In the summer of 2007, the world’s leading experts on not getting things done gathered in Lima for the International Conference on Procrastination. No, I have no idea how long they’d been meaning to get around to it, and there will be no such smart-aleck commentary from me here: can you imagine how many incredibly lame jokes procrastination researchers have to endure on a daily basis? Peru was an apt choice: in March the same year, its government launched an initiative to combat the nation’s chronic punctuality problem. (And, yes indeed, several officials did arrive late for a press conference to launch the campaign, according to a report in The Times.) But for all the scholarly research on ‘task avoidance’, and literally hundreds of self-help books, procrastination is still commonly misunderstood. Which means that if you suffer from it – and some people really do suffer – your attempts to cure it might be making it worse.
Chronic procrastination afflicts an estimated 20 per cent of Americans, according to the leading figure in procrastination research, Professor Joseph Ferrari, and the numbers are surely similar elsewhere.71 But it isn’t the same as laziness, being disorganised, or putting off boring chores. It’s an active avoidance strategy, and because it’s usually rooted in the fear of failure, or success, or loss of control, it most affects exactly those things that really matter to us, not the chores. Personally, I’ve spent many hours procrastinating by reading books and websites on combating procrastination – with the handy side-effect that I can summarise here what I reckon are the only three genuinely useful pieces of advice they contain:
Books on ‘getting motivated’, and hyper-energetic motivational speakers, ironically compound the problem by reinforcing the idea that you need to feel positive about doing something before you begin it. But that’s a subtle form of pressure. What if you dropped the requirement of feeling good, accepted that you felt bad, and just started anyway? Motivation usually shows up quickly thereafter.
Resisting a task is usually a sign that it’s meaningful – which is why it’s awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt ‘Do whatever you’re resisting the most’ as a philosophy of life. As Steven Pressfield says in his pompous but interesting book The War of Art, ‘The more important [something] is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.’
Procrastination is an act of rebellion against what you believe you ‘should’ be doing, and mentally shouting at yourself to do it will only make you rebel more stubbornly. In his book The Now Habit, Neil Fiore suggests keeping an ‘Unschedule’ – a time log on which you make plans for leisure activities but on which you record hours of work only after you’ve finished them. If you plan in advance to do a certain number hours of work in a day, anything less becomes a failure; if you make no such plans, every minute worked counts as a success.
Shut up and listen, because I’m about to share just about the only life-enhancement strategy I’ve managed to implement with near-complete success since starting this whole undertaking. Sadly, it’s about keeping your email inbox under control, not how to have a fulfilling relationship or triple your income (I’m still working on those). But it has advantages, such as the envious comments you’ll get from colleagues when they see the pristine whiteness of your inbox. ‘You are a freak,’ people tell me, with some regularity. That’s got to be envy, right? Right?
Methods for managing information overflow abound, but it was one book and one website – David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and 43folders.com – that facilitated my epiphany. The underlying principle is that your inbox shouldn’t be a place to store emails: you wouldn’t store regular mail on your doormat, and you wouldn’t leave your groceries in shopping bags, returning to them to fish things out as needed. Yet that’s how we treat email. Here’s the alternative, in my own slightly remixed version:
Step 1. If you’ve got hundreds of emails hanging around from more than two months ago, move them into a new folder called something like ‘my embarrassing backlog of emails’. It’s unlikely there’s anything in there so urgent it can’t wait: someone would have pestered you about it by now. You’ll return to this folder at some other point, for example never.
Step 2. Create a folder called ‘archive’. If you already have a system for storing emails, move everything into this one. You don’t need to store emails according to who sent them, or what they’re about: these days, any email program worth its salt can search the whole archive to locate something.
Step 3. Attack your inbox, email by email. If an email’s useless, delete it. If not, ask yourself: is it ‘active’ – is there a specific action you, or someone else, needs to take, or do you just vaguely think it might be worth keeping? If the latter, move it to the archive. (Don’t assume you have to respond to every email you’re sent, either. Some just aren’t worth it.)
