Productivity is made up of two parts: doing the right things in the right way. Both of these require that you know what you’re doing…and why.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are at the last of ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at a fundamental…and possibly the most important…rule: know what you’re doing.

Know What You’re Doing

If you decide to go on a trip, the first thing you have to decide is where you are going. If you want to minimize time and distance traveled, you need to know what the best route is. But the best route in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t know where you are headed.

Knowing the destination is the same in productivity. You have to know what you are trying to accomplish…and why…in order to have optimal productivity.

Why This Is Different Than Focus

Focus is much different, but often confused, with the concept of knowing what you are doing. Focus is knowing and remembering what you are doing in the moment. Knowing what, and why, you are doing something in the larger sense is your road map to success in the larger project.

Think of it in terms of a journey. Focus keeps you from driving off the road. Knowing where you are going gets you on the right road in the first place.

3 Ways To Clarity

Luckily, there are some easy ways to get yourself on the right track, and see where you are going, without aimless wandering.

What Is The Point?

“What’s the point?” This is not the statement of someone bored out of their minds. It is a valid question.

Why are you doing what you are doing? Why are you attempting this project?

Let’s say you are contemplating climbing Mt. Kilamanjaro. What is the point of you doing so? Is it because you have had a deep and abiding desire to experience the mountain, Africa and the climb? Or is it because someone said you should do it?

Why you are doing something is a very important thing to know. If the motivations are not your own, but rather thrust upon you, you will be hard pressed to finish the goal. When the goal is truly your own, you will be much more motivated to finish it.

Where Will This Lead?

Another factor is to know if your goal is an end itself, or if it is a stepping stone to something else.

There is nothing wrong with intermediate goals.

However, we can set intermediate goals to get us to the big prize, but those intermediate goals might not be appropriate.

Are you writing a how-to book because you have something to share, or because you want to be a best-selling fiction author?

Instead of setting those intermediate goals whose purpose is only to spur you on to something else, check out with an expert if it is appropriate. Talk to a fiction author and see if writing non-fiction is truly a direct stepping stone. Talk to a mountaineer and find out if climbing Kilamanjaro is necessary or helpful on your joureny up Everst.

Begin With The End

Once you know where you are going, you need to keep that end in sight. Otherwise you can be tempted by things that really won’t further your cause.

If you are on a roadtrip and stop at every roadside attraction, you will get where you are going, but the stops weren’t germaine to the trip itself. Yes, they might have contributed to some fun and excitement, but were merely distractions from the main business.

Projects can have waysides like that as well. You may be wanting to plant a vegetable garden, and get sidetracked researching plants that won’t grow in your area, or researching building a greenhouse. Tangential, yes. Necessary, no.

As you are working toward a project, always keep that end in sight, and ask yourself if the current actions move you closer to that goal.

Conclusion

Knowing what you are doing and why can boost your productivity better than any other foundational tip. Be clear on where you are going, and why, and you will be in a better position to get them done.

If you were doing laundry, would you wash the clean clothes a second time? Of course not. It would be a waste of time and energy. The same rule applies to productivity as well.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at a fundamental rule: Don’t Rethink.

Why Rethinking Is Bad

Just as re-washing clean clothes is pointless, re-thinking about anything is pointless as well.

This is not to say that considering an issue with more or new information is bad. What it means is to have the same thoughts more than once, with no change, is the same as re-washing clothes as soon as they are clean.

Rethinking is just a waste of brain cycles.

A Rethinking Example

Let’s say that you are in the bathroom in the morning and notice you are getting low on shampoo. “I need to remember to get more shampoo,” you think. This is a good thing. With that reminder, you are putting it into your memory for processing.

But you don’t write it down. So as you are walking into work you notice someone’s wet hair and you think, “I need to remember to get more shampoo.” As you are waiting for lunch, you are perusing a magazine and think it again. As you are watching telelvision that night you see an ad and think it again. Now if you persist in not writing it on a shopping list, the thought will pop up at random times, like during a presentation you are giving, or during your morning exercise.

