I was reading a question posed on Mark Forster’s forum about whether doing the opposite of what others generally do is effective when it comes to productivity, and I realized that I have found that it is. Here is the advice I have NOT followed with great results.
#1 Collect all your to-do’s into one trusted system.
The gurus who preach this haven’t met people like me who can produce a potential task a second.
Every time I’ve followed this advice, I’ve become overwhelmed and have shut down. It becomes impossible for me to sort out the things I must do from the things I would like to do. A someday/maybe list within the same trusted system doesn’t work for me either. I need to keep all of my ideas and potential tasks in a separate place, so I don’t become confused. Right now, all of my legitimate tasks go into ToDoist and everything else is added to Evernote. Evernote is a great place for me to put things to cool off. I find there are very few of them that I want to do anything with when I review them later.
While it’s a good idea not to have your tasks in many different places, keeping absolutely everything in one place keeps me from getting things done.
#2 Get everything done on today’s list.
I’m like so many of David Allen‘s clients who are desperate for a “win.” But defining win as getting everything done on my list for today does not work for me.
Predicting the demands on my time for any given day is as accurate as a weather forecast. Things happen. People and circumstances can keep me from getting everything done, but so can I. I have no way of knowing when I will run out of gas physically or emotionally. Of course, I do what I can to improve my energy levels, but some days I’m unpredictable. I suddenly need a nap or idle entertainment to recharge.
When I use this principle of completion to evaluate my productivity, I feel like a failure and am less motivated, not more. Instead, I schedule my tasks using Timeful and if I get MOST of my tasks done for the day, I count it as a win.
#3 Don’t procrastinate.
Of course, there are times when procrastination makes more work for us and leads to strained relationships and poor self-esteem. But I’ve learned to be grateful for procrastination.
Procrastinating has kept me from working on projects that I wasn’t committed to. Sure it would have been better if I had said no in the first place, but sometimes I don’t consciously realize that I don’t want to or shouldn’t be doing something. Procrastinating has also lessened my workload. Many times I have put off doing something only to discover that it didn’t need to be done or someone else did it. Procrastinating on purchases has saved me money as well. I buy a tiny fraction of things I add to my wish list on Amazon. I allow the desire of the moment to cool. Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow is contrary to the advice not to procrastinate with excellent results.
Procrastinating isn’t always a bad thing and can actually help me get more done.
I’m someone whose energy and achievement are directly tied to being challenged. I would rather delegate many things I AM good at, because they’re boring and tedious. Things I’m not good at inspire me. I want to learn how to do them so I can get more done. A second problem I’ve found with delegating things I’m not good at is I lose control. My productivity slows down on specific projects as I wait for the delegated work to be done. I can also be taken advantage of by people who know more than I do, because they can tell me how long something will take and how much it will cost and I won’t know any better.
While delegating is the right choice in some circumstances, I’ve found that much of the time I shouldn’t delegate what I’m not good at.
#5 Don’t change systems frequently.
The typical advice is to find one approach to managing your tasks and stick with it. Fiddling with your system just wastes time, the gurus say. But as someone who intentionally changed systems nearly every week during A Year of Living Productively, I learned that doing the opposite has been very effective for me.
Looking back at the times I’ve changed approaches to tasks, one thing is clear: I didn’t make changes during times of high productivity. Instead, I made these changes when my productivity and motivation were low. I would read a new book, try a new app, or scour the Internet for a new way of thinking about work and BAM, my productivity would dramatically increase. I got out of bed excited to use my new system and found myself getting twice as much done.
Rather than being a means of wasting time, changing systems has been a consistently effective way for me to get more done.
How about you? Do you do the opposite of the standard advice with good results?
I spent a year doing weekly experiments in productivity. The benefit of the series is that I learned the most important habits for getting more done. My hope is that reviewing what works for me might give you some insights into what could work for you. I hope you’ll listen to an interview I did with Barb Raveling of the Christian Habits podcast on the subject. Barb wanted specific advice for a time-management hiccup that plagues many of us. I’d love to know if you have different advice.
#1 Plan your week
David Allen’s Getting Things Done was my first foray into productivity literature. I loved it and should have been a paid seminar leader for as many people as I told about it. GTD was the impetus behind me finally getting my email under control and collecting all my to-do’s into one trusted system. I had these habits prior to experimenting. The GTD habit I didn’t have was a weekly review.
