Archive for ‘Time Management’ Category

Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done

Posted on: May 1st, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 24 Comments

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR TACKLING YOUR TO-DOS

Getting things done takes a lot of moving parts.

  • You need to know WHAT to do. (This is where a to-do list or a task app comes in.) 

Our brains can hold about seven things in our short-term memory, plus-or-minus a few. I always think of it as plus-or-minus three, given that phone numbers in North America being seven digits plus a three-digit area code. However, a misinterpretation of a famous psychological paper from 1956 leads people to understand Miller’s Law as allowing us to remember 7 things, plus-or-minus two.

That said, we can certainly remember more things, as long as we don’t have to recite them in very quick sequence. After all, a neurosurgeon doesn’t consult a to-do list to remember all of the steps in a complicated surgery, and we can (usually) handle remembering to make dozens of turns to get from where we work to where we live without benefit of GPS, assuming we’ve driven the route several times.

The simplicity or sophistication of your list of tasks is immaterial. Whether it’s on a sticky note, a page of a legal pad, a digital note in Notes or Evernote or OneNote, or any of a variety of task apps, if it shows the things you need to accomplish, you’re golden. 

  • You need to know what to do first.

The delightfully weird comedian Stephen Wright used to say, “You can’t have everything, where would you put it?”

Prioritizing is a toughie. We often say, “Well, all things being equal…” but of course, things aren’t equal. Some things are naturally high-priority — if you’re dealing with smoke, fire, blood, a baby crying (or a grownup crying hysterically), you need to tend to that first.

Most tasks in life don’t come with such obvious signs of their priorities. Usually, things we want to do are high emotional priorities but may be low productivity priorities. If I gave you a choice between doing an expense report or going to brunch, and assured you my magic powers extended to bippity-boppity-boo-ing your expense report for you and taking all calories and carbs out of your meal, you’d pick the corner table on the patio, convivial conversation with friends, and bottomless mimosas over filling cells on a spreadsheet.

We must prioritize our tasks. As we discussed in Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity, the key is to identify two essential characteristics of tasks: importance and urgency.

The Eisenhower Matrix isn’t the only method for determining these two factors, but it illustrates that only once you’ve figured out what are the most important and urgent things to get done, can you can figure out what things you should do yourself now, what you can delay and schedule for later, what you can delegate or assign to someone else, and what you can delete (or schedule for that non-existent “someday”). 

Some people like to eat the frog, per a quote originally ascribed to Mark Twain, “If the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you.”  

This method encourages attacking the biggest, hairiest task first. Proponents of Eat the Frog, like Brian Tracy, who authored Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, believe will this prevent you from spending the day procrastinating.

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They also posit that conquering the little green beast will give you such a sense of accomplishment that your adrenaline and pride will drive the focused energy necessary to work your way down your task list.

Me? I’m not so sure. I mean, yes, if you do the thing that you’re most likely to avoid first, of course you’ll feel strong and mighty and start knocking everything out of the park.

But how will you get yourself to do that? Even armed with all of the advice in last week’s and today’s, some of us are just going to keep avoiding the BIG YUCKY, certainly at the start of the day. Personally, I’m more inclined to start with something easy, as I believe that small victories breed success.

So, prioritizing isn’t just about the relative measure of the tasks, but of your emotional relationship to doing them. In other words, you do you, boo!

  • Sit down (or stand up) and do it!

Knowing what you have to do and in what order (or at least at what level of soon-itude) is great, but it won’t get your tushy in the chair. As Sir Isaac Newton reminded us in last week’s post, Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination, a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. If your particular body has been at rest for a bit too long, how are you going to get it to hunker down, in derriere-in-chair position, to get cracking?

Today’s post examines the methods, both popular and lesser-known, for proudly placing your posterior in position for productivity.

ONE HOT TOMATO: THE POMODORO TECHNIQUE

Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, and a popular form of kitchen timer in the 20th century was tomato-shaped.

In the 1980s, Francesco Cirillo developed the Pomodoro Technique as a method for circumventing procrastination. The steps are basic:

  • Identify the task you’re going to work on.
  • Set a (kitchen) timer for 25 minutes.
  • Work on that task (without interruptions or distractions) for the entire 25 minutes.
  • Stop after 25 minutes (and if you’re strictly following the technique, check the task off on your official “To Do Today” sheet).
  • Take a short break of about five minutes.

After four completed pomodoros, take a longer break. Four pomodoros plus four short breaks would equal about two hours, so that’s an opportunity for quite a bit of focus each day.

Simple, eh? But there are a few caveats. If you get interrupted, you start over. If you get distracted, you start over. And no matter how well you enter the flow state when working, when the buzzer goes off after 25 minutes, you have to take the break.

You remember flow state, right? We talked about it extensively in Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake” and when our sense of self and our surroundings cease such that we hyper-focus on a task.

For some people, that last part is a real sticking point of the Pomodoro Technique, because the break in the flow at 25 minutes may lead to a break in inspiration and concentration. For others, it’s like stopping a movie just when it’s getting to the good part — you can’t wait to get back to it.

Does it have to be a tomato-shaped timer? No, although it may help some people feel they are doing the technique in an “official” way, and for rule followers, that may help them get into the right head space.

Does it have to be a physical timer? Not necessarily. But the mind-body connection is a powerful thing, and physically manipulating a handheld kitchen timer (tomato-shaped or otherwise) might be be the key for some people to feel their activation energy getting triggered.

If the physical sensation of turning on a timer helps you set your attention on using your time intentionally, then use that to increase your motivation. But if you’re just not that touch-feely, just give a shout to Siri or Alexa to set a timer for 25 minutes, or use some of the zillions of digital pomodoro sites and apps out there.

Does it have to ring like a kitchen timer? Once again, no. Some people may find the harsh and unyielding ring or buzz of a timer to be too jarring, not only ending the flow state, but setting them on edge. If you are neurodivergent or categorize yourself as a highly sensitive person, you may be overwhelmed by an intense buzz; consider a tangible timer with a more melodious sound or pick a digital timer or phone alarm with your favorite “ta da, I did it!” song to gently break you out of your reverie.

Again, only you know what’s going to help you surface from your underwater focus bubble vs. what’s going to make you feel like you’ve narrowly avoided fender bender.

TOCKS

Tick-tock goes the clock, and that 25-minute tomato-based technique is practiced world-wide. But a similar method was developed independently by Daniel Reeves, co-founder of the productivity app Beeminder. (It’s been years since we covered Beeminder, but it’s a data-driven, habit-tracking productivity app where you put your money where your mouth is, pledging that if you don’t hit your goals, Beeminder will charge your credit card!) 