Multiple additional brain cycles that didn’t get you any closer to getting the shampoo. All it did was waste your time and energy reminding you of something you already knew, but your brain also knew you would forget.

Now multiply that by the dozens of things you tell yourself you need to remember every day. It all adds up to distraction and fractured concentration.

The Two Rules to Break Rethinking

Luckily, it is easy to get out of this pattern of thinking. Two rules is all it takes, but you have to do them consistently.

Rule #1: Get Everything Out Of Your Mind

In order to stop the rethinking where it starts, you need to get those random thoughts out of your mind. And I don’t mean just to push them off, but to put them in a place where you will be able to recall them when you need them.

David Allen calls these “trusted systems” — putting them where they will be processed into the appropriate place later — but I am a fan of putting things where they need to go immediately. So instead of writing down “buy shampoo” on a to-do list, I would put it into the shopping list so I would know it is there when I am shopping.

In order to make this work, you have to have your various bits with you pretty much all the time. This means taking advantage of the wonderful amount of technology at our finger tips. (Think, “Hey Siri, remind me to buy shampoo #shopping”) If you don’t have it with you, then you need to have one place where you put all these things, and commit to entering them into the right places as soon as you can.

Rule #2: Don’t Break Your Promises To Your Mind

The second rule is the most crucial. Once you have started to put things in a place where you will find them when you need them, you can’t backslide. Your brain has to trust that things will be put where they need to be, or it won’t trust you, and will continue to remind you of the things. (More on this below).

If you tell yourself you will write or record or somehow capture all these thoughts, then you must consistently do it, and have backup systems in place that are just as reliable for when you can’t put things where they need to go. No “I’ll do it later” or “I’m sure I’ll remember this later” or “It’s such a little thing…”

Getting Yourself Out of the Rethinking Habit

Rethinking is a habit that is brought on by not putting things into the places they need to go. And because it is a habit, it can be replaced with something else.

For the first few days (or weeks, depending on how deeply entrenched you are in this habit), you will need to make sure you put everything into the proper place…and when the thought resurfaces, remind yourself you have already taken care of it.

Eventually it will stop when your brain begins to trust the new way of doing things.

Conclusion

If you get everything out of your mind and make sure you are consistent, you will drop your rethinking to almost nothing. That will free up your brain cycles for much more productive things!

If you were trying to take a letter to the mailbox, would it make sense to walk a mile in the opposite direction first?  Or if you were putting dishes in the dishwasher, would it make sense to completely hand wash them first?

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at another fundamental rule: eliminate the unnecessary.

What Is Productivity?

Productivity has two pillars: efficiency and effectiveness. Doing the right things in the best way.

If you are being efficient, but doing the wrong things, your results will not be meaningful.

If you are doing the right things, but putting in extra work that has little return on effort, you are slowing yourself down.

Why Efficiency Is Overlooked

Everyone automatically equates efficiency with productivity. But few people actually take a good look at their processes. This means that often times extra work creeps in without anyone really being aware of it.

Let’s look at an example: you are asked to pull sales numbers at work for a specific product line. The next month you are asked to do the report again, adding on a few more products. So you recreate your steps, and produce the report. It goes on for a few months, and a product is retired, but the sales reports are still required for that product because it is winding down. So it stays that way until one day you look at the report and realize you are pulling data for products that haven’t been available for months or years.

Not too efficient, but it crept in unnoticed.

How To Spot Unnecessary Steps

I am a big fan of process audits, particularly when it comes to anything we repeat on a regular basis.

To do a process audit, you look at each step and ask if this is the only way to do it, and if it is the best way to do it.

For example, you need to descale your coffee pot at home. As the first step, you have always ordered the expensive solution because that is what came with the machine, and this adds days onto a relatively short process. However, in looking at it again, you see that you can use plain vinegar, and this cuts your time (not to mention expense) way down.

