the toa organizing awards

As I mentioned in a May post, many works influenced my current approach toward keeping organized. I thought it over briefly, came up with a list of examples, and decided (because why not) that the time was right for another pointless series of awards.

The TOA Organizing Awards

For helping me understand the possibilities of being organized…

High-Output Management by Andy Grove

Grove writes that the act of gathering and distributing information is among the manager’s most important functions. Those who are better organized with their time are able to spend more time gathering information. Therefore, anyone who wishes to lead effectively must constantly become better at time management.

For helping me understand how much time I should spend writing…

Daily Rituals by Mason Currey

As I highlighted in my thoughts about Ben Franklin, Daily Rituals proved critical in defining the appropriate length of time for work. After I read about the many creators highlighted in this book, I realized that most artists do not get more than four hours of good work done in a given day. Further, I noticed how most artists worked in one continuous block of time. I applied the lesson and blocked off the first three to four hours of my day for writing.

…and work, too, I suppose…

I also extended this idea to the workplace. I aimed to schedule four hours of real work each day. What was real work? For me, real work generally meant creative tasks like writing code, running job interviews, or teaching a skill.

Once I’d scheduled ‘real work’ into my calendar, I filled in the rest of my time with the brainless admin every employee must do to help run an organization (scheduling meetings, researching contracts, putting my handwritten notes into an electronic format, and so on).

For helping me sort email…

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

As I wrote about in my review for this book, Ferriss’s explanation of ‘batching’ email tasks together helped me a great deal when I was navigating my first inbox crisis. I’ve continued using this principle to group similar tasks together and cut down on the time I’ve spent repeating myself via identical email responses.

…and for helping me send it…

Tim Harford - 'Ten Email Commandments' (specifically, point #3)

Harford’s article extended Ferriss’s logic a step further by ‘batching’ emails into these four general actions. Here’s the way I use the concepts today:

-If I can throw it out, I delete it
-If it takes less than a minute to do everything the email requires, I do it
-If someone else can do it for me, I delegate it
-If I need more time or information to complete it, I defer it

Harford’s article was not the first time I’ve heard about this method. However, for some reason it was the first time I read about it and thought I should give it a try.

For teaching me how to safely put things off for later…

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I remember two very good ideas from Rubin’s book. First, she recommends doing any organizing task that would take less than one minute. Her ‘one-minute rule’ is really helpful for mental clutter – by completing all the little tasks as they come up, I never leave home thinking about a long list of things I’ll need to do when I get back. (This rule is very similar to the ‘DO’ rule for email I mentioned earlier – same principle.)

The second idea was to always have an empty storage area (her specific idea was a shelf). This storage space is for leaving anything with obvious value that does not have a proper home yet. In other words, it should only be used as storage space during emergencies (to the extent that storage can ever be described as an ‘emergency’) and left empty at all other times. This rule is really helpful for visual clutter – by ‘quarantining’ all the unsorted items into a defined area, the rest of the space remains in its generally well-organized state.

For teaching me how to deal with paper clutter…

Tim Harford (again) - "There's magic in mess" (go to the first reference to Yukio Noguchi)

I return to my favorite economist for his insights into paper clutter. His recommendation is to forget about filing systems, folders, or binders – instead, he suggests making a pile on your desk of all incoming paper that has no obvious storage place. If you end up repeatedly going into the pile for the item, perhaps it should go into its own space. But if you go six months without touching the item, it probably means it can be safely thrown out.

I’ve been trying a modified concept at home by using an empty case of beer as my catch-all box for any paper I’m not sure of. I go through the bottom half of it when it fills up and I make a decision about each item. Anything I go into the box for in the meantime gets permanently removed and put into its own defined storage space.

For clarifying the difference between a to-do list and a calendar…

'Ditch the To Do List' by Jemar Tisby

This article points out the great lie of the ‘to-do’ list, at least in terms of being organized with time. The organized person uses a calendar and fills it – the disorganized person has an endless to-do list onto which tasks, goals, and obligations disappear forever.

A good example of this idea ties back to my email idea above. To ‘defer’ an email for later really means scheduling time to answer it, not just leaving it in the inbox indefinitely. In fact, email strikes me as a good place to start for those wondering about how to implement this tactic because for most people email quickly turns into a ‘to-do’ list anyone with your email address can indiscriminately add to.