Step 4. Now for the killer technique. Set an alarm for, say, 45 minutes, and starting from the top, address each ‘active’ email in turn, and determine the action required. If it can be done in a minute or two, do it. If not, write the action on a to-do list. Repeat the 45-minute trick as many times as you can bear – but you may be surprised at how much you’ll get done in a single session. I was.
Step 5. If you’ve got a lot of emails relating to current projects that just can’t be addressed in two minutes, consider printing them out and storing them with the rest of your papers for those projects. Remember to add any tasks that arise from them to your to-do list, as in Step 4.
Step 6. Bask in a well-ordered inbox. At most, it should now contain only those emails that a) are still ‘active’ and b) require a serious amount of your time. There’s no trick for these – you just have to deal with them – but now, having weeded out the rest, you’ll be able to focus on them exclusively. And perhaps reach inbox-emptiness. This might apply only to card-carrying productivity geeks, but there’s something weirdly addictive about the blankness of an empty inbox which makes you want to keep it that way, by dealing with new emails promptly, not long after they arrive. If this last sentence makes you think I am psychotic, please pretend that you never read it.
I am astonished afresh each time I’m reminded that there are people who don’t use to-do lists. They get up, do things all day, then go to bed. At no point in this process do they cross off tasks in a notebook, fill in timetables with coloured felt-tip pens, or organise complex systems of Post-its. They just do things. The notion of dedicating time to time-management strikes them as perverse – so presumably the idea of weighing the pros and cons of different kinds of to-do lists, as I’ve been doing recently, would trigger paroxysms of horror. Obviously, these people are weird and should be shunned. The ideas I’m about to discuss aren’t for them.
For those of us who do keep a to-do list, whether sporadically or religiously, it’s often a cause of mixed feelings. Writing a list provides you with a sense of control. But if you fail to complete it – or even end the day with a longer list than you started with, as sometimes happens – the feeling is one of defeat and of losing control. We use lists to help us focus, but then again, we value spontaneity; we don’t want to feel governed by the list. We’re also dimly aware that making lists can be a form of procrastination: you feel as if you’re taking constructive action when really you’re not.
Is there a way to use to-do lists happily, without adding stress or killing spontaneity? There’s an absurd amount of writing on this topic, but only a handful of key points:
Are you using a single list both as a reminder of everything you’re committed to doing, and as a menu of tasks for one specific day? That’s a recipe for stress – plus, you’ll never get the buzz of crossing the last item off a list, which all true todo list keepers treasure. So keep two: a ‘master list’, which you should never expect to ‘finish’, and a daily list, created by selecting tasks from the master list.
When making the daily list, don’t pick 20 things you hope to do and that you think will add up to one day’s work: you’ll overestimate your capacities. Instead, pick the three or four most important things, and really commit to doing them, even if you think they’ll take you only a couple of hours. Odd thought it may sound, keeping promises to yourself like this is exhilarating. If you find you have time to spare, pick more items from the master list.
New work floods in constantly, but don’t add it to the current day’s list unless it’s an emergency: keep that list ‘closed’ and add the incoming items to the master list. Oh, and you know how you sometimes add a task to a list even though you’ve already completed it, just for the thrill of crossing it out? (Admit it: you do.) That’s allowed. We tragic list-makers must take our pleasures where we can.
My favourite candidate in the American election of 2004 was Bob Graham, a Democratic senator from Florida whose policies were never very clear, but who had the endearing habit of logging every minute of his life in a series of colour-coded notebooks. ‘7–7.40 a.m.: kitchen, brew coffee, prepare and drink breakfast (soy, skim milk, OJ, peach, banana, blueberries)’, read one typical entry. And another: ‘1.30–1.45 p.m. rewind Ace Ventura’. But this mild quirk counted against him – psychological quirks, or mild ones at least, apparently being a barrier to the presidency – and he soon dropped out of the race. This was a pity, since for anal retentives everywhere, Graham easily passed the legendary ‘barbecue test’ of US politics: would you invite this candidate round for a burger? (‘7–7.45 p.m.: Attend barbecue.’)
