Stock photography for the win! This is pretty much the exact emotion I’m talking about, right here.
I like getting things done. My wife often says that I’m perpetually in “task mode.” I feel most alive and relaxed when I’ve gotten a bunch of stuff done in a day. I try to live by the motto of, “never put off to tomorrow what you can do today.” Anyone who has spent any time with me knows that I run my life with two tools: my calendar and Todoist. I fully admit I get a dopamine hit every time I am able to check something off my list. In fact, I credit prioritizing and being organized with my time and task list for whatever modest success that I’ve had. I am generally motivated by visualizing what needs to get done and being able to see progress towards the goal of everything being completed. Unfortunately, while working from this list has big benefits - it also can have some pretty solid drawbacks.
As great as the feeling is of checking off a bunch of stuff on my list every day, sometimes I end up in a period where I check off a little bit less than I add. Usually, this isn’t a big deal because you can’t complete everything in one day and often I make progress on something for weeks before it gets fully checked off. However, every so often – maybe once a year, or so - I get in a period where this lasts for a while and I suddenly find myself terrified by the length of the list. And as motivated as I get by having a task list where I can see myself reaching the end, I have a tendency to get vapor-locked when the task list is so long that I cannot see light at the end of the tunnel.
I use software to organize my task list, but if my handwriting was this neat, I might use paper, too…
I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve had multiple people on my team admit in a check-in meeting that they’re feeling overwhelmed by their own task list and don’t know where to start. I know for me when the amount of things you need to get done keeps getting longer, it becomes really easy to try to boil the ocean. You might start writing an email to someone about project X, but then you realized that deliverable Y is coming due, so you jump over to that Excel spreadsheet. Then another email comes in from your boss, so you start composing a reply – because they’re you’re boss, after all. About halfway through that, you realize that the email for project X is sitting in your drafts folder half-composed, and you kick yourself for not getting that off your plate, so you go back to that.
Sound familiar? If not, you have no reason to read any further. Congratulations on your relentless perfection; enjoy a beverage and my intense envy. If it does sound like you, you’re not alone. It’s very common for otherwise motivated, focused professionals to freeze when they have too much to do. I find this is especially true in IT as we balance the day-to-day requests for service, projects, CAB reviews and the other procedures and processes we put in place. I actually found a great HBR article on this exact feeling a few years ago by Peter Bregman. You should read it - but if you don’t, know that I stole pretty much everything for this post from that article because I’ve found it works.
If you find yourself in this situation, I generally close my task list for a bit and sit quietly and just breathe. Anxiety is the enemy of focus, and focus is the most important thing for productivity. After no less than 2 - but no more than 10 - minutes of quiet breathing, reopen your task list and read it top to bottom. If you can any given task in under 5 minutes, highlight it somehow. When you get to the end, you should have a lot of tasks highlighted. Now, set a timer for fifteen or twenty minutes. You can use any time in that range. I use 15 minutes. The important thing is that you set a time, and you stick to it. Now start that timer, and crush through as much as you can in those fifteen minutes. Just beat back the emails, quick asks, and DMs. The important thing is that when the timer goes off you stop immediately. You’re done with that phase. Time to move on to the next one.
When you’ve gotten to the end of the 15-minute sprint, shut off all notifications and work only on the most important, highest priority larger project that you have on your list. Do only this with no distractions for at least 30 minutes. If you can make it to 45 minutes with no distractions, that’s OK; how long depends on you and what you can do without losing focus or twitching because you haven’t checked Twitter or email in so long. When you get to the end, stand up. Get up out of the chair and walk around. Get a coffee or water, see what the weather is outside, or hit the restroom. Do whatever you need to do to walk around. Then you can take 5 minutes to check email, Twitter or whatever, and start the process over again.
By using this method, you’ll end up crushing through the small items on your list which will give you the feeling of momentum. Then harness that momentum and motivation to propel you through the harder, longer work. The real secret here is to break the work down into bite-sized chunks. If you look at a task list full of week-long projects, it’s easy to freeze up at the magnitude of the work in front of you. However, if you keep doing this pattern, you’ll start tackling it bit-by-bit and sooner than you think you’ll have made real progress.
Some steps are easier than others, but each step leads you to success.
…..Or hypoxia and cerebral edema. You won’t find out until you get there!
This may seem like a really simple, perhaps quaint way to approach what seems like an overwhelming problem, but I can tell you from experience that most of the time the simplest solutions are the most elegant and effective. This isn’t unlike anything else in IT. For the same reason you would never use 15 VLANS to do what can be done with two don’t overthink your productivity. Just break the work down into your “quick wins” that you can hammer out in 15 minutes, and your longer work that requires more focus. There’s really no reason to get fancier than that.
After all, as the saying goes: the best way to climb a mountain is one step at a time. As it turns out, getting through a daunting task list is no different.
How about you?
Do you use a task organization system? If so, have you ever felt stuck, frozen or “vapor-locked” because there’s so much on your task list?
Do you separate your “to-do” list into “quick wins” and longer, more involved tasks?
Would you be willing to try this method out today? Crank through 15 minutes of quick wins, and try to log 30 to 45 minutes of deep, focused work. Try it and come back. How did it go?