item’s relevance gets evaluated much more deliberately. An interesting article you collect on Tuesday may not seem so interesting on Sunday, after it’s passed through a cooling period.

Exceptions:

• Fiction, which is consciously recreational
• Information needed to currently resolve an impasse on an active project (e.g. “What’s Error Code A73909?”)
• Two-minute reads
• Email and other messaging

Feel free to customize your own batching to suit your needs. For many people, email is their info porn. I’m an Inbox Zero kind of guy, so email isn’t a problem for me. But if you find yourself reflexively checking email, consider batching your email sessions. You don’t necessarily have to batch your entire week’s reading into one day — but I had to. After I made it a rule to stop myself every time I felt the urge to read to fill time, I became conscious of how much of my time was unconscious.

Notice that one of the exceptions is just-in-time information needed to unstick a current project. Just-in-case information doesn’t count — batch it. Compiling information to motivate action is a crap shoot at best, and is just as likely to provide new rabbit trails instead of closing current ones. Research, as Charlie Gilkey points out, is:

. . . a prop, folks. Yes, part of the creative process requires that we research whatever we’re thinking about, but if you find yourself nodding your head at what I’m saying, you know that there’s a point in which you have enough information to do something and there’s a point in which you’re using “research” as a way to get around creating. No amount of information or inspiration is going to solve the problem – for the problem has nothing to do with information.

I once attended an interview with screenwriter Mark Fergus (Children of Men, Iron Man) who claimed that he used to watch a dozen or so films as “research” before starting his screenplays. Suspecting that he was procrastinating, he decided to put off watching the reference films until after he completed a first draft. He pointed out that after getting first draft done, he usually had all of the information he needed in the draft to continue without the screenings.

From consuming to producing

Resisting the urge to consume information can be unsettling, especially when there’s no substitute activity to fill the void. In times like these, your task list is your friend. Don’t sit around wondering what you could be doing in the absence of a crutch activity. Either do something productive, do something genuinely recreational, or review what needs to get done. Trust me, there’s never a shortage of more worthwhile activities. The trick is to keep them conscious.

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Technorati Tags: Lifestyle Design, Productivity

A To Do list with very broadly defined tasks, like “Write article,” will create unconscious resistance to following through on them if they contain implicit dependencies that need to be surfaced. For instance, if the article needs a fact that hasn’t yet been researched, the writer will probably hold off on starting the draft in hopes of summoning the missing motivation sooner or later. But nothing stifles motivation like ambiguity.

What’s missing isn’t motivation, but information. “Look up Menken quote on presidential qualifications,” a two-minute action that would supply the missing piece necessary to assemble the article, can make the difference between starting and procrastinating. The effort required to take the action is minimal, but identifying the specific action required to kick start the project can take some discipline. Next actions are obvious in hindsight, but can be elusive on the front end without focused awareness.

The most insidious form of multitasking

Thinking about what action to take next while trying to take it creates stress. Thinking and doing simultaneously is multitasking. The thinking process needs to be separated and alternated with action to be effective.

A broad action like “Test Outlook” is an abstraction, so instead of being able to execute it immediately, the mind has to imagine what testing Outlook looks like. In order for anything to happen when clicking Send/Receive, the email account has to be configured. The first physical, visible step would probably be “Enter POP address into Account Setup.” If that were on the list instead of “Test Outlook” (and “Test Outlook” was redefined as a project and placed on the project list to hold the outcome), initiating the whole process would become much more fluid.

Save yourself the overhead of doing project thinking while trying to take action. Get the thinking ahead of time, so that your actions become largely mechanical — not in the sense of lacking vitality, but self-consciousness.

Take breaks to regroup, not rest

We can minimize the amount of thinking required while performing a task, but not eliminate it. Things zig when they should zag, and we need to correct course. If we’re lucky, the next course of action is self-evident, but sometimes that’s not the case, and we end up spinning our wheels. Circular thinking produces no forward motion.

