Mox Nox In Rem

The Epidemic of the Un-Finished Thing

As a Productivity Ninja, I am able to see trends early. As I work with clients, I can see patterns as they first appear, and one of the most striking patterns of the last six months has been the emergence of the Epidemic of the Un-Finished Thing.

 These Things show up on clients' PCs, in two places. First, in a swarm of opened, started-but-unfinished documents, presentations and spreadsheets. When questioned, the client will say, "Yes, not sure about that, it will probably disappear when I close my PC."

 More pernicious is the second type of Thing. This appears in the "Drafts" folder in Outlook. A recent client had 452 items in Drafts. These are things that had been very important when they arrived, and when she started drafting a response, but as soon as her attention was snatched away by the next new thing, the Thing was left Un- Finished for ever.

 This is the problem. We are always so focused on what's "new in" that we tend to ignore what is actually, really, truly worth doing. So we hop, like kids on hot sand, from one immediate, trivial thing to the other, never actually doing anything worthwhile.

Gibsonian Affordances

I am not a Productivity Ninja at home. There, I've said it. For some reason, all the things that keep me focused and on track work-wise seem to evaporate as soon as I get through the door of Brown Towers.

 And it's that very same door that is going to be the starting point for a revolution. In "The Organized Mind", Daniel Levitkin talks about Gibsonian Affordances - objects whose design features tell you something about how to use it. A “push” door is signaled by a flat plate; a “pull” door by a handle, for example.

 The first implementation of Gibsonian Affordances is our new key system. We have a front door, a back door, but their near-identical bronze keys are all kept on the same hook. So there is a certain amount of effort and stress involved in getting to the right key.

 No longer.

 The front door is red and the back door is white. On Saturday I bought a small tin of red paint and a small tin of white paint. So, hello colour-coded back- and front-door keys, and goodbye confusion.

 This got me thinking about further Gibsonian opportunities. I shall report back

The Organized Mind #1 - know your limits

One of the challenges of the modern world of work is our brain’s ability to process stuff. What is the brain's real-time processing capacity, and how does that capacity match the processing requirements of the world around us?

 In "The Organized Mind", Daniel Levitin answers this question. The human brain can process at around 120 bits per second. One person talking to us is about 60 bits per second of information. So, we can easily absorb the output from a single person talking to us. If we work hard, we can probably take in what two people are saying (simultaneously). But what are our chances of absorbing the output of three people talking to us (simultaneously). Realistically? None.

 This matters because we live in a world of babble. At any time, as we sit at our desks, we have to contend with email traffic, the telephone, Instant Messenger, other humans in the office, our own thoughts, etc. Oh, and we also need to focus on the Single Most Important task at hand.

 That’s why work is difficult. And that's why, as Productivity Ninjas, we switch off all the distractions we can - all of the above, except for the Single Most Important task at hand.

Mox Nox in Rem

Four small (Latin) words that mean so much.

Literally: “Soon nightfall.  To the business”.

Or, more colloquially, “Let’s get the show on the road”.

Or, really, Let’s get on with it”.

The point is this.  There are a million things we could do today.  We could watch TV.  We could Twitter.  We could check our emails.  We could do any number of things that will probably not make any difference to anybody, ever.

Or we could do something that will make a material difference to us or others.  Before nightfall.

Email-free Christmas (Part III)

In my last couple of posts, I have talked about my “de-mailing” over Christmas, and it was hard, then easy, but ultimately rewarding.

What was the process that enabled this to happen?  There were three things:

1. Path of Least Resistance.  In “The Happiness Advantage”, Shawn Achor talks about “the path of least resistance.”  He says that he pondered why he never practised guitar.  It was just too much effort to get it out of the cupboard.  Not a lot of effort, but too much.  So, he changed things, and kept it in his living room, right by the sofa.  This small change made a massive difference to the frequency of his practice.  It almost became difficult not to pick the guitar up.  So, if we want to develop a good habit, put it on our daily path, in our field of vision.  And the reverse is true.  If we want to stop doing something, make it hard to start.  So I moved the Mail icon from the toolbar on my iPad and buried it in a folder in a folder on page 3.  It wasn’t impossibly difficult to get in there and look at email, but it was certainly inconvenient.  After a while, I forgot about it, because I didn’t see it every day.
2. Clear “Out of Office” message.  My email OoO reply said “I will be away until 6 January 2014 and unavailable by phone and email until that date.”  Pretty clear, I thought.  No-one complained about its directness.
3. Clear voicemail message.  My voicemail message said “I am out of the office until 6th January.  If your call relates to a work matter, please don’t leave a voicemail, but call back on 6th January.  If it is a personal matter, please leave a voicemail and I will get back to you.”  Again, direct.  But no-one complained, and a few people called back on the 6th January.

The point of all this is that you have to create the fire-break.  If you fail to clear a good gap between you and the flames of distraction, those flames will jump over and spoil your holiday.  I managed to clear the firebreak, and it worked.

 

Email-free Christmas (Part II)

In my last post, I talked about the results of dodging email for 2.5 weeks from 18th December to 6th January, and how I concluded that most email was pretty pointless.  That may be obvious, but what was not obvious, in advance of the exercise, were the psychological benefits of what I am now calling “de-mailing”.

