I just signed up with the UH Manoa Outreach College again to offer a one-day class this October. This one is scheduled to be in person, pandemic permitting. The College made a nice little writeup about the class here. It combines my general workplace productivity content including email and task management and priority setting, with a focus on balancing the urge to constantly do more with a purposeful effort to do less and free your mind from constant busyness. Hope I can see some of you there.
Tag: GTD
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Online classes and a new YouTube channel
I’m working with the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to offer a unique combination of my class content in a remote, zoom-like, environment. You can read more about it and sign up at their page here. I’ll be including most of my Email Management, Task Management, and Prioritization (Getting the Right Things Done) courses along with some of my newer Doing Less content. I’m looking forward to it and hopefully the first focus on productivity doesn’t dilute the ending message to slow down and take a step back from time to time too much. 🙂
I’m also experimenting with ways to get some of these courses out to a broader audience, so I’ve started a YouTube channel. I’m starting it with my Email Management course content and some random other thoughts. Stop on by and let me know if you’ve found it useful. I need 100 initial subscribers to get a better URL and make my content easier to find, so if you feel like subscribing, it would be a big help if you could. I’m not going to beg for likes and subscribes in the videos themselves, but I would like them to be accessible to people looking for such content.
Well, that’s it for now. Mahalo.
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Class Offerings
Over the years, I’ve developed a number of short courses on a variety of topics concerning workplace efficiency, effective management, and leadership. Lately, I have expanded the content and realized there may be a larger audience for all of this than what I am currently reaching. So, I’m also thinking of new ways I can present the material and am considering whether I can make them into a set of self-serve videos that people could pick and choose from. The classes usually include a lot of interactive discussion and some exercises, so I’m trying to develop some way to translate all that into the different format. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
I also need a place to record a summary of the offerings, so for now at least, this is that place.
The Productivity Series
Your email inbox includes hundreds of emails that demand your attention or some action to close out. You are continually barraged with new work requests that make it difficult to both keep track of everything on your plate and stay focused on the task at hand. You find yourself constantly working to do the urgent tasks on your list and seldom find the time to work on those long-term important projects that don’t have specific deadlines. You would love to delegate some of your work, but the process is usually painful enough that it seems easier to just do things yourself. You sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it. If any or all these situations sound familiar, and they are too much so for many of us, these four classes can help you regain control or refine your existing processes for more thoughtful productivity:
1. Email. Learn how to reduce the amount of time you spend processing your email and make your own emails more effective.
2. Task Management. Learn how to organize your tasks so you don’t lose track of what you have to do or where you are on a given task. Reduce the amount of time you spend switching tasks and prepare yourself to better respond to new task requests.
3. Prioritization. Learn to make time for the important as well as the urgent. Understand basic human tendencies that sometimes inhibit us from making the best decisions on what task to spend our time on. Learn when and how to slow down and say no.
4. Delegation. Learn effective ways to offload tasks to others and still get results.
Individual Components
Email Management
Finally, a meeting where you’re not only allowed, but instructed to read your emails. Leave this class in control of your email. We’ll discuss the zero inbox method of email management, including ways to send more effective emails, receive fewer emails, and derive better processes to organize the emails you receive.Task Management
Once you’ve learned to manage your email, attend this session and learn to manage your tasks. How do you keep track of what needs doing? How do you make sure important tasks don’t slip through the cracks? How do you stop your mind from reminding you at all the wrong times about all the things you need to do? We’ll focus primarily on a simplified Getting things Done (GTD) type task management approach and discuss several practical ways to implement it.Getting the Right Things Done
Go beyond task management and learn how to identify what the right things to be doing are and explore why we don’t always seem to do the right things, even when we know what they are. Mastering this content should help attendees remove low return tasks from their plates, focus on getting the most important tasks done, and partner better with their colleagues.Doing Less or There’s more to Life than Efficiency
Focusing on productivity and efficiency are good things, but as with most things, too much of a good thing can still be too much. In Doing Less we talk about the value of slowing down, allowing time for context and creativity, and choosing a path simply because it is unknown. Together with Getting the Right Things Done, we address the other half of task management beyond organizing and controlling your tasks to prioritizing, doing, and sometimes purposefully not doing.Successful Delegation
An important part of controlling your own task list is delegation. A critical and necessary part of delegation is tracking and ensuring your delegated tasks get done. Here, we discuss techniques to make proper requests of others, set deadlines, and follow up without coming across as a nag or an untrusting colleague.Effective Meetings
You’ve mastered your inbox, taken control of your task list and become a master of delegation. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to attend, or perhaps even hold, a meeting to discuss your projects. This course offers a framework for meetings that helps ensure you walk away from each meeting with the results you need and with appropriate participation from the attendees. Would you rather watch a good move, or go to a meeting? If you chose a movie, come learn why and how you should attend a meeting instead.Leadership and Teamwork
Can anyone be a leader? Do I need a title to be a leader? How do I learn my leadership style? Leadership is about character and skills and both can be learned. In this course we differentiate management from leadership, discuss the different ways one can lead, find a common thread running through most leadership models and the best leaders, and learn to lead by first understanding yourself, then others. We build a set of skills and a problem solving framework to help leaders and teams focus on the right problem solving steps while avoiding common pitfalls.
