Today on ProductivityCast we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done so you can review and reflect, and then get back to getting things done better. It’s halfway through the year and so it’s a good time to discuss the mid-year review. A mid-year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take the time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause, step back, and gain clarity on where we stand in relation to our aspirations and how we can make the most of the second half of the year.

Correction: Ray said “weekly review” at the start of the episode when he actually meant “mid-year review.”

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In this Cast | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Reticular activating system (RAS)

The biggest myths about emotions, debunked | Lisa Feldman Barrett

Antifragility

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:18
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:26
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, on ProductivityCast, we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done for a bit, so we can review and reflect. And what I mean by that is that we’re halfway through the year. And this is a really good time for us to discuss the mid year review. A mid year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and really recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause the back and gain clarity, gain perspective on where we stand in relationship to our aspirations, and how we can make the most of the second half of our calendar year. So let’s talk today about what the [mid-year] review is to each of us on because it may be different. We’ll then talk a little bit about why why someone should do a mid year review. And perhaps why not, I mean, there may be some folks who don’t do it, and therefore giving some perspective there. And then we’ll talk about some of the elements of our own media reviews. And perhaps how you can get started developing your own video review. If you haven’t done one before, we’re just kicking the tires, and making your mid year review better. So let’s talk first about what is a mid year review. I kind of gave a definition in our preamble. But if you want to give some further color to it, what do you think the video review is to you?

Augusto Pinaud 1:53
Okay, we all have, you know, our reticular system activated by the means is our brain is like a scanner. And he’s paying attention to what we what we do what we are down, we want to know what direction we’re taking. If you don’t set that scanner in any direction, well, it doesn’t matter, it will scan something, but is that Samsung? What do you want. One of the things that I believe is important is to track that word did you want to go on it is still something that is valid that is interesting is there is nothing wrong in to change the direction. What is wrong is to in my perspective, is to walk aimlessly and just moving and seeing what is happening. So I have been personally on truck and off truck for both. And in my experience on truck is way more fun. So that’s part of the reason why I conduct this MC gear reviews and why I work with my clients, the clients that I have coached in to do this review and why I believe is very, very important. It is very simple to lose track. But it’s also easy to get back on it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14
As a sidestep just to clarify for some folks, what Lisa was talking about was the reticular activating system. And so this is a neural network in in our brain, right we have a neural network. And the RAS is responsible for a wide variety of things. And some of those things, of course, are our ability to identify patterns of things. It also regulates our wakefulness, it regulates our ability to basically have a consciousness, motivation, all kinds of other things. It’s also the thing that identifies our fight or flight response or flight flight freeze response. And it’s really how we perceive the world. So a lot of that RAS is activated, those network of neurons are really activated when we’re trying to identify patterns of things. So you know, when we see something that shaped like a lion, moving toward us, whether it’s a lion or not, our RAS kicks in, and we start to respond from a biological perspective, right, we prepare for fight or flight, because of our mind, surfacing those stimuli, we get activated for preparation for whatever that thing is. So just want to make sure folks are kind of on the same page when when we talk about the RAS,

Art Gelwicks 4:22
the mid year review, in my estimation is one of those things that becomes a necessary evil for many people because that they get so involved in the work and doing the work, that they haven’t got a running time period, they may not even do weekly reviews of going through and determining where they stand and where things are. I also think it’s a bigger review though. It’s the it’s the review that determines Are you on course, it’s not for minor course adjustments, but is your destination the correct destination. So for me, it’s always a matter of not only of determining Are you making progress on the goals that you’ve set Get out. But it’s an opportunity to say, okay, based on where the world stands right now, where my world stands right now, are those the right goals? Are those the opportunities that I want to be pursuing are those the objectives that I need to have at this point in time. That’s not something you want to do on a weekly basis, because you’ll never get out of the analysis mode. But this is very much in my mind, the opportunity to do a strategic analysis of what your goals and objectives are.

Francis Wade 5:30
And I’d be the contrarian here, or the devil’s advocate. For a change,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:36
surprise, surprise,

Art Gelwicks 5:39
that’s my job.

Francis Wade 5:40
I’m taking art putting on our chat for a while, I don’t do a video review. And I know that the logical that I should do one. But here’s why. I have three kinds of interests in the in our business. And we cover three web three conferences per year, one in productivity, the other one in strategy and another one in Caribbean HR. And they they go from March, March, June, and September. And we have our strategic plan for each one. And we gotten into the practice of updating the strategic plan after each conference. So we’re, we don’t quite review them because they don’t follow the calendar. But we do three rounds of strategic planning each year, to focus on each business. Invariably, for example, the strategic planning conference is coming up this week, probably next week, or the week after, we’ll do a review, or we’ll do a new plan for the next year. But we’ll also review the other plans. So we don’t really have a media review. receipts, not a not, not the way that you traditionally think of it, we we do forward planning for each each of the three businesses, so to speak, or interests. And in that we tend to cover the wall cannibal overlook, look over the wall, all three are doing. So not really. But in a way, I guess something similar gets done. This doesn’t follow the calendar, that’s for sure,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:21
I’ll offer a different perspective here, which is not counter to what Francis is talking about. But more from, from my perspective, I am a natural planner. So I could plan all the time, all the all the ways and do nothing, right? That would be my natural state of being. And I recognize that very early on in my life. And I realized that I just love planning, I love the idea of pulling out a Gantt chart, I love sitting down with a mind map and just planning all day long. And that’s not how things get done, right. So you have to step away from that planning activity or, or, if you’re like me, you have to step away from that to be able to get things done. But that also means that you need to reward yourself for doing the things. And for me having these reviews, both the weekly review and larger reviews gives me the opportunity to it’s kind of a reward for doing the work, because my natural desire is to actually just do the planning, right, I want to do the planning, and I want to hand it off to somebody else to be like, You go handle those details, right. But because I’ve done the work, now I get to sit back and actually do the planning. And that’s my reward. So the mid year review specifically, is typically if I’m having a good year, and things are going the way they should be. And then the media review is is really this rewarding space. For me. It’s a place where I can enjoy the fruits of what I’ve worked on. And so often, those of you who are listening, don’t give yourself enough credit for the work that you’re doing. And we need to step back and just give ourselves a little bit of credit for what we’re doing. And I feel like the midterm review is one of those things like throw yourself a little party and have a great time with it because you’ve worked hard for six months. And I know you’re working hard. And if you aren’t working hard, this is a really good opportunity to kind of set yourself up for the next six months to work really hard so that you when you get to the next mid year review or the end of your review so to speak, you can you can celebrate, right this gives you that anchor in the sand to be able to to know that you’ve had a chunk of time, whether you’re following the 12 week year and you’re going based on those kinds of sprints, or you’re doing some larger sprints like I am I do I do pretty much the the 12 week 13 week year kind of concept. I call them sprints and I like those kinds of reviews where I’m I have that timeframe set aside to basically pause, reflect, appreciate the work that I’ve done and planned for the future. The mid year review is that next level of of celebration in a way it’s a milestone for me and my year and it really does help me as a plant Enter, sit back and feel good in some way, shape or form, it’s actually a, it’s a, it’s a rewarding practice for me. And it may be for you as well. Let’s talk about why different than Francis, where you have a cadence, where you’re where your year is structured in such a way that allows you to plan along the way, why should someone do a mid year review? Why should someone not do a mid year review. And I will start off with the with the primary type of person who probably doesn’t need a mid year review. And those are folks who have highly structured calendar years. And so this ends up being something where you have a structured set of reviews that are that are forced upon you. And therefore adding another personal review may be just a little bit too much. If you are doing quarterly reviews. And in essence, your mid year review falls on obviously a quarter, you’re just basically doing double the work. So if you feel comfortable with the fact that your quarterly review is basically standing in for your mid year review, then you don’t need to do a separate mid year review from the quarterly review, necessarily, right. And that’s going to differ per person. So you know, your results may vary here, but I just don’t think that I have clients who will come and say, Okay, well, I’ve done my Quarterly Review, now I’m going to do my video review. And I feel like this should be one in the same, I don’t feel like you should try to force yourself to do just a quarter and then also a mid year at the same time. That is you can do them at the same time, you can just bring those together. For folks where this may be overwhelming that you’re looking at too much material at once. This can, this can be something that’s just very overwhelming to the system. And therefore you would avoid it and therefore not do as well a review that may be a problem for some folks. So you may want to break that review up into into separate constituent parts by life domain, so that it’s not as onerous for you as as as it as it can be.

Francis Wade 12:02
But for the ones that I do, it’s it’s, well, as I said, don’t quite do them. But But whenever I sit down to do a, I wouldn’t call it a review. And I think this is one of the things that I I recommend to people when they when that comes out of there come from GTD and come from the world of doing a weekly review and have that as their background. There is no planning step in the weekly review, which is to me is a huge, huge missing. The point of sitting down is not just to look back, it’s to look forward. So a big part of the review, so to speak, is to readjust, make new plans, set new targets, incorporate lessons learned into what you’re doing going forward. And to me that’s the point is what’s coming next The point is not what just happened. The main point is what’s coming next. So the orientation really is towards what do I need to fix, change, adjust. Add in takeouts where my were my goals are unrealistic. Where do they need to be? Or where were they not ambitious enough where they need to scale up? So it’s a it’s a phase change, you’re looking to see do I do I make a phase change at this point, based on my understanding of where I am, versus where I thought I wanted to be or where I wanted to be. So for me, it’s looking forward, that’s a huge part of the activity. And for me,

Art Gelwicks 13:36
situations change. And a lot of times the change is not under your control. It’s an external influence that has come into the equation. And the major media review is the opportunity to look at those changes that affect multiple parts of whatever you’re doing. A lot of times we’ll be looking at, okay, how does this affect this project? How does this affect that project? But it could be how does this affect me as a whole? How does this affect my availability? My my approach to my work? Could it be that significant of a change. And when you’re dealing with things at that altitude, it’s sometimes it’s difficult to look at them, or to not look at them at the individual project level, because then you start to solve the problem right away. I think mid year review is one of those opportunities to not solve problems, but identify problems to to recognize, as you mentioned earlier, recognize the successful things that you’ve done and say can I do them again? Can I reproduce this or improve my other operations? But even more so to be able to go through and say, Okay, this is a potential issue. Maybe this is an issue that is coming, rather than has already been here. And now it’s starting to show up on the horizon. If you wait to a yearly review, to address those kinds of things. That’s often too late. You have not given yourself the opportunity to do Gaston, I always have this mental image of the captain of the Titanic. The equivalency of that yearly review would be seeing the iceberg and actually being able to avoid it. So knowing that you have an opportunity to say, oh, there’s an iceberg, maybe we should change direction, rather than waiting until it’s too late. And sometimes there aren’t. And you go through and you have that validation to say, yep, everything’s on course. Everything’s headed the direction it should be. I’m making the progress I should be, all’s right with the world and continue on. But this is this is that checkpoint? And I don’t think we do ourselves a favor, by not having, at a minimum this mid year. But having frequent checkpoints to say, okay, am I on target, get your head out of the work and look around and make sure you’re driving in the right direction.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:57
One thing that I think comes up as a thought, from what you’re talking about art is the importance of making decisions from a place of call it abundance from a place of calm and collected temperament. The reality is, is that when you come across a problem, like what you’re talking about, right, like something’s off course, there’s an iceberg, and you’re, you know, you’re very close to it. Maybe you know, the impact is imminent, setting aside some, like safe space for yourself, to think that through like, in the right circumstance, where there wasn’t this problem, how would I respond? If I had all the resources in the world? How would I respond, and then kind of working toward reality, as opposed to being in that? Oh, my gosh, I’ve got the last dollar in the bank, what do I do now? Right? The, that’s not the best place to make decisions from, right. And it kind of goes back to my, whenever I have a new business that I’m dealing with, I always educate the small business owner, that they should get a home equity line, they should get a credit line with their bank, they should do all of the stuff for getting good credit available, when they don’t need it, right? Because that’s when your credit score is going to be your best. It’s when the business doesn’t have any debt. It’s when the business is got the mess, most energy, right, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re starting your business, you’re excited, everybody is excited about the business, then you set that line of credit aside, right, and you have it for a rainy day. Right. That’s why you you do this stuff up front. And that’s the kind of expansive abundance position that you want to be in when you’re doing your mid year review. And I feel like that’s the kind of space and place where you want to make good decisions so that when stuff hits the fan, you’re able to step back and say, You know what, I had a plan in place. Right? And this is that was the ideal, right? Now, let’s work from that ideal to what is reality. But we’re making better decisions, because we’re not looking at it purely from crisis mode. And the bottom of the barrel, right? We’re looking at it from some some better perspective, some some better positioning,

Augusto Pinaud 18:02
really was was was what you said, I think that’s what it needs. If you think right now, okay, we’re going to be driving from the south to the north of your country, doesn’t matter. What is your country? Okay? Unless you will have done that drive every week. Do you need a map? Do you need to check? Hey, are we really interactive? We missed the exit. And it’s exactly the same thing you asked. Francis was saying, okay, hey, we drive this in this order. So we always drive in this order that may require a different Chuck, but I instead maybe have been every six months, probably what happened on what was Francis was describing is that at the end of every of this conference comes an evaluation period, what we did, right, why we did wrong, what we need to change or evolve for the next one, and what we can add for the next one. So it’s not that he’s not doing the review is doing a review in a different way. In this case, in the case of the people who should do this review, as you were saying, Ray, you do it every 12 week for 12 weeks, that works perfectly fine. Okay, that you go every quarter. That’s what 13 weeks is, in case you’re not aware of that is every 13 weeks, it’s a quarter that works fine. If you think on corporations, many corporations go and do that quarterly review where we are. What we tend not to do is to do it in our personal life. And because of that, sometimes we make big things that change. So my kids, I have two little kids still so they just finished school. And well. Can we go business usual? Technically yes. Except that my daughter is now going to high school. My son, it’s going now to fifth grade. That Technically for us is the same. But for him, it’s not now he’s going to be treated as a bigger kid. He’s going to get a Chromebook that he needs to be responsible. He and ultimately, I will be responsible. Let’s be honest. So that means great. Is his backpack. Okay to carry a Chromebook? And the answer is no by well, because his backpack to keep backpack? So do we need to consider those things or as hardware sitting or wait until that iceberg hit us again, and we need to use the insurance write a check for the new Chromebook, whatever it is, either way, is fine. I, I always said you don’t do productivity for the press and you. You do productivity for the future. You you do all these reviews, not for the new right now that you’re in right now is where it is. You are doing these six months review? What are the review? For that future self? What can you do today, evaluate today, and review today that will make the life of that future do better, or easier, or more complete. And data for me is the recent of these reviews, doesn’t matter if you do them mid year, or you do them every quarter, this thing is you need at some point to disconnect. Okay, go to somewhere that is not your office and look into all these aspects forward. Because if you don’t, then you’re always on reactive mode, you’re always responding to fire, you’re always responding to the emergencies instead of work into avoiding them to happen. And that, for me is a big power of all these things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:02
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to sit down and watch a few YouTube videos that were in my watch later list. And it’s voluminous, I don’t consider it an injury, I just collect them in there and watch the whenever I have time. And one of the things that I came across was this interesting video, and I’ll put it I’ll put this in the show notes. If I if I find it. The idea was it was talking about emotions and some of the myths about emotions. And one of the key elements that came out of this particular psychologists perspective was that a we curate the present moment, for our ability to have future emotions that resonate with us in a positive way, I may be mischaracterizing her in just a little bit. But the essence of what I got from it was that, you know, our, our history, or maybe childhood trauma, our childhood experiences, our the relations that we had, as as children, those inform our current and present day emotional landscape. And we can change that by virtue of the by the present moment for our future self. And so we have to consistently think about how we keep well how we curate the present moment, how we curate our present emotional life, so that our future emotional life is better, we would hope and what Augusto is talking about here really touches on that that point a lot, which is that we are benefiting our future self by by basically taking this time now to birth this, this future reality, right, we don’t have very much control over the future. We have control maybe over the next few minutes of our lives. And we what we do in the next few minutes determines what happens in the next few hours. And the next few days, the next few months, and the next few years. So what can we do right now to curate a good life. Right, the good life so to speak, in and for the future. And I think I think that really is an important note here to make when we think about something like a media review. Alright, let’s talk about how we might manifest our media reviews or how what elements of our own media reviews are really key or core components of it.

Francis Wade 24:09
I want my media reviews to be like a my weekly cup of coffee. My my most productive Fun Day is at my desk. Our Saturdays when I have my weepy cup. And as a non coffee drinker and apparently I’m and I’m sensitive to coffee eight. By virtue of that, we want to have that cup. I can work until about 8:30pm 9pm and not feel a thing. You know, I could I could just go go go might take a little nap during the day but I you know, it’s a long day, but it doesn’t feel like feels great. As someone who likes to accomplish a whole lot. I like the feeling of getting a lot accomplished because I’m focused. I don’t have interruptions. The copy goes whatever it does, and I feel good all day. I write up the teleport where I hit the hit the sack, I’m feeling like, wow, that was a great day, I would want my weekly review to be like that. It’s not, it’s not the word review kind of puts me to sleep a little bit. For me, it will be more of an acceleration, my semi annual review. But my my review had wanted to be like a, like a cup of coffee in the sense that it accelerates the rest of the year. So I’m not doing it for the review, I’m doing it for the acceleration, the Jumpstart. So I would, I would, if I were to do one on a regular basis, I would rename it the the acceleration meeting or the the propeller meeting or something that would give me you know, indicate that really what I’m looking for is what Augustus talked about, which is, I’m looking to bring something into the future that if I don’t have this meeting that I couldn’t bring, so part of that includes the review, but the review is not the point. Hence, my wanting to rename it to something more, more, more accurate or more compelling in terms of the actual outcome, because you could really, you know, you could very well review the the last six months and come away with nothing except either a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of failure, you could just stop in a review and stop if you thought that was the point. But I prefer to think of the point as this next level of accomplishment, this is exciting, something that’s about to start. And the six month, six months review is kind of like the what is kind of like the point where this second start, second half of the year starts. And where I bring all this new stuff into it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:46
I think terminology for purposes of it being both motivating and exciting is important. I think that you know if you need to call it the. So I’ve I have a dear friend who she didn’t like the term weekly review. And so she just calls it the weekly view. Right. And so she she wants to look ahead, and so she calls it the weekly view, I think I think that makes a lot of sense. And so if you want to call this your mid year planning session, you know, mid year acceleration session, whatever you want to call it, I think that makes a lot of sense to make it what you want. Now, of course, I consider any review something that is looking at the past in order to inform my future, I embrace the term review. That doesn’t mean that you do and that’s okay. So I very much hear what Francis is talking about, name it, whatever you need to name it, in order for you to know that it’s the right thing for you.

Augusto Pinaud 27:34
What is important is that it’s done, not what you call it, I agree,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:38
what are some other core elements of the Week, the weekly, the mid year review, and we can we can go from there. So I’ll I’ll just name some of the big elements. For me. I always try to make sure that my my video review contains some level of a goals evaluation. And so I want to look at each of the goals and determine that the goals are still the goals that they should be. So just thinking through, what are the goals that I have set out for this year? Or the next few years, right? Because I’m looking at it on a higher horizon here when we’re talking about goals. But then I’m looking at my projects, and those are going to be within the year to two years. And so I’m looking at both my projects and my goals. And I’m just doing that kind of kicking the tires on touching base with each of these things, do they need to be changed? Right? Do I need to reevaluate whether or not I’m going to reach one of those goals? And something that I’m not as good at? And I would like to get better at is not? When I when I reevaluate those goals to communicate that to stakeholders, right? It’s just making sure that folks know that I’ve, I’ve re evaluated, I’ve chosen not to do it. And many times, I’m not sharing that with other people, or whatever that might be, you know, just feelings of, of not being as productive as I want it to be in that particular year, or whatever it might be. And I’ll just like set it aside. And I think it’s better for us to just like in a good GTD practice for those of you who are GTD practitioners, right? It’s your need to renegotiate and then communicate, right? So you need to make sure that if you’re going to renegotiate a commitment that you’re going to let people know about that. I think that happens on the higher horizons as well happening on the projects. And the bowls level, I think really does help, especially if you have a spouse or partner, and you want to make sure that they’re on the same page as it relates to like, Okay, you gotta buy the house next year. And then you decided, well, no, I’m not going to, that’s probably something you should talk about with your spouse or partner, if you’ve made that internal decision, and you haven’t quite shared. So things of that nature. I like to look at performance metrics. And so these performance metrics can be as simple or as complex as you’d like them to be. I take things like the number of captures that I since I can actually track the number of captures I make throughout the year. I then track how many actions I complete. And while those are not the same thing, right? The number of things that come in, many of those get deleted, but the number of actions I complete are also a unit EAC metric. And so I look at those in comparison. So if I’m capturing 100 things a week, and I’m completing 15 to 20 of those next actions on my list, is that the right balance, and then I can look at that kind of on a broader level, on the mid year level, that semi annual review, I can say, Okay, well, I’ve collected 3000 items in the course of six months, that’s not unusual for me, I’m capturing throughout the day, and I’ve completed roughly about six or 700 next actions than I can, I can understand that I’m on track, like, that’s a good, that’s a good ratio for me to know that I’m moving toward the things that need to get done in my world, even not knowing the substance of the items, just the numbers can tell me that I’m on track. And that’s, that’s an important thing for me, you need to figure out what that is for you. Right? It could be the number of projects completed, it could be the number of events that you’ve hosted, or the number of meetings that you’ve attended, or reducing that number of meetings you’ve attended, which will then increase your discretionary time, and therefore, your productivity, right, like we need to, we need to understand some of these numbers. And we have the data now we have what it’s like all there, you know, unless you are completely bullet journaling on paper, and you keep a calendar in the bullet journal, and you have no data whatsoever, somebody else probably has that data systems about you. And therefore you could probably get that data and understand yourself better. So some level of performance metrics can be really useful. This is not all of them. But I’ll close on my whole section with just it’s, this is a really good time. Just like how David Allen talks about in your weekly review, this is a time to to look at your various tools and make sure they’re in good working order, I have a tendency to not do that during my weekly review, because I think it’s just too often that you’re that you’re tweaking and trying to play around with your different tools. And so I like to do during my semi annual review, or the mid year review, is this notion of looking at my systems, my daily routine and my tools and spending that time to hone them, right, like, Okay, I have this new webcam, and it’s just I’m constantly frustrated by a couple things about it, right? So how do I, how do I optimize my usage of it, you know, like, Okay, I need to make sure that I maybe get another webcam, or maybe I just need to do some tweaking of this webcam so that it’s consistently in the right place, and whatever, I need to maybe learn how to use the webcam better, right? Those, there’s a lot of moving parts to this webcam. And so I just need to learn how to how to learn, you know, this becomes a project, right, I’m gonna capture that, and it’s going to become a project, learn how to use the webcam better. And now now that I knew all the features, now my system is going to be better, because I’m going to be more, I’m going to be less fragile, right, I’m going to be more anti fragile when it comes to operating the webcam in the heat of my day. And so these are the times where we can look at it and say, you know, what, actually, I’ve been, you know, trying to, you know, do these things in my morning routine, and they just don’t flow together, how can I just swap a few things around so that I do them in a better order, and therefore it creates a little less friction for me, and a little less friction, maybe for spouse, partner, the dog, cat, whatever. And so everybody can kind of have a more, you know, fluid day, because, you know, those kinds of just changing, like when you brush your teeth in the morning can be a huge change to your routine, but it can also be a huge benefit. Because it’s like, okay, you’re taking that, you know, five, six minutes in the bathroom, when your spouse is actually trying to go to the bathroom. And so, you know, it’s like, okay, well, if I just move it to a different time, then that person is not frustrated that much in the morning, and little things like that can actually like save a marriage. So, you know, like, think think through these, these these moments, and figure out what you can do to change just little things in your daily routine that can actually give you a great deal of reward. Right? It may be that, you know, like you brush your teeth before you kiss your spouse in the morning. And like little things like that, that can just be a huge, you know, like you think you don’t think about those things, because you’re just trying to get things done. But a little bit of foresight really goes a long way. So I feel like this is this is the time to think about those things. Because you can say you know what, you know, so and so just complains all the time about x and y, you know that I leave the rubbish, you know, bag by the side of the door in the evenings. You know what I could take that out before I go to bed as opposed to right before the garbage people come? And that’s going to make the spouse or partner that means happier that the rubbish isn’t sitting there overnight. Right? Who cares? Whether it is or not, right? It’s about the fact that you care about your spouse, spouse or partner not being frustrated by this tiny element. And of course you could change it right? So unless there’s a really good reason for you not doing it, like the raccoons get it every day every night, you know, you know, like maybe then you get a garbage can you put it in the garbage can, you know, like, you can figure these things out, but this is the time to think about it right. All the things frustrate you and frustrate the people around you. cuz of the way you live, your idiosyncrasies really affect the bolts, right? And, and so this is the time to really improve those things. And it makes your life easier when other people like being around you. So just something to think about.

Art Gelwicks 35:15
I think this is one of those opportunities when you’re looking at your medeor view to decide things to kill off. That’s something we don’t typically give ourselves permission to do. We’ll commit to things, we’ll put something on our roadmap, and we let it linger. We hope it’ll go away on its own. But there are certain times you just need to say, look, this is not going to happen, I’m not going to do this situation has changed. This is that, that chance to say, look, I’m going to start pruning this list down. And if you want to use that analogy, think about it like a hedge or a tree or something, you’re going to go out and you’re going to prune it. Why do you do that? Well, one, it makes prettier, but two, it’s for the health of that thing. And it’s the same thing here, these lingering items, these lingering projects that you have, for some reason decided are no longer going to be part of your mix, need to be pruned off, or else No, you will impact your overall mental health, and the health of your other projects that are going on. I think

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:11
it’s really important to do, and set aside time, whether that be at the beginning or at the end of your media review for basically, pure reflection. And this can be expansive, creative thinking, and just gives you the the opportunity to capture new things. I have a frequent phrase that I use with people, I don’t typically say it to their face, but I think it when they say it, which is that when they’re like, Oh, I’m bored, I always think that’s because you’re boring. And while it’s not the nicest thing to think it is just a reality, which is that you have been given the opportunity to live in this day and time, and you have all the opportunities available to you in and on the planet. Especially if you’re listening to this podcast, right? You’re you’re you’re really given a great opportunity to just live a verdant life, you know, like plant the seeds and, and do do the work and cultivate a life that’s worth living. So if you are bored, that’s you’re not trying hard enough, right? There are so many things to do in the world and on the planet today. And so take them into your review, and capture those things. Like this is the time to think you know, like, if you want to take up a new hobby, if you want to be able to do a thing, there are so many things that you can do, you can fill your time, I know I can, I can fill my time all day with everything but work, right? So there are so many interesting things in the world. I’m constantly fascinated by those things. And so during my semi annual review, I get that opportunity to capture those things. And while I may never do them, right, they they’re all going on to that maybe list. The goal is to be able to figure out when you want something new to do you want to have a little bit of, of spice in your life, this is the time to go to that list and look at those things and excise them and see whether or not that’s something that you could you could do. Case in point I have recently decided that I am in like a little bit of a fitness kick in my life right now. And I’ve always been fit, but I you know, I’ve just taken it up a notch. But at the same time, I also recognize that at some point in my life, I will want to do things that are a little bit more sedentary. So I’ve decided to take up birding and birdwatching is the easiest sport in the planet. Just literally just park yourself somewhere and stare. And so, you know, there’s all kinds of things that birders do. And I’m sure there’s some people who listening that are that are up in arms right now, you know, with all the various you know, they hike and they do great good on you. But for me birding will be finding a spot and parking myself there. And, and just watching what nature brings to me. And the and so, you know, I’ve been I’ve been in this process of learning about birding not because I’m going to be doing it immediately. But because over the next, you know, probably 1015 years, I will spend more and more time traveling and doing more in nature, and I want to be able to be prepared for that. And so, you know, a semi annual review is really the right time for you to be able to to start thinking through, well, what does the next few years of my life look like? What did the next, you know, maybe five or 10 years gonna look like? And what can I do now? That can be interesting, that’s going to set me up for that type of success. Right? And so I got all the equipment, I got the books, you know, I got all the bonds, you know, book of all the North American birds, you know, and now it’s a challenge for me to go ahead and start, you know, checking off the birds I’ve already seen in life, you know, the common ones, and then thinking through Well, what are the birds that I want to go see and where are they located? Right, and what time of year are they going to be there and what I want to travel to that area in order to see them, right. This gives me a little bit of structure to my year now because I’m like, Okay, well, you know what, I want to be there in October. Wilbur, I want to be there in January, I want to, I want to think about where I want to be traveling. So I can see these particular species, there’s something really positive about being able to have something to look forward to. That’s not It’s not grand. But it’s certainly not boring. And so you know, don’t be bored. Because it really doesn’t make you boring. It makes you less, you know, it makes you less desirous to be around. And I think this is something just to, like, do in any review, whatever it might be, is to think through your levels of gratitude to things. What are you grateful for in life right now. And I think it’s a good way to, to end any session to close a particular session, is to just think through what what are you grateful for? What do you appreciate in in about your life, and this is, again, that curating your emotional world for the future. If you think gratitude today, you will have greater emotional regulation tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So really think about what you’re grateful for. And you’d be surprised force yourself to do this, like you really think through like, I want to write down 10 things I’m grateful for, at the end of a semiannual review, you’d be surprised at the number of things that you can come up with, that could be very simple, or they could be much larger items. If you do this practice on a semi regular basis, you will feel better about the things you have versus the things that you don’t. And if you can want more of what you have and less of what you don’t, you’re just going to be happier in life. And I’m by no means a minimalist. So I’m not talking about this from a physical goods perspective. But I really mean it from a perspective of just wanting what you have in life and being happy about it, because you never know when you’re not going to have it anymore. And that loss aversion will really increase your eudaimonia. And so I could just leave you all with that, with that thought

Francis Wade 41:49
Bond valuable to think in terms of projects, and wherever possible to productize. Commitment, like the one one that you just mentioned to the bird watching, you know, my wife and I have a similar one. No, we both picked up Duolingo. We talked about on a previous episode, there were both Duolingo ing. But so it kind of wasn’t started off as a bit of a lark to kind of see what this thing was like. But now we actually have a project, we hope to go to Panama in October. No, it may or may not happen for whatever reason, but it’s at least a project. You know, so both of us are sticking to it because we don’t want to get there and embarrass ourselves we think so you know, it puts some skin in the game and makes a commitment real. So that’s very different than just doing a bunch of Duolingo never ending and just kind of having an unreal project around it does add a certain level of urgency and accountability and gives you a structure and gives you a due date to get things done by when I used to do triathlons, it was the same it was a tremendous forcing function did the same did the same job. They mean, wherever, wherever possible, turn the thing into a project with it, which has to do data as some kind of event which is, I guess what our conferences are for us in our business at the free conferences I mentioned earlier, they cap a year of activity, so to speak. But it comes to a definite sort of a hit as a summit. But it comes to a definite kind of endpoint or a point of accomplishment where something either will happen or won’t happen. And that clarifies everything that comes before it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:41
This has been a great conversation. Thank you, gentlemen, we always have to think about how the world works around us. And the media review is a really good time for us to be able to do that. It’s just think about the world around us as opposed to being in the moment and living in the world. We can kind of take that view and look at it from a little bit from the outside and help make it just better, you know paving a better path for ourselves, or at least filling in the potholes. While we are at the end of our discussion. The conversation doesn’t stop here. If you have a question or comment about what we’ve discussed during this cast, please visit our episode page on productivity cast dotnet there on the podcast website at the bottom of the page. Feel free to leave a comment or question. We read and respond to comments and questions there. as well. You’re invited to join our listeners group inside personal productivity club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiast that I host where you can interact with V ProductivityCast team directly to join for free visit ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash community and you can get started there. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade, and art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast Each week, you can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net and visiting the about page. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And on behalf of all of us here at productivity Cast here’s to your productive life

Voiceover Artist 45:02
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

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Today, the ProductivityCast team talks about terminology, that is, what are the terms that we use in the personal productivity space? And why is there so much confusion around those particular words that we use?

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In this Cast | Defining Personal Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Defining Personal Productivity

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Raw Text Transcript | Defining Personal Productivity

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. Today, we are going to be talking about terminology. That is, what are the terms that we use in the personal productivity world, and really, why there is so much confusion around those particular words that we use the importance of them. And then we’ll talk about some of the terms that we all have defined over time. Some words, we’ve created some terms, or phrases we’ve created, and why. And then, of course, what we can do to make this a little bit more useful for everybody. And so let’s start off with why is this important? What’s the importance of the productivity terminology, the personal productivity, terminology that we use every day,

Augusto Pinaud 1:11
when, when I begin working into personal productivity and researching into practice, personal productivity, one of the things that surprised me was the definition that most people have off time. Mostly because the definition has nothing to do with time and everything to do with scarcity. Actually, if you pull a dictionary, the definition that most people have of time is actually the definition of viscosity. So as you look and begin from the wrong definition, to build personal productivity, the only thing you can do is build a rock model. You know, when you start with wrong assumptions, it’s hard to build something that actually works. And that works for you. And that is the problem. And that happened was so many of the definitions plus invented work that some experts for color in some way are so people who study to spend time and study and decide to create to define things that it makes sense on the sale of the book that they’re trying to do, but not necessarily on the definitions that people manage. And all that create. Over the long term is confusion.

Francis Wade 2:28
I think it’s an unavoidable confusion because we are talking about psychological objects, not physical objects. And psychological objects have a history to them. They change over time. And they’re they’re made up and they are, they’re very dependent on Lang on the language that you happen to be speaking in. We had a conversation off air about German language, German, and how words get made up all the time. And that’s very easy to do when you’re talking about intangible psychological objects. It’s harder to do when you’re talking about a tree, which you know, a tree today is pretty much the same tree as it was million years ago. But something like insomnia is a pretty recently made up word, because like 100 years old, and the way we use it obviously, is very different than people thought about insomnia 100 years ago. So a word like time when Weinstein came along and led us to think very differently about time. And before clocks were invented in this 12 or 1300s. People thought very differently about time then also. So as we create these words, they allow us to do different things. They help us in some ways, they hold us back and others. But the truth is that the meanings keep changing. And the fact that they keep changing, meaning that we have to pay attention to them, if we want to use them to, for example, make improvements in our individual lives, we don’t have a choice. This is like a moving target. Bunch of moving targets.

Art Gelwicks 4:11
Yeah, to meet the definition, debate falls into the same realm as in rules for games. If you’re not playing by the same rules, you’re not going to know what the objectives are, you’re not going to accomplish or achieve the common goals. So if you use a parallel, say American football, if everybody does not know or agree to what a touchdown means, then anybody can run around saying they scored a touchdown. There’s a common definition, there is an agreed upon standard of measure. And that’s what so many definitions provide is that standardized concept of measure and unfortunately, within the productivity space, that seems to be one of the sponginess things that we have is getting everybody to agree on And what definitions actually are. And there’s two things that I run into all the time. And I’ve caught myself doing it. And I have to correct when I do it as well. One is I miss identification of definitions, applying the wrong definition for something, because that’s what we think it means. But we’re not 100%. Sure. The other one, and I almost want to say it’s a little bit more insidious is the adaptation of definitions to support a particular model, platform, agenda, whatever you want to say, to put something into place, so that it goes Oh, see, because productivity is x, my stuff is accurate as why? Well, that’s assuming that everybody agrees that x is what productivity is, and I don’t believe that’s the case. And so many, so many situations. So having a common definition for things that is, I don’t want to say globally, agreed upon, but as closely commonly agreed upon as possible, really makes this even approachable. When we start to look at improving people’s productivity and efficiency.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:15
I somewhat agree. And I think that what you’re talking about there, art is probably why I have so many terms of art that I have created for all kinds of personal productivity situations, except that mine was built out of necessity, not out of building a model, and then choosing to shove a square peg into a round hole, it was, oh, this thing that I’m doing needs for me to define it. So I can explain it to others. And so it became a just a need to be able to create something to contain that new thought, that new method process or whatnot. And so I’m hopefully doing it on the opposite side of what you’re talking about, which is I’m not, I’m not creating something and then trying to pigeonhole these pieces into it. But really choosing to embrace the, the term because it helps it’s helpful in being able to explain it to others, I also find that my biggest challenge with personal productivity terminology is that we don’t know whose term we’re using, when we talk about any given term. If someone says to me, something I know like a time demand, I’m very clear, in the sense that I know that that came from a certain Francis Wade. And so if we go ahead and then say to me, Oh, well, a time demand is something else, not the one that I know is the term or the phrase created by Francis that I’m lost. And we don’t have that kind of contextual framework. Right now, in the personal productivity community, people will use certain things like task or to do or even personal productivity, but they haven’t really given us the foundation for what they mean by that. And when we enter into conversation, we’re not in the appropriate context, you’re talking about time blocking, or time boxing, or any of those other terms that are kind of loose, they can be defined many different ways. We’re talking past each other, because you may think of it as being something very different than I think of it as being frequently, you know, we use the methodology getting things done. If we all were to define what getting things done well is today, we’d all have different definitions. And that is because we take pieces from the methodology. And I find that to also be somewhat confusing for people, when we then take that from the kind of macro level, have a methodology and when we bleed it down to the very individual pieces. Methods are incredibly difficult to, quote unquote, define because they are by nature, instructional. And so when we, when we try to give terms to things, they end up becoming confusing for people, because if I say GTD, or I say weekly review, or if I say next action, those three things are unique. Only one of them, by definition, will be useful to you, right? Because getting things done, or GTD is going to be a method and instruction, weekly review, same thing. Maybe you can define it in a in a core way. But it’s still going to be confusing without giving you step by step instructions. But the next action I can actually define and tell you what it is, I can I can say it is a physical next step I can see you doing that will move a project forward. So it brings something to completion. And so the next action is something that we can define the other things we can describe, in that sense, Francis,

Francis Wade 9:39
the way you’re getting things done as defined, most people define as a time management book. Wikipedia defines that way the author doesn’t. Let’s that’s just as basic as it gets. If he’s saying that it’s not about this, everybody else say saying it is about this. That’s right at the heart of you know what we’re about in terms of of improvement in that area.