I became overwhelmed by the process of reviewing all potential to-do’s each week as part of the GTD process and so I just didn’t do it. Unfortunately, that meant that I wasn’t reviewing my calendar or projects for the upcoming week. I was often finding myself surprised that I couldn’t get to a number of tasks I planned because I had forgotten about prior commitments.
Using a paper planner during my experiments convinced me weekly planning was important. Now I have the habit of planning my week each Sunday. I actually look forward to it! I review my calendar, projects, and life areas in ToDoist, and even Pinterest ideas that are sorted into corresponding secret boards. Rather than overwhelming me, a weekly planning session (or review) helps me feel in control. I can set weekly goals and make sure that the tasks I can reasonably accomplish in the upcoming week are visible. The rest are put aside. I no longer have calendar surprises! For more on my weekly planning process, read this post.
If you aren’t getting much accomplished in a given week, try a weekly planning session. Just 30 minutes of planning will be a wonderful investment in your productivity.
#2 Schedule your day
Before my year of productivity, I wasn’t really wild about scheduling my days. It felt too restrictive for this spontaneous, time-rebel woman. I did love my week of using SmartDay, an iOS app that automatically places to-do’s around scheduled activities. But my passion for the habit of scheduling my days didn’t reach its peak until after the series was over.
The first thing that convinced me of the value of scheduling was Francis Wade’s post that has been hugely popular on this blog. I thought I needed to revisit the idea and I did begin using SmartDay more frequently. But it wasn’t until I read this article about how the president’s day is scheduled that I realized that I needed that kind of productivity. While I don’t have an assistant who schedules for me, I am that assistant.
About the time that I read this article, I heard about an iOS scheduling app very similar to SmartDay called Timeful. I love it! Each morning I put together the day’s agenda based on my weekly plan. When each new activity is supposed to start, Timeful plays a pleasant tone on my phone. Unlike a paper schedule, Timeful makes it easy to move things around and change the amount of time I plan to devote to them. Timeful reigns me in when I start off thinking I can easily finish 101 tasks in a day; they just won’t fit in the calendar! If I want to leave times open in my schedule, Timeful makes suggestions and learns from my behavior when I am most likely to want to do tasks. The bonus is Timeful can be used to schedule goals as well. I don’t think I’ve ever completed the schedule as written, but here’s why this doesn’t discourage me: I accomplish more in half a day that’s been scheduled than I do in an entire day just working from a to-do list. I created a Timeful calendar in GCal and now also have a record of how I’ve spent my time.
If you need to get more done, try scheduling your day. Even old-fashioned paper will work!
#3 Build energy-based routines
Routines differ from schedules in that they are tasks you repeat daily or weekly and don’t need to be put on your to-do list. I relied on routines before starting my year of productivity, but I kept trying to force myself into idealistic routines that just didn’t work for me. For example, I tried to get myself to do homeschooling subjects with the kids (that I don’t enjoy doing) in the afternoon. Once afternoon comes, I have very little energy left to overcome resistance. I learned that putting those subjects early in the day, when I’m most energized, made all the difference. I saved the subjects I loved to teach for the afternoon.
Similarly, I learned that trying to get myself to do high-energy tasks in the evening was a waste of time–no matter how ideal it would be. Evenings are now saved for social media, schlepping kids to activities (when I can’t talk my husband into doing it), and family fun. That understanding enabled me to stop being so mad at myself for “not getting anything done” in the evenings.
But I was left with a dilemma. I am writing a homeschool curriculum–a major undertaking. I kept trying to find a time to work on it in my daily schedule. Morning was an obvious choice, but it wasn’t working for me at all. I can find morning time to exercise, do devotions, and chat with my husband, but not for writing. I tried getting up even earlier during the course of my year of productivity and found I was crashing mid-morning. I’ve already made it clear that I’m worthless most evenings, but I thought I would just have to force myself to write at night. You can imagine how that went. I realized that the ideal time for me to write was early afternoon. Yes, I just said that I didn’t like to teach aversive subjects in the afternoon, but that’s teaching after a full morning. I have always longed to write in the afternoon, but felt guilty about it. After reviewing other homeschooling mothers’ schedules (who have many children and blog, too), I realized I was not only spending more time doing hands-on teaching than they were, but than most public school teachers! I reevaluated my teaching schedule, made some changes to encourage more independent learning, and started writing in the afternoons. I have written every single day since making the change and feel energized while doing so!
If you are struggling to get things done, build a routine around your energy levels. Keep experimenting until you find the right combination of times and tasks.