Back in 2004, Reeves (independently) developed a variant of the Pomodoro Technique based on the idea of working for 45 minutes and taking 15-minute breaks. Each 45-minute block is called a tock. Like the Pomodoro Technique, Tocks rely on specifying what you’ll be working on during the tock.

Those who practice these hourly tock/break blocks are encourage do start on the hour, making it easier to track how much you accomplish (and see when it’s time to get your tushy back to work). Reeves also urges users to take note of mental distractions so they don’t end up like the guy in the Distracted Boyfriend meme.

This reminds me of something I heard Alan Brown of ADD Crusher once say, that when one is being distracted by other possible tasks, it’s important to remember that there are “only three types of things.” There’s:

  • What I’m working on now
  • Important things that are not what I’m working on now, and
  • BS things that are not what I’m working on now.

I see two advantages of noting your distracting thoughts. First, it will give you confidence that you won’t forget the (possibly) brilliant ideas that you had, and letting go of that fear will allow you to focus on what you’re doing. Second, it will yield a tangible list of other tasks to consider when you take your break, or later on when you’re deciding what is important or urgent to schedule.

Beeminder is bee-themed, and the original Tocks blog post sourced a bee-shaped timer that was later unavailable. However, I’ve found it, as well as a slightly less adorable alternative. If something like this would inspire you to be a busy (and productive) bee, go forth and create some buzz!

Etsy has the original version for $19.98 (plus shipping) for a set of two Spring Bumble Bee Design 60 Minute Kitchen Timers:

Less adorable and lacking actual deelyboppers, but available with Amazon Prime for $17.55, is this Kitchen Bee Timer:

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THE 90-MINUTE FOCUS BLOCK

At first glance, this just seems like a super-sized Pomodoro. Instead 25 minutes of focus plus a break, you work for 90 minutes. But there’s scientific backing.

The field of sleep research has found that our bodies experience ultradian rhythms, recurrent 90-minute cycles throughout each 24-hour day. These are similar to the cycles of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, discovered by researcher Nathaniel Kleitman. (This is why sleep researchers advise sleeping in multiples of 90 minutes to ensure you don’t get awakened mid-cycle, and why 7 1/2 hours of sleep (five 90-minute cycles) may make you feel more refreshed than 8 hours (four 90-minute cycles but then being jarred awake partway through your fifth).

Kleitman found evidence that we have 90-minute periods of high-frequency brain activity alternating with 20-minute periods of low(er)-frequency brain activity. (There’s a whole science-y explanation of how the cycles are governed by how our brains use our potassium and sodium ions to conduct electrical signals, but this is a blog post about productivity, not neurobiology. Thank goodness.)

So, if our energy levels and cognitive functions are optimal during particular 90-minute periods when we’re awake, and we attack tasks during the 90-minute blocks when our high-frequency brain activity is running on all cylinders, we’re going to be more attentive, more creative, and more productive. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Our brains use more energy than any other organs in our bodies, and when our brains are in that high-frequency mode, we’re using up that energy and freaking out the sodium/potassium levels. We NEED that 20-minute break, but we’re too distracted to take it. So the brain says, “hold my beer,” and slows us down into the low(er) brain wave frequencies, making us distracted, tired, foggy, and cranky.

If we take that 20-minute break, the sodium-potassium partnership ramps back up and we’re ready to tackle our tasks in a focused way. If we ignore that break, we’re going to experience a diminishing return on our time-and-focus investment.

TimeTimer Plus 120-Minute Timer

So, using a 90-minute focus block is similar to the Pomodoro Technique, except that you’ll trade your 25-minute work sessions for 90-minute blocks, and extend your 5- or 10-minute breaks to 20. 

That said, humans can be weird. Have you ever gotten hungry but instead of eating (which you knew you should do), you pushed yourself to keep going to the point that you pushed right through hunger and into queasiness? Those of us who get migraines know that when we first experience symptoms, we should take meds, hydrate, go to a dark room, etc., but many migraineurs will tell you that at least sometimes, they ignore the symptoms until it gets much worse. Again, humans are weird. 

Alarms may not be enough. You might want to set the sleep mode on your computer monitor — or borrow from the accountability and body doubling lessons I’ve recently shared. For example, ask a friend to call or swing by your desk to remind you to stop after 90 minutes, then go for a refreshing walk outside.

THE 52/17 METHOD

Perhaps you feel that somewhere between 25 minutes and 90 minutes is your sweet spot? There’s an option that looks random, but anecdotal research may persuade you otherwise. As Julia Gifford wrote in a piece for The Muse, she identified another work-to-break ratio workflow that might help you focus more productively.

Gifford’s team studied the top 10% most productive employees using the time-tracking and productivity app DeskTime — and learned these folks rocked at taking productive breaks. (If you read my Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel, the efficacy of these breaks won’t surprise you.) In particular they found that, on average, these super-productive employees were working for 52 minutes and then taking 17 minute breaks before getting back into the thick of it.

Giffords’ theory is that these highly-productive employees treated their 52-minute blocks as sprints, a popular concept in the corporate world, particularly in technology fields. In a sprint, you work with “intense purpose” and dedication to the task, whatever it is, and then (as with the 90-minute focus block) let the brain rest and recuperate (and NOT think about work, or at least that work) before the next big sprint.  

We aren’t robots. We just can’t sit and stare at a screen or make the widgets on a factory floor, or whatever, for 8-hours straight. Even robots can’t always work like robots!

“Repeating tasks causes cognitive boredom,” says Gifford, and whether we break it up with cake in the staff room (mmmm, cake) or a brisk walk or a convivial chat around the water cooler, we need a pause that refreshes.

So, the big drivers of 52/17 are purpose (backed, I’m sure, with a hearty dose of motivation), distraction-free worktime, and flow.

FLOWTIME

The Flowtime Technique, as developed by educator Zoe Read-Bivens (writing as Urgent Pigeon for Medium) in 2016, was designed to take a major drawback of The Pomodoro Technique — that it interrupted the flow state  — and use performance analysis to improve productivity.

All of the above options count on working for a set time (25 minutes, 45 minutes, 52 minutes, 90 minutes), and then stopping at a pre-ordained time as prompted by an alarm. As noted, for some people who are neurodivergent, have ADHD, or are otherwise sensitive to loud noises or task transitions, this can be counterproductive.