Or perhaps you are looking at backing up your photos on your hard drive. You have always figured out which pictures haven’t been backed up based on the date, and then upload those to the cloud. A more efficient way might be to have backup software monitor the folder where you keep the pictures and back them up to the cloud automatically.

Designing An Efficient Process

So now that you know how to spot unnecessary steps, you also need to be aware of efficiency when you are doing something you know you will repeat.

The approach here is simply to write the steps down as you are doing them. That way you can turn them into an SOP, and you can also revisit the process to see if what you did in pursuit of getting to goal is the best way to approach it.

Maybe as you were putting together the company newsletter, you needed to collect information from four different people, all of whom sent you information in different formats. It worked for the first month, but for the second you decided to standardize the input into a Google Form, thereby eliminating the need for you to retype and reformat from email, word documents and other things.

Conclusion

Inefficiencies can be eliminated either at the outset of a project, or after the proces is in place. Either way, by eliminating the unnecessary, you make yourself a better productivity agent.

I want you to take 10 seconds and think about this next question:

How many projects do you have lying around half-finished, waiting for you to “have time to get back to it”?

Keep thinking….

How many are there in your life?

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at a fundamental productivity rule: complete or abandon.

Half-Finished Projects

OK, before we get started on this article, I want you all to know that I am in the leading position of the pack of people who have unfinished projects. I have trouble finishing things. Whether it is simply framing a piece I have created, or piling things to be scanned/entered/processed, or the nine (insert eye roll here) unfinished novels sitting on my hard drive.

There are, I have been told, people in this world that start something, work on it, and complete it before moving on to the next thing. If you are one of these rare birds, I have two things to say to you:

1. Email me so I can get your perspective and tips for a guest post. I’m not kidding. laura@lauraearnest.com.
2. Stop reading this article. It’s not for you. Really. Stop. Right now. Leave it unfinished. Oh, yeah, I forgot who I was talking to.

Anyway.

So one of the things I do four times a year is to take stock of my unfinished projects as part of my RAM dump (more on this in an upcoming article) Unfortunately the list never seems to shorten. It stays at about the same number of projects from quarter to quarter. Not necessarily the same projects, although there are many of those.

The Danger of Half-Finished Projects

The problem is that these half-finished projects are what David Allen calls Open Loops. They are not to the point where we can put them away finished, so they sit there, nagging at us when we happen to catch sight of them, or popping into our heads at inconvenient times, or invading our dreams.

Half-finished projects suck our brain power away from the things that we could be doing. Instead of focusing on one thing at a time, we have these projects pulling at our attention.

That’s a big problem if you want to be productive. Part of being productive is being able to focus on what you are doing and getting it done. How can we do that if our attention is always being pulled away?

Complete or Abandon

There is a simple-to-remember and hard-to-implement rule that can take care of this. It’s called “complete or abandon”.

If you put something aside, you must decide, before starting something else, how you will resolve the first item. You must either complete it, or abandon it.

And by abandon, I do not mean shove it in a closet somewhere with the secret intention of getting to it “some day” but rather getting rid of the project altogether. As in throwing it out. As in destroying it so it cannot be picked up again…if you choose to do it again, you must start from scratch.

It can be scary to do this, particularly if you have invested a lot of time in it.

I had a beautiful cross-stitch piece that I was about 25% done. The problem is that the fabric was impossibly small, and each stitch was a combination of single strands of three colors. The effect was glorious. The implementation was taxing and frustrating. After having put it aside for the fourth time, I took it off the stretchers and walked to the garbage can. In it went. I felt terrible at first. But then I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. And I was able to move on to something that brought me pleasure in the execution.

Getting rid of the unfinished left room for the new.

Making A Habit

This attitude is something that can be built into our daily life. We can choose not to take on new projects until the old ones have been completed or abandoned, thus keeping our project list to a decent size. (See Curb Your Appetite For Projects)

But in order to do that, you have to start with what you have outstanding right now. You have to go through the list and evaluate, and either abandon the project, or finish it before you start something else.