Graham’s approach was overkill, to be sure. But logging certain aspects of your life can be a surprisingly powerful practice – not necessarily because there’s much value in the record you create, but because the very act of recording exerts an interesting psychological effect. Spend a couple of days recording your time use in detail, several productivity experts advise, and you’re likely to find yourself using it more efficiently. Record what you eat, and you’ll find yourself eating more healthily, even without taking any other actions. (I tried both recently, for three days each. The time log alarmed me, by revealing how much time I’m capable of frittering away, but it helped, and the effects lasted beyond the three-day period. The food log turned me effortlessly into a health nut, but the effect was far more short-lived.)
This is an individualised version of the Hawthorne effect, observed in the 1920s and 1930s at a Chicago factory. Experimenters from Harvard tried to boost employee productivity by adding rest breaks of different durations, and by changing the lighting, temperature and other factors.72 Many of the changes improved output – but so did changing things back. The mere fact of being observed, the experimenters concluded, was what made people behave differently. Copious doubts have since been raised about the study, and besides, it’s easy to see how it could be used as an excuse for keeping workers under close surveillance. But as a personal technique, it seems to work, helping us make unconscious behaviour conscious.
The idea of making the unconscious conscious chimes with the Buddhist concept of ‘mindfulness’ – what the author and meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein calls ‘the practice of paying attention in every moment of one’s day’. When I first encountered this notion, it was deeply unappealing: wouldn’t it just mean becoming hyper-conscious of your every move, unable to relax because you were engaged in obsessive self-monitoring? The answer, I think, is that it could, if you did it in a judgmental way, relentlessly trying to analyse whether or not each action was the ‘right’ one. But the lesson of the ‘personal Hawthorne effect’ is that you don’t need to make any such judgments. Merely observing your behaviour seems to make for better behaviour. Just paying attention is enough.
Like many novelists, the sci-fiwriter Neil Gaiman rarely does a public reading without being asked the tiresome question: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ He used to respond facetiously – ‘From a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis’ – but that grew boring. ‘I make them up,’ is what he says now. ‘Out of my head.’ People don’t like that. ‘They look unhappy, as if I’m trying to slip a fast one past them,’ he writes in an essay at neilgaiman.com. But the truth, he admits, is that he doesn’t know where his ideas come from.
Through history, creative people have said the same, but that hasn’t stanched the deluge of pop psychology books on how to generate ideas. The surprising problem with some of them is they are amazingly boring; How to Have Creative Ideas, by Edward de Bono, may contain useful advice, but, as with his other work, I’ve never had the perseverance to find out. (Hilariously, he once wrote a book non-ironically entitled How You Can Be More Interesting.) More often, they’re plagued by a familiar, soul-destroying ‘zaniness’ of the same kind that inspires those team-building awaydays where managers play paintball and try not to ponder the futility of existence. One such is Doug Hall’s book Jump Start Your Brain: A Proven Method for Increasing Creativity by Up to 500%. Hall runs workshops using the Eureka!® Stimulus Response™ method, so next time you have a eureka moment, best ask his permission.
It’s tempting, amid this nonsense, to conclude that creativity is intrinsically mysterious and can’t be elucidated. But what if we’re just approaching it wrongly? ‘Blue-sky thinking’, like its cousin ‘outside the box’, has been mocked into obsolescence, but the metaphor they embody persists. We think of creativity as unrestrained and wild – that if we take the lids off our imaginations, great ideas will bubble up. We talk of ‘unleashing’ creativity. But the counter-argument, increasingly influential in business, is that creativity thrives on constraint.
‘Is there something in the nature of constraints that brings out the best creativity?’ wonders Scott Berkun, whose absorbing online essays on innovation, at scottberkun.com, are well worth reading. Consider a good haiku or sonnet, and the answer is obviously yes: it’s precisely the limits of the form that inspire new ways of working inside them. In the workplace, that means no more open-ended brainstorming: if you want the best answers to a question, focus it narrowly; consider a time limit, too. Google reportedly sometimes puts fewer engineers on a problem than it needs, in an effort to inspire ingenuity.
