Get Everything Done

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

The day following my horrific experience of the 19 cups of tea, my consumption went down to 12. So I decided for the next day (yesterday) I would set myself the target of drinking the same number of cups. Interestingly by the late evening I still had a couple of cups to drink and had to force myself.

So I have come to the conclusion that the best way to proceed is to follow the same pattern of two alternating days - one day drinking as many cups as I want without restraint, followed by another day in which I have to drink the same number as the previous day.

Today is a no restraint day, and I am on my 4th cup of tea as I write this at 3 p.m. So it looks as if I will be well under the previous figure of 12 cups by the end of the day.

It’s early days yet, but I do get the impression that the method is reducing my cup of tea consumption. I’ll be very interested to see if this continues.

Previous Posts on This Subject

I have often said that it is structure that controls our actions - and that given different structures we will act in different ways.

So here are two different ways in which I act:

• When I get a rental DVD from amazon.co.uk it tends to lie around for a long time before I watch it. I seldom if ever get up to my monthly maximum.
• When I download a TV programme from BBC iPlayer it gets watched promptly.

Why the difference?

Amazon has no time limit and there is no penalty for not returning a DVD. As long as I continue to pay my monthly subscription they are perfectly happy!

The BBC iPlayer site has programmes available for 7 days after they are broadcast. If you download a programme you can keep it for 30 days before it is deleted automatically. But once you start watching it, it is deleted automatically after only 7 days.

So the result of the BBC’s system is that I never fail to watch the downloads.

My question is: could this 7-30-7 pattern be adapted into a time management system?

Any suggestions as to how that could work?

There’s a famous book on military strategy written by a Prussian general in the Napoleonic wars - “On War” by Carl von Clausewitz. It’s still studied in Military Academies all over the world. One of his concepts is that of “friction”, by which he means all the messy real-life things which get in the way of a commander’s beautifully conceived plans.

For example a commander issues orders for a battalion to advance to a certain line during the night in order to be ready to attack at dawn. But the rations are late coming up, the ammunition wagon loses a wheel, it starts to rain, the vehicles get bogged down, the streams flood, they come across an unexpected enemy patrol, the lead company gets lost, the maps are inaccurate, and someone calculated the time of dawn incorrectly. (Anyone who’s been in the Army will recognise all of these!)

Clausewitz stresses that any commander who doesn’t take the effects of friction into account when making his plans is asking for trouble. Friction is an ever present reality in war. It was in the days of Napoleon (and long before) and still is now.

In exactly the same way if we don’t take the effects of friction into account when we are planning our days, we are going to be in trouble. Often when I am talking to a meeting I ask the audience how many of them draw up a plan for each day of what they intend to do. Usually about 60 per cent put their hands up. Then I ask how many succeed in finishing their plan most days, and most people put their hands down again!

When I ask what the reason is for not getting to the end of the plan, the answer is always “Interruptions”.

Now interruptions are one type of friction, and anyone who doesn’t take interruptions into account when planning their day is asking for trouble, just like von Clausewitz’s commanders. There are many other types of friction in our work lives too. One example happened to me when my computer decided to stop working last Tuesday. Another is that I seem to have lost the charger for my laptop - just as I need to use it this weekend. Those are just two examples out of thousands.

Have a think about your day and see what types of friction are affecting your work. Once you’ve identified the concept in your life, then you can do something about it.

There are basically two things you can do about friction. One is to recognise that there is always going to be some friction however well organised you are, and not to schedule yourself so tightly that you are thrown out by it. The other is to make sure that your systems contain as little friction as possible. This is largely a question of thinking ahead to get systems right before they are needed, and taking the time to put systems errors right when you notice them.

Finally Clausewitz’s solution:

Perseverance in the chosen course is the essential counter-weight, provided that no compelling reasons intervene to the contrary. Moreover, there is hardly a worthwhile enterprise in war whose execution does not call for infinite effort, trouble, and privation; and as man under pressure tends to give in to physical and intellectual weakness, only great strength of will can lead to the objective. It is steadfastness that will earn the admiration of the world and of posterity.

