Best Productivity Habit of 2007

The best Productivity Habit that I managed to establish in 2007 was walking or running every day.

This started out as a drug-free way to lower my cholesterol, which was a bit high. I wasn’t especially overweight or unhealthy – I was seeing a personal trainer once a week. But still, a blood test showed my cholesterol at 6.7. Mind you, the HDL/LDL ratio was right in the middle of the normal range, so it wasn’t a tragedy…

Regardless, it came as a shock to the system, so I thought I’d do something about it.

The question was of course, when would I find time for that? I was already having trouble fitting everything in.

I figured that the best way to make sure it happened was to DO IT FIRST. So I started getting up 30 minutes earlier, at 5:30.

This was a bit difficult the first week, but I committed to myself to stick it out for the week. In that 30 minutes I could walk about 2km and I was happy with that.

The surprising thing was that by the end of the first week I was feeling pretty good. I started to feel part of an elite group (there’s not many people that you run in to at 5:30am – but you do see the same people every day!). I really liked that I was doing something positive while most people were still sleeping.

Successful people do what unsuccessful people won’t do…

By the second week, I was running a little. Where I live is VERY hilly, and I struggled with the uphills.

By the third week, I was running more, and I started to notice that even though I was getting up earlier, I had MORE energy during the day! Also, I was chuffed that the habit was starting to feel like it was sticking.

About a month in, I was running 3.2km (2 miles) non-stop, and that was taking about 23 minutes. I found that if I missed a day, I would feel quite bad, and this would motivate me to make sure I never missed 2 days in a row. I’ve seen this trick on other blogs. It works.

In 365 days that year, I probably missed less than 10 days. On rainy days, I would walk with an umbrella, or just run anyway. It really doesn’t make much difference. I felt a bit like Forest Gump – I was run-ning…

Quite accidentally, I lost about 6kg (I think that’s about 13.5 pounds). Wow, that felt good – I wasn’t even trying. I also found that running is better for my back that walking. Sometimes if I walked I’d end up with a sore back – I must have dodgy posture. Running seems to hold everything in the right place.

A lot of people say they can’t run because of their knees, and after about 2 months my knees started to complain. I talked this over with my chiro, and he said it’s usually because of tight ITB muscles. He gave me a stretch to do before and after and it’s been fine since. This isn’t the stretch he gave me, but I’m sure it’s just as good.

Anyway, I’m please to say that this habit has stuck for almost a year and a half now. I’m now running 5km almost every morning, and I’ve started getting up even earlier so I can get more distance. Interestingly, I had NO TROUBLE getting up earlier, I just decided to do it and it happened.

I had a very demanding working year last year, and I just know that being physically fit really helped me get through it. It has also given me a perspective on getting older that I never had before. When I see people only a few years older than me with limited movement, limited capabilities, I think “what is your retirement going to be like?” My vision of ‘retirement’ involves a lot of travel and just a lot of doing stuff; I figure that being fit is an important pre-requisite for that.

The best part of this habit is that most of it happens now before I’m even fully awake J And really, the hardest part of it is getting out of bed. The rest just happens – and getting out of bed isn’t really that hard.

Living on the edge – why productivity projects need a buffer

All too often, major projects that are important, but not necessarily urgent, can drift for weeks without tangible action. These, of course, are the last projects you want to neglect!

Managing tasks by grouping them into projects is a common strategy. In the GTD method, a project is an outcome that requires a number of actions to achieve. The idea is simply to identify the next action. This removes the ‘noise’ of the project, and gives you something simple that can be done to keep the project moving forward.

Over the years, I’ve done a fair bit of writing and speaking about project management, and more relevantly, portfolio management. It occurs to me that the GTD-style life-important projects have no ‘buffer’. By this I’m talking about the kind of buffer that gets inserted into project plans to absorb unexpected delays and problems.

So if we have no buffer in these projects, why are we surprised that these important projects keep slipping?

Now, there is a project management methodology called Critical Chain. Some of the most valuable insights in this methodology come from the realisation that there is usually buffer built into a project that you don’t realise is there. The usual suspects are:

1. Parkinson’s Law – where the work expands to consume all the time available for the task
2. Student Syndrome – having more than enough time for the task, so you leave it to the last minute. Then something goes wrong and you take more time that you thought, so the task finished late and impacts subsequent work etc
3. Safe estimation – people usually factor in buffer when they are estimating the time required for a task i.e. the estimate is usually one that will be achievable about 80% of the time, which implies the estimate has about 30% buffer built in. [20%?]

The point is that there is more buffer available than you think.

