This next-action conversation forces organizational clarity. Issues and details emerge that don’t show up until someone holds everyone’s “feet to the fire” about the physical-level reality of resource allocation. It’s a simple, practical discussion to foster, and one that can significantly stir the pot and identify weak links.
How Much Planning Do You Really Need to Do?
How much of this planning model do you really need to flesh out, and to what degree of detail? The simple answer is, as much as you need to get the project off your mind.
In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and the action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint.
Most projects, given my definition of a project as an outcome requiring more than one action, need no more than a listing of their outcome and next action for you to get them off your mind. You need a new stockbroker? You just have to call a friend for a recommendation. You want to set up a printer at home? You just need to surf the Web to check out different models and prices. I estimate that 80 percent of projects are of that nature. You’ll still be doing the full planning model on all of them, but only in your head, and just enough to figure out next actions and keep them going until they’re complete.
If the project is still on your mind, there’s more planning to do.
Another 15 percent or so of projects might require at least some external form of brainstorming—maybe a mind-map or a few notes in a word processor or PowerPoint file. That might be sufficient for planning meeting agendas, your vacation, or a speech to the local chamber of commerce.
A final 5 percent of projects might need the deliberate application of one or more of the five phases of the natural planning model. The model provides a practical recipe for unsticking things, resolving them, and moving them forward productively. Are you aware of a need for greater clarity, or greater action, on any of your projects? If so, using the model can often be the key to making effective progress.
Need More Clarity?
If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking
up
the natural planning scale. People are often very busy (
action
) but nonetheless experience confusion and a lack of clear direction. They need to pull out their plan, or create one (
organize
). If there’s a lack of clarity at the planning level, there’s probably a need for more
brainstorming
to generate a sufficient inventory of ideas to create trust in the plan. If the brainstorming session gets bogged down with fuzzy thinking, the focus should shift back to the
vision
of the outcome, ensuring that the reticular filter in the brain will open up to deliver the best how-to thinking. If the
outcome/ vision
is unclear, you must return to a clean analysis of why you’re engaged in the situation in the first place (
purpose
).
Need More to Be Happening?
If more action is what’s needed, you need to move
down
the model. There may be enthusiasm about the
purpose
of a project but at the same time some resistance to actually fleshing out what fulfilling it in the real world might look like. These days, the task of “improving quality of work life” may be on the radar for a manager, but often he won’t yet have defined a clear picture of the desired result. The thinking must go to the specifics of the
vision
. Again, ask yourself, “What would the outcome look like?”
Plans get you into things but you’ve got to work your way out.
—Will Rogers
If you’ve formulated an answer to that question, but things are still stuck, it’s probably time for you to grapple with some of the “how” issues and the operational details and perspectives (
brainstorming
). I often have clients who have inherited a relatively clearly articulated project, like “Implement the new performance-review system,” but who aren’t moving forward because they haven’t yet taken a few minutes to dump some ideas out about what that might entail.
If brainstorming gets hung up (and very often it does for more “blue sky” types), rigor may be required to do some evaluation of and decision-making about mission-critical deliverables that have to be handled (
organizing
). This is sometimes the case when an informal back-and-forth meeting that has generated lots of ideas ends without producing any decision about what actually needs to happen next on the project.
And if there
is
a plan, but the rubber still isn’t hitting the road like it should, someone needs to assess each component with the focus of “What’s the next action, and who’s got it?” One manager, who had taken over responsibility many months in advance for organizing a major annual conference, asked me how to prevent the crisis all-nighters her team had experienced near the deadline the previous year. When she produced an outline of the various pieces of the project she’d inherited, I asked, “Which pieces could actually be moved on right now?” After identifying half a dozen, we clarified the next action on each one. It was off and running.
In the last two chapters, I have covered the basic models of how to stay maximally productive and in control, with minimal effort, at the two most basic levels of our life and work: the actions we take and the projects we enter into that generate many of those actions.
You need no new skills to increase your productivity—just a new set of behaviors about when and where to apply them.
The fundamentals remain true—you must be responsible for collecting all your open loops, applying a front-end thought process to each of them, and managing the results with organization, review, and action.
For all those situations that you have any level of commitment to complete, there is a natural planning process that goes on to get you from here to there. Leveraging that five-phase model can often make the evolution easier, faster, and more productive.
These models are simple to understand and easy to implement. Applying them creates remarkable results. You need essentially no new skills—you already know how to write things down, clarify outcomes, decide next actions, put things into categories, review it all, and make intuitive choices.
Right now
you have the ability to focus on successful results, brainstorm, organize your thinking, and get moving on your next steps.
But just knowing how to do all of those things does not produce results. Merely having the
ability
to be highly productive, relaxed, and in control doesn’t make you that way. If you’re like most people, you can use a coach—someone to walk you step by step through the experience and provide some guideposts and handy tricks along the way, until your new operational style is elegantly embedded.
You’ll find that in part 2.
part 2
Practicing Stress-Free Productivity
4
Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools
IN PART 2
we’ll move from a conceptual framework and limited application of workflow mastery to full-scale implementation and best practices. Going through this program often gives people a level of relaxed control they may never have experienced before, but it usually requires the catalyst of step-by-step procedures to get there. To that end, I’ll provide a logical sequence of things to do, to make it as easy as possible for you to get on board and glean the most value from these techniques.
