This article is a curated compilation of earlier writings from GTD Focus CEO Francis Sopper, brought together to explore the themes of attention, overload, and how ambitious people engage their work.
Work Overflow
Often how complex your job is, has nothing to do with your title or the number of direct reports you have. I once was promoted and had the number of direct reports reduced. What changed was in the earlier role, our group was made up of subject matter experts, and my job was to get their work out into the world. I was dependent on their workflow, and I had it pretty much dialed in. There were busy seasons, but these would ebb, and I had space to recover and prepare.
In my next job, my direct reports were more dependent on my creating opportunities and developing resources. These were multidimensional and I was often juggling projects and many would drift. Every day ended with more than I could complete in a day. As a result I was frequently a bottleneck. I was stressed, chagrined at my drifting projects, and ashamed of being a bottleneck.
Here’s the irony. The better you get; the more responsibility you get. If you’re ambitious, and, if you’re reading this, then by definition, you have more important projects and actions than you can accomplish within the 24-hour wall. Maybe your job and personal responsibilities have grown. You’re reaching for bigger things. You’re doing new things. You want to open up space. You’re in transition. In my case, the direction of workflow shifted.
Maybe all of those things are happening. Congratulations. I hope.
You’re not alone.
And when this happens, when your workload consistently exceeds your capacity, something predictable begins to occur.
Drift
If we’re in any way ambitious we’re likely to have problems with GTD.
In fact, the more ambitious we are, the more likely we’ll have problems.
We’re pushing the limits.
We’re not lazy. We’re not procrastinating. We haven’t fallen off the wagon.
We’ve hit the, so far, immutable boundary of the 24-hour wall. There’s only so much.
What happens then, is stuff starts to drift. What drifts isn’t the compelling and urgent. What drifts are the things, if I don’t do them today, I can do them tomorrow. If I don’t do them tomorrow, I can do them next week. If I don’t do them next week, I can do them next month.
By this point, you can just about see those things rounding the bend of the Niagara River and heading for the falls.
One of the first things I encourage ambitious people to do is to make a drift list. Capture those things having our attention and every 24-hour period ends without our getting to them.
Handling this now starts with the GTD practice of the Three-fold Nature of Work: planned work, work as it appears; work that needs to be captured, planned, and organized.
It’s the third one ambitious people struggle with the most. You might have a net out there just before the bend in the river to help you capture the drift. I double dare you to find time to plan and organize it.
You’re ambitious: if you could, you’d be doing it.
The solution: do your best; leave the rest.
Ha! Easy to say.
If that feels familiar, the next assumption most people make is that something is wrong with their attention.
Attention Surfeit
Last week, I picked up some resonance from a few of you about the combination of ambition and the experience of having projects and next actions drift away from you.
First, I don’t think you’re attention deficit.
I’m all up in learning diversity. This work I do now began when I was a newly minted college graduate and spent a semester as an intern at a rural school in Maine. Among my responsibilities there was to apply an innovative reading program with high school students who had, up to that point, not learned to read.
By the end of the semester, they all learned to read.
This had absolutely nothing to do with me. At that point, a trained seal had more standing in its profession than I had for just about anything. My job was to follow a strict protocol developed by some geniuses somewhere that the school leadership had been clever enough to adopt.
Attention deficit showed up in my world about 15 years later when a couple of more geniuses — this time I knew their names — Edward Hallowell and John Ratey — recognized some of us had characteristically shorter attention spans for certain things and this condition made it harder to perform well in school.
And as with reading, there were techniques for people with shorter attention spans for certain things to perform well in school.
It turns out, the problem isn’t about learning diversity. Learning diversity has been always and eternal. The problem was (sadly, often is) teaching conformity. Students don’t have disabilities and disorders. We have teaching disabilities and disorders.
Back to your drift. You don’t have attention deficit. Nearly all of us have attention surfeit. And in the 27 years since Hallowell and Ratey published their presciently titled Drive to Distraction, the bids for our attention have doubled and doubled.
Here’s a technique to begin to address the surfeit.
First, review your Drift List. On the list are the things, if I don’t do them today, I can do them tomorrow. If I don’t do them tomorrow, I can do them next week. If I don’t do them next week, I can do them next month.
Now preview your calendar for the next three weeks. I promise you, if you don’t initiate a next action for any of these drift items in the next three weeks, without a serious change in your current way of working, the next action won’t happen within the following three week period.
