Over the past few weeks, a good number of people have been asking how I keep up with everything I work on. In this article, I outline my time, attention, and decision management philosophies, and integrate those philosophies with my descriptions of ethics and truth from previous essays.
So, what ought I do? Many of us do too much with our time, others too little, and there are multi-billion dollar industries centered around life planning and productivity. Much of this article reflects the largest influence on my personal productivity style, David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. If you haven’t read his book on the matter, I highly recommend it.
I can’t decide what to do with an evening until I decide what I want to do with my life. I could exhaustively examine my skills, drives, and abilities, but that would only tell me where I’m headed, not where I want to be. I imagine, instead, how I want to be remembered. This reflects most clearly what I want to do with my life. These goals include building relationships, being a good father (eventually), publishing intelligent research, relaxing when appropriate, keeping an ordered and healthy environment, and learning new things every day. If I can be remembered as a loving partner, friend and father, an intelligent researcher, engineer, and linguist, and a orderly, productive member of my environments and communities, I can consider my life’s goals met. From this, I draw a powerful conclusion, which can be equally beneficial to others:
If you’re not doing something right now to further your life’s goals, you’re wasting your life’s time.
Any time I’m asked to take on a new project or relationship, the first thing I ask is “does it fit into my life’s goals?”. If it doesn’t, I’ll politely decline. If it does, it goes into the system I describe here. Post-it notes and highlighters may function to keep a person organized who need to remember to change the oil in their car on a regular basis. For those of us who want to put a dent in the universe, though, a little more structure is needed. Every project is broken down into its atomic steps, those physical “next actions” which can’t be mutually derived. These actions are assigned to environments known as “contexts” (home, work, email, phone, etc), they’re given priority and effort estimates, and saved with start dates, dependencies, and due dates. On average, I spend about an an hour and a half per week processing this system, but this keeps me from spending countless other trying to remember what I needed to be doing where, by when, and with what tools.
An immediate issue is how initiative plays into such a reactionary system. If I see something happening that’s not constructive to the people, places, things, or ideas I value, I know it’s “my problem” if and only if I can do something to address it. Likewise, those actions to address non-constructive externalities can’t put more weight against an existing productive action than they do to correct the addressed destructive force. It’s always a trade-off, but by examining and knowing my personal purpose and values, I can typically tell why I do anything I do.
With a west-coast hippie mother and a conservative midwestern father, I was indoctrinated at a young age with a conflicting set of life-goals. From my mother’s side of the family, I was told to love all, and above all be happy. From my father’s, I was told to be professionally productive above all. Both reflect the core values of each parent, but neither is wholly tenable in absence of external assumptions. From the left, I was taught that cooperation was always superior to competition. From the right, however, these were reversed. Later, I determined that comparing the two, in their purest forms, is a zero-sum game.
This was the conclusion of my previous article on post-industrial economics, that the function of the state is to promote cooperation on issues that directly affect human rights or cultural universals, while promoting competition for the progress of human society. Pure cooperation would imply that all problems of humanity are “my problems”, while pure competition states that only those problems which affect my standard of living are “my problems.” Both extremes here are the long tails of a normal curve – the most effective path, in my mind, is a combination of both approaches.
With any path comes both action cost and opportunity cost. Costs, however, aren’t exclusively financial or physical. They can also be relationship-related (social) costs and thought-space (mental). For every hour I spend at work, I increase in financial capital and professional social capital, but decrease in domestic social capital. The same is true in reverse, and neither can be optimized without the other. The balance is between benefit to each of the societies in which I place value: myself, my household, my city, state, nation, planet, and species. In regards to societies, recall, it’s turtles all the way down. People act like societies, societies act like neurons, and neurons act like people. Each are simultaneously independent and interdependent of their own rights. Moving up in scale, however, the impact of an action is heightened exclusively through influence and meta-influence (the sum of those able to be influenced through your networks). This principle applies equally to those sitting at the trigger of a nuclear weapon as it does to those who roll down their window at a stoplight to give spare change to someone in need.
Why, then, do all self-assumed pure socialists not sell everything they own to bring medicine to children in Africa? Why do self-assumed libertarian capitalists attend state-sponsored universities? The question is one of weights and balances. If a proposed action (including thought and speech acts) is more socially constructive, linguistically communicative, or cognitively representative to a community you value, then the same act is socially destructive, linguistically non-communicative, or cognitively skewed to another community, it is assumed to be “the right thing to do.” By this, I claim that all people function in their own self-interests – what varies is the definition of self.
Once I’ve decided the constructive, communicative, or representative nature of an action or project, the last thing to consider is how long it will take. If it takes less than two minutes (and I’m in the right environment), I do it then and there. If it takes longer, it goes into the planning system. Every project can be broken down into substantive actions. Making a ham sandwich certainly takes less capital and planning than making a spacecraft, but both are, at their base form, the gestalt of actions. Gestalts (the german word for “form”) are those emergent properties of a system that make it greater than the sum of its parts. By understanding and categorizing that the atomic units of a project (actions) need to be done in certain locations, at certain times, and with certain priorities, unilateral progress is possible between otherwise overwhelmingly thought-space-consuming tasks. In short, I dream big, break everything down, and take all of my projects one step at a time.
This, therefore, is a faded dream of the time when I went down into the dust and noise of the Eastern market-place, and with my brain and muscles, with sweat and constant thinking, made others see my visions coming true. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.
— T. E. Lawrence
For some people, the career is all-consuming. For others, such is university, medical issues, religious practice, sports, or hobbies. The productive life balances these labors according to your goals and communities of value to make the most of the ultimate forms of economic scarcity: your time on, and concern for this world.