Still occasionally suffering from an email inbox that doesn’t get emptied, tasks that don’t get done, meetings that aren’t efficient, and other signs that he has still not fully mastered this material, Scot enjoys presenting these courses and learns something new every time. As a result, his processes continually evolve and improve and hopefully others also gain control and purpose in their work life. It is all a work in progress and a journey he hopes to share with others for mutual benefit.
In preparation for a new delivery system, Scot has started a new Astromanager youtube channel with as of yet, no content. If you want to check it out you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2lJ7RdBBowLLON762LQ6Qg. You can subscribe now for that first video notification and a valuable early subscriber number.
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Breaking projects into tasks
I was been feeling a bit unmotivated at work a while back until I realized one reason why. I took (yet another) look at my task list and found most of the remaining items were not tasks, but projects. They were projects that would take multiple hours to complete and in many cases weren’t clearly defined as to their final results. What were these projects supposed to produce? How would I know when they were done? How would I start them? No wonder I didn’t feel motivated. People don’t do projects; they do tasks. When I looked at this task list I saw vague, undefined projects that had no defined end and no defined place to start. They represented hours of work when I rarely have consecutive hours I can spend in one place to work on one project.
So, I picked an item of my list and asked myself what I needed to do to start on it. In this particular case, the answer was to locate an old version of a similar document I had to write, take a look at it, and decide how I wanted to change it for the new document I had to write this time.
A colleague and I regularly teach this trick in a task management class we lead, and it’s standard course in any Getting Things Done like approach: always start and stop a project by noting your next task. Doing so always gives you a concrete place to start when you pick the project up. I shouldn’t have had to remind myself to do this, but at least I’m glad I eventually remembered. A good reminder for myself, but also good to keep in mind when people you work with are not making the progress you expect. Maybe they don’t know where they are headed or maybe they don’t know how to get started. There are both easy things to fix once you are aware of what to look for.
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On systems, processes, and paperwork
Lately, I’ve come across several proposed new systems, processes, and forms — all developed to address an assumed real, but unstated need. In most cases, I could see a useful purpose for the new system/process/form, but it usually wasn’t provided to me explicitly. I didn’t know if my interpretation of what this new proposal was all about was shared by those directing it so I often feared I would be wasting my time by doing something that wasn’t what was actually wanted.
Developing a common framework and tools for management tasks makes sense, but there must be a system behind them, else you just end up creating a bureaucracy instead of an effective, efficient system. I see several things to address before implementing a new system, process, or form:
- What is the purpose/goal? What problem are you trying to solve?
- Who is your audience?
- What are the requirements needed to fulfill your objectives within your target audience?
- What are the implementation costs?
- What are the costs of non-implementation?
- Given all the above, is implementation the right approach?
There’s nothing terribly new here, but the items above make a good checklist to go through before starting a new formal process. If you don’t address the first three points, you may end up spending a lot of time doing something which propels you no further down the road. In addition, if you don’t evaluate the costs of what you’re proposing against the current incurred costs in light of your available resources, you risk spending too much time on something that is ultimately not going to improve your situation enough to be worth it.
Large projects need a fairly broad framework in which to operate. They also, typically, staff a project office sufficiently to help produce and support this framework. While smaller projects can also benefit from this same framework, typically the cost of doing so is prohibitively high. So, smaller projects must think carefully about what it can do, what it can’t afford not to do, and ignore the things it can afford to not do. Going through a similar checklist as above ought to help decide into which category a proposed new system belongs. (Actually, I’m sure this same approach works for large projects as well — we are all resource-starved these days.)
Speaking of checklists, Scot found the book “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande a very good read and a great strategy for helping to ensure routine tasks are done correctly every time. Packing for trips, as an example, got immensely easier once checklists got involved. -
Real vs. fake work: What are emails, meetings, etc.?
