Jul. 22, 2018
Read time: 23 minutes and 57 seconds.
tags:Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action. - David Kekich
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The Problem: New Demands, Insufficient Resources Almost everyone I encounter these days feels he or she has too much to handle and not enough time to get it all done. In the course of a single recent week, I consulted with a partner in a major global investment firm who was concerned that the new corporate-management responsibilities he was being offered would stress his family commitments beyond the limits; and with a midlevel human-resources manager trying to stay on top of her 150-plus e-mail requests per day fueled by the goal of doubling the company?s regional office staff from eleven hundred to two thousand people in one year, all as she tried to protect a social life for herself on the weekends. A paradox has emerged in this new millennium: people have enhanced quality of life, but at the same time they are adding to their stress levels by taking on more than they have resources to handle. It?s as though their eyes were bigger than their stomachs. And most people are to some degree frustrated and perplexed about how to improve the situation.
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Our individual office silos are crumbling, and with them is going the luxury of not having to read cc?d e-mails from the marketing department, or from human resources, or from some ad hoc, deal-with-a-certain-issue committee.
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We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling. ?Eric Hoffer
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1 The organizations we?re involved with seem to be in constant morph mode, with ever-changing goals, products, partners, customers, markets, technologies, and owners. These all, by necessity, shake up structures, forms, roles, and responsibilities. 2 The average professional is more of a free agent these days than ever before, changing careers as often as his or her parents once changed jobs. Even fortysomethings and fiftysomethings hold to standards of continual growth. Their aims are just more integrated into the mainstream now, covered by the catchall ?professional, management, and executive development??which simply means they won?t keep doing what they?re doing for any extended period of time.
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The hurrier I go, the behinder I get. ?Anonymous
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The ?Big Picture? vs. the Nitty-Gritty At the other end of the spectrum, a huge number of business books, models, seminars, and gurus have championed the ?bigger view? as the solution to dealing with our complex world. Clarifying major goals and values, so the thinking goes, gives order, meaning, and direction to our work. In practice, however, the well-intentioned exercise of values thinking too often does not achieve its desired results. I have seen too many of these efforts fail, for one or more of the following three reasons: 1 There is too much distraction at the day-to-day, hour-to-hour level of commitments to allow for appropriate focus on the higher levels. 2 Ineffective personal organizational systems create huge sub-conscious resistance to undertaking even bigger projects and goals that will likely not be managed well, and that will in turn cause even more distraction and stress. 3 When loftier levels and values actually are clarified, it raises the bar of our standards, making us notice??that much more that needs changing. We are already having a serious negative reaction to the overwhelming number of things we have to do. And what created much of the work that?s on those lists in the first place? Our values! Focusing on values does not simplify your life. It gives meaning and direction?and a lot more complexity.
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Focusing on primary outcomes and values is a critical exercise, certainly. But it does not mean there is less to do, or fewer challenges in getting the work done. Quite the contrary: it just ups the ante in the game, which still must be played day to day. For a human-resources executive, for example, deciding to deal with quality-of-work-life issues in order to attract and keep key talent does not make things simpler. There has been a missing piece in our new culture of knowledge work: a system with a coherent set of behaviors and tools that functions effectively at the level at which work really happens. It must incorporate the results of big-picture thinking as well as the smallest of open details.
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What if you could dedicate fully 100 percent of your attention to whatever was at hand, at your own choosing, with no distraction? It is possible. There is a way to get a grip on it all, stay relaxed, and get meaningful things done with minimal effort, across the whole spectrum of your life and work. You can experience what the martial artists call a ?mind like water? and top athletes refer to as the ?zone,? within the complex world in which you?re engaged. In fact, you have probably already been in this state from time to time. Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. ?Nadia Boulanger
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World-class rower Craig Lambert has described how it feels in Mind Over Water (Houghton Mifflin, 1998): Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing?. Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lin?0??nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival.
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Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. Responding inappropriately to your e-mail, your staff, your projects, your unread magazines, your thoughts about what you need to do, your children, or your boss will lead to less effective results than you?d like. Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don?t operate with a ?mind like water.?