Related article:

More About Systems

Related discussion:

Scheduling

I’ve just finished the day after midnight drinking my nineteenth cup of tea - truly a revolting experience!

The trouble is I don’t really know where to go from here. I certainly don’t feel at this precise moment that I ever want to see another cup of tea again, but will I still feel like that in the morning? And even if I do, how long will it last?

I think what I will do tomorrow is drink as much tea as I want naturally and record how many cups I drink. We’ll see whether the last two days’ exercise has had a beneficial effect or not.

Related posting:

Caffeine Consumption: Day 1

Luciano Passuello  has a useful article about Will Do lists, based on my ideas but adding some of his own, on his blog Lite Mind. The comments are worth reading too.

Related article:

To Do Lists - How We Hate Them!

I finished Day 1 of my experiment on reducing caffeine consumption having established a benchmark of 19 cups of tea - yes, you did read that right: 19 cups of tea.

Frankly this morning I find the idea of having to consume 19 cups of tea today revolting in the extreme. So perhaps the technique is working!

Update on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 15:45 by Mark Forster

Urgh! Nearly 4 o’clock and I’ve still got another nine cups of tea to go.

The things I put myself through for my readers!

After just one week of getting back on the Do It Tomorrow system, I can’t believe how my life has been transformed. I’m experiencing renewed energy and am moving forwards on all fronts. And as always seems to happen when one starts to move forward, opportunities have begun to open up in front of me.

Specifically I have got rid of all backlogs and so am completely up-to-date. I’ve rejuvenated my blog, got going again on my newsletter, started to develop ideas for new products and generally feel that I’m in the driving seat again.

And I’ve done all this without working later than 3.30 p.m. any day this week. With one exception - today!

Today my computer started playing up badly in the morning and I got the “blue wall of death” twice. However I couldn’t do much about it then because I had a meeting at 11.45 a.m. When I got back from this at 3.30 p.m. I was able to sort the problem out fairly comprehensively but it didn’t leave much time to finish my Will Do list for the day. Bear in mind that in Do It Tomorrow terminology a computer breakdown is an “Immediate” task, since it prevents one from doing any other work.

So I’ve finished the working day with a whole load of tasks to carry forward to tomorrow. That is absolutely nothing to worry about. It is bound to happen from time to time, and is only a cause for concern if one can’t catch up after 3 or 4 days.

Finally, here’s my “What’s Better?” list for my new Current Initiative - sorting out my office:

• Wrote blog entry on the subject
• Moved books back onto shelves
• Made a start on sorting out books
• Tidied area around shredder of bits of paper

Buy Do It Tomorrow

Having cleared my paper backlog yesterday (hurrah! hurrah!), I am starting a new Current Initiative today. This is to sort out my office. If I do it properly (as opposed to just a surface clean and tidy) it is a big job because it involves sorting out such things as the best locations for the furniture, computer, printer, phone, fax, etc, and also weeding and revising my filing system, and moving things to storage or dumping them altogether.

There are several ways I could tackle this:

• Empty everything out of the office and start again from scratch.
• Break the project up into a series of smaller areas and deal with each of them as a separate Current Initiative.
• Pay someone else to do it for me

But the way I am actually going to do it is using a “What’s Better?” list. This is a technique from my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True. All it involves is writing out a list of everything that is better about my office today. I ignore things that are worse or the same. The idea is that doing this focusses one’s mind on the growth points. And on the principle that what you pay attention to grows, those growth points will then grow further and faster.

In the book it is used as a way of measuring one’s progress during the day in general - and I know from experience that it is a very powerful way of moving forward. Will it work for a specific project like this? I’ve no idea. The reason I chose this method is precisely because I wanted to see what would happen.