#4 Work little and often
It’s a waste of time to try and figure out why you procrastinate on some tasks. Yes, I’m a psychologist and I’m saying that! I have no idea why I hate mailing things so much, but I do. I would rather take a paper and drive it across town. It’s weird. But during my year of living productively, I discovered a solution: just do a little and do it often.
I discovered that I could get things mailed if I counted any tiny step as done for the day. I would find an envelope and re-date the mailing task for the next day when I would put a stamp on it. Yep, it’s ridiculous, but it worked. Before I started practicing little and often, I would have items to be mailed sitting for weeks. Now when I come across a scheduled task that I’m putting off, I will count any little step as done for the day. Fortunately, I don’t have to do this often, but it makes a world of difference to do something. The next day when I’m faced with the same task, it feels less onerous because “I’ve already started it.” Even though Pomodoros were a separate weekly experiment during the year of productivity, they’re effective for the same reason. For a particularly aversive task, I will set the timer for five minutes and call it done.
Do you keep facing the same yucky task day after day? Do five minutes or one tiny step on it and count it done! Repeat tomorrow.
#5 Do it now
My week of doing it now appealed to readers and even my kids who loved this video. I can be doing a great job with my schedule, but if I don’t do the little tasks when they need to be done, I can easily find myself overwhelmed. I’m talking about things like adding things to shopping lists as you see you need them, putting clothes away as you take them off, and cleaning up messes as you make them. David Allen recommends doing tasks that took less then two minutes. I think that’s a fine rule, but even better is to do tasks now if now is the best time to do them. We will not have more time later!
Some quick tasks are better batched. Paying bills is a good example. I pay bills online on Mondays. Even though it would take me just a minute to pay a bill I receive on a Tuesday, I don’t. But if I spill a box of cereal, I’ll clean it up now. I won’t wait until kitchen clean up day. Does this seem obvious? I become an imbecile when it comes to these things.
If tasks are starting to pile up, do them now if now is the best time to do them.
#6 Ask for help
I have my kids do chores and my husband is a big help, but I rarely ask for help in other ways. During my weekly experiment, I learned how important delegating can be to get more done. But in the months since my experimenting, I have learned that asking for help can be an even more powerful way of accomplishing things.
Because I didn’t have the ask-for-help habit, I wasted a lot of time doing things myself or doing them the hard way. I recently found another example of how my behavior hurt my productivity. I had been wishing for an iOS app that would enable me to process my to-do’s. I had to wait to use the desktop to get them into ToDoist. I also wished that there were an iPhone app that would allow me to attach photos or files to email automatically. Mike Vardy mentioned Dispatch in the ToDoist Google+ group. Turns out, it does everything I need it to do. I could have been enjoying the faster email processing if I had only asked if there were apps that did what I needed. It’s a hard habit to break, but I’m trying to ask people for help more often.
I’ve also learned to ask for help from God. I have always been willing to ask God for help for medical and relationship and even emotional issues. But not to-do’s. When it came to tasks, deep down I felt that I had no business asking God for help. I just needed to work harder, stop procrastinating, and stop watching cat videos. If I asked for help, that’s what He would say anyway, isn’t it? It turns out that God is much less of a task master than I am. Even when I waste time, God wants to help me. He doesn’t want me to be a self-reliant Christian, but to get to know how good He really is. He has canceled appointments when I’m overbooked, left the stoplights on green, and even given me a close parking space when I asked. Asking God for help with all the little to-do’s is a habit I’m in the process of developing. God is in the process of using it to develop me.
If you don’t know what to do first, try going to God! Ask Him for help, even if you’ve been on a cat video marathon.
Which of these habits do you need to develop most? Or is there another habit that helps you get more done?
This week I tested Getting Things Done. {affiliate link} I put all my tasks into a trusted system and labeled them according to priority, context, time, and energy required. Many of them were associated with a project as well. Scroll to the bottom of last week’s post to see my plan.
How Getting Things Done Saved My Sanity This Week
Writing everything down gave me peace of mind. I was at a place where I had a lot of things rolling around in my head and it really was a relief to write them all down and then process them.
A weekly review gave me added peace of mind. For the first time, I looked at IQTell‘s Weekly Review option which has checkboxes for all aspects of it, including considering higher level goals. When I tried GTD many years ago, this was the piece that I was missing.
Working by context streamlined my work. I was in a low-energy state with iPhone in hand, so I looked up tasks I could do with my phone. Turns out something I dreaded (cleaning up my mangled address book) was easy and enjoyable. I also had lots of tasks that needed doing in our outside office. I realized I was putting those off because I didn’t want to interrupt my flow to go out there. Once I had a nice list of things to accomplish there, I was ready to get to work.