In using the Critical Chain methodology, it’s important to understand what the constraint on capacity is. This is a bit like understanding where the bottleneck is and why it’s a bottleneck. Usually the constraint is a resource, maybe a person, maybe a particular team, maybe a particular machine. Usually this resource is operating at full utilisation, while other resources in the system are not. This is how you often identify the constraint. The rules for dealing with constraints (the Five Focusing Steps) are:

1. Identify the constraint
   
2. Exploit the constraint – This means make sure you really are maximising the throughput of the constraint
3. Subordinate to the constraint – ensure that all other activities/resources are performed to maximise the performance of the constraint
4. Elevate the constraint – By now, you’ve done everything you can around the constraint, so only now should you focus on increasing the capacity of the constraint
5. Return to (1) – something else may become the bottleneck if you’ve properly managed the first one.

So, let’s explore what each of these mean from a personal productivity perspective:

Identify the constraint	Easy one. It’s probably you. Actually, it’s probably that you don’t have enough time to get all your stuff done – especially the important stuff. There’s too much urgent stuff to do. So it’s a you/time combination. We’ll make this assumption.
Exploit the constraint	You are trying to maximise your throughput on important tasks. Since you have 24 hours per day like everyone else, the first step is to eradicate time spent on non-important tasks, so as to make more time for important tasks. You can really regain a lot of buffer here. Eg: Ruthlessly filter out or refuse non-important stuff. (Takes guts) Be specific about your action and project outcomes. Don’t waste time on an ill-defined action. Defining an action is a valid action. Be specific about how long you expect an action to take – set yourself a deadline and avoid Parkinson’s Law and student syndrome.
Subordinate to the constraint	In a single-person sense this overlaps with Exploiting the constraint, but could also cover delegation. How much non-important stuff are you doing that someone else could do, really?
Elevate the constraint	Increase your capacity. Identify unwanted, time-sinking activities and deploy that time for something else.E.g. there’s only about three hours of TV each week that I really want to watch. So I tape it and watch it all on Friday night. The rest of the week the TV stays off. That got me an extra 15 hours a week.Also, I spend about 10 hours a week driving to and from work. I used to listen to the radio. Since one of my ‘important’ things was to learn a language, I found some CD lessons designed for use in the car. So I learnt Italian. I guess the real meaning of the Elevate idea is to get more resource at the constraint, so I guess the next thing would be to find ‘important’ things that I can delegate. Interesting idea.

 

The key point is that even though GTD projects don’t appear to have buffer, there is in fact buffer to be found if you look for it.

It’s likely that you will still end up with a big list of projects and actions, because the more productive you are, the more you want to do.

So look for the buffer that you don’t realise you have.

How to reduce productivity stress… and sleep like a baby

The worst thing about being passionate about productivity is that you become very sensitive to the times when you’re not productive. Is the desire to be productive generated by a big list of things to do, or is it the other way around?

I find that stress manifests itself through:

1. The mental ‘pop-up reminder’
2. A persistent anxiety that I have forgotten something or am neglecting something.

For me, the stress indicator is whether or not I sleep well at night. The loops look something like this:

Good Spiral

Bad Spiral

I’ve tried a couple of ways to convert the bad spiral into the good spiral. Early attempts aimed at a good night’s sleep as the starting point. I exercised, got up early, avoided indigestion, and used mind calming techniques to remove or at least defer anxiety. E.g. “I will not worry about this now, because I know it will pop up tomorrow, so I’ll worry about it then” – can be surprisingly effective.

I was really surprised I could get this working; it only took a few weeks.

But it was still really deferring anxiety. In most cases, the pop-ups were still there, along with a background level of anxiety. So I concluded that I had not addressed the root cause. I guess this is what people who resort to sleeping drugs find.

Maybe I was allowing too many non-important tasks into my life? After re-reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I tried to apply the Urgency/Importance categorisation across my tasks. This was great – it highlighted that I was not getting to the important things – and it caused me to think about what really is important to me. Still had the pop-ups and anxiety though…

From here, I went on to read a lot of ‘getting organised’ type of stuff, and eventually latched onto David Allen’s ideas. I discovered that the mental pop-ups were occurring because my mind had no real sense of timing for its reminders. It will only stop the pop-ups when it knows it doesn’t have to remind me anymore i.e. it trusts that I have a method to handle the reminders.

This has been a watershed. I began carrying a pocket notebook and pencil around to capture the reminders and ideas as they came to me. I diligently entered these into a spreadsheet and used it as my daily task list. In the first two days I loaded about 90 items into the list. Amazing – no wonder I couldn’t sleep! All of those pop-ups going off all the time! Just three weeks later, my list is about 200, but my pop-ups have dropped to just a handful a day. Importantly, I’m sleeping like a baby.

The secret is not the act of listing – I’ve been making lists for years. The secret is the commitment to a cohesive process for capturing mental pop-ups and dealing with them. My stress levels plummeted within a week.

I’m now working on the best way to work the list…

Summary – The first habit to reduce stress

Buy a small pocket notepad and pencil – get into the habit of carrying it with you ALL THE TIME.

TIP 1: As you transfer items from your notepad to your main action lists – cross them out in the notepad, and tear out the pages when you’ve transferred everything. This helps you ‘close’ the pop-up.

TIP 2: When you buy your notepad – buy two so you’ve got the next one to move on to when you finish the first.