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Productivity expert David Allen calls it The Doing Dance. It’s the frustrating, every day effort to get our work done, amid the interruptions, emails and other issues that arise during the day. He argues it’s helpful to understand the three-fold nature of what constitutes your “work”:
- Doing pre-defined work: This is what you would be doing all day if you got no input or interruptions of any sort. It’s predetermined, an inventory of actions and projects on your to-do list, calendar and in your head.
- Doing work as it appears: A customer calls, a colleague pops into your office for a chat or your boss calls a meeting to update everyone on a new development. “You are doing the work as it shows up to be done. You are actually defining your work rapidly in this case and choosing to do the new stuff instead of any of the pre-determined activity,” he writes in his newsletter.
- Defining work to be done: This is processing your in-tray, your email or your meeting notes — taking in input and making decisions about what needs to be done about it. In some cases, you’ll take quick actions and in others you will add to your inventory of defined work.
He acknowledges that delineation is so obvious it doesn’t seem to need to be stated. But the problem is we actually don’t act as if work involves those three strands. We treat the first category as work but view the second category, work that appears, as a burden to endure, and the third category of emails and other inputs for processing as some irrelevant activity apart from work.
It’s all the work we must do. We can’t treat part of it as a burden imposed by others and hope it will magically disappear. It’s the eternal dance of the workday, a continual challenge of allocating limited resources.
Understanding that dance – and your day – involves your to-do list. Productivity consultant Marc Zao-Sanders says five things generally feed it: Ideas, messages, meetings, work and life in general. He recommends keeping just one list – and making it digital, so you can access it from any device. It’s easier to determine the importance and urgency of your work if it’s in one spot.
Break tasks down and label each with a verb that provides clarity on what action is required. He recommends the items involve 15, 30, or 60 minutes of time, and be slotted into your calendar for a specific period. “Do a little extra thinking to make the tasks less overwhelming and more manageable, so they actually get started… and actually get finished,” he writes on his blog.
He stresses the importance of keeping the items on your to-do list prioritized. Revisit it regularly to make sure the more urgent and important items are at the top. “If the list is long, chuck it into a spreadsheet, score each item 1-10 and sort on that scoring. Your list will immediately be in a much, much better state, and you may well be too,” he says.
The daily dance involves dealing with distractions. University of California, Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark, in an experiment, had some Microsoft employees use the Freedom distraction-blocking software to block social media and tempting web sites for a week. That was compared to a week where they were open to such distraction.
As might be expected, when using the blocking software, participants were significantly more focused and reported higher productivity. The cost of distraction, they learned, was not just the time spent on social media, but the additional time it took to re-anchor themselves in their tasks. But the clarity came at a cost: They had less enjoyment in their work with social media taken away.
“Distractions, often seen as obstacles, can actually serve a purpose. They can offer a fleeting refuge, a momentary retreat where one can catch their breath, recalibrate and return to work with a fresh pair of eyes. The key is controlling when and how long we engage with distractions,” she writes on her blog.
Quick hits
- Author and family business CEO Kevin Hancock says “apologies aren’t meant to change the past; they are meant to change the future.” To do that, leadership consultant Steve Keating notes you must promise to change, give space for the other party’s response and follow through.
- Executive coach Carol Kinsey Goman advises if you struggle when networking at a gathering, change your attitude by viewing yourself as hosting the event and therefore required to greet everyone openly.
- Venture capitalist Sahil Bloom believes 90 per cent of overthinking results from a single flawed belief: The decision is what matters. But the outcome in any given situation is determined far more by the actions after the decision than the decision itself. Trust in your adaptability.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.