Get Everything Done

Aaron wrote an interesting post about procrastination (
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2785776 ). Reading it, I had to fess up that (no surprise) I'm far from immune from procrastination myself. But thinking about his post also reminded me of what has been a bigger time management issue for me: working too slowly. I don't think I've ever posted about this before.

Arguably, working too slowly on any given task is a form of procrastination. But I would argue that it's conceptually distinct from procrastination (classically defined), which is putting off or avoiding doing a task in the first place. When you work too slowly, you can start a task before everyone else and still finish last. (Compare Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.")

I believe that Mark addressed this problem in DIT under the rubric of "low processing power" (I gave away my copy of DIT and don't have it in front of me. Forgive me if this attribution is wrong!). My sense is that Mark's main answer to the problem of working too slowly has been to offer systems which increase the operational efficiency with which one processes tasks. In short, if you 1. use a system like DIT (or AF or Simple Scanning, or....) you will 2. process your work faster and, as a result, 3. complete it faster. While there's no doubt that Mark's systems can make a huge difference in speeding up work, in my experience, there can be a major gap between 2. and 3. You can use a brilliant task management system and still be less efficient than your apparently scattershot peers, because they take less time to do things.

Here are three generic examples. (As an homage to DIT, you are named "Mick Cool" in these examples and your disorganized but oddly more efficient peer is "Joe Slobb").

1. You want to finish your tax return promptly, so you add "taxes" to your long list. It stands out for you and you work on it daily in multiple sessions over a number of days. The work is a trifle tedious, you occasionally feel distracted, and it takes you a while to double-check your calculations. Your neighbor Joe Slobb leaves his tax return for the last minute, but he only takes 3 hours to finish a comparable return, whereas you took 6 hours.

2. You have an essay due in two weeks time. You work on it diligently every day from now until the deadline. The basic research gets done without too much difficulty (using Mark's DIT certainly helped), but when you get the writing stage things slow down considerably. You estimate that you spent 40 hours on the assignment. Your classmate Joe Slobb, who doesn't use an agenda, let alone a list system, spends 10 hours doing his assignment in the last few days before the deadline. Grade-wise, you both get a B.

3. You're tasked to write a fairly straightforward client email. You add it to your "no-list" list and get to it promptly. It takes you a while to get the words right and while writing, a detail catches your eye which you research as a potential problem. By the time you send the email, 45 minutes later, you have several more weighty tasks to do and you're annoyed that you took so long. In the lunchroom later that day, Joe Slobb tells you that he took 5 minutes to write his client email and that the problem you were worried about was "no big deal." You have just as much job experience as Joe Slobb, so you wonder how his intuition allowed him dispense with the task so easily.

There is nothing special about these examples and they could be multiplied indefinitely.

I think it would be tempting to respond to this by saying that "working too slowly" is too loose a label for what are distinct (and often task-specific) issues. For instance, one might work too slowly because of a lack of training. Or, conversely, one might work too slowly because one is a perfectionist. One might even opine that working too slowly is a separate issue from the bulk of what we discuss here, which is task management (rather than, I suppose, time management).

And yet, for me (and probably for others too), these issues tend to cluster into an identifiable pattern of activity which is a sister or cousin to procrastination. Sometimes the same person can work too slowly on things they are bad at (lack of training) AND on things they are very good at (perfectionism). So, it might be worth addressing this as a cohesive overarching problem.

One thing that does seem to help for slow workers is external pressure and/or accountability. As with procrastination, having pressure or a deadline can concentrate the mind and make one work faster. But, of course, we can't always control external pressure. Most jobs have period of low-pressure when one's pace of work can (and does) slow down. Also, of course, pressure can sometimes have a negative effect instead, leading to paralysis or procrastination classically defined (i.e. task avoidance).

In this vein, the few of Mark's systems that involve a compulsion to do tasks can obtain good results for slow workers. I'm thinking here of systems like the Randomizer (all task selections are forced), Superfocus (with its mandatory column 2 tasks), and FV (the first listed task must form part of the task chain). But these systems may not be a quick and easy fix either, because resistance can build up against the compulsory aspect of the system, leading one to switch to a less compulsory system (e.g. Simple Scanning) instead.

So, on behalf of all the slow workers out there, I would be curious to hear of any strategies, perspectives, and solutions that the forum members may have. I'm also curious if you think that any of Mark's systems/approaches are especially well-suited to overcoming this problem. I'm always open-minded to try new things and to re-try old ones.