Why Your Most Important Work Keeps Getting Pushed Aside

This article brings together selected writings by Francis Sopper, CEO of GTD Focus, exploring ambition, attention, and the challenge of having more to do than any day can hold.

 

If you’re ambitious in any way, you’re likely to have problems with GTD.

 

In fact, the more ambitious you are, the more likely those problems become.

 

You’re pushing the limits. You’re not lazy, not procrastinating, and you haven’t fallen off the wagon. You’ve simply hit the so-far immutable boundary of the 24-hour wall. There’s only so much.

 

What happens then is that stuff starts to drift. Not the compelling and urgent, that gets done. What drifts are the things where, if I don’t do them today, I can do them tomorrow. If not tomorrow, next week. If not next week, next month. By that 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 make a drift list, capture the things that have your attention and yet end every 24-hour period undone. Handling this starts with the GTD practice of the threefold nature of work: planned work, work as it appears, and work that needs to be captured, planned, and organized. It’s that third one ambitious people struggle with most. You might have a net out there just before the bend in the river to catch 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, for now: do your best. Leave the rest.

 

The Attention Problem

 

After writing about drift recently, I heard resonance from a number of you, the experience of watching projects and next actions slip away despite your best efforts. I want to address something directly: I don’t think you’re attention deficit.

 

Attention deficit showed up in my world about 15 years into my career, when Edward Hallowell and John Ratey recognized that some of us have characteristically shorter attention spans for certain things, and that this made it harder to perform in conventional settings. As with so many learning differences, the problem was never the students. The problem was teaching conformity. Students don’t have disabilities and disorders. We have teaching disabilities and disorders.

 

But back to your drift. You don’t have attention deficit. Nearly all of us have attention surfeit. And in the nearly 30 years since Hallowell and Ratey published their presciently titled Driven to Distraction, the bids for our attention have doubled and doubled again.

 

Here’s a technique to begin addressing the surfeit.

 

First, review your drift list, those things that keep getting pushed to tomorrow, next week, next month. Then preview your calendar for the next three weeks. I promise you: if you don’t initiate a next action for any of those drift items in the next three weeks, without a serious change in how you’re working, they won’t happen in the three weeks after that either.

 

This requires a particular kind of Weekly Review. You’re looking back at the previous week for movement on drifting items, looking ahead at the upcoming week for any engagement of those items, and pondering what has your attention that you need to remove from view. The Someday/Maybe list is for your hopes. Most of us also need a No Way Baby list for the surfeit.

 

When Overflow Becomes the Norm

 

The complexity of a job often has nothing to do with your title or the number of people reporting to you. I was once promoted into a role with fewer direct reports than the job before it, and yet it was significantly harder to manage. In my earlier role, I supported subject matter experts getting their work out into the world. I was dependent on their workflow, had it mostly dialed in, and while there were busy seasons, they would ebb. I had space to recover and prepare.

 

In the next role, my reports were dependent on me to create opportunities and develop resources. These were multidimensional, projects drifted constantly, and every day ended with more than I could complete. I became a bottleneck, stressed, chagrined at the drift, and ashamed of the backlog I was creating for others.

 

Here’s the irony. The better you get, the more responsibility you receive. If you’re ambitious — and if you’re reading this, you are — you have more important projects and actions than any 24-hour period can hold. Maybe your responsibilities have grown. You’re reaching for bigger things, doing new things, trying to open up space, navigating a transition. Maybe all of those things are happening at once.

 

Congratulations. I hope.

 

You’re not alone, and you address it by returning to the threefold nature of work: pre-defined work, work as it appears, and defining work.

 

The Gift of Knowing

 

Recently, between holiday commitments, a steady stream of incoming responsibilities, a non-serious but impactful family illness, and — ick — end-of-year paper that needed processing by hand, I felt under the pile for about ten days. You know how it is.

 

David Allen reminds us that this happens. Getting behind isn’t the result of poor practice, it’s because life sometimes drops things on us in clumps. The important thing in those moments is to ignore the size of the pile and focus on the one thing at the top. Process that. Now there’s a new thing at the top. Process that. The pile may be big or small, it doesn’t matter. There’s only ever one thing worthy of your attention, and it’s the one at the top.

 

I’ll say what I’ve said before and will say again: it’s the most effective approach, and it’s not as easy as it looks. My fear is that deep within the pile, something is quietly growing from a task into a problem while it waits.

 

Here’s the gift of GTD though. Processing doesn’t mean doing. It means knowing. It means getting projects onto project lists, next actions queued up, work moved to the person whose role is to act on it next, and opportunities either pursued or cleared away,  harsh sometimes, but when life offers you candy, you occasionally 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 right now. And yet I feel free and focused, because I know what I am doing.

 

I’m writing to you.