Art Gelwicks 10:01
There’s also a big difference between defining a thing, or a specific concept. And what we’re terming or we often see termed as definitions that are broad concepts and weekly reviews, the one that just jumped to mind for me, because we understand kind of what that is, you can write down a one or two sentence definition, I’m using air quotes. But it doesn’t mean that that’s an accurate definition, because that’s a complex process. A weekly review has multiple steps, multiple ways, engaging it, it is by its very design different for individuals and processes and various platforms. So defining something that that by its very nature is, I don’t want to say undefinable, but designed to be malleable. Just clutters the entire conversation. And we have to break it down further. GTD is one of those that you get into a challenge of capital, GTD versus lowercase GTD and just having a conversation, say, Yeah, I want to get things done doesn’t mean I’m talking about getting things done. It’s the Kleenex effect. So we have to be very careful with our terminology, not necessarily from the standpoint of, do I need everything to be exactly defined? No. But what I do need to recognize is that some terms require more than just a line in a glossary. They’re much more complex, and they have to be broken down to be able to get everybody onto the same page.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:45
And last on this topic is is the fact that many of the time management, personal productivity, and otherwise used words, they’re pulled from different arenas, they’re pulled from, sometimes psychology, sometimes project management, they’re pulled from different fields of experience. And those fields of study or experience are, they’re not the same thing, when we bring them into personal productivity, they become this a different entity. And so what we perceive as being say, a professional activity, in say, the project management space becomes very different in the personal productivity space. And that creates confusion. And then the The worst is when we take psychological terms, and we use them in popular psychological parlance. And so therefore, it becomes this topic or of discussion around things like consciousness, or people talking about, you know, unconscious items and those kinds of things. You know, I tend to be a little bit clinical in that sense, my, you know, in the way in which I speak about those terms. And yet, at the same time, I’m not necessarily working with the psychological definition in those senses, and then does create confusion. And I think that it’s one of the things that we have to walk a tight line with, there’s a there’s a tightrope walk, as it relates to many of these pseudo psychological terms. I wish that we could just banish the word subconscious from all productivity language altogether, just never that we can all just agree never to use it again. And we would all be better off for it. Because there’s just a maligning of the term. And I’m sure that Freud would be rolling over in his grave. If he knew how much we use that term, incorrectly, most of the time,

Francis Wade 13:34
equals equals the question, why is it so difficult to Why is personal productivity terminology so difficult to understand? I think we’re agreeing that there’s a lack of common ground, which is what our call it today is about, right? It’s about creating common ground, at least between the four of us, the rest of the world may disagree vehemently, but at least we’re putting a stake in the ground to see okay, there are lots of definitions floating around makes communication difficult. It makes understanding hard, it makes progress impossible. But by fixing certain terms in certain ways, we’re hoping to give everybody a firm foundation upon which the build

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:13
Absolutely. And so today’s episode is about us going a little bit further toward that shared space in terms of what can we all either agree on or show where we do contrast. And that contrasting is not bad. And that’s the that’s the thing that I want to welcome everyone in the personal productivity community to is that, you know, as we frequently do here on ProductivityCast, we don’t agree on everything, but we can come to the boundaries of where those things are gray or are hard lines in terms of agreement and disagreement and find use in that. And it’s not that you know, every recommendation I ever give is going to be useful to people and likewise for each of us, but it will resonate Meet with someone who’s listening somewhere at some time. And so it’s really useful for everybody to be able to hear what helps others in that sense. And so I think defining things is just really helpful in in that way. So let’s start with perhaps a few terms, I think time management is probably a really good place to start. And then personal productivity. And I will just make the caveat that no matter what personal productivity is, is, I think the appropriate term for us to use when we use the term productivity, generally, it ends up bleeding into the confusion, confusion realm, again, because productivity is typically an economics term, when we when we talk about labor, and that becomes just very, very difficult for people to understand. So just know that when we’re using the term productivity, we’re really meeting personal productivity. And for the most part, we should always be using the term personal productivity so that we know that we’re talking about the the broader language around time management, and personal performance. So let’s start with time management. How would you all define time management,

Art Gelwicks 16:17
time management is one of those tricky ones. That’s, that’s one that’s a landmine waiting to happen, because you have to deconstruct the the term before you start to define it. And we’ve already identified that defining time is a hard one. So time management, at least in common parlance, to me is the effective management of what can be accomplished in a fixed resource, which in this case, is time because time is invaluable, you can’t add time you can’t take it away, it’s just what it is. So managing to time is actually the more accurate definition of it in my mind. And the term time management, I think creates its own problem. Because you’re you can’t manage something that is inflexible. So it’s almost a term that I, you know, this is going to be a problem with this series that we do here, I’m going to want to throw out a bunch of terms that I use, I’m not going to want to use them anymore. And the more I think about time management, time management is one of those terms, I’m thinking that I want to throw out. Because there’s no way to easily say, time management means anything useful. Because by its definition, you are asking someone to do the impossible.

Francis Wade 17:45
The same problem is recognized by academics, at least in the psychology world, where most of the time management research has been done. And there are a few, like a few papers that basically say there is no common definition. But it hasn’t stopped people from writing about the same or different academics writing about it without defining it. So it’s a it’s a mega problem, I think. And I wrote a wrote a paper on it after studying the problem for a year trying to figure out okay, what does time mean? And what does management mean? We put the two together, what do you get, and I was trying to solve the problem for, you know, the common manager and subordinate, that a manager says to his or her subordinate that isn’t used to improve your time management. The subordinate really should ask, Which definition are you using? That should be the next question. Because you really, you really don’t know what school of thought what what symptom he or she really has in mind, that makes him or her think that oh, you need your time management issues. I’ve also talked to lots of people potential clients, who are potentially perennially late, they can’t get to their email, they or they don’t have time for exercise or family and they say, Oh, time management issues and they say, oh, no, no, I’m really good at time management. And I, you know, whatever definition they’re using, includes includes their skill, whatever their skin happens to me, it doesn’t cover all the defects in their day to day living that i From the outside looking in a scrape the time management issues. So it’s a it’s a core problem, you can’t have conversations unless you have a you can’t do we can’t really do research, unless you have a definition to begin with. And I think what you’re seeing there art is that the deeper you go to define time and define management, it actually takes you into the world have more psychological objects, and more and more and behind those there are more and behind those are more. And like I said before, psychological objects, the meaning of them changes over time. So by For Einstein, time management may have meant something and after Einstein, it definitely means something different. So for even for us to have a conversation about it, we’d have to agree on a working definition and then say, Okay, well, that’s our starting point. That’s our building block. No, we can talk about it. But that’s a necessary step,

Art Gelwicks 20:17
take the term and reverse it. And I think all of a sudden, we’ve got a different structure, instead of talking about time management, if we talk about managing time, well, we’ve all agreed at the beginning that we can’t change time, the only thing you know, if you try to manage time, it’s assuming that something’s broken there, the only thing that can be broken there as your clock doesn’t work, right. But with the types of things you just described, its workload issues, its throughput issues, its efficiency issues, none of those have to do with actually time, it’s a matter of what can be accomplished. And defining the period that you feel that you can accomplish those in but that period is well without your well outside your realm of control. So the exercise of going through and defining terminology, I think we’re seeing this as an excellent case of it, the terminology has to be deconstructed to understand exactly does it even apply to the concepts that are there, I can’t think of a case where you are, you would truly be able to manage time. Therefore it makes it no erroneous statement. You can manage your workload, you can manage all those other things, but I can’t make time take longer or shorter. Therefore, it doesn’t help anyone, myself included, to try to measure things and evaluate the effectiveness of platform changes and methodologies. Based on time management as a concept,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:55
what I want to do is give a few definitions. And then we can go from there, which is to say that Wikipedia, definition of time management, I think, to be confusing, and interesting, all wrapped up in a bubble. And so Wikipedia defines time management, as quoting here, the process of planning and exercising conscious control of the time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity, and quote, I’ll just leave it there, as to how you create confused confusion among people. I will note for myself, I like to take things and parse them apart, so I can understand them. And I generally think of time as a relative experience of past, present, and future and knowing what those three things are, and the measurement thereof. So time itself is something that we know and can measure as being happened before now or later. And we can we have this relative experience of that. And then of course management is for me, I tend to think of the practice of applying control or influence on people and objects. And as Francis noted, you know, you can have psychological objects, and you can have physical objects. And soon we’ll have virtual objects. But at the present moment, we, we know how to apply some level of control or influence on people and things generally in our worlds. And once it becomes a practice something that we actually do do over and over again, that is management. So we take those two words, together, time management becomes the practice of those two things. And it becomes less about the actual time and more about what we’re doing inside of that time. And so that’s where the the two words coming together, as art noted becomes somewhat contradictory, because you’re not capable of actually controlling the time. So when we take the two words together, then becomes an means something different, which is then the practice of applying or controlling, you know, applying control or influence on people and objects becomes the issue toward greater effectiveness, greater efficiency within your present, right or your future presumably. So it’s applying that kind of work to how do I control or influence both myself because I’m a people right on people and objects in the the present or the near future. So that I can actually whatever it is, be more efficient, be more effective in that course of time. So that for me is what time management is. Agree, disagree. Do you have other thoughts that percolate from that,

Francis Wade 24:50
I think is a workable definition. The challenge I have with it is that it for the same same actions that you take you could also call them personal productivity. And it could be just as useful. So if I decide to time block my calendar, I could say I’m using a time management technique, someone else could say I’m using a personal productivity technique. And they’re both right. So they’re both, to me, they’re both photo handles on the problem, which are useful, you know, it’s like a point of entry, or a suitcase has a handle on it so that you can carry it, it’s a level that you to accomplish something bigger. So I think the time management as you define it is one handle on the suitcase. personal productivity could be another handle on the suitcase. Task Management could be another handle on the suitcase. But getting things done is which is kind of task management is another handle on the suitcase. I think all the different handles are, you know, they have their place. There are not exclusive definitions. And they are very culturally, you know, for those of us who are productivity geeks, we use particular language because it allows us to put a handle on the suitcase and then carry it. So nothing wrong with it. It’s just that it’s not a psychological object, you’ve got to be aware that you’re in this zone in which these definitions can change. And they have usefulness. And they’re probably useful for a time. And then after a while is that being useful? They I wrote an article on the word melancholy. So melancholy was like a big thing over 100 years ago. So people talked about that was like, you have a melancholy melancholy today. What we don’t know what the heck that is. But back then it was a useful level on a particular kind of intervention, you probably went and did exercise to get rid of the melancholy you travel to the Caribbean to get rid of the minute. And we’re still doing those things today. We just don’t use the handle of melancholy today. So I think it’s fine. I don’t think it’s a it’s not like an obstacle. It’s just that when we’re using when we’re using these terms as think we need to be cognizant that what’s the word there, they’ve lived their limited usefulness there. And if they kept tempted to get the job done, then by all means use it. But people go a step further, and then turn these things into religions. And that’s where problems start. Because then they want to lock into one definition, and then insist that everybody else use that definition and not use whatever handle you want to use, because your handle is inferior to mine. And then you get into a different whole different kind of problem. But that problem infects every, I think affects every school of thought. And I think part of what we’re trying to do is to at least say, Let’s agree on the common school of thought. And then let’s try and make improvements based on what our agreement looks like.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:57
Noting that I do see time management and personal productivity as uniquely distinct to things. And the reason for that is that management, that practice of applying controller influence on people and objects, the thing on which we’re trying to apply that control or influence becomes different, it becomes more granular when we talk about, say, project management, or when we talk about performance management, because we’re talking about these kinds of things like fitness is a type of management. And we have many different types of fitnesses. So I do see personal productivity as being an umbrella term. And we’ll get to that shortly. But it becomes an umbrella term for the other types of things in which we, in which we manage, we have task management, time management, product, project management, and so on, so forth. Those are all things that fall underneath the umbrella in just in my view. And again, I could be I could be convinced otherwise, but that’s just how I’ve constructed my own latticework of terminology so that I can control the the view of where all of these various terms fall into my own world.

Art Gelwicks 29:05
Yeah, not too badly paraphrase the movie Dune, but if you can define a thing, you can control a thing. And that’s when we look at these terms. I’m not an English major by far, but the terms that we’re throwing out here are a composite of a noun and a verb. Task Management, note management, time management, it’s our the thing at the beginning is the noun, but the verb is the action that we’re going to apply to that. And if you look at these terms, we understand what notes are, but do we notes are different for people, we understand what tasks are but doing tasks are different. And then to apply this generic amorphous concept of management to those things. Makes the definition harder to understand rather than clarifying it. And that’s where I think we have to be very careful as well. As people who operate within this space and as professionals in this space, we have to be careful that we do not misconstrue to people. A term as a definition, as not a fixed point of measure. This is not an indicator on a ruler. This is a larger concept. This is something that requires understanding, interpretation and evaluation. And we have to be clear with that do not go through and say, Yeah, this is what that means. If you can’t say exactly what that is, and show it and define it in such a way that there is no debate between multiple people, then it’s not a definition. It’s a concept. And we have to look at things from that perspective,

Augusto Pinaud 30:46
is difficult because as we were discussing, every definition, it’s not a definition, if I build a dictionary right now, and any work that we consider, okay, that’s a definition. The problem here is personal productivity, time management, we start with a definition, good or bad, deep or not deep doesn’t matter. And then we start adding our own salsa to to those tacos, you know, it’s, we are making tacos, but then each one of us are going to add their own salsa, and that is a real taco. And that is the reason as in tacos is so hard to find a good one. Okay, because it’s only good one, you know, when have your own friends were saying when it’s your own handle, that that’s the only handle that work. So the problem is how we standardize something that has been completely honest, standarized, number one, and number two, where every industry comes with their own terms, and then we try to grasp them up and really apply the one that will benefit us the most. So when I talk to clients, one of the things that is fun, and we talk about personal productivity and time management, well, it depends. The definition in general is what is going to make them look good, not what necessarily, the definition will help them to move forward.

Art Gelwicks 32:24
That’s another one that we haven’t really dug into. But and I don’t want to dig into it right now. But there’s a lot of terminology that has been created just to support marketable concepts. And we have to be very, some of them, some of whom are very good. Some of the terminology works. Bullet Journal is, as an example, the terminology works, it kind of describes the thing, but it has become this def this generic term. This is bullet journaling. Well, what is it? It’s still too broad still to open. And I even take a little bit issue with personal productivity as a as a term because we can’t really define it because it’s a counter term to something else. If it’s personal productivity, what’s the alternative? Because there has to be something else otherwise, you wouldn’t have had to define it in the first place. And that would be non personal. Is that work productivity? Is corporate productivity as a business? Where what is the counterpoint to that definition to be able to provide us the perspective and relevance to understand what these are? And if we don’t go through and look at those counter positions and say, oh, okay, it’s not that. So it’s this, I can understand why people get so confused. When they look at various tools, they look at methodologies, and they say, Oh, they’re all using the same term. They’re all using the same reference language, but they’re using it in totally different ways. And that lack of standardization, I think, really drags down a lot of what we’re talking about here, it makes it harder, to be more quote, productive. And we still haven’t even gotten back to the definition of what the heck is productive.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:13
I hear what you’re saying aren’t. And I do understand that there is a piece here which is potentially reductive, or at least derivative, from the perspective that if we say the word productivity, or productive, we’re really utilizing terms from other fields. Again, productivity already came from from a space, which when we think about economics, or or in the professional sphere, it’s really a business term utilized for calculating output. All right, what effort required was required to create output. So we do have a definition for productivity, which is why I avoid it. When I talk a talk about personal productivity. I modify productivity to be personal so that it is in right relationship with what we’re really discussing, which is Have the practices that we utilize in our own world. And so I’ll just throw this out here, which is that I always define personal productivity in some combination of saying, it’s about doing the right things in the right amount to get the right results. And it is a an umbrella term, to explain that we have all of these pieces that come together. And I guess I’m just less concerned about the amorphousness of it, that it’s kind of a it’s like a black hole, it sucks everything in, you know, once you hit the event horizon, you’re in and you’re not coming back out. And so personal productivity ends up being that that omnibus term for me, as opposed to being something that needs to have a a clear cut. So precise definition that anyone touching, it is going to know exactly what it is because what what’s productive for you is not productive for me necessarily, and vice versa. And, and that is why that term ends up being more useful to me than not because it is more encompassing than not, it’s inclusive.

Art Gelwicks 36:10
I very much use the same definition. I use that all the time you do the right things in the right ways at the right times. But this, the more again, the more we kick this around. It’s a fascinating thought exercise to me, because when we talk about being productive, there’s a countermeasure to it, how do I know I’m not what is then the definition of being unproductive, or unproductivity, or lack of what however, badly, I want to mangle the English language that counterpoint really becomes the more critical because to meet the definition, you have to successfully stop being the other thing. So looking at the Merriam Webster Dictionary, definition of the word productive, just the first one here, having the quality or power of producing, especially in abundance. Well, right away, I’m going to take that tissue. I don’t agree with that definition. But in certain circumstances, in certain cases, yeah, I get that you are producing an output, you have a volume of production. But how often when we think about the things that we do, and the people we interact with, how many of those people are, quote, producing things in volume. If that, if that were truly the definition, commonly accepted of being productive, we would all be cranking widgets, we would all be doing piece work and generating as much stuff as we could. Regardless of quality, there’s no definite, there’s no indication of crew producing quality output. It’s the quality or power of producing of generation, it’s turning ribs on an engine. So this is where, again, I really struggle. And I know all of all four of us do this, when we coach people understand what that term means to you first, and then between the coach and the individual say, Okay, we’re going to work with that definition. And we’re going to find ways to apply that as your consistent measure,

Francis Wade 38:27
for example, the working approach I use is to sort of bring in the human element. So are you right, that those kinds of production definitions are that’s what I was trained in as a as an operations research industrial engineer? At school, that’s those were the you know, we were we were primarily focused on machines. And the idea was that you would get the machine going and keep it as busy as for as long as possible. And, you know, it was, the idea was that you’re working with inanimate objects that produced something. So when, when, when that language got translated into the human world, the idea transferred, which is that yeah, sure, a human being wants to produce as much as possible. Of course, that doesn’t really work. Because human machine is a physical object and a human being is a psychological object. Or there’s aspects of our psychology that are so important that we can’t leave them behind. So I picked up a different I picked up a different approach. And I said, Okay, maybe productivity, and this is what I use with my clients pretty much productivity means accomplishing what you intend to accomplish without defects. No defects in this context is not the defects of producing widgets, but it’s stress. Having a life balance, managing All your email, all the things that people complain about, I pretty much made a list of them. And I said, Okay, these are all the defects or unwanted symptoms that people were trying to be productive are trying to rid themselves of. And some of them are very soft, some of them are harder, like missing a deadline is a pretty hard defect. But being free of time, stress or having peace of mind, is in a way a soft defect. But it doesn’t really matter. Because we as human beings want to be free of all the defects. So when I’m working with someone, the question is, well, which unwanted symptoms are top of mind for you? Which ones are you in particular, experiencing? That have had you call me in the first place? So we have a conversation about, I don’t use the word defects. But that’s what that’s really where my thinking is coming from? I’ll say What are you trying to get rid of? What do you what do you wish you never had, in terms of your experience. And so that’s, that’s my approach to sort of bringing in the fact that this is a human being struggling with psychological aspect of what looks like a production production process from a particular from industrial engineering point of view, it looks like a cycle a physical process. But it’s not

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:29
just in furtherance of your, your point at the beginning, Frances which is that many of these terms like business terminology came from military terminology. And that becomes even more difficult. Most of business terms really did come from a military hierarchical structure. And so those then have bled into no pun intended, the the world of, of productivity, personal productivity, and that has made it even more for me a little bit discomforting. To your other point about defects. I usually coined that as pain, people tend to know what what physical or emotional pain they’re experiencing. And so what you say as defect, I’m usually asking people for what challenges they’re facing. And I usually use the terminology pain, and and it helps to trigger for people something that they can relate to.

Art Gelwicks 42:21
The thing that occurred to me just as we’re talking about this is often the challenges people get into is they are trying to achieve someone else’s definition of the term. So for example, let’s let’s take a manager direct report conversation, its annual review time, and the manager goes, you need to be more productive to get that raise. If you stop there, you have a problem, you have a problem on both sides of the equation, because you have not set the rules, you have not set the definition, I guarantee there is no common understanding as to what that is to achieve that standard. And yet, that’s a conversation that happens all the time. Not only do you have it within organizations, we have it within just individual conversations, you have a conversation with your significant other, I wish you would get more done. It’s the same thing I wish you would be more productive. If define it, tell me what that standard is do you want is your definition of productivity, generating 14 TPS work reports by the end of day Friday. If that’s it, then okay, now I have something that I can go towards, because it’s a defined term in this context. And I think that’s the one thing that we keep skirting around a little bit is that these definitions are highly contextually sensitive, they will adapt, depending on the conversation, the work environment, the rule environment, even the people involved, we need to apply that as part of our understanding. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with writing these things down and sharing them for common group people who are for common groups who are working towards an objective and saying, This is what it means when we say we’re being productive. This is what the measure is. And you have to be able to do that. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone through and defined systems for people. And the first thing we do is we have a glossary meeting, we put together a terminology list. And I’ll ask because I get to play that dumb consultant card and said, I don’t know what this stuff means, tell me what every one of these terms are. And we start talking through them like so this is what that term means. And guaranteed if it’s 10 people in the room, four of them are gonna look at each other and go, Well, that’s not what it means to me. And that becomes in this entire open discussion about the fact that they’ve never been playing by the same set of rules. So when we talk about things and the talking heads and on videos and on podcasts, you know, often will We’ll throw terms out saying, oh, yeah, everybody understands that. No, it is worth the effort to say, in this context, in this conversation, this is what this term means.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:12
We’ll actually tackle the terms side in the next episode, I think will be will be plenty of discussion for the next episode. But don’t leave any final thoughts we want to leave folks with before we close out today’s episode,

Art Gelwicks 45:22
my my only thing is this is conversation you need to have not not us. But each person needs to have this conversation with themselves and the other people around them, and understand what those common measures are. And I think start with yourself, write these terms down and see how many of those you can actually put something next to, I’m willing to bet half of them, you’ll look at it and go, I don’t know what that actually means.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:49
I would encourage people to go out there and think of the terms that they have been reading, none of you listening have not come across many of the terms we have talked about today. And certainly many more. And you may have been floating along, thinking that you knew the definition, and are reading materials that actually also include those definitions. And I invite you to go look at the various blog articles you’ve read and see how the author, the how they define when they write the material. And whether that context makes sense to you now, just do a little bit of reflection on that. Because I think that it would it’s going to be illuminating to you to realize that many times the context is out of context, in terms of the term and you need to you need to yourself, find out what that person means, you know, just make a comment on the blog and say, Hey, you used time management in this article. What do you mean by time management, and just hearing the author comment back with their definition can sometimes be incredibly insightful, and useful to you understanding what they really meant in that article. And it’s not that their definition is wrong or right. As you can see, we all have different differing opinions, it’s that knowing what they mean, when they write about these topics, then helps to inform and if they don’t have a good definition for it, then you can apply your own and that will be useful as well. But I just really find it to be helpful to go out there and look at what you’re reading and question it be inquisitive as to what these terms are, what these phrases are that are being utilized, and whether or not the authors of these articles have a way of explaining them that can be useful to you. We’re gonna plant a flag in the sand. And we’re gonna come back next episode. And when we do, we’re going to talk about many of the terms that we have ourselves either come across and found issue with umbrage with their definitions, or that we have found lacking or avoid and we’ve created our own terms over the years and and explain the process by which we created those definitions. And so with that, thank you, gentlemen, for this conversation. We will leave it there and we will come back in our next episode to talk about the various personal productivity terms that we’ve created.

Voiceover Artist 48:12
That’s it for this productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team debated subjective versus objective time as commentary on the article, “My Fixation on Time Management Almost Broke Me.”
Thanks to Brian C. for the recommended reading! (See https://www.personalproductivity.club/posts/14785370.)

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In this Cast | ProductivityCast – Subjective versus Objective Time

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | ProductivityCast – Subjective versus Objective Time

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• Is Time Management Really “Real”, Or Is It Just a Misnomer? | by Francis Wade | 2Time Labs | Medium
• Victim Mentality: Causes, Symptoms, and More
• The Impact of Temporal Schemata: Understanding When Individuals Entrain Versus Resist or Create Temporal Structure | Academy of Management Review 
• Ramit Sethi
• The R Project for Statistical Computing 

Raw Text Transcript | ProductivityCast – Subjective versus Objective Time

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to ProductivityCast. Welcome to our listeners. Today, we are going to be talking about objective versus subjective time. And we will be trying to objectively thinking about whether or not it actually even exists. So, for instance, do you want to open this up with regard to this article. So basically, this is an article from hbr.org. And actually, Brian Clark in personal productivity club had brought this to my attention. And the article is my fixation on time management almost broke me by Abby J. Ship. She is a PhD researcher at Texas Christian University. And she has a PhD in organizational behavior from University of North Carolina. And so her research focuses on the subjective and psychological experience of time, including what she’s quoting here as the trajectories of work experiences fit satisfaction and burnout, for example, and the nature of mental time travel and attention, and how individual views of time impact performance, well being and coordination in organizations. And so very interesting area of research that she does. Francis, can you open us up in terms of what Dr. Ship talks about? In this article?

Francis Wade 1:36
The topic of the article is my fixation on time management almost broke me. So it’s a bit click Beatty, in the sense that you’re thinking that she’s talking about what everyone is talking about the respect to time management. But those of us who are in the know, you know, that you probably would want to what version of time management is she talking about? And how did it break her. So just in the way this article starts, I’m just gonna talk about the start for a moment. She’s define time management in a particular way. She’s claimed that the way that she relates to time management broke her. And she’s, in a way blaming time management. And I think there’s huge problems just with that she gets them to other more realistic things in the latter part of the article, but the context of it, I don’t know if the, you know, you write articles, and then the editor decides what’s the sexy part that will draw people in? Well, the sexy part that drew people in through the title is just way off base. And why well, I wrote an article can time be managed, and really looked at whether or not this is a reality or a construct in language. And I came away with the latter. So for her to go this far down the road without defining time management is a huge problem for those of us who care, both definitions like this and why they matter.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:02
Yeah. So I think about this from the perspective that what she’s really saying is that because she became hyperbolic with regard to her own use of time management methods, right? She she basically had this obtuse view that she could do more and more and more not hitting upper limit, and or have unhealthy behavioral interventions, and then presume that those are time management. I just, this is where I have I struggled with her lead up to it, which is that there is this sense, and I think it’s an unhealthy sense that many of us have, and I don’t think she’s out of the ordinary here. I think there there are other folks who are highly productivity minded, ourselves included, who get to a point, and we feel productive, and we think, well, we can be more productive, we could do, we could do that much more, and then it becomes unhealthy. And that actually drives us to spend more time on trying to iron out these small inefficiencies potentially, or small in effectiveness components of our world. And that ends up spending more time and being more deleterious to our outcomes and to our health and not so I get that I understand the argument, but that is not because of the time management methods themselves. That is a that is a psychological behavioral component, not an issue of the methodologies or the technologies themselves. Anyone else agree or disagree?

Art Gelwicks 4:33
But should the methodologies take that into consideration? No,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:37
I don’t think so. Like okay, so Jerry Seinfeld is supposed to be the progenitor of the don’t break the chain, time management methodology, where you cross off the items on the calendar in a mechanism to chain together and therefore create momentum around getting something done. Why is it his responsibility to then take into account all of the various psychological capabilities that we have and limitations that we have, when it comes to this, when, in reality, he just proffered what he does. He didn’t say, there’s some great psychological underpinning here, he didn’t say there was some great, you know, amount of, of, you know, grand, whatever. He just basically said, This is what I do, it works for me. And it was taken and run with it. You know, and many other people have now talked about it about him, because he’s a famous comedian, and so on and so forth. So like, I just don’t see the the opportunity there for him to have given this underpinning, you know, he didn’t write a book about it, he didn’t do anything. But you know, what, don’t break the chain helps. How many 1000s of people every year, get things done?

Art Gelwicks 5:44
Is there any reason to not do it, though? I mean, if you have the opportunity to take consideration of the subjective parts of how you’re executing your productivity into consideration and compensate for them adjust or at least be prepared for them, does that not inherently make a better system for yourself? I mean, I think about things like you know, when you have something on your list that you’re going to do, and you know, it’s going to take you two, three hours to do it. And it’s something you hate to do. You know, it’s going to feel like it takes forever to get that completed. Well, that’s perception. It has nothing to do with how long it actually takes it to get done. But it might, because if you don’t want to do it, who says you’re going to do it at your maximum speed, your maximum level of productivity, the odds are extremely good, you’re not. So failing to take that into consideration, at least personally, sets us up in situations where I can understand the struggle that she’s talking about. I don’t agree with everything in the article, but I do understand the concept and the struggle that she’s talking about. Where’s the cap? I mean, we started talking about that at the beginning. Where’s the top end of productivity? If I feel like I’m hitting? No, I’m hitting everything on my task list. And I’m getting my stuff done. And my projects are getting turned in? Should I stop there? Time management methodologies and productivity, you know? Everybody running around right now will go well, no, you need to work harder. You need to work harder, you can work harder, you’re getting everything done. That means you can do more. And I can understand why that would break somebody. I can totally get that. Because there is no sense as to where does this thing go off the rails? And without that taken into consideration? Yeah, there isn’t a methodology out there that says you’ve done enough stop. If there is, I don’t know about it. I’d love to hear it if there is but I don’t know of one that says, Yeah, you’re good.

Unknown Speaker 7:55
And I don’t think I agree with you there. I don’t think there is one and it is an issue that you find into a lot of people, okay? Where, and I found that especially in people who

Augusto Pinaud 8:13
chlorin to extremes, okay, who they are beginning to personal productivity, okay. And then now they went from this disorganization mode to a more structure one, okay. And they start building their system, and they’re now getting some stuff, and are okay, I’m so ineffective. And then I see it on the other extreme, okay, people who has been traditionally, you know, really organized and effective and productive, and then suddenly wants to raise the bar, and then they feel that they’re not, and it’s not that they are not, if you objectively compare apples to apples, with their own productivity, do you see how they’re being more effective, but the problem is, you lose, what is out of the possibilities, the real possibility is 24 hours, how many hours are you sleeping? How many hours are you working? How many hours are you taking self care? And then how many hours are you really working? Okay, because if your list, we look at your list, and we analyze all those tasks and it says you have 96 hours to accomplish those things. Okay, the day is still going to have 24 hours, okay? There is only one feeling at the end of the day failure. And it’s a problem with productivity. No, it is a problem that we tend to start taking and taking and taking it because we can process them. We begin to feel that we are invincible that we can take whatever it takes. And at some point we miss into go into calibration said that isn’t the problem is not that I have this 1000 things on my system. It’s I still have 24 hours. So I need to or hire people so I can get 96 desk To download a war, I need to work into my system. So I can only have X amount of hours a day that include sleeping, self care, and many other things. And then what are the number of hours that I’m going to work? Because otherwise, yeah, you get exactly into what this article describes. The system will kill you, if you just go from another tick. Okay, the ticking will eventually killed you. But it kills you because we tend to forget, where are those hours? And where are those real possibilities. And by the way, I’m guilty as charged

Francis Wade 10:40
with what’s behind what you’re seeing. Gousto is a sense of being responsible for your actions. The first part of this article makes it sound as if time management did it to her. Like there’s this thing out there that came in and did this thing to me. But the truth and the fact that when you get past the fact that there is she doesn’t define time management and tank can’t be managed. And time management is only a psychological object. It’s not a physical object, like walking in arena and getting wet. Psychological objects can always be reinterpreted, wherever, whichever way we want. And that’s what she’s done. She’s according to rage. She’s taking this hyperbolic definition, set it up as the boogeyman and said look at the boogeyman did it to me, this is the first part of the article. I’m just saying she did this. And I agree people can do this all day long. But you can do with anything you can you could say, look at marriage that to me, Weren’t you there in the marriage at some point? No did it to me. There is nothing out there. When it comes to psychological objects that don’t do things to us. We’re the ones who define them. And if we define them, well, we get the benefits of it, find them poorly, we suffer. But we’re the ones doing it. It’s not it happening to us. But I think her realization later on in the article was that her she didn’t say it this way. But her definition was wrong. And she didn’t actually say that throughout the whole article. But she at least added to her understanding and said, we’ll get into it the second part of the article, but the first part and the clickbait clickbait comes from this weird place that if you start just start to read it, you’re like what time management did something there or poor thing,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:25
I’m going to put a link to this folks in the show notes, which is a WebMD article on victim mentality. And, you know, the the beginning of the article really does structure around this. And she prefaces it that way, on purpose, I think for a goal of being able to draw the reader in. And so I think I think this was I don’t know if it’s purposeful, but I think she did, she did put this in that perspective. And I think it’s helpful just for people just to kind of understand where she’s coming from, in that perspective, art go for it,

Art Gelwicks 12:55
I’m gonna flat out disagree with you there, the victim mentality thing is a bad excuse. Don’t use that as a standing point. Don’t use that as an argument, because it’s not victim mentality. If you go through and you look at all these methodologies that are pushed and promoted, and everything I’ll take, you know, GTD is a perfect example, if you’re not working at your maximum volume, you’re not productive. And that is the message that is continually delivered. You look at productivity, anywhere on like, tick tock, Instagram, anything like that. That’s the message, how many posts have you seen around productivity hacks, that you’re not if you don’t do this, you’re not being productive enough, you’re not getting enough out of your day, you’re not being a good enough person. That’s that reinforcement that is that constant message that has been pounded on people. So even if you start down that path, no matter how far down that path, you’re not far enough, yet. That’s the message. So if we say that people are taking this from a victim mindset, I’m sorry, they’re not they’re getting abused by the system half of the time. Because no matter how far down the process, you go, you’re not far enough, yet, you will never be productive enough. I challenge you to look at half of the posts out there and tell me which one will tell you where you’re going to be productive enough, you are now successful,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:12
we definitely have popular literature and popular discussions on the blogosphere and whatnot, that do push this notion that you have to do more, be more, otherwise, you’re not good enough. I don’t take that too. Again, anything related to the time management methodologies themselves. This is a this is a problem with society and culture. I mean, the idea that we have workaholism that we have any of those things is not because a time management method was created. We could potentially blame that on the industrial agent and the concept that humans are widgets, or widget creators, and if we if we mechanize we continue to think about humans as being machines. And we talk about our brains as computers and so on and so forth. Right these, this this notion that somehow we are not biological creatures is that we’re not animals, in essence that are meant to have rest and meant to have leisurely lives or those kinds of things, right? We just, we divorce those pieces. And then we presume that we should just basically turn every ounce out of people in terms of energy. It’s up to us, and it’s wrong. But But conceding that point, the article still does preface this as being, you know, somehow the methodologies fault. And I think that’s where I make the clear dividing line. And I

Art Gelwicks 15:31
go back to my basic point, show me one methodology, just one that tells me I was productive today that I was successfully productive today. I have yet to find what if you can tell me where in what methodology I can sit down at the end of the day, and the methodology will tell me yes, you were productive today. There’s nothing objective to that. That is your subjective assessment. And if she is subjectively saying that these time management methodologies failed me, because I never felt like I was being productive. That’s I’m not going to fault the methodologies for not taking that in consideration. But I’m saying this is a real thing. This is the reason why we have this entire freaking industry. Because if this was not the case, everybody just pick a methodology and chug right through. But it’s the people part of the equation.

Francis Wade 16:27
I tell them to their art a little bit, because if he said that we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because she didn’t actually say what you said, I wish she did it, because then we could say, oh, empirically, she tried this methodology, A, B, and C, and it failed. And it didn’t work for her. But she’s going way beyond that. And as Ray said, being hyperbolic, and saying, time management did something to me this. And she didn’t name any methodology, she basically said, my way of trying to manage my time, should even say that she said it time management did something over here to me. Like she separated herself from her own practices, label the practices and call them time management and said, time management did it to me, that’s a little bit like some people I know who blame their blame David Allen, for all these things that David Allen never said, doesn’t propose. David Allen wants you to have peace of mind at the end of the day. And that’s what he really wants. That’s a whole point of his book. But I’ve seen people critique his book and say, Oh, you’re telling us to do this. And if we’re not doing that, and we’re not doing that, but that’s not what he said. That’s not what this methodology is about. And she, she loves everything together and says, time management did it to me, and she’s not talking methodologies. If she were, we’d have to be having a different conversation. But that’s

Art Gelwicks 17:47
okay. I mean, let’s be realistic. Let’s be realistic about it. If she were to pick out a specific methodology and say this one didn’t work for me, what would be the general community reaction, you chose wrong methodology that doesn’t move the marker that doesn’t open this discussion up. Not one person listening to this podcast, or even on this podcast, has not been frustrated with a methodology at some point in time. Every methodology we’ve all gone through, at some point in time has frustrated us. It is annoyed us it has made us look at alternatives. So yes, making the blanket statement that time management failed me and did something to me. I’ll make the argument. Time management methodologies opened my eyes to the realization that there isn’t a Maillot methodology out there that works,

Augusto Pinaud 18:38
good to bring a parallel to this, okay. And I’m going to bring this trend that we have into minimalism and reducing and frugality and reducing the expense. Okay, I’m going to bring that for a second, okay? And you read all this, okay? And you are going to find the same thing. Okay. The people who find and I have found one person who talks about a concept is names from it’s at the ends Ramit talks about conscious spending instead. And what he said is do is you basically reduce, you know, mercilessly, everything that you don’t care for and you maximize expense and fun into what you care for. Okay, that by the way, as I forgot the minimalist concept, it’s much better. Again, you get rid of basically a reduced expenses and anything that doesn’t bring anything to your life and so you can have really fun and the other thing, productivity is not a lot different than this. The problem is, we are focusing this in the wrong things because we want to have everything okay. When you come and make a statement like time management fail me, okay? is the equivalent to have now two shirts and say, Well, I wanted to have a party, but I don’t have anything to wear. Well, yes, of course you have nothing to wear. You now have two shirts you You sell everything on your house, you have an empty house and a shirt. Yes. You have nothing to wear that that’s what you did. It’s no different than this. And it’s no different than in productivity. What is what you want to be productive about it? I’m sorry. I’ve been coaching people now for a while. Okay, I just want to find one person that when I asked this question, what do you want to be productive? For? They have an answer. By the way, that’s one of the things we work on. Okay. Because if you tell me right now, well, what if you don’t know what you want to be productive? Sorry, CS Lewis said any you don’t know where you’re going? any road will do? That’s the reality was productivity. If you don’t know, why do you want to be more productive for you are always going to find something that is going to need you more productive, and just that’s going to break you and just that’s going to make you miserable? And yes, you are never going to find that answer of I did well. And that’s close for this sideline of minimalism and frugality before we lost people in in the panel, and not the listeners in the panel,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:09
I will make no comments on the topic of minimalism, darkness this episode, here’s

Art Gelwicks 21:15
a corollary that I don’t know if that’s the right word or not. But here’s something I want to tie into here. The statement that time management has no direct relationship with productivity. You can be have highly managed time and be very unproductive. And you can be very productive and not have a time structure. I’ll make that argument. Because I did it yesterday, I had a very productive day, got everything done that I wanted to do. I didn’t plan the timeout timeout for anything, I had my checklist of things to get done. But they took as much time as they did. And I was able to progress through them and execute and get everything finished. So there is no direct causality there between managing my time and a productive result. One does help the other,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:17
you can’t bifurcate the universe from the laws of physics, right?

Art Gelwicks 22:23
But why not? What what is preventing me from doing that? The only piece I took out of that conversation was how long each item would take.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:31
Right? Right. But you have all kinds of things going on unconsciously, you have the course of a day, you can’t say the sun rising in the sun setting are not aspects of your understanding of both time and, and space time. And those kinds of things, right? We’re always aware of those things. It’s like an artist who will say like, I can’t be bounded by, you know, structure in order to do my art, right? The reality is you still have to be bound by the laws of physics, by by gravity, you know, you have you have structure, even when you are not aware of that structure.

Art Gelwicks 23:05
So it’s based on my subjective interpretation of my productivity and progress during the course of the day is it not? Sounds like what this article is talking about,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:15
but use the argument of the artist, right? If they were a data just right, or an impressionist, that has no bearing, like the concept of impressionism is a is a is a fact and interpretive fact. Right? We know what what impressionism is, and the artist is saying, I can’t paint like an impressionist because of my because of of gravity. That’s, that’s, you know, like, patently false, right? We know that there are people who are using impressionistic art in modern times and paint Impressionist paintings to say that gravity is, is somehow impacting their ability to create an objective, impressionistic art piece is false. We know that empirically. Right. So like, that’s, that’s what I’m hearing in terms of the right analogy, and maybe I’m getting it wrong. But what I’m hearing you say, though, is that you can step away from time management, methodology and time management practices. And by virtue of having learned those skills, you don’t need all of those things to the letter of the law of that particular or to the canon of that in order to be productive, in order to be productive.

Art Gelwicks 24:28
Let me give you a different analogy for it. To me, it’s the difference between training for a marathon and going out for a jog. The objective is the same. Now one is more complex than the other. You have training for a marathon big deal, and all kinds of work to do all kinds of planning to do you know, over multiple periods, going out for a jog or going out for a jog. But I don’t apply the same time management construct and same artificial constructs around going out for a jog But yet, once I do that jog, once I go out for that little run, I feel like I was productive. That’s what I wanted to do. And I did it. So we get into this, this construct of building these rule sets. And then we feel like everything has to go into those rule sets. Same thing happens with our tools, we get one of these tools or multiple tools, and then everything’s got to go into that tool. And it’s got to hold all these structures, and it’s got to be able to deal with all these permutations is like, snow, it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to, it doesn’t have to be big and scary. Sometimes things can be little, they can be posted notes and pins. They don’t have to be new notion in Salesforce.

