Archive for ‘Productivity’ Category
Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. ~ William James
We all procrastinate. Everyone knows that it’s irrational to put off doing something until the quality of the work might suffer. It’s obvious that it doesn’t make sense to keep not doing something when the deadline is fast approaching. And yet, at least sometimes, everyone procrastinates.
WHAT IS PROCRASTINATION?
Contrary to what you might have been told in your childhood (or even more recently), procrastination is not about laziness. Rather, it’s a self-protective mechanism.
Research shows that we use procrastination as a technique to regulate our moods. More specifically, to regulate, manage, and prioritize a negative emotion in the present over the negative outcome of our procrastination in the future.
Instead of delving into the science and scaring you off with words like amygdala and prefrontal cortex, here’s a cartoon to ease you into what’s actually happening in your brain when you procrastinate.
WHAT TRIGGERS PROCRASTINATION?
The tippy-top expert on procrastination, Canadian professor of psychology Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University in Ottawa, is the author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.
According to Pychyl, there are seven triggers that cause people to procrastinate:
- Boredom — Whether a child is delaying doing homework because the assignment isn’t challenging or an adult is facing a stultifying task (vacuuming, I’m looking at you!), doing anything stimulating (even if it’s counterproductive) may feel better than doing the boring thing.
- Frustration — The task itself may be frustrating because it’s full of difficult, fiddly little steps, like putting together a spreadsheet from multiple sources of data or figuring out how to build an Ikea desk without any written instructions; or, you might be frustrated because the work involves dealing with annoying members of your team.
- Difficulty — When something seems like it’s going to be too mentally or physically taxing, it’s comforting to procrastinate. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we’re preparing, or doing pre-work, to set the stage for the difficult task, but there are only so many pencils your teen can sharpen before settling in on that calculus homework.
- Lack of Motivation — This may seem the same as boredom, but it’s actually more complex. Boredom is mostly about the task; some activities are just inherently lacking in stimulation. But motivation relates to internal drive. Even if you aren’t happy in your current role at work, you may not be that excited about applying for a new job (perhaps because of depression, anxiety, or fear of change). You have to see the benefit of working on your resume and prepping for an interview as steps toward a personal goal of being more professionally confident, rather than just items to be completed to “get a job,” which may not be inherently motivating.
- Lack of Focus — Mental focus depends on physical and emotional stimuli as well as external stimuli. A variety of emotional concerns related to the task at hand — fear of failure, being embarrassed in public, losing a scholarship or a job — as well as unrelated issues like family or relationship troubles, or health concerns, can detract from your focus. Similarly, working in a crowded or noisy space, or even in an environment with visually distracting elements, can dilute your focus. Some people need to turn down the radio while driving to find the address they’re seeking; others need a tidy desk in order to read, even if the desk is outside their line of sight. You can’t focus if you’re hungry or tired, either.
- Feeling Overwhelmed — Too much of too much will always keep you from taking clear action. In the professional organizing field, we talk about suffering from decision fatigue and often say, “The overwhelmed mind says ‘No’.” Have you ever stood in the toothpaste or shampoo aisle and been shocked by the ridiculous number of competing alternatives? Similarly, if there are many different ways to approach a talk (writing a blog, replying to an email, making a plan for a move), overwhelm may lead us to just physically or mentally wander away.
so much to do pic.twitter.com/fiSm7Y2Erg
— poorly drawn lines (@PDLComics) December 21, 2022
- Being Overworked — Burnout is definitely a trigger for procrastination. If you’ve ever worked day-in and day-out on a project such that by the time you got home, you had literally no mental space or physical energy to do anything, even to prepare food, that’s a sure sign of overwork. Alternative options might be more or less pleasant (think: socializing or housework), but you might choose to lay on your couch and mindlessly scroll through social media instead of either thing you were supposed to do. Overwork eliminates the energy necessary for doing anything in the now, so everything gets pushed to a theoretical later.
Of course, Pychyl is not the only one to define triggers for procrastination. Others have identified fear of failure, impulsiveness (sometimes associated with ADHD), and generalized anxiety. Various executive function disorders can make it difficult to sequence or prioritize tasks.
The point is, procrastination is not laziness, but a conscious or even subconscious need to not feel icky now, even if you’re going to feel doubly icky later.
Procrastination is not laziness, but a conscious or even subconscious need to not feel icky now, even if you're going to feel doubly icky later. Share on XPRACTICAL STRATEGIES TO COMBAT PROCRASTINATION
Obviously, once you identify your trigger to procrastinate, you can employ techniques to reverse the behavior. For example, if a task is boring, like housework or working out, you might pair it with music or a streaming TV show.
