Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Time Management”

31 Mar 2012
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How to get things done and why we self-sabotage

Over 1.3 million of us annually ask Google ‘how to get things done’. Productivity, personal effectiveness and time management are concerns which hang over modern humans like a mild, but persistent headache. Commentators blame the increasing pressure on information overload; the always-on, hyper-connected nature of modern communications. Others point the finger at the requirements of the 24/7, 365 business world.

Unfortunately I think the answer is far simpler, but the implications create a far more difficult problem to solve.

We are emotional creatures that have developed a consciousness through evolution. This means that our emotional filtering and weighting of all stimuli tends to lead our response before we apply rational thinking. Our conscious brains appear to work on an automatic pattern basis, endeavouring to recognise a stimulus eg. a red stop light, and respond according to the pattern programme i.e. we stop without really thinking about it.

We procrastinate and end up with ever-growing to do lists containing the important stuff because of how we have emotionally weighted the items on the list; and probably even because of the existence of the list itself.

In simple terms I think we don’t get things done that we feel resistant to. Obviously we feel resistant to either hard or unpleasant things – like a tax return. But also to things that we do not have a pattern for; the things that are new or strange like writing a report or starting a new project at work. We take on, or are given, tasks without knowing how to do them. Equally, we just take on too much and feel resistant to the sheer volume.

This emotional resistance only becomes counter-balanced when we hit a deadline where we have to do the task. Invariably we then do it – and marvel at how easy it was. Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Decision making, Execution, Habits and Routines, Productivity, Psychology, Time Management
18 Jul 2010

Reasons to Quit: Questions to Ensure You’re Doing Work That Matters

Fried and Heinemeier Hansson in Rework suggest the following questions to ensure you don’t ‘throw good time after bad work’:

‘Why are you doing this?

What problem are you solving? – ensure it’s not an imaginary problem

Is this actually useful? – don’t confuse enthusiasm with usefulness

Are you adding value? – sometimes things you think are adding value actually subtract from it

Will this change behaviour? Is it really going to change anything?

Is there an easier way? – Problems are usually pretty simple. We just imagine they require hard solutions

What could you be doing instead? – what can’t you do because you’re doing this?

Is it really worth it? – can you determine the real value of what you’re about to do before you take the plunge’

Posted in Business, Focus, Mindfulness, Reviews, Time Management and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
30 Jun 2010

Things Get Done When You Do Less

As a member of the human species, you are hard wired to achieve. You may not feel like that if you’re sat there: brain diffused from multitasking, web-thread-chasing and information channel hopping. The empty plate of cookies or pizza you can’t remember eating as you read about the latest thing you can’t remember reading on the screen five minutes ago: these things may feel a million years from hunting and gathering to achieve another day alive as your relatives did.

A counter-intuitive observation is that things get done when you consciously try to do less and have the will to stick to your commitment to do less. The more you even plan to do in an allotted period of time, the less you actually get done. Why is this? I often think of a computer to help me on this.

A computer has a hard drive to remember things – a bit like memories and knowledge in the human brain. A hard drive becomes fragmented when files and folders get broken down and spread out over the hard drive over time. This slows the computer down because it cannot process information as easily which is not held together. It has to read multiple places on the disk to piece together the information it needs. Defragmenting, or ‘defragging‘,  ’reorganizes the hard drive by putting pieces of related data back together so that files are organized in a contiguous fashion’. Contiguous means any two or more objects that are very close or connected in space or time.

When you undertake multiple tasks – or even create a long ‘to-do’ list for the day, you similarly spread your mental processing power. Thoughts on other tasks get in the way of you having continuous thoughts on a subject, and thereby slow your ability to achieve your objectives of getting things done. Even if things do get done, often the quality isn’t there because you haven’t been able to hold your attention on one thing for a sufficient period of time to get to the really good or break-through thinking. Don’t confuse this with the use of the conscious to take in multiple inputs for the unconscious to percolate on. In this concept, you absolutely focus on related subject matter for a period of time to gather inputs or ‘ingredients’ for your thinking, and then deliberately turn your conscious attention away to something else to enable your unconscious to work away in the background.

The problem with spreading your mental processing power as a human is that you haven’t got a power cable. Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Control, Creativity, Decision making, Focus, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment

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