Francis Wade 25:43
But I think this is this is the point we’re making. That is the definition of there’s a definitional basis problem at the basic of basic of a term like time management, or jogging. It depends on how you define time management. So the way you define time management is that when I made my to do list yesterday, I didn’t use time management. However, every time management book has a part on making lists and following them throughout the day. So everyone, most people define time management to include the activity that you that you defined time management separate from the productivity that you’ve had yesterday, which I think is useful. It’s just that your definition is the popular one. And she didn’t define what she meant by time management, except to say that here’s a bunch of hyperbolic things I was doing. And I’m not calling that time management and under I’m making that the boogeyman and I’m saying that that that, to me, is an order of articles that I’ve read, which say that time management is no good. And they always start with a definition of time management that is peculiar to the individual. Let’s say that. So they build the boogeyman up, they tear it down, and they say, therefore, time management doesn’t work, or therefore I should do energy management, therefore, you should focus on your feelings instead, therefore, you should, but it’s all a definitional problem. And when there is no clear definition, or in as I would argue, in my paper, can time be managed, when you can’t define it. Because time management cannot be managed because it doesn’t exist, then we’re all talking, we’re think we’re talking about the same thing. And we’re not, which is the point that remain. And I think the example that you gave is true, you know, run out and run 10 marathons. And to say that a marathon is equivalent to jogging can only be true if you’re defining true, the aspects that are dissimilar in a peculiar way, because there’s a million ways in which they’re very different. So it depends on how you define it. And if you define it rigorously, then we can have a conversation. Otherwise, we have to go back to the definition and say, what do we mean by the term, because we’re then just comparing apples to oranges. And I think that’s a huge problem. In our field of productivity,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:52
especially when in productivity, we have very few places where terminology actually is defined, if I say to you, time blocking time, chunking time stacking, or habit stacking many of these terms are, are defined by an individual, and they are not generalizable. And so therefore, you know, we’re not really capable of saying everybody defines this term this particular way. And that’s a topic for another podcast for another day. But moving along to this secondary notion in the article now, which is subjective versus objective time, what she’s what I’m hearing her say, and correct me if I’m, if I’m misinterpreting her. She’s talking about subjective time as our interpretation of time time, of course, being something that is a measurement of quantitative measurement. What I’m seeing when I’m reading, what she writes, is that there is a subjective interpretation of of time. And we need to take that into account as it relates to how we deal with our productive days

Art Gelwicks 28:57
that I agree with completely. I think that is dead on and we’ve all experienced it, at some point in time, you’ve been doing something that you really enjoy, and all of a sudden the clock has zoomed past, you know, you allotted two hours for this. And also in the two hours are up, it’s like wait, but I was having fun. I was making progress. I feel like I was doing well. I want to do more time, or the flip side of the coin, where it feels like it’s taking for ever. You’ve ever sat through a staff meeting, you know what that’s like, so that, that perception is extremely true. It’s It’s proven out through psychological studies and analyses. How we take that into consideration, though, is a very personal thing in my mind. We have to, we have to be very introspective as to how we view different types of things that we are going to do. aren’t that good things to us? Are they bad things to us? Are they boring things? Are they exciting things and be able to take that into consideration? If I think about you Here’s things that I enjoy doing, it makes sense to me to expand the amount of time that I’m going to allocate to do them. If for no other reason that I get more personal satisfaction out of doing them during that time period, and if there’s things I don’t like, well, I want to condense that time down and make sure that I’m as streamlined as possible to get it done and over with. So I agree completely. I think subjective time is a core driver to a lot of this stuff. And I think that’s where a lot of methodologies struggle is allowing people that opportunity to work there subjectiveness into the objective measures that are in the system.

Francis Wade 30:41
And the object, the the so called objective measures. According to the physics, they aren’t even objective. Because time, time is a human construct. It’s a way of measuring change. And if our listeners have heard of the twin paradox, if you take a couple of twins, put one into orbit for a long enough time and leave the other one here on earth, when you bring them back together, one will be older than the other. Because time has passed differently at the two extremes. So even the physics says that time is subjective. So it’s it’s all if it’s all made up, then we might as well play with it the way art is the way art is saying we might as well say, Okay, well, there’s a 1999, and y2k, we thought it was gonna be the end of the world. And it was very limited a problem. But it’s a it was a global made up problem, because we all made up that this was 1999. And that there was going to be a turnover of the clock that was going to cause a problem, which was true in the software. But there’s no objective reality that that was the year 2000, that was all a human construct. It was all made up, we could have all agreed to let’s let’s dial it back another 100, a few 100 years if we could have changed a time to any point in time that we wanted to. And there’s some societies, some tribes that exists today that don’t measure time. They don’t they don’t have that they don’t have constructs around time. And we’re taught what time is, as kids, we get to age eight, somebody teaches us what a clock is. And before that, we will know that in Teach us we will have no clue. So it’s all subjective. So the idea of playing with our subjectivity, and not accepting the that its objective in any way. If it’s all subjective, then we get to play with every aspect of it, including even hard commitments. I think she she mentioned this when somebody, you’ve made a hard commitment to do something hard. Hard doesn’t. Not even 9099 y2k problem was hard. It was just global. But it wasn’t hard in the sense that, you know, I take a rock and hit you in the head, that’s hard. Because that’s a physical reality. She’s talking about psychological, psychological experiences, some of which are based in global agreement. But those aren’t hard. And I think she’s right about that, then there is no hard deadline, hard deadline, no really hard deadline,

Art Gelwicks 33:17
you got hard with a capital H, you know, ones that the world’s going to end kind of thing. And then there are ones that everybody has to deal with. I’ll take in the corporate space, for example, you’re talking about getting something done in the next thing, that manager supervisor, person of authority, turns around and says, Oh, and you can have that done tomorrow, right? That becomes an artificially constructed deadline. It has nothing to do with the quality of the work, the delivery, the execution, none of that. It is just something that was picked for some abstract reason. But now, all of a sudden, time management kicks in, oh, I have eight hours between now and then how can I fit all this in? How can I get more out of this limited, abstract artificial block of intervals. And that’s where I think these things start to deconstruct and we have to in the productivity space, we have to start peeling that away. We have to get away from this idea of we just can’t think about everything measured in 15 minute increments anymore. We have to think about the quality of it. We have to think about the mental impact on the people doing the work. We have to think about the impact on the organizations and we have to think about the work itself. Is it worth even doing?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:42
So the author brings up this new term called temporal schemata. And what she talks about here in the research that’s linked to it, she links to an article that she’s a co author of with Dr. Hedy a Richardson and the study is called the The impact of temporal schemata understanding when individuals and train versus resist or create temporal structure, and she defines the idea of temporal schemata as basically, quote, unquote, time rules, quoting here, again, fixed views of when things should occur or how long they should last, in the abstract of the research. She called these cognitive frameworks about time. And I find this fascinating, just in general, because it puts a term to something like the fact that she mentions in the article as an example, that meetings should be 30 minutes or 60 minutes long in length. Just as a general rule, we see that because we have calendar tools, that when we place a calendar item in the calendar will typically choose something of an hour’s length, and then when we shrink it to a shorter period of time, we typically will choose a 30 minute increment as being the length of those meetings, purely because the software gives us those options, not because of of reality, and that has created an organizational behaviors, that culture just dictates that meetings are 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, two hours, those kinds of things. And of course, we need to resist just because something needs to be a shorter amount of time, that it should only be 30 minutes. And so therefore there’s this by layer situation here, which is not just our subjective view of time, but also our subjective view of these temporal schemata. We need to we need to look at time rules within an organization and, and look at them with skepticism, look at them with critical eye so that we can say, Hey, do why should this meeting? Why isn’t the meeting 12 minutes long, right. And that way, we can then go ahead and say, if we only need so much time for something, that’s a lot the appropriate time to it, and right, match that with the right people so that we’re not actually wasting other people’s time. And we’re not wasting our own. So I feel like there’s some really strong argument in the article. Notwithstanding the preface kind of context of the article itself, I find that piece itself to be very, very useful. Any other thoughts related to the subjective, or the interpretive mind as it relates to, if we know that time is time, I mean, at least here on Earth at sea level, time is the same, right? Because if we do do increase elevation, time does dilate, right? Time dilation is real. But here on sea level, where we are, for the most part, time is the same. And we want to be able to manage time effectively. I’m a heavy Time Tracker. I’m also I’m a quantified self, or I track a lot of data about myself. And so I consider time to be an objective construct, notwithstanding how I perceive what I do in that time. So I purposefully understand and track my time to see how those things differ. So that I can come to some central view on how it is that I spent my time. What do you all do in order to be able to be more effective in the face of the fact that time? Is that ever marching road ahead,

Francis Wade 38:12
I track my time as well. I wish I had better tools to analyze the data that I’ve collected. But as a reflective tool, I find it very useful to look back and actually compare what I spent my time on versus what I think I spent my time on or what I intended. So I find that to be to be really useful. Also,

Art Gelwicks 38:33
I’ve spent my entire career measuring my Time and Billing for my time. And I’ve come to the realization that I need to spend less time focusing on how much I can get done during a billable hour. And what does it take to get the work done? That, to me is the linchpin of the entire conversation when when I look at this, and when I talk to anybody about this, when they lay out, what am I what am I going to do to be productive? I’m like, Well, how are you going to know when you were productive? What’s the end line? What’s the goal line? Then figure out? What’s it gonna take to be able to reach that, but don’t say, you know, what can I do to be productive in the next two hours? It’s, it’s the wrong perspective. It’s the wrong way of looking at, it’s creating an artificial stress that’s unnecessary.

Francis Wade 39:24
I don’t know if I agree with that are in that, I think there is value to when you may have a real deadline. So last week, I put on a virtual conference with some very real deadlines. And I had a as you can imagine, it was a massive project with lots of people 1000 people showing up in a particular space because I invited them to be there and implicitly, I promised that everything would be in place for them to be there. You know, having having accepted that and having also committed that and not burnt out in the process. And that those of us who are putting it on would actually enjoy the experience. So committing to that, as well as the hard data, the soft, hard data that we had published. The question then became, which things do we do? In what sequence? And how do we make sure that they get done, because they had to get done in order to accomplish the overall objective? That requires the kind of optimization that you’re talking about? I think what you’re seeing is that that optimization can’t overtake the overall objective, because by itself, optimizing how you create your schedule, or your the schedules that you create means nothing if the larger context isn’t very, very firm, or very, very clear. So that’s what I hear you saying?

Art Gelwicks 40:51
Well, no, and I agree with you. And I think we’re dancing, we’re both answering around the same point, because you didn’t say, can I put this conference together in 40 hours, that wasn’t your definition, you had a hard date, and you planned out to reach that date that milestone, if it took you 10 hours, if it took you 60 hours, you were still going to do the work necessary to to achieve that end goal, at the high level of quality that you wanted to deliver. At that point, you would say I was productive. Now, part of that measure may have been to do it in as few hours as possible. So you have time for other things and other activities. And that’s completely valid.

Francis Wade 41:32
But there was a, there was more to it, though, because another angle of it is there were features I had to take out. Because there was not enough time to fit them in. So there’s there’s also that so I had to add to say no to a bunch of cool stuff. Because I just couldn’t, couldn’t fit it in so that there was a hard there was a hard reality in there that I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do. So I had to make choices and say, Well, you know what, maybe next year, I’d have I could do that. But again, in the overall context. So not burning out having this be fun, having it be peaceful, having that be injurious to or lifestyle and food and well being and

Art Gelwicks 42:12
so that the difference is that I that I hear is that next year when you do this, you want to do the cool things. So you’re going to allocate more time to be able to do that. Or you’re going to decide, I’m not going to do those at all. It’s not that you’re going to try and figure out how to cram the cool things into the same amount of time, you’re going to take the historical data, you’re going to take your subjective analysis as to how you felt about that execution and having to leave those these pieces out. And you’re going to adjust accordingly.

Francis Wade 42:43
No, I’m going to ask that question. Because here’s what I’m going to do. I’ve already decided this. Interestingly, so the cool thing is in, I’m going to, here’s my strategy, I’m gonna have to start earlier, and developing some of them, I’m gonna have to outsource, like, for example, the graphics because I do all the graphics right now I tried outsourcing it this year, didn’t find someone who use the tools that I wanted to use, and then gave up. But I would try, I would start earlier to find someone who has the skills. So that we am so outsourcing and starting early are my two strategies for getting in more of the cool things. So in a way I am doing what you’re doing. It’s just that with more runaway, I can have more options. I can have more choices, strategies that I can put in play,

Augusto Pinaud 43:29
I think I’m going to agree with and beat the dead horse. But if you don’t, I’m just going to quote CS Lewis, if you don’t know where you want to go, any road will do. And that applies to productivity 100% If you don’t know what you want to do, what is the kind of productivity that you want to have? What is the time that you need for self care? And how do those things, and those little elements are important in your life, you are never going to win that race. There is always one check, you can do one extra check you can do and you don’t know what you’re looking for. It doesn’t matter how many things you can accomplish on that list.

Art Gelwicks 44:12
For me, it’s it’s pretty straightforward. Make the time part of your equation, the last piece, answer every other question, What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What’s the benefit? What’s the personal satisfaction, answer all of those questions, and then go back and say, what’s the time it’s going to is it going to take for me to hit all those markers. If you don’t do that. You’re just asking for stress.

Augusto Pinaud 44:35
Yeah, I actually simplify a version of that and I said plan first, for your recovery time for your free time for your vacation time. Then plan how you’re going to protect that time and what you have leftover. Then use it for that. When you plan that way that is contrary of how most people play plan. You are You’re going to find a lot more satisfaction,

Francis Wade 45:02
it takes a certain kind of emotional maturity to put your experience before the mechanics. But I think you guys are right, if if you have the discipline to do it, and the discipline to not forget what you’re doing, then the time aspect of it is really just kind of, in a way, don’t in the weeds, it’s important. But by the time you get to that, if you’ve already put the others in place, then you will achieve the experience that you want. And ultimately, we want the experience, not just the time optimization, because what does that add up to anyway, in the end, right, so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:39
I’ll leave us with this, which is the fact that contrary to the to the author of the article, Dr. Ship notes, her views on time management don’t actually reject her notion that she wants to be productive. Clearly, she has an interest in being productive, as we all do. And we wouldn’t be recording this podcast on this panel. And you wouldn’t be listening to us as listeners, if you didn’t have interest in your own personal productivity. The goal here then is to figure out how what we are doing impacts what we can do better. And I just ultimately always have landed on the idea that active and passive tracking of time is the best way for us to do that. Our perception of what we are doing is very different than when we track data empirically, and review that reflect upon that. So while what you guys talked about in planning for how we spend our time, we also need to be understanding of the immutability of time, and therefore, figuring out what it is we did so that we can optimize for the future. Past performance, usually begets future performance. And so therefore, if we can change what we’ve done in the past, and just small ways, we can be more productive. And so I just highly recommend that people think how to track time how to manage the process of figuring out what it is we did, and why did we do it that way? And can we do it a little bit better. And it’s not about grand changes. It’s these small little incremental changes that really have the most profound impacts on our health and well being, and ultimately, our personal productivity. And so I want to thank you, gentlemen, for the conversation. Thank you all for listening to us, we have a couple of just points before we close out. First and foremost, while this conversation is at its end, we don’t have to end it necessarily here just in the audio, we can even extend it into the conversation that happens not only on the podcast episode page on productivitycast.net, but we also have our community inside personal productivity clubs, you can join that by heading over to productivitycast.net. And you’ll find the community link there and you can join us and engage in the conversation, we’d love to have you engage in the conversation with us. Also, while you’re on the episode page on productivitycast.net, you’ll find our show notes, those have links to the various things we discussed here today. And so there you can link out to them and find all those resources there. We also include text transcripts in both a readable format on the page, and one which you can download as a PDF. So you can have that there as well. You can learn how to subscribe and rate and review us all from productivitycast.net So if you visit the website, you’ll see the subscribe tab and it will give instructions on how to do all of those things. And with that I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade, and Art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast this and every week, you can learn about more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net as well. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us at ProductivityCast. Here’s your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 48:43
That’s it for this productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

Today, we’re releasing this episode which was recording live at the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2023 stage. The theme of the conference is “One Size Doesn’t Fit All” and so the ProductivityCast team spent time discussing in front of the live audience what our thoughts are on challenges of one-size-fits-all and some thoughts of solving for it. Enjoy!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/138 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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In this Cast | One Size Doesn’t Fit All – ProductivityCast Live

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | One Size Doesn’t Fit All – ProductivityCast Live

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• Remember the Milk
• CrossPlatform podcast

Raw Text Transcript | One Size Doesn’t Fit All – ProductivityCast Live

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and a Gousto pinout with Francis Wade and art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23
I’m Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24
And Art Gelwicks is with us somewhere in spirit. But he’ll be back hopefully, and with us shortly. Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to you all, listening, live, watching live or listening after the fact to the podcast feed. We are here live at the task management and time blocking virtual summit 2023. And the theme for this summit is one size doesn’t fit all. And what Francis kind of positioned us to do here on this episode was to talk about really the the ideas behind what does one size fits all mean? Does it really make a difference in our productivity? Can we think about this in a more, I think fluid and dynamic way. And I’m going to play devil’s advocate a little bit in this Episode Episode to talk about really the, the fine line between efficiency and effectiveness, when we think about one size fits all methods, tools, and otherwise. And so what do we want to get started here, let’s let’s talk about one size fits all being a problem, because we’re consistently trying to do more. And as Francis talks about task volume, for instance, do you want to kind of talk to us about the number of projects and commitments that you typically talk about with regard to how one size fit all one size fits all really becomes a problem for folks, when they’re attempting to do more and more

Francis Wade 1:48
Sure, is that we’re greedy. It’s, we fill our we fill our plates in terms of capacity. So we do as much as we can do, and we grow as much as we can grow. And when we get to a particular level, we still want more. So even if we pick up a new app and learn some new techniques and become more productive, because we can manage more tasks, eventually, or capacity runs out, because we just keep adding more tasks, we’re really until eventually, we coupled and start to experience problems all over again, it’s just human nature, the more we do can do, the more we want to do. And it’s just a matter of wanting, just being aspirational, just being positive. Having a vision for yourself, that is beyond your grasp. wanting more out of life, wanting to grow, wanting to learn wanting to contribute, wanting to serve, you know, there’s always all of these commitments, they sound great, because we are just wired that way. But what they all translate to in the world of task management in terms of what goes in your to do less than what goes in your calendar is one word more. So given that we always want more, there is no single set of techniques, and there’s no single tool that will ever serve us forever. It serves us up to a point. And then we want more. And we either give up wanting more, which some people do, or we change our approach. So that more becomes possible human nature.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:32
And I would probably put a different lens on this, I would filter that response to the fact that we are in various different cultures and societies that really require a lot of us today, you know, there, there is just a different sense of the world than at the turn of the last century, or even the turn of the prior century to that. There’s just so much more expected of us. And we are required to be connected to all of our past mistakes in a lot of ways. And that creates a lot of shame and regret for humans just generally. And I think the idea of one size fits all ends up being problematic for folks who do have any sense of their past, coming back to bother them haunt them, so to speak. And I don’t mean this in terms of like doing something bad. I mean, in terms of like just capturing your existing task volume, and recognizing that there’s a backlog that at its very nature causes a an emotional response that has its own effects on us. And I think that can be very, very troublesome for folks. So we have task volume. I’m going to kind of twist us to the other side to this, which is kind of Devil’s advocacy, right out the gate, which is to talk about the fact that we have lots of solutions in the world and In which the one size fits all works. And maybe not perfectly, but maybe enough, I’ll use the example of all in one productivity tools like an outlook outlook positions itself as the one tool you need for being able to manage communications. I think to some extent Microsoft Teams is starting to encroach in that space a bit. But But focusing on Outlook, right, we’ve got email, we’ve got calendar, we’ve got task management. At some point, it did a journaling type of tool in there as well, there was kind of a note taking capacity, you have add ins that extend on that. So it’s customizable, and it’s extensible, make the argument that that one size fits all strategy does not work for organizations.

Art Gelwicks 5:49
No, I’ll jump in there and say it absolutely doesn’t work for organizations. And it’s exactly what organizations need. And here’s why I say that. Because organizational implementation of those types of one size fits all solutions are not about the users using them. They’re about what it takes to maintain them, and what it costs to deploy them. And what it costs to license them. That’s the the objective. And that’s the purpose, it has nothing to do with whether or not it’s the best option for the end users, because they’re rarely taken into consideration for that. So when you have a tool like Outlook, where Microsoft will tell you that it will do everything, including slicing bread, it’s not, they don’t really care that, well, it’s not the best option for doing task management. And it’s not the best option for handling your calendar. Typically, what you’ll see retroactively is they’ll try to shoehorn functionality into it, to get it closer to those applications that actually do those very things. So, in a corporate environment, it’s extremely rare to actually get an application that’s really good at the singular job it’s supposed to do, because then you wind up with a huge number of applications to to maintain license and ultimately pay for

Augusto Pinaud 7:06
to go by little back to what Francis was saying. Us, you know, there are two problems, yes. Our task, you know, we go into task management or learning to manage our mess, because that overwhelm, okay, because we want more and more and more. And what is little say, in the world as you work with somebody is there is a moment in which you need to start looking for better. And what I mean by that is, as Francis was saying, and I will agree, there is a moment that you reach capacity. And when you reach capacity, what are you going to do, okay, as to this day, I have not been able to find the upgrade. Okay. So if somebody knows how to do an upgrade, please let me know. Okay, but since I cannot do an upgrade, this is what it is. So the moment you reach capacity, is when this game gets interesting, because that’s where the geeking and the time management and the story comes into place. Because now is how we are going to get better task, okay, on how we are going to maximize that resources, those resources that we have, so we can really be productive. That is where things that I have mentioned before, in other episodes of this podcast, that do not do list, what is the things that you need to stop doing? What is what you need to teach others to do when I work with families for task management? Okay. How do you teach your kids how to use these tools? Because it’s very interesting are my kids are 14 and 10. Okay, they can play with Windows, Mac, iPads, and Chromebooks. No problem, okay, switch between one or the other. But somehow, we parents, you know, don’t give them the tools that we know they’re going to need. Now do I think my kid will use not to be or to do is when they get to their professional life? Maybe not. But this is a great time to teach him, hey, you need to find a way to capture you need to find a way to collect and to think so that you can do so that way. They don’t get to where we got Okay, that is more and more and more and more crashed. Okay, but they can gradually learn that the only way they’re going to be very successful is as they reach capacity, they start looking for better.

Francis Wade 9:46
I would add to that and say that it’s not it’s not. Greed is a big part of it in terms of personal aspirations, greed for more capacity or wanting and needing more capacity. But also there’s no standing still, you know, I had one inbox when I was in 1995 96, one inbox that got five email messages per week. Let’s see, I now have, I can’t even count the number of inboxes, that I have places where I can get messages. And the email is at least the least up to 200 to 300 a day. So I’m in a totally different zone than I was way back when, and trying to manage my whole world with one inbox, one email address, as if I got three or five emails a day is unworkable. So if I look to the future, why should I think that this is going to be the limit of the inboxes? And messages that I have to manage? No, chances are, there’s going to be more because that’s just the way technology is going. And you know, there’ll be everybody has an uncle or a cousin who sends them conspiracy theories, right? You know, back in 1995, that didn’t happen. So you’re getting a lot more potential time demands, potential tasks coming into these inboxes. And you can’t do anything about it, you can’t write off the world, you could, but you don’t want to write off your uncle, because he’s sending you conspiracy theories. So you need a way to cope with the change in technology. So that’s not a change in necessarily your practice. It’s that you’re being given inboxes people are using email, and they’re sending you more messages, and you either coach yourself off, or you at least pretend to accept them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:24
What I’m hearing from both you and Gousto kind of brings this thought to mind, which is that when we are thinking about the concept of of the more specific we get, though, not just in terms of of this kind of sense of having to use many different tools for many different things. But the more you focus actually, on one thing, the more likely you are to need a specific tool for that thing, right, because the better you know, the confines of that project or repeatable task, then the more bespoke the tool can be or the set of protocols can be to doing that thing, I use very specific tools for producing this podcast, that are very tailored to just doing this work. They’re not tools that I use everyday for anything else. And so they’re, they’re designed for that. So I would not, I would not try to use an audio editor to do video editing, right, you know, like, those kinds of things don’t make sense. But in my system, I’m capable of toggling back and forth between both efficiency and effectiveness. But specifically for these kinds of, I don’t know, the more you focus on the the work at hand, the better you’re able to identify the the tools that are going to be best for that kind of work. And even to the extent of I keep track of what needs to be done, and a completely different tool for the podcast, that I do everything else in my world. And it’s just because it’s simpler for me to be able to look not only in that system for that work. So hopefully that gives a little bit of mental fodder for folks to think about in that sense.

Francis Wade 13:07
I would also add today, because are you going to be using the same audio editor five years from now? No chance.

Art Gelwicks 13:15
And this is actually a good, good point to address this. If it’s customizable, is it really one size fits all? I’d argue that no if it if it may only provide a limited number of sizes, but it’s still not a single size. That’s I think, where we start to get into this difference between a tool and a platform. And when you start to look at functional tools, functional tools are typically, for lack of a better term, one size fits all for that function. They are designed to do a job audio recording perfect example, I would not use an audio recorder to manage a spreadsheet, why that is not its functional purpose as a tool. However, a platform that is designed to handle multiple types of functionality. We’ll never excel in any one of them. It is truly the jack of all trades. But it does give you that capability to configure and match your needs sent more specifically. This is where we have the problem though. It’s not a tool or a platform issue. It’s what are you asking it to do? Are you asking this thing to define how you should do something? Or do you understand how you should do something well enough to define it for this thing? And I think that’s where people get hung up. Because they’ll look at something that’s a platform, like a notion for example, and they’ll expect it to be able to do what a to do is does. Well Todoist has a specific objective task management that’s that’s its gig. It is not designed to be a database. It is not designed to be a note management system. It’s not it’s not its purpose in life. So we have to understand what is our need set. Because ultimately you do want to get to a one size fits your needs. But when all four of us would look at a task management system, we’re all going to have different needs sets.

Augusto Pinaud 15:21
But you change the and I think that’s where that need to go is the question is not one size fits all. One size fits you, what will fit you. And that is one thing that we go into this show and come over and over and over. You know, what works for Francis or yourself or Ray? Okay, doesn’t matter how effective it is, may never work for me. Okay, I’m even we were joking on the pre show. Okay, how my kid got an Android. Okay. And he was complaining about his speed. And I almost told him get a no, but okay, and but why? Well, because I leave on an iPad, that’s what is happening, okay. And is that we have established, there is no difference. But what happened is that what it will work for me may not work for anybody. And that’s a key into that, what is the trust, it doesn’t matter if the size fit or don’t fit, what matter is to understand it, that’s the challenge, what will work for you. And then when you go into those corporate environments, how you can get those standard tools that you’re going to get work for you. But first and foremost, you need to understand what works for you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:43
I don’t think one size fits me, I am very comfortable with having multiple tools for multiple different similar veins of my world. And to some great extent it’s because of compartmentalization, I want to be able to very clearly have a distinction between my work and my personal world. And so that’s just an easy and clear distinction to have different tools for those things aren’t go ahead, and we can come back to this topic,

Art Gelwicks 17:09
I was gonna say there’s, I got into a conversation about this with a friend of mine recently. And we got, we got talking about what productive pants are you wearing that day. And I have to explain that if you go into your closet, you don’t have 14 pairs of the exact same pair of pants, guaranteed. You have dress pants, you have work pants, you have casual pants, you may have sweat pants, you have pants for specific purpose, but they’re all pants, they fit you, they do that job that needed that is needed to be done at that time period. Now, if you’re looking for one pair of pants, that can do everything, you might find it, the odds are pretty good, you won’t, you may find something that you can wear all the times like our good old blue jeans, or you may want to be that specialized to have you know, these are my gardening pants. And these are my car working pants. And these are my fancy dance pants, whatever it’s finding, as we’ve as we’ve talked about what fits you now and I’ll stress the now part because for apparently my pants have changed size. So sometimes my pants fit and sometimes my pants don’t fit. So you have to adjust accordingly. And and when you look at a tool that is that rigidly locked down, that provides a structure that you just follow these dots, it can’t adjust with you. And that’s where I think a lot of people get into the mistake of the one size fits all. They look for a tool that provides them a structure without recognizing that they may not fit that tool.

Francis Wade 18:43
But it’s some kind of introspection required to figure out your need. If I can’t see myself, I would have a difficult time fitting into a corporate environment at this point. From a pest management point of view, because of the tools I use, you know, I could imagine the IT department saying Oh 90% of these you can’t even touch but you’re here on the job. And that would mean that my productivity would plummet because I would be forced into not using a tool, for instance using the one they gave me. So if I start from the inside out, I tell the truth about what I’m doing. And I become this rare doc that probably wouldn’t fit into a rigid system, I’d have to find some accommodation. But let’s at least a bit of introspection about what I do and what I need and even how I find new stuff. Because I like trying new things with the hope of replacing what I’m currently using in task management or anywhere else. So I think there’s an introspective action here. Kind of to understand what my needs are.

Augusto Pinaud 19:48
You see and you bring you bring a very interesting point and art and I discussed this point in the Cross Platform podcast extensively because of what you said Okay, as you said, I will not be able to go into the corporate environment and you have valid reason. But you are making that conscious choice, and you have the ability to make that choice. What happened with the people who don’t, okay, who Hey, their life happened on that corporate are great, it’s a great opportunity or for whatever reason, they are moving, or they have always been into that. And now they have that IT guy who said you cannot. And that is very critical and very important, and how it comes even to be more critical or more important to understand what you need. So you can adapt it to that, so you can make it work in the confines of the box. Okay, the box may be smaller, the box may be more difficult to fit, but now it gets, okay, how I’m going to keep us productive with this little box, and how can I dis constraints or make work these constraints, so I can really be productive?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:05
What are some practical components of all of this, that people can take away? Specifically, you know, many of us are in, you know, one phase of our life for a pretty considerable amount of time, you know, whether that be considered the prime working years or otherwise, some folks are in the ramp up years, right, where they’re where they’re maybe new to the workforce, some people may be retired or in a in a secondary career, some are in their fifth career, you know, some entrepreneurs out there, or they’re retired, and therefore, it’s not really task volume, but really just managing the everyday repeatable items. And then specialized projects. So all of these require some level of, of as Francis noted, introspection, I usually say surfacing to awareness, right? Like, we need things to be surface to awareness for us to be able to know that they need to be managed. So what are some practical things we can think about when it comes to one size, not fitting everything in our own personal worlds.

Francis Wade 22:07
Underpin the, it tells me not that it tells me but I, I find out what I need to look for. So I’m able to narrow my search. So I remember, like, if I could think of a good example, I would, but I remember needing a particular tool for my task management, and not being able to find it for a couple years. And then having to oh, there is one. So my time tracking, I use an app on my phone that doesn’t quite fit with prompts me whenever some time has passed that I’ve not tracked my time. And I have a practice of tracking sometimes during the day and definitely at night, it’s become more accurate. Because I used to track every two weeks, I used to capture screenshots using a program. And then every two weeks I would laborious Lee go through the screenshots and then estimate all the time that I spent in different times. And it was always up to do some guessing. Because if I was away from the computer, or if it didn’t capture the screenshot, I’d be like, Oh, my God, I have no idea what I was doing that day. So I wished for something more portable and more ready, ready, readily useful. So I use this program and it works works really well. So if we know we have the need, we can start looking for the solution. And it took me a couple of years to find it. It didn’t exist at the beginning of my search, but somewhere along the line it got invented. So this introspection gives us a way of specking out our needs, and then doing a targeted search.

Art Gelwicks 23:42
It’s two things one, know what puts you on the struggle bus. What are the things that that you encountered for me? What are the things that I encounter on a daily basis that caused me struggle, anxiety, difficulty, derail productivity, all those negative things? What are those trigger points, those are the things regardless of the solution that I have, that have to be addressed. The second thing though, is and I jotted it down here, know thyself, and know thy tools. So I’m adding on to that old phrase, because and we talked about this all the time. If you know your tools, if you take your time to learn your tools, whether you have one multiple or dozens doesn’t matter, as long as you know your tools. If your tool should have to change, you can change, you can transfer that knowledge set to whatever the new solution is. And if we go back to what Ray was talking about earlier about the audio recording, if you should change audio recording tools, all that knowledge about audio recording doesn’t go away. It just has to be transformed into the new syntax and structure of the new tool. And that’s what we have to do is we have to define and document Our own syntax and structure. If we do that, then whatever tool we look at whatever path we go down, we can apply that syntax and structure to, if I go back to my pants analogy, it doesn’t matter what pants I buy, they’re still my legs. So I understand what’s going in the pants. And as long as you know, and as long as I adapt for that, it should be workable, and I can then continue to make it function. There is an underlying expectation that the tools and the platforms we use will change. It is exceptionally rare to see anybody who is able to use something for years and years and years and decades. And because the technology itself changes, and when I say technology, just even paper, we got erasable pens, that’s a technology change. It changes how you think about things that changes how you do things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:56
I know that over the past year, plus I have been, we’re going through the process of determining what I need. In a task manager, I’ve been as many know, I’ve been using Remember The Milk to great effect for many, many years. And I think I’m you’re 13 or 14 or something like that now, and it just serves its purpose, I haven’t had a need for anything more spectacular, quite honestly, it does a lot. I mean, now they have milk script, which is an entire kind of JavaScript based scripting platform for being able to do that. And that kind of automation. And it’s, it’s amazing, I love Remember The Milk. But I also have this drive this need this desire, Francis would call it greed. To to, to consolidate into an existing tool that I have. And generally that doesn’t bother me. But I have been feeling this need to, to kind of do the one size fits all thing. And so I’ve been it’s been interesting for me though, it’s it’s allowed me to be able to sit down and say, What are the criteria that I need, or as art was noting for this to be rock solid for me. And I realized that I actually don’t need that many things, I really, I really what I want is the ability to be able to have that tool, speak to other tools. And then otherwise, the basics are enough for me. And I think that’s something that you should start to think about for yourself. Like if my tool connects to Zapier, or it integrates directly with the other tools that I need, then perhaps the existing tool doesn’t need to be detritus now, it’s just a functional tool that you can use. And it’s and then it’s extended by other tools. And I hate to be focused too much on the tool itself. But just thinking for yourself through any given protocol, right, any any, any way that we think about how we work, think about the way in which it integrates into the rest of your work flows. And then you can start to think of them as puzzle pieces. Right? That that extends to skills. If you think about how you, you know, if you’re doing carpentry, or any of those other kinds of things, something that art knows more about than I will ever you know, woodworking and so on and so forth. You know, but you learn a skill, a craft like that, those become skills that you then can apply in other areas, right you can you can go into the kitchen and be like, oh, you know what the the the woodblock that holds the knives can be sharpened and cleaned up and done in a particular way using the right whetstones whatever they might be. That’s that’s a replicable skill outside of the context. And I think a lot of people forget the concept of being able to contextualize generalizable skills. And so we can have very specific skills. But those skills can then be generalized in some some fashion with just very, very minor tweaking,

Augusto Pinaud 28:59
I don’t know if I want if I’m worried about the tool that can do everything. Because I prefer it will be ideal to have all the tools communicate and come to one place. But the reality is that it’s okay to have the different compartments and it’s okay to have the different tools and it’s okay, that everything don’t necessarily gets to one place. And the only reason I said that is because what the experience has show is that if you put everything in one place that will work amazingly, if you can make distinctions the only tool I have found, and yes, I am an expert in and ask the expert is not me. And the only reason that works so well enough me is because the tools allows you to have the different instances. So when you open the application, you see this is my personal This is my business. This is the other thing that I have And even though they are all in one application, they are certain distinction. There are certain things that work very well together. And there are certain things that the distance, it’s very healthy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:13
Fantastic. All right. So we have one question coming in from a listener Pedro. Hello. As he says, at one time, it seemed that an effective personal information manager or Pim, the aim was the Holy Grail, so to speak for knowledge workers, do we now live in a time when we shouldn’t go on this quest, that is, should we should we not try to find that one solely useful tool, who wants to tackle that?

Art Gelwicks 30:39
I think we’re constantly looking for that tool. I think that’s part of this underlying quest. I mean, when you talk about a PIM, I go all the way back to tools like arriba, back in the old DOS days, where we were junior or sidekick, where we were trying to get an application that would be our basic assistant, handling our external information, internal information organization, doing all the things that we found, we were never particularly good at doing. We are still in that continual quest, if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, nor of looking at these applications, tools like to do is to nos be a notion have come from that evolution. And I don’t think we will ever see that quest end because of the underlying premise of this whole conversation, which is that one size does not fit all, there will always be someone who says, I have a better way of doing it. And you should use my way. And we will eternally see that. So as long as we see things out there, that give us the opportunity to take, adapt, configure and apply. I think we’ll still continue to see this evolution, if we ever get to a point where we have one tool that works for every absolutely every one all the time, I’m actually a little concerned, because then I think we’re missing something cool. Seeing that sci fi movie,

Francis Wade 32:05
I agree with you that it’s not going to happen, we’re in a it’s a moving target, or needs are moving technology’s moving. And that means that the choice of tool has to move as well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:16
Something that we will get to is a point where most tools integrate, most tools can be in some way shape or form automated. And we are getting closer toward a place where whether we call it AI or you know, some kind of, you know, machine learning solution becomes so convincingly fluid in our lives right there embedded in the tools themselves, that the combination of those these three things, integration, automation, and artificial intelligence, makes it more fluid for us to be able to have that kind of personal information management, that kind of like speaking to Jarvis, Allah, Tony Stark and Iron Man, you know, where you just have this seamless experience where that entity that code is doing so much of the work for you that it seems more fluid, and it’s ubiquitous, it’s on all screens and all surfaces for you to be able to interact. I think there is a point where we get to that kind of pseudo singularity, I don’t think that it is very close at hand. But it can be useful in a lot of ways in its patchworked sense today. And I think that’s really important for us all to kind of take hold. I think the consensus here is that one size doesn’t fit all. But you can find a size that fits you within context. And I think it’s really important for us to all continually surface that to awareness. And so thank you, gentlemen, for this wonderful conversation. While we are at the end of our conversation for the recording. We are not at the end of our discussion. In totality. If you have a question or comment, feel free to go ahead and visit us on our podcast website page, you can go to ProductivityCast debt dotnet and leave a comment there you can also join our community by going to ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash community and and going ahead and joining the community and continuing along in the dialogue there as well. If you have a topic to suggest or otherwise, go ahead and post those in the community. I always love new topics, suggestions or questions. And of course I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade, and Art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast this every week, thank you to our live audience for this ProductivityCast live recording. Really fun to be able to interact with you all while we record. And that has been a it’s been a lot of fun to be able to do as well. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 34:41
That’s it for this productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

In a post entitled, Hyper-Scheduling, David Sparks (a/k/a MacSparky) writes about his method of time blocking on a granular level. This week, the ProductivityCast team provides their commentary, challenges and methods on this concept of hyper-scheduling, which will hopefully spark ideas on how you can better manage your time-based work.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/137 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• Hyper-scheduling – MacSparky 
• Unschedule
• How to Use the Unschedule – Video Tutorial 

Google Assistant Time-Based Actions:

• Events – https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/7678386?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
• Reminders – https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/9387035?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
• Timers – https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7028899?hl=en

Raw Text Transcript | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode, today, we are going to be talking about the calendar and really how to utilize the calendar to be more effective, really related to David Sparks. And some of you may know him as Mac Sparky at macsparky.com and the Mac Power Users podcast, he has been writing about something that he calls hyper-scheduling since 2018. And I thought we would actually tackle this topic in terms of just covering what he is really talking about in his series of articles around this. And so in 2018, he wrote this article that he said he was experimenting over the last month, in essence doing more deliberate scheduling of his time. And so really, what it looks like is a an explanation of what is time blocking the idea of being able to put blocks of time in your schedule. In his particular case, he’s calling it hyper-scheduling, I believe, because he is identifying more granular times where he’s doing things. So instead of say, large swaths of time for the day, he’s putting smaller and smaller blocks of time in the calendar for particular activities. And he defines various blocks. And he gives you the opportunity to be able to think about your own world in terms of what those smaller, more granular blocks could be, for purposes of having a schedule that you can fall in line with, as you make your way through the day. And the idea here, at least as I understand it, is that he’s giving himself the leeway to change things around. But it’s just a little bit more structure. He does this the night before. So instead of the morning of he does this the night before, and he gives some mechanics and so forth. He’s written five or six articles about this over the last three years. And so I thought it’d be helpful for us to walk through through some of these pieces. And he’s written some clarifying components of this, you know, some of the feedback he’s gotten and his responses to those as well. And so let’s just start off with that explanation kind of under our belt, right? This is kind of like a variant, or his his take on time blocking? What do you think about this take on time blocking? And what parts are good? What parts do you feel like, have an opportunity for improvement,

Francis Wade 2:56
he talks about capturing the schedule, initially on PayPal. And I’ve noticed, the first thing is that I changed my time blocking depending on how busy I am. So I’m in a hyper busy period this week, because I have a conference coming up that I’m in charge of, or hosting. And every minute of every day is valuable. And you know, I’m swapping things in and swapping things out and pushing things to next week. I’m in that mode where you’re trying to conserve as much time as possible before a deadline hits. And I normally would keep my schedule on my calendar, but the ad on my digital calendar. But the idea of going into my calendar and doing it and dragging around and dropping, and then going through all the different steps that it takes. For me to get to the calendar I want seems like a lot of work. So when I’m in this face, I just made a paper calendar, I started to write things down because in a minute, I’m done as opposed to 10 minutes, or 15. And it made me think he’s onto something. First thing he talks about the use of a digital PayPal entry and I forget the name you guys can you guys are experts in that area, you can speak to that. But it struck me that the interface and how easy it is to do time blocking has a lot to do with what kind of time blocking you do. Because I’m probably going to go back to using the computer using Google Calendar or schedule an escape path after this week. But interesting, I think there’s different approaches depending on how busy you are and how much spare time you have. And he may be hinting at that.