As with all of the other methods, Read-Bivens’ Flowtime approach insists on uninterrupted work sessions, but instead of stopping when an external force (like an alarm) prompts you, you work until you start to feel distracted, or mentally or physically fatigued. Then you log how long your focused work session lasted — how long you stayed “in flow.” 

  • Pick a specific task from your to-do list.
  • Write down your start time for each task.
  • Work with focus as long as you can.
  • Write down the distractions taking you out of your flow state as they happen.
  • When you’re tired or hungry or muddled, stop.
  • Write down your stop time, and then note the total elapsed time you focused on the task. Basically, it works like a time sheet; you can use an app like Taskade or create a spreadsheet with cells formatted for time, and create a formula to calculate the elapsed start/stop time.
  • Take a break for however long you want.
  • Lather, rinse, repeat.

Without scheduled breaks, you’ll be less likely to anxiously await the “end” and be more likely to get into flow and stay there. Flowtime gives you flexibility to have productive sessions personalized to your work style, and it pushes you to be really clear on what’s interrupting your focus.

I can also imagine that if you get to know your cycles of productivity, it can help you block out your work time around meetings and other obligations so that you have adequate space in your schedule for your work without friction, and lead you to schedule your high-effort tasks when you’ve got the most mental energy.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of admin associated with this method, requiring planning beforehand and performance analysis afterward. It’s adding more work to your work. If you’re the kind of athlete who tracks your steps and reps and miles and measures performance to better know yourself, Flowtime might be ideal. However, if giving yourself no stopping time isn’t enough of a trade for all this admin, or if not having a limit on your break time might lead you to procrastinate on getting back to work, it may not be for you.

I suspect Flowtime might be best used when your work is creative in nature. I’d never encourage my clients who are artists to paint for 25 minutes and then take a break, and novelists probably shouldn’t be zapped out of flow by an alarm. If your entire job is creative, perhaps in the arts, or you’re needing to do brainstorming sessions for ad campaigns or client pitches, Flowtime might make sense. But if you’ve got lots of distinct (and perhaps not-entirely-creative) tasks to complete, one of the strict time-based methods seems like a better fit.

What methods to you use to get your activation energy, circumvent procrastination, and get your work done? Which methods might you try in the future?

Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination

Posted on: April 24th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

 

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.

 

  • 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 X

PRACTICAL 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

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.

 

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 X

A 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?

Paper Doll Interviews Motivational Wordsmith Kara Cutruzzula

Posted on: March 6th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 13 Comments

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.

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 X

Letters 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.

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How did you come to publish it? Can you tell us about that writing experience? What did writing that book change in your life?

Do It For Yourself actually came from writing my newsletter! Madeline, an editor at Abrams, read my newsletter and reached out — the publisher wanted to release a motivational journal and she said she liked my writing style and point-of-view. At the time, I was working as a consultant at Money Magazine covering personal finance and careers, and I had also just gotten into the BMI Workshop.

But I’m a big believer that you can do almost anything if there’s a clear goal and end date. Your life organizes itself around these important pillars. So I wrote the journal in a few months, then it was published, oh, 18 months later! (Book publishing exists on its own timeline.)


Seeing people connect with the journal and hearing how it improved their own practices and projects has been incredibly rewarding. It was also nice to create something tangible and concrete, and beautiful enough that people want to display it on their nightstands (or their TikToks).

This past fall, you published Do It Today: An Encouragement Journal, the second in your “Start Before You’re Ready series. I reviewed and profiled it in-depth last month in Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources. It is freakin’ superb!

Can you tell us how this book came together? With its accent on motivation and productivity, I have to ask, did you write this for yourself? Do you follow the advice and follow the journal prompts yourself?

Do It For Yourself kind of took off — it’s currently in its ninth printing! — and my editor and I started talking about a possible follow-up. I asked myself, what might people need right now? And the answer was obvious: encouragement. Encouragement to try new things, pick up old projects, bounce back from rejection, and expand their web of connections.

So this journal features short essays and prompts along those lines — and yes, I wrote this entirely for myself because I needed all this encouragement, too. If you don’t connect with the work you’re putting out there, it’s unlikely it will resonate with other people. You have to believe it! I need constant reminders about all of these things and often turn back to the journal, hoping a prompt will thaw some frozen part of my brain or create a new idea. And it does.

You’re not a coach, but your books play a cheerleading, guiding role in helping your readers create and achieve. Aside from what you write in your newsletter, do you test your advice out on your friends and fellow creators? 

I’m lucky enough to have many brilliant friends and collaborators and we bounce ideas around all the time. From “can you read this email and let me know if it sounds OK” to “could you edit this draft” or “do you want to set a mutual deadline by Friday to accomplish that nagging task?” So all of this “advice” is actually a distillation of what I’ve witnessed and experienced around other people.

The writing experience is different for every author. In the lingo of NaNoWriMo, there are “plotters” (writers who outline) and “pantsers” (those who write by the seat of their pants). What are you? What’s your writing routine like? 

I do not like outlines. Let me rephrase that: I HATE OUTLINES. But I have convinced myself to try to outline – or reframe what an outline is in order to make it less painful. For my last two journals, I wrote a loose structure, basically a paragraph of what I wanted to cover in each chapter. I’m working on a new screenplay right now, and forced myself to write a bullet point list of scenes I wanted to include. Technically that’s an outline, but my brain still resists that word. Figuring out what I want to say usually comes from the writing itself. 

My routine is all over the place. Some days I’ll write nothing, other days I’ll write 10 pages! If a deadline is involved, I’ll get it done — it’s the old journalism training, knowing that the story had to be finished by a certain time or the page in the magazine would be left blank. You gotta get it done.

HOW WE ARE DOING IT TODAY

As I wrote in my review of Do It Today, my favorite part of the book was the section on “percolation,” or letting yourself have an idea on the back burner without having to constantly “produce,” non-stop, and noted that it reflected a lot of what I’d been writing about combating toxic productivity.

If you had to pick one journaling exercise/section from the book that you wish everyone would try, which would it be? 

Oooh, I love writing thank you notes to rejections! Failures and rejections are a part of life. But I try to remember that you get to choose how you respond. Rejection often stings, but I’ve found writing and sending off a thank you to whatever opportunity turned me down frees up a lot of mental space and allows me to move forward.

Writing and sending off a thank you to whatever opportunity turned me down frees up a lot of mental space and allows me to move forward. ~ @karacut Share on X

So if you didn’t get that residency/client/gig/opportunity, try not to simmer in the angst for too long. Consider why you were so drawn to it in the first place and use it as an arrow to move forward. Write a little thank you and get ready to start the next big thing.

