A Good Productivity System Knows How To Have A Bad Day.
Are you trying to build a productivity system, or are you building something more resilient? This week, we’re looking at why even the most organised systems break down and how to build resiliency into your own systems.
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Script | 438
Hello, and welcome to episode 438 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Whenever I take on a new coaching client, the first steps we take are usually to get things organised so we can clear the decks, so to speak. In other words, in order to build a system, we need clear space on which to build.
It’s the same if you were rebuilding a house. Before you can build the new house, you will need to clear away the old house and start with the ground levelled, while leaving the essentials such as the power, water and gas inputs.
Well, it’s the same with building, or rebuilding, a productivity system; we need to retain the basics—a calendar, a task manager and somewhere to keep information, such as a notes app.
Once we have a clear space to work with, we can go to work on the more important aspects of getting organised and being able to better manage the workload that is coming at us.
This week’s question is about how to do just that. Clear the decks and then build some resiliency into your system so that whenever you have a challenging day, and we all have those, your system does not break down again, but instead supports you.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kelly. Kelly asks: Hi Carl, how would you go about doing a complete reset of your system? I’ve been trying to stay organised for years and have never found anything I can stay consistent with. What would you advise someone who needed to do a complete reset?
Hi Kelly, thank you for your question.
As a coach, it’s easy for me to give someone ways to simplify their system, keep their task manager clean and remove conflicting meetings on their calendar. I can also help them clean up their notes and files and build wonderful ways to organise their workload.
I can introduce time blocking techniques that work and a lot of other remedies. I have a whole cabinet full of productivity medicine I could prescribe.
But often that’s not the real problem. It can be a symptom of an underlying problem. Having a wonderfully organised system that looks pretty and clean may not always help you make the decision about what to work on next.
As the saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig
The problem, though, Kelly, might not be your system. It might be something a little simpler than that.
In the past, I’ve talked a lot about building processes for doing your most important work. These are important because they remove one of the most common reasons why any system may break down.
Never being completely confident that what you are working on is the right thing.
A process allows you to pre-decide what to do and how to do it. The more you run the process, the faster and more efficient you become at running it.
Take email and message management as an example. The process is simple:
Clear your inbox early, then later in the day, as late as you feel comfortable, allocate some time to go through your actionable messages.
There are some variables in this process. Depending on the kind of work you do, you may find you need to respond to messages a little more frequently.
Many of my coaching clients manage teams of people, where some messages, such as an urgent decision, need to be made. These messages can be built into the process so they are dealt with two or three times a day.
The good thing about building processes is that you can add these variables to your own processes.
Take, for example, some of the professors I have as clients. Many of them have to write and submit grant applications two or three times a year. These can be complex documents that require research, collaboration and a lot of time.
If this is something you often need to do, then building a process to write and submit your applications would mean that you would know when to start, what needs to be done, and you would be able to protect sufficient time for completing the application.
Some of these applications can take three or four months to complete and submit. With these, you would be able to trigger the process at the right time. All you would need is the application deadline.
The processes you build for your most frequently recurring work ensure that you don’t need to overthink anything or guess when to start.
You’ve effectively pre-decided what needs to happen and when.
(I know there’s likely to be some variables in these kinds of projects; not all grant applications are the same, but you can allow for these variables when you begin the process.)
This is better than a single task that comes up in your task manager that says “work on grant application”. When you see a task like that, and it’s surrounded by tasks such as “follow up with Chloe on the marketing material” or “submit holiday request form”, which task are you most likely to do?
I bet it’s not “work on the grant application”.
The grant application might be more important, but it’s unclear, vague, and will likely take up hours of your day.
Sending a message to the wonderful Chloe, someone you like and enjoy chatting with, is going to be much more attractive.
And that brings me to another area you may wish to look at, and that is how you define your system breaking down.
One or two bad days a week does not necessarily mean that your system has broken down. There will be days when genuine emergencies, meetings and other responsibilities prevent you from doing your important tasks.