Anyway I’ve got one thing that can go on my list already: I’ve written a blog entry about it. That must be something that’s better!

Buy How to Make Your Dreams Come True

A reader’s comment on one of my articles reminded me of a technique for giving up smoking which I had read about somewhere many years ago. The idea was to stop smoking being a pleasure and make it into a chore by giving oneself the compulsory task of smoking a certain number of cigarettes during a day.

As soon as I remembered this, I thought that I’d like to try it out. Since I gave up smoking over thirty years ago, I can’t use it for that purpose. But there is something I want to cut down on (or perhaps even cut out altogether) and that is caffeine. I don’t drink coffee, but I do drink endless cups of tea. I wonder if it’ll work for that?

So tomorrow I have the task of drinking as much tea as I like - without restraint. And then the following day I HAVE to drink the same number of cups. What happens after that? I’m not quite sure… I’ll have to make it up when I get there!

Tomorrow evening I’ll report back on how many cups I drink tomorrow - and it’ll be a lot!

I’m getting back into the swing of things now by using the Do It Tomorrow methods, but it’s brought back to me that there is a definite tension between having a methodical system for one’s work and being spontaneous and creative. It’s very easy to become a ‘prisoner of the system’. That is in fact the reason that I have spent the last year or more trying to find a more intuitive and spontaneous way of working. The fact that I failed shows how necessary it is to have structure in one’s life.

Nevertheless it is immensely important to preserve the creative aspects of working without preconceived structure. So the solution is to wear the structure lightly, but also to be able to avoid doing nothing more than drift when the structure has been relaxed. How can we do that?

In my article Feeling Good I wrote about how using a simple method to monitor one’s state of mind could have a major effect on one’s productivity and effectiveness. Basically it consisted of asking oneself at regular intervals “How good am I feeling right now?” and then marking oneself out of 10. I described in my article how I even succeeded in curing myself of a fear of flying by using this technique.

I’ve discovered an even more powerful question to use in this way. The question is “How much resistance am I feeling right now?” Just as with the “feeling good” question, you mark yourself out of 10. However in this case you are aiming for a low score rather than a high score!

What does the question mean? You may be saying to yourself “resistance to what?” The answer is resistance to whatever your mind is subconsciously telling you would be the best thing for you to be doing at this precise moment. You are either doing it, or resisting doing it.

So for instance this morning instead of getting on with the next item on my list I started following up a thought I had just had by googling it. Instantly my resistance went up from 0 to 7! And it took a while to fall back to 0 even after I had stopped surfing. By contrast when it was time for lunch I felt the resistance grow because I was working instead of relaxing.

Like the Feeling Good method, it is important you don’t try to force this. The idea is simply to monitor your level of resistance and let it adjust itself. The process of monitoring itself will cause the resistance to fall overall. You will soon begin to discover what sort of things make it rise and make it fall. You will also discover that they will be different things according to the time of day or the circumstances.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

John McConnel, a stress management trainer and coach, has sent me a useful checklist for having a great 2008. You can read it and/or download it by clicking here.

He is happy for you to make what use you like of it as long as you attribute it to him.

One of the questions I have been asking myself recently is “What happens if we deliberately live without any goals?”

All the books I’ve written in the past and just about every other self-help book assumes that goals are essential to success. But is this true?

We tend to think that living without goals would result in lying on a couch in front of the tv all day with a six-pack of beer (or whatever your own particular form of goofing off is!) But I suspect that this is actually the result of negative goals, rather than no goals at all. A negative goal would be something like “I don’t want to do the housework”, “I don’t want write that report”, or “I don’t want to do any work”.

The reason I have been asking that question is that I am conscious that many major positive changes in my life have come about without my having formed any definite goals about the changes. It’s been far more a case of acting on opportunity out of a deeper feeling that I am taking the right action for me. I’ve written before about how it’s sometimes only possible to see what is important to you by looking back to see where your past actions have been leading you.