It also may be helpful to take away the temptations of more entertaining options. Lock your phone in a drawer — having to unlock it to play Candy Crush may give you the necessary pause to stick with your task. If you’re tempted by websites that are more entertaining than the work you’re supposed to be doing, lock yourself out of those websites (for whatever time period you set) by using a website-blocking program like:
Cold Turkey — works with Windows and MacOS
Focus — works with MacOS-only
Forest — designed for your phone, it works with Android, iOS, and in your Chrome browser
Freedom — works with Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, in as a plugin for Chrome
LeechBlock — works in various browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera (but not Safari)
Rescue Time — works with Windows, macOS, Android, iPhone, and iPad
Self-Control — works with acOS-only
There’s also Paw Block, which, while it only works as a Chrome or Firefox extension, has the benefit of showing you pictures of kittens from the around the internet when it prevents you from accessing distracting websites.
If you’re frustrated by the elements or situation of the task, you might bring in a friend or colleague to help you do it, someone who doesn’t have the emotional connection to the stressors that are throwing you off. They don’t necessarily need to perform the tasks, but just body double with you so you feel soothed and less frustrated.
You can break down difficult tasks into the tiniest possible elements, or seek a supervisor’s guidance, so the annoyances seem less annoying. (It’s tricky in the moment, but you might also try to reframe “difficult” tasks as challenges and contests with yourself.)
If you’re feeling unmotivated, see if you can find a short-term reward. (Cake? Cake is always good! But a refreshing walk outside after finishing the first of three elements of a task may help you get your head back in the game.) For a deeper lack of motivation, work with a therapist or coach to help you identify the meaningful benefits you can get from doing the things at which you tend to procrastinate, or possibly find a life path that eliminates those tasks. (If creating PowerPoint slide decks gives you a stomachache, maybe you need to consider becoming a lumberjack or a lighthouse keeper. Not everyone wants to be an knowledge worker, and that’s OK!)
If your procrastination is due to floundering focus, determine what’s contributing to the lack of focus. If it’s internal (troublesome thoughts and emotions), consider meditation, walking in nature, and talking through the excess thoughts with a friend and/or in therapy.
But if it’s external, if you’re feeling attacked from all sides by an overload of sensory stimuli, you may need to declutter and organize your space or move your workspace elsewhere (or invest in noise-canceling headphones). But it’s possible you’ll want to see if an ADHD or other diagnosis might help support your efforts to get assistance dealing with distractions.
Overwhelm may seem a lot like frustration. While you may be frustrated by just one (big) annoying thing, overwhelm feels like you’re getting pelted with dodge balls from all directions. It’s a good time to sit down with someone who can help you see the Big Picture and identify the priorities and sequences. Professional organizers and productivity specialists excel at helping you battle overwhelm and get clarity.
And if you’re overworked and experiencing burnout, it’s time to have a realistic discussion with your partner, therapist, boss, and anyone else who can help you achieve balance before you suffer health consequences more serious than just the emotional distress related to procrastination.
In the short term, some meditation and schedule modifications might work, but if you’re experiencing chronic overwork, more intense career and life changes might be necessary. Start by revisiting my series on toxic productivity, below, and pay special attention to post #3.
Toxic Productivity In the Workplace and What Comes Next
Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset
Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel
Toxic Productivity, Part 4: Find the Flip Side of Productivity Hacks
Toxic Productivity Part 5: Technology and a Hungry Ghost
You’re more than your job pic.twitter.com/qAHwtnT6Ux
— Junhan Chin | Illustrator (@junhanchin) August 31, 2022
EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL STRATEGIES TO COMBAT PROCRASTINATION
Making changes in your space and schedule, breaking your projects into smaller tasks, and giving yourself rewards are all smart practical solutions, but they’re external. Changing your external world can only eliminate some of the obstacles to your productivity. To truly conquer procrastination, experts advise making internal changes as well.
Admit it!
Denial is not just a river in Egypt. When you catch yourself procrastinating, acknowledge it. Once you call your own attention to the fact that you’re delaying doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing, you can look at that list of triggers and say, “Yikes! I’m avoiding writing this report. Why is that?” You can’t solve a problem if you don’t realize it exists. Admitting it gets you halfway to a solution.
Forgive yourself
This isn’t the same as letting yourself continue to procrastinate. And just like forgiving someone else isn’t the same as saying that the undesirable behavior never occurred, forgiving yourself gives you the opportunity to recognize that past behavior doesn’t have to dictate future performance.
A 2010 study by Michael J.A. Wohl, Timothy A. Pychyl, and Shannon H. Bennett entitled I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Study: How Self-Forgiveness for Procrastinating Can Reduce Future Procrastination found, as the title indicates, that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on preparing for exams earlier in the semester were far less likely to procrastinate on studying for the next exams.
You’re human; if you were a perfect person … well, you’d be the first one ever. Forgive yourself for having procrastinated in the past.
Practice self-compassion
Related to self-foriveness is self-compassion. Researchers found that people who procrastinate tend to have higher stress levels and lower levels of self-compassion, and theorized that compassion cushions some of the more negative, maladaptive responses that cause repeated procrastination.