When thinking long and hard doesn’t work, take a break. Some breaks are designed to recover from fatigue, but the point here isn’t to relax, but to suspend doing while thinking about what to do next — to stop multitasking. If I get stuck in mid-sentence while writing a post, and more than a couple of minutes elapse while I’m staring at the screen, I’ll get up from the laptop and ask myself what specific thought I’m trying to express. Once I’ve clarified what I was trying to say, I can focus on how to say it, but when I try to do both at the same time, my eyes glaze over.

This sort of strategic disruption is why “sleeping on” a problem, taking a walk, or taking a shower can dislodge solutions more effectively than trying to concentrate your way through a problem in the midst of it. But once the principle of not doing while thinking is understood, it’s not necessary to resort to elaborate rituals. I don’t need to take a walk or a nap. I really don’t even need to get up from my desk and pace around. I just need to break my visual association from my writing activity, which is why many writers (and other artists and scientists) frequently stare into empty space.

Give yourself permission to momentarily take your nose off the grindstone and get perspective. It’s hard to see a project while in it. If the right path is unclear, the first think to do is stop walking. Create a clearing for thinking instead of reacting.

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The latter statement is true. It’s certainly possible to complete one or more tasks in the time it would take to make a list, but that’s not the point of a weekly review, nor is it the point of a list; nor is it the point of taking a systematic approach to personal organization. The value of having a task or time management system is perhaps best illustrated by comparing it to its absence.

Batch processing vs. doing everything now

You guesstimate that the email you have to write to Susan will take about 10 minutes. The round trip to and from the hardware store to get the a replacement washer for your leaky faucet might take 30 minutes. Unboxing and hooking up the flat screen TV you got the family for Christmas will probably take on hour or more.

You can do any one of those activities in less time than it would take to do a weekly review, but collecting them and putting them on their appropriate lists — Computer, Errands, Home — could be done in under a minute or two. By collecting on clarifying your inventory of projects during a block of non-doing time, you finish the thinking about them in advance, so that during the week you can focus exclusively on doing rather than rethinking. Just-in-time execution is like running your washing machine every time you have an article of clothing to wash.

Instead of asking, “What should I do now?”, you only have to look at the list that corresponds with where you happen to be at that moment. You’re sitting in front of a computer, so writing the email to Susan seems like a good option. Or you’re sitting in your car, and you notice that stopping at the hardware store before going home would be a smart idea.

If, on the other hand, your thinking hadn’t been done in advance, thoughts about the faucet might occur while you’re sitting in front of the computer, and you might decided to get in your car to get the washer. Since the errand isn’t on a list, and it exists strictly in working memory, you’re either compelled to “do it now” before you forget about it, or allow it to consume continuous partial attention while you’re writing your email to Susan. Instead of your holding the errand in your day planner, your mind becomes the day planner.

By giving yourself more time to think about all of your projects on the front end, it might have occurred to you to think about less obvious aspects, like getting the HDMI cables that weren’t included with the flat screen TV — another task to add to your consolidated Errands list. Now on the drive home, you can eliminate the next actions for two projects.

Separating thinking and doing

Very few people are aware of how much stress is created by trying to think about what to do next at the time that they need to be doing it. Realizing you need additional cables after taking the TV out of the box is more frustrating than having thought of it beforehand, even though the amount of physical effort is exactly the same.

If you had taken the traditional approach of time management systems — blocking out one or two hours on your calendar to “Set up TV” — you wouldn’t have applied enough granularity of thought to have taken more discrete tasks like “Get HDMI cables” into account. This is the fundamental difference between a To Do list and a Next Actions list.

Clarifying projects and next actions is an executive task. Holding projects and next actions is a clerical task. Use your brain for the executive functions, and offload the clerical work to a system of shelves — list managers, calendars and file cabinets –organized for efficient retrieval. It’s organization that makes a library a more functional tool than a random pile of books in a warehouse. You can spend your time focusing on what to get instead of how or where to get it.

“But I don’t think in lists!”

A frequent protests against using lists is that they’re one-dimensional, and that they don’t reflect the complexity of real life. That’s absolutely true. Thinking always involves more situational awareness than a list can integrate.

