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December 04, 2008

Striking the balance between defining and doing

Today I had a tele-coaching call that reminded me of what David Allen calls the Threefold Nature of Work. My client recently worked with me for a day-and-a-half setting up his GTD system and practicing the moves of processing and organizing his work and life. In this follow-up call he revealed that one of his biggest difficulties was that, now that he had a trusted system up and running, he felt somewhat obsessed with constantly updating and tweaking the lists. He also felt a bit of a compulsion to instantly processing into the system any new idea, notes or paper he came across in his day, often at the expense of not working on higher priority work that needed to get done.

While this may seem like somewhat extreme behavior, I've seen shades of this syndrome occur with many clients. It's almost as if, now that they have this trusted place to manage their agreements, they need to be hyper vigilant about getting new agreements in and keeping the lists pristine. This can become debilitating and can result in a feeling of being a slave to ones list - always in it and never getting any of it done. I think that in some cases this happens at the early stages of taking on the GTD practices. With time, most people learn to self-regulate and recalibrate their practices so that they can have the proper balance between defining their work, doing predefined work, and allowing appropriate energy and time for all of the ad hoc surprises that need attention.

I acknowledge that this case is probably the exception to the rule - as most of the time, the real difficulty for most clients is that they aren't giving enough time and energy to processing their in boxes. But if any of what I've written above rings a bell for you, here are some shifts in practice that might help you bring balance back to your practice:

Separate the Processing from the Collecting Allow yourself plenty of leeway during your day to just collect a note about the thought or idea you've got your attention on, throw it in your in box, and save the processing for later. In other words, jot down the rough thought and sometime later define exactly what it means to you, what you're really going to do about it, and where your going to organize it.

Save the Detailed Refining of the Lists for the Weekly Review If you find that every day you are constantly going back and tweaking a lot of details on your action lists you may be in micro-manager mode. Save that for the your Weekly Review and let yourself do all of that fine-tuning then. That way, in between Weekly Reviews you can have more freedom to DO the things on the list and REACT appropriately to all of the new inputs coming at you.

Set Aside Processing Time If you find yourself compulsively processing your in box throughout the day even when your gut tells you that there's a higher priority aching to be done, try committing to a set window of time once a day just for processing. That will allow for more doing time on your important priorities and potentially on those ad-hoc surprises that need your attention.

Observe Your Own Patterns We all have patterns of behavior that we continue despite our better intentions. If compulsive email processing is a problem for you, create a daily self-observation exercise: Twice a day, stop what you're doing for two minutes, and reflect for a moment about the following questions: When today have I defaulted to processing my in boxes when there may have been something more pressing or important that needed my attention? What payoff did I get from this? What was the impact on me? On those I work with? Doing this for several weeks is likely to reveal some new patterns and insights about your own motivations and behaviors that you may have been previously blind to.

I'm curious if this post struck a chord out there. Please let me know. I'm eager to learn more about this subject.

Posted by mdolan at 04:15 PM | Comments (13)