Work is part of life. Choose the
work that you love and
follow your bliss of course! Two interesting ideas for a Saturday morning:
1. Deep work (writing, creating, thinking) requires a big picture focus that is obsessive to pursue the long term payoff. 2. Scheduling time effectively depends on whether you are a maker or a manager (or some combination of the two).
Schedule time in big blocks for the maker, and traditional appointments for the manager (placed at the end of the work day for a maker!).
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| 6-15-2012 from my "A Day" submission |
- Getting Things Done is excellent as a methodology for capturing tasks and next actions (lists) but at the expense of task universalism. Consider the idea from Cal Newport, aka StudyHacks that Not All Work is Created Equal. In Allen’s world, in other words, everything reduces to clear and easy-to-accomplish next actions.
Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal. I disagree with this idea. Creating real value requires deep work, which is a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.
Flipping through my notebook, about every 4 or 5 weeks, I redraw a big picture block diagram (boxes with project names and interconnections) or a mind map. My purpose is to find focus on the big rocks that make a difference in long term success. This is somewhat similar to my weekly church attendance and daily meditation which help to focus spiritual life and purpose. But deep work or big picture diagrams are necessary as methods (philosophies?) for focusing on obsessive (and often messy) pursuit of something new.
Deep work is fundamentally different than the shallow (though still important) work of keeping on top of the little things required to function personally and professionally.
Quotes from Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism.
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule makes a coherent distinction between scheduling norms for creators vs managers. I've been in both positions and have to juggle both hats so I can relate to the examples.
The manager's schedule is identified by an appointment book, with hourly time blocks. When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
The maker's schedule is common for programmers and writers who generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least (time blocks). A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting.
Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Ok, that certainly makes sense. But the kicker here for retaining a maker culture (or helping keep productivity for maker's) is the following:
How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.
Scheduling to balance maker vs manager tasks and responsibilities may have some payoff to consider. Consider blocking off the beginning of the day or entire days for maker activities.