What have readers been telling you is their favorite exercise/section?

Chapter two is called Start Before You’re Ready, and that idea seems to resonate with readers. Asking yourself, “What is the next smallest step I can take?” and then “How long will it actually take to complete?” changes your perspective. You’re getting honest!

So instead of saying “I need to reorganize my entire office,” I might ask myself, “Which area is giving me the most angst right now?” and “How long will it actually take to go through it?” The same idea holds true for our work and creative projects. Get honest with yourself about time estimates; it’s much less intimidating than a scary, open-ended task.

Last summer, as part of the launch of the Do It Today journal, you started the Do It Today podcast, where you interview people about how they are spending their days while they’re deep into creation mode or working on solving a problem. As you’re gearing up for season two, will you describe what this podcast experience meant to you? 

For most of last year, I felt like I was floundering. Truly. When you’re in charge of structuring your days, the freedom is nice but also overwhelming.

I wanted to know: How do other people do it? What does another person’s day look like? How do they overcome obstacles? How do they do their best work? So I impulsively started a podcast, mostly as an excuse to ask people I admire slightly invasive questions about their work and creative processes. Our conversations were incredibly encouraging, and I can happily say this year I’m in a much better daily groove, thanks in part to hearing about other people’s strategies. 

I’m gearing up to release next season, featuring a wonderful interview with you Julie, and also a Broadway producer, a personal finance expert, an author and keynote speaker, and an A-list screenwriter. There are so many common threads and themes between how people work — it’s extraordinary to see.

THE CURTAIN CALL

What else should Paper Doll readers know about you, your life, your take on motivation, creativity, and musical theater? What’s on the highlight reel of your life these days?

It’s never too late to try something new!!! That deserves three exclamation points.

I’m surrounded by people making big career pivots, adopting new skills, moving around the world, and also doing the less glamorous and equally hard work of showing up for their most meaningful work day after day. You can do it, too. I’m cheering you on! (That might be my most-used slogan.) 

My highlight reel right now consists of seeing lots of theater with my husband Colin (we just got married in December!) and taking winter naps with our rescue cat, Lula. And leaning into work and activities I actually enjoy. Everything else either gets paused or cleaned out. Life’s too short.

Before we wrap things up, tell us what’s next for Kara Cutruzzula, multipotentialite and musical maven?

My third book, Do It (or Don’t): A Boundary-Creating Journal is coming out September 12, 2023 and is now available for pre-order! Get ready to do a deep dive into setting boundaries for your projects, creativity, and relationships. (This is an area I wanted to work on myself, so figured we could all work on it together!)

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This year I’m developing the musical and also turning back to screenwriting and playwriting, and have some big goals attached to those mediums. I’m also having fun connecting with people through my newsletter.

Most of all, I’m embracing empty space. It’s kind of like leaving one drawer in the closet completely free, and not believing you have to fill it up right now. I’m leaving a little space in my calendar for what is going to light me up in the future — whether that’s tomorrow or two months from now.

And that is music to a professional organizer’s ears.

Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit

Posted on: February 27th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

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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I love Hazel’s blog, because she always offers practical yet warm insights. Earlier this month, she came up with an idea for a mindset shift for conquering procrastination, and it really got me thinking.

Usually, we approach procrastination from a practical perspective. For example, we look at how to use planning and scheduling, particularly time-blocking, to set expectations. Social science research, for example, has found that making a voting plan for when and where you will vote and how you will get there makes it more likely that you will cast a ballot. 

We also look at tactical methods for getting ourselves into position to complete a task, such as using the Pomodoro Method, or enlisting accountability, as we discussed recently in Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity and Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity.

Hazel, however, piqued my interest in suggesting something I hadn’t seen before in her post entitled Think of Your Big Project as a New Hobby. Now, I don’t want to steal Hazel’s thunder, so you should read her post in its entirety. But the basic concept is that when you find yourself procrastinating on a big project — as I recently found myself doing — a shift in mindset could ramp up your enthusiasm and make the work more appealing.

Hazel notes that the more often you do something, the easier it gets. Typically, we choose to do something repeatedly — like a hobby — because it’s fun. So, Hazel suggests approaching a project, particularly one about which you’re procrastinating, as if you were embracing a new hobby.

She notes that new hobbies usually require the acquisition of new skills and new information — just like projects do — and setting aside time to work on them. Hazel even offers a list of practical solutions (and even pointed people back to my body doubling posts — neato!) for hobby-fying a project. 

If we perceive something as drudge work, we’re more likely to procrastinate on it, not set aside time to do it, and think about it as something to be avoided. We don’t get particularly excited about doing expense reports or preparing our taxes. But if we reframe a project and consider it as something that benefits us, or the people we love, or our community, if we re-set our expectations regarding how to approach something not-that-fun, our avoidance might fade away to nothing.

I think Hazel was right on the money. Over the last month, I’ve had a number of projects that were out of the ordinary for me, and one in particular involved employing technological skills that aren’t in my wheelhouse. I had to create a video (of which, more later), and as the days ticked down, I remembered my misery at completing the project last year, even though I was excited about the content. Shockingly, the video editing skills I learned in 1989-1990 in my graduate program in television production and management have very little application in 2023!

This year, I was eager to do the research and prepare my presentation, but anticipating the video production and editing was wearing me down. However, with Hazel’s blog post in mind, I started exploring ways to learn about new approaches with what Zen practitioners call, shoshin or Beginner’s Mind. It’s supposed to encourage eagerness, dispel anxiety and frustration, and yes, make procrastination less likely.

I hate being a beginner, but I psyched myself into beginnerhood for the “hobby” of making a visually-appealing, non-talking-head video. The same day I read Hazel’s post, I spoke with my accountability partner and all-around cool kitten, Dr. Melissa Gratias (whom I’ve also interviewed on the blog, in Paper Doll Interviews Melissa Gratias, Author of Seraphina Does Everything!).

Melissa had some amazing ideas that let me drop-kick PowerPoint and edit video content directly in Canva, the same platform I use to make the blog post banners at the top of every Paper Doll post. (Melissa also came to my aid every time I was stymied by an aspect of Canva that Googling didn’t solve.)

Hazel may not have realized she was channeling a key idea in Zen Buddhism, but by inspiring me to transform a hyperventilation-inducing project into one that was more hobby-like, she changed my entire outlook. I enjoy researching. I love learning new concepts. I particularly like developing skills that I can make systematic so they’re easier and easier as I do them more often. Hobbies for the win! 