Conclusion

The method is stark: complete or abandon. But you will find freedom in not having those projects distracting you from the things at hand.

Your Assignment

Your assignment from this article is to make a list of everything you have started that isn’t quite finished. Walk through your house. Look through your email. Look around your workplace. Make that list as complete as you can.

Then go through one by one and decide if you are going to complete or abandon. If abandoning, do it right then. If completing, put it on your current list and finish it as soon as you can.

If lasting change were easy or overnight, there would be no bad habits. But lasting change isn’t sudden, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at a realization critical to lasting productivity: lasting change isn’t sudden.

Overnight Success

I always smile when I hear someone referred to as an overnight success. Because in reality, there is no such thing. Those that claim they have had overnight success are ignoring or minimizing the months or years of hard work it took them to get where they ended up.

What about for us mere mortals? Think about the last time you tried to establish a new habit. Maybe it was exercising, or eating better, or smoking cessation. Were you able to do it overnight? Probably not.

The same holds true in productivity. Productive behaviors, whether turned into habits or not, require time and deliberate intention.

Why Change Takes Time

Change has a number of factors that feed into it, including motivation and level of effort. One often-overlooked factor, though, is how long the behavior you are trying to change has been in place. It is easier to change something you have been doing for three weeks than it is to change something 30 years in place.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons that it is easy to “fall off the wagon.” The time you have been doing a new behavior is less than the time spent in the behavior you are trying to change.

There are many theories about how long it takes to change a habit. I’ve seen everything from 30 days to six months. But the actual time is going to be dependent on many factors, and pretending it is just days doing the new behavior is simplistic and unrealistic.

Why Change Takes Deliberation

Change can’t happen unless you make it happen. That seems obvious, but so many people will make the remark that they want to change, and then do nothing different.

Just as you can’t lose weight if you are taking in more calories than you expend, you can’t be more productive and continue to spend six hours doing nothing productive.

Building Lasting Change

Fortunately, there are some simple steps that you can use to build lasting change.

Start Small

I am a big fan of the Mini-Habits* method of creating change. By starting so small that it is almost impossible to fail, you can build new action and habits into your life on a daily basis. Small actions are easily do-able, easily sustained, and less likely to be abandoned. It is easier to commit to drinking one glass of water than a gallon, after all.

Be Persistent

Change takes effort. Even when things don’t seem like they are changing, we need to keep pushing through. Persistence is one thing that will get you where you are going.

The Grand Canyon wasn’t carved overnight, and neither will your new behaviors.

Ben Franklin put it very well when he said, “Energy and persistence conquer all things.”

Look For Signs of Progress

It can be hard to persist when it doesn’t seem like you are making progress. The best way to track progress is to build it into your change…for example, actually writing down how much you ate, or how many emails are left in your inbox or how many minutes you spent exercising.

Conclusion

Change isn’t easy, and lasting change isn’t sudden. By starting small, being persistent and tracking your progress, you will succeed in making the changes you want.

An exclusive article on effectiveness will be going out to my Patreon subscribers on Wednesday. Not a subscriber yet? Go to https://www.patreon.com/LJEarnest and become a patron today.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at another fundamental process: build your habits.

Habits Get A Bad Rap

Many people decry habits as bad things, because they can lead to doing things automatically, and thus to inflexibility.

Yes, they can.

Habits, by their very nature, are supposed to be automatic. So things get done without you thinking about it.

Why Habits Are Good

At the same time, doing things automatically means that you don’t have to think about them. And that frees up your brain space to be working on other items.

Consider this for a moment. If something you need to do is habitual, you don’t think about it, you just do it. This means that you don’t have to consider the logistics of going to the gym, for instance. You just pack your bag and go, out of sheer habit. You don’t have to convince yourself to go, you don’t procrastinate. You just get it done.

This automatic action toward your goal means that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to plan. You don’t have to rethink the steps every day. You just do it.

How Habits Play Into Productivity

Habits are the foundation of a good productivity system.