Implementation—Whether All-Out or Casual—Is a Lot About “Tricks”
If you’re not sure you’re committed to an all-out implementation of these methods, let me assure you that a lot of the value people get from this material is good “tricks.” Sometimes just one good trick can make it worthwhile to range through this information: I’ve had people tell me, for example, that the best thing they got from my two-day seminar was advice on setting up and using a tickler file. Tricks are for the not-so-smart, not-so-conscious part of us. To a great degree, the highest-performing people I know are those who have installed the best tricks in their lives. I know that’s true of me. The smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part responds to almost automatically, creating behavior that produces high-performance results. We trick ourselves into doing what we ought to be doing.
It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.
—O. H. Mowrer
For instance, if you’re a semiregular exerciser like me, you probably have your own little tricks to get you to exercise. My best trick is
costume—
the clothing I put on or take off. If I put on exercise gear, I’ll start to feel like exercising; if I don’t, I’m very likely to feel like doing something else.
Let’s look at an example of a real productivity trick. You’ve probably taken work home that you
had
to bring back the next day, right? It was mission-critical that you not forget it the next morning. So where did you put it the night before? Did you put it in front of the door, or on your keys, so you’d be sure to take it with you? For this you got a higher education? What a sophisticated piece of self-management technology you’ve installed in your life! But actually that’s just what it is. The smart part of you the night before knows that the not-so-smart part of you first thing in the morning may barely be conscious. “What’s this in front of the door!? Oh, that’s right, I’ve got to take this with me!”
What a class act. But really, it is. It’s a trick I call Put It in Front of the Door. For our purposes the “door” is going to be the door of your mind, not your house. But it’s the same idea.
If you were to take out your calendar right now and look closely at every single item for the next fourteen days, you’d probably come up with
at least
one “Ohthat-reminds-me-I-need-to ____.” If you then captured that value-added thought into some place that would trigger you to act, you’d feel better already, have a clearer head, and get more positive things done. It’s not rocket science, just a good trick.
You increase your productivity and creativity exponentially when you think about the right things at the right time and have the tools to capture your value-added thinking.
If you take out a clean sheet of paper right now, along with your favorite writing instrument, and for three minutes focus solely on the most awesome project on your mind, I guarantee you’ll have at least one “Oh, yeah, I need to consider___.” Then capture what shows up in your head on the piece of paper and put it where you might actually use the idea or information. You won’t be one ounce smarter than you were ten minutes ago, but you’ll have added value to your work and life.
Much of learning how to manage workflow in a “black belt” way is about laying out the gear and practicing the moves so that the requisite thinking happens more automatically and it’s a lot easier to get engaged in the game. The suggestions that follow about getting time, space, and tools in place are all trusted methods for making things happen at a terrific new level.
If you’re sincere about making a major leap forward in your personal management systems, I recommend that you pay close attention to the details and follow through on the suggestions provided below in their entirety. The whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. You’ll also discover that the execution of this program will produce real progress on real things that are going on in your life right now. We’ll get lots done that you want to get done, in new and efficient ways that may amaze you.
Setting Aside the Time
I recommend that you create a block of time to initialize this process and prepare a workstation with the appropriate space, furniture, and tools. If your space is properly set up and streamlined, it can reduce your unconscious resistance to dealing with your stuff and even make it
attractive
for you to sit down and crank through your input and your work. An ideal time frame for most people is two whole days, back to back. (Don’t be put off by that if you don’t have that long to spend, though: doing any of the activities I suggest will be useful, no matter how much or how little time you devote to them. Two days are not required to benefit from these techniques and principles—they will start to pay off almost instantly.) Implementing the full collection process can take up to six hours or more, and processing and deciding on actions for all the input you’ll want to externalize and capture into your system can easily take another eight hours. Of course you can also collect and process your stuff in chunks, but it’ll be much easier if you can tackle that front-end portion in one fell swoop.
The ideal time for me to work with a professional is on a weekend or holiday because the chance of outside disturbance is minimal then. If I work with someone on a typical workday, we first make sure that no meetings are scheduled and only emergency interruptions are allowed; phone calls are routed to voice-mail, or logged by secretaries for review and handling during a break. I don’t recommend using “after hours” for this work. It usually means seriously reduced horsepower and a big tendency to get caught up in “rabbit trails.”
4
For many of the executives I work with, holding the world back for two contiguous days is the hardest part of the whole process—the perceived necessity to be constantly available for meetings and communications when they’re “at work” is difficult for them to let go of. That’s why we often resort to weekends. If you work in an open cubicle or office, it will be even more of a challenge to isolate sufficient time blocks on a regular workday during office hours.
It’s not that the procedure itself is so “sacred”; it’s just that it takes a lot of psychic energy to collect and process such a large inventory of open loops, especially when they’ve been “open,” “undecided,” or “stuck” for way too long. Interruptions can double the time it takes to get through everything. If you can get to ground zero in one contained time period, it gives you a huge sense of control and accomplishment and frees up a reservoir of energy and creativity. Later on you can maintain your system in shorter spurts around and “between the lines” of you regular day.