Fine-tuning GTD: Should we use 7-minute "micro-tasks" instead of "Actions" ?

[Ship69]

Hello

I thought this was interesting.
The "time management expert" Allyson Lewis of The7MinuteLife.com(*) builds everything around the 7 minute window.

So whereas David Allen likes us to break Projects down in to Actions that can be done in one sitting, Lewis says that the window of distraction is surprisingly short - just 7 minutes!

Here's what Lewis says:

1. We have a concentration span of between 2 and (max) 20minutes before we are susceptible to distraction. On average 7mins is a good target for any of use - even for anyone who is 'distractable' (ADD/ADHD etc).

2. Therefore in order to beat distraction, we should break all our projects tasks down into "Micro-Tasks" that can be done in 7 minutes.

3. It's good to use a timer (on smartphone or kitchen timer) to time those 7 minutes, to help get into the habit of not being distracted, not over-running and above all to build the habit all not failing(!).

4. Planning time
e.g. Each evening we should spend 7 minutes choosing "What is my goal for tomorrow" (no distractions - use timer!)

e.g. Each morning we should break that goal down into Micro-Tasks (c. 7minutes long each)

5. She recommends writing down 5 Micro-Tasks (each 7mins long) that you commit to as being your top priority for the day. Yes you hope to complete other stuff, but you absolutely commit to doing all of those 7 tasks - or at the very least spending a full 7 minutes attempting to complete them


I also quite like her idea of having a "Daily Progress Report" card that you fill in for each day. This not only contains psychological triggers for routine stuff (e.g. drinking 8 glasses of water, getting X hours of sleep, meals at correct/sensible times etc) and it also allows you to get immediate feedback and "reward yourself" with points. Paper is a good medium because unlike digital it can't readily be rubbed out so constitutes a form of pre-commitment.

Also using piece of paper for each day also allows you to get to the point where you have done enough for today i.e. "get to enough" and then relax. As over time it can be very psychologically damaging to lead our entire lives feeling we "don't have enought time".

Personally I know that I can SOMETIMES concentrate for 20 minutes maybe even a full hour, but by aiming too high I often fall off the track. No doubt we are all different, but I know that in hind sight using 25 minute "pomodoros" was quite hard for me and I lost too many battles with distraction and eventually abandoned it.

Any thoughts?

J


(*) Her site is The7MinuteLife.com - although the website was broken this morning!

 

[Oogiem]

First off I totally disagree that 20 minutes max is the time for concentrated focus on a given task. This is based on my own experience where I can sit down for what I think will only be an hour to work on something and when I finally surface to even look up I realize that 4 hours have gone by. I can sit down to "read 1 chapter" in a book and get so captivated that I finish the entire book in one sitting, often in 5 or 6 hours of straight reading. For me at least it is so easy to get so focused on something that I forget to do basic stuff like stand and stretch or even look up (if it's a computer task) or I can forget the time and miss appointments. I use drinking a lot of water to force me to break up my day by forcing me to go to the bathroom. Even work as it appears can take a lot longer. When we are lambing and I have to deal with a malpresentation I stick with it until the lamb(s) are out. It might be 2 minutes for a simple one like a leg back or it might be an hour or more if I have to untangle twins with heads and feet all coming at once and not all part of the same lamb. On very rare occasions it's been several hours to try to deal with a particularly bad situation and that was followed by about a hour of necropsy when I lost all the animals involved.

I also disagree that even in GTD an action must be completed in a single session. I often have actions that will take much more than a single session to complete. Some people will change that by saying the action really is "Work X minutes on task Y" but that has never worked for me. I do far better with actions like "Weave the knitting bag fabric" which might take me 80 or 100 sessions of an hour or so each.

I handle the done enough for today and personal or thought time by ensuring that my GTD system also contains things like hobby tasks, or fun stuff as well as routine maintenance work and the more traditional projects. That way I can easily choose an action that will relax or invigorate me as needed and still know I am making progress on all fronts.

I already do a review of what I need to do during the day so for me at least a 7 minute task each evening isn't necessary. I review all my lists and my calendar each morning. That's enough to give me a focus for the day and is similar to her 7 minute goal planning the night before. I have found that daily quickie review very helpful.

 

[Ship69]

A few points:

1. CONCENTRATION DURATIONS
> I can sit down for what I think will only be an hour to work on something
> and when I finally surface to even look up I realize that 4 hours have gone by
Doing something continuously for anything over an hour is (to my way of thinking) a catastrophe, because:
a) One's mind will be going slower and slower without realising it.
b) One probably should be doing other stuff in any case, after a while.