Art Gelwicks 4:41
I liked the idea of that level of scheduling. I just don’t think it’s practical, at least not not in my world. I mean, it’s it’s nice to be able to go through and say, you know this will take 15 This will take 25 But I just don’t think that works in most cases you spent So much time monkeying around with your schedule, that you almost get to a point where you’re not getting anything done. I mean, I like the idea, the bigger idea of time blocking where you say, Okay, I’m going to allocate, you know, two hours to work on this today, and set that in your schedule. But as you dig down more granular, you’re getting really to the point of a checklist with times assigned to it in my book. And that’s, I think there’s a law of diminishing returns, that starts to creep into this fairly quickly.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:32
I think this is highly dependent upon the type of work that you do, and the expectations you have of the other people around you. And so if you are delegating work, if you are managing people, and if you’re working in any collaborative environment, many of these things are going to break down if you don’t have a lot of control over your own time. And so in my particular world, where I do have a lot of control over my time, like I have almost exclusive control over my work day. And so the idea that I give control, so to speak to others to schedule, time in my calendar, or those kinds of things, you know, I’ve latitude to reject calendar events, move them around all of those kinds of things. And that does give me the ability to do some variant of time blocking if I wanted to. And so I can see this working for me, if I if I liked the idea of my calendar being filled with things other than meetings. And I think just because as a GTD er, I have a tendency to think about things from a list perspective, and not from a calendar perspective. You know, calendars are for meetings in my world, and then those things that do need to be done in a timeframe. And that means that there’s actually more in the calendar than one might think. But at the same time, I do tend to use those calendar anchors for prompting me to look at my lists for what can be done. So in essence, the, the time blocking in my world is actually a context, not a set of tasks. And that sounds to me a little bit about what David Sparks is talking about here, where he has these, there triggers for contexts of things to do, and there’s a melange there, have, you know, he’s got a little bit of, you know, go do X, go do Y, those kinds of things, you know, routine based items. But for me, I like the idea of saying at this particular time, I’m going to transition and, you know, shift my modality from one to the next. And when I’m doing that, this is the thing I’m going to work on next. So when I look at the calendar, I can see oh, right, in two hours, I’m going to be shifting gears to this chunk of work. And that gives me the ability to start kind of moving myself in that direction, which I think can be helpful.

Art Gelwicks 8:00
What’s too small, what size time block is too little at work to 15

Francis Wade 8:06
minute blocks. But again, only in times when you have no discretionary time. Like for example, if I’m in a situation where I have three meetings, which are almost back to back, and I only have a half an hour between each one, then I’m going to not only have the energy, I’m going to schedule the time in between the meetings to do something that takes 15 minutes or half an hour. But on a regular day, like really I have discretion over my time, and I have some discretionary time, I think it’s a matter of how much slack time do you have, if you have the slack time, then you don’t need to get down to 15 minute increments. But if you’re if you’re running on a clock, if you’re if you’re someone who has commitments and things you have to do, at particular times at five o’clock, that person is going to call at 530 Someone else is going to call if you’re in a situation where it’s like that, then I think you go into smaller increments.

Augusto Pinaud 9:07
So my approach is a little different time obviously play a factor. But also what is my ability to focus because I wish to tell you that I everyday can focus 100% and be hyper focused and that is, at least in my world doesn’t happen. There are days that is harder for me to focus harder for me to concentrate harder for me to stay in task. Those days, the time block goes smaller, because I can convince, persuade, or stay on task 10 to 15 minutes that I struggle with that and then change or continue or set another 10 minutes. When my ability to focus is high. I can set larger chunks and I’m able to stay on them. But as my attention is scatter I need those time blocks to be smaller so I can stay on top of them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:04
I’ll just note that based on what a Gousto said, is that most people are in the same set of focus times throughout their days, every day. So while some of us have days that are very different than the other, that does not change your biology. So when we have a perception that for somehow somehow we have lower sets of focus, at this moment in time, the likelihood is that that’s a feeling not a reality. And so we have to remember that we have a rhythm in which we follow. And your body naturally is more focused. During those times, we’ve talked about this in past episodes, whether that be the concept of your circadian rhythm and following along with the ultradian rhythm, but you have these focused periods of time where you are naturally inclined to have strong executive function, lean into those times. And if you just do a little bit of analysis, you can find those times. So that means that every day you get a repeat on that same opportunity. So even if there are some days where you may have a meeting that overlaps that, or maybe you have some crazy making that’s going on in those periods of time, generally, if you can allot that time, to that high focus work, you’re going to be much more likely to get that kind of, of creative or flow work done during those periods of time.

Art Gelwicks 11:24
So I’m gonna go back to the size question, because I still, I’m still struggling with part of it, we talked about the 15 minute interval, which isn’t unrealistic matter of fact, many calendar applications, that’s the most granular level of interval that they’ll provide to you. But is it really 15 minutes, I mean, we’ve talked about before about giving yourself time to spin up an activity and then spin it down for the next one. So even if you give yourself two minutes to spin it up, do the work and two minutes to spin it down. You’re really only talking about 10 minutes of active time. This is how much time are we going to spend breaking things down to little tiny things to do. I mean, I understand filler spaces and things like that. But there’s a point where could this even be anxiety inducing? Because now you’ve got it to such a tight schedule, and now you get a call in erupts? Or something else that happens and throws the entire thing off kilter? Is all that wasted exercise, then I have my doubts.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:40
So my, my response would be to that art, which is that, you know, there is a point where too much is too much, right? Where, you know, if you if you create too much structure, you will naturally rebel against that structure, right, there isn’t a natural component there. At the same time, if you have no structure, then there is a structure even when you don’t believe there’s a structure, right, so you’re gonna fall into path of least resistance and likely the things that you don’t want to do, and the things that you do want to do or the things that won’t get done. So we have to balance those things out. And I think that you’re right, in knowing thyself, in the sense of choosing the right amount of structure, that’s going to be the guardrails to keep you moving toward, like staying on the road requires lines to tell you that you’re staying on the road. And, you know, you could you could drive on roads without lines, but I bet you a lot of people would start cracking into each other, and driving off the road more often if the lines didn’t, didn’t exist. And so it just depends on how many lines do we need on the road, right? And how close to those lines need to be to each other. Francis

Francis Wade 13:45
with analogy, I live in a country where most of the roads don’t have lanes. So there is a certain man

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:54
I’m from New York City where the roads have lines and we still don’t abide by them. We have been

Augusto Pinaud 14:00
on those lines and New York is just as a reference is not to be follow. It’s a reference thing for the people from

Art Gelwicks 14:08
Pennsylvania, we hide the lines and potholes. So

Francis Wade 14:13
you can never tell. But I was I was thinking also to add what I said before that they when you’re on vacation, you obviously well. Most of us on vacation don’t need 15 minute increments. So it’s not like there’s a hard and fast rule about which approach to use. I think it’s horses for courses. You just be flexible and adapt and use the amount use the granularity that you need to get life done. And be ready to abandon it not abandon. You’re ready to switch gears. When life changes. Something else comes at you like like I for example, I can time block a Saturday fairly effectively, or a Sunday without interruption or I because the people who would interrupt me aren’t working. So I say, Okay, well, this is a great opportunity for me to get stuff I want to get done. Because the chances of being interrupted are really low, very different for Monday or Friday. But the bottom line is to be very aware of the volume of time demands that you’re dealing with, and then adjust accordingly. And not get stuck with excellent people doing any one particular way of time blocking versus any other sort of being sensitive to say, Okay, I have this amount of discretionary time, do I need a time block, if I don’t, then I could just put one, put nothing in my calendar at all, then just go with it go with the appointments. I found myself moving between the extremes and just using whatever I need to say, whenever it’s whatever I need to use whenever it’s needed,

Art Gelwicks 15:55
I don’t want to come across as being negative on this idea of hyper scheduling. And I realized I was doing that a little bit earlier. And I think it’s partially because I approach this from a different angle, I use what I often refer to as the Lego methodology, where within your schedule and your time blocks, there’s two types of schedules are two types of time blocks, they’re the time blocks that absolutely heavy time constraint tied to them, because they have to happen by a particular date and time. So if you’ve got something that has to happen, by the end of the day, you block out specific time to get that stuff done, then there’s time blocks where work can get done. But the work to be done in that time block is unspecified at that point. So let’s say you’ve got a 15 minute interval between meetings, you could block that time. And this is what I often do is a block that type of my calendar as a 15 minute work block. Where that comes in handy is in my task list, I have tags on a large number of my tasks that are not time specific as to the estimated duration of the task to complete. So if it’s, you know, cleaned out my inbox for my email that maybe that’s a 15 minute task. Well, it’s tagged as a 15 minute task. And if I look at my to do list right now, I probably have about 30 or 4015 minute tasks that are sitting in in there that need to be done, but not by a specific date and time that when that 15 minute window hits on my schedule, I can pop over my task list, look down that list of tags for 15 minutes and say, Oh, I’m going to do that one now, and move on to the next one. So that is in my mind, that’s a type of hyper scheduling. But it’s a flexible one because it allows me to decompose interruptions. So let’s say for example, I had a one hour meeting blocked out on my calendar, and it gets cancelled. After doing my happy dance, I realized that I’ve got an hour of work time available to me, Well, now I can decompose that time. That could be an hour, it could be 230 minute tasks, it could be for 15 minute tasks, it could be, you know, 610 minute tasks, however, I want to decompose that and apply it to the work that needs to be done. I can none of those items are pre scheduled as per se. But it means that that’s time that’s not lost. And maybe some of those tasks are mindfulness and personal health tasks. You know, maybe it’s a coffee break task that I throw in there. Great. That counts too. And I can punch through that on the list. So every day, you know, if I have a calisthenics period, I go grab my 15 minutes for that because that window of opportunity showed up. So when I think about the hyper scheduling idea, I believe that’s where I struggle with it is assuming that you have a level of control that you don’t, for those of us who don’t, and not being able to create a structure that we can flex within whenever we need to. And if I think about the article that we were looking at, there are some examples that kind of resonate with that were he would have a block of time and then subdivide that block of time. Well, it’s a similar principle, I may allocate three hours for QA checking on a site I built great. Within that three hour time period, I’ve got lots of smaller things and I may subdivide those accordingly. odds are pretty good, they have a sequence to them, but they may not. It may just be work that has to be done and move along. That actually fits much closer to an agile methodology than it does anything else.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:44
I think we have to remember that everybody is unique in the way in which they respond to things and something you said earlier art about the idea that this might be anxiety producing. For some people, the amount of structure will be comfort thing that is that it provides a guide rail for them that is helpful and gives them direction that they unfortunately don’t want to have to create or provide for themselves in the moment. So it’s just like, if I was taking off as an astronaut, while I’m in the Shuttle, I want very clear instructions that are granular, press the red button, press the green button, press the blue button, right, I don’t want to have to think Wait, you know, yesterday, we kind of turned the dial some little bit to the left, I want to know exactly where I should do and what I should do it at that time in those critical moments. But there are other times where I probably don’t want as much structure and control because I want to be able to be a little bit more say, let’s use the word creative or intuitive. In those moments, I’m going to then, you know, lean into, you know, less of my executive function and a little bit more of some other part of my brain. And that gives me that level of kind of balance. And I think everybody’s a little bit different. And I think not only are we different, generally, we can be different in these very specific cases, to the point Francis was making earlier about being in a in a hyperactive mode, right, where you have this very clear set of activities that need to be done toward an important purpose right this moment. And therefore, the time is a little bit more structured, because every moment counts. And I think that that’s an important kind of piece to this whole puzzle. I will note that you know, something that David Sparks hints at here in the articles that we’re talking about, is that again, well, let me start back with with it, if we make the premise is hyper scheduling nothing more than time blocking with a different name, I think I can get on board with that. I think that there are so many different types of of time blocking and time chunking, we’ve already had episodes on those topics. The reality is, is that he’s just using a different term for what I think is the same thing. And I think I agree with Francis in that sense. What he blends in here and makes a good argument about is that, for the most part, time blocking works for a lot of people for many people. And it’s important to recognize that component, it may not work for everybody. And for those people, they need to find other methodologies that do support their working capabilities. They’re working trends. And I think that’s also a good component to having a good productivity system is to kick the tires until you find the thing that does support you. One of the things that he found to be one of the criticisms that he wrote about and I thought this was really interesting, was, you know, for those people that was basically, you know, this is just basically a controlled type of procrastination, or that hyper scheduling is unrealistic. My question for you all is for the person who always has something that they want to do, where does this process breakdown? Because if the reality is, is that anytime something is not in the calendar, but I still have things that I want to accomplish, the idea of having all of this time blocked, so to speak, I’m always going to fill it with something that I want to be don’t doing. So where does the system break down in terms of taking time off? Or maybe having open spaces? Where do you find that the system is not particularly the idea of time blocking will ultimately fail, you wear those failure points for the person who finds themselves looking at a time blocking scenario and thinking, well, even if I block time off or a break, I’m still going to feel that sense that something needs to be done.

Art Gelwicks 23:48
That compelling notion of always feeling like something has to be done, I don’t know is necessarily driven by time blocking and hyper scheduling. But it’s facilitated. It’s certainly enabled by it. Because you feel like if you if you dig into this deep and you you buy into this deep and then you look at an open calendar. Your first reaction is I need to fill that calendar. Why? Why do I have such big open time blocks, I can put stuff in there, I can be doing things. It’s not giving you the permission to say, No, I’m not going to do anything right now. Not not going to go down that path. So it creates a reinforced herbal structure. And this is where I brought up my anxiety point earlier. For people who struggle with executive functions for people who struggle with focus challenges. It can be very difficult because you look at that artificially generated schedule that’s staring at you. And all of a sudden, a small changes now put it off the rails. There’s your anxiety right there. How do I get it back on the rails? You know, am I not doing the right thing? Am I not Good at what I’m doing, because I can’t follow this basic schedule. That’s what makes this difficult. So where I see something like a hyper schedule could be useful, is in that same context that when it doesn’t, I know I sound like I’m saying both things. But for people who really struggle with trying to keep things on track, it can provide those guardrails. But there has to be a limit, there has to be a balancing point. Or else you wind up again, just working your schedule, not actually working,

Francis Wade 25:35
you asked about mistakes, I think there’s a technique that you could that people can use in all situations, and that is to schedule in unscheduled time. And that’s not the same as a black calendar, a black Canada, a blank calendar says, my priorities are reflected in this tool. It doesn’t mean that you have any flexibility at all, or it doesn’t mean that you’re not working, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot to do, it just means that in this tool, my priorities are not being captured. I think the next step sort of to go along with the artists thing is that if you do plan to take time off, or if you do plan to be extremely flexible, or if you do plan to be on vacation, and to schedule, nothing, it’s better to schedule nothing, rather than to leave nothing scheduled. In other words, you block out the whole day, and you just say, vacation starts at 6am. And it ends up 10pm. And you put a big little block in there. And you don’t think about it again after that. That’s better than having a blank calendar. So if you take that extreme and pass it into the regular every day, each day, I have a an on a scheduled block of unscheduled activity, I could use it to rest, I could use it as a buffer in case anything crazy comes in. On some days, lots of crazy comes in. So if I’m smart at putting in more buffer time than less, on some days, there is no buffer time whatsoever, because everything is scheduled. But the the idea of putting in a buffer zone, put I’m gonna be putting in I don’t mean, and this is I think a mistake that people make when they talk about time blocking. They say, in their mind, they instantly translate unscheduled time into buffer time. Which is not the same as scheduled in scheduling in buffer time. buffer time is a tool from as industrial engineer it for us. Buffer is not just stuff you’re not thinking about, but for something that you actively manage. And I think the same is true for us a calendar, the time you’re not scheduling, if you actively manage it, you get a different result than if you just start from MTN just keep filling until it’s full. That’s a very different mindset than seeing and putting aside extra unscheduled time in this very deliberate way. I think the two are very different.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:19
I definitely agree. And I think it’s important. I know we referenced this in the episode on getting more out of your calendar. But you know, I adhere to the Unschedule, which is the Dr. Neil Fiore concept. And I’ll link to that again in this as well, in the show notes just for for everybody’s edification. But the idea here is that knowing what you’re doing, even when what you’re doing is not what you think as being highly productive energy. expending work is still important. I liked the way in which you phrased it, Francis, which is that, you know, controlling your time is as important being aware of the time that you’re not going to be controlling you get some better benefit out of it.

Unknown Speaker 29:03
So I think is important, what Francis is saying, in many cases, you know, and I, I’m a big fan of color, so I have things on. On my calendar, there is a white calendar. Okay, that is what I called things to know. Okay, cool to know. And there are things that I want to have on the calendar, FYI, that I have not committed yet, but I want them there and I want them to block the time, or at least to have the time and consider but there is other things as

Augusto Pinaud 29:35
Francis was saying that are on my calendar on different colors. There is a black calendar in there, okay, for things that should have that, hey, I need to make sure that my email gets clean and process due that time is respected every day. No, but it’s good to know it is there. Okay. Do I have a scheduled meeting so that times yes, I have. But again, it is important to have that time in there. So that way, you can recalibrate and recalibrate appropriately. So I think that’s one thing where the calendar can be used much better into, which is not necessarily time you have committed or you’re rigid, but it’s the only way it’s going to happen as maybe a meeting, but it’s things that are going to make your day flow much better. You know, I blogged a Friday, once a month, for an afternoon over Friday, because the third Friday of the month, I tried to block that afternoon. Do that means I don’t work that afternoon. That’s so I can catch up on what has happened on the week prior. So do I work most of those Fridays I end up working? Okay. But what it is, is there is no meetings, no surprise, I call and then I know I can program so I can work into a much more calm state.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:57
So I wanted to do as we as we come to the latter part of the episode is to talk about how you would manifest if you were to do this kind of hyper scheduling, which is more granular scheduling than, say, the traditional time blocking concept in let’s just take it as time blocking as well. So if you were going to do that, how would you do this level of? Let me restate that. If we were going to take the the notion that David Sparks is talking about here and do hyper scheduling, which is more granular scheduling into your system? How would you do that? What would be the method or mechanisms and tools you would use to make that happen? Would you use paper and pen? Would you use a calendar application? Would you use a spreadsheet, I’m curious what the what the functional makeup of your tools would be? If you were to do this,

Francis Wade 31:53
I want someone to invent. I don’t even know what I’m talking about what I’m actually imagining. But there’s a space beside my laptop, right? An A, it has my phone, it has some papers that I catch, I write things on when I’m moving quickly. I want my calendar to be in that space, I want to press a button, and I want it to appear. And I want to take a stylus or a pen and I just want to write on it. And then I want to hit a button and have it disappear. I don’t want to tablet tablet, I don’t want to the screen, I don’t have to type I don’t have to click, I just want to be able to get in and out of it as fast as possible. So an interface that is instantly available that doesn’t require a keyboard doesn’t require most, and just gets gets me in and out in two or three minutes. And if I could just move things around at will. I don’t want I don’t want the force of another device. But the current devices are difficult.

Art Gelwicks 32:58
Do you want it to be a device? You don’t want it to be a device? No. So another device? Okay, so you got a yellow legal pad and a pen at this point. That’s the only other option you got there. Francis, where else do you want that to go, I want better than that. You can’t have both It either has batteries or it doesn’t.

Francis Wade 33:17
You know, I saw I saw I saw I saw

Art Gelwicks 33:21
you want a boogie board. You want one of the dry erase boards. Because that’s basically what you’re describing. Okay.

Francis Wade 33:30
Now I want it to be right beside my laptop.

Art Gelwicks 33:33
I’m confused. I want it

Francis Wade 33:35
represent my laptop. But I saw I saw I saw an app, a device. So device but it’s an invisible device that projects onto your desk. So if I could get something that could project my schedule onto my desk, and I could manipulate it right there and then without having to open anything pick up a physical object, but I could just do it on the fly and then dismiss it.

Augusto Pinaud 33:59
Or you were watching the Marvel Universe this weekend. That sounds something Tony Stark will have built but I haven’t seen it in any store that I can buy.

Francis Wade 34:08
I need one of those

Art Gelwicks 34:10
first piece of junk mail you get covers up your calendar as soon as you throw it on your desk. So are your coffee mug is sitting on top of it.

Francis Wade 34:18
I want to press a button and have it go away. So I want it there when I want it. I want to press a button then have the regular desk just

Art Gelwicks 34:24
Okay, so aside from the sound effects and the non existent technology I’m looking at the setup that I have right here I have a tablet to my left, that has my calendar displayed on it, that I can just interact with the stylus and I can just tap and open things and close things and see what’s going on at any given time. But how is that any different than just keeping your calendar in a window on your desktop? It all comes down to accessibility doesn’t it? Yeah,

Francis Wade 34:59
that’s it. So that’s, I would use a tablet too. But there’s, there’s no space beside my laptop, or, or it’s limited or a full tablet, I don’t want it there. Just to manage my calendar, it’s too much device for a single applicant doesn’t

Art Gelwicks 35:15
have to be. I mean, like I said, the tablet that I’ve got set up here, and I’m not advocating just a tablet, I’m just saying, because it’s another screen, and it’s a little screen. In this case, it’s a 10 inch screen. I can do all kinds of stuff on it, I can pull my notes up, I can access everything else, because it’s all synchronized in the cloud. But for the purposes of what we’re discussing, it’s very useful for that kind of calendar display. And if I was going to operate digitally, for this hyper scheduling, that would probably be the way I would do it. And the reason why I say that is is because the calendar that I have on that tablet, I can also ask access from my desktop. So if I’m sitting in Outlook, and I add something to the calendar there, it appears on this magical little display to my left. So I know that stuff’s being tracked and being taken care of. I’ve seen it where you thought about it, I mean, it, it works fairly well, I mean, especially if you’re in a setup where you have dual monitors or something like that, again, we’re talking about opportunities to have, you know, again, an expanded amount of tech. But you could flip it around just as easy. You can have just take your you know, your legal pad and write down your schedule for the day and just lay it off to the side, the only hang up I have is everything has to be on the right side, because I’m so right handed, my left sides useless. But that that kind of thing, makes it easy to at least track if I

Francis Wade 36:45
could get if I could get an arm from my tablet with my calendar on it, that’s similar to what so it’s not laying on my desk and taking up precious real estate,

Augusto Pinaud 36:54
I have two layers. So there is a layer on the top where the camera that we’re going to talk talking right now. Yeah. And I have an arm that that has the devices. So I have a device where during the work day when I’m sitting in here, my iPad Mini basically works as a calendar. And it says a screen split calendar and a half and to do is on the other half or not the team’s depending what I’m working on. But that’s the only function of that device during the day where if I’m not in a conference call, it’s that if the only moment it changes when I’m doing a video call, because that’s where I’m doing the vehicles, I’m happy to present. But it’s a tablet, it’s an iPad, in my case, it’s an app inside iPad,

Francis Wade 37:39
I send you my address.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:42
My concern with any of these types of technologies is that for me, particularly if it’s out of sight, out of mind, and so I am very fixed on the activity that I’m doing. And we’re as some people think about the the problems with multitasking, I am a single Tasker to a fault. And so you know, like if there are other things going on, I’m I am, I am processing a single thread at any given time. And I don’t like to be interrupted in that thread. Even when other people come to me with other issues, I have to stop them because the thread that I’m on needs to be completed before I will convert to that next thread. And not only do I do that purposefully, but I just am predisposed to that. And so what I try to do as much as possible is to give myself cues, that shifting needs to happen at some point, so that I can start to decelerate and do the acceleration on the other side. And so having multiple screens have those things available to me is really helpful. So to your challenge, Francis, akin to what I think art is talking about here is that I have this second device here with the calendar, and task managers and project managers to the side here. So my primary work is being done in front of me. But I always have off to the side, this particular machine that is just running calendars, tasks, projects, and otherwise, it’s always a fingertip away, and I have it so that the screen just turns off after a few minutes. And then if I ever wanted I just tap the screen it activates again and all those things are there and available. So it’s a useful premise to have that there. Just so that you’re capable of like, okay, what’s the next thing that needs to happen? Great. I can check that off. And I also am a big fan of this is why I continue to use Remember The Milk I have Remember The Milk take over the entire screen for the singular task I’m working on so that I cannot see any of the other tasks. And so I actually have But just do that one thing in front of me. So I have it just take over the whole screen. That’s the only thing appearing on the screen. I don’t want any other distractions. And that also allows me to annotate that task as I’m working. So as I’m working on something, I can just reach over and type a few words as to what is going on with this particular tasks such that if I do get interrupted, then I can switch gears quickly. But I know where I left, left off, because the task was open and available to me to annotate as I was making my way through. So that really allows for that switching, that is for me necessary. It’s just not my natural skill set. It’s not something that I lean into, in terms of of things. And I know that a lot of people are natural multitaskers, so to speak, I am not one of those people. And I don’t like doing it. And I feel like it makes me less productive on top of all these things. So it’s not only a principled approach, but it also happens to be my natural way of being. And this gives me at least some modicum of control in that space.

Art Gelwicks 41:04
My phone is set up now on my right hand side, and the only thing that’s displaying is my calendar. And I have that the Calendar block shown up and I have it just in the day view that I can see exactly what’s coming up on my calendar just on my phone, and it’s out of the way

Francis Wade 41:18
in that in that candle stand up.

Unknown Speaker 41:20
Exactly. It’s just a desk doc.

Francis Wade 41:22
On the desk. Yeah, just little desktop desktop. Okay. Here’s the other thing. I’d love to have Hamada voice interface for the calendar. It’s called Google Assistant appointment to four o’clock Google will do that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:34
Yeah, Google’s Google definitely has your back there. Yeah, Google can do all of that. Today. It was to me, can I

Francis Wade 41:39
take a current status? Here, you can see a schedule scheduled time to work on the paper at four

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:44
o’clock? Yes.

Francis Wade 41:45
I’ve tried. I’ve tried Google. Is it a system on my on my Android phone? Yes. Well, that’s all that this takes me to a whole new realm of opportunity and possibility. Thanks, guys.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:57
So that folks kind of have an idea when when you ask the assistant to do certain things, you are asking them on kind of three levels. One is you can enter something into the calendar. And so you can just say, you know, you know, schedule this particular thing, then you can ask it to remind you to do something, and that, you know, remind me to is a trigger for it to create a task to remind you to do something at that particular time. And then of course, there’s the setting of timers, you can name those timers. So that you can say I want to be done with something by X amount of time, or I need to shift gears and leave for my next meeting by X amount of time. And so you can tell it, you know, set a timer called, and then whatever you want to call it, I find that to be really useful. Because it’s not about starting something at some point, it’s about ending something at some point. And that helps you shift. So I can have something end and trigger me and then I know Okay, now I 15 or 20 minutes to get to the next place. So I need to wrap up what I’m doing right now and make that transition. And then that next calendar event is there waiting for me. So you can you have all three of those things all done by voice from within the assistant.

Francis Wade 43:10
Or I welcome I work on an article on this because I’ve never I would love to.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:15
I will put links to all of the support articles for Google into the show notes for everybody. Yeah, it’s very, very hard tried

Francis Wade 43:21
Google assistant in a while, because when I tried to do the things I’m talking about a few years ago, I was like, got it. It was I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And I gave up and I said this is only good for running, opening an app and doing basic stuff. And I quit.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:36
It has come it has come a long way. All right. Any final thoughts for folks about hyper scheduling and tools associated with hyper scheduling?

Unknown Speaker 43:44
Yes, I, I wanted to, I think you make a great point that this kitchen is key. But also part of that hyper scheduling and time blocking is people tend to think and this is when I need to work. And one of the things that are key is how you’re going to manage those transition points that we had just discussed the end, it is really important. Okay, when is the next transition point and how I’m transitioning from this point to the next one. And I think there is not enough time on in most people have not spent enough time really perfecting that transition point. So they come and work the blogs but then the blocks doesn’t work because they get stuck into the process or the process prior gets a little bit longer. So it is really important to make sure that you work into both the transition points how they should end and how the next one should is should start.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:47
I will close out with just a little bit of conversation on the idea of perseverance when it comes to any level of time blocking or hyper scheduling or otherwise. It’s very easy to create a schedule and then And, as David Sparks talks about, you know, change, things change, and therefore you move them around. But if you move them around too much, then there comes a sense of, Well, nothing is really fixed, fixed. So I can just do anything whenever, and therefore you start to procrastinate or just play Tetris with your calendar for the sake of it, it becomes a game for it becomes illusory. And that is not necessarily useful to you. So if you do feel the sense of something appears in your calendar, and you feel that level of resistance to doing it, lean into the resistance, be uncomfortable for a little while and work through it, your brain is a very good energy saving device, and it likes to save energy. And so it will just say, Okay, let’s do nothing as opposed to doing that thing. But if you if you just stay with it long enough, give it a few minutes. And you will see that if you just take action, you will inevitably find momentum with regard to those blocks of time. And that’s very, very powerful to just overcoming that inertia, so to speak, when it comes to being productive. And that will make your time blocking more effective over time. And that, of course, will then reinforce you overcoming any levels of procrastination in the moment that you might find. And so good luck with that. And so this brings us to the end of our conversation, but certainly not the end of the discussion. So if any of you would like, you can head over to the Podcast, episode [email protected]. There on the podcast website at the bottom of the page, you can leave a comment or question. And of course, we read all of your questions and comments. And if there’s a response necessary, we will go ahead and do that. You can always find every episode by the three digit number. So if you go to productivitycast.net, forward slash 001, you will get to Episode One, Episode 2002, and so on and so forth. So feel free to find those on each episode page, you’ll find our show notes, you’ll find links to any of the things that we discussed. And also text transcripts the both in a readable format that you could just expand and read on the page, as well as one that you can download as a PDF. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud
, Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast Each week, you can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net too. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 47:36
And that’s it for this productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team continues their conversation about sequencing for greater productivity, this time about ordering projects to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

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If you’d like to continue discussing Projects Sequencing: Ordering Your Projects to Enhance Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Projects Sequencing

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Projects Sequencing

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• Microsoft Excel
• Notion
• Coda
• Lifelong learning
  • Lifelong learning institutes – Wikipedia  
• Tom’s Planner

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of productivity cast, I’m just going to call it this is going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to talk today about really the other side of sequencing. We talked about task sequencing in the last episode. And in this episode in this cast, I wanted us to talk about projects sequencing, why would we benefit from it? what are maybe some of the pros and cons? What are some of the examples of ways in which we use sequencing in our own productivity systems, and potentially some pitfalls, some things that we see folks around us experiencing in terms of troubles and challenges, and then we’ll end with maybe just some Quickstart tips, some tips and tricks for you to be able to get started with projects sequencing, if you’re not already doing it? Let’s start off with why what is the reason for someone to be able to and want to sequence projects, which are different than tasks? Can you give a compare and contrast there for folks, and then we’ll go from there,

Francis Wade 1:32
I think we’ve all been in that situation where we messed up a project so bad, because we thought it would be a short thing, or it would be a minor, you know, minor commitment, only to realize as opposed to two hours, it took 20. And as a result in crossed into an gotten away of other projects. And in retrospect, we look back and said to ourselves, boy, if I just sequenced it differently, if I had just focused on the one, and then decided to do the other at some point in the future. If I just applied a little bit of insight and maybe a little bit conservative, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache. So I think those who are interested in Project sequencing are those who take on larger projects, those who get asked to join lots of projects. But above all, there are people who’ve been burned by making mistakes by not sequencing projects correctly. I think that I’m sure that’s what brings most of us that are called today.

Art Gelwicks 2:37
It’s one of the reasons why doing retrospectives uncompleted projects is so important, because it’s the only way to learn what the sequences should have been that you didn’t pick up in the first place. I mean, we assume we can figure those out, because we’ve done this, but because we’ve done this provides us the historical data and the insight. That’s what those retrospectives provides. So when we start talking about Project sequencing and task sequencing within a project scope, if you’re going to do that type of project, again, you need those learnings you need that insight? And if you fail to do it, what’s the old saying you’re doomed to repeat history?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:16
Yeah, what I hear is that there is a finite set of resources in our life, whether that be time and energy and other things. And while we should have an abundance mindset, we should understand that focus is necessary, and that we have to allocate resources. Well, in order to be able to get projects successfully completed. And by sequencing projects, were in essence, postponing certain things or conditioning, certain things, so that the more important things, or at least the more important things right now get done well. And from my perspective, it’s a standard of excellence in your personal productivity more than anything that forces projects to be sequenced. And the other side is that sometimes you just don’t have the resources to be able to do that project right now, that could be a time resource, that could be a financial resource that can be a labor resource, you need someone in order for something to happen. And so there becomes a conditioning of when these projects get put on to your current active status than not. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the examples in your own world where you benefit from being able to sequence projects in a way that really it helps you. I

Francis Wade 4:38
think it helps me to say no, frankly, that’s the biggest benefit for me, is that when someone comes along with red shiny object, the thing I’ve been waiting for all this time, and you know, they paint a picture of how great it will be to have me on the project. And it’s not something I had originally planned to do. But you know in that moment Mental of optimism you scan. If you only do a mental scan, you’re just back into trouble. But if you do a mental scan of your commitment, I use age, or I should be able to do that. And, and that comes because you haven’t done proper sequencing of your own projects ahead of time. So when the request comes, all you’re left with is a vague sense of Yeah, I think I’m I should be okay. But you don’t really have anything that you’re looking at, that’s written down, you don’t have anything on people, you have actually haven’t invested the time to do real sequencing, which you must do. If you’re someone who manages lots of projects and lots of tasks, you must have a an accounting, a written accounting of your long term commitments, otherwise, you become that guy. And we’ve all worked with that guy who says yes to everything. And that guy is a disaster. And if you find out that he says yes to everything halfway through your project, that he’s working with you on your big trouble. But that guy, we don’t want to become that guy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:09
Who do you give projects to the busiest person in the meeting, right? The reality is, is that many times, when you are the productive person in the room, people start to pile on, because they recognize that you’re capable of being efficient and effective with your time. And that becomes a problem for you. So So understand, many of us here have been there, we understand that perspective. And saying no, is a way of potentially probably project sequencing, in the sense that you are, at the very least, pushing back against and setting boundaries against these kinds of, well, since Susan always gets everything done. Let’s put more on Susan’s plate. That’s, you know, both inappropriate, and you know, unhelpful to Susan. But it’s something that we have to be mindful of. And so you need to be able to set these boundaries to start, and then project sequencing becomes a little bit more useful. I’ll give one particular example where projects sequencing for me is just kicked in. So at any given time, I am doing quite a lot of learning. And I call them journeys. I call them quests, you can call them learning paths, whatever it might be. But in any given year, I decide what it is that I want to learn. And so this year, I have been on a a pretty thoughtful path toward upping my programming and coding skills. And so I’ve been learning these various coding platforms in order to be able to figure out where I want to go. So my learning journey is sequenced. So that I am taking a particular course at any given time, and I am not taking other courses at that time, because I want to be able to make sure that one happens, then the next happens, then the next happens, so that I’m building upon that knowledge. And so we can see this in academic or educational environments very easily, right, if I don’t have this information, then going to this next step is going to be not as useful to me than the next step, which is not going to be as useful to me. So as we advance in our skills, we can sequence the learning associated with those pieces, those stepping stones. And so that’s how I develop my learning journeys. I sequence the projects, in this case, the courses or the deliverables in that. So for example, I started out with, I wanted to learn programming fundamentals. And so just not not getting too far into the into the specifics of any one language. So I started out with fundamentals this year, I’ve been learning all of the various different types of of programming models. And that’s been incredibly useful to me. Because no matter what language I learned in the future, programming language, or coding language in the future, that’s going to be useful to me, I then went into it ease, right the the editing environments for me to be able to do the editing that I that I want to or the programming that I wanted to. So I did a whole bunch of research on the various editors, right? And that was its own learning component own project, right. So it wasn’t actually learning, coding. But it was a foundational structure, which was a project unto itself that was going to be done before that. And so I’m still in the process of deciding whether or not I want to do a cloud based IDE or a local IDE, and how that’s going to all work. And that that will lead me next to the hosting environment, right? How am I going to host my applications? How am I going to produce those applications on the other side, and that really helps me kind of lead the future development on solid ground. So when you’re sequencing projects, think through the whole process, and then go go backwards and think okay, well, what are the things I’m going to need in the Future. And therefore, let me let me do that work now, so that the future is smoother ahead. And when you sequence projects, you can really do that. And I think this, the learning journeys example, for me, is probably the best one, that I can explain why I do this level of ordering of outcomes.

Art Gelwicks 10:21
Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting that you talk about it, because learning, learning journeys are something that you can kind of get a sense as to how things are going to build. If you’re doing that, without that type of a thematic approach would say it’s just projects, and what projects are going on, you really have to have a good understanding of the projects themselves, before you can start to look at the relationship between the projects to determine their programmatic sequency. And that’s really, we’re talking two different levels here within the project. That’s traditional project management determine the sequencing of execution determining, and there’s certain scripts that you can follow depending on the types of activities when you get to the programmatic level, and how those projects interrelate. And deciding that Project C should really come before project B, because of the following. It requires a very detailed understanding of those projects. But it also requires a willingness from the people involved in the projects to make those compromises to adjust from that perception of well we do A then B then C, then D, why would we change that. And often, that’s the key drivers. That’s why you change it because of internal factors, external factors, personnel factors. I mean, I look at, I’ll use an example, my wife’s a project manager. And a lot of the projects that they’re working on right now, the projects are getting delayed, because they have delayed shipments in steel. Well, that’s a factor that you now have to take into consideration when sequencing the projects is that this component is not going to be available, therefore, we need to jockey these we need or need to rearrange them, it’s an in depth understanding you have to have at the project level, and then how they co relate. It’s not an easy task. It’s something that requires focus. There’s a reason why people do this as a career. But at the daily basis, we have the same challenges. If you think about all the things you have to maintain your house, or take care of just your daily life, there are certain things that need to happen before other things. Or if they did, the overall day would go more smoothly. But you have to give yourself time to do that analysis and get that understanding and find out did it work and did it or did it not. And make adjustments accordingly.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:47
Layered on top of that just just to give more flavor to what you’re talking about your art. And what I’m what I’m what comes to mind for me is the fact that if if we go back to my whole learning journeys perspective, I’m doing this work, and deferring all kinds of other work down the pipeline, because I can’t do it now. I don’t have the skills to be able to build in the particular language that I need to. And so not that I haven’t, and quite frankly, that you know, a lot of these programming foundations and, you know, whatnot is just refresher for me, which is fine. But the newest IDs that are on the market, I haven’t touched them in a while, I’m curious, I want to be able to have the best of breed when I’m doing this right now. And so all of this work now is basically taking other projects I have, and putting them to later, because I know that the work now is going to benefit me in the future in that way. And so think that through, you know, so if you have a, a project you want to do in the future, what’s the what are the projects that you can do now that are going to make that project in the future? Better, Faster, you know, in whatever the positive? You know, modifiers are? What are those things that are going to be in the future by virtue of you doing the right project in the present, which goes back to that focus issue for me, which is that if we’re not focused on the right project that we should be doing right now, we will typically feel misaligned. Right, you’ll feel off and not to be woowoo about it. But we you will, you will you will know in some way shape or form that you’re not following the path that you need to because you’re coming up against challenges, you might challenges that you don’t feel like are internal, their external challenges, you’ll you’ll start to feel those those things happen. And that will be a good litmus test for you as to whether or not you’re doing the right project, right now. What are some of the other examples that you can come up with that? Identify for you? sequencing projects, or like that you use in your own world for sequencing projects, maybe just some concrete examples for listeners?