So if you genuinely live without goals, positive or negative, what are you going to be doing? I think a fair amount of the time you would be doing the things which you enjoy doing, simply because you enjoy doing them.

If you enjoy doing something, you are far more likely to do it well in my experience.

I’m not quite sure where this is leading me, but I am sure it will be interesting to find out!

It’s too early to assess the results of the request I sent out yesterday about the future of my newsletter, but one fact is coming out very clearly - most people have very little idea of what is available on this website.

There are over 200 articles on every aspect of time management, personal organisation and achieving goals. The website acts as an archive for every article I’ve written which still has some currency.

How can you access this information?

If you’re looking for a specific article or subject, then use the Search Box at the top of the left margin. This is fast, accurate and completely up-to-date (if you don’t believe me then try searching for any word that appears in this posting). You can search by category if you want to narrow it down further.

However the key to the articles is the Blog Archive link in the Navigation section in the left margin. This gives all the entries by Category, by Title, by Week and by Month.

Also in the left margin you will find links to the Most Popular Articles.

Happy browsing!

I was asked the other day what I considered to be the skills needed for effective time management. I could of course have produced a list as long as my arm, but on reflection I decided that there were three skills which lie at the root of being effective. In fact they are not so much skills as attitudes.

1. What’s really important? The ability to identify what is really important to your work and the determination to concentrate on it is fundamental. To identify this you have to be quite clear what you are aiming to achieve overall and what is needed to get there. This attitude is the exact opposite of the sort of “thinking” behind phrases like I really need to run a marketing campaign, but I haven’t been able to get round to it.
   
2. Think systems. Businesses are often made or broken by how good their systems are. If your own personal systems are bad they will waste vast amounts of your time and hold you back. Poor time managers tend to use “work-arounds” when a system doesn’t work properly. Effective time managers take the time to put the system right so that the work-arounds are no longer necessary.
   
3. Work to completion. The effective time manager never leaves things unfinished. That doesn’t mean that he or she necessarily finishes everything in one session. What it does mean is that the momentum is kept going and that loose ends are tidied up. Poor time managers tend to start projects off with a burst of enthusiasm and then let them slide once the original enthusiasm has abated. The result is not only that the project isn’t completed but that the time spent on it is not available for other projects.

Over the next few days I intend to write in a bit more depth about each of these three subjects.

Virtually everyone has problems with procrastination at some point in their life. For many people it is relatively easily overcome. For others it has a permanently crippling effect on their lives. Whatever their talents and however big their dreams, they are unable to express them fully because they keep putting the necessary action off. So their dreams and visions remain dreams and visions and nothing more for year after year.

If you are one of those seriously affected by procrastination, the usual band-aid approaches such as concentrating on the first step will not be sufficient to prevent the feeling that, if you carry on the way you are, written on your tombstone will be the epitaph “Could have done better”. So in this article I want to look at some of the deeper reasons why people procrastinate.

Procrastination is usually seen in people who for one reason or another feel unsatisfied with their work. It comes worst in two types of people - those who feel overwhelmed and those who don’t have enough to do. Frequently they are the same person in different circumstances. They need the pressure of deadlines and the consequences of missing them to get them moving at all.

If this describes you, then you are showing the symptoms of being out of the flow. To be in the flow of work you need to feel challenged but not overwhelmed. If you are overwhelmed you lose the sense of flow, and the exactly the same applies if you are not challenged enough. The result in both cases is dissatisfaction, the feeling that you are not achieving anything. “Busyness” and “goofing off” are two sides of the same coin.

The real solution to procrastination therefore is to get back into the flow. You need to identify the work that uses your talents and your skills It should present you with fresh challenges that stretch your ability but don’t go over your head. A good question to ask yourself is whether, in the context of your organisation, you are doing work that only you can do. If anyone could do your work then you are unlikely to be being stretched or challenged in any way at all. If you find you are not using your skills or that you are overwhelmed with trivial work, you have fallen into the trap of being busy rather than productive. In that case procrastination is almost inevitable.

