A couple productivity tips for overthinkers
1. If you find that you’re reluctant to permanently give up on to-do list items, “deprioritize” them instead
I hate the idea of deciding that something on my to-do list isn’t that important, and then deleting it off my to-do list without actually doing it. Because once it’s off my to-do list, then quite possibly I’ll never think about it again. And what if it’s actually worth doing? Or what if my priorities will change such that it will be worth doing at some point in the future? Gahh!
On the other hand, if I never delete anything off my to-do list, it will grow to infinity.
The solution I’ve settled on is a priority-categorized to-do list, using a kanban-style online tool (e.g. Trello). The left couple columns (“lists”) are very active—i.e., to-do list items that I might plausibly do today or tomorrow, with different columns for different contexts (e.g. “Deep work” items for when I have a block of time to concentrate, “Shallow work” items for when I don’t, and before a trip I might temporarily add an “On the airplane” column, etc.). Then going off to the right, I have a series of lower- and lower-priority columns—“Within 1 week”, “Within 2 weeks”, “Within 1 month”, “Within 2 months”, “Within 6 months”, “Someday / maybe”, “Probably never”.
I don’t take the column titles too literally; the important part is that if something doesn’t seem that urgent or worthwhile, I find it very easy and satisfying to drag that task one or two columns to the right. I’m not giving up on it forever! But the further right we go, the less frequently I’ll look at that column. So I get the benefit of a very manageable to-do list without needing to make the irreversible commitment of deleting items that I haven’t done.
(Following David Allen, I also have a “Waiting for…” column for items that someone else is supposed to do. I also have a “Done” column, which is arguably pointless as I just delete everything off the “Done” column every couple weeks, but the deleting ritual is nice because I get another chance to make sure I’ve really finished it, and is also an excuse to feel happy about my recent accomplishments.)
2. If you find that you’re reluctant to delete (or heavily edit) a piece of text / slide that you worked hard on, copy it into a “graveyard” first
I hate the idea of deleting something I wrote, because what if I change my mind and decide it’s better as it is? I’d have to rewrite it, and maybe it wouldn’t come out as good the second time! Gahh!
(Granted, lots of text editors have affordances for going through a document’s history to retrieve deleted text. But I find them a hassle to use.)
Instead, whenever I’m deleting or rewriting more than a couple words, I simply copy-and-paste the current version into a disorganized “graveyard” of text snippets, paragraphs, sections, etc. at the end of the document (or in a separate sister document).
Realistically, I almost never pull anything out of the “graveyard”. But now and then I do pull things out—not only in the course of whatever I’m writing, but also sometimes months after I finish. And more importantly, knowing that the graveyard is there and easily accessible makes me feel more comfortable “killing my darlings” in the first place.
Ditto for editing slides and so on.
3. If you find that you’re reluctant to throw out papers, make it fast and easy to file them
Sometimes I get something in the mail that I probably will never need to look at, but I don’t want to throw it out, because what if I’m wrong and I’ll need it after all? Gahh!
This is what a filing cabinet is for.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen writes “If it takes longer than sixty seconds to file something, you won’t file, you’ll stack.” (See here for his practical tips on how to hit that 60 second deadline, if you don’t want to buy the whole book. For me, it’s more like 30 seconds, even if I’m adding a new folder to the file, because I don’t bother with the label-maker.)
The “30 seconds to file” rule is much more important than that the filing cabinet be well organized. I always tell myself, “well, if I really need something, it’s in there, I’ll be able to find it eventually, even if I have to spend an hour looking through every single piece of paper”. For example, in my alphabetical filing cabinet, I might well randomly file half my electricity bills under “ELECTRIC” and the other half under “UTILITIES”. Oops. But oh well, whatever. If I’m actually pulling a certain type of document from the file frequently, I can always reorganize it at that time. And likewise, if I’m frequently accessing a folder, then I’ll naturally tend to remember that it exists and what goes in it.
