I’ve been an avid enthusiast (not to say follower) of GTD and productivity blogs in general. (This one has long been chief on that list; keep up the good material without diluting it.) Currently I just started a new role at work where I have a bit more responsibility.To keep track, I’ve been using tasks–via Outlook 2007 and Remember the Milk. Both are great ways to quickly catalog things to be done.
However, the other side of my job is that I can get “interrupted” with urgent things that legitimately take precedence over my (usually) non-urgent tasks. So days can go by without me getting any tasks completed. This feels pretty crummy.
What do I do with that? Any mentality tips you can offer to help me go home at night feeling a little more satisfied with my progress?
Best regards,
Andrew Conkling
I would suggest that you divide your todo list into two types of tasks each day. One group of tasks are the ones that you home to accomplish for the day. The other group is much shorter and contains the three things that you are committing to get done for that day. These three tasks shouldn’t be a full 8 hours of work. In fact they may only take 1 or 2 hours of uninterrupted focus to complete.
The idea is to give yourself a certain number of things that you are promising yourself to complete that represent the most important things you need to accomplish for the day. If possible arrange your day so you can work on these items first. That might starting work a bit earlier, or simply closing your office door from 8 to 10. You also might consider doing these tasks before answering emails or checking voicemail.
Personally I am on a constant mission to do less. I don’t think I’m made to handle 20 or 30 tasks in a day. Even if I have a bunch of stuff to do, I’d rather give myself 2 or 3 tasks that will have the biggest impact and focus on whether or not I get those items done. With the other stuff I look for ways to delegate, automate, do less frequently, or stop doing all together. I’m not saying you can get rid of all the other tasks, but by clearly defining what is most important you can end your day knowing that you did the vital stuff–even if you were interrupted for the rest of the day.
One of the problems with GTD (in my opinion) is that it encourages people to try to do more. The people I know who are most effective are usually the ones that are only doing a few things. They have figured out where they add the most value and concentrate on that.
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“They have figured out where they add the most value and concentrate on that.”
Well said. That reminds me of a concept from Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive (which I believe I won from a drawing on this very site). Drucker states that a person should ask themselves something like “How can I contribute the most to my organization?” or “What can I do that others may not be able to?”
I’ve found this to be great advice, but it can be difficult to remember when I get into the “fire fighting” mode.
Another simple, free, task list manager is http://www.gubb.net . As much as I liked RTM, I found Gubb to be more intuitive with slightly better features.
Mark,
Thanks for fielding my question. I appreciate your thoughts.
I definitely have resisted the urge to try to do more (or at least to collect more to do) that GTD does encourage. (That’s why I said I wasn’t quite a follower. ;) I think the problem of my workflow is that it feels satisfying to finish something “actionable” (i.e. I can check off a box in my list of tasks), but most of my work isn’t on my task list. Reconciling that will take some conscious thought at the end of my day.
Vernon, I’m actually only using Remember the Milk for my personal tasks, and I’m quite fond of the submit-by-email feature (for when I’m out and about) and the Gmail integration, but I’ll check out Gubb also. Thanks!
I, too, am trying to limit what I do. I agree with your assessment of GTD. It nearly sunk me under a load of tasks. I was so overwhelmed by the size of my next action lists I refused to do any of it. Sort of a mental rebellion. It was only when I really limited what I have on my plate at one time that I started to make progress.
I would love to have the freedom to do the things that will have the most impact, but sadly, my priorities at work are not my own. Likewise at home, as much as I would like to spend the entire evening helping my daughter read, the laundry is piling up.
The obvious answer for me is that I give up at work, and work on what is considered important. I can voice my opinion, but since I do support, this is not necessarily the way my business works.
At home, instead of working 2-3 tasks in a couple of hours that will have the most impact, I either have to do just 1 of those tasks, or make the tasks small enough that I am progressing on important stuff in the time I can.
Thanks for a great article!
@Barrett – That book was very influential in forming the way I think about work. :)
@Andrew – It can be difficult to balance the idea of trying to make sure you don’t miss anything important and trying to keep from grabbing everything under the sun as possible tasks. One approach is to go ahead and write everything down, but then be brutal in deciding what you are NOT going to do. The problem is that this can add a bunch more work to your organization process.
I think on of the big pitfalls people run into is spending too much time on their process and tools and not enough time doing the actual work. Tools are great, but only to the extent that they help you really accomplish important things. If your tools help you accomplish more and more things that are less and less important, you need to rethink things.
One of the bigger advantages to GTD is the idea that you can fully concentrate on the task at hand, because you don’t have the nagging feeling that you are missing something else. This is valuable but can be offset by the feeling of being overwhelmed because you wrote down everything you could possible think of doing.
@LJ – Working for someone else can be tough. On one hand you want to really give your all and buy in to the goals of your organization. On the other hand you can spend your life working for a company without doing much to really help yourself prepare for the future.
Sometimes it can be good to take the position that your job is just what you do in order to be able to spend time on the things you consider more important. This obviously can really change how you choose employment.
I found myself getting overwhelmed by my to-do-lists until I was introduced to the idea of creating a schedule for each day. This proved to be quite difficult to implement on paper, but with a PDA and Outlook it’s become much easier, especially with synchronization between the two.
The hangup people have is that they think that a schedule they create for the day is set in stone, and that they could never keep it. Well, they are right about the second part, but today’s tools allow so much flexibility that a schedule can be used as a guideline subject to on-the-spot changes at any moment.
Used in this way, the schedule takes a great deal of pressure off the to-do list as a tool, and allows it to act as more of a list than a task manager. This flexible approach allows us to create a balance between the to-do list and schedule that each person needs to adapt for themselves.
When my schedule is not laid out in detail, what I find is that I end up carrying too many details about the timing of items on my to-do lists in my head, which quickly becomes a burden.
Hope this helps.
Outsourcing a part of your hectic schedule does help ease out some of the stress related to meeting targets and deadlines. Additionally productivity is also increased.