The blue-sky metaphor further implies that ideas come from nowhere. But every idea is a combination of others, Berkun notes. ‘Say it five times … Every amazing creative thing you’ve ever seen [can] be broken down into smaller ideas that existed before. An automobile? An engine plus wheels. A telephone? Electricity plus sound … If you want to be a creator instead of a mere consumer, you must see ideas currently in the world as … ingredients waiting for reuse.’
So the pressure’s off. You don’t have to launch yourself into blue sky, nor conjure ideas from thin air. In fact, you almost certainly won’t succeed if you try.
In 2006, an expert from the Oxford English Dictionary declared ‘lifehacking’ to be one of the words of the year. Getting nominated by the OED is usually a sign that a trend is already horribly past its prime, but lifehacking has won me over. The term, coined by web guru Danny O’Brien, comes from computing, where a ‘hack’ is a quick and dirty solution to a programming problem. Hence ‘lifehacks’: crude but ingenious productivity tricks for getting more done with less stress. The most compelling lesson I’ve learnt from the geeks is this: buy a kitchen timer. Recently, I’ve been carrying one almost everywhere I go – which is fine in all contexts except at airport security, where, for some reason, they seem suspicious of things that tick backwards towards zero.
Lifehackers love kitchen timers because they’re cheap and simple tools, and you can use them in myriad ways to trick your brain into behaving how you want it to. Here are some uses:
Procrastination stems partly from terror – the longer a project languishes unfinished, the more horrifying it gets. The productivity expert Mark Forster, in Get Everything Done, recommends diving into such dreaded work for timed ‘bursts’ of five minutes. That’s a tiny, unintimidating amount of time. Also, crucially, this technique replaces a scary yardstick for measuring your progress (‘I need to do this project really well!’) with a neutral one (‘I just need to work on this for five minutes’).
Once you get into the swing of this, Forster suggests, start increasing the timed periods to 10 minutes and upwards. (A timer that doesn’t tick audibly is probably best.)
For chores that aren’t scary, just boring, set the clock for much less time than you think you’ll need, then move fast. If you apply this to housework, you’ll resemble a ridiculous stop-animation cartoon, but who’s watching? My investigations suggest that a small city flat belonging to a feckless single male can be cleaned this way in under 20 minutes. You may object that you, in contrast, are the parent of four children, each with a psychological disorder that compels them to tear hundreds of sheets of paper into bits, mix them with Lego and flour and water and tread them into the carpet of every room in the house. Fine: you’ll need more time. But the point is that you’ll need less than you think. Try 25 per cent: if it looks like a four-hour ordeal, set the timer for 60 minutes.
Evolution has built our brains to believe that things that are scarce are automatically more valuable. Make this work to your advantage, if your job allows it, by experimenting with a radically curtailed workday. If you had only four hours in which to work, how much more of that four-hour period might you devote to working? Surveys keep suggesting that the average office worker barely manages a handful of hours of real work in a day.73
Unconventional, I know, but why not?
Hofstadter’s law, conceived by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, goes like this: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected – even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. Even if you know a project will overrun, and you build that knowledge into your planning, it’ll simply overrun your new estimated finish time, too. We chronically underestimate the time things take: that’s why Sydney Opera House opened 10 years later than scheduled, and why the new Wembley stadium in London opened in 2007, not in 2003, 2005 or 2006, each of which had been, at various points, the predicted completion date. It’s also why the list-makers among us get up each day and make to-do lists that by the same evening will seem laughable, even insane.