But that’s not the purpose of a list. A list is nothing more than a collection of items that require attention. Lists either hold items you need to think about, or the results of items you’ve already thought about. If you write “faucet” on a mind sweep list because it had your attention, you’ll still need to loop back and clarify the meaning of that item: “Faucet . . . I need fix that leaky faucet [puts 'Fix faucet' on project list] . . . What’s the next action? . . . I need to get a new washer from the hardware store [puts 'Get washer from hardware store' on Errands list.]“

More complex issue are simply different context with which to apply the same process. Instead of “thinking about” going to graduate school a chronically amorphous fashion, you capture the thought. putting “grad school” on your mind sweep list to bring the issue into objective awareness, allowing you to think about it concretely.

One possible train of thought might be: “Grad school . . . What’s the outcome I’m looking for? . . . I’m not ready to go back now, but would resolve that situation?  . . . I need to determine which Masters program I’d like to pursue [puts "R & D: Best Masters program" on project list] . . . What’s the next action? . . . I need to ask Ron about the program he completed at Davis [puts "Ask Ron about Davis Masters program" on Calls list].” Notice that no decision has been made to actually go to grad school, but the thinking has moved from idle contemplation to a specific action that would enable an informed decision.

A journal entry would probably allow more thinking in depth about this issue, but as a focus tool, a list is easier to refer to when it’s time to act. Trying to scan a page of prose to extract the actionable items involves rethinking that would probably be too. cumbersome to motivate further action. So if you prefer the journaling approach, but sure to examine what you’ve written for action items, and get them on a list as soon as possible.

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Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

I wrote about the importance of typing speed a while back, but it wasn’t until recently, when I decided to increase typing speed by double that its value was reinforced. When I wrote the previous post, I tested at 54 wpm, which I considered sufficient. I was wrong. I haven’t reached my goal of 108 wpm, but after two months I’ve reached 93 wpm, and the difference is substantial. Expressing thoughts in writing through inarticulate typing is like trying to talk with a mouth full of marbles — it’s possible, but arduous enough to often feel as though it’s not worth the effort.

Good typing vs. adequate typing

Increasing your typing speed isn’t about bragging rights. And while many typists will argue or imply that doubling typing speed cuts one’s working time in half, the gain isn’t quite that linear.

There is, however, a close correlation between fast (accurate) typing and good typing. Good typing is lacks self-consciousness. You have a sentence in your head, and your fingers carry out that sentence autonomically, not unlike the way your mouth and throat allow you to speak your sentence without conscious effort. Adequate typing gets the job done, but with much more time and effort, and less pleasure.

Less-than-good typists typically think that they’re spending the bulk of their writing time thinking about what to write, rather than how to get that content into the keyboard. They’re generally unaware of the continuous partial attention they give to the mechanical process of typing, so they attribute the additional effort required to continually refocus as “composition.”

Adequate typists are “functionally literate” keyboardists who “know” where all the keys are (at least the ones closest to the home row), and generally strike them with the correct fingers, but have trouble with numbers and shift-key characters. They usually don’t have to look at the keyboard, but do have to spend a split second of low-level thinking determining where their fingers need to move with each keystroke. At least hunt-and-peck typists are self-conscious of their self-consciousness.

A global skill

Increasing typing speed transforms the experience of writing. It can mean the difference between wanting to answer an email immediately or letting it sit in your inbox. It can mean the difference between wanting to comment on a blog post or lurking. It can mean the difference between taking notes or relying on memory. It can mean the difference between learning to navigate frequently used applications with shortcut keys or using the much slower mouse — which requires taking one’s hand away from the keyboard, then returning to the home row (a greater distraction for subpar typists).

Fluid typing is a meta-skill that automatically increases your facility with almost any computer application, even some ostensibly mouse-driven ones like Photoshop. You get into the habit of learning to navigate new apps by looking for the shortcut keys, which often overlap between programs (like Ctrl-O to open a document). When I’m learning a new program, I make it a rule to use the mouse the first time only to see if the menu listing for the desired feature indicates the shortcut key: for instance, in the Windows Live Writer app that I’m using now, I see that the Insert menu shows Ctrl-L to add a picture. Once I know that, I no longer use the mouse to add a picture.

