Reply To Teflon
Teflon said:
Scott said:
I start focusing in on my inbox as my next action universe and I stop thinking about how important responding to email is versus the next actions on my projects. If you consider everything you have to do before deciding what you will do, you won't be as likely to fall into the trap of being too interruptible or being purely reactive.
Is it possible that this is where GTD contradicts itself. The system, through the weekly review, suggests that you need to have already thought so that in the “heat of battle”, your work day, you do not need to. Thus, we have NAs. However, I see a contradiction here. As you state, you are constantly having to stop, think, judge, select, and move on. This could be constant if you are always reassessing your entire work load each time you complete a NA. This is really what GTD calls for. With this constant re-thinking has GTD not contradicted itself?
I think that the apparent contradiction is based on two things. First, I think you may have an unrealistic idea of what "mind like water" means. Second, I seem to have given you an incorrect idea of what I am doing.
Having "mind like water" does not mean that you don't think. It means that you think effectively and efficiently so that you respond appropriately to what arises without overreacting or underreacting. (See GTD pp 10-11.) The term comes from Japanese martial arts and like other such terms presupposes that it is the end result of years of arduous training. The Marines have a saying: "The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle." In other words, if you want to stay alive on the battlefield, you need to do a lot of hard work and thinking
before you get there.
In GTD, the arduous training is in learning and mastering the system. People have to understand how to write well-formed next actions. They have to understand how to create and use a set of context dependent next action lists. They need to understand how to plan projects and do a thorough weekly review. In GTD as in battle, there is no substitute for knowledge and skill honed by training.
In GTD, the hard work and thinking is done during the weekly review. During that time you go over what outcomes you are committed to and what you are going to do to realize them. You also determine during that time what is important and what is not, what is urgent and what is not, what you intend to work on and what you don't.
As a result of having done this work, decisions about what next actions to do will be effective and easily arrived-at since they will be based on a clear understanding of all of your commitments. Another result of having done this front-end work is that as new problems and opportunities arise, you should be able to fit them into the overall scheme of things fairly easily. At no time should your work decision be the result of an arduous and time consuming process of searching through and reanalyzing your next action lists. If you are looking at your next action lists, it is mainly to remind yourself of the results of the thinking you have already done.
The question you are always posing to yourself is, “Is my time best spent on this NA or any one of the myriad of other NAs, tasks, past times, etc. open to me?”
That's right. However, if I have done my homework during the weekly review, the decision should be easily and quickly made. I would add that the less often you ask yourself that question, the more likely it is that what you will do next will
not be the best use of your time. The quotation from my previous post is an example of me not doing this, and being less effective because of it.
You are prioritizing, just on the fly.
I generally follow David's four-criteria model (See GTD pp 192-195.) I think it is a more flexible and intelligent process than simple task prioritizing.
It would seem to me that by calendaring items you are making more of a plan than the NAs allow for without giving up the flexibility. I can still do all the judging/reprioritizing I want but I have to do it less often. This is due to the fact that in my weekly review I laid out the plan, based on my projects list, for the upcoming week on the calendar and not purely in NAs.
This is where you and I really part company. I can't see why you would want to create plans that could conceivably be blown out of the water by 8:15 AM on Monday morning. All I can say is, for your sake, I hope you are doing them
in pencil.
With 60 minutes dedicated to Project X, I am not going to do any judging of what else I should be doing in that hour, barring an emergency. If I feel like going for 90 minutes then I will do some judging at the end of the originally calendared block of time. I am also not going to find that I advanced only a couple of projects in any given week because I was in the zone on them and neglected to snap out of it to check in on my other projects. The calendar can force you to put down the "fun" projects and think about the not so fun ones. Now, if I “burn out” before the 60 minutes is up then I hit my NAs list for a couple of quick hits.
Like you, once I have started on a next action, I don't re-evaluate how I am spending my time, either. I have already made the decision that what I have started on is the best use of my time, and that it will remain so for the amount of time I expect it will take to do it. Unlike you, however, if I am interrupted fifteen minutes into the task by something that takes two hours to deal with, I don't have a calendar to rework. I just deal with the interruption, and then go back to working on whatever would be the best use of my time, which at that point may or may not be the interrupted next action.
As far as your calendar "forcing" you to work on all your projects, fun or not, I don't believe that a calendar can force you to do anything. It can only remind you of what you have already decided to do. Looking at your project and next action lists would do the same thing, only you won't have to be reworking them every time you are interrupted.