Art Gelwicks 15:05
Yeah, one of the things that that I get into a lot is, and it’s it’s from the database world, this idea of a one to many relationship, is there a project that can be executed that’s on the docket, that will have an impact on multiple other projects? If that’s the case, to me, that gets a much higher prioritization. And so when I look at things, excuse me, when I look at things such as building a database structure, well, ultimately, the prod the project is to produce a bunch of reports. But I know that back in the sequence, I have to build a database structure, I have to build a data dictionary, I have to get to a level of consensus with the client to be able to produce these multiple projects at the end. So the singular projects at the very beginning have to happen in the beginning of that sequence. Even though someone who was asking for a report will look at me funny and say, Why do I have to sit in a meeting about a data dictionary, I don’t even use a data. I don’t even know what a data dictionary is. And I have to then explain to him, I need this to be able to give you what you want to be able to get to that endpoint in the journey. I need the sequences of pieces. And it’s very important when we think about this, as professionals, we understand the different parts of of our job and what we do. But often nobody else does. They don’t. They don’t get why there has to be step one, step two, step three, step four, they want step four, and they’re willing to live with Step three, but they couldn’t care less about step two and step one. And it’s how that works into the sequence. That’s one of the pieces of planning that I’m trying to do all the time, is figuring out well, how do I how do I get you to that end result? And what are the steps to make it realistic. So it’s not a concrete example. But it is one of those things that every exercise I do, starts at the end, and then works backwards to figure out what are the things that have to happen before it for it to be able to be successfully executed?

Francis Wade 17:19
I think it makes sense to do what Ray is talking what you’re talking about. The one too many is often a skill or a personal capability. But I find that people who I who I work with some reason, they don’t think in terms of skills, they don’t think in terms of these building blocks that I have a particular capability that allows me to do these 10 Other things, or it allows me to do this thing much faster. I find that curious, because I I find myself be pointing out, pointing them towards skills that they need to pick up, as opposed to them kind of doing what reset, which is starting at the end and working their way back to say, oh, step one is actually getting is actually learning the skill. It’s not using the skill over here. But and I don’t know if it’s because if it’s because technology makes things so easy, that when you’re actually confronted with something that isn’t easy that you’d lose, go to a website and sign up and put in your login. And then you start to use it when there actually is a real learning curve. Like for example in in Google Analytics or, or Google ads or Facebook ads. Those are all complex, complex activities that you don’t just pick up and start doing tomorrow. They do require a sequence of learning. But I find that nowadays that that that an audit, that craftsmanship that it takes to get from A to A level of proficiency isn’t underestimated, or I hear someone on the website saying in 10 minutes, you can master this. Or people don’t get all of us our trick because things seem to be coming to us. In many areas of life. They’re coming so easily and so quickly that when something hard is really in front of us. We don’t really know what to do. We get a little bit flummoxed.

Art Gelwicks 19:23
And we see this a lot. I mean, everybody looks for the app that will do it for you. And it does a specific thing. I mean, where people really get hung up on they get an app or an application that build that does all kinds of things and then they don’t know where to start because it’s not pushing a button solving a specific problem pushing another button solving another specific problem. And you’re right, you’re not developing skill sets necessary to solve multiple problems. You’re not developing that rational type of thinking and critical thinking necessary to be able to say How can I tackle this particular issue? It’s a parallel. That’s something that we’ve talked about in the past about learning an application. If you take something like something as simple as Excel, or you know, one of the other big applications like, you know, notion or Coda or something like that, learning that application as a platform inside and out, means that you have taken the time to develop a skill set as a project, that you can now apply those to other projects. But you have to do that. You can’t just arbitrarily say, I’m going to learn it on the fly, you can, but you’re only going to get about 30 to 40% of it, maybe. So, it really, if you’ve decided that that’s the tool you’re going to use. That’s a project sequence, that is a task sequence, I’m going to learn how to use this part of it, to do the following. And embrace case, learning it just to be able to learn it and add that into your toolbox of available options. Is that much more important? I think it’s it’s fascinating how we don’t do that. It’s, it’s rare that I find somebody who takes great pride in continuous learning. They’ll often call it other things. Oh, I read all the time, or I, you know, yeah, that’s fine. It’s called continuous learning. It means you’re exploring, and you’re expanding your toolset that you have available to you to be able to make the decisions on sequencing these projects, because you have a deeper understanding. When if you take something simple, like sawing a piece of wood, okay, I have a piece of wood, I have a saw, I’m going to saw it. If you’ve done it more than once, you know, I also need a vise, I need something to hold it. I need a ruler, I need a pencil. Those are only things that you you discover having done it. Well, that’s the type of thing where that becomes part of your sequence. Often we learn it just by not having those things. But the next time you do it. Now, you know as part of that project sequence is the prep is the setup to get toward an end result, where you’re not wasting a lot of time undoing that work. And I think that’s where so many people don’t dedicate the quality time to this process. They are so worried about getting to that end deadline. That, yeah, you’ll get to that deadline, that’s fine. But are you doing good work. And as part of the process, there’s a term in the in the technology space or in development space, I’m sure Ray, you’ve heard of technical debt, where you’ll make decisions as part of a development exercise to get you to an end result, knowing that in the future, you’re going to have to fix and or change them. You’re you’re actually making conscious mistakes, are accepting conscious mistakes, rather, knowing that later on, you’ll have to fix it. And many corporations live within that space of technical debt of they have literally years of technical debt, that they have to go back and resolve multimillion dollar projects around just solving all the mistakes we’ve made over the years. That kind of planning and forethought when you start to think about larger programs and you say okay, not only are we going to execute this exercise, but as part of this, can we bring down the technical debt? Can we solve some problems that are going to solve problems for other things later on? That’s sequencing, that’s relationship within that program level management.

Augusto Pinaud 23:47
But I think you make a great point that applies not only to technologists, technical depth, is the same thing on learning. Are you reading? Because that is what you do to relax to growth? Or are you learning are you reading to learn it is different? It is not the same? Even if you read exactly the same book, it is not the same thing when you have that second intention on this project. And I think that’s one of the things that are key into this task sequencing or project sequencing is what is the goal? Why are you doing this project and that is something that even that it sounds for this discussion of us to do is not obvious to happen. Okay, how many projects do you go on your professional life? Okay, that it seems like nobody has to spend a second thinking why are we going to do this? No, no, we’re in right now trying to solve this fire. I get it. But solving this fire is going to affect some snails is going to affect other things is going to can we extinguish the fire here, but then now we’re going to turn fire somewhere else. And it’s that thinking that is required to produce the appropriate sample sequences. You know if I said right, okay, fine. I need a fence in my backyard. Okay. Okay, so I need a fence so that I can open the door and the dog can go out and play and don’t run to the street. That sounds fine. Okay, so I can fix that problem from a chicken wire, fence, okay, to a really fancy, white acrylic fence. Okay, but if you don’t think if you only think on solving the problem, oh, you can put the chicken wire but then when I went to sell the house later on, okay, the people who’s going to come and say, Who put that fence, so ugly fencing there? Okay, we’ll give that guy. But that’s part of the issue is none of the other thinking happened. If that thinking may have happened, okay, well, I may want to sell this house in the future. So, okay, well, why don’t explore the options, okay, what is there any kind of fence that may increase the value over time? How much that will cost is worth investment or not. But all that thinking requires to understand the problem on hand, but also disconnect from the problem in hand and see what other things this problem affects. And I think that second element is one of the things that I see missing on many of this, there is a reason they start sequencing fail so bad. Okay, because he’s okay, no, no, we are we’re doing this fine. But what is going to affect? I don’t know, when we get there. We will get there. When we go there. I’m going to read this 20 books, great. You’re reading 70 books a year? How many of them are you applying? Or don’t know I’m I’m reading, then you’re not consciously learning is two different present, there is nothing against reading. Okay. But there is a difference between grabbing a book and reading and grabbing a book and reading to see if you can implement anything that concious on the second case, it’s what it makes the sequencing other that is the book to the next book to the next book, the project to the or the task to the next task and doesn’t matter. In order to make the sequencing you need to understand where are you going? And what can you envision, that can be affected. And that effect could be positive is not all negative. But you need to slow down for a moment. And think, what are the things that are going to be affected by this,

Art Gelwicks 27:39
one of the things that often we get hung up with when we talk about this kind of sequencing to is we think it’s a single point in time event. During the initial project planning, program, planning whatever, we’re going to figure out the sequence. And that’s what we’re going to do. Well, this is a dynamic thing, it it changes, no plan ever survives first contact with a project manager. It gets modified, it gets changed, it gets altered based on reality. And when we start to think about project and program sequencing, we have to incorporate into it opportunities to rework that sequencing. There’s a concept within these, we’ve often heard of them called governance meetings and things like that. Those don’t do it. Because often what happens is a governance meeting is deteriorated down into the what didn’t you do, right? And who can I yell at to get things moving forward faster, has nothing to do with learning from what’s going on and adjusting accordingly. has everything to do with blame and pointing fingers? But that’s the opportunity to say, hey, let’s look at the sequencing here. Is there something that needs to be changed? Is there something that we can alter to have a better positive impact? And this has to be that that constant evaluation, I’m a big fan of creating dashboards to look at key metrics, as things go through. And if you follow anything like Agile methodology, you’ll hear of terms like burndown Charts, where you have certain number of items, and as you work through those, that chart continues to burn down to zero. Well, unfortunately, those charts don’t reflect sequencing. They reflect quantity. So all they’re doing is showing we’ve got 100 tasks to do and now we’re at 78. Yay, we’re making progress. Doesn’t say that that 13 tasks that you just did, are even the right ones to be doing right now. Had nothing to do with it whatsoever. They’re looking at it from the perspective of the numbers going down, we’re doing good things, and that’s not necessarily the case at all. So the sequencing and the relationship, carrying over from the last show the relationship between the tasks I think is is critical, scale it up to the project level scale it up to the program level, you start to look at things at the strategic level, the vision of the organization does all this tie together. Often it doesn’t. You wind up with these engagements that are way off track from what they’re supposed to be doing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:19
Something comes to mind when we when I was hearing what you were all talking about, and it relates to getting things done, or the GTD methodology. And as a GTD practitioner, I’m always thinking about the fact that in GTD let’s call projects outcomes here so that we’re not conflating the two of them. So, you know, many times we can have single action outcomes. That is, it just takes one action or to complete that outcome. It could be something that has just a few actions, that completes an outcome. And those seem trivial in nature. They’re small, they’re short, they’re brief. But they’re still considered projects, by terminology in getting things done terminology, but they’re just call them outcomes, then we step up a level to kind of projects and that concept of, of planning out something that has a longer horizon, say, more than a day, maybe even more than a week, more than a month. And so projects are the thing that I think about when it comes to GTD in being difficult in the sense of outcomes, because you have to sequence the smaller things within the course of a week or even a day, when are you going to do these different outcomes, and in what sequence. And it’s not about having something in the distant future be better. It’s about the almost immediate future, the near term of the next day or to be productive for you. And you can’t be if you don’t order those things in the right timeframes. So what comes to mind, for example, is that you need to really understand your biological primetime so that if you’re going to do something at a particular time of day, you’re going to sequence those projects, those outcomes in my usage of the term here, for GTD projects, I want to I want to sequence those outcomes in the times of the days when I’m likely is to do them well. So I’m not going to go for a run at 11am. Because that’s my, you know, time to sit down and do some thoughtful work, right, that’s what I’m going to do my flow work, as I call it, right, so I’m going to sit down and I’m going to do whatever that is generative work that’s going to that’s going to take me deep into a flow state, I’m not going to go for a run at that time, it’s just a misalignment of my time, I want to be able to do the right outcomes at the right time. And those happen much more on the shorter timescale than they do on the longer timescale. And I’m willing to be argued against that point. But, you know, we, the impacts are lesser on the long term scale, when we sequence tasks that are sequence outcomes that are really there in our day or week. And I’m just curious how you think about the concept of doing shorter term projects, within the course of say, a week, two weeks or even a day? How do you how do you perceive organizing those things in your own productivity system?

Francis Wade 33:25
Yeah, I think I think it’s, it’s a challenge, because you’re, you’re, you’re combining short and long term activities. And, you know, if you’re, if all you’re focused on is a short and midterm, you will never pick up, the kind of skills I was talking about. You you investment will never end there’ll be the right time to make the investment. because there’ll always be something more pressing to do at the moment. So that there’s a, the sitting down each day and deciding what the day is going to look like or the week, however often you do, it is all important. Because you’re you’re basically deciding whether you’re going to achieve those long term outcomes, because those are the ones that are going to get pushed aside because of something urgent. But if you create space for them, like you’re implying, then you could actually fulfill them. But again, back to kind of what I was saying before. They’re also very few people who time luck. There are very few people who sit down for a half an hour or whatever, at the beginning of a day, and say, here’s what I want my day to look like based on my short, medium long term priorities. They just kind of react to the first email that comes in and by the time they finish reacting, It’s six o’clock and it’s time to go home. That’s it’s unfortunate, but they’re not. They’re not leading a life in which they are fulfilling their own outcomes. They’re leading a life driven by other people’s priorities. It is not it is not easy. And if you have a boss who is not cooperative It could be almost impossible, I think,

Art Gelwicks 35:02
No, I couldn’t agree with you more on that it is definitely a situation where so many people have gotten used to being dictated to, when it comes to their workload, and not having control over their workload, and not even knowing how to take control over it. And to push back to go all the way back to the beginning of our conversation here, that ability to say, I’m full, I’m full up, there’s not much more I can do. Because nobody wants to say I can’t do something, we’ve gotten it into our mindset that that is such a terrible thing, that we’re not able to do something that means we’re letting people down and we’re not team players. It’s, it’s this. It’s just a thing that we’ve had beaten into our heads for so long that we need to get over. But we need to understand that there are limitations to the amount of work that can be done. There are limitations to the to that work being quality, and quantity. And they are a balancing act, and you can’t What’s the old saying, you can have a cheap, fast and good pick two. Because that’s really what it comes down to. And we have to have the wherewithal of our own limitations to say, You know what, I, there’s nothing else I can do to help you right now. I’d love to, I really would, if there were things that you want me to drop, so I can do that. That’s fine. I had this, I have this conversation with direct reports all the time, they’ll come to me and they’ll say, You know what, I have too much. Like, okay, so what’s too much explained to me why it’s too much. And often it is a sequencing problem. Often it’s they just don’t have it worked out in a way that optimize it. But many times they have taken on too much work. They have said yes, too many times. I said, Okay, so what you’re doing is you’re diminishing the quality of everything you’re doing, trying to make people happy by saying yes, this is where you have to develop that sequence, you have to understand that, you know, to do these reports that you’ve committed to where you feel, it may only take an hour to do each week, it’s really eight hours of work each week, to do X, Y and Z beforehand. And to do A, B and C afterwards to make sure that they’re complete. Give me that scale, you need that scope and perspective. And managers fail to do that managers will happily drop a task on somebody and say, oh, yeah, great, you can take care of that, with no comprehension whatsoever as to what’s actually involved in doing the task. I’m a big fan, no manager ever does this. But I’m a big fan of saying, Look, if you’ve got a task that you are going to delegate, I say that you have done it at least once first before you delegate it. So you at least have the the tiniest sliver of understanding as to what it actually takes to do that task. And if it’s something that you absolutely can’t do, you know, programming, perfect example, there’s a lot of coding things I can’t do. I’m so old school, we don’t have interpreter basic anymore. So I’m really kind of out of the mix of 10, go to 20. But I’ll go to the program developer and say, Look, I need you to do this. And I need you to show me how complicated it is. Is it easy? Is it hard? Is it? Is it difficult? Is it something that you can do without much effort, I need to understand the scale. So that when somebody comes to me and tries to get me to drop something else in your lap, I can turn around and say no, sorry, he’s got X to do or she’s got Y to do. And it’s really complicated. It takes time. They don’t have the bandwidth available to do that. So when we think about sequencing, and I just use the term bandwidth, which is one of those corporate things that anymore. When we think about sequencing, it’s not just a, b and c, it’s how big is a? How big a C? And how big is the pipe you’re trying to shove them through? And how long will it take them to get through? Perfect example of that it’s if you take a balloon, and you fill it up with water, so it’s really squishy. That’s let’s say that’s a project. If you get a pipe, and it’s just a little smaller than the balloon, you can squish that balloon down to fit in that pipe. But what happens when you do that is the balloon gets longer. it squishes down in the middle, and it gets longer on the ends. So it takes more time to go through the pipe. Well the smaller the pipe, the longer the balloon has to be the less bandwidth that’s available to actually get the work done. Now try and put two balloons through at the same time. Three, four, what do you wind up getting wet? If nothing gets done. So

Art Gelwicks 40:04
understanding that scope and scale, even as the person who’s not doing the work is critical, if you’re helping someone work through that, to understand the challenges involved,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:17
I think that triggered in my mind when you were talking about that art is the fact that when you are doing any level of projects, sequencing, you do have to take into account the work of others, and how that impacts projects. And I know I alluded to that when I talked about the fact that your resource allocating and those kinds of things, but it’s really important for what you’re talking about here, which is to just even getting a ballpark estimate from someone of how long something’s going to take them to do, especially if they are the expert, or the technician in that particular regard. They’re the ones who are going to be able to tell you, Hey, this is gonna take me three weeks, which means that you now have three weeks where if you’ve done everything you can do and now you’ve passed it along to someone, before you’re going to get it back kind of a hot potato, you know that that projects not going to land back in your lap to do anything, you now have three weeks where you can actually align other projects. And so you do have to be somewhat dynamic in Project sequencing when it comes to those kinds of circumstances. And that can actually be really productive. Because you can say, Okay, well over three weeks, now I can I can move something that was in the future closer in time. And it’s also something that I am just frequently having to repeat to people, which is that my goal for everyone is to have a task list, that is not a wish list, right? That is you’re going to do the things that are actually on the list. And if you are creating lists, and you’re not completing the things on those lists, then those are wish lists, right, you want to get them done, but you’re not getting them done. That means that the wish lists are becoming things that you’re kind of cherry picking from and you’re not being the best, you you’re not choosing the best and most priority items from those lists. But that also means that if you do the effective creation of a task list, right, I’m gonna complete these three things today. And then you complete those three things today. It’s not like you can’t go to your other lists you if you have effectively externalize them, you can bring more stuff to today and and speed up the process. But if you put six on the list and get none of them done, or put three on the list and get four of them done by pulling one of the future items to today, you’re that much further forward than you were if you did none, and I just I consistently see people doing that, right, they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, by virtue of this concept of, I’m going to I’m going to do all of this work today. Because because, you know, for these items are overdue, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, right, when in reality, in two days, you could have them all done, if you just focused today on those items. And to some great extent, projects sequencing is is really where the rubber meets the road here in terms of planning for those kinds of outcomes to say, You know what, I’m not going to be able to do these three projects in the next month. But that also means that I’m going to do this one project. And then lo and behold, you find out that project only takes a week to do and then you move everything forward because of that. So don’t think that you can’t get these things done faster. But you do have to focus. And that does mean that you have to sometimes delay one thing for the other. And that leads me to, as we come to the close of the conversation, a discussion on where people can get started in Project sequencing. And I’ll just outline very briefly a tool, I’m not sure if I’ve explained this before on ProductivityCast. But I’ll give it just a minute or two. And I call it the major projects queue. And the idea here is to identify what you call a major project, right. So you get to be the definer here in terms of that. But for me, a major project is something that I consider to be a a substantive outcome, right? Something that’s, that’s a big chunk of work that’s going to be done. And so major projects can be hosting a conference, it could be publishing a book, it could be any number of those big deliverables in my own world. So I decide on those major projects upfront, and I limit them to one to two per life category in any particular period of time, usually half a year to a year timeframe. And I make that list and they become the major projects and they become sequenced. So until that next project reaches a state of maintenance, that is I’m not having to do more work to create momentum, then nothing else starts and that allows me to to create some level of boundaries around the amount of work that I take on so that I don’t get overwhelmed. And I’ve just recognized over time that if you give me the opportunity, I will just keep piling on Because I want to do more, I have a full head of ideas. And I want to keep producing those those things. And so I have to create some level of friction from doing that. So it’s not about not doing it, it’s about not doing it right now, that means it just needs to be postponed or deferred until later timeframe. And the major projects queue for me has been a really great way to be able to do that. Any any other quick tips, tricks, thoughts for folks who are getting started or having struggles with projects, sequencing?

Francis Wade 45:33
What tool? Do you use the major project sequencing sequences, I’ve tried using basically Excel, I’m not very happy with it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:40
Yeah, so I’m actually using Tom’s planner, which is just a Gantt charting software, it’s a web based Gantt chart, and it’s just, it’s very simple. And so again, you know, one is conditioned on the other. So as you move one forward or backwards, and you can make them, you know, connected to one another. And it’s the most simple Gantt chart, and it just helps me really see things in that perspective. At one time, I was doing it all in mind maps. And I just decided to move it to Tom’s planner quite recently. And it’s been really, really useful for me, because then I can just, it’s high level, right? So these are big deliverables. So it’s, there’s not many of them. And it just gives me an ability to see, okay, this, these are the things that I want to be completing this is the timeframe, where I feel like they will become sustainable or in maintenance mode in my world. And, and sometimes that means just reaching the first milestone, right, because once I’ve reached that first milestone, then I know that we’ll really know are, we’re up the mountain. Now, it’ll all be downhill from that point, right. And so I’ll be able to pick up momentum, but I just can’t do that when I may be learning about a whole bunch of new things on the way up the hill. And therefore, that takes more time than once I’ve gotten to the top, and I can start to catch the momentum from gravity on the other side. And so I’m just trying to understand how much bandwidth to go back to arts corporate speak, you know, I’m going to need to be able to get to that point. And sometimes I’m really good at estimating it, sometimes I’m not. And so then you make adjustments, right. And that’s, that’s what the Gantt chart allows me to do is just, you can just stretch or shrink those pieces. And then I can see, oh, okay, I was planning on doing this big project. Now, well, it gets stretched out longer. And so now it’s not going to be for another three months. And that’s okay, I just saw how life happens

Augusto Pinaud 47:36
for me. So mind map and Mind Maps has short with all those things, and I just moved them out of different arms, those are the arms are waiting, those are the arms that are active, and we are right now moving. And that’s what keeps me moving between one thing and the other.

Art Gelwicks 47:53
Yeah, I agree mind mapping, aside from the date level, relationships, being able to create those higher level one to many types of relationships and identify them in times when you’re not, they’re not painfully visible. I find mine mappings change in approach instead of thinking about things along the number line in a sequence. But their relationship to each other is really powerful within that kind of structure. Just don’t get upset when this is hard. Because this is not an easy process. First time you do it, it’s going to be wrong. Guaranteed. Second, third, fourth, you’ll build up to this. So this is something that requires patience to develop the skill. Going back to what we were talking about.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:37
Thank you art. Thank you, gentlemen, we are at the end of our discussion today. But of course, the conversation doesn’t have to stop here. If you head over to productivitycast.net to the episode page, you can go ahead and join the conversation with us, you can also join our digital community. If you go to productivitycast.net and click on community, you will be taking over to personal productivity club and inside personal productivity club, we have an entire group dedicated to ProductivityCast. And so you can then join in the conversation there we post the episodes and you can comment along with other listeners of the podcast. Of course, if you go to productivitycast.net You will also find there on the episode page, our show notes. Those show notes include any of the links to the two topics we discussed. So for example, in this episode, I put a link to lifelong learning Institute’s since our noted lifelong learning, and continuous learning those kinds of things. And so those things are all there in the show notes. And so they’re links to them. And we also have a text transcript. So the text transcript is really useful. You can click on the Read More link, it’ll expand the machine generated text transcript right there on the page, so you can read along while you listen to the episode. You can also download it by clicking on the PDF download link below the Read More link so there’s a sentence that says you can download it, click on that and we’ll go ahead and download that. Feel free to subscribe to the podcast if you’re listening or watching this any Where else, if you go to your favorite podcast app, I am a fan of podcast apps that are actually podcast apps. So so if you go to overcast or Pocket Casts, and go ahead and subscribe there, that really makes sure that you get the new episodes downloaded for free every week when a new one comes out. Of course, we enjoy your ratings and reviews and whatever podcast apps allow those ratings and reviews and those, of course help us grow our personal productivity listening community. And so thank you for doing that. Thank you for the reviews, we always enjoy them. And so with that, I want to express my thanks to acoustic pinout Francis Wade, and art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast. Each week, you can learn more about them and their work again on productivitycast.net. Just go ahead and click on that about page and you can find all of their links to them, and their socials and so on, so forth. So, enjoy learning more about them. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 50:56
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

This week, the ProductivityCast team tackles the topic of ordering tasks conditionally and task sequencing for momentum.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/135 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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If you’d like to continue discussing Task Sequencing: How to Condition and Order Tasks for Greater Momentum, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Task Sequencing

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Task Sequencing

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• OmniFocus
• Any.do
• Microsoft Project
• Microsoft Teams
• Nozbe
• Todoist
• Temporal Structures in Individual Time Management – Wu Dezhi
• Remember the Milk
• IFTTT
• Zapier
• Unschedule
• GTD Weekly Review
• Join Ray’s Weekly Review Accountability Party on Fridays at 10:30 AM ET!
• Krisp
• Notion
• Paprika (grocery shopping app)

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Hello, and welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about something that I find to be fascinating, which is the order of operations, so to speak of tasks. And tasks. sequencing is interesting to me, because I think that when we deal with so many complexities in life, there are ways in which we can really order the tasks that we’re doing, not just for making them more effective, but also making them more efficient. And I think that it’s important for us to think through how we put things one in front of the other. And so I thought today, we would have a conversation around the idea of why would you condition tasks? Why would you sequence tasks, in essence, and then we could talk about maybe some of the examples and or pitfalls that we experience when we do task sequencing. And then we’ll close out with maybe some tips and tricks for you all to utilize when you want to jump start the process of task sequencing. So let’s get started with Why do you task sequence? Why would you want to do task sequencing,

Francis Wade 1:32
if we don’t think about task sequencing, we end up making mistakes, small mistakes, big mistakes, we end up arriving at places late because we didn’t start early enough, we end up with late deliverables, we end up being stressed, there’s a host of problems that we can create if we don’t do task sequencing correctly. And they all end up causing us emotional stress, the people around us come to realize that they can’t count on us. It’s loss of reputation, there’s just a whole host of problems that gets created when we don’t really pay attention. And we just do what we think we feel like doing in the moment. recipe for disaster.

Art Gelwicks 2:19
Task sequencing is one of those things that you don’t realize it’s important until you don’t do it. Because you go to plug into working on a particular task. And you realize that three other tasks before that had to be done first, for this one to be able to be executed. So being able to take the time to say okay, what, what’s the predecessor what has to occur to prepare this task to be able to be successfully completed? And then what are the next tasks that get triggered from this. And often we, we lose sight of that. And partially because it’s not a natural habit to think about the before and the afters. But the other thing is that most task management tools don’t support this kind of thinking. They don’t have any structure built into them. To have that transitional piece from task to task, you wind up doing it artificially through the organizational structure. So the outlines and nesting and things like that,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:17
I think that OmniFocus is really the only one that I know of that has a true conditional task feature built into it. Are there any others that you know of that that really, truly will basically only show a task after you complete one?

Art Gelwicks 3:31
Not without getting into the project management space that I’ve seen? I mean, most of that’s a much heavier lift, which it shouldn’t be that hard of a thing. I mean, to paraphrase, you know, top gears, Jeremy Clarkson, how hard how difficult could it actually be? Because all you need to do is provide a connection to the next task and ID. And maybe that’s the charge is that every task would have to have some sort of unique identifier. But I’m really surprised that most more applications don’t give you that option to say when I finished this, what’s the next task I want to do? And be able to designate that and say, Okay, here’s the next one in the sequence and the next one, because when we talk about flow states, when we talk about time blocking, these are perfect connections to that. And it just seems to be a blind spot in the task management applications that are out I will definitely

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:28
say that I think that task sequencing is important, if you think about it from the perspective that we design checklists, because we want to know in say, any given known project, that we know the sequence, the order that those things should be done in one before the other. And many times what happens is we have the complexity of many different projects ongoing that has many different things that we need to do throughout any given day or week, and not knowing the order in which they’re going to happen. It creates a level of just inefficiency that causes things to break down. And also, you lose momentum in many cases. And so if you think about it, if you have to go to the grocery store, you would group the things you’re going to purchase, buy the areas of the grocery store, right, you’re not going to go, go get the milk in, and then walk, you know, to the other side of the grocery store, then walk back and get the eggs. And then you know, you’re going to when you’re in dairy, you’re going to get all the dairy items, you know, you get the milk, cheese, eggs, when you’re in the bread aisle, you’re going to get all of the, you know, grains. These are things that we naturally do in some areas of our lives. But for some reason, when we think about tasks, we don’t actually group things, or sequence them in a way that makes them to be more efficient. And that just creates more problems.

Augusto Pinaud 5:45
Yeah, only focus on that sense, as you were mentioned, was incredible in the sense that not only you could say, do not start this task, or show me these tasks on top. But you could also say, not only you cannot show to me until the prior one is ready, but also need to be after this date. And you could combine those two conditions, I have not seen anything that do conditions as incredible as OmniFocus. That’s the sad part was a collaboration. But from the condition perspective, and the fact that you could mix, conditional or non conditional in the same projects, and you could have part of the project who has those conditions, parts of the project, or tasks that did not have them. It was really, really incredible. You brought

Art Gelwicks 6:31
up the grocery list thing, right? That did does remind me the application any do it’s interesting when you go and you plug tasks in there on their shopping list, it will actually organize those by category within the store. So like it’ll try to put the dairy items together and the thing, so it creates groupings. But again, that’s not a sequencing as per se, because there’s nothing within that grouping. It’s it’s all you’re in the dairy aisle, find your stuff, I’m trying to think about how some of the tools will do sequencing, for example to do is the closest you get with sequencing and Todoist as you can change the order of tasks in the list. And that’s assuming you’re going to work from the top to the bottom, most Kanban tools, you can rearrange the cards in the board, something like a Trello or something like a notion board, you can change the order that way to create a somewhat of a sequence. But there’s nothing that locks it in to say that when this one’s done, this is the next one that has to be done. And I’ll make the argument that the next one is actually less important than what was the preceding one that needed to lead up to this task. So what had to be done first, because what I’ve seen consistently is that when you have a task that you’re not prepared to execute with everything, it fails. But if you have a task, that’s going to dovetail into the next one, that’s logically the one that’s setting up the success of the next task. So the predecessor is really the one that makes all the difference. And it really doesn’t matter how you, you look at it. If you want to look at a task and say when this is done, I can do this next thing, or when I need to do this when I need to do the prior ones. But it does raise an interesting situation. Now in the conversation, we talked about task sequencing, sequence implies 12345. But that’s not always the case, you can have four or five tasks that have to happen before another task can start. So if you’re if you take something simple, like mowing the lawn, well, you have to get out the lawn mower, put gas in the lawn more clear the debris out of the yard, and then you can start well, those are all tasks sequence. But they’re all equal to get to the next level. This is again, this is where we’re starting to play in project management space. But it’s so simple. It’s such a basic level, that I still don’t understand why we don’t see some sort of capability, but even barged into existing applications.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:12
And it’s interesting more to me that we see more and more applications that are doing some level of kind of zettelkasten type features where we see linking backward and forward in the database to items. So the ability to link things is actually trivial now in many software, and yet we’re not having the capability to track those things. And for me, just so that we’re aware for me, I just want to know, I don’t need the software to hide things from me as as like you can’t do this until that thing is done. I just want to be able to have some signifier that there is a condition that needs to be met before this task gets done and or another task needs to be completed. I think of task sequencing as being in any condition that needs to be met before this task gets done, right, so if I need to do some action, and say, for example, you know, I need to get my next paycheck before that happens, well, I’m not going to, I’m not going to do that thing until I see that thing happen. And so, it may be some external thing that happens, it may also be something that I need to do. But both of those things are important to me, I need to know that I’m gonna get a phone call from Susan, Susan is going to tell me, I’ve got the green light to do X, then I will do Y. And it’s that very kind of context, whereby I’m then capable of identifying, okay, next week, there are some things that I’m not going to be able to do until I get a response back from Susan. Okay, I’m going to set those aside into likely my someday list Allah GGD. And forget about it, because I don’t need to deal with it this week, unless Susan calls me and says, Hey, Ray, you’ve got the green light. So there are all of these different types of conditionality that we need to think about when it comes to what tasks need to be done. What examples kind of come up for you in thinking thinking of concrete examples aren’t used the grocery shopping, you know, and that kind of example, are there other examples where you find that sequencing is either necessary, or just so much more useful when you do use it, the thing

Art Gelwicks 11:34
that I run into all the time is when you when you create tasks related to a process, that sequencing built in. And even if it’s a fairly simple process, it’s a reproducible one. And to reflect that process in your task management system, you need to then emulate that sequence for it to be done effectively. Otherwise, things fall off the rails, you’re constantly going back and checking some sort of a reference document for your process. And it may not be, you know, an exceptionally complicated process. Let’s let’s take since we’re starting to head towards the end of summer, you think about end of the year things or end of the summer things you’re going to do, maybe, maybe you have a swimming pool, then you’re going to be closing the swimming pool up after you know, sometime in September, that has a whole series of things that have to happen, a lot of things have to happen prior to even getting started, they have to happen that day, they have to happen within a couple of days after. And that sequence is very important. Because if you don’t do things in the right steps, you can have a mess and very huge number of problems. A lot of people I know will actually just write down, these are all the things that I need to do, and then assume that that is the way that it will operate. This, the specific to me is that if it’s something that you’re going to do more than once, and it has multiple steps, you need to be able to demonstrate that sequence within the task tracking, I was thinking about the sub task idea, because a lot of the tools offer the ability to have subtasks. But those are disparate tasks and most tools, I think it would be kind of nice if those were actually linked tasks. So if you had, you know a list of tasks, and you would you would take a task, and then you would have a sub task under it well, that maybe that’s another just task from the list. So you can say, okay, when I click on that, it’s also going to close out the other one, too. It doesn’t sound like it, this should be this hard. I

Francis Wade 13:37
had this conversation with a developer, a task management developer, and he assured me that it is exceedingly difficult. He said it is It sounds easy. It seems like it should work. It seems like all of them should have it. But he tried to convince me, he was pretty good Vinci that the programming of that requires to create a task dependency. And the inside the software is extremely complicated. And it gets complicated really fast.

Art Gelwicks 14:09
I think they’re overthinking it, then, because they’re immediately running into what would be project management. They’re thinking about something on the scale of a Microsoft Project or a PERT chart tracking, they’re getting too big too fast. If all you’re doing is saying that this task is related to that task, not scheduling, not dates, not calendars, none of that, because that’s what I will completely agree if you’re trying to do something where you have a schedule of dates, and you want to have it automatically adjust those based on task relationships. Yeah, that’s a big hairy monster to try and deal with. I’ve seen people try and build those out in Excel and wind up losing hair because of it. So when we, when we think about something small though, just you know, that logical next step, take a task, what tasks are related to this, what are connected to it, that’s all that’s all we’re looking for. right away, building off of that, yeah, go find another tool. But I just think they overthink it at times.

Augusto Pinaud 15:06
And I think that’s, that’s exactly what it is part of the problem is, the need is not another Microsoft Project, okay, the guy or the person who which role requires something as complex as Microsoft Project will not use, this will go directly to those tools. For other reasons. What is needed is a more basic level of this task. It’s not about, it’s about really, okay, this other task will not start until this, this one finish or this group of tasks. Finish. And, and again, as we mentioned, OmniFocus has done it for years incredibly well. And it was a strength from the focus, there were things that now I recreate on Todoist, or recreate on nodes that are less effective and pretty, because you cannot really hide these other tasks, you now need to find ways to hide it, instead of just saying, Don’t show me these tasks yet, because I don’t want to see it. Because I need to finish this other set of tasks before and one example is insurance of the house. Okay, I need to pay the insurance of the house every year and wait for the check to return. Why? Don’t ask me, it’s how it’s set up. And it’s really close. But okay, I pay and then three weeks later, the mortgage company pay and I get my check back up every year. But that means I need to be aware that in this next month, okay, they’re going to take a chunk of money on that account that I need to make sure it is in there. So the insurance company can do they’re automatically withdrawal. Okay, but also I need to create a second task that says waiting for to gain three weeks waiting for the refund for that thing. And in OmniFocus, it was really easy. Okay, he was all set in automatically. Here. Not so much. Even I had a winter list for things to check around the house. Okay, unplug the houses, you know, typical checking checklist for the winter, that in only focus was really easy. The question was, is winter jet. Okay, every day, you finally have not clicked that I suggest, okay, the rest of the list never populate my system. When you go to other platforms to do list in this case, that is not true. So I need to find other more complex ways for the user at least, to hide those things. So I don’t see them until I decide that is ready, or we already went through ways to do it.

Francis Wade 17:55
The two that I’m thinking of are examples. I’m thinking of our webinar today, webinars that I do. And they require a two week cycle, a week of preparation, a week, the day of execution, another week of other promotional activity and setup for replay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the other one is, uh, I do two annual online conferences. And they take about three months to prepare. And another two weeks to wrap up after it’s been after they’re finished. And these are repeatable activities, that in which the tasks are connected to each other. But they don’t necessarily occur one after the other, in terms of a must be done. The moment before you do B, the tasks can be separated in time. But one thing I’ve read about, I’ve heard suggested it was it was done by an actual academic from forget the university University of Utah she’s from but anyway, Desi Desi will the name but she suggested that we should be able to download chunks of activity the way you don’t know the instructions for how to you know build a desk or something from Ikea, you get the instructions from them and they tell you follow the sequence. She She argued that you should be able to download a conference or a webinar as a group of activities of dependent activities into your task management system. And following what Augusto is saying you should be able to hide everything until you do the first task. So the first task could be set the date and once you set the date, then it should automatically populate the next activities. You do them it should automatically populate this So this is still satisfaction. But there’s a lot of things in our world, like paying mortgages, which have a standard flow. And we should be able to download these flows from other places and just put them right into our calendar.