Getting started

I suspect that there’s better offline typing software out there than I’ve come across personally. My experience with CD-ROM titles like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which are bloated with multimedia content, was frustrating enough to almost put me off of learning to type forever. I much prefer free, online, Flash-based typing tutors like Peter’s Online Typing Course.

POTC consists of 18 progressive lessons. You move on to the next lesson when you can type three refreshed screens of refreshed text in under 60 seconds with no errors. I recommend putting in 30-60 minutes a day, avoiding the temptation to skip to the next lesson prior to completing three screens in a row without error — even if it means sticking to the same lesson unit for several days. Learning to type is a skill for lifetime, so there’s no reason to rush through the content.

In addition to the 18 lessons, the site contains seven exercises to try. I’d suggest skipping them until you’ve completed all of the lessons. The lessons will get boring, but switching to other material for variety’s sake will only increase the training time in the long run. Of these exercises, the most useful one is the “Make Your Own Exercise” tool, which allows you to copy and paste text from whatever real-world source you choose. This can come in handy if the type of text you’re used to working with is different from the norm. For instance, a programmer might want to paste in code to get more practice with special characters, numbers and whitespace.

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Technorati Tags: Productivity, Writing

A comment in a recent post criticized my observation that “Firewalled focus can be antisocial”, retorting that this sounded like “an easy excuse to work less.” Of course, firewalled project focus itself can be an easy excuse to work less, since “I’m busy” is the king of easy excuses, but there’s a larger issue at stake: the thin line between firewalled attention and tunnel vision. Instead of charging ahead at full steam, it helps to build in intervals of reflection to make sure the ship is heading in the right direction.

Knowledge work is measured in days, not hours

Tom DeMarco’s Slack has a revealing chapter on overtime. Like multitasking, overtime has a demonstrably negative impact on productivity, but remains a cultural norm in the workplace. Operations analysts studying knowledge work (domains like engineering, design and administration) are able to extrapolate a project’s time to completion by sampling the initial days of output and plotting a scatter diagram.

What’s curious about the method is that the degree of accuracy doesn’t increase when measuring the total number of work hours instead of days. From my review:

For the correlations to be meaningful, the factors measured need to be defined in such a way that the scatter points fall as close to the trend line as possible — the object is to find the factors that improve prediction by narrowing the scatter. One possible refinement would be to substitute effort in workdays with effort in workhours. In theory, this would improve accuracy, since the number of hours worked from day to day can be highly variable. In practice, increasing the hours per workday makes no empirical difference. “[DeMarco:] The twelve-hour days don’t accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is hogwash.”

In other words, two twelve-hour days yields the same output as two eight-hour days. It’s easy to demonstrate to yourself: just try journaling for 20 minutes today, then 40 minutes tomorrow, and see if your second session has twice the number of words as your first. In all likelihood, it won’t. Why wouldn’t two twelve-hour days accomplish as much as three eight-hour days?

Knowledge work is different than rote work. It’s less deterministic and more abstract. On an assembly line, the correlation between hours worked and widgets cranked is much tighter. The worker simply has to execute the work that’s already been defined. A knowledge worker has to define the work that has to be executed, then execute it, then redefine it and repeat the cycle; so constant recalibration is required. Too much time spent in continuous execution leads to wandering.

Focus on next actions

Days and hours are useful units for tracking work, but less practical for defining it. Instead of saying, “I’m going to work on X for Y hours,” consider reframing tasks into next actions modular enough to complete without needing to resume them over multiple sessions. Instead of writing “Read Python book” on my next actions list, I write “Read Python book Chapter 9.” By making next actions is discrete as possible, you avoid the tendency to stretch them out. More importantly, it’s much easier to redefine the work that immediately follows (Read Python book Chapter 10) without feeling as though the project will continue indefinitely. You’re building in those moments of reflection needed to keep projects on track.

If you do need to block out more than an hour to work on a single task, feel free to schedule the time on your calendar for the general activity, but still have a more specific next action on your action list. For instance, if I wanted to spend four hours reading the Python book, I would enter, “1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.: Read Python book” in my calendar, but on my @Home list, I would only enter the very next action: “Read Python book, Chapter 9.” If I finished the chapter after the first 90 minutes, I would cross off that next action and redefine the new one: “Read Python book, Chapter 10.”

