Secrets of Productive People | Mark Forster | Summary
Productive people are those who make a real and measurable difference to the world.
Mark Forster (his blog is here) is a productivity guru, who IMO stands taller than David Allen because he dismantles the building blocks in ways you can put them together on your own and explores more of them, all the time. He teachers you to be creative yourself (in solving your productivity problem), rather than giving a prescription. Caveat - When you are new to him, he can appear all over the place.
Mark Forster defines - Productivity = Efficiency X Creativity. Efficiency comes from productive time management. Creativity rests on how to get great ideas, while questioning the problem, you want to solve.
Both need to be sustained over time and should build to a critical mass in one chosen direction. Because - To bring oneself up to word class in any given subject is reputed to require around 10000 hours of focussed work.
Persistence and Consistency are under-valued because their results tend to look easy and they are unglamorous by themselves.
doableAction - Recognize that three pillars of productivity are Efficiency, Creativity and Consistency.
doableAction Being productive is a learnt skill. Putting the effort into fixing your weak spots will repay you over life!
One way to get started is to look for patterns in what makes any of us unproductive. And then doableAction do less of the same. These are - Be unsystematic, Don’t follow through and Overload yourself.
Email is an example of a low level system. It affects everything that is based on it. You need to do it right. Your system is unique to you and only you can fix it. Begin by looking for your ‘always’. If you say, I am always behind or I always forget to check my schedule in the morning - then it is not about bad bad you. It is about fixing the low level system.
Don’t throw away your current system. Instead tweak and improve it. It is more likely to work (doableAction - Did your GTD effort fail? Why?).
Do this by asking questions about the system! (and your ‘always’ or ‘never’ around it). More about questioning below -
Questioning is fundamental to the creative process. doableAction Ask the ‘why’ questions. Why do I forget to check my schedule in the morning? Then question your answer with another why. Repeatedly as needed.
doableAction Follow up with ‘How’ question. The ‘Why’ are necessary, but need to result in a ‘How’. That makes it constructive.
You may not be able to answer the question in mind. Let it simmer in the back. doableAction - Have a system in place to revisit your pending questions.
Let your questions provide answers to you, so that you are not just going along with everybody else or with the latest fashion. But thinking for yourself and fixing what needs attention.
Revisiting is great not only for questions but for generating quality ideas. doableAction Write my five best ideas for, ‘xxx - whatever you want to ideate on’. Don’t think too hard. Write it. Then put it away. Repeat exercise next day, without looking at these. Do this for five days. Then see and compare.
This also works for questions that require thought. Make bullet points instead and keep putting them away for the 5th day.
The core idea here is, ‘Little and Often’. And sustained (background) mindfulness.
‘Little and Often’ cuts both for ideas and time (procrastination). If you have been putting off doing something, doableAction Get started and do a little bit. Then come back to it later.
Salami Slicing (the name) relies on identifying the first step of a big project and starting on it. It can be (worst case) as simple as just getting the file out.
To manage time better, look out for chunks of your discretionary time. Where you have control over what you can do with it. All of us, have at least some of it. Even in the most tied down of jobs. Key is to use it well.
Treat your discretionary time as a precious resource and manage it accordingly. doableAction Look to create more of it by skipping meetings and saying ‘No’ especially if you are be able to demonstrate value from the time so saved!
Mark Forster talks about Distant Elephants too. From a mountain top in Kenya (while on a safari) the grazing elephants look peaceful. So does your calendar an year out from now. Come closer to the elephants and you will find mayhem and destruction. Ditto when tomorrow becomes today. doableAction think well before making commitments far out in the future.
Let us now look at productive time management - one of the basic systems we need is how to manage our time.
Basic daily routines should be under control | Tasks should be action’ed quickly and systematically | Big projects should be given adequate time. doableAction Use these as a checklist to decide if your time management system needs tweaking.
A good system should operate in the background and get out of the way.
The problem with todo lists is that they are out of date, very shortly after you have written them. Then they add to your stress of things not yet done, without any hope of crossing all of them off. You add things to ToDo lists because you do not want to miss them. So, they also spread your focus all over the place. Even though narrow focus is better, our natural tendency is to widen it all the time.
Narrow focus is based on the idea that you take on work, if you are able to keep up to date with it.
doableAction Here is a simple system that works. His blog has many more.
doableAction Caution! Do not thrown away your old system completely, while trying out this one (or any new one, for that matter).
The 5 tasks system -
To start - every morning - Write out a list of 5 tasks to do.
Don’t feed from a larger list. These should come fresh out of your head. It is essential for the method to work properly (this require some courage so before your start, move your essential reminders to some app with alarm set at the right time - and out of your discretionary time)
The tasks can be any size, but doable in a day. They should be with a clear finish point. Example - ‘write 1000 words of my novel’ instead of simply, ‘write my novel!’
Do the tasks in order. You don’t have to finish a task. Just do some work on it. If you finish a task, cross it off the list.
Else, Re-enter it at the end of the list, still crossing it off. Repeat this process - working in order - Crossing it off.
Remember to go back to your list - to cross off every time, re-entering when incomplete - as you work. Crossing gives satisfaction too :)
Repeat this process until you have only 2 tasks left on your list. Add another 3 tasks (by thinking afresh, in that moment and not from another list) and continue as earlier.
Once you are back to 2 tasks again, then repeat the same, by adding 3 more, again. And so on.
If you are afraid, you will miss a hard commitment, set a time reminder for it, taking it off your discretionary time. The system works because it forces you to consider many times in the day, what matters?
Next day is a fresh list always. In the same day also, if things change too much, you can start the list afresh. Believe it or not - that is all!
At the end of the day, task list will show what you have done in the day. Ask yourself, is this what you wanted? Learn from it.
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The brain becomes, what we demand from it. It is shaped by repetitive activity. Only if we have ability to carry out repetitive tasks (read boring), can we aim to shape our brain. Good news - Once you get the hang of it, ‘State of Flow’ is not boring at all! Rather, it is more like ‘absence of time’ or ‘mind like water’
This comes from creating good systems for ourselves and then keeping them. Here are the doableActions
Get the low level routines right. Email. Task Management. Use questions to improve yours. Then stick to it. They should be 2nd nature. Reserve mental effort for better things, after fixing them once and for all.
Practice questioning, until it too, is 2nd nature. Productivity is a long duration dance between creativity and efficiency. Questions help you apply creativity to a problem you are solving.
Ditto for taking action because that is the building block for efficiency. There is no one best task management system. The one that you can stick to is the best.
The 5 tasks system works well with this. It also prevents you from over-committing yourself and at the same time motivates you to take on more.
Mark Forster advises you to get your time management system to your second nature as your highest initial priority in the process of becoming a productive person.
This summary (first 10 chapters of this book) are the basic and essential building blocks to being productive for life.