It is no coincidence that school lessons, university lectures, even psychotherapy counselling session tend to be less than 1 hour. 1.5 hours at the most.

2. DISTRACTIONS
The think about attending a lesson is that one is physically committed and there are fewer distractions.

Yes I am perfectly capable of focusing for up to 4 hours if the mood takes me, but the other problem is that I can't guarantee to do so. After a while, other task (often of lower mental resistance) will suddenly pop into my head often screaming with great importance and/or urgency.

So what is being proposed is that the best way to NOT get distracted is to break tasks down into mini-tasks that one can guarantee to complete (if physically possible) once started, without getting side-tracked.

I think it's good to do revisit your high level priorities after the working day has completed and again first thing in the morning partly because you are then giving the (extremely powerful) sub-conscious mind time to crunch overnight what is actually outstanding.

Oogiem, what about you? How and when do distractions happen?

 

[TesTeq]

Lewis says that the window of distraction is surprisingly short - just 7 minutes!

A great marketing idea. Based on dubious assumptions.
It must be very distracting to switch microtasks every 7 minutes. :-D

(*) Her site is The7MinuteLife.com - although the website was broken this morning!

Probably fixing the site required 8 minutes. :-D

 

[TesTeq]

Doing something continuously for anything over an hour is (to my way of thinking) a catastrophe, because:
a) One's mind will be going slower and slower without realising it.
b) One probably should be doing other stuff in any case, after a while.

So my book is based on CBD (Catastrophizing Book Done) methodology because I wrote it using the "one 4-hour uninterrupted block of work per day" schedule.

It is no coincidence that school lessons, university lectures, even psychotherapy counselling session tend to be less than 1 hour. 1.5 hours at the most.

School lessons, university lectures, and psychotherapy counselling sessions are hardly "flow environments".

Yes I am perfectly capable of focusing for up to 4 hours if the mood takes me, but the other problem is that I can't guarantee to do so. After a while, other task (often of lower mental resistance) will suddenly pop into my head often screaming with great importance and/or urgency.

All my previous remarks are based on my experiences so maybe slicing your day up will work for you.

 

[Ship69]

Interesting. All I can add is that I guess it slightly depends on:
A) how complex your productive work is and
B) how much creative/lateral/intuitive thinking is required
C) how many decisions are required

If complex, it may take a lot of time to load all the relevant information into your mind at once. If so long blocks of time may be required. Some computer programmers like to work right through the night for this sort of reason.

However if good judgement, and/or bucket loads of common sense and/or great creativity and/or lateral thinking and/or intuitive thinking is required then the quality of your thinking may suffer.

I remember watching a documentary in which Andrew Lloyd Webber sat down at the keyboard and composed a little melody for someone on demand whilst the cameras rolled. What struck me most strongly was that after just a few minutes and not much development on it, he stood up and said "Right that's enough work for today! I don't think we're going to get any further on this now..." What an easy life I thought! But maybe the level of creativity of a composer needs a fresh mind.

Decision fatigue is another problem the is very well documented by psychologists, that tends to affect us much more than we realise.

But yes, if what you are doing is a pretty linear process, in effect a bit like mentally "shovelling widgets from A to B", then an uninterrupted long blast may work well. This is probably particularly true if is a complex but linear process.

Personally I am perfectly capable of working for a large number of hours straight on a task. But looking back I normally find that the quality of that work lacks creativity and imagination and after a while, without me even noticing at the times, it will also start to lack pace. And worse it will then have draining my mental energy afterwards by more than is necessary.
So for best results I do the exact opposite and I more or less FORCE myself to take what I call "compulsory breaks" which I part of me is deeply resisting. For this reason I may even need to time them with a kitchen timer! And yes I drink lots of water party for that reason.

Can you say more about what constitutes a "flow environment" for you?

 

[Oogiem]

Oogiem, what about you? How and when do distractions happen?

People are distractions, noise in any form (music or anything) is a distraction, phone calls and text messages are a distraction.

I tend to turn off all that stuff when I really need to work on something that I know will take brain energy.

As to quality and creativity, in my own life if I get into the flow I am just as or even more creative as when I am distracted. Designing a pattern for weaving involves planning the warps, weft shots, tie ups, treadling and more to get what I want. That takes a lot of creative energy and is usually best done in one go because you have to juggle the yarn weights, twist, grist, composition, plies, expected finishing techniques, use for the final fabric and eventual garment construction needs as well as more esoteric things like body weight of person wearing the item, color theory and how colors blend when used in a woven item which is a lot different than color used in painting or scrapbook pages or drawing with pencils.

