Satan created email: how to work better when there's too much to do.
#WrightNews | 19–25 September
I was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of weeks ago, at the age of 35. Being diagnosed this late has meant that I’ve had to hack together coping systems. There has been a lot of trial and error, with emphasis particularly on the error. I’m now at a point, though, where I’ve got (I think) a decent sense of how my brain works. I’ve also noticed that many people I encounter are overwhelmed: they feel unproductive, overworked, guilty. They’re victims of akrasia1, ashamed, yet frustrated. The poor state of teacher well-being is well-documented, as I’ve outlined in this post, so I though any opportunity to share some ideas about how one might be more productive might be welcomed. This is why I share these … tips? Hacks? Ideas? I’m not sure what to term them, but I hope they bring somebody, somewhere, some peace.
Hack the environment
I use noise-cancelling headphones. I have spent a lot of money on them and they are amazing. Once I put them on, I am in work mode. They block distractions out, as well as priming me — I associate putting them on with doing deep work — more on that in the next section. I’m sensitive to light, so I have asked to be moved into the dark corner, far away from the windows. There is also a quiet room in which I can work if things get too overwhelming. I have rituals and routines for everything (some of which are outlined below). These things make it more likely I’ll get work done. And they work, too: I don’t work at home, and haven’t done for about two years. I get to work at 7:30 and I leave at 4:30 p.m.
Deep work vs shallow work
Even if you don’t have ADHD, actually paying attention to some thing important is hard. Myriad distractions and the myth of multitasking see the scant hours of PPA wasted. Deep Work by Cal Newport sees this ‘shallow work’ as the scourge of the modern work environment, and he’s right: shallow work involves a vague sense that ‘things need to get done’ without actually zeroing in on exactly what needs to get done. It’s so easy in shared offices — a quick chat here, a phone-check there. You’re surrounded by noise. I find it impossible to work in environments like these, but I’d be surprised if anyone got any meaningful work done in these circumstances. The ideas that follow are those that eschew and avoid practices that lead to shallow work and instead lead to deep work. Deep work is the ideal state: there are no distractions, you are completely immersed in a task, it feels effortless — it’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘a flow state’2. The problem is that it’s hard to get into a state of deep work when one is doing busywork — that is, the boring and repetitive ‘admin’ tasks that often take up the bulk of one’s time — as I’ll get to later, email is one of the chief problems in this case. As Newport writes: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
There are two things we can take away from this. Firstly, boring tasks are inevitable; a lot of the ideas below will deal with dispatching them with as little friction as possible. Secondly, if you’re only ever doing admin, you’re likely bored. Maybe you need to make time to do something for yourself. In Make Time3 the authors argue that we spend too much time doing what we’re supposed to do (read: what other people have decided we should do) and not enough time doing what we actually want to do. By the latter, I mean pursuits that are fulfilling. These are many: they could be anything from starting a blog, going on a run in the evening, practicing a musical instrument — anything that makes you feel content, purposeful and fulfilled. But how does one make this time in such a busy life?
Make time for what matters with a daily highlight
Knapp and Zeratsky used to work at Google, but left when they realised they were burning out fast. They weren’t doing anything other than work and they were neglecting their families. Central to them reclaiming time was the habit of a Daily Highlight. A Daily Highlight is decided first thing in the morning and it is the first thing scheduled, before anyone else makes demands on your time. It is something that you want to do in a 30 minute slot. It can be something that moves you towards a goal, but it can also be something really small, like phoning a friend, playing with your children, or walking around a lake. The point is that it is scheduled in and looked forward to every day. It is never missed, because it is the most important part of the day. It is related what you think matters the most to you.
I used to religiously schedule in a Daily Highlight, but I don’t anymore. I’m more informal about it now, but I like to think I’ve internalised that mindset. I’m writing this post now — and I write these posts habitually every week — because I want to. One of my goals is to get better at writing, so I make sure to make time to write.
Prefer systems to goals
Goals are useful, but they only really give you a direction. If you want to climb Everest, wanting to do it isn’t enough.4 It’s the systems that really matter; how do you go about getting things done? Central to this are habits. James Clear’s very successful Atomic Habits, about which I’ve tweeted, argues that we need to pay attention to our habits — our ‘systems’ — if we want to be productive and successful. There’s more detail in my Twitter thread, but essentially his system is based around his ‘cardinal rule of behaviour change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. When designing my life, I try to think in terms of this. I try to associate desired behaviours with reward and undesired with punishment. Practically speaking, I make it as difficult as possible to engage in behaviours I want to avoid, be that hiding my phone, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, or leaving my running gear out so it’s easy to put on in then morning.
Have an inbox for things to process later; don’t try to do things all at once
One of the problems with modern work is that everything feels urgent. Not only this, but urgent things keep coming up. It’s like a firehose. How can one get into state of deep work if one is being distracted by each ‘urgent’ thing that pops up? The answer is simple: it’s impossible. Instead, have inboxes where you put things that come up so they can be acted on later. This takes care of the Zeigarnik effect, too, which is the postulation that we are much more likely to remember a task during which we are interrupted. Interruption at the inbox stage makes a task more memorable, as well as freeing up what I like to call ‘cognitive bandwith’ that causes overload.