This is the ‘planning fallacy’, and it’s been well-documented by psychologists. (Presumably their experiments took much longer than intended.) It’s a strange kind of delusion, since we’re not really deluded. We know everything always takes longer than expected; we just seem to forget, again and again. In one study, students were asked when they expected to complete an essay, and gave an average answer of ten days before deadline. The reality was an average of one day before deadline. Yet when the students were asked when they normally completed such essays, they knew the truth: one day before deadline.74
It would be good to find a way around the planning fallacy, since never finishing your to-do list is a joyless way to live, and underestimating task-times means constantly rushing to finish things. (I speak as an expert.) How, though? Intuitively, it feels sensible to work out in detail what your projects involve, to break them into chunks and estimate how long each part will take. But the problem with unforeseen delays is you can’t foresee them, no matter how finely detailed your planning. And so, writes Eliezer Yudkowsky at overcomingbias.com, the unlikely trick is to plan in less detail: to avoid considering the specifics and simply ask yourself how long it’s taken to do roughly similar things before. ‘You’ll get back an answer that sounds hideously long, and clearly reflects no understanding of the special reasons why this task will take less time,’ he writes. Nonetheless, ‘this answer is true. Deal with it’.
Better yet, where possible, avoid planning altogether. Use the ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach, and correct your course as you go along. The major advantage is that you’ll quickly start getting real feedback. If you’re starting a new business, say, you won’t have to imagine how customers might respond to your adverts; you’ll know. This approach also helps when it comes to that curious category of tasks that don’t obey Hofstadter’s law: the ones you fret about for weeks, but that end up taking ten minutes. Sometimes, the secret to getting things done is just to do them.
A few sentences from now, I’m going to reveal that I am obsessed with index cards, and you’re probably going to mock me. That’s OK; I can cope. But first let me just remind you of the company I’m in. Vladimir Nabokov wrote several novels on index cards. The celebrated nonfiction writer John McPhee has developed a whole system of research and writing around them, and Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly used them to develop the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Which means that index cards played a critical role in modern literature, journalism and philosophy. (And, incidentally, in the French Revolution, which some say was when they were invented: the new government used the backs of playing cards to record details of the books held in libraries seized from private ownership.) Impressive, no? All right. We can proceed.
I am obsessed with index cards.
A number of us, actually, suffer from this condition. For several years, a back-to-basics camp among productivity enthusiasts has embraced the unassuming index card as an unrivalled tool for personal organisation – a dirt-cheap, portable medium for keeping lists, taking notes, brainstorming, memorising, organising your schedule, or leaving reminders for yourself. One of their passions is the ‘Hipster PDA’ – a tongue-in-cheek proposed replacement for personal digital assistants, consisting of a stack of cards, a bulldog clip … and nothing else. But on the Internet, if you look for them, you can find photographs of some far more complex, borderline alarming efforts to organise one’s entire life on index cards.75
To get theoretical for a moment, the cards fulfil two requirements of any good information storage system. First, it’s easy to put stuff in: I’m far less likely to record a thought if I have to fiddle with a tricksy handheld electronic device. Second, it’s easy to manipulate stuff once it’s in. You can’t, by contrast, endlessly rearrange the pages of a notebook in order to prioritise tasks, structure a piece of writing, discard things you no longer need, etcetera.
But might the power of index cards be greater still – mysterious, almost? I’ve wondered this ever since reading Robert Pirsig’s novel Lila, in which the lead character is a philosopher who lives on a boat, writing his magnum opus on thousands of cards. As each thought occurs, he records it. Then, for hours, he rearranges the cards, grouping similar ideas together until a structure begins to emerge, seemingly independent of his will. This kind of ‘emergent order’ is a hallmark of the web – think Wikipedia – but it’s somehow spookier when it happens on paper, and involves only one human.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann did something similar in reality, creating what he called his ‘secondary memory’: an index-card system that held, eventually, a lifetime of research notes. He came to think of it not as an archive but as a collaborator: as in Lila, an order emerged from the bottom up, and when he followed cross-references through the system, he’d discover connections that took him by surprise. Since being able to surprise someone is a characteristic of true communication, Luhmann argued that he was actually communicating with his system. Personally, I don’t talk to my index cards. But maybe it’s only a matter of time.