Similarly when doing programming work on LambTracker I have to spend a fair amount of time refreshing my memory of the code because I don't write code daily. I then go on to plan and code from there and again longer periods of intense work are necessary. There are usually 3-4 different ways to accomplish the same task and the creative part is seeing what will work fastest in operation, or be fastest to code (if I need the feature to do some specific flock task soon, as in within a few hours, which happens more than you might imagine) or what will set up hooks that I can hang desired features onto later. Coding is not linear though esp. in an object oriented platform it's very circular and state driven.

It all boils down to what works for you. I don't expect everyone to be able to concentrate on a single task to the exclusion of all else and still produce good work but I know that for me that is often the case. I also know that practice doing concentrated thinking improves ones ability to do it. If you always give in to the desire to switch tasks or contexts when things become difficult you never exercise the stick to it muscle of your thinking brain. I am reminded of several professional writers who stick to a strict schedule of x many hours of writing daily even if all they do is sit there staring into the screen or at the blank paper in the typewriter or the empty page in the notebook. Eventually the mind will figure it out and get to work on the real job.

 

[mcogilvie]

Hello

I thought this was interesting.
The "time management expert" Allyson Lewis of The7MinuteLife.com(*) builds everything around the 7 minute window.
...
Personally I know that I can SOMETIMES concentrate for 20 minutes maybe even a full hour, but by aiming too high I often fall off the track. No doubt we are all different, but I know that in hind sight using 25 minute "pomodoros" was quite hard for me and I lost too many battles with distraction and eventually abandoned it.

Any thoughts?

J


(*) Her site is The7MinuteLife.com - although the website was broken this morning!

I think these ideas are incorrect. Last week, I spent 2.5 hours each day working on a manuscript with two colleagues. Over Skype, with screen sharing. The work we were doing was highly technical, requiring very strong mathematical, verbal and organizational skills and great attention to detail. By Friday, we had a finished manuscript. Now it is true that the work the manuscript was based on had taken place over the course of a year. However, the final push to put together a coherent story and finish the manuscript was a lot of work, and not sustainable. The best I've ever done for sustained focused technical writing 5 days a week has averaged 1.5 hours over 3 to 4 months. This is not 8 hours a day, but it's not 7 minutes either. Of course, I'm not doing nothing for the rest of the day, just less demanding work. Oddly, I find that the emotional energy needed to start and to complete a task has very little relation to the time needed. Some of the most difficult things take very little time.

 

[TesTeq]

Can you say more about what constitutes a "flow environment" for you?

Flow environment = mental state when the world disappears and you're alone with your work.
My wife understands that I can be physically present but mentaly absent when I'm writing a book or fixing a chair. She begins to talk to me but she is not angry when I say: "I'm sorry, I was thinking about my work, now I'm switching my attention to you, could you please repeat from the beginning?"

 

[devon.marie]

[...] we should break all our projects tasks down into "Micro-Tasks" that can be done in 7 minutes. [...]

3. It's good to use a timer (on smartphone or kitchen timer) to time those 7 minutes, to help get into the habit of not being distracted, not over-running and above all to build the habit all not failing(!).

I also quite like her idea of having a "Daily Progress Report" card that you fill in for each day. This not only contains psychological triggers for routine stuff (e.g. drinking 8 glasses of water, getting X hours of sleep, meals at correct/sensible times etc) and it also allows you to get immediate feedback and "reward yourself" with points. Paper is a good medium because unlike digital it can't readily be rubbed out so constitutes a form of pre-commitment.

Also using piece of paper for each day also allows you to get to the point where you have done enough for today i.e. "get to enough" and then relax. As over time it can be very psychologically damaging to lead our entire lives feeling we "don't have enought time".

Well, I know this wouldn't work for me based on the single fact that for an 8 hour work day, I'd be interrupted 68 times by an alarm. That seems pretty nonsensical to me. It also seems like it's training us to be robots with zero attention span. Pretty soon we won't be able to do anything in life that must take longer than 7 minutes.

She's also way off the mark of other current research in productivity. It's generally agreed that ROUGHLY an hour, followed by ROUGHLY 15 minutes break is the best pattern, for the most people, to be productive. People are all different, though, and wildly so, so anything so specific as 7 exact minutes seems just like... hype for sales.