Another closely related cure for procrastination is to be on top of your work. Even work you don’t particularly like becomes much less resistance-inducing if you are on top of it. Not many of us like washing dishes, but think of the difference between doing the washing up immediately after every meal so that it is out of the way, and leaving it for a week so that you have the constant threat of it hanging over your head!

To achieve this, you need to fight backlogs like the plague. Never allow yourself to run up against deadlines. Always use all the time available to do something. For example if you are given two weeks to write a report, then use the whole two weeks. Don’t leave it till the evening of the night before the deadline!

Letting work pile up into a backlog drains everything you do. Clearing a backlog should always be the first priority. Nothing is more important. If it proves impossible to clear a backlog, then you need to review your commitments. If you have so much on that you are constantly behind on your work then you will always be under stress.

If you take this kind of holistic approach to procrastination, you are much more likely to find that it drops away of its own accord, rather than your having to fight it every inch of the way. Maybe your tombstone will read “Achieved everything he/she set out to do”

One of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves is “Is this the way I want it?” It’s a question that we can ask about our lives as a whole, or about the simple things which affect us every day. So for instance as I write this article I can look around my office and say “Is this the way I want my office to be?” If my answer is “Yes, it is”, then I can pat myself on the back and feel a sense of satisfaction.

More likely my answer will be “No, it isn’t”. Then my next question must be “What do I need to do to make it the way I want it to be?” In the case of an office the answer to that may simply be: “I need to tidy the bookshelf” in which case I can just get on with tidying the bookshelf. Sometimes the answer may be much more complicated than that: “I need to get a bigger office”. In that case I can ask myself the further question “What do I need to do to get a bigger office?” The answer to that might be “I need to get a bigger house!” That leads to “What do I need to do to get a bigger house?” Sometimes very small questions can lead to big results.

“Is this the way I want it?” is a question which is significant both when dealing with major issues and minor annoyances. Sometimes quite small things can get left undone, and irritate us every time we see them. For instance we may think every time we open a certain drawer “I really must sort that out”. But we never do. Everything that is not the way we want it drains us. The more things that we have in our lives that we put up with, the less we are going to be happy in our work or life.

If our workspace is not the way we want it, we won’t be working as well as we could be. If our house is not the way we want it, we will not be able to relax properly or enjoy entertaining our friends. If our weight or our fitness is not the way we want it, we are putting our health at risk. Often if we neglect these things they gradually get worse, until they let us down with a bump.

Sometimes of course we have to accept that there is nothing we can do about something. Not many of us like paying taxes for example, but we don’t have much choice about it. In that case it is important that we learn to let go of it so that it no longer affects us. Sometimes we put up with things for the sake of other people. That is our conscious choice.

As an exercise, you could try walking around your house or workplace with a notebook, asking yourself “Is this the way I want it?” Write down everything you find that isn’t the way you want it to be. Then pick one thing off the list and resolve to make it the way you want it to be. Pick something easy to start off with. You might set aside a portion of time each day to cross more items off the list.

(This article was published in the latest edition of my newsletter)

It may be due to unforeseen circumstances or just to our own bad planning or procrastination, but we all sometimes get to the point where we have so much work to do that we have no idea where to begin. We are seized with paralysis - we can’t start on anything because of all the other things pressing on us. Of course doing nothing makes the problem even worse. So we get into a vicious circle: we can’t act because of our sense of panic; the fact that we’re not acting makes the situation worse - and therefore our panic increases.

It’s at times like this that we may do some really stupid things. These may range from the relatively mild, like snapping our colleagues’ heads off, to the disastrous, such as resigning from our job or having a nervous breakdown. Once we lose control what usually happens is a crash of some sort. If we’re lucky we will escape with just bruised self- esteem, but we may have irretreviably damaged a project or our whole career.