I haven’t yet felt the need, in this tour through popular psychology, to praise Stephen Covey, author of the famous The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s one of those hopelessly unrealistic books that insists you begin your journey to fulfilment by Discovering Your Values and Finding Your Life Purpose – a process which, it’s implied, will take a few days of slogging through several grim chapters of homework-style exercises. But a few days is both too long (who’s got a few days to spare?) and too short: surely discovering your ‘life purpose’ takes your whole life? I finally lost respect for Covey when he decided there was an eighth Habit, requiring a new book. Who’s to say there won’t be a ninth, tenth, eleventh? I’m no maths expert, but I’m guessing the possibilities are, well, infinite.
But Covey’s obsession with values leads him to one key insight, and it’s all in that word ‘effective’. People sometimes misremember the title as The 7 Habits of Highly Efficient People, but there’s a reason why it’s not called that. Covey recognises that there’s no point being really good at doing stuff – highly efficient, in other words – if it’s not the right stuff. Efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness. Work is probably where we misunderstand this the most. A day when lots gets done feels like a day well spent, regardless of what got done, and few companies manage to avoid the curse of ‘presenteeism’, where just being at your desk looking busy is rewarded. (Almost every time-management book falls into the trap of assuming that whatever you’re doing is worth doing, and just needs doing more efficiently.) But there’s ‘busywork’ in our personal lives, too, whenever the volume of activity becomes a standin for its value: what else is happening, really, when you go speed-dating, or push your kids into doing 25 extracurricular activities, or lead a frenetic social life based on keeping in touch with as many people as possible?
The scariest part – for an inveterate to-do list maker like me – came in Paul Graham’s essay, Good and Bad Procrastination, at paulgraham.com. Graham identifies ‘type-B procrastination’: not inactivity, but unimportant busyness. ‘Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it doesn’t consider the possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination,’ he writes. It’s still procrastination, he points out, to do a lot of pointless tasks just because it feels nice, while the big, difficult thing – the one that matters – goes undone. I recognised myself and felt caught red-handed.
Of course, our lives are full of duties we don’t find fulfilling but cannot just abandon in favour of more ‘important’ things. One popular piece of advice is to spend even just five minutes each day on one important thing, before the urgent stuff takes over. Increasingly, little tricks like this strike me as far more useful than grand philosophies of happiness. Meanwhile, if you find my life purpose, please get in touch.
There’s a popular subgenre of books about writing known informally as ‘writer porn’, in which famous authors describe their daily routines, which pens they use and, especially, the secluded mountain-top cabins where they work each morning for six blissfully undisturbed hours. I don’t think I’ve ever actually met such an author, but for anyone whose job is even slightly ‘creative’, they stir envy: we’d all love such big chunks of time in which to focus. Instead, our lives are plagued with what the blogger Merlin Mann, at 43folders.com, calls ‘interstitial time’ – small chunks of minutes spent waiting at the doctor’s surgery, or for someone who’s late, or for a meeting postponed at short notice.
It feels like time wasted. But it needn’t be. The poet William Carlos Williams, for example, wrote much of his oeuvre on the backs of prescription pads during gaps in his workday as a paediatrician. Here are some insights from bloggers and authors on using interstitial time, condensed into a form you can digest in three minutes, while waiting for that delayed train:
Really important things, we tell ourselves, deserve big blocks of time and undivided concentration – so they never get done. In truth, most ‘major projects’ won’t be any worse for being worked on in short bursts. As for those that will, remember G. K. Chesterton: ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.’ Would you rather do something only fairly well, or die before you’ve done it at all?
You’ll fit more into a sliver of time if you’re doing several similar tasks – answering a stack of emails, say – than if you try to switch between different kinds of activity. Workplace studies show that time spent ‘task-switching’ eats up the day.76 Even if your lifestyle does allow long, uninterrupted work periods, batching routine tasks is still sensible: deal with all your email twice daily, for example, and you’ll spend less time on it overall.
Mann praises knitting, which fulfils the three criteria of a good interstitial-time activity: it’s portable, it can be done amid distractions, and even a few seconds spent on it contributes to the end result. (That’s not the case with tasks requiring ‘set-up’, such as waiting for ever while Windows boots up on your laptop.) Identify in advance which of your tasks fit the knitting criteria: those involving reading and (hand)writing are a good place to start. Or take up knitting.