I am a huge fan of using paper for daily tracking, though. I track all of my tasks digitally (Trello being my tool of choice) but start every day with an entry in my bullet journal. Deadlines and calendar events go in my entry first, and then I add any other tasks I'd like to get to today if it looks like there will be time. Don't get to them? No worries - they're still tracked in Trello and I can add them another day. But I still have one sheet of paper guiding my day, and these add up to years of work logs I reference all the time. So, I agree that paper can help bring focus and clarity to one's day.

 

[bcmyers2112]

One of the things that attracted me to GTD was the alternative it presented to daily to-do lists, which never worked for me. The way I've come to understand GTD and practice GTD, what you're suggesting wouldn't be a "refinement" as much as it would be an extra burden.

When I find myself distracted from the task at hand by thoughts of others, it usually means I need to spend a few minutes collecting or clarifying things I've let build up in my inboxes and my mind. If it happens chronically, I'd see that as a signal that I need to spend some time at reviewing the higher levels to make sure I've captured and clarified anything relevant about my roles, goals and long-term visions.

One of the core premises of GTD is that by keeping a complete inventory of everything that has your attention, you can choose the best action in the moment based on what you can do where you are. This way you can avoid daily to-do lists and the feeling of failure one gets when the unpredictable nature of life inevitably upsets whatever plans you made the night before or early that morning.

To me, trying to practice GTD while adding practices like this that contradict it would be the worst of both worlds. From where I sit, it would be a lot of effort trying both systems while getting a payoff from neither.

Of course, you don't have to practice GTD in its entirety. Even David Allen acknowledges that for some people, it may be worth their while to get a few tips and tricks from the book.

And I've learned over the years to be less dogmatic about GTD (and life in general). There are plenty of people who accomplish a lot without ever practicing (or even encountering) GTD. So if you'd rather try a different system, I hope it works well for you.

But you asked for opinions, and mine is this: it seems like you've committed to practicing GTD in its entirety rather than just implementing a few of its tips and tricks. If that's the case, I question whether the "7 minute" rule with its daily to-do lists would really help you. I actually think it would add to your burdens. Instead I'd suggest taking a look at whether you're truly capturing and clarifying things well enough, and if not, why not. The answers might lie there.

 

[Ship69]

Nice answer - good food for thought. Thanks.

On reflection I think a rigid 7-minute rule is slightly insane. But cutting tasks down into bite-sized task that I know I can complete in one sitting seems to be good for "higher resistance" task.

 

[bcmyers2112]

Nice answer - good food for thought. Thanks.

On reflection I think a rigid 7-minute rule is slightly insane. But cutting tasks down into bite-sized task that I know I can complete in one sitting seems to be good for "higher resistance" task.

Yeah, definitely. As David Allen says, we're all starved for wins. Anything you can do to set yourself up for wins makes your actions list more attractive, and therefore increases the chances you'll actually do them.

The very definition of "next action" in GTD parlance is a physical, visible action that you can accomplish in one sitting. What does "one sitting" mean? That's up to you. Different people have different attention spans. Also, some tasks are easier to sustain over longer periods than others. So "read a book" might be a next action for some; for others, "read the first chapter" might be better.

Another trick I've learned when facing a task I'm resisting is to give myself permission to do just a bit of it and then stop. For example, if one of my physical inboxes has languished for a few days, the idea of getting through the whole stack sometimes seems too daunting. But just processing one item is a breeze. So I give myself permission to do just one, and stop there if I want. Which of course, I don't, because just doing one more would be easy. I just repeat that mental game with myself until the inbox is processed.

You can do the same with predefined tasks. If you have a report to write and you're dreading it, give yourself permission to write just one paragraph. Or read just a few pages of a book. Or make just one phone call off a list of calls to make. Whatever. I see this as an extension of the overarching strategy of GTD to use the smart part of your brain to make it easier to get the not-as-smart part to do what needs being done. One part of the brain is tricking the other by setting up easy targets to hit.

 

[bcmyers2112]

I should add something: on occasion I use daily to-do lists to help me remember what I felt were the most important next actions at a given moment. The thing that I've learned to avoid is treating them as "must do's", because that's where I've experienced an unnecessary sense of failure. I've found that opportunities to accomplish worthwhile things often present themselves as "interruptions" but the only way to take advantage of them is to be flexible and open to the possibility that what I had planned for the day might not be what I should be doing that day.

 

[Oogiem]

The very definition of "next action" in GTD parlance is a physical, visible action that you can accomplish in one sitting.