If you’re having trouble getting your mojo going on a project (or can envision that happening in the future), give the ideas in Hazel’s post a try.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BACKUP

If you’ve read the Paper Doll blog for a while, you’ve probably seen me promote the importance of backup. Usually, I’m touting computer backup, such as in Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan.

But I’ve also looked at backing up from the perspective of human backup, such as in Cross-Training for Families: Organize for All Eventualities. Those two posts reflect both a plan for backing up, and having a backup plan for life.

However, last week I heard about a different concept for backing up that’s worth discussing. At the start of the year, in Paper Doll’s 23 Ideas for a More Organized & Productive 2023, I mentioned that I was going to be doing Laura Vanderkam‘s annual 168 Hours Time Tracking Challenge. I enjoyed it so much that I also signed up for her Tranquility by Tuesday Challenge based on her book, Tranquility By Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. (I already knew I’d like it because she previewed the book at the 2022 Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. See below)

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For each week of the challenge, Vanderkam sends emails encouraging participants to put one of her nine lessons into practice. Last week was Lesson #5: Create a Backup Slot. Here, Vanderkam talked about how even the best of intentions are not enough when we try to create a schedule that allows us to be productive and accomplish all of the things that are important to us. Most tellingly, she wrote:

I have learned that anyone can make a perfect schedule. True time management masters make a resilient schedule.

Yes! Resilience is essential! A schedule is a map of our time. With a road map, sometimes there’s a crash up ahead, or a road is washed out, or someone gets car sick. If we want to accomplish what’s important to us, we have to be prepare for unanticipated calamities.

To this end, Vanderkam advises that we not fill our schedules from morning to night (of course!) but instead designate more times in our schedules than we plan to use.

Borrowing from my cross-training approach for human backup, I might schedule Monday afternoons for writing, but cross-train Saturday so it knows how to handle the task. (OK, we’re anthropomorphizing the days of the week. Just go with it.) You might plan to do your bookkeeping on Wednesday mornings, but if an all-hands meeting gets called or you have to pick up a sick kid from school, and your Wednesday morning blows up, Thursday needs to step in as backup.

Rather than searching your schedule for places where you can either cancel something or squeeze in one more task, if you already have backup slots scheduled, you’re prepared in the eventuality of your life falling tush-over-teakettle.

Rather than searching your schedule to cancel something or squeezing in one more task, if you already have backup slots, you're prepared for when your life falls tush-over-teakettle. Share on X

Vanderkam’s approach is wise but too rarely practiced. We see blank spots in our calendars and jump to fill them, to do more, to accomplish more, to achieve more. This can be aspirational, or it can be stressful. If the latter, harken back to my posts on toxic productivity from last summer:

If the idea of too much empty space on your schedule makes you nervous, try just one or two slots, maybe an hour or ninety minutes, on Thursday or Friday, where you’ll be the most likely to catch up on tasks that got displaced from earlier in the week. Think about designating themed slots, like for marketing or accounting or personal development. That way, if you get to your backup slot and don’t need it, you can use it either for something within that theme, or for something fun and rejuvenating. 

If you find that you’re drop-kicking things that matter to you because something blew up your schedule, adding backup slots could help you master your time and life. And Vanderkam asks, “If life went perfectly, what would you use your open time for?”

Good question. After all, why are you doing all this work in the first place?

THE WORK IS NOT ENOUGH

I read a lot of email newsletters. (Seriously. It may be an addiction.) So, to remember to read blog posts and newsletters of people whose work I’m not regularly seeing on social media, I use an RSS feed. My preferred platform is Feedly, and I can segment the blogs I read by category like entertainment, finances, productivity, tech, etc. and do a deep dive into all the posts I’ve missed over a week or month, keeping my inbox less crowded.

One of the authors I read is Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study. The essay that caught my eye was a fairly personal one, The Work Is Not Enough. (Note, there is one not-safe-for-work vocabulary word in the essay. Please do not click through if you are likely to be offended.)

Petersen’s post dovetailed with Vanderkam’s lesson, because, starting a few weeks ago, her life and schedule sort of blew up. Her partner was ill, her doggie was sick, it’s tax season, and there were work kerfuffles. Each thing caused the dominoes to fall:

Losing a day, an hour, an afternoon — if that was time used to put things in place to keep them rolling through the week, and that time is lost, then you find yourself in a 17-task pile-up. … and pretty soon you’re in laundry apocalypse, and the only thing that’s going to save you is […] the next weekend.

Can’t we all relate?

Petersen notes that all of the tasks, in their own version of a sort of life laundry apocalypse, could have been handled individually, but together, her mind was whirling trying to figure out which enjoyable things she should have culled to avoid the apocalypse, or could cull in the coming days to get back on track. But she recognized, 

I don’t need to stop taking care of my friends’ kids, or stop running, or stop having dogs, or stop skiing in order to make this all [waves hands wildly] fall into place. I just need to be vigilant about not taking on more work than I can reconcile with the rest of my life. The work matters; the work is important; the work is wonderful. But the work is not enough.

Petersen is recognizing that often, when we have to choose what to toss from our busy schedules to get back on track, we throw ourselves overboard. 

For most of us, the thing that’s easiest to jettison is the thing that’s most precious to you — because letting it go ostensibly affects you and you alone. A hobby, a personal goal, a book club, a walk, a nap, all so readily sacrificed. But those are the things that allow us to stand up straight as we carry the weight of everyday annoyances and tasks. They are the counter-balance. They are essential. We cannot mistake the ease with they can be put down with disposability.

Wow. Seriously, wow. I wish I’d had this essay to share back when I wrote the toxic productivity series, and I’m glad I can share Petersen’s wisdom here. Yes, we should develop our skills to manage our time and tasks well, but let’s not do it at the risk of what makes our lives worth living — our relationships, our joys, or our humanity.

THE 2023 TASK MANAGEMENT AND TIME BLOCKING VIRTUAL SUMMIT

For the fourth year in a row, I’m participating in Francis Wade‘s Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. Francis is a fellow Cornell University alum — we actually lived in the same international dorm — founder of 2Time Labs in Jamaica, and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity: How To Protect Your Mind As Time Demands Increase.

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In last year’s preview to the 2022 summit, I covered a lot of the reasons behind productivity struggles in Struggling To Get Things Done? Paper Doll’s Advice & The Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2022, from external struggles like lack of structure and technology overwhelm to personal challenges and tool/user mismatches.

I recapped the gems from experts at the summit in Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022. So, if you missed all that, basically you’ve got a tons of wisdom (theirs, as well as mine) to review.