The first phase was hard.  Like a smoker separated from his tobacco by statute or family intervention, I felt like a stimulant had been withdrawn.  I suppose it had.

But after a couple of days, I forgot all about it.  I had put in places arrangements (see next post), so that anyone could get hold of me in the event that anything important happened.  But no-one called.  Nothing important happened.  It rarely does.

The more distanced I became from the world of email faffery, the more I enjoyed my holiday.  I did things that I didn’t think I would do, and I thought things that I wouldn’t have thought if I had been caught up in the hamster/wheel interface of normal short-cycle electronic thought processes.

The next post will outline the three key steps for de-mailing over the holidays.

Email-free Christmas (Part I)

One of the joys of being a Productivity Ninja is that we occasionally - very occasionally - get the opportunity to conduct cruel and unnecessary experiments on ourselves.  These tend to be in the domain of Productivity.

So I thought I would give it a go over Christmas.  The objective was to avoid all interaction with email from close of business on 18th December until start of play on 6th January - a good 2.5 weeks.  At the end of the period, I would have a look at what I had missed out on, analyse the figures, and conclude.

This should be easy for a Ninja, right?  Wrong.  We’re all the same.  We’re all slightly addicted to the feeling that someone, somewhere on this grey planet, wants to get in touch.  So, yes, it was hard.  But it was also interesting.

In my next post I will reveal the Top Tips that enabled me to virtually forget about email for two weeks.  But for now, here’s the analysis of what landed in that period, broadly categorised:

		No.	%
Commercial/Junk		93	43%
FYIs		79	37%
30-second scan/discard		28	13%
Small actions		13	6%
Important Actions		3	1%
Total		216	100%

Of the 216 emails I received...

43% was junk - “Merry Christmas!”, “Our Christmas Sale starts Monday!”  Have you ever noticed how few sentences ending with an exclamation mark ever contain anything to exclaim about?

37% was just CC stuff; things people thought that I needed to know about.  I can’t recall what any of things were, so those people were probably wrong.

13% was from people who wanted me to do something but, on reflection, I decided against doing so.

6% was things worth doing, but only took a minute or so...

...and 1% (three emails in total) were important things.

So, what can I conclude form all this.  Three things:

1. We massively overstate the import of things that come to us via email.  Most of it is crap.
2. As a result of 1 above, we spend too much time in fidgety, short-cycle, email-focussed behaviour.
3. As a result of 2, we are failing to do the big-picture, patient, valuable work.

 

The Productivity of a Three-Year-Old

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.

 

Stop Working In Your Dreams. Start Working On Your Dreams

One of the joys of being a Productivity Ninja is that we get plenty of access to the psyches of our clients.  All of these people are overwhelmed by “stuff” - unstructured commitments, emails, meetings, etc.  It’s no fun, not being a Ninja.

At a workshop in Newcastle a couple of weeks ago, we were discussing meetings.  One of the attendees said that she had so many meetings, she would often dream of meetings.  Dream of meetings.  Very odd, I reflected.  It’s just a short step from there to the “other side” - where you receive draft minutes for a meeting that took place in your dreams.  I don’t think she had quite got there yet, but her problem was telling.

This normal human had, for over fifteen years, been working in an environment where the workload had occupied every waking moment, and she had just transitioned to a state where it occupied her non-waking moments as well.  This would all be fine, of course, except that there is a price to pay.  By dedicating so much of our psyche to the minutiae of our work lives, we effectively crowd out any creative capability we may have.  Creative, human time, for this lady and for every other work-overwhelmed human on the planet, must wait for another day - or another life.

I managed to give her a couple of quick fixes for her meetings hell, but the space for her to stop working in her dreams and start working on her dreams is some way away.

Things We Confuse, Part I

I recently had the pleasure of travelling from London to Brunel University.  As I approached the cosmopolitan nirvana that is Uxbridge, I looked around my Tube carriage.  There were five other passengers and every single one of them was either Blackberrying or iPhoning.

You know the look.  Head bowed, brow creased, thumbs and fingers moving in a blur over a tiny keyboard, transmitting kilobytes to somewhere else.  It doesn’t look like a happy experience.  These people aren’t enjoying themselves.  Nor are they really doing anything useful.  It is a kind of electronic displacement activity.  They should wear a badge, “I am very, very busy on my mobile device, because to be otherwise engaged would expose me to the challenge of just being at peace with my own psyche.”

Ok, it would need to be a big badge, but you get the point.

There are two confusions here.

First, the idea that nothing that might happen outside of the Blackberry/iPhone could possibly be more important than whatever is happening inside it.  This is demonstrably untrue.  The work doesn’t happen on a tiny electronic screen.  The work happens when we have ideas, make connections, do something of value.  And none of that happens on a mobile device.

Second, these people are confusing Connectivity with Productivity.  It’s not the same thing; in fact, it’s the opposite.  Connectivity means responding to whatever is latest and loudest in digital-world.  Productivity is about stepping back from the Tyranny of Immediacy and doing “Big Rock” work - something that makes a difference.  Again, that never happens on a mobile device.

So we all have to choose between being Connected and being Productive.  You can do either, but you can’t do both.  Even in Uxbridge.