So what can we do when we first start feeling that sense of panic? We want to be able to get back in control. It may seem impossible at the time but in fact there are several things we can do.

Basically there are two things to remember when we get into this state. Firstly, it is motivated by fear, so anything we can do to reduce the fear will help. The best remedy for fear is always action. So we need to stop running around like a headless chicken and start taking purposeful action.

The second thing to remember is that in this state of panic we are being driven by our primitive mind, not our rational mind. We are in the “fight, flight or freeze” state that we inherited from the days when our ancestors were lizard-like creatures sitting on rocks. We perceive a threat and we tend to react to it, rather than approach it in a rational way.

In my book “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play” I suggest writing down a list of everything that you have to do and then grading it “Must Do”, “Should Do”, “Could Do”. Concentrate on the “Must Dos” and you will quickly increase your sense of control so that you get out of the vicious circle.

Another thing you can do is to identify the one thing that you are most resisting doing. Very often if you can get this moving you will free up all the other things that you have to do. You usually know perfectly well what this is, even if you avoid thinking about it as much as possible! Ask yourself what the very first step would be to get this job done and concentrate on that. Once you’ve got started it is much easier to keep going.

Finally, remember that procrastination is often caused by perfectionism. We make tasks unnecessarily large because we can’t accept that we are going to do them anything less than perfectly. The result is that we often don’t do them at all! Counteract this by asking yourself “What’s the minimum I can do here that’s good enough?” Concentrate on getting that minimum done and you will start to regain control again.

(This article appeared in the latest edition of my newsletter)

Rob Gourdie has written a very positive review of Do It Tomorrow on his blog. He’s only been using the methods for four days and has already found that they are revolutionising his life.

A question I often get asked is “Just how organised do I have to be?”

My answer is “enough and no more!”

Over-organisation can be almost as big a problem as under-organisation. The reason for this is that once you have got organised enough to carry out your function satisfactorily any further organisation is going to take up time and effort unproductively. We can all think up plenty of examples of this simply by bringing the words “government” and “bureaucracy” into our minds. When I was working on inner-city projects for the Church of England twenty or so years ago, I remember we were shown, as an example of “good practice”, the form which an American governmental organisation required projects to complete when they were applying for grants. It was forty pages long! Bear in mind that these grants were intended to help small community projects, whose staff were very hard-pressed and frequently not particularly literate. We decided not to use a form at all, but simply asked projects to write in and tell us whatever they felt like about what they intended to do - and if we liked the sound of it we went and looked at it on the ground.

Another aspect of organisation which people often have trouble with is keeping their desk tidy. In many organisations having a tidy desk is taken as being an indicator of efficiency. Whether this is really the case or not is doubtful. If you ask a successful businessperson what the secrets of their success were, I doubt if “having a tidy desk” would feature in their list. They may or may not have a tidy desk - it’s just that they don’t see the tidiness of their desk as being a relevant factor in their success.

Personally I’ve never found it easy to keep a tidy desk, and if I look at my desk now I’ve got a whole load of junk on it. Let’s have a look:

Two books I’m currently reading
A Travel Guide for my forthcoming holiday destination
A prescription I’ve just picked up from the pharmacy
A tube of toothpaste I bought at the same time
An empty cup of tea
My car keys
My wallet
My binoculars
A heap of credit card vouchers which I’m weeding
My task list
My list of personal contacts
A ballpoint pen

It looks a mess, but I can put my hands on every one of those items instantaneously, and they are all in the process of being actioned in some way. In other words, although it looks a mess, it is actually highly functional. If I try to keep my desk tidier, then a) I will have to spend much more time doing so; and b) I won’t be able to find so quickly the stuff which I’m using. Now of course a desk can easily become so untidy that it stops being functional and starts to impede your efficiency. I know all about that - I’ve been there! The point is that we need to find the degree of order which gives us the greatest degree of effectiveness.