What matters is that you can recognise that your day’s not been a good one and be accepting of that.
Again, you can bring in a process to reset your week here.
Look at what you were not able to do, and with your calendar open, look at the rest of your week and decide what is important now.
You may find that something you were hoping to get started this week will now have to move to next week so you have the space to do tomorrow what was important today.
Our planned weeks can change very quickly once the week starts. This is why you will find that doing a short, five-minute review of your plan at the end of the day can help you to reassess your week and, if necessary, reprioritise things.
One of the reasons I put together my Getting Back on Track course was to give you the processes to be able to recover a week (or quarter) that has gone downhill fast.
When I was putting together the course, I wanted to find a quick, simple way you could get back on track without having to reinvent everything,
This starts with knowing what your absolutes are, the non-negotiables of your day, if you like.
For example, for me, my daily non-negotiables are walking Louis, exercising, spending a minimum of 20 minutes on my communications and doing at least one creative thing each day.
Aside from walking Louis, there’s a great deal of flexibility there.
Of course, on most days I will do quite a bit more than those things, but if my day gets interrupted by an emergency, if all I did was deal with the emergency as best I could and did those non-negotiables, I can reach the end of the day knowing it’s been a good day. It may not have been spectacular, but I managed to get my non-negotiables done.
The key when your day has been disrupted is to do the five-minute reset at the end of the day. Reassess your priorities for the week and see what can be moved to next week to give you the room to absorb the disruption.
The interesting thing here is that if one or two of your days have been disrupted and you were unable to do the work you intended to do, there’s likely to be insufficient week at the end of your task list anyway.
So something’s not going to get done. Would it not be better to pre-decide that now, rather than get to the end of the week feeling bad because you weren’t able to finish everything you wanted to?
If you’ve got an efficient collection system where your to-dos, appointments and notes are collected, and you allow time every 24 to 48 hours to process what you collected, then the mechanics of your system are working.
And organising what you have collected is simply asking what is it? What do I need to do with it? And if it’s a task, when am I going to do it?
(Again, a process)
However, there is one more thing you can do to give you more confidence in your system…
That is something I’ve already alluded to: Pre-decide your priorities.
The first time management book I ever read was Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management. It’s a brilliant book, and as a consequence of getting that book, I began using a Franklin Planner, although in those days it was called a Franklin Quest.
In the book, Hyrum Smith spends around a quarter of the book explaining Governing Values. These are the values we hold dear to ourselves. They can relate to our relationship with our family, spirituality, our beliefs about right and wrong, diligence and work ethic.
He explains that there is a natural hierarchy to the values. Some are higher in importance to us than others. For example, if you place going to church higher than your friends, then if there ever was a conflict between attending church or playing a round of golf with your friends, you would choose going to church.
You’ve effectively pre-decided what you would do in a given scenario.
Towards the end, Smith translates these governing values into how we approach our work.
If you identify your most important work, for instance, if your role requires you to manage a team of people, you could pre-prioritise your work by
Top priority: helping deal with major issues and crises and ensuring my team has everything they need to do their work.
Medium priority: departmental strategy, budgets and communications with other departments.
Low priority: Work that can be delegated and low-level admin tasks.
Then, if one day you walk into a major crisis with an important customer, and the finance director is chasing you for next quarter’s budget, you already know where to put your focus. The crisis.
You can respond to your finance director, explain the crisis, and tell her that you will send the budget later.
You effectively pre-decided where you will put your attention.
So, Kelly, before you do a complete reset of your system, consider that there may be some other underlying issue.
Ask yourself: what exactly happened without judging yourself, and then ask which parts of the breakdown were within your control?
Often our systems break down not because of anything we did, or didn’t do, but because something much bigger outside of our control got in the way.
Ultimately, a successful productivity system helps you make progress during normal days and weeks and helps you recover quickly during difficult ones.
I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.