Think of it as similar to overeating. If you cheat on your diet, low self-compassion might get you so down on yourself that you figure, “I’ll never lose this weight. I might as well just eat the whole ice cream carton!” But if you’re able to have self-compassion, you may tell yourself, “Yup, I did eat more than a half-cup serving of ice cream. But I understand why I did it. Next time, I’ll try drinking a glass of water and walking around the block first. Or maybe I’ll go out and eat the ice cream on the front porch, where the rest of the carton won’t be so accessible!”
(Seriously, whoever thought half a cup of ice cream was an adequate serving, anyway?)
Be intentional
All of the alternatives I described up above for seeking assistance and changing your environment (and the ones we’ll discuss next week) will only happen if you place your intention and attention on making changes.
Yes, this means a little extra labor on your part. If you know you procrastinate because you anticipate interruptions (from co-workers in the office or tiny humans when remote-working), you’re creating a problem before the problem exists, so you’re missing out on productivity before you need to and then again when the problem actually occurs. (And then you’ll spend the time after the interruptions being resentful about them, and that will lead to less productivity, too!)
Once you know what you’re up against and which triggers present a problem for you, build time into your schedule to plan your way around the obstacles and triggers. That might mean seeking out time with professionals who can help you, whether those are therapists, professional organizers, productivity specialists, or life or career coaches.
Embrace consistency
The various popular books on forming habits, like James Clear’s Atomic Habits, all agree that it starts with changing your identity, and seeing yourself as “the kind of person who” does things in a more agreeable, positive way.
Showing up daily is easier than showing up once in a while. pic.twitter.com/5CrOdIQjCu
— Sarah Arnold-Hall (@saraharnoldhall) February 6, 2023
One of the ways you can prod the formation of that kind of identity is to develop consistent actions and behaviors. In order to be the kind of person who goes to bed on time (and thus, can get up on time), you need to jettison the behavior of doom-scrolling for hours before bed. To consistently do that, you might set an alert on your phone for 8 p.m. to put the phone away, somewhere far from the couch or your bed. (Afraid you won’t get up on time if the phone isn’t near your sleeping area? Revisit my post from last summer, Do (Not) Be Alarmed: Paper Doll’s Wake-Up Advice for Productivity.)
Be a Self-Starter
You’ve heard me talk about activation energy before. In my post, Rhymes With Brain: Languishing, Flow, and Building a Better Routine, I wrote:
We also depend on activation energy. Because the hardest part of what we do is the getting started, we have to incentivize ourselves to get going. There are all sorts of ways we can trick ourselves (a little bit) with rewards, like pretty desk accessories or a coffee break, but the problem is that action precedes motivation. We’re not usually psyched to get going until we have already started!
Action precedes motivation. We're not usually psyched to get going until we have already started, whether it's a runner's high or Csikszentmihalyi's flow. Share on XA huge key to breaking the procrastination habit is getting started. After all, Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body at motion tends to stay in motion. (OK, it actually says, “a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force.” But this isn’t Physics 101.)
Did you watch the cartoon at the start of this post? (It’s OK if you skipped it; just scroll up and watch now and we’ll wait.) If you did watch, you know that you’re more likely to feel negative emotions about a task when you’re avoiding it, but when you’re actually doing the task, it doesn’t feel so bad.
So, get yourself in motion so that you can stay in motion! Get yourself past the hurdle of starting and that small victory of starting, and the realization that it wasn’t as bad as you feared, might make you less likely to procrastinate the next time you’re facing that same challenge.
GET STARTED AT GETTING STARTED
Once you’ve read all of the preceding advice, you still have to get your butt in the chair. (OK, yes, you could use a standing desk. Let’s not be pedantic!) There are two key ways to do that.
First, embrace accountability. As I’ve previously described in these various posts, borrowing willpower from others by getting support from “partners in crime” can be just the motivation you need to get started and stick with it, whatever the “it” is:
Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity
Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity
Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions
Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek
Second, even when you’ve got accountability support (and especially when you don’t), there are techniques for helping you get started on tasks in ways that feel hopeful, and that make finishing seem possible.
So, come back for next week’s post, Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done, where we’re going to be doing a deep dive into a variety of well-known and sleeper strategies for eliminating procrastination. We’ll be talking about tomatoes and frogs, blocks and tocks, and so many numbers that you’ll think we’re in math class. (But I promise, just in case you tended to procrastinate on math homework, there will be no trains leaving Chicago at 120 miles per hour.)
Until next time, read more about the nature and causes of procrastination:
Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing To Do With Self-Control) ~ The New York Times
Why People Procrastinate: The Psychology and Causes of Procrastination ~ Why People Procrastinate
6 Common Causes of Procrastination ~ Psychology Today
7 Triggers of Procrastination ~ ChrisBaily.com
Procrastination triggers: eight reasons why you procrastinate ~ Ness Labs
When you tend to procrastinate, what triggers tend to haunt you? What methods do you use to keep procrastination at bay?