For showing me how to organize long blog posts…

Lost In Translation by Ella Frances Sanders

Just kidding, reader. I haven’t learned how to do this yet. That word bracket was something else though, was it not?

Anyway, I think this is enough for today, organized reader. I have one more book to highlight and I think it is safe to call it the big winner in this unofficial ‘TOA Organizing Awards’ series. Look for this final post sometime soon.

Until then,

Tim

life changing books: the 4-hr workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (Spring 2013)

I initially read this book back when I was experiencing work overload for the first time. What had been a fairly mundane 9-5 routine was slowly expanding into a 730am - 545pm workday. I made my manager aware of the problem and he responded nobly by becoming unusually difficult to reach. Clearly, my inflated hours were the new norm and I wasn’t going to get much outside help to reverse the trend. If the strain was going to ease anytime soon, it would require some ingenuity with how I approached my work.

The application of Ferris's 'batching' strategy was the big breakthrough for me. Batching means doing similar tasks together so that setup steps are not repeated. Or, to put it another way, batching eliminated the time used when switching from one task to the other. The 4-Hour Workweek used workplace email as one of its examples for how batching worked in the real world. This was convenient for me because my inbox was quickly becoming my most time consuming problem (1).

The way I applied batching to email required that I change my decision criteria for responding. Instead of replying to an email when I was ready to reply, I started replying when waiting was no longer a reasonable option. In the context of my role and the company I worked for, this meant waiting between one and two full days to respond.

This small change made a big difference. Waiting a full day cut down on the 'instant messaging' that cluttered my inbox (and often created more confusion than clarity). It gave me time to collect more information before responding and allowed me to revise my initial response if I came up with a better thought during the day. Sometimes, enough similar emails would come in during my waiting period and I would answer all of these emails at once. Most importantly, the batching mentality allowed me to take responsibility for my own failings and set the course for my improvement as a communicator.

My inbox battle would run for a couple of years after I returned this book to the library. But knowing that I was going to determine the absolute minimum frequency with which I would respond to my inbox was a crucial step. Slowly, I stopped wasting my own time by over-responding to email and found I could fit my expanding set of responsibilities into a more reasonable daily work schedule.

Footnotes / the organized one speaks

0. Just saying…

This book also opened my thinking to the limits imposed by domain dependence. Batching as described above isn’t all that complicated and most people do a form of it in one way or another. When I first read The 4-Hour Workweek, I used to grocery shop once a week because I knew daily shopping would add a lot of extra commuting time to my supermarket trips. I didn’t think of this as batching – I just thought of it as obvious.

But it wasn’t so obvious that I could readily extend the logic to how I opened my email inbox. I've seen a similar sort of thing fairly often over these past few years. A lot of people are capable of brilliant new ideas or creative solutions to existing problems once they are able to link their problems to an area that they already understand. The challenge in life isn’t coming up with lots of brilliant ideas - the challenge is applying the one or two brilliant ideas you've already had in a new context.

In its own way, this book challenged me to look for the universal truths that linked otherwise unrelated topics. It forced me to challenge my own assumptions about what it means to truly understand something. Instead of worrying about all the details (which have a nasty habit of changing at the most inconvenient time, anyway) I started to concern myself more with basic principles, natural rhythms, and universal truths.

1. It ain’t me, man, it’s you, and him, and her, and them, and…

Back then, I approached my inbox like everybody else – with a process devoid of any thought process or impulse control. I logged in whenever I felt the urge and responded to the most urgent messages until I thought of something else to do. Occasionally, I 'organized' my inbox by color-coding notes or recklessly creating folder after folder. Every once in a while, I deleted a bunch of long-ignored messages and hoped not to suffer any consequences for my sloth.

At no point did I make any real effort to evaluate my process and organize my daily approach. And it never crossed my mind that I was the prime culprit for my inbox problem – I took it for a given that I was The Organized One. If you had asked me at the time, reader, to describe why my inbox was such a mess, I would have explained that everything except me – the workplace culture, our clients, my colleagues, the ever-present Powers That Be – was to blame for the incoherent digital mess I dealt with each day.