Augusto Pinaud 20:17
And to do is, requires more work on the front end, but one of the things you can do is create templates. And those templates, you can put those dates. So when you create them, everything gets populated that way. So there are ways to do it is just getting the dependents in the sequence, it will be much faster, much simpler than all the work arounds you need to do to create things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:41
Yeah, so what I’m hearing here is there’s really two different kinds of sequencing that are involved and potentially a tertiary form as well, which is the kind of conditionality piece that I talked about. But the point here is that if you have something that is structured, that can be put into a checklist, then you can identify that once that condition is met, task A is done. Now Task B can be done. If there is a checklist involved, then that can actually populate with, say a date sequence associated with it. So that these things now need to be done in this order by these dates. And so you can then populate your system you’re utilizing that, and or there is the idea of like with OmniFocus, you have a singular task that is conditioned on the prior task being completed. And then it appears or, you know, gets excised from some other list and comes to your your primary task list once that thing is met. So I just wanted to explain very briefly how I do both of those things in my own world. And maybe that will help folks kind of understand this. So when it comes to checklists, I actually have a set of, of templated emails that I’ve designed to use Remember The Milk, and you can email bulk tasks into the system. And so the great part about that is that anytime I see a condition met for something, I can then just pull up that template and send it to remember the milk. I can even automate that because I can have IFFT or Zapier, go ahead and send those emails into Remember The Milk based on a condition met, and then it will just populate the system. And since in the in the bulk email format, you can include task list, due date, start date, tags, all kinds of things in those lines. When you import, it can put them in all of the places it needs to and it can time, put the due dates and times in them as well. So let’s it’s very, very helpful for being able to say, Okay, once this thing happens, then all of these other things need to happen right thereafter. Just set it up as a way to like and Todoist, you have a template, and remember the milk, I use the email into function for bulk email tasks. And so that’s one way to do it. The other is the more simplified way, which is that I always code conditional tasks, so that I know that there is something that needs to be done before them. And so for me, I just use the chevron at the beginning of a task line that tells me that something else needs to be done before that thing will go into place. And then in the in the task description at the end, I will actually note what that thing is. So it’s it’s basically what resource do you need or what condition needs to be met in order for that thing to happen. And so the chevron allows me to be able to, in essence, filter out anything that is conditioned, right, I can’t do it right now. So in essence, it’s a special type of someday, maybe, but it’s something that I say, for example, I expect that call from Susan this week. So I will place that task into my current week’s list of tasks. Notwithstanding, because I, I’m prepared for her to call me Tuesday or Wednesday. And then I’m going to have to be able to do that on Wednesday and Thursday or Friday. So I’m going to place that into my current tasks. But if I can’t do it, then I don’t want to see it right now. So that will be filtered out of view. Until such time as Susan makes that call, and I get the phone call, I can make it active. So there’s two pieces there, right, there’s the for me filtering using that icon just to have a visual for what is a conditional task. And then the other part is identifying what the resource limitation is, so that I can see the sequencing activity. I also put sometimes, you know, activity constraints in parenthesis after the task description, you could use the notes section of your task manager to do that as well. I just happen to like to see all of it right there in the task description. But you know if it’s going to be a very long reasoning as to why something is or is not So, I will put that in the notes of the task then and make a note see notes, I will literally in parenthesis, put see notes, so that I know to look into the notes and check those out. So those are two different ways in which we can we can do that in systems.

Augusto Pinaud 25:13
It is interesting if I listen to you, because I like my task as clean as possible. So I am the one who put everything on the notes and on the bottom because that description I wanted as precise as possible. So for me, it works exactly the opposite the notes, it’s what contain all that array of information and conditions and things to remember, I know that I was smiling as you were describing that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:40
yeah, and one thing to remember is that my system is designed so that when I’m tracking time for all of my work, whether it’s billable or non billable time, and so I use toggle track against that description. And so I need to make sure that it is highly descriptive, because that’s going to show up in my billing system. When I do click on the Start and End Time for toggle track. So I’m doing it for good purpose for that reason. And also, I want to be able to know what I’ve actually done throughout the day. And if I do a good description, then I will know the context immediately when I see the task, and I will complete it better. I just found that for me. And that’s not for everybody. But I find the more descriptive my tasks, the more likely I am to know immediately why I want to do that thing. And then to be able to do it. And so I do put a little bit more detail in my tasks than I think the average person, but it just helps me in that sense. And it just goes to show you know everybody’s different, you have to your mileage may vary. You need to know how much detail you need in your tasks to make them both useful. But also, they should generate a sense of momentum. Where can we fall short when it comes to task sequencing? Aqui trip it up.

Augusto Pinaud 26:57
The first the first one I’m on top of you is I need these exactly one of the pitfalls of OmniFocus is that you can overcomplicated the system. Any of these things as as an incredible potential. It has also an incredible risk to overcomplicated things. And over complication means that you tend to be less effective and do the task less because it’s now harder to find them. Because they you may not see the task but because it will be dependent on two things that you have made may have forgot to check. So that’s for me is the biggest pitfall that said, for my past experience, the benefits, I outweighed the over complication, you can always come to the wizard review and simplify if needed, that when you don’t have it is simply impossible to rebuild it.

Francis Wade 27:50
I think there’s lots of room for better UIs better user interfaces, the list format, or the calendar format. I think they’re a bit for a different time. And not the world that we’re in right now. We’re I think the user just wants to know, what should I work on next. And there’s a couple couple of calendar that auto schedulers anyway that offer you, here’s what you should work on next. But by and large, they’re most of them follow the calendar or list format. But you don’t really need all of that, in order just to answer a simple question. And I think if they were thinking of what you the user need to do to take your next action, they will read as they would, they will be able to rethink. And basically, what we’re saying is take away all the complexity from view, you could handle it somewhere else, as long as it’s being handled, but then just tell you the part that you absolutely need to know. So and shorten the time that it takes for you to find it. You know, just fast, quick, simple, direct, maybe not even in a calendar or task manager, it could be just a pop up on your screen that smart pop up, not the kind that we have right now. But that’s all you need. But I haven’t seen anyone start from know that none of the kind of designs or task manager seems to have started with what does the user absolutely need? When do they need it? And how can we minimize the time it takes for them to find it when they need it? And then work back from that? It seems like they’re working from the database forward with predictable kind of complicated interfaces as a result.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:37
And isn’t that really the the challenge of the type of user because I spend a good amount of my weekly review, preparing for what is going to happen so that I have a higher likelihood of that happening. And most people do not do that. But if I were to come into contact with a piece of software that was highly opinionated did in that sense and tried to provide me with some level of logic that was not my own. I don’t know how I would feel about that. I think that certainly I want, quote unquote, it to be easier. Right, I would love for you to utilize the Unschedule method in line with my GTD weekly review. And I’m utilizing all of this software to make my world more efficient. But at the same time, I actually like touching every single thing that I’m going to do in the subsequent week, because that task sequencing happens, and I understand it better by virtue of touching each of those items along the way, because I can make the judgment call this is why am I why am I looking at doing this, right? Or this is probably low priority, or this person asked me to do this thing. But really, it’s not high priority to me, it may be high priority to them, right? So if if they’re on fire, they need to stop, drop and roll. But that’s not necessarily my problem. I’m not on fire, right? So you have to kind of take those, like use that those heuristics in a way that help us understand that. And if it’s put into the black box, right, I tend to think of like any AI machine learning or algorithm that I can understand as being the black box, if I put it into the black box, then that takes some of the mental muscles away from me, right? If you if you don’t use your muscles, they atrophy kind of thing. So if I do that, then I become less attuned to those pieces. What do you say to that argument in terms of, of, of a desire to still have good productivity skills, while at the same time having the software facilitate maybe the mundane components, I was gonna

Art Gelwicks 31:48
say that was my worry, when we were talking about this is that we’re we’re looking to, for the software to do too much for us, we lose the ability to investigate those tasks, to think about the tasks to think about the sequencing, to think about the impacts and have that mental awareness. If we count on software to do that decision making process for us, I’m totally up for automation. I think that’s great streamline the manual, repetitive or mundane, repetitive tasks. But we need to be able to process and have that time to be engaged in what we’re doing. And that engagement needs to happen on the planning point, more than it does on the actual doing point. I think people get away from that they they want to find a tool that does the hard part for him, which is the planning. It’s the thinking through it’s the creative visualization of how do I get from this collection of random tasks to a complete completed successful activity? So while I think there is a lot of value to these are the things that I figured out are in the sequence, what’s the next thing that I need to be doing and the tool should facilitate that process? I don’t think there’s going to ever be a tool out there that can decide what that process should be in the beginning. It’s going to there’s so many variables that come into play with that. And if we look for that, I think we’re looking for the wrong target for the biggest return on our effort and, and our investment.

Francis Wade 33:22
I think I might disagree from the point of view that there is lots of busy people, executives, who have administrative assistant, who does exactly what we’re talking about? No, do they do it? Well, some, some are amazing at doing it. And some are terrible. And if you’ve ever met an executive, an executive who had to change that administrative assistant from someone who was competent to someone who was clueless, you’ve ever heard their complaints, you know what it’s like to go from one extreme to the other, and then start to start all over again, and not even have a real idea of how that person became so competent at figuring out their schedule and telling them what to do about it saying that the person would the administrative assistant would do everything because in the beginning, he or she couldn’t do anything, right, because it takes training to get to the point where they could figure out what the executive is doing. So essentially, what happens is that there’s a period of training, where an executive would have to train his or her administrative assistant to get to that point of super competency. Well, the same thing is with with software, same thing is with auto schedulers is that they take training, they come with capabilities. And you are essentially the same way we just talked about CRISPR being a program that learns your voice as it goes along is the same way that you need to train an auto scheduler users In administrative assistant, and as you train them in the very basics like, don’t schedule may work out for 10pm. In the evening, as you get past the basics, you move on to secondary, tertiary and higher levels of complexity that you can then delegate to the person or system. And then you kind of move up to the next level and up to the next level. But most executives I’ve spoken to I’ve not met one who really understands what I just described as a process. It’s, it’s more like, they call HR and say, Send me somebody good. And that person could be 18 years old, I’ve seen that happen. The CEO has an 18 year old imaging assistant who’s like, you know, she’s brand new, she’s never been work before. But difficult. She’s available. So let’s give him to her, her to him.

Art Gelwicks 35:52
But that’s the exact same mindset that they then take with software, they look at it and say, Okay, fine, give me a piece of software that is the equivalent of the administrative assistant that has 30 years of experience, and it can immediately do exactly what I need it to do without any effort on my part. And then they get frustrated with well, why doesn’t it know to do that? Why would it know? Honestly, every piece of software is the equivalent of the clueless administrative assistant you just described, it starts off that way. They all have a base set of skills, they just graduated from college, they they know, they’ve got the BAA, and they’re just ready to go and do some work. But they have no idea what the guidelines are, what your requirements are, honestly, what your foibles are, and your, you know, your little weird quirks that you have to have, you know, I can’t have a task that’s blocked in on three o’clock on a Wednesday, because that’s when I do this and that and the other thing. And Ray, I know you’ve worked with assistants directly, and you know, that grooming process, for lack of a better term that has to happen to develop that relationship. So many people are not willing to put in the effort to create that relationship with the software that they are trying to entrust their entire productive system with,

Francis Wade 37:14
is actually a whole, it’s the things we’re talking about, I’ve never actually seen written anywhere, that the hype of the software, you go to the sites, it isn’t as if they’re giving you the 30 year old versa, the person who’s sat in the next office next to you for all this time, they’re promising that they really can’t deliver it. But they don’t offer a distinction between the 18 year old and the one who’s been there for 30 years, they they the hype is that, don’t worry, you’re someone who it’s as if they’ve been with you all this time. And it’s just not, it’s just not true. So then offer you a path that will offer you any training, they don’t give you an indication that you’re going to spend some time training this thing.

Art Gelwicks 38:01
Where they flip it is they can, they don’t want it really confused, but they obscure expertise with functionality. So they figure if we have more features, it’s smarter, so it will do more things for you. And I’ll call that a perfect example of this is notion, notion is a really powerful app, it is also a quagmire. To get things set up in that first learning curve it has it is just because there’s so much in it. So you’re bringing on board a person, if we use the person analogy, you’re hiring a person with a vast amount of book knowledge, but no practical experience in what you’re trying to do. And now you are going to take the time to translate your practical experience into their book knowledge. Well, the first thing, you have to have the same book knowledge. If you don’t, you’re not even talking the same language. But then you start to get into say, Okay, now you have to understand your own structures and processes enough to be able to communicate them to somewhere else. And how many times have we seen somebody say, you know, you ask them, Well, how do you do this? Well, we just do. Well, where’s your where’s your process outline for this? Well, we don’t have one. So how do you know what you’re supposed to be doing? Well, we just do the same things we’ve always done. What piece of software is going to turn that into anything intelligent, very little, unless they’re your they are getting you to spend a whole lot of money. And I guarantee I’ll get off my soapbox in a minute. I guarantee there’s a whole lot of big brain people standing behind that software interpretate the software implementation in doing the interpretation for it. So we have to look at and that that went corporate but even down at our own basic level. If you were to take your significant other and say guess what? I’m going to put you in charge of all of my productivity planning, you’re going to, you’re going to do all my planning of my schedule, can you imagine the fights you will have for like months, trying to get everything together, because they don’t think like you do. And you don’t think like they do. And they’re not putting up with your nonsense. Software, at least won’t yell at you, when you’re being a ridiculous person in your planning.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:23
I will say that one of the major pitfalls of dialoguing about any of this is the fact that technology is only as good as your compliance to use the software and your awareness of the features. And I mean that in terms of not only what it can do, but what it can’t do, and many times what we perceive software to be doing is more than it is. And it’s usually less than it is. And so I think there is that fundamental piece, I also think, kind of arguing out of both sides of these corners here, that the average person probably is very comfortable with something that is a simple user interface that just tells them what to do. Whereas for me, I would like to do all of the work. And then on the flip side, know that when it gave me some simple prompt, you know, just a little pop up display on my screen. Whenever that work needed to be done, hey, this is the work that you need to do. It’s reassuring that I’m doing the right thing. And so much knowledge work today, we’re not really told that we’re doing the right thing at the right time, we have to make that determination. And it would just be nice to have some algorithm that confirmed and affirmed that you were doing that. So I get the it’s a it’s an appeal, there’s a there’s this nice tug at that at that component. But yeah, it just takes a long time getting someone, as you said, groomed to know you and how you work and all of those things. So being able to offload that onto a human is tough enough, better yet to technology that is still in its nascent forms, you know, machine learning, a lot of this technology is all very still early, early days, you know, infancy. And it’s going to take some time before it really learns how to do a lot of this material, a lot of this work. And it’s multiple types of technology being blended together. As we come to the kind of close of our time together, I wanted to talk about maybe some of the tips and tricks to get started. If somebody wanted to start Task sequencing, maybe what are some of the pitfalls they may come into contact with? And how can they make sure that they get started correctly. And I’ll just get started here with saying to simplify your work, and I don’t mean complex versus simplicity in in that very binary sense. I mean, in the sense that simple solutions are usually elegant solutions. And that means that there’s a lot of work that goes underneath the thing that looks simple. And so think of the elegance of walking yourself through a week, what things need to be done for that to be to be able to happen, the most useful thing I can offer to you is that in the many years I’ve been studying personal productivity, I have come to the determination that routines are primacy in terms of being able to create sequences of tasks that allow for greater effectiveness in life. And so that’s a great place to start, which is to think, what are the things you do every day, and just reversing or reordering? The sequence of doing those things can create a greater start to your day, for example, I usually use the example of mother or father who doesn’t feel like they have time for the kids. Because they’re, you know, frazzled. It’s kind of, you know, Tasmanian devil, as they get out the door to get to the office, you know, it’s a world when all things are kind of flying around, kids get thrown into to car seats, and you’re off to the you know, it’s just, it seems like a mess, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Right? You can really, truly organize your morning so that things get done in a proper sequence. And it’s just going to make your life better and quite honestly, you’re teaching your kids organizational skills, and you actually get to to spend time with those children in a way that they actually enjoy mom or dad in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t because Would You Rather mom or dad like spend time with you as they make their way through their morning or mom and dad yelling at you to like, Okay, go grab the thing from the from the fridge and you know, grab your bookcase, book bag and it just all of that, you know, nonsense going on around you is chaotic and is probably not healthy for the child. It’s not healthy for you because it’s more stress than you need. And and you can actually increase your the value of the relationship with your child if you learn how to be organized in that sense and And I really felt that growing up my mother, being a very highly organized person, it was, I never felt that push a rush to get it was things were organized in certain way that you got up and you did those things. And then you’re out the door. And you know, like, I would just like, walk out the front door feeling like I just was, was just like cuddling with my mom, you know what I mean? Because it was just like a nice, easy mechanism. It wasn’t always easy getting up every day for school, but she knew what I needed to do, she made sure that they were in an order that made sense for me. And that worked. And so think of your routine in that sense, what can you do, maybe it’s just just changing one thing to put it at after the other to make your morning just a little bit more seamless.

Art Gelwicks 45:48
For me, it’s, it’s the working backwards thing. That’s the hard part. If you want to start into this, every task when you’re planning out the task, ask yourself one question, what has to be done before this, for this to be done successfully? If you can get into that routine, you’re setting yourself up to being able to develop the sequencing as you build it into whatever you’re tracking this in. But that’s the habit. You’re not using the term habit, but that’s the habit that you want to establish, is asking yourself that logical question, and that should be part of your weekly planning your task planning, all of those steps? What do I need to have done? Before I start this, for this to be able to be successful? Do I need things? Do I have to finish things? Do I need to go get things? You know, it doesn’t have to be things but are there people I need to involve? Ask those questions. If you start that, I think you’re halfway along the path that you need to pay.

Francis Wade 46:49
I agree. The business that Ray is talking about of grouping, grouping recurring activities into repeatable rituals or sort of repeatable mini projects every day. And then thinking about how can I make it better from one day to the next, if not every single day, one month to the next one semester to the next. Because you’re going to be executing the same rituals. And you don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel each time, you don’t want to have to be the Tasmanian devil coming out the door, you do need to do what Ray’s mom did, which is to pre think, put things in place, kind of lock them in, and then allow them to run for a while to see how well they were I’m guessing this is what your mom did read aloud to see how they can see how they worked. And then afterwards made some improvements and then rinse and repeat. But to get into that sort of virtuous cycle and not just leave it up to Tasmanian devil every day, or Tasmanian devil every time you need to go and have a conference or whatever the repeatable activity is get as many of those away from the creative, generative kind of ad hoc way in which they all start and move them into sort of production, which is that, yes, I flick a switch, the ritual starts, I flick off the switch, it stops to move them into production. So move them out of creation and into production. And then revisit them as needed. I think that that principle of tasks, task sequencing, I think is combining both of you guys are seeing I think is a is a let’s call it the cornerstone, I guess just not at frankly, I don’t think there’s much is enough. Attention put to what we’re talking about. I think it’s just left to the example of mentioned before is when I think of also the training of an administrative assistant, is there’s all these studies that show that that person’s effectiveness is critical to the performance of the executive. But a couple of years ago in preparation for our conference I went looking for, okay, who who knows something about this topic? Crickets. I couldn’t find a thing. I found, like one website, I’ve kind of talked about it, but the person was really selling their services and they kind of spent a little bit time going meta, but they really were pitching themselves as a virtual assistant. But the the recurring activity of training someone in that manner is something that you would think that should be taught in business school, right? Not even talked about, is this well, given the person’s criticality. And I don’t think but I imagined the search no wouldn’t yield would kneel to many good results either. This is a bit perplexing for me because you can’t scale unless you go through this process of what we’re talking about.

Augusto Pinaud 50:00
I agree 100% was what art says think what are the previous but also pay attention? Not only what are the previews, but what repeats in your life? Because that’s one thing that I see is that every time not only Yes, you need to think what is coming before the task, but also, are these tasks recurring because they are recurring while you are inventing them every, every time you want to do the will, you know, I had a client who lived in OmniFocus. And he ended up having his planning for food in OmniFocus. Why? Because he could do sequencing. So you can say, Okay, this week, we’re going to eat chicken, meat and pasta, and OmniFocus was intelligent enough to populate his grocery list based on that. Okay, I can you do it that way? There are plenty of sufferers. Okay, I use paprika, paprika will allow you to make those plans. Okay? Doesn’t matter what you use. But think on those where are those little point of resistance that are not allowing you to breed your best self, but to default to the to the behavior you don’t want? Those are the ones that you need to start looking before what are what is creating not the good sequencing that you want, but the poor sequence in that journey, or that you don’t need. So that’s it, start there, start little building one next, then the next.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 51:33
Well, thank you, gentlemen, for this conversation. This has been a lot of fun talking about task sequencing. And of course, we are at the end of the episode, but we’re not at the end of the conversation. And so if you have a question or comment about what we’ve discussed during this cast, feel free to visit our episode page on productivitycast.net. There on the podcast website at the bottom of the page, you can leave comments or questions. And of course, we read and respond to those comments and questions if you want a response. So by the way, if you are on the episode page, you’ll find our show notes. So those have links to anything we discussed. So I tried to keep track of all the things that we discussed and link to them there. We also have text transcripts. One is a readable transcript, just click on the Read More link, it expands it and you can read that along with the audio as it plays. And then there’s also the downloadable link below that. And that is a PDF document you can download all and have offline for you to be able to read along with. If this is your first time with us, feel free to subscribe to the podcast, click on the subscribe or follow button in your podcast app. And go ahead and follow us so that you get the downloaded episodes free whenever they come out. And feel free to also you know, follow rate and review us in any of the podcast apps. Those of course help us to know that we’re doing what you want us to be doing in terms of content, but it also helps us grow our personal productivity listening community by letting the podcast gods know that we’re putting out quality episodes. And so thank you for doing that. If you have a topic you’d like to suggest, head over to ProductivityCast dotnet and go ahead and submit it there you can leave a voice recorded message or you can type a message into the contact form there. And maybe we’ll feature that on a future episode. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade, and art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast Each week, you can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net and clicking on the about page. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 53:31
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team chats about how to track and manage time in a calendar/agenda style format to be more productive.

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In this Cast | Get More Out of Your Calendar

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Get More Out of Your Calendar

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• Sortd
• MacSparky
• Acuity Scheduling
• Calendly
• ManicTime
• Unschedule
• Ikigai

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:24
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about getting more out of your calendar, how to track time in a calendar interface to an agenda style format, so that you can actually be more productive. And so let’s get into the topic related to utilizing your calendar for tracking it is something that is probably common to many of us, that is we are used to the calendar format, we we’ve been raised to see time in either a monthly, weekly, even a day style agenda. And so we’re very comfortable with laying things out. It is just another form of list in a, you know, in a matrix or otherwise. And so the idea of a calendar is useful to us. And I’m curious from all of you, how do you use a calendar for tracking? Let’s start off with events? Since I think it’s probably the most common style and way of or, or data that you would capture into a calendar? It’s it’s the most common form of data that you would capture into a calendar format, which is what is going to happen in the future? And so how do you how do you use a calendar in that sense, and then we can perhaps, then turn over to the task or in Francis’s terms, time demand space to think about how you would capture, forecast budget, and ultimately track the things that are happening in your productivity system.

Francis Wade 1:57
The way I do it, is to schedule the appointments in and then use an auto scheduler to fill in the gaps, so to speak, to put the flexible tasks in the times that I don’t already have committed. But I think what you’re alluding to is that that’s that’s the first part. And it might be even the easy part, the subsequent parts, which we all do, would do to some degree. And I think we all do mentally anyway, is we ask what whole? Well, did I build a schedule? And then how do I improve it in the future? How do I how do I do better? Scheduling in the future, because we’ve all the planning fallacy is real for all of us. We’ve all said all this to take an hour and five hours later, we’re groaning and struggling. And but does that mean that the next time that we go to plan the activity that we’re actually any better? Or do we fall right into the same trap? I think the great thing about using a calendar is that it allows you the opportunity to be accountable to yourself to some degree for the plans that you made. When you have a list, only a list. And no calendar, I think the opportunities for improvement are fewer and more, more difficult to grasp, because you’re really just going off of kind of hunches and memory at least for the calendar year you have some possible data to work with. So I think the scheduling is perhaps the easiest part, the harder part is to become a better scheduler, which I think we all all need across the

Art Gelwicks 3:29
board. I use it poorly. And we’ll go from there. Yeah, I use it. I have a basic challenge. And I think a lot of people run into this, I have two calendars that I have to maintain and a minimum one business calendar, one personal calendar, the business calendar is not actually maintained on my own devices, it is maintained on a client machine. So I am actually take that back, I have three calendars because I also have the company calendar. That’s part of the challenge I have is that I’m bouncing between calendars. So I have to think about where does this need to go when I’m going to capture something which is rendered my calendar management and usage fairly inefficient. I mean, I’m looking at double and triple work anyway, adding extra stuff to it for processing and learning from it has fallen by the wayside a bit. So there’s definitely room for improvement with this mess that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:27
I have. And it sounds to me like you are doing that because of company policy.

Art Gelwicks 4:31
I’m required to do it. Trust me, it’s not voluntary. I would love everything to be in one place, but it’s not.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:38
Yeah. So my first suggestion to anyone is that if you are capable of doing so centralized to a singular calendar tool, even if you are utilizing multiple calendars in your world, seeing them and allowing them to overlay really is useful. You know, if you have, say a Google account like a Gmail account and you have a calendar there and you have an apple Will account and so on and so forth. That’s pretty simple and easy to do, which is to bring those, you know, items over to one app, and then synchronizing into that singular app. And that allows you to see things that are happening in multiple contexts, multiple areas of your life in one space. And I think that a lot of people can benefit from from doing that. So certainly centralizing is helpful. And I think that what most people get fearful of is that then they’ll be overwhelmed by seeing too many things at once. But remember that or if you didn’t know, you can actually turn off those calendars just by taking them out of view. In Google Calendar, you literally just click on the calendar, and it will disappear from view, when you want to turn it back on, you can do that. And it’ll just overlay and then hide those calendars on command. Same thing with Apple. Same thing with Outlook,

Augusto Pinaud 5:50
I actually use an app called sorted, sorted pool from my calendar into a sheet and create every appointment as a task. And then that allows me to integrate that with Todoist. And then bring the other task into there. So allows me to really look not only to where are those calendars, events, but what I’m going to be doing on those calendar events. On top of that, I try, I don’t do a good job in this to report every half an hour, what I plan to do, and what I actually did, and the days that I do that, well, I get much better success as the end of the day than the days that I’m not great at it. But it’s something that I’m still working on to make a better job. My Calendars are crazy, mostly because one I do a lot of things, but two, it keeps colors for different parts of the business or different parts of the family and, and thing. So it’s a carnival of colors. It’s what it’s probably in sorted what I use what I use the most. Even more than checking my own calendar,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:09
you bring up a really great point, which is the coloring of items, I use two layers of color in my calendar. So each calendar represents a different area of my life. And what I call life category. So each calendar is is a life category. And sometimes they also are programs. So I will have a dedicated program because that calendar is then published for Google Calendar to a website or someplace else where it’s automatically updating. So there’s a reason for keeping that separate calendar so that I don’t have to double entry into other places. What I do then is each calendar then gets an additional color for the context of work. So for example, if I have to be someplace physically, I will change the native calendar color to another color that tells me that I have to be someplace in person, because right now, that is the rarity, as opposed to the common being in a zoom or, you know, Google meet or something like that. Now, I’m like, Okay, I have to actually buffer in travel time and otherwise. And that means placing additional calendar events into the calendar to show travel time to and from that place. And those are variables that I like to know. So I will color the the calendar event, you know, an additional color. So it is very different from all the other events. And then when I’m planning for the coming week, I can see the little my case dark green events, and then I can say, okay, I can talk to my scheduling assistant and making sure that we are putting in travel time and buffer time between those things. So that I’m able to get to and from places but not just to and from, I need to debrief from those meetings. So I need to make sure that I have enough travel time and then time to sit down and say what happened in those meetings, is are there actions I need to capture into my system, all of that stuff has to happen as well. So those meetings are much more time to then than just the travel time and attendance at the meetings. And I believe that’s the case for all meetings, you know, there’s time that you need for preparatory work you there’s time to be in the meeting itself. And then of course, there’s time for debriefing afterward. And many times your calendar doesn’t represent that. And so you think you have more time than then than not. And even worse is that you don’t do that work. And therefore you go from meeting to meeting from week to week, whereby the work is not getting done, because you’re not actually capturing and representing it in your system somewhere. So I really believe that most people are just not putting enough into their calendar or into their task management system. If they’re using a task manager to capture. What do you need to do to show up to that meeting for it to be most productive? And then getting out of the meeting? What what did everybody agree to do in that meeting, including yourself and where Is that get actually done before the next meeting. And if you can represent those in the calendar, I think that can be really useful for a lot of people where meetings are the the driver of work for them in their organization. So they, they know that there’s going to be a tempo of meetings, so why not put the work that needs to be done in the calendar to represent that,

Art Gelwicks 10:21
I think you hit a really good point with that something I hadn’t thought about, specifically. And that stop thinking about calendar entries as entries and thinking and thinking about them as the event they represent and what’s necessary for it to be a successful event. So if it’s something like I put on the calendar, that I’m going to do my filing, you know, during a particular time, there’s things that have to happen for that to be successful. Normally, I would break that down into tasks and a task list and things like that, but I’m doing all that work anyway. So either I do it in the calendar, or I have to connect that calendar entry to something that’s going to represent all the steps necessary to have a successful event that that calendar entry is tied to, but I need to stop thinking about Oh, it’s on the calendar and move on. I mean, for some reason, the mental scope I have of most things on my calendar is that of a post it note, it doesn’t have a lot of depth behind it. But this is something that actually could be much more useful if I think about it that way. So I’m going to I’m going to flip this around, because apparently I’m terrible at calendars. Let me start asking some questions about this. First thing is, and this is probably a really basic one, what’s your preferred format? I mean, everybody thinks about month or day or what do you guys have a preferred layout that you is kind of your go to for managing your calendar,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:47
I know I do. So. So I switch between. So in the Google Calendar interface, you are capable of switching between different calendar timeframes by keyboard shortcut, and so W’s for weak axis for your custom, and you know, and so on, so forth, T is for today, for the kind of agenda mode, I have gone between, basically the two week timeframe. And the week timeframe as my preferred because they show the most amount of data for the timeframes that are going to be most important to me. from week to week, I have a Google workspace business. So I have all Google workspace for everything. And Gmail allows for the calendar view directly embedded within the Gmail interface. So that shows the day view. And so I actually get all those three views ended up being the majority of the way in which I, I see events. So if I’m in my email, I’m seeing things on a day by day perspective, I’m just seeing the day view. And then in my calendar, when I go to the either Calendar tab, or if I’m looking inside of an application that has pulled in my Google data, I’m usually looking at it in the seven day format. When I’m planning, then I turn on to week view. And then I’m looking at an a two week timeframe. So I’m capable of seeing forward or backwards two weeks at a time, so that I can I can do that level of thinking. It’s like it’s drawing it out a little bit, right, the the one week view is going to give me more detail, more more of each item. But I don’t need to see that when I’m planning, I just want to see the the it’s not the Gestalt. But it’s it’s more of a pullback view, it’s a little higher level,

Francis Wade 13:34
I like to use the 3d view when I’m doing my sort of day to day activity. When I do the start of the week, I’ll do the week view. And then I usually don’t go back to it. But a 3d view is where I do most of my and I use, I use mostly Google Calendar, on my phone for sort of the daily planning. And each day or each, depending on what the what what’s happening in my life. I use the calendar and skateboard. It’s tied into the one in in Google Calendar. So I’m really just going there to do my auto scheduling. So I just basically open it, click and then move on. But it does give similar views as well. I just don’t need to pay much attention to them. I can basically just go back to Google Calendar after hitting the Schedule button. But the 3d view is my default. I leave

Augusto Pinaud 14:26
on the week on the week view that’s where I spend most and I was thinking about it as during Art and Francis were talking about their views and but it’s really for me, it’s it’s the week calendar I unless I am on the iPhone, where the screen will not allow me to do other than the day really is too small for me to be worth it. Everything else I look into into the View format and the week format allows me to see how much blank if any There is a still in my week, or how much do I need to block to be saved, safely able to do what I’m planning to do on the week,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:09
if you are utilizing Google Calendar, when you use use it on the desktop, and you use schedule as your option for format, it shows it in a list view. And when you do that, in the mobile versions of Google Calendar, it actually shows it in a card view. So they’re stacked events. And I really, really liked that view. And so for those who just from an aesthetic perspective, it just provides what I feel like is just a more readable environment on Google Calendar on mobile versus Google Calendar, the schedule option in the full desktop view,

Art Gelwicks 15:44
that’s that’s exactly what I was going to bring up because you guys are talking about, you know, three day layout, day layout, things like that, that really lend themselves to a full screen. I’m a big fan of I use agenda view in Outlook. But I also use that scheduled layout, that vertical layout and that that anchor incremented block structure is visually very clear to me. But just sitting here, as we’re talking playing with my calendar, I realize it does create an issue because it doesn’t show you overlaps clearly. For example, I have a couple of items on my calendar right now that are overlapping. And it doesn’t show that they’re overlapping, it just stacks them in sequence. So you don’t really have that perspective. So I think one of the things that I’m going to change right away, I may manipulate my calendar, using the schedule view. But I need to pop into a day view, just before I’m done to make sure that I haven’t stacked like four things at the same time. Because it’s not, it’s not painfully clear when I have things overlapping on my calendar. So it’s just another view that we’re going to have to get used to.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:51
Yeah, and I have to frequently also make everyone aware that sometimes events will overlap. But I plan to end the meeting early. And so I can get to the next meeting on time. So I have to tell folks, okay, yes, we can schedule in this timeframe, even though there’s an event that may be overlapping here. This is because a client sent the event and they think it’s going to take longer than it really is going to I know it’s not going to. And so we’re going to, we’re going to still be able to keep on schedule not withstanding. And so seeing that overlap is actually helpful. But you also have to know internally, how much time really do you need, you know, for a particular meeting and making sure that if someone else is scheduling on your behalf, or sending you the invite, and so you don’t have control over that, that you still have an internal knowledge of what’s going to happen. So you can calendar effectively, because you don’t want to have a gap, whereby now you’re losing time, because there’s nothing happening happening in that space. At least for me, we’re I’m very meeting heavy in my week, I want to be able to have efficiency, as much as I do effectiveness in terms of having meetings collected together, I want to have those meetings, have them done, and then be able to go on to other work where I have open space for focused action and and really flow work. And so there was a value to thinking algorithmically about getting your events into as few blocks as possible in your week, so you can meet with the people you need to, but then go back to having discretionary time to actually get work done.

Art Gelwicks 18:23
Yeah, that was going to be my next question for you guys is, and this, I’ll talk about my own experience first. And then you guys can tell me something similar for you. Your favorite calendar trick or hack, one of the things that I did a couple years ago, within Outlook, as I wrote a macro based on another one I had found on the web, that every time you would have a meeting, you could then go run the macro and 15 minutes before the meeting and 15 minutes after it would add in additional meetings that were private meetings that people couldn’t grab, giving me a buffer time around whatever that was, the challenge I was having is I had to physically relocate between meeting rooms. And I needed time to be able to get from point A to point B, it’s like getting across campus at school. So same idea for me, I ran that macro, boom, those pieces were in nobody could then grab the block on top of it. It worked fairly well. I mean, some people just flat out ignored it. But that was one of my preferred tricks. So I’m curious. So I’m curious what you guys do, what do you do within your calendar? What’s your favorite little hack that makes your calendar management easier?

Augusto Pinaud 19:26
There’s a couple of things one I want to mention before you mentioned something important because as much as I love the Apple Watch the calendar and the Apple Watch is completely useless for me exactly for what you refer before art. That is study do not give me Do not allow me to know if there is any overlap because what it showed me Scotch so I can see the cards or at the same time or not. So it doesn’t do anything for me on tricks. I’m going to mention two things. One is I use a service called acuity you can use Calendly doesn’t matter which one that has eliminate this the email discussion of When can we meet, When can we meet and I forwarded you a link. Now you can spend all the time that you need, looking at when it’s available or what is available on my calendar and what is not available in my calendar. And that has really say, hours in my schedule, because I don’t need now to to be into this back and forwards to find three find four find that is never give me an answer on. The other thing is I look at my calendar every every night, I try at least, to look the next three days. Because even that I’m looking at that weekly, you know, consistent enough, there is a stuff that hides in that calendar that you don’t consider, oh, this is going to require or even this is going to require more time or even that you thought that it’s not going to require now as the deadline is coming for that meeting or for that event, you say this may require a lot more time than than what I had, or, or things happen, you know, my wife got hit in the car. Yesterday, not a big deal wasn’t a lot. But now I need to solve that I need that now need to take priority get into the calendar, and all this. So I that helped me to see okay, what can I move or not move to be able to solve that issue and that problem.

Francis Wade 21:35
I think one of my I wouldn’t call it a trick, but it’s a process I would say is to become a better better scheduler, by by trying to reconcile my plans versus my usage. It’s it’s clumsy, I it takes a long time to put the data in. I don’t really analyze it using any fancy tools. But I at least have the loop closing every sometimes it’s like a month later. But at least it closes at some point where I look at my schedule on this, well, I capture the time that I spent doing whatever I’m doing in there, I don’t literally sit down and compare. But I have a sense about how long something takes by seeing how it was passively captured. And I use manictime How long the task actually took. So you know, it’s not it’s not strong, it’s not good. It’s not timely, but every hour does get accounted for eventually. And by doing that I could see like, for example, I added on a task to my weekly bi weekly newspaper column. And that task started off taking like eight hours. This was really a suggestion, by the way to add in the clips, video clips of the video and audio, video, audio and visual clips from the article works great. The time it took me the first day was probably took me two days. Got that down to a day. Got that down to half a day. But now I’m gonna backlog because I had other things that I needed to do. I put out three articles, and I have three of them pending. And of course, it’s looking like heck, but I finally scheduled the item in my calendar. And in the future, my scheduling of this activity will get better and better and better. As i The time will be reduced because I become more effective. But I know it’ll automatically right now it’s automatically scheduling to follow the publication of the newspaper article. So it’s at least accounted for in my calendar. But again, I need to become a better schedule of that activity. So that’s just one example of many examples like that. As I, the better I get, the more peace of mind I give myself the less fewer times I get over scheduled and overcommitted,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:06
I’ll just give one commentary on the idea of of schedulers and using scheduling applications, as Augusto was talking about, I have come up against a little bit of pushback. And maybe it’s just because of my world and the and the people that I’m working with. But you know, some folks will either not understand what a calendar scheduler will do. They will also feel uncomfortable with going into your calendar and being like, am I going to see your calendar and I have to explain to them, you’re not going to see my calendar events, you’re just going to see times that are not available to you and or otherwise. And I’ve had to encourage a lot of my clients to use a calendar scheduler because the back and forth is just too much hassle. It’s too much time and so encouraging people to use them themselves. As I’ve always said to folks, I don’t care if you send me your scheduling link or you, I send you mine. Let’s just use one. So that we don’t have to go back and forth over and over again. And I think as soon as people start to see the value of being able to say, Okay, I see my calendar, I can look at my calendar, I can look at your calendar and see the open times. Great. Now I can plug in a time in your calendar that works for both of us that value without having to, for me to write out in an email, Okay, how about Tuesday at 10am and Wednesday at 3pm and Friday at 11am? And then send an email back and say, Okay, that didn’t work. How about some other days? And then you send a few more, it’s like, why would you put yourself through this when technology, this is exactly what technology was built for. And so using those scheduling Apps has been really, really helpful once you overcome some of the minor potential human issues of feeling like I’m not a voyeur, you know, those kinds of things, because people can feel that way. Like, I don’t want to see your calendar, I actually had a client say that she was very uncomfortable, because she was just like, I don’t want to see your calendar. I don’t, you know, and she just didn’t realize that it was not actually showing her my data, it was just showing her open time. I also block out times when I do not take meetings at all. And this is really helpful when you’re using a calendar scheduler, because you need to protect your time for the times when you when you say your biological prime time, your focus or flow work times, like those times need to be blocked in the calendar. And you need to be doing that on a semi regular basis, something that I’ve found that is more effective for me is to not always have that time blocked out forever. But doing that on a rolling basis. So you know, every three months for not the next three months, but skip a month, and then the three months from that so that you’re basically every three months, you’re looking four months out for the next three months. And that allows you to then block out the times. And that gives you a little bit better of a sense of what’s going to happen. Because if you try to block out time forever, for some particular type of work, that you don’t know is going to happen, your ability to forecast that is just too limited. And so your the time horizon is too far out for you to be able to figure out really what time is going to need to be blocked out. So I try to start blocking within that quarter for how much time needs to be blocked out. And that gives me a better sense, you know, like, Okay, I’m going to have, I don’t know, you know, 30 hours of work for this particular project for the next three months, per week. And I’m going to need to block that time in the calendar so that people cannot take that time, even if it seems aggressive. I’m still happy to open up time, week by week, so that people can schedule into my calendar. But it will give me a much better option of being able to get actual work done and to make good on my client projects than if I were to allow people to schedule all that time on my calendar, and then to feel the conflict.

