It Will Always Collapse

Won’t it?

Three weeks of travel.

If you’re looking for an excuse for why I’ve been absent from the keyboard, from the pen and paper, from the site… Well, you won’t find it here.

Consider it an explanation. And an apology. And, if pressed, an admittance of failure.

But it has made me think, these weeks alone, silent, thinking to muscle that I have neither time or energy to do the things I want to do.

Won’t that always be the case? The urgency of the needs seem to crowd out the aspirations of the wants.

I haven’t recently given practical advice on the site, so indulge me, for a moment, while I depart from the land of the telling a good story and reflect on how to solve this problem.

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If you’ve ever read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, you’ll probably find these three types of work familiar:

1. Doing pre-defined work: working of of to-do lists, action items, inboxes, etc. that you’ve previously defined.
2. Doing work as it arrives: these are all the interruptions from phone calls, urgent emails, knocks on the door, that we never expect (but should always plan for).
3. Defining your work: this is the time you devote to making sure your actions and projects are in service of your higher goals and expectations and your work is headed in the right direction.

Did you notice that, the meat in that sandwich of doing your work? The 600lb. gorilla in all of that is the work that arrives. It’s undefined, unknown, and it’s highly variable.

There’s even more to it than that though. Because often this undefined work comes at a frantic and high-energy place. It’s fun to get wrapped up in, and more concerning, it’s easy to stay in that mode. The longer you spend fighting fires, the more you think that every problem needs to be doused with a hose.

And so we start to forget all the work we’ve defined. We forget all the work we need to define. And the work that we put on our plates, the work that we want to be doing, the aspirations that we have about what we could be, starts to collapse.

How do we take back our time from the demands of others? How do we keep the commitments to ourselves, those secrets we’ve chosen not to share with anyone else, when our commitments to others are so visceral and externalized? How do we stop our day from getting eaten up by the unknown work, and keep our balance between doing, defining, and crisis management in check?

I don’t have all the answers, and if you’ve noticed, I haven’t even really found something that works. But I do have an idea that I’ll be trying out.

The Aspirational Review

One of the biggest reasons we – and when I say “we” I most certainly mean “I” – get sucked into constant crisis mode is because we haven’t done the work on the front-end to identify the work that needs to be done to avoid the problems in the first place. We sit in meetings, take notes, determine action items – and then we head to another meeting, and it’s all forgotten. Repeat over the course of the day, and you have a list of things that needs to get done, but no time to actually review the actual actions that need to be taken to do it (let alone actually do the task in the first place).

Meanwhile, there’s a list of pet projects and wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-dos a mile long, waiting for a sliver of attention, that you’ll never get to because you’ve made yourself “too busy” to actually manage any of the work that you take on for yourself. Instead, you play a constant game of catch up, running just in front of the ten-ton boulder that is your work catching up with you, hoping no one notices the perspiration from you sprinting all over the place, or the bags under your eyes from burning the midnight oil.

Phew. Do I sound a little irritated? Don’t worry – I promise this is (mostly) a moment of self-deprecating introspection. It’ll be over soon.

There really is a list of a hundred story ideas – most of them outlined, ready for me to just put in some words and post to a site – and at least a dozen more pieces that are in some state of completion. But they don’t get done, because they are written out, and then they go unnoticed, tucked away in some corner where the sun don’t shine.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. And it shouldn’t, really, truly, be this way. Because all it takes is a fifteen minute review at the beginning of the day, and maybe another fifteen minutes at the end of the day, to get the work you have on hand under control.

What is a review exactly? I see it as three things. First, as an opportunity to compile and define all the work that you generated for yourself over the course of the day and has gone unfinished. Second, it’s an opportunity to plan your day ahead (or verify that your plans were kept) based on the time you have available and the tasks you’ve given yourself. And third, and most importantly, it’s an opportunity to review the actions and projects you keep telling yourself you wish you had time to do and make time for them.

Because here’s the real deal – if it’s important to you, why aren’t you doing it? The excuse of there not being enough time just doesn’t cut it – either it’s important, and you make time, or it’s not important. And that’s certainly all-or-nothing, and it’s definitely totalitarian, but it’s a simple fact.

Anyway, I do find that this review time helps keep me on track, mindful of the fact that not everything that comes up during the day is a crisis, and aware that the important things I’ve defined for myself still matter, and still need to get done, even if they aren’t part of my “work”.

This is important to me. This is a commitment. And this is what I’m choosing to spend my time on right now.