Productivity

Just some notes. Eventually I'd like to turn this into a longish article to shortish book.

Intro

Most Writing is Crap

The internet is full of "# tricks for being more productive". They're mostly crap filled with things like "Make lists" and "don't procrastinate". These won't help.

One of the longest standing works is "Getting Things Done" not necessarily because it's great, but because it goes into depth. I don't even use the techniques in the book and I still read it every few years because it helps me think through what I should be doing.

Why I'm writing this

I'm not writing this for you, I'm writing it for me. I struggle with these things constantly. My successes only make me want to get better, and my failures make me want to refocus to get back on track. This document serves as my guide to myself on how to think about the problem.

My Approach

We're going to build up. I'm used to programming where the problem is broken down, then solved in pieces.

• Defining the problem
• Measuring the data
• Body
• Psychology
• Habits
• Systems
• Accounting
• Bringing it together

Unlike many other texts on the subject, I will not be prescribing a system to manage your productivity. Instead, I'll be guiding your consideration in what you need. My goal is to provide a way of thinking about productivity that will let you design and analyze systems that fit your life.

Defining the Problem

The first major challenge is that "Productivity" is a big, fuzzy, ill defined problem. And it means different things for different people.

We will break it into three components

• Efficiency
• Utilization
• Confidence

Before we dig into these too much there one thing to keep in mind. This break down is a model. It is a useful way to think about the problem, but like all models, it is not a perfect representation. It leaves out details and will occasionally break. It's a tool, so use it as a starting point and with discretion.

Efficiency

Efficiency is how long it takes you to do something. The tricky thing with defining and measuring efficiency is that it's really hard to get a benchmark. I try to spend 30 minutes each morning taking care of emails. Sometimes that's plenty of time, sometimes it's not. The number of emails and their complexity changes and that has no impact on my efficiency. But sometimes I'm distracted or I spend too much time trying to craft the perfect response instead of being satisfied with "good enough".

And changes in efficiency don't always mean the same thing. If you're not getting faster at something it may be that you've fallen into a rut or it may be that you've achieved the maximum efficiency you're going to for that task. We always want to look for ways to measure and improve efficiency, but not too much - the cost of additional efficiency can quickly outweigh the gains and turn into "yak shaving".

Utilization

This is "how many hour you spent wisely". Utilization can be tricky because you don't want to fill every minute of your day with tasks. And I would argue that spending time doing things you enjoy can still be good utilization. Which means utilization isn't "how many hours did I work" but "how did I do balancing how I spent my hours".

Confidence

I use this term more in the sense of statistics "confidence interval" that high-school-guidance-councilor "be confident in yourself". This how much confidence you have that you will have the information you need, when you need, a clear picture of what you should be doing, are capable of doing and will do something that is a good use of the time.

So rather than confidence in yourself, this is confidence in your system. And it shouldn't be 100%. Every system fail sometimes. You should have a reasonable confidence that your system will achieve good efficiency and utilization most of the time.

Body

I'll start here because the research on this topic is the clearest and it can have the greatest impact at the lowest cost.

Sleep

There are so many myths and bad beliefs around sleep. And almost everyone has bad habits. Fortunately, sleep is simple. That's not to say it isn't hard, it's just not complex.

You probably need 8 hours of sleep. It's not a hard rule, but it's a safe bet. There is common belief that getting by on less sleep or waking up earlier is somehow impressive or shows character. This is wrong and this is stupid. In particular, there is overwhelming research that less sleep can impair decision making and critical thinking. And the best part of that is it impairs the individuals ability to recognize their own reduced capacity. The point is, you'll be more productive with 16 waking hours and 8 good hours of sleep than any fool that tries to squeeze out 19 waking hours on a flimsy 5 hours of sleep.

If you ever have the opportunity (a week or two where you don't need to "get up"), a great experiment is to let your schedule drift and see how many hours of sleep you tend towards. Take note that your schedule may drift, but after a few days you'll find you're sleeping a consistent number of hours. Another approach is to get your schedule stable at 8 hours (or more) and try cutting back by 15 minutes once every week. You'll find a time that works for you. However, for the rest of this section, I will refer to 8-hours as definitive because it's simpler.

