How I Stay Productive #1: The Frameworks & Models

The most memorable novel I’ve read in my life is “Shibumi” by Trevenian. In it, I discovered and fell spirit and mind over body in love with the concept of “Shibumi”. My operational version of “Shibumi” is perfexcellence, a contraption of the words perfection and excellence. Perfexcellence is the general map of my journey to self mastery and productivity is a key part of that journey.

I think productivity is critically important because without it, we can’t thrive at work. I LOVE work and consider it a manifestation of one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind. Work is the activity that more than any other, forces us to develop physically, intellectually, emotionally and for some, spiritually. No one puts it better than Kahlil Gibran:

Great music doesn’t just happen. It takes lots of creative thought, lots of practice and lots of growth through change. It is seldom the case that we see the whole score at once, rather as we take the first step our path becomes clearer as we forge ahead.

In these series of blog posts, I share with you how I’ve developed and evolved my productivity system. It has been an amazing journey, from weekly planning in a paper diary inspired by the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to a tightly integrated system of apps, devices and online services that it is today. I stand on the shoulders of titans and I hope these posts will inspire someone in their quest for productivity, or as it often happens when I read about other people’s productivity journeys, improve or tweak some aspect of their existing system. These posts are also for myself - writing about something I do almost instinctively forces me to revise my knowledge and increases my mastery of productivity.

I will cover the following aspects of my productivity system:

1. Frameworks & Models: the foundation of my productivity system (this post).
2. Tools & Workflow: used to implement the productivity system and the workflow that unites these tools & techniques.
3. Managing Reference Information: how I use Evernote as a reference system.
4. Command and Control system: how I use OmniFocus.

Four pillars make up my productivity system. These pillars are frameworks, concepts and models which form the foundation of my productivity system. People smarter than I am whom I trust have researched these. Practicing these concepts have increased my understanding of them. As a result, my productivity system has matured and works for me. In other words, my system grows and changes to align with these concepts and principles (generally).

Systems Thinking

Generally guides how I think and act. Some of the important principles of the system & model thinking are:

(1) Everything is connected in some way: These connections are not always obvious and the more we understand them, the better we are at crafting solutions that not only solve the current problem, but more importantly do not create new problems elsewhere or in the future. I learnt this the hard way, when my ultra-productivity system consistently landed me in the hospital at the end of 2010, 2011 and 2012 with burnout (yeah, I tend to be slow to learn some lessons). My system helped me create and implement Africa’s best IPv6 training program, put my organisation and continent on the map of a European Commission project and got over $70,000 worth of lab equipment to support my work. Those were desirable results. However, there was another result which I didn’t plan for - burnout! Burnout was a contrary consequence of my productivity that resulted from neglecting the principle of sufficient rest and renewal as integral components of productivity.

(2) Cause and effect are not always closely related in time or space: Consider farming; the cause (tilling, planting, watering, fertilising, pollinating, weeding) and effect (bumpy or lousy harvest) are separated by at least 3 months and sometimes years (I planted stuff that took over 10 years to bear fruit). Understanding this is key to mastering the connections mentioned above and creating sustainable solutions. My annual burnouts (effect) happened was the result of practices in the service of productivity I did 8 months earlier.

(3) The best place to improve a system is to focus on its bottle-neck (or constraint): Every system has a bottleneck. As you work on and eliminate a constraint, another one pops out, usually in another part of the system, hence the need to not see productivity as any fixed target in time and/or space but as an ongoing process of progressively identifying and eliminating the bottlenecks which throttle our productivity.

Here's a nice illustration of the habits of a systems thinker.

My book recommendations for delving deeper into these topics are:

1. "The 5th Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organisation" by Peter Senge.
2. "Theory of Constraints” by Eliyahu Goldratt.

Getting Things Done (GTD)

Getting Things Done is a personal productivity framework developed and popularised by David Allen in the book of the same name. I live and swear by GTD, using it to capture, organise and plan almost everything that I do in all aspects of my life. The key principles of GTD are as follows:

(1) Mental efficiency depends on the amount of working memory that’s available to dedicate to the task at hand: Any idea that we have not clarified will linger in our working memory, rendering us less effective. To use a computer analogy, working memory is like RAM. Once we save information to the hard disk, we can remove from RAM, thus freeing more RAM to help the currently running applications perform better. So a critical task that must be developed into a habit is to make sure nothing that isn’t important to the task at hand takes up space in our working memory.