This year’s theme absolutely delights me: One-Size-Doesn’t-Fit-All. Now what? If you ever read my post, The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing, you know how how I feel about the inadequacy of one-size-fits-all approaches to organizing and productivity.

My own presentation by pre-recorded video (about which you’ve now heard) is Paper Shame — Embracing Analog Productivity Solutions in an Increasingly Digital World. (Pssst: Melissa Gratias helped inspire the title!) I’ll also be a panelist on Saturday afternoon (because Francis has his wife/co-founder Dale know I’m not a morning person). The topic? “Paper vs. Digital.”

That panel will be moderated by friend-of-the-blog and productivity dude extraordinaire Ray Sidney-Smith. We’ll be joined by Artificial Intelligence expert, Misha Maksin.  

Each year, the summit is refined and improved. This year, 27+ experts are participating, and I’m excited that I know so many of them!

On each of the three days of the summit, attendees get 24-hour access to a selection of video recordings on topics with titles like:

  • Handling Multiple Projects with Ease: How To Remove the Friction and Handle the Details
  • Productivity and Neurodiversity: Should I Fit in Productivity’s World or the Other Way Around?
  • Mastering Productivity with Mindfulness in 5 Steps
  • Build Without Burnout: Setting a Schedule for Your Business and 9-5
  • What’s Really Driving Your Distractions?
  • From Micro to Macro: How to Make Time Blocking Work for You
  • 3 Techniques to Level Up Your Time Blocking
  • Get a Game Plan: Three Steps to Designing Your Winning Week
  • Why You Aren’t Achieving Your Goals: Breaking the Cookie Cutter Approach to Goal Setting
  • Your Ultimate Productivity Tool: You Already Have It and It’s Not Paper or Digital

And that’s barely a third of the video options this year!

On Friday, the live portion of the TMTB Virtual Summit begins with Francis opening the event, followed by a full day of live panels and interviews. Another slew of video presentations will also be released.

I’m looking forward to Dr. Frank Buck interviewing his sort-of namesake, Dave Buck, as well as a live episode of The Productivitycast, with the aforementioned Ray, Augusto Pinaud, Art Gelwicks, and Francis. (Read more about this gang in Paper Doll Picks: Organizing and Productivity Podcasts.) I’ve been a guest on that podcast many times, and am sure it’ll be a hoot.

I’m also really excited about the panel discussion, “How Does Time Management Work Across Cultures and Countries?” and the interview with Mike Vardy about The Productivity Diet. 

On Saturday, there will be more video presentations released (including mine!) as well as another spate of live interviews and panels. (You’ll enjoy everything, but if you want to see my panel, it’s from 1:45 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Saturday.)

There are also oodles of bonus offers and “swag bag” items.

The whole event takes place on a very cool interactive platform called Airmeet, allowing us to interact at digital “tables” in a sort of cloud-based ballroom and attend Zoom-like lecture rooms for official events. As with previous summits, there’s time for networking with attendees and these great speakers and geeking out on productivity.

When you register for a free e-ticket to the event, you get 24-hour access to each “chunk” of videos, plus all of the live interviews, panels, and networking events in the Airmeet Lounge. 

Again, attendance is free, but you’ll have to carve out time in your schedule to watch the videos — it helps that Thursday is a video-only day! — and attend the live events, which run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

If you want more time to absorb everything, you can purchase an All-Access Pass, which is basically a smörgåsbord of summit offerings and bonus extras, including:

  • recordings of all of the pre-recorded video presentations (including mine!)
  • recordings of all of the live panels, interviews, and events
  • an audio or PDF copy of Francis’ book
  • a 50% discount on Francis’s My Time Design Rapid Assessment program

(Be sure to pay attention to the resulting screen post-purchase so you know how to access your goodies.)

The full price for the All-Access pass is $249. But because I love you, I’ve got a super-nifty coupon link good up until the start of the summit that takes the price down to $99! 

What project might you approach as if it were a hobby?

Where can you create a backup slot in your schedule?

How will you protect the elements of your schedule that give your life meaning?

Will I see you at the 2023 Task Management and Time Blocking Summit?

Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity

Posted on: February 20th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

In honor of Presidents’ Day, I thought it might be fun to look at some of the values various US presidents have embraced to help them not only get more things done, but get more of the right things done.

Be assured, this is completely apolitical content. Additionally, let’s agree that we’re all aware of the complicated lives and backgrounds of presidents (particularly those born prior to the 20th century); none of this should be taken as full-on endorsements of them as men (few of whom would compare entirely favorably with Mr. Rogers), but only as people who endeavored to accomplish much.

And I give you a Presidents’ Day guarantee: you will not be encouraged to purchase a mattress anywhere within the text of this post. (That said, the vast majority of presidents who had something to say about productivity spoke robustly on the importance of sleep!)

PUNCTUALITY

People who are on time are dependable. If you arrive on time (or a little early), then those you are meeting need never fear that they are in the wrong place, that they are late, that you met with some misfortune, or that you forgot them.

Being somewhere on time shows respect for the value of other people’s time. It proves that you don’t consider what you were doing beforehand (or whatever made you late) to be more important that the activities of the person you are meeting.

But from a productivity standpoint, punctuality is efficient. If you’re on time, and if everyone else is on time, then you can stick to the agenda without apologies, hurt feelings, or distractions due to late arrivals or missed information.

George Washington was a stickler for punctuality. As a teenager, he carefully read and took notes on more than 100 rules about civility put together by 16th-century Jesuit priests. From there, Washington developed his Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. 

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While an inordinate number of these would fall under Miss Manners-type advice, like keeping your nails clean and not taking off your clothes in front of company, one particular guiding principle caught my eye.

82. Undertake not what you cannot Perform but be Careful to keep your Promise.

That includes showing up when you said you would.

I’ve heard half a dozen stories about Washington’s keenness for punctuality. Allegedly, he dined daily at 4 o’clock; when he invited senators or representatives to dine with him, if they arrived late, they found the president midway through finishing his meal or even having completed it. “We are punctual here. My cook never asks whether the company has arrived, but whether the hour has come.”

By 21st-century standards, this may seem inflexible. After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” But the word “foolish” carries a lot of weight here. Habit and ritual have value, and they help presidents and fourth-graders alike to get more done.

Once, Washington’s secretary kept POTUS #1 cooling his heels. The secretary blamed a malfunctioning watch for his delayed arrival. Displeased, Washington replied, “Then you must get another watch, or I another secretary.”