This requires a particular kind of weekly review. You’re reviewing your previous week for movement on drifting items, reviewing your upcoming week for engagement of any drifting items, and you’re pondering things that have your attention that you need to remove from view. The Someday/Maybe list is for your hopes. Most of us need a No Way Baby list to dump the surfeit.
So if the problem isn’t a lack of attention, what does it look like in practice when too many things compete for it?
Knowing What I’m Not Doing
What with the Thanksgiving holidays, non-stop incoming responsibilities, a non-serious but impactful illness in the family, and, ick, end-of-year paper in the mail that needed processing by hand, I’ve felt under the pile for the last ten days. You know how it is.
David Allen reminds us, things happen and we can get behind. It’s not because of poor practice, it’s because life sometimes drops stuff on us in clumps. The important thing is to ignore the pile and focus on the one thing at the top. Process that. Now there’s one thing on top of the pile. Process that. Maybe it’s a big pile; maybe it’s a small one. Doesn’t matter. There’s only one thing worthy of your attention. It’s the one thing at the top.
You’ve heard me say before, and I’ll say it again: it’s the most effective approach and it’s not as easy as it looks. My fear is deep within that pile is something slowly growing from a task to a problem while it’s being ignored.
Here’s the gift of GTD. The processing doesn’t mean doing. It means knowing. It means getting projects onto project lists. Next actions queued up. Stuff moved to someone else whose role is to act on it next. Opportunities trashed or deleted — harsh, but when life offers you candy, sometimes you have to keep walking toward the broccoli.
Yesterday, I got to the bottom of the pile. I know what those things over there are: they’re things I’m not doing. Nonetheless I’m feeling free and focused now because I know what I’m doing.
I’m writing to you.
But even when we know what we’re not doing, the question remains, how do we actually make progress when everything feels like too much?
Quick Wins
Your phone doesn’t think you’re attention deficit. Neither do digital game makers. Las Vegas casinos don’t either. They think you have lots of attention for the promise of a quick win.
Perhaps you’ve walked through one of those casinos and have been captivated, as I have, by the sustained and focused attention of the folks playing the slots. No doubt many of those people in other contexts would describe themselves as attention deficit. Not here.
We can use this phenomenon to our advantage. It works like this. If I asked you to imagine a simple exercise like a sit up, and then asked if you could do 100 of them, most of you, maybe nearly all of you, would say no. Now if I asked if you could do two sit ups. Many of you would say, yes.
How about this? If you were able to have a day, when you could pause every ten minutes and do two sit ups, in eight and a half hours, could you complete 100? Many more of you could, and most of you who could do two, could complete more than you may have imagined.
With our attention spans, we compare ourselves to those rare cognitive athletes, who can apply hours of single-focused attention. It’s like comparing ourselves to marathon runners who can complete 26 miles in three hours. That’s between 50 and 60 thousand steps. Many of you walk a marathon a week at 10 thousand steps a day. There’s actually not a lot of long-term benefit to doing it faster.
Instead of thinking of ourselves as attention deficit, let’s focus on deploying our attention in chunks that are right for us. And this is easier done when you define your work as next actions and move through them one at a time.
A succession of smaller wins also gets us to the finish line.
Of course, even small wins depend on something more fundamental, your ability to engage your attention in the first place.
Timing is Everything
I just wrote the title to this set of thoughts and set a stopwatch. We apply our brains to different things all day. It turns out, we have different attention spans for each of those applications. Right now, I’m doing that kind of complicated thing we often call writing, but that underestimates the work of conceptualizing ideas, imagining an audience, and pushing words out in letter-by-letter, finger-by-finger sequence. For me, and for most of us, it’s what I call a cognitively heavy lift.
Writing: 4 mins 52 secs
I got up; paced around; stretched my neck and shoulder muscles; got a drink of water. I forgot to time the break. Break times are predictable also.
Shimatta! I forgot to restart the timer.
It’s on now.
One of the most important things I do when I’m in person with a client is to time their various activities. For nearly all of us, there is a predictable arc to how much time we’ll spend thinking about something before our brain wanders off for a coffee, cigarette, and piece of pie.
Writing: 3mins 28 secs
Boris The Cat was scratching on the furniture so scooting him away was a natural break. Didn’t time that one either. I’ll try to get the next one.
