One of the many, many joys of being a Productivity Ninja is that I get to experience at first hand the daily stresses and strains of non-Ninjas or, as we call them, “people”.
On Friday I ran a Public Workshop in London, where 24 “people” came along, spilled the beans on their Productivity challenges and got some help.
One of the attendees, when asked what her Productivity challenge was, volunteered that her desk looked “like it had been organised by a three-year-old”. Quite funny, I thought, and then, Quite not funny. The problem is that, for many of us, we peak - from a productivity point of view - at three years of age. At three, things are clear, and you probably can just lay them out on a desk. But from, say, three-and-a-half onwards, things get too messy for infantile systems. Things move too fast, there’s too much of it, there’s not enough structure, even less clarity.
But the problem is that, while the complexity and volume increase, our systems don’t evolve. This happy attendee had a child-like system because she had never been taught anything else. And this is the point: none of us has ever really been told how to manage our stuff. How to define the work, organise those definitions in a useful way, and adopt the habits that will enable us to focus on the most important things and when not focussed, relax.
I have run workshops in schools and universities, and people always ask the same thing: “Why don’t we teach students about this?”
Answer: I have absolutely no idea.