Minimize & Organize

I’ve been working on my downsize project for years now. Let’s say it’s an on-going construction site. Since I have many ideas, I have learned to be more (not perfectly) realistic about what I can really put into practice.

Yesterday, at the END of the school year (International School), I started organizing my teaching materials into one binder. This year, I had a pile of paper in the lesson room that I was constantly shuffling through in search of … whatever. Next year, everything is going to be in ONE place so that I just reach for the binder and pull out whatever I need. I’ll email the music to the parents to print out. I’ll have one copy myself so that if (mostly when :-( ) a student has forgotten his notes, I’ll have the piece right there. Always hoping that the student remembers what he was supposed to have practiced!

The war against piles (of things) is ongoing. They sneak up on me during intense work phases. And, all of a sudden (ahem), they’ve taken over my apartment. Learning to dispose of shiny, inviting magazines has been really difficult. They look so new! I have started donating them to doctors and physical therapists for their waiting rooms. At least I’ll have something I like to read while waiting.

Here are some tips I’ve found useful for getting my act together:

MINIMIZE

How much stuff do you own? How many pieces of clothing or shoes? How many books? How many movies, or video games? How much makeup, or how many tools? What all do you possess? (I checked my eyeliner pencils the other day – I have (had) 10!!)

How many of those things do you use regularly? Do you use all of what you own? Are there some things you NEVER use?

What about that dress or suit in the back of your closet that you haven’t worn in two years? Or those jeans you’ve been hanging onto because “you might fit into them if you just lose a little weight?” (I had a brand new pair of jeans which, instead of sending them back, I kept them until I hoped to have the correct weight. Two years later, the jeans were still unworn. I gave them to my slender daughter.)

What about that book you keep because you “love it so much,” even though you have so many new things to read? The ski equipment you bought a few years ago, but never seem to find the time to get out to the slopes? What about the ice skates? If you don’t use it, why do you own it?

Sentimentality and nostalgia are powerful forces. Things become precious to us for all sorts of reasons, some of them genuine, some of them imagined.

Think about some of the things you own. Would your life be less enjoyable if you didn’t own those things? When you find yourself tempted to buy something, that filter will help you; it makes you ask “Do I need this?” and “Will I be using this in six months?” and “Am I buying this to please myself or am I buying it to please someone else?”

ORGANIZE

Have a Welcome Zone at the door of your house or flat. It doesn’t have to be elegant but it does need to be functional. Establish an area or hook for your keys and purse, a bowl or container for change and your wallet, a surface (like a small side table) to sort the mail and other items (newspapers, books, magazines, purchases) as you bring them in. You might add a small wastebasket to hold your discarded incoming materials to be recycled, and a mirror for last minute checkups.

Your goal here is to create a space that you'll want to really use each time you come in to your home to sort through the stuff you're carrying in your bags, pockets and hands upon arrival, so you stay ahead of the mail, bills and items coming in to your home and also, have smoother sailing on your way out. This also avoids the morning panic looking for keys, purse, wallet, etc.

Once the mail, reading material and items from delivered packages are sorted, put away anything else you've brought home: groceries, purchases, empty lunch containers, dry cleaning, etc. Put them away, right away! Don’t have undesignated piles messing up your Welcome Area.

Research proves that clutter not only affects our physical space, but our mental/emotional space as well. It can lead to more stress, depression, and lack of focus.

Tidy Up 10 Minutes a Day: You can divide these up into two five-minute Tidy-Tornados or a full ten-minute Whirlwind. Swiftly speed through your home and put away all those little things that you left out, opened, or tossed somewhere throughout the day or evening. This way you can reset your home each evening and start fresh each morning. Eventually, you’ll start tidying up as you finish something.

Use vertical storage:

Instead of cluttering your floor space, use vertical storage. Shelving, and wall storage solutions will help you gain more floor space and keep everything in plain eyesight. Use highest shelving for seldom used seasonal items, so you don’t have to climb a ladder or step stool often. Remember not to store things you don’t use anymore! Assess your reason for keeping, and be able to have a physical place for everything you keep. If the only place your items fit is in a box in the garage, you probably don’t need it.

Where focus goes, energy flows.

We need Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Concentrated work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep, focused concentration will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way. Instead of choosing the most important tasks, THE ONE (most important) THING to work on, most people go the line of least resistance and pick shallow work to fill their time.

In the bestseller Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work gives no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored.

TIME BLOCKING

Time Blocking is dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building your schedule for the next day. During this planning process you consult your task lists and calendars, as well as your weekly and quarterly planning notes. The goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right  pace for the relevant deadlines.

This type of planning is like a chess game, with blocks of work getting spread and sorted in such a way that projects big and small all seem to click into completion with (just enough) time to spare.

Three Concerns

Such a detailed level of planning generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week produces an estimated same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

Sometimes people ask how time blocking can work for reactive work, where you cannot tell in advance what obligations will enter your life on a given day. The answer is again simple: periods of open-ended reactivity can be blocked off like any other type of obligation. Even if you’re blocking most of your day for reactive work, for example, the fact that you are controlling your schedule will allow you to dedicate some small blocks (perhaps at the schedule periphery) to deeper pursuits.

(Another smart strategy in this context is to give open-ended reactive blocks secondary purposes: e.g., “process client requests; if I have downtime during this block, work on project X.”)

Sometimes people ask if controlling time will stifle creativity. If you control your schedule: (1) you can ensure that you consistently dedicate time to the deep efforts that matter for creative pursuits; and (2) the stress relief that comes from this sense of organization allows you to go deeper in your creative blocks and produce more value.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

Fixed-Schedule Productivity

The system work as follows:

1.    Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.