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Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an ?open loop? pulling on your attention. It?s likely that you also have more internal commitments currently in play than you?re aware of. Consider how many things you feel even the smallest amount of responsibility to change, finish, handle, or do something about. You have a commitment, for instance, to deal in some way with every new communication landing in your e-mail, on your voice-mail, and in your in-basket. And surely there are numerous projects that you sense need to be defined in your areas of responsibility, as well as goals and directions to be clarified, a career to be managed, and life in general to be kept in balance. You have accepted some level of internal responsibility for everything in your life and work that represents an open loop of any sort. In order to deal effectively with all of that, you must first identify and collect all those things that are ?ringing your bell? in some way, and then plan how to handle them. That may seem like a simple thing to do, but in practice most people don?t know how to do it in a consistent way.
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The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors: First of all, if it?s on your mind, your mind isn?t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you?ll come back to regularly and sort through. Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. Third, once you?ve decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.
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An Important Exercise to Test This Model I suggest that you write down the project or situation that is most on your mind at this moment. What most ?bugs? you, distracts you, or interests you, or in some other way consumes a large part of your conscious attention? It may be a project or problem that is really ?in your face,? something you are being pressed to handle, or a situation you feel you must deal with sooner rather than later. Maybe you have a vacation trip coming up that you need to make some major last-minute decisions about. Or perhaps you just inherited six million dollars and you don?t know stem<U+1CC2> do with the cash. Whatever. Got it? Good. Now describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this ?project? off as ?done?? It could be as simple as ?Take the Hawaii vacation,? ?Handle situation with customer X,? ?Resolve college situation with Susan,? ?Clarify new divisional management structure,? or ?Implement new investment strategy.? All clear? Great. Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, where would you go right now, and what visible action would you take? Would you pick up a phone and make a call? Go to your computer and write an e-mail? Sit down with pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Talk face-to-face with your spouse, your secretary, your attorney, or your boss? Buy nails at the hardware store? What?
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Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. ?Henry Bergson
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The Real Work of Knowledge Work Welcome to the real-life experience of ?knowledge work,? and a profound operational principle: You have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you?re afraid you might. As Peter Drucker has written, ?In knowledge work? the task is not given; it has to be determined. ?What are the expected results from this work?? is ? the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.? The ancestor of every action is a thought. ?Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Why Things Are on Your Mind Most often, the reason something is ?on your mind? is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: you haven?t clarified exactly what the intended outcome is; you haven?t decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or you haven?t put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.
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Rule your mind or it will rule you. ?Horace
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Most of the to-do lists I have seen over the years (when people had them at all) were merely listings of ?stuff,? not inventories of the resultant real work that needed to be done. They were partial reminders of a lot of things that were unresolved and as yet untranslated into outcomes and actions?that is, the real outlines and details of what the list-makers had to ?do.? ?Stuff? is not inherently a bad thing. Things that command our attention, by their very nature, usually show up as ?stuff.? But once ?stuff? comes into our lives and work, we have an inherent commitment to ourselves to define and clarify its meaning. That?s our responsibility as knowledge workers; if ?stuff? were already transformed and clear, our value, other than physical labor, would probably not be required. At the conclusion of one of my seminars, a senior manager of a major biotech firm looked back at the to-do lists she had come in with and said, ?Boy, that was an amorphous blob of undoability!? That?s the best description I?ve ever heard of what passes for organizing lists in most personal systems. The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things; they haven?t yet realized how much and what they need to organize in order to get the real payoff. They need to gather everything that requires thinking about and then do that thinking if their organizational efforts are to be successful.
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You can train yourself, almost like an athlete, to be faster, more responsive, more proactive, and more focused in knowledge work. You can think more effectively and manage the results with more ease and control. You can minimize the loose ends across the whole spectrum of your work life and personal life and get a lot more done with less effort. And you can make front-end decision-making about all the ?stuff? you collect and create standard operating procedure for living and working in this new millennium. Before you can achieve any of that, though, you?ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do that, as we?ve seen, is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all: you don?t manage five minutes and wind up with six; you don?t manage information overload?otherwise you?d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even opened a phone book, you?d blow up; and you don?t manage priorities?you have them.
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The beginning is half of every action. ?Greek proverb
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Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.