I'd edit this to be in GTD a next action is a single physical concrete action that you can do that can't be broken down into smaller bits. It may take a long time and many hours of doing that one action before it's done, depends on your actions. But if you can't break it down into a smaller bit (ignoring for the moment the do X for Y time actions) then it's a next action even if it takes days, weeks, months or in my case years or decades to complete.

The Do x for Y time period actions are IMO a way to break through the resistance when the action is huge. The old eat an elephant idea. The next action is "Eat the elephant". The way you do it is one bite at a time. Some folks prefer to see the action like "Eat 5 bites of elephant" on their lists some just want the single action since it's really one discrete thing. Now in my case I'd break that down into butcher elephant into constituent parts and start a stew of the tough bits ;-) but then again I'm a farmer and a hunter and eating animals usually starts with a butchering process.

 

[TesTeq]

The Do x for Y time period actions are IMO a way to break through the resistance when the action is huge. The old eat an elephant idea. The next action is "Eat the elephant". The way you do it is one bite at a time. Some folks prefer to see the action like "Eat 5 bites of elephant" on their lists some just want the single action since it's really one discrete thing. Now in my case I'd break that down into butcher elephant into constituent parts and start a stew of the tough bits ;-) but then again I'm a farmer and a hunter and eating animals usually starts with a butchering process.

Yes!
And in my case timing does not work. For example if the Project is to read a book I use "read next chapter" Next Action. I never use "read for 30 minutes" Next Action.
You can catch me that I say that I was writing my book 4 hours per day. Yes, that was the goal: "to work 4 hours a day" but these 4 hours were filled with chapter/topic based Next Actions.

 

[Gardener]

a) One's mind will be going slower and slower without realising it.

What makes you say that?

On the 7-minute thing, I think that task switching every seven minutes would never allow me to get anything done. I've read that getting up to speed on a task, after an interruption, takes somewhere between ten and twenty minutes (the first source I found when Googling said, in fact, 23 minutes), so this would pretty much ensure never being "up to speed".

 

[bcmyers2112]

What makes you say that?

On the 7-minute thing, I think that task switching every seven minutes would never allow me to get anything done. I've read that getting up to speed on a task, after an interruption, takes somewhere between ten and twenty minutes (the first source I found when Googling said, in fact, 23 minutes), so this would pretty much ensure never being "up to speed".

I forgot about that, but yeah, it takes a lot of mental energy to get into a groove of doing, or to unhook from one activity and get into another. I've also seen science that backs that up, and it matches my own experience.

 

[Gardener]

Returning to this: This is at least the second time on this forum that I've seen the idea that sustained focus is a BAD thing. Not the idea that multitasking and task switching can be OK, but a big step past that--the idea that they're what we SHOULD do.

This has made me think that a work style of constant task switching, and multitasking across many projects, can have a frenetic, frantic, high-speed, high-stress feel. And that settling down to a single task with extended focus can have a calmer feel.

I find myself wondering if what's going on is a perception--IMO, a very false perception--that the level of one's stress is directly proportional to the level of one's productivity or accomplishments. If the world is a blur of stress and changing mental landscapes, maybe that produces the illusion that more is getting done.

After all, in that situation we're touching--just barely--a large number of projects, and those projects, if they got done and done well, would represent a large amount of accomplishment. The problem is that very often we're only touching those projects. We're just smudging them with our fingerprints; we're not actually getting them done.

 

[mcogilvie]

This has made me think that a work style of constant task switching, and multitasking across many projects, can have a frenetic, frantic, high-speed, high-stress feel. And that settling down to a single task with extended focus can have a calmer feel.

I find myself wondering if what's going on is a perception--IMO, a very false perception--that the level of one's stress is directly proportional to the level of one's productivity or accomplishments. If the world is a blur of stress and changing mental landscapes, maybe that produces the illusion that more is getting done.

After all, in that situation we're touching--just barely--a large number of projects, and those projects, if they got done and done well, would represent a large amount of accomplishment. The problem is that very often we're only touching those projects. We're just smudging them with our fingerprints; we're not actually getting them done.

This is all true, but I would like to add that there are rhythms to the things we do. Long vs. short is just one axis for tasks. Another is hard vs. easy. Sometimes we have short hard things to do, sometimes long easy,but usually a mix. There are times, such as after a big project finishes or a school year begins, when the mix changes character. Awareness of that natural rhythm broadens perspective and keeps us more balanced. Of course, it is completely possible for someone to not have a great fit with a particular kind of job. For example, not everyone could work in an emergency room. That is a higher-level kind of issue, not at a next-action level.