A Long Slow Road

The idea of productivity hacking and productivity systems has appealed to me since a reading an article in Wired a couple of years ago about Dave Allen and his GTD (Get Things Done) system to personal productivity.  Since then I have experimented with this and other systems that in principle will all help improve personal productivity and through that help you reach your personal goals.

My personal motivation is to spend more time with my young family so I’m interested in trying to achieve the same amount of work in a reduced amount of time. Yet even with this motivation no system has delivered a measureable improvement. I don’t blame the systems, but I find that I have a very hard time adopting any structured process with the required level of discipline for it to deliver results.

I think this has a lot to do with the rapid adoption of a complex regime, which in turn requires substantial willpower to adopt and discipline to maintain. Unfortunately for me, I just don’t have the Benjamin Franklin mind set, even if I am jealous of the ruthless focus to his daily routine.

Currently I am experimenting with what a new model that I have formulated, learning from my toothbrush, my iPad, the Zen Habits blog and a geeky love of self organising systems. I do not claim that this is novel or my own creation, if anything is a description of change in my thinking that created something that worked better for me and I wanted to share even if it is blindingly obvious to everyone else.

The background to my current experiment starts with my toothbrush. For many years, as back as far as I remember I would only brush my teeth in the morning. Now, this goes against all advice on dental hygiene but I only have two fillings both when I was a teenager and I never had problems with gum disease.

A couple of years ago my wife, (fed up with her scummy husband) started to remind me to clean them in the evening until after a period of time it had became automatic. I only became consciously aware of this one night when I forgot to brush due to change of routine.  Lying in bed I noticed that something had been missed out, and when I remembered I didn’t even think about fixing it. Importantly this wasn’t willpower or discipline this was just a simple habit.

Getting an iPad was my next step in this journey, it’s still new and shiny and I adore it. One of the things I had been doing over the last couple of years was hoarding free eBooks. With the iPad I now had the reader I was saving them for. So I one night on the train home from work I read Leo Babauta’s Focus manifesto.  There were many things I enjoyed about this book but I was particularly struck by the section on Effortless Action. The opening paragraph is quoted below:

“There is a concept in Taoism “Wei wu wei” which is often translated as action without action or effortless doing. I prefer to think of it as action that does not involve struggle of excessive effort”

The rest of the chapter presents a wonderful image of how natural processes do not fight or struggle yet achieve amazing things. This resonated with a passage that Richard Dawkins uses to describe evolution: “a long gentle slope up the mountain of success”. Leo offered an alternative mental picture of water flowing down a hill. I my own work I enjoy exploring swarm behaviours and how complexity can be created from very simple rules and I saw a parallel between these different worlds.

My next step was to begin thinking of personal productivity not as “system” (these are ironic quotes), Instead it could be decomposed into a collection of behaviours that would have the natural effect of creating a productive life style. So instead of adopting a productivity system top down, an alternative model would be to cultivate a collection of simple small achievable habits and routines that when combined would create a more productive behaviour.

Just like the brushing my teeth before bed was a small positive habit that I developed over time I started to think about the basic question which habits to try and cultivate? How many habits could develop in parallel?  The important thing was that each habit had to be a small change and there had to be a conscious trigger point. This would give me a hook to initiate the behaviour until it became part of the routine. A simple example was picking a certain flight of stairs to walk up rather than take the lift.  The trigger was seeing the lift; the action was taking the stairs instead repeat until waking the stairs was the normal behaviour.

To paraphrase Dawkins this is the long gentle road to self improvement rather than the big bang change to a better life but I find that the simplicity in making small changes and the frequent small successes of this approach much more compelling than my previous experiments, even if it takes years to pay off.

The following are a list of my first selection of behaviours I wanted to cultivate. I have initially focused on health issues as this was what I felt I was sacrificing to work. But the list in my head is long.

• Replace a chocolate bar at lunch time with two pieces of fruit. Now, I’ve been eating some form of chocolate at lunch since I was 7 when it was packed in my lunch box (My mum also always packed fruit too) but as I grew older the snack bars grew as I did. So replace the lunch chocolate with fruit.
• Doing some press-ups every night after brushing my teeth. So here I use the teeth brushing trigger and added some press ups immediately afterwards into the bed time routine. This is a nice one as I started small, just 10 per night, but as this behaviour becomes more habitual the number can adapt and grow.
• Yoga in the mornings. Similar to the press ups, but in the mornings trying to do a simple yoga sequence before showering. This is important to me as years of sedentary desk work and little exercise means that I have been waking up stiff in the mornings, This this is something that starts with 2-3 minutes a day and can expand as it becomes habit.

Those were some of the habits that seem to be sticking. Some more I am trying to cultivate that are not going so well are:

• Replacing watching a specific soap opera with learning to play Go with my wife. We stuck with this for a bit but we both got sick and Go sort of stopped. We’ve stopped watching the show but started watching something else instead.
• Replace my normal behaviour check email as the first thing I do at work with something else. This, in my opinion is one of my most productivity destroying habits that I have as it can completely disrupt your day as you fire fight other people’s issues that came in overnight.

There are others that I am beginning to plan as I look for small simple things that will result in a healthier, more active, and more creatively productive life style. I am trying to keep them to very small changes with an obvious trigger point that I can hook them on. I have no real evidence that the big picture will work – but I find the idea of Wei Wu Wei something that seems so beautiful that I going to trust my intuition on this one.

Productivity Rebooted

I need to start with a confession. This week I have had a massive productivity fail. I had lost control of my projects and was trying to work on all of them together which was leading to achieving nothing.

The first step in the reboot was recognising this was going on. For me I was getting so stressed I asked to meet up with a friend so that I could have a general moan about the state of the world. But when he asked me what I actually wanted to talk about, I was able to connect the dots in my head and say out loud that I was drowning in work and needed to talk it through.

Rather than wait for for this meet-up, I thought I would look for inspiration in the productivity blogs I’ve been reading. I’ve been a productivity geek for a couple of years now,  since reading this article in Wired. One of the few posts I have bookmarked since then was this article: The Art of Finish. On its original reading it had been interesting as I’m great at starting projects but lame at finishing them, but it had never stuck except as something to come back to. This time it resonated in a deeper way as  the criticism of GTD were now meaningful. The structures it recommended were something I could incorporate into my own work patterns. Most importantly it offered a route forward.

So to cut a long story short I went through my project list, picked out 8 of the most important and time dependent projects and pushed the rest into the holding pen. I came up with hard completion criteria so that I would know when I was finished and I wrote it all down.

Since then not 18 hours ago I have been tempted many times to look at work on projects out of this list and internally been able to say no to myself. I’ve been able to declutter my mind to focus on real steps forward. I feel like things are achievable again.

So today when I actually meet my friend the conversation can be about solving actual problems and not a confused moan about life.

Productivity Rebooted