If you had to stop and consider all the details of everything you do every day, you would exhaust yourself. Or you would have to build massive lists in order to accomplish things.

Let’s look at this from a first-thing-in-the-morning perspective.

The alarm goes off. Do you get up or not? Have you had that debate with yourself? You know how much effort it can take to force yourself out of bed.

Next, you need to get ready for the day. That would involve clothing, personal care, and grooming. Think about how much effort it takes to think about what you are going to wear. Ever been stuck in front of the clothing trying to decide? What about all the things you do for grooming and personal care? How much would it add to your expended brain effort if you had to remember to brush your teeth every morning, shower, dry your hair, shave or put on makeup, etc.

Yet by having habits, we don’t think about it, we just do it. And we have more energy to start the day because we haven’t had to spend the energy thinking about the automatic stuff.

Habits Should Be For Things That Need To Be Done

The danger of habits is that we don’t want to build habits around things that really don’t need to be done. For example, you wouldn’t want to be doing something every day that was unnecessary. As a habit, you wouldn’t think about it, and you would do the task and waste the time and effort.

For instance, let’s say it was your habit to put out food for penguins. You did it every day, not thinking about the 10 minutes it took you to do; and yet it furthered no goal and really didn’t need to be done. After all, you don’t live where the penguins do. 10 minutes a day over a year adds up to over 60 hours of time a year. That’s a working week and a half. But as a habit, you would just do it without further consideration.

That’s a danger, not to mention not a good way to spend your time.

How To Build Your Habits To Boost Productivity

Habits can be built on purpose, with the end goal of boosting productivity. Anything that can be made habitual…and that needs to be done…can further your productivity.

The first thing to do is to set a goal with what you want to do. As an example, let’s say you want to read more non-fiction. It’s hard for you to find time to do that, so you put it off until you have a chunk of time to devote to reading…which means it never gets done.

So here is how you can approach building a productivity habit.

• Make it small. As I learned from the book Mini-habits [Insert Link], the best way to make habits is to make the first actions so small that it takes no effort to do them. For our example, you might not have time to read a chapter a day. You might not have time to read five pages. But I bet there is a level where you say, “Sure, I could read x paragraphs/pages a day.” For me, it is two pages, and that is Kindle pages, with the font popped up rather large. By setting the goal so small, I am assured it will happen. Because even on the super-rushed days, I can find the two minutes it will take to read the pages.
• Tie it to something else. New habits are best tied to something else. If you wanted to get into the habit of flossing every day, you would tie it to cleaning your teeth. It doesn’t make sense to tie it to locking your front door. My reading habit is tied to my first-thing-in-the-morning writing session. I spend some time doing personal development work every day, and this was the logical time to put it in place.
• Make sure it happens. Life gets in the way sometimes. However, that doesn’t mean your habit should fall by the way just because your routines are disturbed. You should have a way to make sure it happens by a given time. In the case of my reading, I have an alarm set for 6:30 pm, and if the alarm goes off and I realize I haven’t done my reading, I will take the two minutes to do it right then.
• Be accountable. Habits are formed by repetition, but few can maintain something without some system of encouragement. Jerry Seinfeld had a calendar where he marked off the days he completed a habit. There are apps out there to help you with this as well. Or maybe you need an accountability partner to help you stick to it. For my reading, I use an app on my phone that helps me track my habits called Streaks.

Conclusion

Habits can boost your productivity if they are specifically designed to do so. Set a goal that will further your projects, and set up the habits by making it small, tied to something else and with a way to make sure it happens and track your progress. Watch your productivity soar by putting it on auto-pilot!

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at another fundamental rule: start as you intend to continue.

Why January First?

New Year’s resolutions have long fascinated me. Is there, I wonder, something magical about the first of January that will guarantee results?

Nope.

In fact, putting changes off until January first is just a socially sanctioned form of procrastination.

Same with any other “I’ll wait to start that until…(you fill in the blank: have a birthday, have more time, retire, have kids, get married, have more money in the bank, etc.)