Privacy in Your Home Office: From Reality to Fantasy
When Virginia Woolf wrote about having A Room of One’s Own almost a century ago, she wasn’t being entirely literal. She was talking about the lack of opportunities for expression that women in her day had. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Woolf wrote.
Of course, this was mainly a metaphor for all of the lack of access women of her era (and most eras) experienced: lack of money to access education, lack of career choices, lack of ability to guide one’s own future. “A room of one’s own” in terms of the metaphor is complex, but the concept has stood out in popular understanding both in the figurative sense as well as the literal one since the 1920s, when Woolf published the essays based on her lectures.
What does this have to do with organizing and productivity?
GIMME SOME SPACE (FOR MY STUFF)
We all — unrelated to gender or age or any of a variety of factors — need our own space to think, to create, to work, to strive toward greatness, and even to be our best selves. Nobody can be “on” 24/7/365. Having no private space amid the chaos, whether that’s in a home or office, eventually prevents us from achieving or even aspiring to achievements.
At the start of the pandemic, there was an enormous push to understand the needs of remote workers. Setting your laptop up at the kitchen table just wasn’t going to cut it. Everyone began to look at ideas for creating remote work spaces that were efficient, effective, productivity-supporting, comfortable, and private.
For an intensive primer on how to create a home office with storage that supports all of your needs, I encourage you to visit the guest post I wrote in 2021 for the excellent storage supply company, meori.
From Dad’s Study to the Modern Home Office covered everything you might want to know about home office design and storage. The post looked at why home office storage usually fails, the questions you should ask yourself to design better home office storage, and key strategies for creating your ideal work and storage space.
Of course, to create a room (or space) of one’s own, you have to look beyond the tangible. For example, for a deep dive into the emotional aspects of working remotely in the ongoing COVID era, you might want to visit my post The Perfect Unfolding As We Work From Home.
From a more interactive behavioral perspective, the classic Paper Doll post R-E-S-P-E-C-T: The Organizing Secret for Working At Home looked at how to create a work environment that ensures that others give us respect, and that we respect ourselves and our own time, energy, and attention.
PRIVACY, PLEASE
Privacy is essential. While we tend to think of privacy in an office setting as the ability to conduct our work without others overhearing our conversations, it’s important to also consider how much we needed to be protected from overstimulation caused by other people’s conversations (or pen-tapping, gum-chewing, or video game playing). We looked at this to some extent in Divide and Conquer: Improve Productivity With Privacy Screens.
Whether we are neurotypical or neurdivergent, we all need to find our own rhythms, and that can involve protecting ourselves from the visual and auditory stimulation that comes from being out in the world. Decades of work environments have taught me how I work best.
When I first worked in television, I had a small, windowless office with old-fashioned, oversized furniture. I had no visual disturbances, but even with the door closed, I could hear the hubbub of a “bullpen” situation right outside my door.
At my next TV station, my office was slightly larger, but near the back of the building, away from noise, and my one window looked out onto an A/C unit and the outer wall of a warehouse. Although I’m an extrovert, when I work I want as little outside stimuli as possible, and this was perfect; with my door closed, I could concentrate and focus entirely on my own thoughts.
My last TV station was in a converted auto sales showroom. The entire front wall of my ridiculously enormous office was made up of floor-to-(high)-ceiling windows looking out onto a parking lot and a busy highway. Others may have envied the space, but I had to keep the vertical blinds closed 90% of the time (both to keep out the blinding sunlight and the visual stimuli).
In my own home-based set-up for more than two decades, my desk faces a blank wall so that nothing beyond my computer screens can distract me. This might be hell for others, but it’s ideal for ensuring my focus.
Your mileage may vary.
FINDING YOUR IDEAL SPACE — REALITY AND FANTASY
You’ll find a lot of advice online for creating your own home office space with minimal effort. For example, you could:
- Remove the accordion doors from a bedroom closet and add a wide but shallow table as a desk.
- Add lighting fixtures and a desk in an alcove under the stairs to create a private Harry Potter-inspired workspace.
- Add a curving curtain rail on the ceiling (like the kind that creates privacy in hospital emergency rooms) to designate a corner of a bedroom or other area of the house as an office and separate the workspace from the rest of the area with a curtain.
- Use IKEA Kallax bookshelves (filled with books) to create a room divider to give a sense of privacy. (Feel free to watch the video with the sound off; the AI robotic voice insists on spelling Kallax out each time. The future is weird.)
But again, the internet abounds with such options. I thought it might be fun to look at a variety of standalone office ideas that range from the inexpensive and realistic to the when-you-get-that-huge-advance-on-your-great-American-novel option.
