Productivity is a fine balance of “when to”, “what to” & “how to”
But in the information age, where attention is a currency and skills can be readily learned, the proportion is highly asymmetrical.
When to > What to > How to
When to is probably the most valuable form of intuition we can develop. Why? Because timing is everything and the rate of completion is key.
When to: Go fast, Go slow, Do the most cognitively demanding task, Perform the least cognitively demanding task, Start, Stop…
One of the most compelling arguments supporting “when to” is the Parkinson’s Law which states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Corollaries:
- Work complicates to fill the available time.
- Work contracts to fit into the time we give.
If you come up with three action items in your daily to-do list spread over an 8-9 hour time period, then the tasks will increase in complexity, distractions will be the perfect relaxers, & procrastination the best coping mechanism.
This is why to-do lists are not ineffective on their own. Why? They are not governed by a strict “time-honoured system” but rather serve to help outline what needs to be done, in what order, and serve as proof of what was achieved.
The “to-do lists” are a function of “what to” but perform really poorly in the “when to” // “how long to” side of things. In the process, we end up doing more of what could have been done with less which negates the entire purpose of productivity.
Of greater importance is “when to” – start and stop – because the “what to”- if you’re doing the right things – will always be there. We are more prone to making mistakes in adjudging the perceived task time completion than figuring out the tasks at hand.
Taking a When to > What to > How to Approach means: Asking yourself a series of counterfactual questions:
- What would it look like if you finished the project on a very aggressive timescale? -What would you do if you only had ten minutes to get something done?
- What if I could finish all my to-do lists tasks within 4 Pomodoro Sessions?
- How could you accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months if you had a gun to your head?
These questions set our minds in motion to figure out how to compress our processes, accelerate learning, fast-track experiments, channel an inner level of focus – all because time “when to” is limited.
Ian Fleming, author of James Bond spy book novels, wrote one of the books in the series in two weeks. How? He checked into a hotel in a place he didn’t want to be – where the prospects of him being a tourist were nil. With nothing to do, he wrote like a fiend. And checked out.
Maya Angelou would rent hotel rooms to work a lot on her writing. “I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty… I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. I stay until 12.30-1.30pm.”
Barack Obama flew to Bali in 1993 to work on a draft of his book Dreams From My Father in the early years of his marriage. He found it to be the ‘most sensible and efficient way’ to finish his novel.
Ultimately, the end goal of productivity is efficiency. Efficiency buys you net time. Net time helps you reflect. In the process, improving the “what to” and “how to”. If the “when to” is not properly calibrated, you will always end up finishing on time thus no net time.