Diplomatic, at least on these occasions, Washington was not. But hewing to strict rules and not letting anyone else mess with his temporal boundaries meant he could accomplish more of what he had planned.

Be assured, I understand that we all have different obligations. A doctor may be running late because a patient earlier in the day had a medical emergency. (Having once been that medical emergency, I am much more sympathetic in this regard.) The person meeting you may lack the (financial and human) resources you have, so when a caregiver or babysitter cancels, or transportation breaks down (or public transportation runs late), it’s important to have some empathy.

And if someone is chronically late (and you’re sure it’s not some kind of narcissistic power play), it may be due to neurological challenges related to any of a variety of executive function disorders or ADHD. Yes, it’s frustrating. And if that chronically late person is you, well, we know it’s frustrating for you, as well. But there’s hope.

Punctuality is often seen as a static personal characteristic rather than a skill set, but you can improve. For example:

  • Know how long it actually takes to accomplish your most common tasks. Be realistic.
  • Do not over-schedule yourself. Ever brain needs time to refresh and re-set. 
  • Schedule buffer time, recuperative time, and travel time. If you don’t schedule time to transition between tasks and/or locations, you are likely to fall further behind. In middle and high school, we called it “passing time,” as you had to pass from classroom to classroom. Do not engage in the magical thinking that you can start one meeting or appointment at the same time you are ending another one, even when video conferencing. Try the therapy model of 50-minute hours when scheduling Zooms.
  • Don’t depend on willpower. Your lateness is likely not because of laziness but attempting to do “just one more thing.” Curbing that instinct will take effort and support.
  • Set alarms. When the time is up, the time is up. For some people, it can be emotionally uncomfortable to stop and transition, but consider the emotional discomfort both you and the other person will experience if you are late.
  • Accept/request help from others to move you along. 
Schedule buffer time, recuperative time, and travel time. If you don't schedule time to transition between tasks and/or locations, you are likely to fall further behind. Share on X

If all you remember of Washington is false teeth and cherry trees, you might enjoy reading You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe. It’s less worshipful than other biographies (or Christopher Jackson’s portray of General Washington in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), but it’s compelling reading.

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BACKUPS, OPEN TABS, AND SWIVEL CHAIRS

Whatever one might say about Thomas Jefferson (good, bad, or … let’s be real, it’s never indifferent), there’s no getting around the fact that the guy loved his gadgets for getting things done.

Jefferson wrote a lot of letters; historians estimate that he sent approximately 20,000 letters over the years to friends, family members, and colleagues, not even counting official diplomatic or presidential correspondence. (He also wrote some nasty poison-pen newspaper editorials under false names.)

Nowadays, to keep track of our email trail, we might thread the conversations, or sort by sender, or develop complex archiving and tagging systems. Thomas Jefferson made use of a polygraph.

No, not that kind of polygraph. This isn’t an episode of Law & Order: Monticello.

Annotated engraving of Hawkin’s Polygraph from Rees’s Cyclopædia, ca. 1820

Over the years, Jefferson acquired increasingly refined versions of a polygraph device that allowed creation of simultaneous copies of the letters he wrote — as he moved the pen, another pen, on another sheet of paper, wrote in parallel. He needn’t be attended by a secretary, nor did he have to worry about the security and privacy of his letters. Thomas Jefferson made use of a low-labor method of backup.

Jefferson also understood that — in an era before Google, 2-day delivery, or Boolean Search — having quick access to his resources helped him research and write more quickly. He oversaw the creation of a revolving bookstand, modeled on a sheet music stand, that allowed him to access any five books at once with a simple spin. You can even purchase a table-top model from the Monticello store.

While I’m loathe to promote multitasking, unlike our modern browsers, at least his number of open tabs was limited to five!

And that’s not the only way he set his productivity in motion — Jefferson invented (some say “refined”) the swivel chair! While drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson used the popular and oh-so-British Windsor chair. (You’d recognize one immediately — a wooden seat with four legs attached below and a bunch of wooden spindles slotted into the seat from above form the back of the chair.) 

Jefferson Swivel Chair

The traditional Windsor chair was too confining. Jefferson added an iron spindle between the top and bottom halves of the seat, enabling the chair to rotate on doohickeys he repurposed from window sash pulleys! Later, he replaced the original legs of the chair with bamboo ones and added a writing desk. Considering the writing desks are ubiquitous in college classrooms worldwide, this was quite a special invention.

For what it’s worth, productivity-wise, Thomas Jefferson was also a proponent of rising early, stating, “Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.” While Paper Doll doesn’t personally abide by the notion of The 5 a.m. Miracle, Jefferson’s consistency in his schedule — rising early, hosting a hearty breakfast for his guests, and spending the morning writing letters to get his creative juices flowing before working on other projects — reflects the same kind of time blocking that we know helps people build successful productivity habits.

How can you put Jeffersonian wisdom to work?

  • Back up everything so you always have a safeguarded copy. For tips, look at Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan.
  • Experiment with ways to keep your resources front-and-center. That doesn’t mean letting your mess pile up. Earmark part of a shelf next to your desk for resources supporting projects you’re working on right now. For digital resources, embrace technology that makes your resources easily searchable, like Evernote.
  • Develop consistency in your own schedule by creating blocks to ensure there’s ample time to accomplish what you most value.

EFFICIENCY VS. EFFECTIVENESS

If his diaries are any indication, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, really understood the paradoxical nature of how some people, although working very hard, often fail to achieve their goals.

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Before he was even president, John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State, and of that period of this life, he said with dismay,

Every day starts new game to me, upon the field of my duties; but the hurry of the hour leaves me no time for the pursuit of it, and at the close of my Career I shall merely have gone helter skelter through the current business of the Office, and leave no permanent trace of my ever having been in it behind.

He saw that without foresight and planning, without identifying the most worthy pursuits, he would be busy without being productive.

Even in John Quincy Adams’ early years, he bemoaned,

I find it easy to engage my attention in scientific pursuits of almost any kind, but difficult to guard against two abuses — the one of being insensibly drawn from one to another, as I now have from Chronology to Astronomy and from Astronomy to Logarithms — the other of misapplying time, which is essential to the business of life; public and private. 

Long before we talked about “going down the rabbit hole” as we surfed the internet, linking from article to article, or followed social media links hither and yon, JQA recognized how easily time can control us if we don’t seek to control it, or at least our use of it.

