Let me tell you about my old SatNav. At times in the past I used to find myself often driving north on the A1 in England. If you don’t know it that A1 goes right up the spine of the country connecting London with Edinburgh. There comes a point where you can come off the A1 headed north and drive west on the M18. My old SatNav used to tell me to do just that. It would tell me to come off the A1, drive 6.1 miles west on the M18, come off it, round a roundabout and then drive 6.1 miles east back on the M18, to the exact point I left the A1, to rejoin the A1 and continue my journey north. So, what can we learn about productivity & my old SatNav? Don’t do things just for the sake of it!
It is very easy for your productivity, organisation and information management system to become bloated. VERY easy. All of that bloat is in fact a complete waste of time. Worse, it actually makes organising yourself far more unwieldy, slows you down and will increase the stress of maintaining your system.
Let me give you some personal examples.
Example 1 — Task Management
I once used an app called Nirvana to manage my tasks. Nirvana is an excellent application in so many ways and if you follow GTD in a more pure sense then it is definitely one to look at — especially if you are not an Apple user. Nirvana allows you to ‘mark’ your tasks in multiple different ways. You can set up ‘Areas’ which would be for your life areas or buckets. You have a separate list of contacts to reference people and then labels for anything you want. In addition you have a whole host of options for marking the estimated time (from 5min to ‘Whoa Nelly!’) and three different options for the energy a task will require.
Because the functionality was there, I used it and when I processed every single task I would consider each of these different things and mark up and label the task accordingly. Because it was there.
When I switched to ToDoist, I created around 30 separate labels so I could do all this in ToDoist. My process was for each task, to click the label button and run down the full list each time to apply every label that was relevant.
At some point I realised 2 things. The point of labelling your tasks is primarily to help you filter them and decide what to work on in any given moment. Most of these labels were never used for that purpose. I used the 5min label occasionally to find a quick task if had some spare time but none of the others. I never used the people one and never used the energy ones. So, the second thing I realised was that this was a complete waste of time and energy. Like a trip 6 miles east on the M18 and back again, applying these labels was a detour from effectively processing my new tasks that required time and effort but did not advance my productivity journey at all.
FYI — I had a very similar experience with an Evernote tagging system that I came across!
Example 2 — The end of year review
Let me start by saying that I think an end of year review has a lot of value, so it isn’t the concept that is a complete waste of time in my view. Beyond just our productivity but for our general well being in life, slowing down for a day or two towards the end of the year to take time to reflect on the previous 12 months is an incredibly positive experience. I would say this is true even if you don’t come out of it with any concrete conclusions. The act of slowing down to reflect has value.
In my time, I have come across multiple different approaches to this. At one time I favoured an incredibly structured approach and as such I found various templates online and even a powerpoint presentation to work through. All contain page after page of very specific questions to work through on different areas of life.
Or you can find videos and Notion templates that take you through reviewing different views of different goal, task and project databases.
I very quickly realised that for me personally, these types of end of year review were not providing me with the opportunity to reflect that I was wanting. I personally prefer my end of year review to be more reflective and thoughtful than a more data analytical approach. I am sure there are plenty of people who do actually need to make a pitstop in Bramley off the M18 on their way north on the A1. I don’t and just because they do, doesn’t me I have to as well.
I could write loads of other personal examples down but I will leave it there today.
So, what do you do in your organisation of your time, tasks and other stuff that is really just bloat?
November is a great time of year to be asking this question. Often, but not always I find myself with a quieter week or two just after Christmas and one of the things I do here is try and remove any bloat from my organisation system.
I will often therefore be thinking about this as walk, run and do mundane chores in November and December.
Removing this bloat can pay dividends. We all know that Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs have both famously filled their wardrobes with identical clothes so they never have to decide what to wear. This is to prevent decision fatigue and preserve their decision making energy for things that really count.
Do you really want to expend that energy making decisions about your tasks that will in no way, shape or form have any impact on when or how you do them? Do you want to be wasting your valuable time and energy on this?
So why not take some time to consider over the next couple of months what you can learn about productivity from my old SatNav? What things are you doing just for the sake of it?
(n.b. whilst my old SatNav had its foibles, it was better than my old, old SatNav. The touch screen was damaged meaning I could never press Q,W,A,S,Z or X.
So, if your postcode contained those letters, I wasn’t coming for a visit. I suppose my post on Keyboards is probably the closest you’ll get to what you can learn about productivity from Old, old SatNav)