My inboxes
My email5 inbox (more on the evils of email later)
My inbox in Bear, which is my note-taking app. Anything I want to work on later gets put in the inbox. I review it periodically and develop notes that might prove useful for my writing (usually those that inform these posts).
My Instapaper main feed. I save articles I want to read to Instapaper; later, I go through them and either:
Move them to the IMMEDIATE folder — this is for things I want to read as soon as possible (usually because they relate to something I’m currently working on);
Move them to the MAYBE folder — these tend not to relate to current projects, but might be useful soon. This gets reviewed every now and then, with items promoted or demoted.
Move them to the INTERESTING folder: this is for stuff that seems interesting, but might not be that useful. This gets reviewed periodically; some things get promoted and some get archived.
Archive the item; I can’t see myself wanting to read it anytime soon.
My inbox in Craft, the note-taking app I use for work. It gets reviewed and organised during my weekly review (more on that later).
Inboxes can get overwhelming; this is why I have a weekly review practice.6.
Related to inboxes:
I’ll do it later is not (always) procrastination: it is empowering
It’s a good idea to ruthlessly prioritise. Human beings always underestimate how much time things take7; see also this post from Neel Nanda, so we should assume that we have time for far less than we think. This means that we should focus on what really matters. The trouble with this is that we tend to prioritise the urgent, whereas what matters most is the important. The trouble is that the important isn’t always urgent, usually because urgent is what someone else wants us to do. And people get us to do things by emailing us, which is the bane of the modern workers’ existence:
Evil-mail and how to tame it
Email is someone else’s to-do list8. The key is to touch each email only once. Firstly, this means staying away from email until you’re ready to batch-process. I ‘do email’ twice a day: once in the morning, once in the afternoon. I don’t (or at least try not to) check it after this. Part of the problem is that people use email for everything: it becomes a filing cabinet full of information, ideas and attachments. It is horrid and it takes up too much of everyone’s time. Here’s how I deal with it:
Upon ‘touching’ an email, I do one of these things:
Reply (and then archive the original)
Save attachments and then archive the email
Create a task in my task manager (Things 3 in my case, but any will do9) and archive the email.
Create a calendar entry and archive the email.
Archive the email (if nothing else is required).
The power of this is that I never need to use email for anything other than communication, which is what it’s for. Email is not designed to be an information silo — we have hard drives and note-taking apps for that. Doing email this way saves me so much time. Try it and see.
Weekly reviews
Every Sunday, I do a weekly review. I’d walk you through it, but I’ve basically just stolen Tiago Forte’s: read his post for how to do it.
Weekly reviews are useful, because it stops me forgetting things (or at least deceases the likelihood). It doesn’t take long — but it puts me in control of the work I do, not the other way around. It makes me think about whether I’m spending time on the right things, or whether I’m wasting time. It sets me up for the week and, possibly more importantly, gives me pause to be proud of what I’ve done. When I have had a week in which I’ve managed to get things done to a realistic level, I’m proud of myself. Don’t let this post fool you — I fail a lot. But that’s fine, because:
Be okay with some mediocrity: give your 80% to the 20% that matters
The Pareto Principle — in basic form, the 80/20 rule — states that 80% of the results are gained by 20% of your effort. Put another way, you should focus on the 20% of your work that actually matters. Perfectionism is dangerous, because it sees you sink hours into things that don’t really matter much, in the long run. Instead, the 20% of things that matter should get as much of your attention as possible. That can mean that you miss some things — intentionally. People worry about doing this, because they worry they’ll ‘get into trouble’, but I think that if you’re a person who delivers on the big things that matter, the odd missed unimportant thing won’t matter to any manager with even a little sense. You can only do so much; it doesn’t matter whether you want to do everything: you simply can’t. Either make peace with this or don’t, but remember:
The people who are working all the time are the least productive
The person who works at home until midnight, tells you that they worked all Sunday, and brings their laptop on holiday is always a miserable person. They have convinced themselves that what’s needed is one more sprint. But they haven’t realised that they are always sprinting. They are so tired that they only ever do shallow work. And shallow work is pointless. Take time to stop. Block out some time for deep work and give it your all. And then stop. Look at someone you love.
Get in touch on Twitter @curtaindsleep to let me know what you thought of this post!
Lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment. ↩︎
Flow, 1990 ↩︎
Knapp and Zeratsky, 2018 ↩︎
As Tiago Forte writes, a goal without a plan is actually a dream. ↩︎
My process for doing this is very similar to Tiago Forte’s;see here. ↩︎
This is the planning fallacy ↩︎
Pretty much everything in this section owes a debt to Tiago Forte’s excellent post on email management ↩︎
I really do recommend getting a task manager app. Pen and paper works too, but I love being able to search. Things 3 is great, but it’s Apple-only. I also recommend Todoist. ↩︎