Falling Asleep

I have the great fortune of finding it easy to get to sleep. And I recognize that some people seriously struggle with insomnia. But there are a few things that can help.

I have done some research into this, both out of curiosity as well as to help my wife who often has trouble falling asleep. What I've found has helped her and even made it a bit easier for me to get to sleep. The first, most important thing - falling asleep can be a slow process. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. For some people, reaching stage-1 sleep can take half an hour and during stage-1 you will still be semi conscious, and that can last 10 minutes. What further complicates this is that stage-1 sleep can mess with your sense of time. This means it may feel like you're laying awake for hours when in reality, you're half asleep for less than 40 minutes. Best thing to do is stick it out.

But that's only half the battle. The other problem is that being locked in your own mind can be rough. It's easy to start worrying, start planning or anything else that will keep you awake. There's no silver bullet for this, but there are a lot of techniques. Try a few and one should work, if you exhaust my list, there are others, try those.

• Word Games: These don't work for me, but they work for my wife. There are lots of variations, but one example is "find a category and a word that belongs to that category so the last letter of the category is the first letter of the word", an answer would be "Food:Date".
• Counting breaths: this works best for me, I focus on slowing my breath down as much as is still comfortable and count my breaths down from 100. I almost never make it down to 1.
• Clear your mind: this is difficult but can actually be a lot of fun. Try to clear your mind of any thought. When I do this I start by focusing on the concept of nothing, then on nothing at all.
• Audio books: I like to fall asleep listening to an audio book (with an auto-off timer). This works particularly well with books I like that I've gone through before.

Waking Up

This is still a tough one for me. I am not a morning person. However, I've learned a few things that help.

The biggest help has been doing away with majestic notion of waking up, springing from bed with gusto to take on the day. I've conceded to reality. Instead, when my alarm goes off, my goal is to get on my phone and start reading my RSS feed. That works for me, but any low energy entertainment you can do half asleep with out getting up will work. I've also used video games in the past. A few minutes of that and I'm actually ready to get up.

Exercise

This one consistently shocks me at how important it is. Intellectually I know I need to exercise. But sometimes, for one reason or another, it falls by the wayside. When I start again, I am always amazed at how quickly I feel better and increase my productivity. Now, when I start seeing my productivity slip, this is always the first thing I look to. If I haven't been exercising regularly, I make it a priority, if I have been, I try to push myself a little harder for a few days.

I've also found that moving exercise earlier in the day makes waking up easier. I've gone through this a few time. At first, I'm too groggy to exercise shortly after waking up. It may take an hour or two before I'm awake enough. But if I stick with it, after a few weeks I'm ready to exercise within 30 minutes of waking up. This also makes waking up easier and "sharper".

Intensity

This is the good news; you don't need much to make a big difference. I used to bike, and I found as little as 20 minutes of moderate biking a day made all the difference. For a while I was doing high intensity running. Too be fair, that was awful, but I could get in a solid work out in about 10 minutes. Lately I've been focusing more on body weight training, and I can get a good work out in 15 minutes.

There's no right and not a lot of wrong. Don't do anything that will hurt you, and get enough exercise that you get a boost to productivity (and can fall asleep). Try different things. It's tempting to be able to say you've done something for a long time, but that's not inherently a good thing. Variety can be just as good. Finding what works is the only metric that actually matters.

Finally, improving is good - good for your health, probably good for productivity. But be careful. It's easy to increase too fast. And if your workout gets too intense, it can be hard to maintain. Remember that it's more important to do something today than to beat your last metric.

Psychology

Let's start here - when trying to be productive, pretend that there is no such thing as "will". If you try to will yourself to procrastinate less, you will fail. If you're going to will yourself out of bed, you're going to oversleep.

What we will treat as very real is "ego depletion" or "cognitive energy". It's kind of like will-power in that more cognitive energy will let you take on scarier tasks. But where it's different is that you can't summon cognitive energy. At any point in time, you have some amount and you need to decide how to invest it. Also, you can invest in future cognitive energy.