Sanwa Home Privacy Tent
Do you remember Party of Five? The mid-1990s Fox Broadcasting show about five young siblings trying to survive after a family tragedy launched the careers of Neve Campbell, Matthew Fox, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Lacey Chabert, among others.
When I saw this first product, I was immediately reminded of how, in the earliest seasons, Chabert’s character Claudia created her own bedroom by putting up a tent in the middle of the living room. The Sanwa Home Privacy Tent (AKA the 200 Tent001) is designed for a similar purpose, carving out private space in the middle of pre-existing space.
It’s a basic nylon tent, not very large, but adequate for one person, a small desk for a laptop, and a lamp or other lighting source — to create a distraction-free workspace. Designed for indoor use, it’s suitable for studying or working. The super-portable tent weighs only 6 pounds, including the case, and measure 35″ x 43″ by 59″.
There’s a skylight/rooftop opening if you’d like more natural light, a side window, and a zippered entrance so you can be available for office hours (or for visits from your pets.) Admittedly, it’s not very pretty, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of the sensory inputs in your home, apartment, or dorm, setting this up for some private workspace could be just the ticket for eliminating your stress.
The instructions apparently only come in Japanese, but as the video shows, assembly looks very intuitive — it pops open like a mesh laundry basket!
Sold for about $125 at various stores online, it’s currently sold out at the Japan Trend Shop where I first found it. (It is in stock if you want to purchase it directly from Sanwa in Japan for 7980 yen, or a bit over $61.)
Alternatively, if you search Amazon for “indoor tents,” you’ll mostly find children’s tents and playhouses for under $60, but I have to admit that I envy something breezy like this indoor playhouse. (It’s regularly about $110, but at multiple times over the last few weeks, I’ve seen it on sale for under $65.)
Highlights from the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit
As you know from my post Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit a few weeks ago, I was set to spend three days at the beginning of this month attending, and being a panelist and presenting at the summit. This is the fourth year I’ve been involved, and it was definitely the best yet.
The theme of this year’s summit, One-Size-Doesn’t-Fit-All. Now what?, is dear to my heart. In February, the summit’s creator, Francis Wade, and Productivityist Mike Vardy delivered a pre-summit session to set the stage. Generally, Francis posited, when people are struggling with productivity (and this is true of tangible organizing struggles, too), they seek out experts, “gurus” who identify their so-called secret formulas. “Do this and all will be well!” And that may be true, but only for a while.
No one system for anything — career paths, life balance, making cookies, or having an organized and productive life — works for every person in every situation. At some point, it’s essential to take the guru’s advice and customize it for yourself so you can live an authentic life.
Even Marie Kondo, whom I chided for insisting her way was the one-true way (in my post The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing) has had to face the fact that her way doesn’t exactly work for the kid-filled life she now embodies. (See all the various recent articles with titles like “Professional tidier Marie Kondo says she’s ‘kind of given up’ after having three kids.”)
Early on, especially pre-internet, there were no centralized places to access productivity advice. Then, so many people got into David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD to those in the know) that it was evangelized everywhere. But with the expansion of the web, “productivity porn” proliferated, and people had (and have) access to so many options.
The problem? Whatever popular productivity methods are out there, people aren’t all the same. They are unique. As I presented in “Paper Shame” — Embracing Analog Productivity Solutions in an Increasingly Digital World:
Because I know my own style, I know what works best for me. Because I stay abreast of all of the options out there, I know how to suggest what might be best for my clients. And my job is to know that what works for me won’t work for each of my clients, and what works for my overwhelmed, 30-something client with ADHD and a toddler won’t be the same as for my single-dude on-the-road salesperson client or my new-retiree client whose spouse was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. We’re each unique.
So, it’s important to know that it’s normal if the productivity strategies that work for your bestie don’t work for you. As you read blogs and books and incorporate advice, instead of accepting every bit of it “hook, line, and sinker,” Francis encouraged what he calls an ETaPS framework.
Simply put:
Evaluate your current situation and needs
Target where you want to move the needle (and by when)
Plan how you’re going to incorporate change into your approach, and get
Support through coaches, friendly accountability, and exposure to a wide variety of opinions and methods.
The summit was one stellar way to get that exposure.
These three jam-packed days included 27 recorded video presentations as well as live interviews, panel discussions, and networking at digital Zoom-like tables. It would be impossible to share all of the highlights, which ranged from Olga Morett‘s compassionate, vulnerable approach to “unmasking” and self-exploration for neuro-diverse individuals to Hanifa Barnes‘ framework for building without burnout (which included a deep dive into understanding circadian rhythms and body clocks for chronotypes — apparently I’m a cross between a wolf (night person) and a dolphin (insomniac).
Dolphin photo by Ádám Berkecz on Unsplash
Thus, rather than providing a full recap of the summit, I’m going to share highlights and snippets that caught my attention, and which I look forward to sharing with my own clients.