Think about it…

“I’ll wait until I have more time to clean my email.” And then months go by and important emails are left languishing.

“I’ll wait until I have more time to purge my files.” And then you spend hours looking for a document somewhere in the pile.

“I’ll wait until I have more money in the bank before I pursue something I truly love doing.” And the job sucks your soul away.

Why Not Now?

The trouble with waiting for the right time is that time is rarely right. Waiting until a set of circumstances are in your favor to do something you really want or need to do is not going to get things done.

Waiting until a date or event in the future just means you are not going to progress on your desires.

Why not start now? Why not abandon putting it off, and get started. You may not have all the resources you need, but at least you can make a start on what you want to do.

Stop Procrastinating…

Don’t allow yourself to fall into sanctioned procrastination. If you want to make a change, do it. Start now. Don’t wait until a fictional day, because by then it might be too late.

As Whittier said, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!'”

So How Is This Tied To Productivity?

Productivity is doing the right tasks (effective) in the right way (efficient).

If you don’t do the task at all, that means you are doing something else that is not moving you closer to your goals.

If you are putting off making a change that will make things easier, then you are not doing things efficiently.

Start As You Intend To Continue

It may not be the ideal time. But you can still start.

You may not have all the resources to complete the task. But you can still start.

You may feel the goal is so huge and big that it can never be obtained. But you can still start moving toward it.

Start. Start as you mean to continue. And you will make far more progress than simply waiting for the right circumstances.

Getting Started

So how do you get started?

My favorite method: make a list. I write all the things that I could do to bring me closer to my goal. I don’t edit as I write, I just write everything I can think of that is any way related to my goal. I set the timer for 10 minutes and don’t stop writing.

Yes, some of the ideas are junk. But some are things that I can do now that will move me in the right direction.

Conclusion

Don’t wait until a time or event to start something helpful or important. Find a way to start today, and continue on the same path.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at another fundamental rule: curb your appetite for projects.

Eyes Too Big For The Stomach

During holiday meals, if I took too much food and couldn’t finish it, my mother would look at me and ask if my eyes were too big for my stomach. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices of the holiday meal, and only seeing some of these foods once a year made me want to try everything. I started, but I couldn’t finish.

Projects can sometimes be the same way. We see all the things that we can do, and we start many things, flitting from one start to another, never finishing a project before we move on.

Knowing If You’ve Exceeded Your Appetite

When you take too much food, the evidence is before you. How about when you take on too many projects?

There are a few warning signs you can look for:

• You don’t know where to start. You have plenty of things to do, but you don’t know how to pick which one to do. There are just too many.
• You see reminders of unfinished things constantly. Looking around your house or office, you see things that you have started and not completed.
• Deadlines have slipped. Maybe more than one.
• Your feel overwhelmed with everything you have to do. There is simply too much on your plate and you know you will never get it all done.

Many people who have this issue also don’t have a realistic idea of how many things they have started. There might be a vague notion, but no written list of everything that have committed to or started.

The Beauty of Limits

Limiting how much you work on at any one time gives you a faster completion rate.

This is simple math: let’s say you have two projects, one needs 10 hours, and the other 6 hours. If you have one hour per day to work on these projects, how long will it take you to complete them?

If you work on both projects at the same time, it will take you 12 days to complete the 6 hour project, and then if you continue the same rate on the 10 hour project (because you have started something new), it would be a total of 20 days start to finish for both projects.8

If you work on the short project first, you can get it done in 6 days, and then an additional 10 days for the second, cutting your time by 4 days!

Limiting what you work on at any one time gives you a faster completion and throughput.

Curb Your Appetite for Projects

So how do you curb your appetite for projects? There are a few simple rules to follow:

• Know what is on your plate. Have a list of everything you have committed to and/or started. Keep it updated.
• Don’t use your list for dreams. Have a separate list for things you want to do some day. David Allen* calls this the “someday/maybe list”. Keep your project list clean with only things that you have committed to.
• Keep your load level. Don’t start something new without finishing or abandoning something else. Allowing even short things to creep on will bloat the list to unmanageability.
• Don’t say yes without checking the list. Practice phrases like, “I’ll have to let you know” or “I’ll check my schedule”. Get into the habit of not committing to anything without evaluating your current load.