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Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs. ?Vaclav Havel
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Horizontal and Vertical Action Management You need to control commitments, projects, and actions in two ways?horizontally and vertically. ?Horizontal? control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved. Imagine your psyche constantly scanning your environment like police radar; it may land on any of a thousand different items that invite or demand your attention during any twenty-four-hour period: the drugstore, the housekeeper, your aunt Martha, the strategic plan, lunch, a wilting plant in the office, an upset customer, shoes that need shining. You have to buy stamps, deposit that check, make the hotel reservation, cancel a staff meeting, see a movie tonight. You might be surprised at the volume of things you actually think about and have to deal with just in one day. You need a good system that can keep track of as many of them as possible, supply required information about them on demand, and allow you to shift your focus from one thing to the next quickly and easily. ?Vertical? control, in contrast, manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects. For example, your inner ?police radar? lands on your next vacation as you and your spouse talk about it over dinner?where and when you?ll go, what you?ll do, how to prepare for the trip, and so on. Or you and your boss need to make some decisions about the new departmental reorganization you?re about to launch. Or you just need to get your thinking up to date on the customer you?re about to call. This is ?project planning? in the broad sense. It?s focusing in on a single endeavor, situation, or person and fleshing out whatever ideas, details, priorities,
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Horizontal and Vertical Action Management You need to control commitments, projects, and actions in two ways?horizontally and vertically. ?Horizontal? control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved. Imagine your psyche constantly scanning your environment like police radar; it may land on any of a thousand different items that invite or demand your attention during any twenty-four-hour period: the drugstore, the housekeeper, your aunt Martha, the strategic plan, lunch, a wilting plant in the office, an upset customer, shoes that need shining. You have to buy stamps, deposit that check, make the hotel reservation, cancel a staff meeting, see a movie tonight. You might be surprised at the volume of things you actually think about and have to deal with just in one day. You need a good system that can keep track of as many of them as possible, supply required information about them on demand, and allow you to shift your focus from one thing to the next quickly and easily. ?Vertical? control, in contrast, manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects. For example, your inner ?police radar? lands on your next vacation as you and your spouse talk about it over dinner?where and when you?ll go, what you?ll do, how to prepare for the trip, and so on. Or you and your boss need to make some decisions about the new departmental reorganization you?re about to launch. Or you just need to get your thinking up to date on the customer you?re about to call. This is ?project planning? in the broad sense. It?s focusing in on a single endeavor, situation, or person and fleshing out whatever ideas, details, priorities, and sequences of events may be required for you to handle it, at least for the moment. The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get things done. Appropriate action management lets you feel comfortable and in control as you move through your broad spectrum of work and life, while appropriate project focusing gets you clear about and on track with the specifics needed.
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As you?ll discover, the individual behaviors described in this book are things you?re already doing. The big difference between what I do and what others do is that I capture and organize 100 percent of my ?stuff? in and with objective tools at hand, not in my mind. And that applies to everything?little or big, personal or professional, urgent or not. Everything. I?m sure that at some time or other you?ve gotten to a place in a project, or in your life, where you just had to sit down and make a list. If so, you have a reference point for what I?m talking about. Most people, howeveriorh??hat kind of list-making drill only when the confusion get too unbearable and they just have to do something about it. They usually make a list only about the specific area that?s bugging them.
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There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought. I try to make intuitive choices based on my options, instead of trying to think about what those options are. I need to have thought about all of that already and captured the results in a trusted way. I don?t want to waste time thinking about things more than once. That?s an inefficient use of creative energy and a source of frustration and stress. And you can?t fudge this thinking. Your mind will keep working on anything that?s still in that undecided state. But there?s a limit to how much unresolved ?stuff? it can contain before it blows a fuse. The short-term-memory part of your mind?the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized ?stuff??functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there?s limited capacity; there?s only so much ?stuff? you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They?re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload. For example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn?t have anything to do with what you?re reading here? Probably. And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear up out of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally. And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted ?bucket? that you know you?ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was increased.
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There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought. I try to make intuitive choices based on my options, instead of trying to think about what those options are. I need to have thought about all of that already and captured the results in a trusted way. I don?t want to waste time thinking about things more than once. That?s an inefficient use of creative energy and a source of frustration and stress. And you can?t fudge this thinking. Your mind will keep working on anything that?s still in that undecided state. But there?s a limit to how much unresolved ?stuff? it can contain before it blows a fuse. The short-term-memory part of your mind?the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized ?stuff??functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there?s limited capacity; there?s only so much ?stuff? you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They?re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload. For example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn?t have anything to do with what you?re reading here? Probably. And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear up out of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally. And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted ?bucket? that you know you?ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was increased. It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. ?Sally Kempton
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The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can?t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there?s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you?ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you?ve generated personal failure, because you can?t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can?t be pinpointed. Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so consistently, for so long, that they don?t even know they?re in it. Like gravity, it?s ever-present?so much so that those who experience it usually are<U+022E><U+2714>t even aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension they?ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.