(2) Separate the capture of ideas from their processing: This GTD principle has led to a habit where I am always capturing thoughts about things that I might do into a trusted system. These thoughts range from ideas to research further (when I’m reading books or at a conference), projects to initiate (after a strategic planning session), tasks from a meeting, products to research, concepts to try out etc. All I do in the habit is write it down in a trusted system (which I’ll delve deeper into in the Command and Control post). Deciding whether I want to pursue those ideas further or developing them into tasks and projects is a separate process that I dedicate time for (1 - 2 hours every Monday and about 15 minutes every day). The more consistent we become at capturing ideas into a trusted system, the easier it is for our minds to let go of them so our working memory can be free to be dedicated to the task at hand. Working memory should be reserved for things we are actually working on, not trying to remember un-yet clarified things that you might want to do.

(3) What you can do at any given time depends on the context in which you find yourself: No matter how important it is, we still can’t send emails during most flights. Context represents the place, tool, person that we need to get a task done. Think of it this way: we always have a loooong list of everything that we want to do at home, at work, at church, while travelling etc. Seeing that list all the time is energy-draining and discouraging (hint: that list will never be empty). It’s also inefficient because we’ll have to scroll through a long list to find what we can do. Contexts are views into that long list that show us only what we can do given what resources are available to us at the given moment. I don’t want to see work tasks when I get home, similarly, I don’t want to see tasks that can only be done at home while I am at work or travelling abroad. I will share some of my contexts in the Command and Control post.

(4) Weekly review of your task list: Any human-made system left to itself, tends to decay. Think cars, aircraft, roads, etc those things need preventive maintenance; so does your productivity system. The weekly review is how you keep it up to date and relevant.

Here's a flowchart from the David Allen Company that illustrates GTD.

Book recommendations:

1. “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.
2. “Making It All Work” by David Allen.

Prioritisation: Differentiating the Rocks from the Gravel & Sand

One of the biggest productivity lessons I’ve learnt is the importance of allocating one’s resources appropriately. Not every task that demands our attention is born equal and so one of the biggest decisions we must make as professionals every day is which one of the 10,000 things that need our attention we should focus on. This idea is at the core of FranklinCovey’s 3rd of the Five Choices as illustrated below.

As much as I love ‘work’ work, there’s nothing at work that’s more important than attending to your sick daughter or spouse especially if you are all they’ve got. When I sit down to process all the thoughts that I’ve collected, I use the following frameworks to evaluate relative importance of tasks:

a) The time matrix: growth and progress come from tasks that are important but not urgent (Q2 in the illustration below). The danger here is that without proper planning and lots of discipline, we can spend all of our time on tasks that are important and urgent ( Q1), get burnt out and escape to Q4 to cool off.

b) The Pareto Principle or 80:20 Rule: Generally, 80% of the effects result from 20% of the causes. Thus 20% of our activities will yield 80% of the productive output. Those 20% high leverage tasks are often the important but not-urgent tasks of Q2 in the time matrix.

c) The Mojo 5S model: This one is from the work of Marshal Goldsmith. Here we evaluate the potential task on how meaningful (long term benefit) and how happy (short term satisfaction) accomplishing it will make us. I’ve found this model covers some activities that the time matrix doesn’t. We’d generally stay away from the SURVIVING quadrant, not over-indulge in the STIMULATING quadrant and spend more of our time in the SACRIFICING & SUCCEEDING quadrants.

Inbox Zero (IZ)

Email came as a blessing to the knowledge worker, then morphed into a cancer, giving birth to various social media and now threatens the very thing it helped initially. IZ is how I keep email in it’s place in my life - a servant of my productivity, not a master of it. You can read more about my IZ process here (How to LOVE your Email Inbox Again)

I'm eager to learn your own thoughts on the foundations of your productivity system. Please share with me!  #ProductivityHacks

Illustration Credits

1. Time matrix & Choice illustration from Franklin Covey
2. GTD workflow diagram from David Allen
3. 80/20 illustration from When 20 means 80… Pareto principle to support managers in tactical decisions.