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April 27, 2008
Rolling up your hoses when you're not fighting fires
We were in a staff meeting the other day discussing some of the finer points of David Allen's 3-Fold nature of work. Part of the Doing phase, the 3-Fold nature describes how you spend your time:
Doing Pre-defined Work (choosing from what's already processed and organized on your lists and calendar)
Doing Work as it Appears (responding to latest, loudest and new opportunities)
Defining Work (your own processing and reviewing time)
Everyone has a mix of all three of these choices. It won't necessarily be an even split of your time and attention. Depends on your job, and frankly your personality. I often like to do bite size chunks of doing work as it appears to stay interested and engaged in something that's taking more mental effort. It's a balance though and only you will know if you are in/out of balance with any of these choices.
If you think about it, even someone whose job is about doing work as it appears, like a fireman, is still working on being ready for the fire while they are not IN the fire. In fact, their ability to deal with that fire effectively requires them to have spent time getting their gear ready so that they can move quickly.
It's no surprise, whenever I cover this module in a GTD class, the majority of the participants find themselves spending more than than they think they should in Doing Work as it Appears and not nearly enough time in Defining Work. The tricky part about it is that each of these phases can really affect one another as well. The less time you give yourself to define your work, the less defined work you have to choose from and the greater the tendency to do work as it appears.
Do any areas of 3-Fold nature seem out of balance to you? Anything you can you do to shift that?
Posted by Kelly at April 27, 2008 12:30 PM
Comments
I find it very difficult to switch between these three. Whichever one I start doing, I spend way too much time on it before switching. So yes, I pretty much always feel out of balance. I should probably limit the amount of time I spend on any one before taking a break, but this requires...discipline.
Posted by: Jennifer at April 29, 2008 01:20 PM
I find that it is extremely helpful if I apply in-basket rules to "Doing Work As It Appears". This allows me to triage and understand what is crisis and what is just an urgent request. In turn, I can stack the planes a little and bring them all in for a safe landing.
Posted by: tom at April 29, 2008 01:47 PM
I have been working on my GTD methodology for probably 12 months now. I still find that I have a long tail of unfinished tasks, one of which always seems to pop to the surface just when I start making progress with Defining Work. However I am seeing progress by returning to the basic GTD principles and using...discipline (to quote Jennifer above). I still have "personal agreements" coming out of my head that I didn't realise I was carrying around.
Posted by: Simon Webb at May 8, 2008 05:43 AM
I have been implementing GTD for several months, and it is changing my life! But I feel like I am spending too much time in the "defining" stage.
I initially captured EVERYTHING, lol. And I have a clean hard list of next actions, but feel compelled to review my current projects list ( @40 to 50 items ) way too often.
For Example, as soon as a "budget" next action is finished, it tugs at the corners of my mind that my working To-Do lists are now incomplete. As I scan down my lists, it nags me that the next budget To-Do ( as yet undefined ) might be a more appropriate way to fill my time than picking a next action from the "fix garage door project " that has been on the list for several days
As "budget" is a major project, there are a ton of independent next actions that I could put on my list at one time, but too long of a next action list seems to muddy things up as well.
I feel like I have missed a concept here .... or do I just need to reign myself in from over-defining and force myself to have faith in the system and wait for the weekly review????
PS (I am confident about not missing "must do's" because of my tickler folder and calendar set-ups ... it is the massive amount of minutiae I am referring to here)
Thanks for any suggestions
Terry
Posted by: Terry at May 15, 2008 01:02 PM
Hi Terry,
Regarding the "massive amount of minutiae" (I love that description), your actions lists should only include next actions, not future actions or dependencies. But it sounds like you've got that one nailed, so that may be a good reminder for others reading this.
As far as the detail, some people will triage things, even if they are current next actions, so that they are not flooding their lists with everything at once. It's like putting a plane in a holding pattern. You know it needs to land, but you're waiting till the right time (perhaps weekly review) to give it the green light.
You might be well-served moving some things off of the current lists onto Someday Maybe and review those choices weekly. For example, at home, I can think of about 20 projects that could be done right now, but only 2 of them are on the current next projects list with related next actions.
Sounds to me like you're doing a fantastic job trusting your intuition. If your intuition tells you budget needs your attention more than garage door, how long garage door has been on the list is irrelevant. It sounds like you are being smart to trust that budget needs a new next action.
It may be that the Weekly Review needs to become more of a trusted habit for you, to reassure that part of you that wants to look at your lists so often that you may not need to. That's a great benefit of the weekly review. It calms the gnawing sense that we should be checking, looking and scanning ALL the time and saves the heavy load for the Review.
Hope this helps! Thanks for writing.
Kelly
Posted by: Kelly at May 19, 2008 02:59 PM
Kelly,
Your response has helped tremendously! I had intuitively already taken a few projects and moved them to "Someday Maybe," but had no confidence in doing so. Now I feel ready to move a few more over.
I was so relieved to abandon my prioritized "Daily To-Do's,", which oozed guilt at each days end when I saw the #3's done and the #1's still languishing, that I have been too resistant to your "triage" idea. It fits me perfectly.
And yes, I have not been trusting in my STRONG Weekly Review (no need to, as I was doing WEAK Every Two Day Reviews).
Thank you so very much for your valuable help.
Terry
Posted by: Terry at May 22, 2008 05:02 AM
