Productivity – Opening Update

Productivity is the second foundation in my year-long project (and course) to improve the universal elements essential to a good life.

As I write this, today is the first day of my month-long productivity challenge, although you’ll probably be reading this in the newsletter around a week later.¹ I didn’t want to publish my month-end fitness update and my first-day productivity update back-to-back, even though that’s how I’m writing them. Here are some links in case you are interested in seeing my plans, results and notes from books I read during the first foundation.

Why Be Productive?

It’s a mistake to think of productivity as merely your ability to get things done at work. It’s an even bigger mistake to think of productivity as the speed of getting work done.

Instead, productivity is your capacity for doing the things you intend to do. That includes your work or studies—but it also includes your household and personal responsibilities, hobbies and interests, relationships and more. Anything you intend to do that actually gets done counts toward your productivity.

The mistake of focusing exclusively on work when we think about productivity is that it leads to a lopsided definition. Since only work output is being tracked, you can feel a kind of superficial sense of productivity simply by prioritizing work.

It’s even worse when we define productivity as the speed of work completed. This turns you into a widget cranker—someone who churns out material without giving thought to quality, importance or impact.

Taken broadly, however, productivity is an essential foundation. Having the capacity to do the things you intend to is a prerequisite for accomplishing any other goal.

My Productivity Strengths and Weaknesses

Productivity has been a central theme in my writing for this blog for almost two decades. Thus, you might think it should be something I’ve mastered, and I no longer need to think any more about it.

Unfortunately, foundations don’t really work that way. We all need tune-ups to our foundations every once in awhile. I’m no exception.

When I reflect on my past productivity, some strengths emerge:

• I’m pretty good at getting important, challenging, long-term projects done. I’m self-motivated and good at sticking through intensive efforts, such as writing books or my full-time learning challenges.
• I rarely drop the ball when it comes to work tasks. It’s rare that I miss an important work email or forget to do a task that’s important for my working life.
• Most of the time, my working life is pretty low-stress. While my career has been punctuated with some more stressful periods, I generally don’t operate in crisis mode, and the vast majority of my attention is on projects chosen for sustaining the long-term growth of my professional life rather than firefighting.

But, in doing my review, I can also see some key weaknesses:

• I’m bad at following through on low-priority errands, especially those that are not work-related. I delay dentist appointments and haircuts. I’ve been meaning to get a new family doctor for years, but haven’t done it. I let quick home-improvement projects, like hanging pictures or reorganizing drawers, linger for months without any decision about when to do them.
• I haven’t always been great at coordinating with my family over commitments. In my work, I have a system of calendars to automatically schedule appointments, to-do lists for my own work and tools for managing my staff. But I still need to check in frequently to confirm kids’ birthday parties or other non-work events scheduled by my wife.
• Additionally, there have been a number of more substantial home-improvement projects that linger, in part, because we haven’t assigned responsibility and priorities, preferring the, “oh yeah, we should probably get that fixed,” approach to dealing with household issues.

In short, while I’m good at focusing on the big stuff, particularly at work, tasks at the periphery or at home have often been less well organized.

Refurbishing My Productivity Systems

My plan for this month has two parts:

• Make sure all tasks, commitments and ideas—no matter how peripheral—are recorded.
• Make sure those tasks are regularly reviewed.

I started by doing a full audit of my existing productivity systems. Some of them were falling apart—represented by lists full of outdated tasks I had either completed or decided not to do.

I think this reviewing problem is the weak link in the chain for household tasks. I’m often tired after working all day or busy with my kids, so I don’t even check to see what tasks need to be done. This is in contrast to my working life, where I’m frequently reviewing my outstanding to-do items and calendar.

In doing this audit, it became apparent that many of the tasks holding me up were ones I had recorded, but I had created too many lists, and the tasks were buried in lists I don’t review often.

The second weakness has to do with family responsibilities. I decided to separate these from my main to-do lists and make sure these are shared with my wife, with any bigger project clearly assigned to one of us. Additionally, I’ll set up a shared calendar so my wife can directly add family commitments or her appointments that require me to be with the kids, so there’s no additional step of me replicating these events on my personal calendar.

Finally, I decided to shift my overall list structure to be closer to David Allen’s GTD-centric setup of inbox/projects/next actions/someday lists, rather than my more ad-hoc system which allowed peripheral tasks to get shuttled into rarely-reviewed lists.

My Plan for the Month

All of this reorganization took me only a couple of hours. So, unlike the previous month’s keystone habit which necessitated an ongoing daily commitment of time and energy, this month’s scheduled time is essentially complete.

However, I think it’s a mistake to set up a new system and then, because the major work is finished, skip ahead to a new priority. I want to spend the next month being highly sensitive to what kinds of friction and difficulties I notice from the current setup. These kinds of systems usually degrade not by being totally unusable, but by being ever-so-slightly inconvenient or untrustworthy so that they end up falling into disuse.

Thus, in addition to reviewing each aspect of the system daily, I will be trying to implement small tweaks throughout the month that will make it more stable and useful in the long haul.

Want to Improve Your Productivity Foundation This Month?

Although I’m working on a lot of lessons for the students in the Foundations course, anyone reading this is free to join as well.

This month’s goal is to create a full-capture productivity system that will store and hold all the tasks, appointments, ideas and projects you’re working on. Then, spend the month monitoring it. If you’re unsure how to build such a system, David Allen’s Getting Things Done is perhaps the best book ever written on this topic, so I’d recommend you start there.

At the end of the month, I’ll provide some reflections on how this month went, as well as share some notes from the books I read (and re-read) on the subject of productivity.

1. And, as a reminder, my own progress through this project is about three months ahead of its publication, both to ensure my team can keep up with the various content we’re publishing and so I can complete all of my research before writing lessons for the course.