Made me think about limiting my work to just each project’s next action. As a blogger, I have dozens of ways to improve my blog on my task list. I realized I was trying to work on them all at once instead of focusing on the one with the most impact before moving on to the others.
How Getting Things Done Made Me Crazy This Week
Didn’t give me a short list of things to do today. Only things you absolutely must do on a certain day are supposed to go on a calendar. For that reason, I didn’t date a task unless it was vitally time sensitive. Within just a few days, I couldn’t stand wading through a long list of tasks, even within priorities or contexts. I have developed a habit of dating tasks I want to at least consider doing on a given day. I started dating them and was fine.
The mind like water didn’t last. If I write down absolutely everything I want or need to do, I eventually become more stressed. I feel (and rightly so) that there is no way I will ever get to it all (GTD or not). Before I wouldn’t write things down that I knew I didn’t need to attend to any time soon or that I would be reminded of naturally. I think this may be the difference in me using GTD at home versus in a traditional work environment. GTD also offers no simple test for determining that you’re taking too much on. The notion is that sometime, you’ll get it all done. If you can’t do it now, just put it in Someday/Maybe. Just label it and you’ll get to it. I think that’s my problem anyway, so GTD didn’t help.
No routines. GTD doesn’t talk about the importance of routines. At first, I kept up my routines as usual because they work for me. But soon I found myself thinking I should get right to my next actions and maybe I could skip the routines. Of course, that didn’t work! Then I had other problems.
Did Getting Things Done Really Help Me Get More Done?
In a limited sense, yes. Specifically, I was able to get more of my context-specific tasks done and they were things I had procrastinated on. I noticed that I don’t think about tasks this way much. I didn’t use energy or time as a way of working on tasks at all, for example. That’s a matter of not having the habit and also giving GTD such a short test. Some readers have pointed out that I can’t possibly assess the full value of an approach in one week’s time. I think that’s a valid concern with several approaches, GTD being one of them. However, I have begun to identify key factors in enabling me to be the most productive and in this case, I recognize that not having a short list of tasks to work from each day does not work for me. If it works for you, please continue using it. I will continue assigning some contexts to my tasks and doing a weekly review.
**UPDATE**
I don’t use contexts at all in my work. I also schedule everything in opposition to David Allen’s advice and it works beautifully for me.
The concept. Stephanie Vozza of Entrepreneur calls time blocking a productivity power tool.
Rather than trying to tackle tasks in a willy-nilly fashion, time is set aside to ensure that you address the work you rarely get to–the work that will take your business, your career, or your life to the next level. The 12 Week Year calls these Strategic Blocks. They are “a three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. During this block you accept no phone calls, no faxes, no emails, not visitors, no anything. Instead, you focus all of your energy on preplanned tasks–your strategic and money-making activities.”
Rather than lose time recovering from interruptions, time is set aside to deal with those timely, but not urgent requests and issues. The 12 Week Year calls these Buffer Blocks designed to deal with low-value activities. “For some, one 30-minute buffer block a day is sufficient, while for others, two separate one-hour blocks may be necessary. The power of buffer blocks comes from grouping together activities that tend to be unproductive so that you can increase your efficiency in dealing with them and take greater control over the rest of your day.” The people who need your attention can know they will have it during buffer time. I plan to have “office hours” twice a day so my family can have my full attention.
Finally, time is also carved out for leisure. The 12 Week Year calls these Breakout Blocks. “An effective breakout block is at least three-hours long and spent on things other than work. It is time scheduled away from your business during normal business hours that you will use to refresh and reinvigorate your mind, so that when you return to work, you can engage with more focus and energy.” I think “normal business hours” could be interpreted loosely or you could be fired! The point is to have guilt-free time to do anything you want to do to be refreshed.
If you’d like to join me this week, here’s what you do. Read this article on time blocking. Decide what strategic activities you will work on for the week and schedule a three-hour block to address it. Determine how to eliminate interruptions. Then schedule one to two buffer blocks per day. Finally, schedule your Breakout Block of three hours for the week. Use it to do things you’d like to do guilt free. The rest of the time can be spent doing work as usual.
Click here to see how my week of time blocking went.
This week I tested Mark Forster’s Ultimate Time Management System. I used a paper list of things I wanted to accomplish in the next two weeks. I worked the old list in any way I wanted, but had to continue through the newly added list of tasks, having to return to the old list when the end of the new list was reached. Scroll to the bottom of last week’s post for more details.