Correlation and Causation

The biggest weapon in our arsenal is correlation. Try something, see if there's a correlation to increased productivity. It's often said that correlation is not causation, but we'll take a Bayesian approach and say correlation is enough to assume causation, until we have stronger data that contradicts that.

Want-to-do vs Want-to-have-done vs Want-to-have-not-done

English has a Sapir-Whorf trap, we muddle together present and future tense. So when I say "I want to clean the garage", it's not really clear if I want to go do that now, or if it's something I'll eventually do, maybe years from now. I will use the terms want-to-do and want-to-have-done for things I want to do now and things I want to do someday respectively.

What saps cognitive energy are the thing we want-to-have-done but don't want-to-do.

Units Matter

I like to think in hours and work in blocks of 10 minutes. I used to think in quarters of a day - I spend 1 quarter asleep, 2 quarters working and 1 quarter doing what I want. The problem I ran into was it was too easy to get derailed. If I was going to spend 4 hours working on some piece of code and I was interrupted, it was cognitively hard for me to get back to work because I knew I wouldn't finish.

Now I think in hours because even if I completely waste an hour, I can set my sights on the next one. I get a fresh start every 60 minutes. And that's important because I come up short sometimes.

Blocks of 10 minutes make it easy to shuffle things around when something comes up. I was going to spend an hour working on something before bed, but something came up and ate 20 minutes, fine I can find something that will take 4 blocks or less.

Systems

Systems are just sets of rules. At this point, you need to start thinking about "your system". I don't believe there is any one right way to do things. What works for me probably won't work for you. Instead, we'll look at a few things to consider and a few possible solutions. Then you can start building your own system.

Keep in mind the goals of a system.

1. If there's someplace you should be, you know with enough time to take any necessary preparations (such as travel)
2. You can quickly make a decision about the best use of your time, given your current circumstances (location, resource and energy)
3. You can objectively review the system to evaluate potential improvements
4. You can forecast well enough to confidently make or reject commitments

Simple is Good, Iteration is Better

We have natural tendency when designing a system to over design. It's fun to add bells and whistles. But in day-to-day operation, maintaining those extra features can be unwieldy. When designing a system, particularly when starting out, choose the simplest thing that won't clearly fail immediately.

The next step is to iterate. Let things fail a little. This will give you useful information. Only when you feel a problem has become significant, modify the system to fix it. And make sure the fix is an overall gain. It can be annoying to type the same thing over and over, and a tempting solution is to use abbreviations. But it only takes a few abbreviations to go from a clear, easy to read system to complete gibberish. And the cognitive load of deciphering what you meant in the first place isn't worth the few seconds gained typing.

For most of this document, I try to not advise specific tools or systems, but I will break that here. If you're just starting out, or looking to start over. Get a 3 ring binder, a bunch of loose leaf paper and a few tabs. Everything goes in there. You'll quickly see that you need to break things up into multiple lists, you may quickly decide to switch over to an online calendar, the binder will be overflowing with other papers. These are all ok. Dealing with how it fails is good and the binder is a great starting medium because it's quick to setup and quick to change how you're using it.

After a few weeks with the binder, you'll have a good idea of what you really need. This will be a big help in choosing and designing your system components

System Overload

This is a principle that is true of almost all systems, not just productivity. If a system is working well, it's load tends to increase. If there's nothing to balance that load, it will increase until the system breaks, or reaches the average of the other systems it competes with. That's a little abstract, so let's look at a concrete example.

Let's say Bob is disorganized. He wants to make an improvement. So he starts a simple To-Do list. For a few days, it works wonderfully. He's on top of things, he finishes one task picks another off the list and gets back to work. As his confidence in the list grows, he adds more things to it. Bigger things (repaint garage), abstract things (plan retirement) and things with low immediate priority (plan a vacation). The list gets long and scary. It's no longer a source of flow, but a nightmarish hellscape of personal shortcomings. So Bob stops using it.

