Just as a full voice mail box can’t accept new messages, a person preoccupied with too many thoughts can’t accept new ones. For many people, an excessive workload is anything beyond what they can hold in their immediate memory. That excess is experienced as stress, causing them to either overreact to all the things they have to do, or in extreme cases, to simply shut down to it all and drop out. Another popular piece of advice on how to get things done is to limit the number of tasks to do on a given day to two or three, then ignore the rest.
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)
It has become customary over the last year to dismiss life hacks as a fad. Most of the criticisms are as vague as the arguments in favor of life hacks. One valid criticism, usually not very well articulated, is that hacks focus on techniques rather than principles. But techniques are many, and principles are few, making it hard to churn out blog posts that focus on fundamentals on a daily basis.
The critique is well intended but misdirected. The problem lies with the end user, not the best practices or tips and tricks given, nor on the software and gadgets being fetishized. Without the right mindset, consuming advice is unproductive, but having a clear purpose for seeking out and implementing advice changes the ethos of life hacking fundamentally.
Personal Kaizen
Let’s shift the focus from life hacks to life hackers, or geeks, and contrast them to “regular people.” Normally a person experiencing a problem will solve that problem on a just-in-time basis without classifying it, therefore increasing the odds of repeating it. A geek takes a more architectonic approach by classifying the problem and looking for a systemic fix, asking two implicit but fundamental questions:
- What are the predictable roots of this problem?
- What are the best practices for solving, removing or reducing its occurrence?
Instead of leaving ice cream in the freezer when starting a diet, then trying to resist temptation, a life hacker throws the ice cream out, knowing that removing unproductive options is more reliable than appealing to discipline. A life hacker working on a spreadsheet understands that taking five minutes to find a function, macro or shortcut key in Excel will recovers hours of wasted time working on a repetitive task manually in the long run. A normal worker is too preoccupied with getting the assigned task done to stop and reexamine the strategy behind the task.
Yesterday, for the second day in a row, I forgot to bring the magnetic ID badge that allows me elevator access to the floor of my office — the badge was in a coat I left at home. The conventional reaction would have been resolving to remember to bring the badge next time. Instead, I took the badge out of the plastic lanyard holder and put it in my wallet. Now I just place my wallet next to the security sensor when I take the elevator, and I never have to worry about remembering to bring the badge. The focus wasn’t on overcoming the problem, but on removing it.
The individual example is trivial, but the same frame of mind can be applied to much more significant examples. Instead of haphazardly trying to control one’s spending each month, a life hacker will set up automatic payroll deductions with her bank for savings, investing and bill payment, knowing that whatever funds remain are discretionary.
Life hacks are instances of an ethos the Japanese call Kaizen: the focus on continuous, methodical improvement by viewing all resources and processes that contribute to a desired outcome as aspects that can be tweaked, measured or reconsidered — variables like tools, schedules, environment, relationships and methods. The same philosophy can and should be applied not only to production, but to life. Recipes by themselves won’t make a great chef, riffs by themselves won’t make a great musician, source code alone won’t make a great programmer. It’s the initiative and interest — the fascination — of the chef, the musician, the programmer, the life hacker, that integrates disparate information into a sum that exceeds its parts.
Better Problems
While we can’t be free of problems, we can always strive to have better problems. For years, I wondered why my coworkers received so much more email than I did. Part of this was due to their comfortable threshold for how many emails they would allow to sit in their inbox, but I recently realized that it had more to do with my threshold for many times I’m willing to delete the same type of email: twice.
As soon as I see the same type of email that I would delete again, I don’t hit the Delete key; I take an the extra minute to create a filter for it. So if I get a promotional offer from eBay, I set a filter to delete any subsequent messages of the same type with their unique identifier (e.g. “% off” in the Subject line). Having a two-minute rule to set filters as part of my daily email processing does two things: it prevents repetitive messages from irritating me into finally taking action on them, and it has the cumulative effect of reducing the size of my inbox over time. Having hundreds (yes, hundreds) of filters prevents me from getting hundreds of messages a day. Messages from whitelisted senders are similarly filtered to be automatically labeled and sorted above other messages in my inbox.
An hour of hard critical thinking can be worth more than a month of hard work. — Tim Ferriss
Network administrators have one of the few jobs where talent is demonstrated by working less. A good sysadmin automates as much of their work as possible by finding or writing shell scripts that keep things running with an absolute minimum of manual intervention. A Danny O’Brien pointed out in his presentation, Life Hacks — Tech Secrets of Over Prolific Alpha Geeks, a geek will spend 10 hours writing a script to accomplish an 11-hour task. They do this mainly because the process fascinates them more than the result, but that initial 10 hours is amortized each time the script needs to be run again — so the “Just Do It” reaction that’s typical of non-geeks is a false economy. The geek addresses the system rather than the symptom.
Many processes in other domains of work an life can be similarly automated with the right mindset. It requires disciplined self-examination, identifying repetitive decisions, documenting them, finding ways to streamline, automate, eliminate, or delegate them to others. Always set aside time from projects to focus on process.
(Photo credit: mwilkie)
Last year, virtual outsourcing made it on my list of 10 Technologies I Resist. Adding a virtual administrative assistant to my workflow seemed like a solution looking for a problem. There wasn’t much that I could imagine a virtual office assistant doing that I couldn’t do personally in much less time and with less management overhead. More importantly, I didn’t want to end up creating activities just to give whatever virtual secretary I retained something to justify my investment.
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)
Time management has become increasingly important to me, despite my reservations about excessive focus on time scarcity (see my time management system smackdown). In the last six weeks, I’ve gone from full-time freelance writing work to working for the Man, doing analytics for an internet firm in El Segundo — while still maintaining most of my professional writing. Between working during the day, the 3-4 hour round trip commute, and freelance writing during the evenings and weekends, I had to let go of activities that weren’t income streams, like blogging and programming. I’ve been anxiously looking for ways to carve out the time to recover those passions.
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”:
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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:
- Define your life categories. Julie recommends no more than six, to avoid diffusing your efforts
- Ask, “What’s my big-picture goal?” for each category. “Finance” is a category. “Save $1.3 million for retirement” is a goal
- 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:
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.
Just as a full voice mail box can’t accept new messages, a person preoccupied with too many thoughts can’t accept new ones. For many people, an excessive workload is anything beyond what they can hold in their immediate memory. That excess is experienced as stress, causing them to either overreact to all the things they have to do, or in extreme cases, to simply shut down to it all and drop out. Another popular piece of advice on how to get things done is to limit the number of tasks to do on a given day to two or three, then ignore the rest.