2.    Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule. The door is open to colleagues for established and known times, and other periods where you isolate yourself to focus completely and without distraction on a single IMPORTANT task.

This sounds simple but it is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal — “I do not want to work past 5 on week days!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let’s look at an example…

To reach my relatively small work hour limit, you have to be careful with how you go about your day.  Here are some of the techniques you can regularly use to remain within the confines of a fixed schedule:

• Serialize your projects. Keep two project stacks. At any one moment you are only working on the top project from each stack. When you finish, move on to the next. This focus lets you churn out quality results without the wasted time of constantly dancing back and forth between multiple efforts.
• Be ultra-clear about when to expect results from yourself. And it’s not always soon. If someone (boss-grr) slips something onto your pile, make an honest evaluation of when it will percolate to the top, then communicate this date.  Make it happen when the time comes. You can get away with telling people to expect a result a long time in the future, if — and this is a big if — you actually deliver when promised.
• Refuse. If your stack is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time,  turn it down.
• Drop projects and quit. If a project gets out of control, and starts to sap too much time from your schedule: drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along, and it conflicts with something else in your stack, drop the less important project. If an obligation is taking up too much time: quit. Here’s a secret: no one really cares what you do on the small scale. In the end you’re judged on your large-scale list of important completions.
• Don’t be available. Perhaps you can work in hidden nooks of the office or in libraries. Check and respond to work e-mail only a few times a day. People have to wait for responses from you. You can set up an auto-respond that tells the writer when you’ll be working on emails. Don’t be easy to find.  People generally don’t really need immediate access.  Always respond within a reasonable timeframe and get them what they need. So they adjust. And you get things done.
• Batch and habitatize. Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit — something you do at a fixed time on a fixed date. For example, I write blog posts on Sunday morning. I do work/planning/reading for my seminars on Sunday and Monday mornings. Habit-based schedules for the regular work makes it easier to tackle the non-regular projects. It also prevents schedule-busting pile-ups.
• Start early. Sometimes real early. On certain projects that you know are important,  don’t tolerate procrastination. If you need to start something 2 or 3 weeks in advance so that your stack proceeds as needed,  do so.

Why This Works

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and “crucial” web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I’m going to face it. If you don’t do this, you let the never-ending stream of work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules. And you’ll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can’t make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don’t compromise. No one really cares about your schedule except for yourself. So make it right. Make it work.

Jumpstart Your Concentration with a Depth Ritual

Develop rituals that lead into a high performance action for the most priority. Don’t do shallow (routine/unimportant) work in your most attentive and productive times!

In Search of Deep Concentration

Aaron is a PhD student. This requires him to spend a significant fraction of his time thinking about hard things.

To accommodate the necessity of depth in his working life, Aaron developed a ritual he uses to quickly shift his brain into a state of concentration.

Here’s how it works:

• Aaron puts on headphones and plays non-distracting meditative music.
• He launches a stripped-down text editor that hides all the features of his computer.
• He loads up a template that contains seven questions about the deep task he’s about to begin. These questions force him to specify why the task is important and how he’s going to tackle it.

Getting through these steps takes around five minutes. As soon as Aaron’s done typing in his final answer he turns immediately to the scheduled deep task.

The Results of Ritual

Here’s how Aaron describes the impact of this ritual:

“Every time I have done this (well, nearly every time) I [entered] a deep thinking phase quite effortlessly. I think the reason why it works is that the barrier to entry is quite small (filling out the template) and the returns (clarity on session objective, momentum) are tangible.”

Achieving unbroken concentration is a mindset: and a non-natural one at that! To slip into a concentrated, focused state, we need all the help we can get.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Smack in the middle of a busy weekend, I am "celebrating" my birthday with a painting course and a lovely dinner prepared by my even busier daughter. But I'm in Europe so my American family is still a day behind. (Yay! I can celebrate longer.)

Find your ONE THING and DO IT!

Gary Keller (The One Thing) has identified that behind every successful person is their ONE Thing. No matter how success is measured, personal or professional, only the ability to dismiss distractions and concentrate on your ONE Thing stands between you and your goals. The ONE Thing is about getting extraordinary results in every situation.

It’s about figuring out what matters most, and when you’re doing that ONE Thing, eliminate distraction. Make regular appointments with yourself to do your most important work. That’s when you avoid distractions at all costs.

Think of it like going to movies. You’re there for ONE Thing—to see the film. Because you’re really clear about that, you turn off your cell phone, you grab snacks in case you get hungry, and you probably even make a pit stop before you go in. All this so you can have an uninterrupted experience.

Blocking Time

When you time block your most important work and treat it like going to movies—you make a stand around avoiding distractions—amazing things happen. When you start thinking of your days this way, the burden of always having to be “on” goes away and you end up accomplishing more.

Based on goals in any area of your life, ask yourself, “What’s the ONE Thing I could do, such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” Then time block to make it happen. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

The amazing thing is when people ask themselves the question, they are almost always accurate. People instinctively know what matters most. If you’re not sure, look to the people who came before you. Chances are someone has already accomplished what you’re trying to achieve and they’ve shared how they did it (in a book, an article or a blog post). Start with their answers and go from there.

How do you discover what your “one thing” is?

Again, it’s the focusing question. You simply ask yourself in any given area of your life, “What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else is easier or unnecessary?” That’s it.

Success is sequential, not simultaneous. It’s one step at a time. ONE Thing at a time. It’s not your one and only thing. It’s the ONE Thing right now. It’s the most important thing.

What you’re trying to do is set up a positive domino run in your life. You want to line things up with the end in mind.