As I was saying, when we set out to do something, our brains work on it, then pause to sit, listen to the birds, watch the clouds drift, then it gets back to work. And one of the important things I do is watch folks, and time those on and off periods. It’s different for different things, I have a short attention span for reading; a bit longer one for writing, longer for swimming and walking, This session alternated between writing, and reading and thinking about what I’d written. If I were just watching and not engaging in metacognition, that is, watching my own brain at work, I would have timed the activities separately. As I’m noting, I’m having some difficulty doing while being conscious to track my doing.
Reading and writing 10 mins 15 secs
Stopped again, paced, snacked on a sweet pepper, paced, ate another pepper. I wasn’t hungry which was the reason for the low-density choice. The eating was just something to do: gastrointestinal fidgeting.
Break 2 mins 44 secs
Remembered to reset the timer after I wrote the first sentence above. I’ve reread this to check the flow and sequence, made some additions to a paragraph above. At this moment, my brain feels restless. My legs are wanting to move and push the blood back up. My neck muscles are feeling stiff.
Reading and writing 9 mins 17 seconds
Got up. paced, stretched, snacked on another veggie.
Break 1 min 44 sec
The important thing is not how long or short your attention span is, or what your break and recovery period is. What’s important is you know you have one. You’ve got a natural rhythm. One interesting thing to watch for is stopping for a break and not cycling back to a task. The need for a break comes, and instead of being a support to the work flow, it becomes an interruption. What’s important is to feel the oscillation and ride it. Lift, rest, lift, rest.
Embrace your own wave cycle.
Reading and writing 11 mins 24 seconds
I started this late in the day, so stopped around 6:30, had food, watched an episode of the Blacklist: James Spader is fun to watch.
Break 1 hour 49 mins 16 seconds
Forgot to restart the timer right away. I let the thoughts percolate on my cognitive back burner so I could stick the takeaway.
The takeaway: thinking is messy, but it’s not random. Quod erat demonstrandum.
8 mins 34 seconds plus a couple of untimed minutes.
And yet, even when you understand your rhythm, there’s another force working against you, time.
Paying the Cognitive Mortgage
You gather for an experience. It could be training, it could be the Camino de Santiago, a cruise, or the Consumer Electronics show. It’s a powerful experience. You learn a lot. You make great connections with people.
A week later, you’re back in the hurly burly of your regular life where there’s no room to process all this rich experience. Maybe you’re wearing the t-shirt as a night shirt.
Your brain knows exactly what to do with all that experience, learning, and connections. For the first few days afterwards, it checks in with some memory prompts to see if you’re going to do anything with all the information you took on board. After about five days, it starts to flush the memory stuff that hasn’t been accessed and isn’t linked strongly to stuff you are accessing. In about ten days, nearly anything you haven’t reengaged with has been flushed from active recall. A few things that have been responding to your brain’s prompts with “I should” stay around a little longer, but your brain slows down the prompting, which slows down the “I should” response.
Those people you made the great connections with? If you passed them on the sidewalk no longer in resort wear and with an all-business demeanor, you’ll probably walk past them unrecognized.
After three weeks, your brain now starts to resist engaging with the information. If you’ve lived without it this long, you can probably live without it. Or so it thinks. Your brain is about efficiency above all. No visible reward or punishment associated with any of that, then why keep carrying it around.
You may have been right about that “I should.” However, let three weeks go by, and engaging that ‘I should” will encounter your brain’s passive resistance. Let three more weeks go by and that resistance is stronger.
The good news.
If you want to build that relationship, become conversant in that language, explore that opportunity, play the ukelele; you have to engage it at least once every five to ten days. Let three weeks slip and those relationships, that learning, that investment in the experience, will get gradually harder to restart – to the point that you’re likely be embarrassed to reach out, pick it back up, and re-explore.
Two years.
Engage something at least every five- to ten-days for two years, and you’ll find your brain has taken it seriously and is going after you to improve and persist. It takes two years to pay the cognitive mortgage, but now you own it.
Which brings us back to the reality that started all of this.
Coming Back to Drift
When things drift, they don’t just sit still.
They become harder to re-engage.
Eventually, they disappear altogether.
The GTD Focus Strategy program is guided by a coach who understands what it means to be busy and overwhelmed with projects and next actions.
You address it by engaging the Three-fold Nature of Work:
- Pre-defined work
- Work as it appears
- Defining work
Your coach will lead you on a path engaging your work in these three distinct categories. Each leans on different components of your trusted systems and requires different habits.
It’s a level up from managing your GTD system. Now it’s leveraging that system to engage your surfeit of opportunity.
Warmly,
CEO of GTD Focus
Francis Sopper