Art Gelwicks 28:01
So you raise an interesting point there with planning part of it. I’m curious, when you put an entry in your calendar that’s not coming from someone else. So they haven’t said we’re gonna meet from like, three to four today. But it’s you putting that time in? How much of a fudge factor are you putting in on your schedule items it, do you if you think something’s going to take an hour? Do you put it into your calendar as an hour? Do you put it in as an hour and a half? Do you put it in, you know, what’s the plus or minus on, on how you’re figuring out what goes where and how big it should be.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:36
So I am notorious for creating multiple events in the same timeframe that I share with others that I that are also then purely personal calendar events that show how much time something’s really going to take. So for example, a client might have an event where I might share with them a link to the meeting and the time. And that’s it. But then I will create an additional calendar event that will have myself and my staff and anyone else that’s needed to have personal and private information around that event. That’s not information that we want to or need to share with a client, right, we overwhelming to them, for them to have a bunch of links and a bunch of documents attached to a calendar event. That stuff then gets baked into the background. And then we can provide buffer time. And we can do all of those things. And it’s just helpful for me to be able to say, Okay, this is everything I need to be able to get there. For example, host control links in some of our conferencing software. We don’t want to share those host codes and so forth in the event with the with the attendees of the meeting, we want to have those only in the one that’s internal. So that stuff will go into that calendar event and then they just overlay each other right and one might be bigger, so it looks you know it just basically consumes the other event, but we know the controlling event is the one behind this Scenes, that is the larger event that has buffer time and otherwise included within it. So there are times when we do do that, and it becomes incredibly useful because we can place commentary in essence, you know, so and so is really picky about, you know this, and so and so would really like for us to be able to handle that. And so we can actually annotate what’s going on with the event directly inside of that calendar event that is our controlling kind of project around that particular event. So those have been helpful in the past, especially with large scale events, or very high level events where we are hosting executives, and we want to make sure that they’re not being pulled into the minutia. But we are, we’re making sure we still have all the event information captured in a place where we know everybody will have it and have access to it on the go.

Francis Wade 30:53
In terms of fudge factor, I have a macro forge factor in Google Calendar, that all my meetings are 10 minutes short of an hour. So it allows you to automatically do that. But that’s, that’s actually of little consequence, the bigger consequences, the three hour activity that I thought it was going to take on all those big items that are really a problem. And I in terms of fudge factor, what do I do, I tell myself that I should spend put more time when it’s the first time activity, when I don’t know how long is really going to take. And I’ve never done it before. So I try to schedule more time. Sometimes I remember to try to schedule more time. Most of the time, I think I’m Superman, and it should be easy. And I fool myself and I make a mistake. So that happens more often than I wish. But in general, if I were more aware, the principle would be to probably double the time for a brand new activity, I think it might take in the best case, and then use that estimate until I’ve done it the first time. And that would save me so many so much heartache. For regular activities that I do on a weekly or bi weekly basis. I know how long they’re going to take, I can be more accurate and more precise. So I I would put less forward. And the ones that I’ve done before,

Art Gelwicks 32:17
I find that I use an old waterfall technique from project management. I don’t use it consistently in my calendar, but I use it with tasks and it could easily carry over. And that’s a concept called lag and lead time. So if you have tasks that have have a relationship, you have to finish this task. Before before you can start the next one. In a lot of project management software, you can say that there has to be a lag of 1.2 or 1.5. And it creates a buffer gap between those two items that then can be consumed by the first one without pushing the second one off schedule. Well, I’ve done similar things in my calendar, not consistently, but when I knew that I would need them. For example, if I’m working on troubleshooting a problem, and I’m gonna block out an hour in my calendar to troubleshoot a problem. We all know troubleshooting doesn’t operate on its own schedule, or on our schedule, it operates on its own. So what I’ll often do is I’ll block out that troubleshooting time. And then for an hour after that, I’ll create a block of overflow time, if I solve the problem in the first hour, great, I have a free hour that has come up after that. But if I don’t, I can then burn into that second hour and then know that I’m not going to throw everything else off schedule. For for specific instances, that works pretty well. But I don’t think there would be any way I could do that for everything on my calendar, it’s just one I’d get half of my usable time. Second, I would spend so much time putting in these overflow areas, that it would be impractical. So that’s that’s kind of the way I approach it. But your mileage may vary.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:57
I like the notion of being able to put work block time into the calendar view. And this is I think, something that a lot of people don’t potentially think about, in the sense that dissimilar to Francis, I don’t want each individual task that I’m going to do. In my calendar view. I don’t want that in the actual time slot. But what I do want to do is I want to be able to understand that that is a work modality and what type of work modality I want to do in that sense. So I am time blocking in one sense, because I’m saying work is going to get done in this timeframe. I just don’t know what work is going to be done until I sit down and look at my context lists and determine what kind of work I’m going to do. But what I do know is my biological primetime, I know when I’m best able to get certain work done. And I also know when I’m more likely to do certain types of work, even if it’s not my biological primetime. And so I’ve identified what I call basically focus action session. In this and flow work sessions, and so focus work and flow work are two different types of work in my view, focus work is when I take a set of actions that can be disparate actions, right it’d be a phone, call an email, write a document, review of a buyer persona, or customer journey from from a client, or business plan doesn’t matter. Those are things that require my focus requires my attention. But it does not require flow. And so those are things that will show up on a task list, because they are fungible, and I’m able to understand their context and move them around. So flow work, though, is going to be something that is going to be a larger block of time, whereby I’m going to hopefully get into a state of flow, right. So I know that there’s an immediately a checklist of things that I do for myself, to get me into that state of flow, right? The type of music, environmental cues, all of those things to make sure that I’m I’m in that space. And calendaring focused action sessions are what I call phases, which is the same thing as focused action work, it’s just what I call one of those sessions, it’s going to be a timeframe where I know I’m going to be able to get enough of that work done, whereby I need to sit down and get these things done. These are things that I wanted to get done this week, or today, that kind of thing, I’m going to block that time out. So I know I have the time set aside to get those things done. And then I might say, You know what, I really want to write the next chapter of this particular book, well, I’m going to put in flow work time, so that I have that time on my calendar, and putting enough of them because flow work is generative, it’s creative. And sometimes you don’t get into flow. So you can, you can sit there for two hours and really feel like I wrote three sentences that I feel are worth my time, fine. But you need to be able to have that sense of understanding when it comes to flow work, you may not always have the generative output at scale that you would with focused, focused work, right focus work gives you a checklist of things that you know, you can complete and check off and check off and check off flow work is variable and its output. And once you get that sense of it, then you get a better sense of accomplishment. And I think so many people feel that lack of accomplishment, accomplishment when they sat down to do flow work. And then they sit back and go, Oh, gosh, you know, I put this time in the calendar, and I didn’t do what I said I was going to do. But if you showed up and you tried, it gets better, each time you show up and you try, it’s it’s an the output will still not necessarily always be equal. And so I just feel like a lot of people think that if they just show up, then all of a sudden the work is gonna get done. And that’s not how it works. When it comes to flow work. Creative work does sometimes, you know, it’s different, maybe with physical modalities where you might be painting or working with clay or those kinds of physical matter. I don’t know, you know, as I’m not I’m not a physical matter, artists or anything like that. But when it comes to those things that are writing, or creative in mental nature, I think that we sometimes think that all of a sudden, we’re gonna have a book sitting on our screen after we sit down for six hours. And I can attest to the fact that that is not how that works.

Art Gelwicks 38:14
Yeah. And that’s very disappointing, because I have hoped for that book to show up. And it hasn’t shown up yet. I don’t understand why this is not working. So let me jump sideways on this a little bit. Because we’ve talked a lot about the work part of it. How much of your personal stuff goes into your calendar? Is there a maximum minimum thing that you put in there? Do you put everything in there so you can manage a little bit, I’m curious,

Francis Wade 38:38
I put everything I stopped, I stopped there first. But in fact, and I use the new fury on on schedule method. Basically, I used it before I knew there was a name for it, but he he talks about it in his books, you create like a scaffold for the week, you take the 168 and you basically design all of the all of the time, I don’t, I don’t put sleep time any longer I used to, but I don’t need to do that anymore. But from the time that I wake up to the time that I go to bed, everything is an add you know generous, generous dollops of of free time, discretionary time, watching Netflix time, have generous, generous, big chunks of time that are either just thought of I want to do or leisure or exercise exercise I do. I take seriously so I scheduled all of that I scheduled my meals but not I don’t schedule breakfast, but I schedule lunch and dinner. And it keeps me in sync with my wife, my wife sort of expectation. So take away all those hours. And what’s left is available for work. But I start by taking away what I don’t want to put into work unless there’s a there’s an emergency or some kind of deadline or what On a regular week by week basis, I take out or a block away those that are not going to be used for work. And then the others are available for work. So that’s kind of how I start. I go the other direction.

Art Gelwicks 40:14
Okay, so we got to whose schedule heavily? I’m curious Gousto since you, I’ve been through your territory of having wee ones at home,

Augusto Pinaud 40:24
mine is a schedule heavy, I am the primary caregiver so that my schedule is dictated by client kids and not in that order is dictated by the kids, then the client. And then sometimes I get some saying into what is left, sometimes most of the time, that doesn’t happen either. But so mine, it’s really, especially last year was really an exception for me, because kids were homeschooling. So I earn, or I got so much time on my calendar to get some stuff done. But as the school is coming back, I have blocked times for lunch, I have blocked times for dinner, I have blocked time for the time that I need to pick the kids at school, because I learned that that time when you pick them up, they will talk for the next 2520 2025 30 minutes. And after that they shut down again. So it is important for me to block that time. So I’m available in the car for when they are going to share if they’re going to share anything so that hour, or that half an hour tend to be blocked. You know, from the moment I supposed to pick them up to half an hour after. Usually, that’s also the time that is enough for me to get back to the office and an old day. So yes, mine is pretty heavy schedule i i also blogged in different colors, I use white, for things that are that I call cool to know. So things like for example, Hey, there is a great event in this weekend on someplace in New Jersey, well, I will put it in white on the calendar, I have not made any commitment. But it’s good for me to know that he’s in there and asset data approach, I will then come in or not come in. And I also use black for my activities that are self care activities. So my meditation is in black, my Mealtimes are in black. So I understand it’s not a meeting, it is something that I’m blocking the calendar so I can have the time for those health care activities.

Art Gelwicks 42:35
It’s interesting, because the one thing I haven’t heard, and maybe because I didn’t ask the question, right, the saving grace in my calendar over the years has been what we call the family calendar. And it’s the joint calendar that my wife and I have access to within Google. Because without that I would be even more clueless as to what’s going on in our house than I am already. When she’s got activities. And when our kids were younger, this was even more important, because we’d have you know, sports practices and everything else like that. But even now, when you know being empty nesters when she has an activity going on or I have an activity going on, we make sure we put it into that family calendar. So it’s visible to each other. It does bubble up and all the different displays and all but that shared view really became critical for us. And literally it’s become a habit now she’ll, she’ll say, hey, you know, we’re going to do this with some friends on Thursday, like great, put it on the family calendar. Because if you don’t do that, I’m not going to remember to do it and I guarantee it’s going to get lost by the wayside. So it’s interesting when we talk about that personal piece, I don’t put everything in my personal life on my calendar. I should probably put more on there. Listening to the things that you guys have laid out here have given me some great ideas as to things to start putting on my calendar.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:58
I’m definitely in the Frances camp with regard to starting with personal and making my way forward. I think that those who don’t know Dr. Fiore’s work, it’s certainly well worth checking out. And I’ve done a tutorial on this. So I’ll put a link to that in the show notes on the Unschedule. But really, for purposes of keeping you motivated, you should have something that you should be looking forward to. And many times in your work week. If it’s all work and no play, then you are feeling the the impact of not feeling like you’re getting what you’re here on this planet for right you just you’re not placing those things that you’re passionate about the things that you’re excited about. I really liked the idea of putting, you know, whatever you believe are rejuvenative activities into your calendar first so that you are mindful of that and that you’re going to do those things. You know the thing that recharges me is reading and if I’m not going to read in my week, then why live But it’s just like that is that is my reason, my iki guy, that’s my reason for being, you know, I just really love reading, I love being immersed in a book, it’s, it’s something that is not only useful to me in my business and personal life, you know, I, I’m going to use that information because I’m primarily a nonfiction reader. But even if I did not need that, for my work, I would still be reading, it’s just my nature. And so by putting that into the calendar, I have something to look forward to. Right. And so this has been incredibly helpful in the face of things like the pandemic and other things, because it’s like, I know what I have to look forward to. And it’s not, it’s not amorphous, because it’s kind of physical. It’s there. It’s it’s represented and intangible in the calendar. And so just keep that in mind as well. We are at the end of our recording, but of course, the conversation doesn’t have to stop here. If you have a question or a comment about something we’ve discussed during the cat cast, feel free to visit our episode page on productivitycast.net. And you can go ahead and leave a comment or a question. And we will be happy to read and potentially respond to those comments or questions if necessary. If you are trying to access any of the items we talked about today, they’re on productivitycast.net. On the episode page, you will find our show notes that includes links to anything we’ve discussed. So you’ll see the items there if there’s something we missed, also, let us know and we’ll put it into the show notes. It also contains a text transcript that you can just click the Read More link, it will open up you can read it along with the audio, then you can also click the PDF download link below that and click on download and it will go ahead and download a PDF to your system. They are machine generated transcripts, but they should be good enough for you to be able to know what we are talking about and all that good stuff. So with that, I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade and art Gelwicks for joining me here on productivity cast this every week you can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 47:02
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

This week, the ProductivityCast team talks about how to set up effective reminders when you’re time blocking (or time chunking) as your primary productivity system. The conversation turns out much more useful for anyone looking to set up an effective reminder system. Enjoy!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/133 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Time Blocking Defined; Why Time Blockers Need Effective Reminders

West Wing (TV series)

What’s Available Today? What You Should Look for in a Reminder System?

• Google Calendar
• Apple Calendar
• Microsoft Calendar
• Apple Reminders
• Google Tasks
• Google Keep
• Microsoft’s Scheduled Tasks (Task Scheduler)
• Checker Plus
• Zapier
• IFTTT
• Microsoft PowerAutomate
• Windows Scheduled Tasks
• Todoist Reminders
• OmniFocus
• Google Assistant
• Apple Siri
• Amazon Alexa
• Checker Plus for Google Calendar 
• Evernote
• Gboard (Android) / Gboard (iOS) (voice typing on Android/iOS)

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:24
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we’re going to be talking about time blocking, sometimes called time chunking. And Francis brought this topic. So I’m gonna hand this over to Francis to kind of open us up in terms of kind of explaining to us what time blocking is. And what we’re going to do today is have a little bit of a conversation around the idea of an effective reminder system, how do you set up reminder systems? And why is it important as a time blocker or time chunker, to go ahead and have reminders, remind you at the both appropriate time and a level, so to speak, and maybe Francis can speak to that a little bit. So that you can really do what you need to do when you need to do it where you need to do it. So Francis, for those of you who are maybe have no idea what time blocking is, can you explain for listeners, what time blocking is?

Francis Wade 1:15
Sure, it’s a technique in which you put a task a flexible task in your calendar. So in other words, you’re moving it either from your memory or from a to do list and you’re putting it on your calendar. In other words, you’re assigning a time and the day and the duration to a task that you could do at different times. So you’re pinning it, in other words to a specific spot in your calendar. And in general, it’s it’s not a technique that everyone needs to use, it’s a bit of a requirement, if you are managing lots of tasks if you only have one task to do per day. And you can do that anytime, then you don’t need time blocking. But if you have lots of tasks, and vertical discretionary time, then pinning tasks to your calendar becomes a requirement just because it’s too hard to have to figure out what to do all throughout the day, go through all of your lists and figure out exactly what you need to do. It’s easier to do it once in the morning or once at the beginning of the week. And then just execute it as you go along. So that’s the general idea, you want to discuss that some more or sort of go on to the remainders.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:28
I’m really curious about this, because I think a lot of people who hear what you’re talking about, which is scheduling your tasks, and a calendar ultimately becomes more difficult as you place things in the calendar. And you realize that you don’t necessarily know how much time something might take or that things might be overlapping each other in terms of the number of things you want to do in the same, say, hour, some calendars don’t allow you to put things in smaller increments than say 15 minutes or 30 minutes. And so you have lots of things overlapping and that might feel cluttered. Is there a software solution that you utilize in order to be able to overcome that? Do you just get used to seeing overlapping? Basically calendar events in your calendar? What do you what do you think about all those kinds of challenges that people have with regard to putting things in a calendar view,

Francis Wade 3:17
we could imagine someone who uses PayPal, it has a really difficult time because they it when things change, and they have to move things around, they’re left with using an eraser crossing things off, it gets really difficult, someone like that will probably upgrade to a tool like Google Calendar, which basically allows you to put anything anywhere, anytime, overlapping as often as you want. It’s not doing anything smart. It’s just replicating what you had on paper in a digital version. So things can be moved around at will at the next level. They’re auto schedules, which make some smart decisions. They don’t allow overlaps. They try to optimize your calendar. And they try to make sure that at least you’re looking at a feasible representation of your calendar and not just things thrown in there willy nilly. So that’s the that’s the most complicated level, the most sophisticated level I’m aware of.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:09
So if somebody is going from task list and calendar two, than having too many, as you call them time demands that require you to kind of level up then there is software bespoke to the solution of taking all of those things and placing them in your calendar. That’s kind of what I was leading the witness so to speak. I wanted to make sure listeners know that there is software out there that is built ready built for this kind of situation, that they’re not just basically placing things into Google Calendar in this hodgepodge way. And so thank you for that. I’ll position is for everybody. And Francis, you can maybe start us off. Why do people need effective reminders? If they’re time blocking, they have everything in their in their calendar, or in their calendaring task based software. Why do they need To be able to be reminded about what they need to do

Francis Wade 5:02
with it. The analogy I like to draw is that of the TV show The West Wing popular in the 2000s.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:08
Okay, you’re gonna need to explain to me the West Wing and reminders now.

Francis Wade 5:13
The West Wing was a TV show about the president, the United States jab, jab back that I think his name was fictional, of course. And he had a secretary and her name was Mrs. Landingham, or Landingham, one of the two. Anyway, she was the perfect secretary, you know, in the show, in that he had a full schedule, as you may imagine, the President does, or a CEOs or anyone who has lots and lots of commitments to execute each day. And her job, one of her jobs, was to manage his calendar. But also, in addition to doing all of his time blocking, she would come and give him that proverbial tap on the shoulder when it was time to switch to another task or to consider switching to another task. And as you can imagine, she had different ways of doing this, you know, she could, you know, just kind of open the door and Wave at him to remain soft remainder that time to wrap up, or she come and tell them oh, by the way, you’re there’s a phone call coming in for you. And she would interrupt the meeting, and that will be a switch. Or she would walk into the meeting and say, Mr. President, your plane is leaving in two minutes. Well, he’s the president. So he determines when the plane leaves, but let’s say he didn’t, there’s a president, you have to leave No, in order to make your meeting with this dignitary via plane. And here’s your bag, and here’s your ticket, and Secret Service will escort you out the door. So she’ll be very firm sometimes. So sometimes she’d be very soft. And sometimes she’d be very strong, different kinds of remainders. But what it allows the president to do is essentially relax. You know, David Allen says Your mind is is for coming up with tasks, not for remembering them. This is a bit similar, your mind is for executing, not for trying to remember what you need to execute. Next, at the minute, you need to execute it. Because there’s a bunch of research that says that, that effort it takes to remember to do something at just the right time takes a whole lot of cognitive resources. And if you can outsource that to Mrs. Landingham, you’re in great shape, because that person will basically just say, Okay, no, tie your shoelaces, I’m exaggerating, but Okay, now it’s time for your meeting with this Chief of Staff. Okay, now it’s time to get on the plane. They act as the person who directs you throughout the day, that’s a moment the perfect remain. And that’s the example I keep in my head. Unfortunately, most of us can’t afford a Mr. Sandringham, we have to make do. And the way most of us make do is by, you know, committing that sin of trying to commit it to memory. And that works. And sometimes it doesn’t work. And usually, you know, we, if you have one task per day, you’re fine. If all you need to do is to remember to eat lunch at 12, you’re probably good, you’d probably don’t need a software solution or a missing Sandringham. But if you have a day, that’s completely time blocked. And let’s say there are eight to 1015 tasks you need to accomplish during the day, then the the importance or the onus is on you to find a way to not use your memory, to remind yourself to switch to the next task. Because if you go over, or if you forget, or if you can, if you commit any of the sins of time blocking, then it’s going to throw your day off, and you’re not going to accomplish what you want at the end of the day. So the question is, which software and that’s where, from my point of view, there’s a huge gap.

Art Gelwicks 8:52
Well, I’m gonna continue the West Wing metaphor because it is one of my favorite shows ever. But I’m going to use a different character from the show. Mrs. Landingham was great. Mrs. Landingham was also always in the outer office. So being able to inform the President as to what was going on, was always in proximity to a particular place. What I think is probably the better example is the character of Donna in the show and Donna was Josh Lyman’s assistant, Josh Lyman was all over the place. He was everywhere. He was running from building to building capital, you run into Congress now. And Donna was almost always with him. Somewhere. She’s chasing him down. She’s running around. She’s calling him. It’s frenetic level of activity that I think a lot of people would be very familiar with. And the Donna character is very similar to a lot of our systems where we can’t count on being in a fixed location, especially nowadays for extended periods of time. So we have to have systems that when we’re in the office, we get a notification when we’re out in the car, we get a notification when we’re in a restaurant, we get a notification, but it has to have that consistency of information. So physical proximity to where we’re capturing these needs can’t be a factor anymore, at least not for most people. For some it can, some people are at a desk all day long. They can have stuff pop up there, they can react to it, that’s great. But just take that exact situation, you get up from your desk and you go to a meeting in a meeting room? Well, if you’re gonna get a notification while you’re in there, for the next meeting, you need to go to having a pop up on your desktop, does you no good. None whatsoever, it has to follow you along with proximity. It’s one of the reasons why mobile calendars and mobile devices are so popular because it’s the data in your pocket. So what I get a little challenged with on this is we start to look at, you know, putting in our notifications into a tool in this without taking the step back and saying is this going to be accessible to me when I need it to be in where I need it to be, the tool may be great. But if the tool doesn’t go along with you, you’re just wasting time in my book.

Augusto Pinaud 11:23
So in complete agreement with you, that bring to a point I have brought into the show times before in which I said that their main productivity device it is your phone, in some cases may be your smartwatch, if it is connected to data, if you your smartwatch need to tether to your phone, then that’s not your main productivity device, your main productivity device is that phone that you carry in your pocket 24/7, almost you know that it goes to your night sign that it’s really reminder, now what you need to do is figure it out how inside of that tool can use it both can use said, you know, using your guys analogy, I’m not familiar with the show, but using Donna and Dolores so that way you can get really that level of direction, or ping or not in the shoulder. So you can go to the appropriate right attention. And one of the things I see that a lot of people tried to do is to find our tool that can do everything, instead of our set of tools. You know, when you look at calendars, there is something magical that happen when you start putting colors to that calendar and given significance to those colors. So that way you can look at that thing at glance and know what kind of event is what is coming. Okay, but that means you are now maintaining two or three calendars. So you can have the different colors. Same thing with the kind of alerts that you need. Some of those alerts need to be on a way some of those alerts need to be on a different way. So you need to be able to have inside of that mobile phone doesn’t matter if it’s an iPhone does matter if it’s an Android, different kind of alert. So that way you get the pings that need to be on a certain way. And the pings that you need are the alerts that you need to get from the other person.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:24
I say this slightly differently, because I don’t call things reminders, they are just triggers across my entire system. And so triggers are a mechanism for identifying when something needs to be done. And that is irrelevant to the thing that needs to be done in my world. So we can kind of swap out the word notification for trigger in my world. And that would be useful trigger could be a piece of paper, you know, like a post it notes stuck to the front door saying Don’t forget your keys to a prompt in a calendar application that says you need to leave right now to get to your appointment on time. And I am a little less dependent on my mobile device, I think than others for those kinds of reminders, although they do extend to my mobile phone, because of the way in which I’ve patchwork together my system. We’ll talk about that a little bit later. So I think that for me, it’s important for you to really think through how you have structured your work life and where you do most of your work. And to concentrate on making sure that your notification system, your triggers, basically do so in the context that most allows you to be productive, so that if you do need it to extend by proximity as art talked about, you know, and for it to go mobile, then that’s fine. But if you do not need that, then it’s also kind of a waste of time to really try to focus on things that are going to do that. So some people have their work and personal lives segmented very heavily. And that means your trigger systems are going to need to be bifurcated between In those two, and that can be sometimes very difficult. I know that a lot of the folks who work for the federal government, you know, they can’t take their work away from the office, for example. And if they do, it’s on specific devices, dedicated devices. If you have that kind of world where you live in an enterprise world where those things are separated, that can be somewhat difficult when you are trying to set up an effective notification systems, you have to make sure your triggers are both contextually appropriate, but also you knowing your own work and personal world to make sure those kinds of things line up. So let’s move on then to the idea of what is available for people today. In terms of notifications, what do people have available to them right now, in terms of the notification world? What software do they have? What apps are on their phones, what features are inside of the current applications that help them basically no, trigger them to do that thing that they need to do right now,

Francis Wade 15:57
I’ve messed around with different ones. And the as a Windows user, the remainder in Google Calendar is the first one that I tried. And it doesn’t, as far as I remember, with up to when the last time I tested tested it, it didn’t work when my browser was running. So this is a it’s an instant problem, I found software, an app that does go off even though my browser isn’t working, it kind of works on the desktop, it’s not synchronized to my phone. So on my phone, I use something else called calendar alarm. I haven’t figured that one out yet. I’m still trying to understand what that is. Because the instructions are so arcane and options. There are certain things that as you said, I want it to do. So I want a consistent set of reminders on my devices, it’d be great if if when I was on my phone or near to the laptop, the phone wouldn’t have to remind me if it knew that it was nearby. That’d be great. But hey, what I don’t even need that. I just need a consistent set of reminders, regardless of what programs are open, as Art said, regardless of where I am. So alarm me, alert me and trigger me in a way that I want. setting this up is not only tricky the first time, but it’s a moving target, because I’ve discovered that they update Android, which means that calendar alarm doesn’t work the way it did a month ago. So I gotta go in and figure out what changes they made to that then interacts with what they did. And the lock screen doesn’t quite and they know this and that. So the overall problem, I think, is that there doesn’t seem to be someone committed to solving this problem by itself there. It’s a bit of an add on problem to other problems. But it will require a concerted effort to solve it across all platforms, all OSs and to give you just one place to go and create all your manners and set all the options understand what they mean. And not have to fuss with what I keep forcing with.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:07
I’ll start with a potential solution for what you’re dealing with Frances one, I don’t understand why you would ever close your browser. I was like, Wait, why would I ever close my browser, I always have my browser open. So but I understand that some people do that if you use the calendar application utilized by Microsoft on your Windows system, you don’t ever have to open it after you set up the calendar, you can basically implement your Google Calendar account inside of that Microsoft calendar. It’ll synchronize your calendar, and then it will without it being open, present you with reminders for those calendar events. So Windows

Francis Wade 18:44
Windows calendar, correct, you just close it after you’re done but use it before well, it exists.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:53
This is new. There’s a Windows calendar application. And as far as I have experienced, the windows calendar application will present those notifications. It kind of runs in the background. So you don’t need to have it open or running or anything like that for it to do. And that will that will overcome the issue because because then you have your calendar notifications triggering you for those things on mobile and desktop in the same database. So you’re not having to extend it outside of that to another application. But it works on mobile as well on Android, your calendar application. Oh, yeah. beautifully. The Windows Oh, no, no, I’m talking about Google Calendar. You’re trying to synchronize those those components, Google calendars, the thing that synchronizing the notifications. So you’re just basically putting your Google Calendar account into Microsoft calendar, or Windows calendar, I think it’s called Windows 10. Then putting your your Google Calendar app to provide the notifications on mobile and that gives you across the board. So

Francis Wade 19:51
that’s it. We’re trying for sure. Yeah.

Augusto Pinaud 19:54
Obviously my main machine is an iPad so everything needs to get there. Done. Doesn’t matter if is my company work who live on Google, or is a client work who live may live on Microsoft 365. So everything at the end of the day converge into that device. And because of that, it gets replicated on the iPhone and gets replicated in the Apple Watch. So, additionally, the other thing that I use is the alarms function on the watch. So there is a, I have shared here on the show that for years, I have back pain, and I found somebody who gave me the tool so I could get rid of my back pain. But part of that is I need to stretch my back consistently during the day. So there is an alarm on my watch every 30 minutes, okay, that I go and tried to do one minute to stretch. And can I do it every minute, every 30 minutes? No. But having set up that way, allows me to get many more of those stretches than they’re not. So things like that are in setup in my watch things like the time to wake up the kids. Even though this block is time, the time is blocked into my calendar, the alarm of that it’s more, it’s set up in my watch. Why? Because there’s times constraints in that they need to wake up quick, they need to get dressed, they need to have breakfast, not on the summer, but during the school time. So that time needs to happen. So I want to make sure that I get something more than the alert on the watch that oh, there this needs to happen. This need to start happening right now. So that is a distinction that I made with what Francis was referring early. If it’s just the nudge, the calendar will do and will give the notifications on the phone or the watch. When something needs to start precisely at that time, I tend to set a second alarm that is just now an alarm that will give in the watch. I don’t have noises they vibrate, but the vibration is different and much longer. So it will allow me to break that concentration or the pattern of what I’m doing. So I can go and pay attention to that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:17
something that you’re bringing up against. So I think is important for folks to think about as well, which is that sometimes an event and a calendar is not the right type of of notification that you need some other additional trigger to either leave to get to somewhere start to make a transition from the work you were doing to the thing that you need to go do next, or go to next, the idea that you might want information presented to you at a particular time, that is not necessarily associated with anything that you’re doing. For example, some people might want motivational quotation to present to them at some particular time. And that notification is not related to anything that they might be doing right now. But it’s going to help them be excited about the next thing they need to do or remind them why they’re doing the current thing that they’re doing. So remember that notifications can be very flexible and adaptive to the environment you’re in.

Francis Wade 23:12
Yes. It goes to say I’ve noticed that when I have appointments on weekends, that I’m likely to forget them or not have the appropriate remainder in place. And the problem is that my remainders are mostly situated on my desktop on my phone. And on a weekend, it’s possible for me to be as art has been seeing not close to either one. So if I’m in the garden, for example, doing something, I wouldn’t necessarily have my phone with me, it’s a Saturday, I haven’t seen the desktop all day. So I’m not really I’m kind of just doing what I’m doing and enjoying it. And I may have a 10 o’clock call that I scheduled. So what I’ve done is done with the goods to set an asset, the hardest of alarms that I knew how to set, which is a wake up alarm, you know, like wake up in the morning, and it just keeps going and going and going and nothing stops it until you actually go and turn it off. It’s not a 10 second reminder, it’s a infinite reminder. So even if I don’t hear it, the My wife will hear it. She’ll say your phone is going off and I say, Oh yeah, let’s jump on the call. Hi Ray. Because I need the extra law. The original alarm isn’t strong enough. Nevada watch, like Augusto said, so I would I would use that functionality. If it were tied into my head into my kind of I definitely would. And if it had the different levels of alarms like he’s using it, I would key key the alarms, the cycle we’re seeing, they’re soft alarms, they’re strong alarms, and then there’s your kind of do ignore us. The world is going to break alarms, different levels of alarms, I would definitely use them

Art Gelwicks 24:58
with just about every application Anything that’s out there that deals with this kind of thing to do lists that sort of calendars, they’ve got some sort of embedded notification. Unfortunately, I’ve also found just that browser or internet based notifications are the most unreliable of notifications. And it’s not a failing of the system, it’s a failing of the fact that you have so many points of connection before the notification gets to you. So if it’s an online calendar, and you’re trusting the browser’s going to send you a notification, well, that means that you have to trust your device to receive that notification and pass it through to you. There’s a lot of steps that can fall fall by the wayside. That being said, I think it’s really important that you choose tools that work with local copies of applications. So calendar, for example, Google calendars are great calendar solutions extremely popular, I use Outlook on my phone as my mail and calendar client. Why? Because the calendar is pulled into the application and replicated. And that way I know, even if I have no connectivity, there is all those notifications are available within that local lab. So I have the device handy. So using those types of things, using solutions that have local copies for your notifications, that don’t require connectivity for it, are the ones that I found most useful. There’s lots of them out there. And there’s other ways you can construct these, if you’re okay with the internet based solutions, looking at automation tools like IFTT T, or Zapier, or Microsoft Flow, or I’m sorry, power automate. Now, all of those give you that kind of notification capability. Notifications, though, also have a problem of inconsistency with creation. So we think about things like every morning, I need to be reminded to do the following, you know, 6:30am, get the kids up. Okay, that’s a consistent one, that’s something that calendars are really good at, it’s when you start to look at notifications that have to happen like every other Tuesday, sometime between nine and 11am, I need to be notified that drive systems nuts because it’s not a consistent range. So when you’re looking at your tools, like I like to do is for my to do things, specifically because it accepts natural language as part of that request. So when I type in an item, I’ll say next Tuesday at 9:30am, as part of the task name, and I know it’s going to generate a notification in the system, whether I received that notification, that’s a whole different conversation. But at least I know the notifications being generated in the system, and I can leverage it. So there aren’t really any specific ones that I would call out as being better than others. But it’s usually it’s not the fault of the application, it’s the fault of the multiple steps that it takes to get to wherever I am at any given time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:04
I think we’ve all mentioned many of the different applications that are out there. But I’ll just reiterate these for folks so that you have them in concentrated space. One is of course, all of the major platforms Microsoft, Apple, Android or Google. They’ve all given you some form of calendaring tool. And those calendaring tools as well as task management tools. All of them now have a task manager of some kind. Apple has reminders Microsoft has to do. And the Google platform has Google Tasks. And there’s actually a reminders feature built into Google Calendar, which is akin to tasks and kind of blends in with it. I would also note that Google Keep is, is frequently forgotten here, Google Keep provides not only time based reminders, but also location based reminders. So that if you do have a thing happening in a particular place, it will trigger you based on proximity to that location. And, and that’s really helpful. So you can say, when I show up at this particular location, or near this particular location, present this information to me. Now that can be tricky, because obviously, you know, your location services need to be turned on and as accessible by Google Keep at that moment, and all of those kinds of things. But who will keep has been incredibly useful to me because it will remind me when I go to perhaps client locations where I just need to know a checklist of things to remember, like how to get into the building, because I haven’t been there in a while, or things of that nature. When I use Google Keep it will say, you know, when I go to this address, present me with this information. And that’s incredibly useful so that I’m prepared for whatever it is that I might be facing when I know what I’m going to be facing, right. Obviously, if I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to help myself, know how to deal with it. But many times I am going to client locations or client sites where the searching circumstances just very different than other places. As are I might need to know the door code in order to get in. And this is silly things like that. And it’s incredibly helpful to have Google Keep remind me of those things, many other task management apps, I believe OmniFocus has that on mobile, the ability to provide proximity based reminders, and that kind of thing. So other applications do have those features built into them. But noting that, you know, outside of time and location, we have other ways of being reminded as well. There are vibration based reminders, there are visual reminders that are audio reminders. And so those are the primary vehicles for being able to be reminded of things. So don’t think of things as just as audio. As Augusto noted, he uses primarily vibration, some of us might use visual reminders that are prompts on the screen, or otherwise to be able to be reminded of these things. So lots of tools on the market that I am aware of, including baked into your operating systems, all of them have some kind of assistant based services that will also provide some level of reminders to Francis’s point about Google Calendar, you know, in the browser closing, and it no longer providing you with a reminder system. Microsoft has a complete service system built into the operating system for notifications. So you can actually go in and schedule what are called scheduled tasks, you can actually provide the operating system with instructions to say, you know it on Tuesday morning at 8am, prompt me with a reminder, and you can actually schedule those things, it’s very easy to do on Apple, you can do the same thing. You know, you can do other kinds of reminders, utilizing the operating system itself in the assistance as well. So we talked about this Apple Siri, the Google Assistant, you know, those are now kind of the primary providers of assistance on phones. But we also do have Amazon’s Matt Ma, and those all actually have their own their own abilities for you to be able to buy voice trigger a reminder of any kind. And that can also be included in text for some assistance, like you can go into the app and type a reminder into Amazon’s tool into Google’s tool. So just know you have those as well. Where do

Augusto Pinaud 32:16
you make a good point with the geolocation in the case of, as you said, OmniFocus gave it to you, apple out of the box in reminders gives you the geolocation to do is give you geo locations to at least on the iPhone, I’m assuming also in the Android, but I don’t have an Android phone to to go say one way or the other. But But you made a great point that we tend to focus into the device on hand when we have all these things around. It is really easy to say, Hey, mom s remind me of this in 20 minutes, or remind me that I need to leave at 130 or that I need to start transitioning, I want 30. And they will do it. And I again, I like to do it in my in the watch because the watch is in my wrist. Can I do it with mme a here in my office? Yes. And that will ring all over my house as far as I’m in the house. But you need to also understand what is the device that is going to be convenient, you know, I can do geolocation on the iPad. But if that iPad is not with me, it’s going to be completely useless. So that’s where having the component of the phone, it’s really what made the geolocation a winning combination for years. I’ve been a proponent of geolocation. Why? Because not only will remember, it’s I can put that even farther to the trying to remember things, okay, because I know that when I drive close to that place, everything is going to be reminded to me, so even if you asked me, Hey, give me a call tomorrow when you drop the kids to the school so many it’s not summer, I will add that reminder to live in the school. So I don’t even need to remember the time or anything. As soon as I drove out of the school, the phone will tell me hey, you told you we’re going to call Francis. So it’s a matter of really not a lack of ways to get reminded. What is important is to spend in my opinion, is to spend time understanding what are the reminders that you have available to you currently? And then what are you really using out of those reminders, because even if you look calendar calendar can give you an alert at the time and alert sooner than the time even two days before the event. So you can program all that. What I found the most common problem is not the lack of ways to be reminded is that people have not stopped for a moment and think, what are the ways that the reminders work best for me and then establish you don’t need to invent the reminders every time. Figure it out. Add what are the three to five ways that you need those reminder and then be consistent. That, for me is what makes this really, really powerful.