QUICK BITES
“The menu is not the meal.”
Henrik Spandet, while talking about the differences among task management, calendar management, and meeting management, cautioned participants to remember that a task list is merely a list of opportunities, just as a menu is a list of dining alternatives. One must prioritize to maximize the experience. You can’t expect to do it all, or do it all at once. (He did not, however, discuss the advantages of eating dessert first.)
“If you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, just sit.”
Carl Pullein‘s take on self-discipline dovetails with my own advice for dealing with writer’s block, and it’s kind of like the reverse of the bartender yelling, “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” You don’t have to perform the task you’ve set for yourself, but if you don’t, then you can’t do anything else. No perfectionist procrastination by tidying your desk; no mindless scrolling.
Sit. Just sit.
And in sitting and not doing, you may find yourself motivated to start writing, creating, or tackling whatever you’ve been avoiding. If not, you will find yourself having to face the reason for your avoidance, which may prove equally productive.
During a third-day “Boundaries, Burnout and Balance: Finding Peace When Working from Home” panel with Renee Clair, Clare Evans, and Olga Morett, the concept of “the booty hour” came up — and how getting the butt-in-the-chair is that make-or-break moment.
Do, or do nothing, is a powerful choice. We are so fixated on never being bored that the idea of having to do nothing may make the thing we are avoiding suddenly a much more compelling alternative!
“What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.”
Too often, Peter Drucker‘s quote is truncated as “What gets measured gets managed” but the full quote is so much more powerful. In other words, be aware of how your methods and strategies impact your work, but do not get so caught up in the minutia of how many emails you’ve cleared (or not), and focus on the bigger picture of accomplishing what you want and need to do.
Don’t spend so much time tweaking your systems to get a micro-percentage point of difference. Know what metrics will help you achieve the return on investment of your time, energy, and attention, and focus there. Prioritization can feel abstract, but pay attention to what has the greatest impact on your life, and what brings you closest to your goals.
“Busy leads to burnout; productivity leads to prosperity.”
Ayana Bard‘s message at the start of her five-part approach to mindfully productivity has been in my head for the past week. Her approach involves gaining clarity (and understanding yourself and your tasks so that you can prioritize), knowing where your time is actually going (by doing a time audit), and managing your attention and (mental, emotional, and physical) energy.
Ayana accented the importance of mindfulness (i.e., paying attention with purpose), and noted that practicing mindfulness is easy to skip but not easy to do. (Hence the practicing part, eh?) She recommends incorporating mindfulness of your energies with regard to ultradian rhythms by working 90 minutes at top performance, taking 20 or so minutes for healing and recovery, and then starting another 90 minute cycle of top performance.
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Professor Bret Atkins‘ presentation The Zen of Ten offered lists of ~ten (though he cautioned, not “top” ten) books (both well-known and a second list of sleepers), podcasts, videos, terms, and tools. The big-name list included works by David Allen, Steven Covey, Cal Newport, and Brian Tracey, as well as the “habits” triumvirate of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
Paper Doll Interviews Motivational Wordsmith Kara Cutruzzula
Welcome back to another installment of our rare Paper Doll series of interviews with colleagues and special guests. I’ve interviewed productivity specialist Melissa Gratias, academic/life coach and inventor Leslie Josel, genealogy organizers Janine Adams, Jennifer Lava, and Hazel Thornton, and life coach/author Allison Task.
Today, I’m excited to introduce you to journalist/writer/editor/playwright/lyricist/librettist Kara Cutruzzula (rhymes with Methuselah!), friend-of-the-blog and purveyor of motivational oxygen.
We met when I subscribed to Kara’s newsletter Brass Ring Daily in 2019. She’d provided a link to a spec script she’d written for Gilmore Girls, one of my all-time favorite TV shows, and I wrote a fan-girling email to tell her how brilliant and talented she was, the subject line of which was, “My neighbor was awakened by my raucous laughter thanks to your Gilmore Girls script!” Kara’s ear for dialogue and how she made secondary and tertiary characters like Michel and Lane absolutely shine were impressive.
Paper Doll readers may initially wonder what Kara’s talent for capturing the distinct voices of characters on a hit television show has to do with organizing and productivity, the bread-and-butter topics here on this blog. But you’ll soon see — and it all started with that get-to-know-you chain of emails where Kara and I traded our insights about the process of getting things done — and the frustration of not getting things done.
it’s OK to archive that email you never responded to back in August 2021.
it’s also OK to respond! yes, today!
less OK is staring at in your inbox for another six months.
free yourself. one or the other.