All it takes is vigilance, a relevant list, and the ability to stop yourself from saying yes without checking.

Conclusion

Are your project eyes bigger than your stomach? Curb your appetite with a few steps, and start getting things done.

As a question for my own curiosity, how many of you know how many projects you are working on at the moment, and what is that number? My own is 11, some of which due to their nature won’t be done until 2017.

There is a tool for everything. Take a look around any home improvement store, and you will see exactly what I mean. But even with this variety of tools, it is still tempting to use a tool inappropriately. It is important to the success of the project for you to use tools appropriately.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are going to be successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at another fundamental rule: use tools appropriately.

The Wrong Tool…An Example

Here is an example of what I mean, outside of productivity. When I was in college, I needed to put a nail into the wall. I couldn’t be bothered to go get the hammer from my roommate’s tool kit. After all, I had a shoe. The first few shoes I tried had soles that were too soft to be able to push the nail in. So I ended up with a pair of pumps which just happened to have a heel made out of steel. It did eventually get the nail into the wall, but it ended up causing damage to both the wall and my fingers in the process. Plus it took about three times as long as it would have for me to fetch the hammer from the kitchen and do the job properly.

The shoe did the job, but it wasn’t efficient, and ended up causing damage.

The Wrong Productivity Tool

I so often see people using the wrong productivity tools as well, and they end up being inefficient and causing damage as well.

I see people putting all their tasks on the calendar. I see people putting all their appointments in their task lists. I see people using task lists as project trackers (raising my hand here). I see people using email as their calendar, task list and project trackers combined. I see people using note software to mix it all together. I see people putting notes in their calendars…after all, why else would there be a notes field?

The argument could be made that you are being efficient by keeping everything together. But the truth is that mixing things up means that you can’t distinguish one type of item from another. And once you have homogenized them, the importance is diluted, and things end up getting lost in the shuffle. Therein lies the danger. If you can’t get information out of your productivity system, you might as well just flush it down the toilet to begin with.

The Danger of Mixing

The danger of mixing types of information is that you end up being able to distinguish things in their importance.

Let’s say that you use your calendar as your to-do list. You have your appointments on there, and then you mix in all of the things that you intend to do that day. Let me emphasize that: intend to do that day. So you are going along with your day, and by 9 a.m., your schedule is already off because your first client was late. But your calendar is full, so you careen into the day, trying to cut corners in a desperate effort to get back on track. And then you are late for your second meeting, because you were trying to stick to the schedule.

Oops.

If a task has to be done only at a certain time, there is nothing wrong with putting it on your calendar. However, using it as a target list is just asking for trouble. No calendar ever runs exactly as planned.

Recognizing the Wrong Tool

So how do you recognize what is the right tool and what is the wrong one?

Most adjustment to productivity systems needs to occur when you realize that something isn’t working as well as you would like it to. That isn’t a license to fiddle, but rather a step to innovation.

The first step lies in figuring out what exactly the intended use of the tool is. A calendar is meant to track appointments – things that happen at a specific date and/or time. A task list is meant to track things to do. A notebook is meant to write down notes and thoughts as they occur.

The second step is looking at how you get information out of your system. If you are using a calendar for appointments, but then storing meeting notes in with the appointment, how are you getting that information out? You are having to rely on your memory of when the appointment occurred in order to find out what actually happened. Ask yourself if you can get the information out efficiently and (more importantly) directly.

The thrid step is looking at any other difficulties in how you are using the tool. If someone called you to ask if you could do an interview with Oprah sometime in the next few hours, would you be able to give a definite answer with one glance? Or would you have to wade through irrelevant information? If someone asked you if something is on your task list, could you find it (or its absence) easily? Are there any leaks in the tool that cause information to be lost or overlooked?