I deliberately avoid putting this down ahead of time, before I completing Chapter 9, since reading the latter chapter is a prerequisite. For a next actions list is different than a To Do list: instead of listing everything I need to do, I only list the actions that I can do immediately. The object is to avoid cluttering your attention with things you can’t actually do.

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Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Pink elephants come in all shapes and sizes. They can be animal, vegetable, mineral or existential. In daily life, they take the form of things like:

• Chewing gingerly to avoid going to the dentist
• “Shoulds” like, “I should look into setting up an IRA” or “I should wake up now”
• Leaving non-current paperwork on a desk without tossing or filing it
• Looking at an email and thinking, “Hmmm” — then moving on to the next one
• Staying with a tolerably uninteresting career to avoid changing to a more passionate one

They can range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the effect is the same: censorship attracts attention.

Trading one distraction for another

Ignoring pink elephants has two side effects. First, we go numb to our environment. We can’t desensitize ourselves to things selectively. Input is input, and once the habit of ignoring input gains traction, it generalizes. All “paperwork” becomes an annoyance, and the content of what’s in the paperwork becomes irrelevant. Junk mail that could tossed instantly sits around for hours or days, and begins to have as much psychic weight as the contract underneath it.

The second side effect is more insidious. We can’t unthink a thought, but we can preempt it by preoccupying ourselves with another one. Why else would it take 10 minutes to agree on where to go for lunch? A crutch activity will take exactly as long as the time we need to avoid thinking about something that matters. It’s a simple matter of trading one distraction for another.

Not all distractions are crutch activities. On the contrary, if something is on you mind, but you haven’t defined what it is and what you’re going to do about it, it’s a distraction. Estate planning that “should” be done but never seems to be urgent is a distraction. That funny sound your car makes that may or may not warrant a trip to the mechanic is a distraction.

A single throughput

It’s more efficient to think about something once than to not-think about it multiple times. Developing the habit of single-handling takes discipline, but once it’s ingrained you’ll have a reference point for executing tasks with a minimum of effort. “Handling” in this context can mean either doing the next action or defining the next action. If it takes more than two minutes (or longer if you’re not otherwise engaged), write it down.

If something is likely to claim your attention in the future, capture it now rather than hoping it will resurface if it’s important. It probably will resurface, but not at the appropriate time and place. You don’t want to keep not-thinking about picking up the birthday cake after work when you’re at work. You’ll have less focus available for work, and your attempts to ignore the unwritten reminders will be successful — when you’re driving home.

Affirming negation

There’s a subtle but critical difference between not deciding to do something and deciding not to do something. Looking at a piece of junk mail on your desk repeatedly and ignoring it constantly requires a small amount of background processing — your brain knows that sooner or later, you’re going to have to throw it out. You have not decided to read it, so the next action isn’t implicit. On the other hand, if you’ve explicitly decided not to read it, you’ll immediately throw it out.

The distraction of one open loop as trivial as junk mail is small, but as open loops multiply, the background noise increases. From a cognitive standpoint, ignoring 10 small things can be more distracting that ignoring one big thing. To keep mental static to a minimum, collect all distractions, however big or small, and process them into an external system you trust.

Another strategy for making decisions is to defer them. You proactively decide now to decide later. Maybe you need a key piece of information that won’t be available until next week, or maybe you’re just to busy putting out a fire to think about everything that needs to be taken into consideration. Instead of simply ignoring the issue, proactively narrow down the time or information necessary to make the decision.

If the decision depends on an external outcome, write down a reminder on your calendar for the date of that outcome (or use your Waiting For list). If you’re too overwhelmed at the moment to focus on a complex decision, replace the usual knee-jerk “I’ll think about it later” with the question, “When will I have time to think about this?” — and answer then question with a scheduled action like “Mind map estate planning” or “Call law firm.” By turning each problem into a physical action, you’ll always be able to follow the bouncing ball, or at least know that it’s in motion.

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Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity, Overcoming Distractions