We all want to get more done and stop procrastinating, and we feel that we could accomplish great things if we could just get our act together. However, most people condemn themselves to the status quo for one reason or another. It's been said that failing to do what one out to do is the greatest of evils. Turning back the tide of laziness, procrastination, lack of motivation, or inability to accomplish is the subject of our discussion here, and it could change the way you approach tasks and goals.
The modern world has become ultra productive, and companies that run things deal with the same issues as the individual, except on a larger scale. They have devised ways to overcome the scourge of inadequacy and produce something that matters. I'll share some of their secretes with you today.
Your productivity depends on your ability to organize tasks and goals
Companies are highly structured organizations where each person has a specific job. Some people in each department are responsible for creating and managing tasks for other people in the department - these are called project managers. Do you find it strange that a company would hire people and pay them a lot of money just to make up tasks for other people? This is how much successful companies value organizing tasks and delegating work. The people who complete the tasks don't have to worry about creating the tasks and vice versa.
How project managers organize tasks
Project managers have two sets of tasks lists for any given worker they are managing - an active task list and a backlog. The active task list contains a few items that should be completed in a specific amount of time - this could be a few days, a week, two weeks, etc. The backlog is much longer; it's a staging area for the active task list. All possible future tasks go in the backlog; some of them will be prioritized to the active list in the next week or two, some in the next month or two, and some may never make onto the active list.
Think of the backlog as every conceivable task you might want done in the future, and as some tasks get done, others still on the backlog may been to be removed or re-prioritized. In a company, the backlog will change as business needs change, and the project manage works with upper management to decide what gets booted from the backlog and what gets moved to the front.
Benefits of this approach
The second law of thermodynamic states that things move from order to disorder. To get things done and be effective, you want to do the opposite. You want to move things from disorder (the backlog) to order (the active task list). Then the respective worker can accomplish each task, create even more "order" as in structure on down the line, and the business succeeds.
As an individual, you are the whole company. You are upper management, you are the project manager, you are the worker, and you reap the rewards when tasks are completed. This should give you great motivation. You must start to treat your own life and the way you get things as if you are a company, and you must put on each of these hats at different times so that you can accomplish your goals.
Most people start with the active task list
Most people just make a list of things, and say, "I need to get this done this week", or "I need to get this done today". But when you just have a task list, you are starting too far down the chain of organizational structure, and you have nothing to build on. Without a long term plan, you task list quickly fizzles, you start procrastinating, and your main goals go unaccomplished.
Your ability to accomplish your goals requires sustained effort over time, and the way you do that is to add structure. This is how Fortune 500 companies control large segments of the economy - it's all about structure and creating order from disorder.
Defining the "Hats" you need to wear:
Here's is a synopsis of everything we've talked about so far. Write this down and remember it. Below is the organizational structure I've outlined above. As an individual, you must be all of these things. You don't have to be all of them at the same time, but you must "wear the hat" as we say. The put on the next hat.
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Upper Management - Where am I going? How do I get there?
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Project Manager - Upper management has given me a set of goals and objectives. They have told me we're going. For each goal, I need to create a list of tasks that, upon completion, will enable us to reach the goal. The tasks are not given to me; I must make them up. I first put them in the backlog, and then I move them to the active task in the order that I want them completed. Many of these tasks build on each other, and I must delegate them in a timely fashion so as not to overwhelm the worker with too many tasks at any given time. It is important that the worker is not given too much to do, or he may feel overwhelmed, and this would be detrimental to your objectives.
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Worker - My job is very simple, I just do tasks assigned to me. Sometimes I have to break out each task into smaller tasks, but I work in a silo like worker bee. My job is to do, and I am far down on the organizational structure. I could be called a "grunt worker". I may be highly specialized, well paid, or I could be low skilled and poorly compensated.
How to put yourself in these roles
You are not a company, but you can pretend that you are, and in so doing, accomplish things in your own life the way that companies accomplish things. You must teach yourself to think like the person in each of these roles. When you are wearing the "Upper management hat", you must not think like a worker or a project manager.
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As upper management - concern yourself only with objectives. What am I trying to do? What am I building? If you were an architect, you would be deciding what kind building you want - not designing the building. You are concerned with it's purpose. If you were building an app, you would be designing the business model; you are the one conceptualizing the product. If you are running a farm, your job is decide what you're going to produce, how you're going to produce it, and how you're going to make money off of it. If you have a ugly, overgrown yard, your job is to decide how you want it to look. If you are trying to lose weight, your job is figure out what your goals are - what weight you want to get to, how many miles you want to be able to run without stopping, or what dress size you want to attain. Your purpose when wearing this "hat" is to define objectives. Write them down.
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As project manager - for each objective given to you by upper management, create a set of tasks that need to be done to achieve the objective. Your job is not to do the tasks or to define the objectives; concern yourself only with figuring out what needs to be done to accomplish each objective. These tasks have not been defined yet, and the worker's job is to do these task. He must not be defining them - that is your job.
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As the worker - you must focus on each task and do it well. Think about nothing else.
How organizing avoids procrastination and burnout
Let's say that you have a huge project that's going to take months to complete.
Switching between goals or tasks sets keep you motivated
In my own work, I've found that having several goals with their task sets and switching between those keeps me fresh and able to get more done. I will pick several goals to jump between, and they don't have to be related. What's important is that your train of though changes. Do a task for this goal, then switch back and do a task for this other goal. This approach reduces mental fatigue because you are "context switching". You are changing the context of the work you are doing. It's like starting fresh in the morning, except you are structuring you work so that every so often you "start fresh". This can happen multiple times a day. Use this approach to renew your mind in a sense. You are at your best for a certain amount of time on any given thing, so you need to make use of this limited window that you have. You can break your day up into "multiple days" that each list only a couple of hours. So for that two hours, it's a new day to you.
What can I do today?
Goals can be overwhelming because they usually require multiple steps that must be accomplished sequentially over time. Most of the time you can't just sit down, work one day, and reach your goal. It will require sustained effort over many days, weeks, months, and sometimes years. If the goal is large, the time and magnitude of effort required to get there will be great.
You must concern yourself with what you can do today. Most people don't know where to start. They have this goal and a list of steps, but for one reason or another they can't start on any of these tasks today because this task depends on something else, which depends on something else, etc. This is why people procrastinate - because they don't have a starting point. You need to train yourself how to start on a project. Once you get started, one thing leads to another until you've made a lot of progress. Today is all you have, and if you can't start today, you will never start. Tomorrow, when it gets here, will be another today, and you will feel as you did today. The same obstacles that prevented you from acting yesterday, will prevent you from doing anything tomorrow, unless you find something to do today and then make yourself do it. As you make yourself do things, doing more things will get easier.
An Example
A good example is SpaceX. It's a daunting task to put a spaceship full of people on Mars. How do you even start? You start with what you an do today. You can dig a hole, put up a fence, pour some concrete, build some buildings, make some roads, design a place to put tanks that will hold liquid oxygen. These are basic things, but they are a start. You must start with these basic things - things that you are capable of doing.
If I'm building an app, my first step is not to figure out how it's going to work without internet or how users are going to be able to share data with each other. The building blocks are what I start with. If you're trying to lose 100 pounds, you start with walking a half a mile a day - that is something you can do today.