This problem can show up in many systems. There are also many solutions. In general they all follow a few patterns. Most systems have a capacity. For a to-do list, it's how many things you can quickly scan (probably 15-20). When designing a system, figure out what it's capacity is. Of course the obvious problem with that is everyone has way more than 15-20 things "to-do". This is generally resolved with layering. Continuing with to-do lists, you may have one list for today, one list for this week and a backlog list. Some systems have even more layers (see 43 Folders). The backlog list may be big and cumbersome, but you'll only need to scan it once a week. And the weekly list would still be too long to be usable, but you'd only be scanning that once a day. Now the daily list is usable.

The other issue with capacity is you always want some to spare. Systems tend to start lagging when they get near capacity. For example, a heuristic for organizing storage is "always maintain 30% available storage". It's a heuristic not a rule, so when you notice you're getting close to (or have dropped below) 30% free space, schedule some time to either clear out some space or expand. This should be true of all systems. Figure out not just the maximum capacity, but the "preferred operating capacity". A to-do list may work fine with 20 items, but it may work much better with 10.

To be clear, this is only an example. You need to find what works for you. But when designing system components (to-do lists, calendars, archives) consider their maximum capacity, operating capacity and layering.

Layers and Evaluation

Rather than having "A System", it's better to have a few smaller systems. But there should be one central point of organization. This central point should not be overloaded.

Life is not static and a system that works well for any length of time will stop working someday. Catching it quickly when changes are necessary and finding the right changes to make is crucial. Make sure to evaluate how you're doing and adapt. There's to purity and no value in sticking to something that used to work, or works for someone else.

Data

When it comes down to it any system is about tracking data.

Events

These are what typically go on a calendar. They are probably the easiest thing to organize. I define an event as having a fairly specific time. Often there's a very specific place. Any system should also account for any steps necessary to prepare and transportation.

Tasks

These are the bulk of what we're trying to order. Tasks can be incredibly complex. So it's important to consider what information is actually worth tracking and using.

• Priority: how important is this
• Criticallity: how time sensitive is this
• Category: Often things like work, home, school
• Requirements: Where do you need to be or what do you need to accomplish this
• Time: How long will this take
• Start: When is the earliest you can work on this
• End: when is this due, or the latest you can work on it

Personally, I track priority, time (I break it down into 'points' where 1 point = 10 minutes), and I combine category and requirements, often just using a single label for "Out" meaning any errands.

Ticklers

A special category of task is a "tickler". This is a task that you can't work on until some date. Some people prefer to keep these in a task system that can handle such a thing, other prefer to keep them on a calendar.

Reference

Any information that needs to be kept, but has no further action is reference.

Notebooks

Often, reference material is stored in notebooks. Many of us carry these with us. It's tempting to limit a notebook to a subject - I did this for years. But I've become convinced that indexing is a better approach. Keep a small number of active notebooks (I have one by my bed, one large one in my backpack and a small one in my coat pocket). Leave a few blank pages at the beginning to keep an index. As you go, fill in page numbers and add a title for each page. Then write the title in the index. I've been doing this for a few years and its kept my notes well organized.

Storage

Any physical items that need to be kept are storage. A good rule is that a storage system should have 1st order retrievability - you should be able to get to anything stored without needing to move other things out of the way. It's also generally good to shoot for 25% empty storage. This helps with first order retrievability and between passing the 25% mark and actually finding time to clean out or expand, you probably won't run out of storage.

Accounting

Once you have a system in mind, make sure you have a way of accounting.

Units

The most important key here is to have some "units" of productivity. For me, I assign every task a point value. One point is equal to ten minutes, if it's something I enjoy, I may assign 2 points to a 30 minute task, and if it's something I strongly dislike, I may assign 6 points to a 40 minute task.

How you actually do this is unimportant. What is important is that you can use the units for projection and comparison. Being able to look at the next few days and project what you can and cannot accomplish is vital not only to being productive but avoiding unnecessary stress. Being able to compare two weeks and spot an increase or decrease in productivity is crucial.

Bringing it Together

I've tried to avoid advocating for a particular system. Instead, I've attempted to get you thinking about what you need

Balance

Find the right balance for you. Figure out what you will be happy to do and be happy to have done.