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THE CORE PROCESS I teach for mastering the art of relaxed and controlled knowledge work is a five-stage method for managing workflow. No matter what the setting, there are five discrete stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We (1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do. This constitutes the management of the ?horizontal? aspect of our lives?incorporating everything that has our attention at any time. The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results. ?Peter F. Drucker
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Basically, everything is already being collected, in the larger sense. If it?s not being directly managed in a trusted external system of yours, then it?s resident somewhere in your psyche. The fact that you haven?t put an item in your in-basket doesn?t mean you haven?t got it. But we?re talking here about making sure that everything you need is collected somewhere other than in your head.
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*The Physical In-Basket The standard plastic, wood, leather, or wire tray is the most common tool for collecting paper-based materials and anything else physical that needs some sort of processing: mail, magazines, memos, notes, phone slips, receipts?even flashlights with dead batteries. Writing Paper and Pads Loose-leaf notebooks, spiral binders, and steno and legal pads all work fine for collecting random ideas, input, things to do, and so on. Whatever kind fits your taste and needs is fine. Electronic Note-Taking Computers can be used to type in notes for processing later. And as character-recognition technology advances, a parade of digital tools designed to capture data continues to be introduced. Handheld devices (personal digital assistants, or PDAs) and electronic legal pads can both be used to collect all kinds of input. Auditory Capture Available auditory devices include answering machines, voice-mail, and dictating equipment, such as digital or microcassette recorders. All of these can be useful for preserving an interim record of things you need to remember or deal with. E-mail If you?re wired to the rest of the world through e-mail, your software contains some sort of holding area for incoming messages and files, where they can be stored until they are viewed, read, and processed. Pagers and telephones can capture this kind of input as well.*
The Physical In-Basket The standard plastic, wood, leather, or wire tray is the most common tool for collecting paper-based materials and anything else physical that needs some sort of processing: mail, magazines, memos, notes, phone slips, receipts?even flashlights with dead batteries. Writing Paper and Pads Loose-leaf notebooks, spiral binders, and steno and legal pads all work fine for collecting random ideas, input, things to do, and so on. Whatever kind fits your taste and needs is fine. Electronic Note-Taking Computers can be used to type in notes for processing later. And as character-recognition technology advances, a parade of digital tools designed to capture data continues to be introduced. Handheld devices (personal digital assistants, or PDAs) and electronic legal pads can both be used to collect all kinds of input. Auditory Capture Available auditory devices include answering machines, voice-mail, and dictating equipment, such as digital or microcassette recorders. All of these can be useful for preserving an interim record of things you need to remember or deal with. E-mail If you?re wired to the rest of the world through e-mail, your software contains some sort of holding area for incoming messages and files, where they can be stored until they are viewed, read, and processed. Pagers and telephones can capture this kind of input as well.
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Get It All Out of Your Head If you?re still trying to keep track of too many things in your RAM, you likely won?t be motivated to use and empty your in-baskets with integrity. Most people are relatively careless about these tools because they know they don?t represent discrete, whole systems anyway: there?s an incomplete set of things in their in-basket and an incomplete set in their mind, and they?re not getting any payoff from either one, so their thinking goes. It?s like trying to play pin-ball on a machine that has big holes in the table, so the balls keep falling out: there?s little motivation to keep playing the game. These collection tools should become part of your life-style.
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An excess of collection buckets is seldom a problem on the high-tech end; the real improvement opportunity for most people is on the low-tech side, primarily in the areas of note-taking and physical in-basket collection. Written notes need to be corralled and processed instead of left lying embedded in stacks, notebooks, and drawers. Paper materials need to be funneled into physical in-baskets instead of being scattered over myriad piles in all the available corners of your world. Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are the most active. ?Leonardo da Vinci
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An excess of collection buckets is seldom a problem on the high-tech end; the real improvement opportunity for most people is on the low-tech side, primarily in the areas of note-taking and physical in-basket collection. Written notes need to be corralled and processed instead of left lying embedded in stacks, notebooks, and drawers. Paper materials need to be funneled into physical in-baskets instead of being scattered over myriad piles in all the available corners of your world. Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are the most active. ?Leonardo da Vinci Implementing standard tools for capturing ideas and input will become more and more critical as your life and work become more sophisticated. As you proceed in your career, for instance, you?ll probably notice that your best ideas about work will not come to you at work.
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Getting Things Done: How to achieve stress-free productivity (David Allen)
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