Art Gelwicks 35:08
I want to raise an issue that’s starting to concerning me concern a little bit here. And that’s too many notifications. We talked about setting up all of these different things. And having my Microsoft calendar on my desktop connects it to my Google Calendar, and my Samsung calendar on my phone connects, there’s my Google Calendar in my watches, now I get a notification, well, I don’t get a notification, I get four notifications, every place. They’re pinging me, like, it’s, it’s a fire alarm, this starts to become a problem very quickly. And now I start to go, Okay, which one do I need to react to? Now I gotta go through and cancel out five different notifications. It’s feast or famine with this kind of thing. And this is where I think a lot of people really get frustrated with it, Android has tried to manage it a couple of different ways on their platform itself. Microsoft’s never really bothered to try and tackle it. It’s one of those challenges that I think makes automatic notifications are just, it almost becomes like spam after a while.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:13
Yeah, so notification fatigue is certainly an issue that comes into play when we get overload, overloaded, or over notified by things. And I think that’s something that we all have to be conscientious about. The good part is that many systems are getting smarter about presenting reminders where they need to be so for example, you know, it will, sometimes the setting will say something like, you know, notify, notify me only on this device when these two devices are paired. So at least in the Google space, we have device pairing, and so when devices are paired, then knows that it is together, and therefore will not do those things. So for example, I don’t have my watch, ever show me any audible or, or vibration reminder, if my phone is present, because I don’t need it to, if I am away from my my watch and in an untethered, then that’s the thing I have on me, it’s attached to me. So that is the thing that will then start to provide those reminders. So there are some ways in which we can kind of get around that. But I think the but arts point is very well taken in the sense that we have to be very mindful that we all of a sudden, don’t get everything beeping and buzzing and buzzing, you know, and vibrating around us, because that will ultimately create adaptation. And we will just basically start to tolerate the notifications and be less motivated to do what the notifications are telling us to do. I know that I provide myself with a quite a number of, of notifications throughout the day. And most of them go away over time, because of automaticity. Right, I they become just a part of my world that I no longer need the notification to know that it’s time for me to go do whatever I need to do. So remember that also that notifications can be helpful for basically helping you with a routine. Once the routine is in place, then that trigger is no longer necessary, because you know, the natural point in which you need to go do those things. So as much as you can get rid of the superfluous notifications, use notifications for the essential triggers, you need to be able to do those things you need to do. And then over time, build a lot of those things into routine. So the notifications or reminders that are left are the ones that are really going to be most effective for you, the ones that are going to tell you know, if you don’t do this, something bad is going to happen. And or if you if you do this, something really good is going to happen kind of a joy based perspective there. So making sure that whatever you’re doing, you’re you’re highly motivated to respond to that notification. And it’s not just for nothing. And if you’re not in a need to be in a highly responsive state, I suggest turning off your email notifications, just like that’s the first thing you should do is turn off those email notifications on your desktop and in your systems. Because the constant binging and dinging of email, I think creates a lot of that notification overload. And ultimately, it’s decision fatigue, right? Should I should I respond to this? Or should I not, and it just depletes your glucose levels. And ultimately, you start to have decision fatigue more and more often throughout the day. And that’s just not good for for you overall,

Art Gelwicks 39:23
I’ll admit a couple of things. I have no email notifications turned on on any of my devices. Not there’s no reason if it’s an email, there is no urgency attached to it. And that’s my rule, and I don’t send urgent emails. I don’t accept urgent emails, because it’s a frequent email, who knows when it’s going to get there. But the second thing that I’ve gotten into we were talking earlier about the applications and the tools to look at, this may be an excellent way for you to kind of filter out the solutions. The solutions that give you granular control over your notifications are ones to seriously consider ones that have this blanket, okay, I’m going to notify you when something happens in this app. That’s not helpful. But when you’re able to go in and say, in this instance, I get this notification in this instance, I get this notification. And I’ll use an example Google messages which I use on my phone for incoming text messages. I have the ability in there to change the notifications based on the conversation. So I have some standing group conversations that have one notification, I have family members who have a different tone, that’s tied to their notifications. Because when when my little pocket Mrs. Landingham, comes up and either waves at me, or knocks on the door or throw something at me, I need that contextual relevance around that trigger, not me going into dig into it every time that trigger actually provides me information. And I think we have the same thing. When we look at various other solutions. If it’s the same tone all the time, you get a ping that you’ve got a notification, well, if it’s Facebook, in your calendar that have that same trigger reaction, your brain doesn’t know what to do with it, it might be something important. So I’m gonna go look and what is it, it’s flotsam. I mean, it’s, it’s not worth looking at. So we have to be able to control that within the solutions that we pick out. Which means that we should pick out solutions that give us the option to control that. And if I was a developer, putting in notification systems, that would be a high priority piece, in my mind, to be able to say, okay, depending on what’s coming through, we need to have notifications go through different ways or give the user the option to define that.

Augusto Pinaud 41:42
Yeah, in the case of many notifications, that will be awesome. I agree. Like you, I don’t have any email notification on having that definition of what the serve I notification? And where are the six place on a checklist that the six kinds of notifications that I do on what are the criterias to get there, has really make a difference in the amount of notifications that I have. So by default notifications for me go off. And I just want to have it’s like, it’s like the ringtone on my phone, my phone, the default ringtone is no noise. Okay, it’s just certain people who have earned that right to make noise on my phone. And other than that, the default is no noise. Because if I am in a meeting, because if I am working, I don’t want that to distract me. Sorry, it’s you can go to voicemail. And I will get to that and get back to you pretty quick. But I don’t want you to be another notification or another distraction.

Francis Wade 42:50
So I mentioned before using calendar alarm on my phone, I use something called just forgot the name of it. It’s a calendar program on Firefox and Chrome. It’s better than Google Calendar. I can’t remember why. But I replaced Google Calendar notifications with that program. Because it gave me as I said, more fine control. Is this checker plus? checker plus? Yes. So I’m going to try I’m gonna try the the suggestion that you mean for the desktop. But again, you know, what I really wished for is one, one interface that would allow me to set my notifications across all devices, all OSS, all apps, if I could find one place to sort of craft, it will be a real, it’d be a real attention manager. For me, I think most people would benefit from having one place because you’re beyond the apps, the apps all come with their assumptions about what you really want and need. But it’s like a calf, a cacophony of as Art said, have different kinds of hodgepodge decisions that developers have made. What I want to come into my attention is something that I would like to manage through one, one app not not have to go through each one and then decide which one is doing what job at what time and where, and then have to decide between them. It’s just right now it’s a lot of work to craft. The attention grabbing notifications that the system that you need, personally, it’s too much work.

Art Gelwicks 44:29
It’s work, but it’s probably the most work well spent. If you translate that in English, that’s we don’t spend enough time tuning our systems. We’d spend a lot of time poking around and other tools looking for the one that will do it for us that we can flip a switch and everything’s all of a sudden taken care of and this was the reason why, you know, our voice assistants we said, oh, okay, it’ll take care of all No, everybody has different structures. And we have to spend our time refining these. And I’ll use a really bizarre analogy that people have listened to this before. No, I do a lot of woodworking. I’ve been actually learning and focusing on how to cut a piece of wood with a handsaw. Now you think this is probably the most basic thing on the planet. But refining that technique and tuning it to the point where I can actually cut a square piece has taken a huge amount of time. And that’s time well spent. Because I know everything I do after that, I can trust that that part of the process is going to work well. And this is where when we look at these notifications, we look at our calendars we look at our task list, this time has to be well spent to trust our systems, rather than just having this false confidence of it promising it’s going to work well.

Augusto Pinaud 45:55
And I love that point that you just bring, how much time? Do we spend really learning the systems and really learning how to get the tools, you know, it doesn’t matter which tools you pick, okay, and but the time, every hour that you spend really looking how Google calendar works, and how the notification works and the different kinds of notifications that you can get work. It’s really an hour that you’re investing into much more productivity in the future. And we tend to look at that as not as productive time as Oh, I don’t have time for that. No, no, no, no, it’s exactly the opposite. You cannot afford not to learn to use your tools really, really well, if you really care about being productive. And what I found many times is people don’t invest that time into learning those tools to see people doesn’t matter, their Windows machines, their iPads, their full mobile phones, and they know how to use two or three functions, but they have never spend the time trying to learn how to use the functions of the tools that you use every day. You know, when I tell people, yes, you can open notes on an iPhone, okay, unclick. And instead of trying to type hit the microphone button on the keyboard and dictate using Siri or you can install other keyboards like Google Voice and then use Google Voice for that process. Okay, most people look at me like, No, you can’t, yes, you can. Okay, and they don’t use their mobile phone as a capture tool. Because the the numbers maybe or their typing may not be something that they can do fast enough. But they could do the dictating perfectly fine. So why they don’t do that, because they have never spent the time to research and to try to find those and to really make the tool but the people I have teach to use that. Now their capture has changed from day to night. And now they capture consistently. And now they know what to process. Even if the dictation is not always 100%, perfect. Hey, it’s 90%, you will get the idea. And it’s much better than trying to say, Oh, gee, I will write that down. When I get to my office.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:35
I’ll say that for me, as we close out the conversation that I really recommend to everyone that they look at all of the applications they have running on their either desktop, application desktop systems, or their mobile systems and identify the notifications that they’re providing. Many times, they are providing you with all kinds of notifications, because applications have the intention of getting you to use them. So they want to push notifications to you on a regular basis to tell you to come and use their app and to become involved and they want to push sales pitches. And they want to be able to push other notifications to have you engage with them. The goal for you is to have as few notifications as possible, and have those notifications effectively trigger you to do the things you need to do. And so if you have any of this over notification problem, then that’s the first step. And then go to the tools that you really do need to be reminding you about the things you need to get done or the places you need to be and look at how your notification system works. I know that at least on on Android and iOS, you have very granular notification controls. So you know not just the ability to control where they display, whether that be in the drop down menu, drop down bar, the notification bar, or prompting you we now have chat bubbles on iOS and Android so they can have these little chat bubbles that show up in show little notification icons. So you can have as discreet, or as overt application reminders and notifications present to you throughout your entire ecosystem. And so a little bit to what both art and producer were saying, you know, you really need to know your systems, you need to really get in there and dig in and see what they’re capable of. And then taking just a little bit of time, it doesn’t take a lot of time, you can do this actually, per application, whenever it next reminds, you just take that two or three minutes and say, Okay, how does this remind me? And is this reminding me the way I needed to, and if it’s not, let’s change it to the way in which it can remind me better and more effectively. And over time, you’re gonna get better and more reminders that really help you be more productive. And so with that, I just want to thank you, gentlemen, for the conversation. This has been a lot of fun. And the conversation of course, for us in the recording is over, we’re coming to the end of our conversation, but we don’t have to end the discussion necessarily with you all. So if you have a question or a comment, feel free to head over to productivitycast.net. If you go there to the episode page, you will find a comment or comment field where you can go ahead and leave your thoughts and questions. And we are happy to answer those and engage with you. If you are also on that episode page, you will also find links to anything we discussed. If we missed something, let me know. But anything we’ve discussed should be linked there. So you can easily jump to it. There is also text transcript. So there’s a text transcript that’s both embedded in the page. If you click the Read More link, it’ll expand and you can read along and listen, it’s machine generated, but it should be good enough for you to be able to read along and understand what we’re saying. And then we also have a download link below that. So you can click on it and it will download a PDF document so that you can take it offline and read that side by side. So you can do all those things if you need to subscribe if this is your first time you want to subscribe or follow the podcast feel free to follow the instructions by clicking on the follow or subscribe link there on ProductivityCast dotnet. You’ll find instructions there for that. And thank you all for listening. If you have a topic you’d like to suggest to us feel free to head over to productivitycast.net forward slash contact, you can leave us a voice recorded message. But otherwise, I want to express my thanks to acoustic pinout Francis Wade and art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast Each week, you can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net and clicking on the about page. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 52:29
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

In this week’s cast, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art discuss why task lists fail in your personal productivity systems? And, we offer some tips for making task lists that are resilient to our workaday worlds.

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In this Cast | Why Task Lists Fail?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Why Task Lists Fail?

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

How to Master the Art of To-Do Lists by Understanding Why They Fail : iDoneThis blog

Todoist

Remember the Milk

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about Action Lists, actually, we’re gonna be talking about task lists, and really what they’re all about, why do we have them? Why do we use them, and some of the common pitfalls that people experience while they are trying to manifest and utilize their task lists. And this is a perennial topic, but I think it was triggered by an article that we picked up from the I done this.com site. And we thought we would have a discussion around some of the things that people really do get hung up on when it comes to task lists. So let’s start the conversation off around the idea of why do we have a task list? What is the purpose of a task list, and let’s go from there.

Art Gelwicks 1:10
we start off with the common knowledge of everybody visualizes a task list. And it’s a list of items with checkboxes next to it. And that’s usually, unfortunately, as far as people will think. But a task list is so much more than that. And it’s not just things to do, I think one of the biggest problems we get into and we saw this in the article, we’ve seen this, in numerous conversations about this topic, is understanding the scope of what a task list can do for us, rather than what we can do for it saying apologies to JFK. So when we think about a task list, we’re initially trying to capture all those little things that we have to do on a given day, given week, given month, whatever. And we’re trying to get those off of that list. Well, that becomes an action in and of itself, trying to clear that listing. I, I suppose that a task list is probably one of the best tracking and planning tools we have available to us. We use all different kinds of tools. But if you if you take a task list and you soup it up, you start to get into a project management tool. So wait, if it has that level of capability with just some extra features. What can a regular task list do to us do for us? Well, I think that’s where we have to go back to our definition, what is a task list. And a task list in my definition, is a tracking and planning tool.

Francis Wade 2:41
For me, it’s an external representation of a bunch of psychological commitments. So we make promises to ourselves to do stuff in the future. And we make lots of promises, and some subset of all those promises, it can be captured externally. So that we are able to have some peace of mind because they are not swimming around in our heads. We use it it helps the chances that we’ll actually get the task done. And so there’s people task lists, there are calendars of different kinds, there are digital task lists, there are Excel spreadsheets. And then there’s also having an administrative assistant, having an individual who manages, basically manages all your tasks for you. So that’s giving someone the job of you know, once you have a task, you just tell the person and then you stop trying to remember it, and the person is trusted, they can be just as effective or more effective than a list or a piece of paper or a digital tool or anything like that. But the objective is the same psychologically, it’s either in your mind swimming around causing trouble waking you up in the middle of the night, and likely to be forgotten, or it’s in some trusted external mechanism that allows you have some peace of mind.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:09
I would very much agree with Francis in in that definition, I think that I think of a task list as an externalized list of your work. It’s just externalizing work. And when we take the work off of our own shoulders, the stress of having to remember it plus the really inefficiency of our mind to remember all the tasks that would could or should be done at any given time. We just aren’t very good at being able to do that algorithm in very complex long term work. And so being able to do that in an external inside of a tool, paper and pen, digital or otherwise, gives us a longer term planning and a lot more complex planning capability than we would otherwise. And I think that’s really useful for most of us. You know, I’m not really going to think about what I’m going to Do a year two years from now. But the reality is, is that I have a thought about something that’s going to be done at that time, in that timeframe. Or on that timeline, I can go ahead and plant that in my digital system. And it’ll show up in one or two years timeframe. And then I can deal with it. And that didn’t, that stress didn’t have to sit on my shoulders for any of that length of time, until I until I prompted it to give me that stress. And so it becomes a positive stressor, something that I am capable of tackling at that time, versus me every day for the next, you know, 700 odd days, thinking about that thing every day so that I don’t forget it in in one or two years time. It’s just kind of not necessary. So I think of task lists as being that one external piece. The other part is, for me the prioritization capabilities of a task list. Coming from kind of the GTD perspective, thinking of next actions, as being those physical things that will prompt me to move a project forward or move, move some kind of work forward, I’m thinking about it from the perspective that I’m looking at my action list and identifying what can be done right now have all of the possible opportunities of things that I can do during discretionary time. So there is there is that function, but it also is a prompting function for the things that must be done. Or there are two different pieces there, right, there’s the stuff that I need to do, and want to do in my discretionary time. But there’s also the things that must be done. And it is not withstanding my discretionary time, it needs to be done today. And I need to be able to do that. And so it to some extent, there is a date time and location function there to a task list that some people actually externalize to a calendar type interface, right. Some people put that into a scheduling system. We’ll talk about that in a bit. So we have these two pieces that are that I think are are very similar, but not the same. But things that I can do on a longer horizons, I have a project and there’s work that needs to be done. It doesn’t have to be done today. But if I have to go get my driver’s license renewed and my driver’s license is expiring today, then I must do that today, that becomes a must. And it also becomes date, time and location fixed. And I think more of the context that kind of connect there, the more it becomes something that that we have to manage differently in our task lists than otherwise. And so maybe it even becomes a different task list for some people or a calendar or something like that. So I

Augusto Pinaud 7:26
think I agree with that definition that you have, for me, they have three types, the ones that need to happen today. Now, regardless of the ones that should happen soon, because they The thing is getting louder and louder moderator and the things that I want to wish now that that wish list here, I want to read these articles, but but they are there, they’re on my task list. But they don’t. It’s really more if I can get rid of that critical step, that I will be able to go to that to those nice to have. And I think that’s where it makes a difference for me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:02
From that point, we can then start to think about what are some of the common pitfalls that folks experience in creating task lists. So I see folks using, you know, task lists for all kinds of things. And sometimes they’re doing them effectively. Most times, they are not, and and so then they come into contact with me because they’re trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their business or with their world or whatever. And, you know, it’s just one of those things where you you come into contact with a lot of people, especially in my personal life, where they are having these kinds of struggles. And so what are some of those common pitfalls that you see folks experiencing? And why do you think those things occur? What do you think is the genesis for some of these pitfalls?

Augusto Pinaud 8:50
The big pitfall that I found is that people don’t get as clear steps. So we get into get driver license, well, yeah, good driver license is great after you have the requirements down in a folder and you’re ready to drive to the driver license. But there is a lot of things, especially in that example that you need to do before we’ll do you know, the requirements, you know, now, you need to have the whatever Five points 10 points, well, did you have those proceeds those who stopped to make those points? Did you even understand those points? So when would you put on your task list is get driver license? What happened is you don’t really you may not have all the information you have to actually drive to the DMV. So you are trying to do a project, not a task to get to a project and that is something that I see often on and on and on, where people don’t stop and think why this task has and move forward. What is what I need to do or what I’m missing in order to get foreword. And part of the reason of that is the week for review. You know, when I see things on my list that haven’t moved, okay, I’ve seen that same task for a couple of weeks now and have moved that the moment I’m I marked them and okay, let me as I go into the review, let me pay attention to this, what it is. And sometimes there is nothing, sometimes it’s just, hey, I’m waiting for sometimes it’s, the timing hasn’t been right. But other times is that I’m missing information. And you are simply not aware of what is the information you are missing, so you can continue moving forward that task.

Francis Wade 10:36
The big pitfall is that people don’t see the management of their tasks as an evolving target, that they, there’s a, you know, we productivity types are guilty of sort of promoting one size fits all solutions, regardless of task volume. But someone who starts off as a teenager writing stuff on post it notes, probably shouldn’t be using writing stuff and post it notes as their go to technique when their CEO, they’re no 55, they have three kids, two grandkids, they have financial investments, or where they have a very, very full life. And writing stuff or post it notes is probably okay for a 13 year old. And it probably is not appropriate for someone at that level. But that concept that that this is an evolution, and you’re looking to gain more capacity as you go along. Just because if you’re someone who is really ambitious, the chances are you’re going to use up whatever new capacity you get all the way from post it notes, to whatever fancy task management system you use, you’re always going to be looking to add more tasks, more tasks, more tasks, it’s kind of a, for me, it’s kind of a psychological push to use up whatever, whatever capacity you have an add more. So if that idea were taught to a 13 year old, it would be like Okay, at this level, you can second like writing, when you’re writing as a 13 year old, you’re able to write at a particular level. When you get to way beyond that level, you need to be writing and using tools and assistance that you didn’t need when you were 13. And that’s it’s very similar. So if that picture were taught, then I think it would solve a lot of problems for people who gets get stuck or don’t understand why the system they have isn’t working. They don’t look for something new, they don’t look for new capacity. But this is a an in and out kind of thing. It’s like a factory, you gotta have an engine that can handle the number of tasks that you have in mind, or you’re going to be pushed back to what we talked about before, which is managing more than in your head, which is just the back to back to having the original problem just at a different level. I agree

Art Gelwicks 12:59
with Gousto significantly on the the idea of people not having their tasks broken down well enough. So often that you’ll get what I call fat tasks in your listing, where you’re not really sure where to start, you don’t necessarily have all the pieces in place to be able to make progress with it. So when you start it all of a sudden, you can’t finish that task. I’m a fan of having very granular tasks, I like to be able to knock things out. And if it’s something extremely detailed, fine. But it’s just another step along the process. And I think that’s where it goes back to this fear that is ingrained in people. And it has been reinforced into people that, oh, you can’t have all these tasks sitting on your task list. You can’t have all the you can’t have 87 tasks to accomplish one thing. Sure you can. There’s nobody who says you can’t, if they tell you that they’re selling you something, you have the ability to define whatever your system is, that is going to be most useful for you. I would not recommend anybody set up their task list the way I set up mine. However, everybody can benefit from basic structures within their system. And what I think is most interesting is task lists can be the best educational tool about how you work as compared to anything else. Because it forces you to think about how are you going to successfully get through something like this, it gives you a historical record to be able to go back and say how did I do this before? And did it work and be able to carry that forward and apply it so if people have one thing to take away from how to be more effective with their task lists, it’s stop listening to what other people say as to how they should use their task lists, and start using them just from the get go. Put stuff on it, take stuff off, work with it, play with it, try it out. This is one of the I could task lists and Note taking in the same class of just the amount of unique definition an individual can have as to how this should work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:09
Yeah, I think I agree in large part to what you’re saying there, I think that one of the things people should do is to look at all of the various ways in which people are using task lists as a as a creative idea generating mechanism, because by looking at the way in which say, art manages, and does his tasks, very granularly, that may not work for some other people, some people might want to have a task list that is much more high level. And that is more motivating to them in that in that sense. And that kind of takes me to my point here, which is that so many people try to do emotional management in their task list. And that is a very common pitfall tasks 10 can be emotionally charged. And what we need to do is to be able to separate our objectivity about the the items, the time demands, as Francis would call them, as being just that they are, they are commitments of us to do something with our time, and with our energy and otherwise. And so we need to manage those in a consistent, clear way. And that’s why I’m a GTD, right? I think of this as a consistent, cohesive system, in which I am managing all of the various actions that I need to take to move projects forward. I am not trying to manage my emotions within that system as well. That’s what journaling is for. That’s what seeking out a mental health professional, and talking to, you know, a therapist or a psychologist are about and those kinds of things. There are ways in which you can use a support network. But so many times I see people trying to not just motivate themselves on their task list, but actually manage and deal with this is actually one of my fundamental issues with the bullet journal is because the bullet journal actually uses journaling within inline within the system itself. So your tasks are actually bled together into your calendar and into your emotional management, which is what’s going on internally in my internal world right now, I don’t see a task list as being that thing. Your task list is a list of things that you can be doing at any given moment. And then you can decide on one list or many lists, for example, I’ve chosen to have one master task list. And then I use smart lists, which are saved searches, to pare them down to the exact things that I can do right now, or that I want to do right now. This is very different than me saying, oh, gosh, you know what, I’m really anxious right now. And I want to be able to manage my anxiety. So let me look at my task list and put some things in there that are going to manage my anxiety. That is not, that’s not what the task was there for, necessarily, right. Now you can place actions in there, like self care actions, you can do all kinds of things that do belong on the task list. But to be able to use it for that purpose tends to be a kind of misguided in that sense, because then what you get is more emotional landmines in your system than otherwise. And I feel like those two bleed together way too often. So just a common pitfall. And I think just a recognition that that happens. And it’s not like you’re wrong or bad, or anything else like that. But it is an opportunity here, I really call you to the idea of finding a tool like a journaling application. We’ve talked about journaling apps before, or even just using your voice recorder and talking into it, that will really help you understand that some of that prognostication that comes out of you that verbal, emotional stuff that’s happening. That’s not necessarily actionable. It’s just you trying to verbalize what’s going on in your head. And then once you’re done, you know, voice memo in your thoughts, then you can say, Okay, well, based on what I’ve just felt, what is the thing that needs to actually be done. That’s the thing that goes on your task list, not the 15 paragraphs of stuff before it. Which I know because I’ve written those 15 paragraphs of stuff, and recognize that through that processing, you know, through that, that that those machinations of thought, and emotion comes the actual actions that will actually be useful to you.

Francis Wade 19:13
I was just Googling the the number of tasks it takes to make a Polaris nuclear submarine. And what you’re seeing sort of reminds me on that because there are X number of tasks in the project to create a nuclear submarine. And how you feel about them is maybe interesting. However, it requires every single person who needs to finish their tasks to finish the task, regardless of how they feel. And I think the task what you’re seeing is that the task list is that connection between thought and action. It’s not really intended to be the connection between thought and emotion. That that’s a different kind of tool. It’s its success is not measured by hope. How happy you are at the end of it, Percy. It’s whether or not you frickin tighten the bolt on, some sort of thing doesn’t blow up, but it gets to the bottom of the ocean. So there’s something plain and ordinary, that I think you’re, you’re emphasizing about using the task list and making sure that the action results from it. And, you know, we, you’re arguing for focusing on that solid connection, and not allowing anything to interfere with that connection. Because that the purpose is action, the purpose is to get so to work, not have a good night’s sleep, per se. I think that those that is one of the pitfalls,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:41
right, and I mean, more to that point, which is the fact that I don’t believe that task lists can solve that problem for you, right, if you have, if you’re going to have a bad night’s sleep, the task list by virtue of having the action embedded on it right, tomorrow, I need to tighten that bolt. So the submarine works properly, is very different than, you know, whatever else you might be going on in your head emotionally about anything else. That is the solution to you having a good night’s sleep. But it’s not the it’s not the emotional management component of all of this. And I just see, so often, people bleeding those two pieces together,

Art Gelwicks 21:18
I think you bring up a really good point with that, because that’s one of the areas that I’ve always struggled with. And it’s actually been a very recent real revelation for me, I’ve often thought about my task list as the place to capture all the things so that they’re not rattling around in my head. And that’s always been the biggest priority, oh, I got to put it down there, I got to put it down there, I realized that the more important thing for me is not so much to get it out of my head. It’s to know what the starting place is and what the next step is, when I finished that one, that it’s an old project management thing I want to use, like Microsoft projects, or a PERT chart mentioning the Polaris example. I wouldn’t use that before. But a task list works the same way structurally as long as you set it up. But I realized recently, that’s way more important to me. And it makes much more of an impact. Even though I’ve been doing this for so long. I’m like, oh, yeah, I’ll just capture it all, and then it’s there. And then I can work on the stuff. No, it’s that sequencing. It’s the the ability to deal with that wiring thing in my brain that says, Okay, you’re done. Now, what’s next? I don’t know if this other people run into this, I’ve been digging, you know, trying to do as much research as possible with this. But this seems to be a common thing. It’s this spiderweb effect, you finish one step, and all of a sudden, you have this realm of different opportunities and possibilities. And in many cases, your brain goes, whoa, I don’t want to do any of those, I’m gonna go do this one. Even though you know that the next one is over on the left hand side, your brain goes running to the right. Well, this is the way you can provide at least a little bit of structure, those guide rails to be able to say, okay, you know, what, this is the next thing to do, go ahead, just follow these steps in advance. But to your point, Ray, this is the emotional reaction, the emotional support mechanism that this type of a tool can be, is you realize that it can almost be your advocate, you are pre advocating for yourself. These situations, like, you know, what this is going to happen, your brain is going to go run in that rabbit hole, how do you help it back out? And, uh, Gousto, I think you were absolutely on target with this with with your comments earlier, this is the type of thing that I cannot recommend enough to people to try. Unfortunately, I would say, you know, common knowledge is oh, you know, put all the stuff in, create your structure, and then it will work doesn’t mean that’s going to work for everybody. Everybody has to tune it. But like I said, for me, this is making all kinds of crazy difference. I’ve been finding a big shift in how I feel about my task list, not necessarily that my productivity has jumped through the roof. That would be fictional, at best. But what I have found is I am much more comfortable with the level of productivity I’m executing. And I’m okay with, I don’t feel the stress of oh, what’s next?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:15
Another pitfall that I wanted to talk about was the idea of putting all of your tasks mixed in with those things that are not things that you’re actually going to accomplish. So call them wishlist items, call them goals, call them projects on in the in the GTD perspective, but tasks for me are things that are concrete action steps. And a lot of people put things that are not tasks on their task lists. So they will put things like broccoli and and that’s just like, it’ll just sit on the task list. And you know, that belongs on a grocery list in my perspective, right? You would do that context based. Put broccoli Put zucchini, what are some other greens, cucumber, whatever, put some leafy greens and some other green vegetables all together, put them on a grocery list, that’s where you, that’s where you going to get them at the grocery store that doesn’t belong on your task list. And so what belongs in your task list is scheduled time to go to the grocery store, or go directly to your calendar and put a time where you are actually going to go to the grocery store, and buffer for travel time. And, and so, from my perspective, that pitfall is that people think that your task list is supposed to consume all of these things that you would could and should do, when in reality, those are all not reality. And what we need to do is to identify on the task list that which is reality, not not only the things that you you can be doing, but the things that you will be doing. And I think this really hurts a lot of people’s self efficacy, because they put things on their task list, and they wish that they can be done. And so I call those wish lists, not task lists. And so what I want people to do is to put fewer things on the task list, because those things will get done, absolutely, positively will get done. And that reestablishes self efficacy for people, as opposed to putting a whole bunch of things that they again, want to do, could do should do, maybe we’ll get to, and then they accomplish maybe five of those things on the list. And then they ultimately feel bad about themselves, because they didn’t complete everything on the list. And we could talk about you know, whether a task list should be all encompassing. For example, I said before, I have a task list that basically is ad infinitum. I mean, there are things on there that stretch many, many years out into the future. But because of my search listing, my my saved searching capabilities of my tool, I’m capable of shrinking my listing completing that list on any given timeframe, because I know how to manage my list. And I know I will accomplish those items, I have that level of self efficacy that’s different than others because of my practice. So don’t misunderstand the idea that you can’t have a list that has many things on it. But you have to understand that if you are are struggling with productivity, if you’re struggling with actually getting things done than you are, then you are creating lists most likely. I mean, one of the number one things I look at when I when I see people systems is okay, how many items are on your list and how many are accomplishing every day and week? And that one good way to do it is actually make a weekly checklist as opposed to a daily checklist. We’ll get to that in a bit. But what do you what do you guys think about the notion of managing tasks on a singular list? Or and or multiple lists? How do you think about those in terms of that?

Art Gelwicks 27:43
It’s tough because the idea of singular versus multiple lists, I think, causes confusion when you’re using an application, because most applications have the ability to support multiple lists with inside them, but they’re not really multiple lists, it’s all still within the same app, you’re just giving it a different header and then subsections around it. So to me, it’s it’s almost a misnomer. Do you want to have one master list of all the different things you you have going on? Or do you want to have separate projects and things like that? Well, you kind of have to have the second one, you have to have some sort of categorization, because you literally just can’t dump it all together, because there’s no organization to it. So it’d be like taking all your notes and all your notebooks and having no sections, no labels, nothing like that. Just throwing it writing it all down in one spot, it would be like using a regular journal to manage your life, it would be nuts. So being able to have quote, smaller lists, I think is a good way to think about it. I think one of the best ways and we see this in so many of the tools is the ability to use labels in conjunction with lists, to be able to subdivide and divide things around the ways you’re going to address them. I’ll give a perfect example of this. I was just working with it this morning, I have a list of all my shopping that I need to go out and do I have to go run some errands. So I have a shopping list of things to get that all comes from one spot. But every one of the items in it gets labeled with the store that I’m most likely to get it from. That way when I go to the store, I can pull open the app, I can tap the label for that store. And then I have those items. Well, if I have items that are in multiple projects, you know, if it’s a big multipurpose store, let’s say like a home center, well, I may have stuff that’s plumbing, some hardware, some whatever, I could get those other places, but the labels give me that flexibility of context. So I agree with you, right, this is kind of kind of like a sub list. Kind of like a smaller list. I like multiple lists. But it’s confusing, because when people look at that they go, but it’s all in one big list. Well, kinda sorta not. It’s hard to describe

Francis Wade 29:57
the idea of lists at all. is really rooted in the paper world. And in the world that I was describing, which is a task management app world. In a database, it’s it’s a matter of, as he said, Actually labeling the tasks and getting the right views. And in that context, you can throw anything in there that is of future nature that you need to complete at any any scale. The problematic you’re pointing out is when you access a particular view of your tasks, you need to know which one you’re accessing, make sure that you’re effectively looking at the ones that if you want to look at what you can do, then focus on those and don’t get polluted with other things from your wish list, for example. So some software, most modern pest management software allows for continued Franssen most modern tasks, most modern task management software allows for that. And again, it’s a matter of capacity, because this is very hard to do, if not impossible to do with post it notes on the one extreme, but with modern software, it’s it’s essential.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:13
Yeah, I think I think it makes a lot of sense for folks to think about their task lists from a number of different perspectives. And one is, of course, as we were discussing multiple lists. The other thing that I tend to think about in terms of pitfalls is that when people are writing out their actions, they tend to not think about, they tend not to think through what is going to actually propel work forward. And so they they don’t think through they don’t envision the successful outcome of that thing that’s going to be accomplished. And so what ends up happening as especially when when maybe the outcome is opaque, or you want something to happen, but you don’t quite know how you’re going to get there. That can be sometimes difficult. But you should at least try to envision yourself doing the things that are going to help you get to that point. And your mind’s eye will then play out what will be the logical next step. And I’ve differentiated those logical next steps into two different buckets. So I actually have two different types of actions that fit onto my list. One action is the very next step that I’m going to take it’s concrete. And it is complete, in the sense of or discrete in that sense, I will do it and then I will be done with that step. And then I will anchor the next step. The other kind of action, or let’s call those next actions in the GTD lingo. In the other type, I call these inciting actions, inciting actions are for the type of work in which I’m going to do a series of next actions together, I typically know all of the actions that are going to be done, although there’s some times when I don’t know what they’re going to be, but I’m going to do them all. And I’m going to come to some next series of completion steps, next actions together, compiled, I call those inciting actions. So an inciting action is where I’m going to do x, then y, then Zed, then A, then B, then C. And then I’m going to get to a point. And I’m going to then be able to note a series of progress. And then maybe there’s a next action beyond that, or maybe there’s another inciting action beyond that. And this comes to checklists. And the idea that there are sometimes places where I have 45, things that I need to do in order to complete this particular project, for example, publishing ProductivityCast. Each week, requires a very extensive checklist, and involves me collaborating, and so on, so forth. So that checklist is produced, I only need the inciting action on my task list, because the checklist is independent and lives elsewhere. So my inciting action is published ProductivityCast, episode xx, I’m not going to write out all 45 items in my task list, because that’s going to overwhelm my system, I don’t need to see all those things in there. That’s a typical example. But there are other items where I just know what I’m going to do in the in the process of getting things done. But what I end up doing is representing in the inciting action all of the time, because I do like to time estimate, estimate, right? So I like to put in that time budget of how much time something’s going to take. And if I put in a next action of go get the folder, but really, once I get the folder, I’m going to do 15 or 45 other tasks related to that thing, I really should in the inciting action identify that I’m going to take an hour and 15 minutes, even though the action is the inciting action to go get the folder to publish ProductivityCast Right, I’m going to get all the files together and put them in and consult consolidate them to the folder. Sure that’s going to be my next step right getting all the source files. But really, I’m going to I’m going to take an hour and a half now of time, and I need to make that represented in my tasks. Just so that when I look at my task list, it calculates how much time I’m going to be spending for that particular timeframe. I can’t look at it and say, Oh, that only says 15 minutes great, because what it really represents is an hour and a half of work. And so inciting actions can be one way that people really get over this hump, the written action needs to represent all of the work, not just what you wrote on the page, in front of you,

Augusto Pinaud 35:23
I think is, you know, it’s all that we have said, it’s important to, to remember that what may work to you know, as, as is true, that task is not meant to keep your emotional data, it’s also true that your emotional states will play a game. So you need to understand these to understand when did you need a lot more directions than other times, there are moments that I can look at the list in and see the 300 task and pick the most important, no issues. There are other moments that I need to use those sub tasks list or so search filters or tags, or categories or context. So I can really help me focus because they do have 100 a task will, I may not be on the best minds style may be tired. So I can, it’s harder for me to make a decision. So you need to be able to plan for those ahead of time, you need to be able to plan for those. When you are in the good state of mind you. I always say to people, you should have what I call a Plan B list. One, how many meetings do I have today? Okay, I have five minutes, great, then what is what I’m going to do if those meetings start late, okay, because if I can take with me three to five tasks that are short and easy, and I can do from anywhere, and those meetings start late, I can get those three to five things happen. But if I wait until I get to that meeting, they will never happen. Unlike that happen. What are what is the how should I act when I am mentally done? What are the things that I should look at? What are the contexts that I should look at? What are those lists created for you, so you can get them done? And I think that really helped moving things forward.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:12
So with that, what’s one thing folks can do? Just very quickly, let’s go round robin, what’s one thing people can do to level up their task list before we close out?

Art Gelwicks 37:23
If you’re using a tool that has the ability to create templates, do it, learn how to use them? Dig into that? If you’re not using a tool that has templates, change your tool? Actually, no, I won’t go that far. But templates, as Ray was mentioning earlier, templates can be incredibly invaluable when it comes to one repeating things effectively, but to making sure you don’t miss things, especially in things that you have to do frequently. So I highly recommend that, again, to do us, which is the tool I use, has a great templating capability. I suggest you look into it. There are other ones I know remember, the milk has a great temper templating capability. Dig into it, it will save you tons of time and stress.

Francis Wade 38:10
My advice, pay attention to your next upgrade. So what’s what’s the next? What’s the next piece of habit or piece of habit? What’s the next piece of technology, or the next habit? Or the next tool or app? Or what’s the next thing for you, that’s going to take your capacity to the next level if you’re someone who is who find just, you know, your propensity is to add more tasks, take on bigger commitments, or even define more level of detail. So post it notes won’t work, then define the next level before you actually need it. So that you don’t have to run into the big problems before actually thinking through what you’re going to implement and how

Augusto Pinaud 38:57
understand it’s going to change. And you need to be able to adapt for those changes.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:03
I will say this that one of the things about working with say, a productivity coach, or working with other folks when you are in that space of feeling like your tasks are not working for you is that coaches are outside of your world. So they’re looking at your items with fresh eyes. And so as best as you can, I was thinking about the idea that a therapist once told me talk to yourself, like a friend would talk to you would they would they think this was reasonable the way in which you were talking to yourself. And I find that same practice to be very useful that if I go to my task list, if you go to your task list and look at it with a fresh set of eyes, that is if you knew nothing about this individual’s interior life, and you looked at that task list, would you know what to do? Would you really understand what it was that needed to be done on that day? First, and if you didn’t, then what would be needed to make it more actionable to make it make sense to you, that sense of dissociating yourself just ever so slightly, so that you can step outside of yourself and look at it from with fresh eyes can be really, really useful for being able to understand that if someone doesn’t know anything about you, and they can still do the things on your list, at least understanding what should be done, then when you look at your list in the heat of your day, right, everything’s going on, you’ve got lots of distractions going on, potentially, the world is in its in its movement, you can look at your list and immediately know, that’s the thing that needs to get done. And this is how I’m going to get it done. And that’s really going to help your future self. So really take that time to make your tasks actionable in that sense, so that you are able to be more productive in the in the throes of any given circumstance. And that’s a complete issue. It’s not just in the list you make today. But in the lists that you make all the time, if you can do that level of consistent control of the actions, then you’re really able to be more productive on an ongoing basis. And that’s what really helps you to compound your productivity over time you get more productive, the more you are capable of understanding all of the various pieces that go into an effective task list. So I hope this was helpful to you all. And we have reached the end of our time today. But of course, the conversation doesn’t have to stop here, you can go ahead over to our episode page. And on each episode page, at the bottom, there is a commenting section, you can leave questions or comments there on the podcast website. So feel free to do so. And of course, you can get to the episode page by just putting in the episode number. So if you go to productivitycast.net, forward slash 001, that’ll be episode 1002 is episode two, and so on and so forth. So go ahead and hop on over to the episode page and feel free to leave a comment or question there. This is your first time with us. Feel free to follow the podcast. If you’re just found us some way us followers subscribe one of those terms in your podcast app. And you’d go ahead and get new episodes either notified or downloaded whenever we put out new episodes. And that really helps you to get access to us without having to worry about you know, finding the next episode when it does come out. So find your favorite podcast app. Also feel free to consider giving us a podcast rating. So if you go into Apple podcasts or Stitcher those are really the two primary that give a rating and review system in them. So feel free to leave us a rating and review. We really appreciate those that really does help us expand our listenership and expose us to more listeners. So thank you very much for doing that. For those of you who have if you have a topic about personal productivity you’d like us to discuss on a future cast, feel free to visit productivity cast dotnet forward slash contact there you can leave a voice recorded message or you can type a message into the contact form and send that along to us and maybe we’ll feature that in a future episode. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade, and art Gelwicks for joining me this every week on ProductivityCast. You can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net and clicking on the about page. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast Here’s your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 43:15
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.