Finding the Right Tool

When you are looking for a right tool, the first thing is to evaluate what you need, rather than trying to fit yourself into the tool.

What do you need to accomplish? Do you need a place to track appointments? A central place to put all your notes? How do you need to put in the information? Where and when do you need access? With whom do you need to share the information? What shared information do you need to access?

All of these questions are things that you need to consider. Figure out what you need — bare bones minimal — and then figure out what the nice-to-haves are. Then, and only then, select a tool to get the task accomplished.

Conclusion

Using a tool inappropriately is just as detrimental to a productive life as not using any at all. Mixing information leaves all the information clouded or inaccessible. By looking at the tools you are using and taking the time to find the right tool for the job, you will be well on your way to a better and more productive life.

Productivity requires a solid foundation if the methods are successful. Just like every building must have a solid foundation if it is going to remain standing, productivity must also have a solid foundation unless you want it to crumble underneath you.

We are starting a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at a cardinal rule: don’t fiddle.

What Is Fiddling?

Fiddling is adjusting your productivity systems. You can call it fiddling. You can call it tweaking. You can call it tinkering. You can call it “system improvement.” There are even many adages in English that go along with this:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“Don’t change horses in mid-stream.”
“Leave well enough alone.”
“Never change a running system.”

What it boils down to is changing something that is working for the sake of trying (at best) to make it better or (at worst) just for the sake of changing it up to see if it might work better.

So it is something that we as people have been dealing with for hundreds of years…and still it is an issue today.

It is just a series of small adjustments meant to make things easier or more efficient….but without a specific goal in mind.

Fiddling vs Innovation

Innovation is sometimes used in place of any of the fiddling synonyms. But innovation is something different altogether.

Innovation is the purposeful change of something, with the thought and purposeful mapping. Innovation involves specific goals, with measurements made to make sure the goals are met.

Fiddling, on the other hand, doesn’t have a specific goal, and the changes are made without evaluating whether or not it moves closer to the goal that hasn’t been set.

Fiddling is change for the sake of change.

Why Fiddling Isn’t Productive

Fiddling is dangerous.

It is dangerous because without specific goal in mind, it is changing for the sake of changing.

The worst part, though, is that it feels productive. “I’m alphabetizing all my tasks because that will make it easier to find.” “I’m moving all my projects to [insert system of the moment] because it will make me more productive…[insert productivity guru] says so.” “I am revamping the priorities/adding descriptions/setting approximate task times because it will give me a productivity boost.”

The problem with these things is that they look and feel productive.. But in the grand scheme of things, it probably won’t help you get anything more done. In fact the time that you spend doing these items would be better spent actually doing things.

Fiddling with your productivity system is just procrastination in disguise.

Approaching Change In A Productive Way

If you want to change something, it is better to take the innovative route. Decide what needs to change, and then take small steps to get there, measuring the effect of each step after it is taken, and abandoning the change if it doesn’t produce enough of a result.

Let’s say you think there is a better way to manage your tasks at work. You are using an electronic system, but you don’t have access to it during a large part of your day. In fact, your tasks are the things that need to be done, but are not the major part of you r job. What is a better way?

I can speak to this, because this is what happened to me about three months ago. I looked at what the end goal was. I needed to be able to track small tasks that come up without missing deadlines, but knowing that I wouldn’t be doing the majority of my work from that list, and I needed to be able to access that list without looking at my computer or phone.

In this case the first step was to create a task list on paper. That solved the problem of access. Then I needed a way to be able to pull just the tasks that were coming due. So I added a column for the due date to make it easy to scan. Then I made another form that would allow me to pick three I would commit to get done that day.

My needs were met, my system innovated.

Conclusion

Make sure that when you decide to make changes to the way that you are doing things that you do it deliberately with a specific goal in mind. Then test to see if the changes are truly an improvement. Don’t change for the sake of changing, or for unverified results.

Otherwise you are just fiddling. And fiddling is just procrastination in disguise.