Repeated Focus
There’s something about this productivity angle, something about its effectiveness and about how unappealing the idea is itself that makes me think this is the most important productivity topic that’s never been talked about.
People who know the GTD method also know that one of the most challenging parts of the system is the weekly review. The weekly review is a scheduled time once a week when you spend an hour reviewing your lists, projects, and goals, and reexamining and resetting your priorities for the following week.
The first time people do the weekly review, it’s usually smooth because they’ve just started using their GTD system. At that point, it’s easier to do the review because there’s more excitement about going through the process for the first time, and because their system doesn’t yet include all their commitments, so the review is lighter than it should be.
The hardest part about the review for me, though, was that it was the most challenging part of the entire GTD system to make into a habit. After thinking about it for a bit, I realized that one reason the weekly review was so difficult was that it’s the only part of the GTD system I have to decide to do.
Creating tasks and sorting through action items are part of the day-to-day. Creating new lists and projects, deferring items and adding them to lists becomes a reflex and a fun thing to do when you use the GTD system. But the weekly review has to be scheduled in advance.
Another thing about it, this idea which makes it such a pain, is that the part that comes easily, organizing and processing tasks, isn’t itself very productive at all. Organizing tasks doesn’t get them done, and it doesn’t help you decide from a longterm perspective which tasks are the most important either. The work that doesn’t have an explicit focus will usually be the least important.
That idea leads me to the conclusion that the best way to be productive is to focus. Decide to focus and repeat it as much as possible. Ruthlessly.
What We Do Wrong
Multitasking is the worst thing we do to our productivity, and we naturally drift towards it daily. Our focus is divided among the many tasks that come up throughout the day, and it decreases with each new task. One reason this is a dangerous habit is that it happens so many times throughout the day, every day, that we eventually get used to it. It becomes the way we do, and the way we think about work.
We also increase the risk of falling into this habit whenever we take action to “help” our productivity: we may buy a second monitor, new task management software, more notebooks, or start adding more email inboxes or calendars. All of these give us more things to focus on, and more rope to hang ourselves with.
Interruption
It’s the applications that keep us connected to others, designed with many features to alert us to new activity. We want to know when people are talking to us, asking us a question, or replying to a message we sent them. The opportunities are endless, and sometimes the ways these tools can interrupt our work are just as endless: Growl notices, Dock animations, system sounds, and icon badges.
Each of these interruptions is difficult to simply notice and ignore. We become drawn to them. Because what’s even harder than stopping yourself from opening your email when you see that alert is trying to get any productive work done, knowing that a message is waiting for you.
If focus takes time to build (say it takes you five minutes to get into a really good focus and into the “zone”), any single one of these interruptions will destroy your investment in an instant.