Occasionally my filing cabinet will get too full, but then I can go through it and find lots of things that I was hesitant to throw out 3 years ago but am happy to throw out today. (Or I can buy another filing cabinet.) I also sometimes move files to a much-less-accessible “deep file storage” box if I’m 99% sure I’ll never need them, but want to let them age a few more years before throwing them out—e.g. records that I would only need in the event of a tax audit.
4. If you find that you’re reluctant to delete computer files / emails, don’t empty the trash
I don’t know how common this is, but I have a friend who deletes files or emails and then immediately “empties the trash” to permanently delete them. I cannot fathom why. Obviously you shouldn’t delete files if you expect to ever want them again, but equally obviously, files sitting in the trash aren’t doing anyone any harm, unless you’re actually running out of storage. And even if you are running out of storage, you can sort deleted files by size and permanently delete just the biggest files, and/or sort deleted files by date and permanently delete just the ones that have been sitting in your trash for a sufficient number of months or years.
I find it easier to delete a file or email with the knowledge that I can always change my mind tomorrow.
A complementary advice to the point 1 based on my work experience is that no matter how many priorities there are defined in a planning system, in practice it all collapses to only two values:
Priority One
Priority “this will never get done, because there will always be some Priority One task to do instead”
So whenever you propose a thing to do and your manager says “okay, we can give this a priority two”, now you know that this is merely a polite way to say “no”.
(My advice for software developers is that if you want to do things such as automated tests or documentation, you must insist that those are not separate tasks, but an inseparable part of the programming task, a part of the “definition of done”. Otherwise, these tasks will get a priority two, and now you know what that means...)
I do all of these except 3, and implementing a system like 3 is among my deprioritized things in my ToDo-list. Maybe I should prioritize it.
When you say you use a kanban-style system, does that just refer to the fact that there are columns that you drag items between, or does it specifically mean that you also make use of an ‘in progress’ column?
If so, do you have one for each ‘todo’ column, or what?
And do you have a column for the ‘capture’ aspect of GTD, or do you do something else for that?
It just refers to the fact that there are columns that you drag items between. I don’t even really know how a “proper” kanban works.
If a new task occurs to me in the middle of something else, I’ll temporarily put it in a left (high-priority) column, just so I don’t forget it, and then later when I’m at my computer and have a moment to look at it, I might decide to drag it to a right (low-priority) column instead of doing it.
Thanks. Do you use this system for reading list(s) too?
Yeah some of my to-do items are of the form “skim X”. Inside the “card” I might have a few words about how I originally came across X and what I’m hoping to get out of skimming it.
Relatedly, I schedule all my todos and my todo list contains only the ones scheduled to within the last week. If a todo is at risk of lapsing from the list, I will either have to actively reschedule it, in which case it is probably important to me, or it just drops into a list of stale todos. Occasionally I remember stale todos and can reschedule them or when I have enough time I browse the list of stale todos to see if there is anything still interesting.
Edit: This method helps because I get overwhelmed and anxious from overly long todo lists.
Having a “Done” column (or an archive board) can be very useful if you want to see when was the last time you completed a recurring task. It helps prevent tasks with long recurrences (quarterly, biennially, etc) from falling through the cracks. For example: dentist appointments. They’re supposed to happen once a year. And, ideally, you’d create a task to schedule the next one immediately when you get back from the previous one. But let’s say that doesn’t happen. You got distracted, there was some kind of scheduling issue, life got in the way. Then, months later, you wonder, “Wait, how long has it been since I’ve been to the dentist?” Archiving completed tasks instead of deleting them lets you answer that question immediately.
In Gmail I like to scan the email headers and then I bulk select and archive them (
* a ethanks to vim shortcuts). After 5 years of doing this I still didn’t run out of the free storage in Gmail. I already let Gmail sort the emails by “Primary” , “Promotions” , “Updates” etc. Usually the only important things are in “Primary” and 1 or 2 in “Updates”.