A couple years back, a group of us at work put together a series of classes designed to help people better communicate and manage their tasks more efficiently. We present them in a sequence we think makes logical sense: Email Management, Task Management, Setting Deadlines and Following-up, and Better Meetings. There is a common refrain heard during our classes that the material is all fine and good, but people just don’t have time to practice and do all the techniques we discuss. People who try to do these things complain that doing so leaves them no time to get any real work done. They say this as if being busy were excuse enough to avoid these responsibilities, as if responding to emails, managing task priorities, following up on task requests, and properly leading and preparing for meetings were optional things that can be skipped when they are busy. I no longer wonder so many people think sending emails (if no one responds to them), setting priorities (if no one pays attention to them), doing work requested from others (if no one ever checks in to see how things are going), and attending meetings (if no one ever prepares for them) are a waste of time.
While many of us would like to spend all our time doing only that part of our work that we enjoy, whether it be writing software, designing or building new instruments, conducting research, or whatever, few people have that luxury either in their organization or perhaps ever in their own work lives. So, let me say something very unpopular: answering email is real work. Making sure you are working on the most important thing to be working on in any given moment is real work. Following up on tasks you depend on that others are supposed to be doing is real work. Attending meetings is real work. These things are not fake work. They are not pointless tasks that don’t further your organization’s objectives (well, at least they shouldn’t be – more on that later). They are part of the necessary ingredients for running and working within an organization.
Now, all that being said, I do admit that not all emails contain useful information or necessary requests for action, not all tasks on your todo list are of equal importance, and some meetings seem to have no practical purpose, but these examples should be the exception, not the rule. What most treatises on managing your email and tasks and running better meetings leave out, for example, is the first step: eliminate as many unnecessary emails, tasks. and meetings as possible. Try sending less email; you’ll probably get less in return. Pick up the phone if there’s a complicated issue involved rather than sending 12 rounds of email. Call a meeting if many people need to be consulted on a complex issue. Accept new tasks only if you can make the time to devote to them. If a meeting isn’t making a decision, why are you having it?
Eliminate extraneous emails and meetings, but do process the rest fully. This is real work. If you have too many tasks on your plate to manage; too many people to follow-up with, too many meetings to attend, then you probably aren’t getting everything done and you might as well select which tasks aren’t going to get done by purposefully eliminating them from your plate rather than letting random fate dictate what tasks you do and which you don’t. When you’ve prepared yourself a plate of tasks appropriate to your available time, manage those tasks properly; follow-up with others needed to help you complete your tasks and projects. This is necessary work. This is real work.
Recently an attendee from one of our classes asked me if David Allen had any quantitative evidence that regularly emptying your inbox actually made you a better performer at work. Although he had a slightly different point in mind, I responded, in part, as follows:
No, I don’t believe David Allen has any quantitative evidence that emptying your inbox is a good thing. I’ve never seen any, at least. I also don’t think he needs any. Do we need numerical evidence to show that listening to our phone messages is a good thing? That writing down action items assigned to us at a project meeting is a good thing? To me, emptying my inbox is about understanding my tasks and workload; I can then decide, by choice, how to handle each task (do, delegate, delete, file, re-negotiate, etc.) and be confident I am not letting some critical request on my time go unnoticed, lost in my inbox.
The email inbox represents a task list. Some tasks can be dealt with quickly while others take more time. But if we don’t go through that task list and make decisions about which tasks to do and which not to do, we are letting chance dictate which tasks get done and which not, simply depending on which emails we happen to look at. (We also make ourselves uneasy, wondering what we’re missing or forgetting about that’s contained in that inbox.) Emptying our inboxes is not about completing all the tasks that the emails represent, but about getting the tasks out of our inboxes (it’s called an inbox for a reason) and into our task management systems where we can decide when to schedule/do the work. David Allen’s point is that it is just as necessary to process our email inboxes as it is to answer our phones, get our mail, respond when someone knocks on our doors, etc.
What David Allen doesn’t address, is how to minimize the number of potential tasks that come to us via our email inboxes. That is something we tried to include in our classes, though, since we believe it’s a key part of the solution to getting our inboxes under control.
So, if you don’t have time to handle your email properly, manage your tasks and your requests of others sufficiently, attend and lead productive meetings, then the first step is to eliminate clutter from your work life. Cut down on the emails you send, filter emails you know don’t need attention right away, unsubscribe to some mailing lists. Delegate, re-negotiate or reject tasks you aren’t going to get done. Eliminate unnecessary meetings from your schedule. But once you do these things, your work isn’t done unless you manage your emails and tasks, check in with those working on tasks for you, and come prepared to make meetings productive. These tasks are necessary. They are real work. They may not be the most glorious of tasks on your plate, but if you don’t do them, the rest of your real work will likely suffer.
Unfortunately, Scot isn’t perfect, either, in making sure all the necessary non-“real” work gets done in his life, but he has found that when he does do it, things go more smoothly and this has been pretty good motivation to make the time to try to do these things right.