— Kara Cutruzzula (@karacut) February 22, 2022
We kept finding ways to work together and support one another’s efforts. I interviewed Kara about newsletter writing and magazine editing for a monthly meeting of the NAPO Authorship & Publishing Special Interest Group and then she interviewed me for a great feature for Forge, Medium’s personal development outlet. Readers, that piece, Now Is the Right Time to Declare Bankruptcy on Your Projects, is so good, you should open it in another tab right now so you don’t forget to read it.
And Kara just interviewed me for the soon-to-premiere season #2 of her Do It Today podcast! If you find productivity compelling, or you could use a little motivation to turn your dreams into reality, get to know Kara!
EVERY SUPERHERO HAS AN ORIGIN STORY
Paper Doll: Could you tell Paper Doll readers about your early life and college years? I know you majored in English at UCLA. What did you plan to do when you finished school?
Kara Cutruzzula: Hearing this question makes me laugh because…I didn’t have a solid plan! My Big Idea was to move to New York and find a job “working with words.” (So cute!) I was applying for internships and editorial assistant jobs every day. Book publishers, magazines, websites, university presses, you name it.
A few weeks after graduating I bought a plane ticket and took advantage of the generosity of my aunts Gina and Jo by crashing on a pull-out couch in their apartment (we called it “the nook”) and crossed my fingers I would find something to do. Then I did.
This highlights something that’s come up over and over again in my career: First you leap, then you figure it out.
You have used your words to craft a set of interlocking and parallel careers. Basically, you’re a polymath (a fancy-pants way of saying Renaissance Woman). Your fascinating and diverse experience includes work as an editor, writer, newsletter creator, playwright, lyricist, and podcaster.
Did (or how did) your internships in film and TV prepare you for the career path you’ve had? How did you get your start in writing for online outlets?
In hindsight these unpaid college internships (at a film development company, at a publicity firm working on Oscar campaigns, and a B2B travel magazine) laid stepping stones for the future. I loved taking the bus (yes, I was the rare LA bus rider) to the 20th Century Fox lot to work at the film development company.
Sure, I picked up chopped salads for the executives, but I also read and wrote coverage of screenplays and TV pilots, and covered assistants’ desks when they were out of the room. (To this day, there’s still nothing scarier to me than “rolling calls” — placing and returning phone calls to intimidating execs at a lightning-fast pace!)
Working at the travel magazine was a great stroke of luck, too. The editor-in-chief, Ken, kindly set me up on an informational interview with a magazine editor when I moved to New York. No job came from that interview, but even a short getting-to-know-you meeting is a huge lift to your spirits when you’re 21 and don’t know anyone in the industry.
As for writing, if you caught me during the first five years of my career, I wouldn’t have called myself a writer at all! In 2008, I was hired as a culture intern at The Daily Beast, a then two-month-old website founded by editor Tina Brown. The team was small, maybe 15 people, and that was my real education. I helped the culture editor plan out culture coverage — what was the site going to cover and how were we going to cover it? — and transcribed interviews and contacted publicists and all sorts of other tasks.
Then I became a homepage editor. Remember, this was back in 2008. We weren’t getting traffic from social media. People actually visited a website’s homepage. As a homepage editor, you were responsible for story placement, headlines, photos, and deciding what needed coverage on the Cheat Sheet — basically “the mix,” as Tina called it. What did people want to read? (Actually, being a homepage editor was scarier than rolling calls!) But there was a real sense that what you were doing was important. You were covering the news. Everyone was incredibly invested, and the team was brilliant.
After The Daily Beast merged with Newsweek in 2010, I moved over to the magazine side to edit and assign stories for the back-of-book section covering film, TV, theater, fashion, and a back-page feature called “My Favorite Mistake,” where I interviewed James Earl Jones, Barbara Corcoran, Richard Branson, and other fun folks. But I got a crash course in magazine editing. Very different from editing for a website! You can only fit so many words on a page. I loved it.
This is a very long way of saying I was primarily an editor for four years. It was fun and rewarding and also exhausting. Newsweek published its Last Print Issue in 2012 (it’s since been resurrected) and I was laid off.
I didn’t want to work full-time at another magazine or website. (This was 2012; freelancing was a little less common than it is now.) So I thought: What else is out there?
Over the next 10 years, I became a writer.
GRABBING THE BRASS RING
You launched Brass Ring Daily in 2017. What caught my eye in those daily emails and the (now) 1000+ newsletter archive was the fact that while you were writing about disparate aspects of your own life, theater, and things that were going on in the world, you were blending motivational quotes, advice about productivity and self-empowerment, and doing it all without trying to sell anything. And Vanity Fair called it, “A life coach in your inbox.”
What prompted you to start the Brass Ring Daily? What has meant the most to you about the experience?
I became a freelance writer and editor — I even spent a solid three years as a travel writer — but I was also holding these monthly “summits” at my apartment where creative folks and friends would talk about projects and share resources.