Vintage Alarm Clock (Public Domain)

He admonished that we should wisely plan our time to include what is necessary for our work, appealing for our personal interest, and meaningful for our personal and professional growth. To that end, you might:

  • Identify what are your highest priorities (whether they are externally-driven, like a paycheck or attention from prospective clients, or internally-driven, like gaining a deeper understanding of a subject or investing in your physical health).
  • Time-block for the categories of your life/work so nothing vital will fall through the cracks.
  • Take note of your bad habits and work on improving your good ones to give yourself more focus on those higher priorities. Check Paper Doll Helps You Find Your Ideal Analog Habit Tracker to see ways to do that.
  • Set alarms or plan catch-up calls, or use accountability methods to make sure you’ve maintained focus and haven’t strayed. For useful guidelines:

Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity

Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity

Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek

PLANNING AND PREPARATION 

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

This is a phenomenal quote, portraying the importance of facing every problem by focusing on planning, preparation, and identifying the right resources.

Unfortunately, just as with Washington’s cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln never actually made this statement. It was, apparently, an old loggers’ saying, fitting in with folksy wisdom like “measure twice and cut once.” Although it’s often been erroneously ascribed to Lincoln, the quote first appeared in an agricultural education textbook in the 1950s and the first association with Lincoln came in 1960, ninety-five years after his fateful night at the theater.

And you may have heard the so-called quote as minutes instead of hours. As a 21st-century suburbanite, I’ve no idea how long it should take to chop down a tree. But even though we have no reason to believe Lincoln said this, we would not be surprised that he might agree with it. Nor do I imagine he’d take umbrage with a quote from a similar 1901 comment in “The Times and Young Men” by Josiah Strong:

He will see that the necessary time spent in preparation for his life-work is better spent than as if he had rushed into it ill-prepared. Time spent in sharpening the axe may well be spared from swinging it.

Honest Abe didn’t ignore concepts of time and project management. In his first inaugural address (in 1861), he said, 

Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.

This was not a call for procrastination. Certainly, he was talking about caution on the precipice of Civil War. But the lessons from both the real quote and the false one are the same. We must be cautious and consider our situation. So:

I should note, Lincoln is also alleged (probably erroneously) to have said, “The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.”

This notion is one we should embrace as we seek to be more productive. We don’t need to be fearful, overwhelmed, or cowed by what is coming. We have time to plan.

The future isn’t a cartoon anvil or speeding train, but a knock on the door each morning. If we schedule time to work on something a little bit every day, whether it’s a 10th grade Social Studies report or a presentation for work, Pomodoro-by-Pomodoro, bit-by-bit, we can achieve our goals.

PRIORITIZING

Often, the problem isn’t that we aren’t getting things done, but that we’re not getting the right things done. This happens when we treat every sensory input as urgent and important, even though it might be only one or the other — or neither.

Before Dwight D. Eisenhower became the 34th president, he was a 5-star general in the United States Army. (Trivia note: only 5 people have ever held this rank, which has now been eliminated. But they didn’t become presidents, so you won’t be tested on their names today.) We can be fairly sure this was a guy who needed to manage his time well.

In a 1961 address after he left office, Eisenhower said, 

Who can define for us with accuracy the difference between the long and short term! Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.

He also reflected these thoughts in his first presidential term when he quoted a university president (whose name has been lost to history), saying,

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

While this may have (mostly) been true for the university president, it was almost assuredly not quite that simple for Ike. However, by championing evaluation all of those sensory inputs before taking action, Eisenhower inspired many, including Stephen Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame.

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Covey took Eisenhower’s wisdom and distilled it into an easily-understood, accessible chart to help you:

  • pause and consider the value of a task or situation
  • avoid giving urgency a leg-up on importance
  • drop-kick the fluff and time-wasters from your life, habits, and schedule, and
  • help clear your mind so you can focus on your real priorities

Covey gave Eisenhower the credit. Unlike the Lincoln quote, it’s not made up from whole cloth, but the Eisenhower Decision Matrix (also known variably as the The Urgency-Importance Matrix, The Eisenhower Method, yadda yadda) is really the work of Covey.  

Importance is something that has a high degree of value in terms of whether it helps you achieve your goals, particularly long-term. Note: some things are important but not important enough for you to do them!

Urgency refers to the speed at which it must be dealt with to avoid unfortunate circumstances. True urgency means fire, flood, smoke, blood, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Things aren’t urgent just because someone is yelling.

True urgency means fire, flood, smoke, blood, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Things aren't urgent just because someone is yelling. Share on X
  • Urgent and important tasks will have a high impact on the achievability of your goals and must be competed with alacrity. They have quickly-approaching deadlines. Do them!
  • Important but not urgent tasks require you to stop — calm down — and start making decisions. Schedule when you can do the task in the future, assuming it’s an important task that you can’t comfortably delegate. Break the task into smaller component elements to make it easier.
  • Urgent but unimportant tasks may still need to be completed, but they may not need to be completed by you. The solution can involve anything from outsourcing a task for pay or delegating to an employee, a child, or laterally (to your spouse or co-worker, though you’ll want to call it something that sounds less bossy).
  • Neither important nor urgent tasks might be anything from social media (when it’s not part of your job) to keeping up with certain trends. Not everyone has to know the latest TikTok dance or what’s going on with AI. 

Of course, as Eisenhower would have understood, the world is in flux. Getting your taxes completed is important (for legal and financial reasons), but is not particularly urgent in July. By April 14th, the urgency is at its pinnacle. Having to use the rest room is urgent, and assuming you do so today, in 2033 you won’t likely reflect on that bathroom visit as important.

The number 10 can be a highly useful way of determining something’s importance. Ask yourself:

  • Will this matter in 10 minutes?
  • Will this matter in 10 days?
  • Will this matter in 10 years?

The Zoom call that seems so important may long be forgotten a month from now, but the dinner with your friend or promised tea party with your child that you blew off to attend it? That could have a long-lasting impact.

The Eisenhower (By Way of Steven Covey) Decision Matrix gives you a framework for evaluating the decisions you make about the way you spend your time and attention. But it’s only a framework. Only you know what you truly value. You are the President of your future.

This post was originally written for Presidents’ Day 2023. Although a few sentences have been tweaked, the timeless advice remains the same.

In these contentious times, I tried to be as ideologically balanced as possible, picking presidents from the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

I selected one Democrat (Obama), one Republican (Eisenhower), one Democratic-Republican (Jefferson), one unaffiliated president (Washington), and two presidents affiliated with multiple parties. Abraham Lincoln was Republican and re-elected as a National Union candidate, while John Quincy Adams was, at various times, a Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, Anti-Masonic, and Whig.

This covers all political parties with which elected presidents were affiliated. 

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