How the Ultimate Time Management System Saved My Sanity This Week
Had me focused on accomplishing “old” tasks. I’ve mentioned before how much I like a closed list of tasks. I found myself very motivated to cross off to-do’s that have been languishing in favor of the new shiny tasks I added.
Gave me an overview of how quickly tasks add up. Adding tasks to IQTell can shield me from the sheer number of them. Not so with a paper list.
No complicated rules. I really didn’t feel hampered in any way as I did what I felt needed doing.
How the Ultimate Time Management System Made Me Crazy This Week
I resisted adding new tasks to the list. Instead of writing them down and seeing my list grow (and potentially keeping myself from doing what I wanted to do), I just DID the new shiny things. A big part of the problem was having a paper list. The list was in one part of the house and I was in another. Why bother finding it to write down a new task when you can just do it? That was my philosophy this week anyway. Unlike DIT, the system offers no clues that you are taking on too much work.
The closed list was too large. On Mark’s forum, Seraphim, mentioned using a one-week time frame for the old list. I think that would have helped a lot. Doing a two-week test made me feel like there was no way I could finish the old list, so I gave up.
Things fell through the cracks. Every day, I put a dot in front of the tasks I really needed to accomplish that day. That helped. But I found myself missing things anyway, because I wasn’t using my Due Today IQtell list.
No big picture. There was such a large mishmash of tasks and projects on the list with no prioritization, that I felt disoriented. Reading the whole list every day was time-consuming and anxiety-provoking.
Did the Ultimate Time Management System Help Me Get More Done?
At first, yes. But after several days, the motivation to finish the old list disappeared. I think a week’s list of things you think you can realistically do might have been more effective. The rules didn’t help me with procrastination, but that’s most likely because I got nowhere near the end of the old list.
**UPDATE**
I honestly don’t worry about old lists of tasks anymore. I look through my list of tasks on ToDoist and choose one per area during my weekly planning session. I often delete tasks that have become irrelevant at that time.
The Productivity Approach I’ll Be Using for Week 20
This week I’ll be testing David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’ll be using IQTell to collect everything I need to do. I’ll be organizing my tasks by priority (I use Must, Should, Could), context (iPhone, errand, etc.), and by time and energy required. Tasks will be sorted into appropriate projects. Rather than Someday/Maybe, tasks will be given a date to consider them in the future. Why? Have you seen Pinterest? That’s my Someday/Maybe list. The notion that I could review all of my Someday/Maybe’s every week during a review is just funny.
The concept. David Allen‘s primary goal seems to be not just helping people get things done, but to have peace of mind while doing so. He points out that unless we put all of our potential tasks into a “trusted system” (that we know will keep us from forgetting the important stuff), we will continue to be anxious about them. A weekly review is done of everything on our plates (paper inboxes, meeting notes, project support files, etc.), allowing tasks to be trashed, filed, done (if less than 2 minutes – though he mentions situations for which this time varies), delegated, or deferred (put on calendar or into a task list). He suggested this weekly review take place on Friday so the weekend can be peaceful, but any day that works is acceptable.
Projects are worked on in terms of Next Actions — the next physical action you can take to move the project forward. The idea is that we often resist work because we haven’t made the steps required clear. “Plan birthday party” might have a Next Action of “Make a list of potential dates.”
Much criticism has been made of David’s concept of working according to context in our age of smart phones and ubiquitous computers that enable us to do so much. However, rereading the book surprised me that context is just one way David says we can choose to actually do the work. Once all tasks are in your system (paper or digital), you may be working completely around your calendar (e.g., meetings) or you could choose to work by priority (nothing about GTD prohibits Eat That Frog, for example), time required (I have 15 minutes before I have to leave) or energy level (at the end of the day, you may want to read, listen to podcasts, or watch videos, for example).
If you’d like to join me this week, here’s what you do. Read this summary of Getting Things Done. You’ll see there is more to the philosophy than I’ve mentioned. Choose a system to collect your to-do’s. Any inexpensive office store planner would do the trick. Besides IQTell, here is a list of free sites for managing GTD digitally. This infographic may help you in organizing your work after collecting it. Then get things done!
Click here to see how my week of contexts in GTD went.
I’m a Christian psychologist turned homeschooling mother of six. My life can be a little crazy, so I look for sanity-saving ideas to use and share. I hope you’ll read my About page to learn more.