[Paper Doll Editor’s Note: My late, great high school history teacher, Mr. Fred Murphy, would have wanted me to draw the parallels between Kara and Madame de Staël, an 18th- and 19th-century Frenchwoman and writer, famous for connecting the greatest minds of her era in salons.]
I took notes during these meetings so that one editor’s name or that great productivity tool was recorded for anyone who needed it. I wrote up a summit recap and sent it out to the group.
After a year or two, my friends Alison and Daphna asked if I ever thought about starting a newsletter. So…I did! And it’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done for my career and also my sense of self as a writer. I always tell people to own something for themselves, even if that something is small.
The newsletter gave me a daily deadline that wasn’t attached to an editor or assignment. I didn’t have to answer to anyone, except my own nagging guilt if I skipped a day. And it gave me a place to collect all the inspirations, book quotes, and my own thoughts on creating. The newsletter collects them and allows me to let them go — basically, it’s my most important tool for organization!
[Paper Doll Editor’s Note: Brass Ring Daily often has delightful cameos by baby animals.]
WORDS AND MUSIC: KARA’S NAME UP IN LIGHTS
You’re also a musical theater lyricist and librettist, and from your newsletter, I know you’ve worked on a wide variety of projects as part of the BMI Musical Theatre Advanced Workshop and the BMI Librettists Workshop. Can you tell readers about Letters from May and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Musical?
The Kara of 2008 would think it is completely wild that the Kara of 2023 writes musicals. I got into the BMI Workshop, which has been around since 1961; the workshop self-describes as “the setting where the writers of A Chorus Line, Little Shop of Horrors, Nine, Ragtime, Avenue Q, Next To Normal, and The Book of Mormon, among many others, learned their craft.”
For the first two years, lyricists and composers attend a two-hour weekly workshop and present songs they’ve written and get feedback from the room. I only cried like five times. Learning something new is hard. Being a beginner is hard. Thankfully, now I cry much less often.
Lyricists and composers attend a two-hour weekly workshop, present songs they've written, and get feedback. I only cried like five times. *Learning something new is hard. Being a beginner is hard.* ~ @karacut Share on XLetters From May is a 10-minute musical written with composer Kristoffer Bjarke as our first-year project. It tracks the life of an artist, May Dalton, over 50 years as she wrestles with questions of fame and sacrifice. Last year, it was produced at a festival in New York, which was a joyful experience after the pandemic knocked the wind out of the sails of many musical theater writers (myself included).
During year two of the workshop, composer Ron Passaro and I adapted [the Amazon Prime TV show] The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel into a musical, which was another great joy.
Musicalizing such strong and vivid characters was a fun challenge — and of course, Julie, you know I love Amy Sherman-Palladino’s writing more than anything. [Paper Doll Editor’s Note: Sherman-Palladino created Gilmore Girls, Maisel, and the under-appreciated Bunheads, which starred Broadway’s beloved Sutton Foster. It’s streaming on Hulu. Thank me later.]
Right now, Kristoffer and I are developing Marathon, which is an original one-act musical which takes place entirely during a race. It’s about patience, persistence, and finding the capacity within yourself to do hard things.
THE TURNING POINT: MOTIVATION & GETTING PUBLISHED
I usually ask interviewees, “What would you say was the turning point that helped you identify your true calling and fine-tune what you do professionally?” But you seem to be what folks have been calling a multipotentialite. Have you HAD a turning point, or are you still discovering many different true callings, all around your love of words?
LOL. I usually feel like I have no idea what I’m doing and also like I’m just getting started. The last 15 years have felt like a prolonged learning process — a stage I named “percolation” in Do It Today. Culture editing informed my freelance writing; editing influenced my lyric writing; and on and on. I want to do a lot of things and am always worried about not finishing enough or over-thinking what I’m making.
One kind of guiding light over the past 15 years was following random flickers of interest. What sounds interesting? Where do I want to go? What do I want to learn? I’ve never regretted going toward those new endeavors.
Writing is obviously a passion for you. Your first book was Do It For Yourself: A Motivational Journal, beloved by readers and reviewers for the combined uplifting wisdom and snazzy design. For people struggling, procrastinating on doing the big things that would make their hearts sing, you offer exercises to change mindset, overcome obstacles, and pursue follow-through.
Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit
In fields like science, medicine, and technology, surprising information comes out all the time, and with that, novel guidance and advice. In the world of organizing and productivity, however, there aren’t a lot of unexpected, planet-sized discoveries or wrecking balls to old beliefs.
Rather, in most aspects of organizing and productivity, we seek to find novel examples and tweaks to help people understand the best approaches for what they already know deep down. Today, I’d like to share three intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently, and an opportunity for you to discover more.
WORK AS HOBBY: OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION WITH A MINDSET SHIFT
The first concept comes from my friend and colleague Hazel Thornton. You may recall her from Paper Doll Interviews the Genealogy Organizers and when I profiled her new book, Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook, in Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources a few weeks ago.
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