You don’t have to use interstitial time to cram more activity into every last minute. But if you want to use it to ‘stop and smell the roses’, you have to choose to stop. The practice of meditation, some Buddhist teachers suggest, can be condensed into these fleeting moments. In any case, from a certain perspective, a sequence of fleeting moments is all we ever really have anyway.
The back cover of How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, first published in 1973, featured this question, in big red capitals: ‘What do Gloria Steinem and IBM have in common?’ The answer was that both had sought the advice of the author, Alan Lakein, ‘the world’s leading expert on personal time management’. Nor was Lakein’s influence limited to feminism and computing: his system, he boasted, had worked wonders for banks, oil companies, Neil Diamond, and the producer of the musical Hair. As if that weren’t sufficient endorsement, Lakein also gets a glowing mention in Bill Clinton’s autobiography. And there’s a man who managed his time as president in such a way as to – well, to enable him to engage in numerous activities.
There’s plenty of wisdom in Lakein’s book, which is still in print. But at the core of his system, and many others since, is an approach I’m starting to suspect may be less smart than it looks: prioritisation. List your tasks and label them A, B or C depending on their importance, Lakein advises, then proceed accordingly. (It gets more complex: ‘Label the most important of these A–1 …’) Some version of this remains central to how some firms try to encourage staff efficiency; many life coaches, meanwhile, recommend picking one ‘life area’ and prioritising it for a month or year. Yet, though I’m a tragic geek when it comes to tinkering with personal organisation systems, I’ve never made prioritising work. I used to think the problem was me. Now I’m less sure.
Intuitively, prioritising feels appealing. We’re all too busy; we all waste time on urgent-but-unimportant stuff; we like the idea of deciding to address things in order of importance instead. But what does it really mean to make something a B-priority? If it needs doing, it needs doing. ‘How impressed would you be,’ wonders the personal development writer Mark Forster, at markforster. net, ‘if your new car didn’t have wing mirrors because the factory thought the engine was more important than the wing mirrors?’ And if something’s unimportant, why aim to do it at all?
You might respond that some things would just be nice to do if you got the time, but that’s a red herring. You won’t get the time – you’re too busy, remember? – and if something is truly nice, it doesn’t deserve relegation to B-status. (Advocates of prioritisation often implicitly equate ‘unimportant’ with ‘fun’, as if fun weren’t hugely important.) Prioritising life areas is odder still. It makes no sense to rate, say, being a good parent as ‘more important’ than being healthy or financially secure; they’re interdependent and, like apples and oranges, not comparable.
Ultimately, prioritisation is an avoidance strategy, fuelled by the illusion that the right system might somehow create more time, and that you might never have to confront the truth – which is that if you’ve got too much to do, you’re going to have to find ways to reduce, not just reorganise, your to-do list. Since I enjoy few things more than reorganising my to-do list, this is rather annoying.
Recently, I’ve been trying to become a Morning Person, and one of the unexpected benefits is this: it makes other Morning People a lot less irritating. I’m still unsettled by those ‘day in the life’ articles, according to which no successful entrepreneur, artist or politician ever gets up after 5 a.m. (Leonard Cohen, 2.30 a.m.; Dolly Parton, 3.30 a.m.; Warren Buffett, 5 a.m.; Condoleezza Rice, 4.30 a.m.) Broadly speaking, though, there’s no better cure for peppy colleagues at 8.30 a.m. than becoming one, and you won’t be surprised that the self-help world is bursting with advice on how to do it:
Some experts claim routine is everything – that you should sleep and rise at exactly the same time each day. Others insist you should listen to your body, sleeping from when you’re tired until you wake naturally. The personal development blogger Steve Pavlina, at stevepavlina.com, argues they’re both half right: the trick is to listen to your body in the evening – don’t go to bed until you feel you could drift off in 15 minutes – and to your alarm in the morning. If you’re accustomed to going to bed at 2 a.m., and set your alarm for 6 a.m., you’ll have a few tired days at first. But you’ll start turning in earlier, naturally adjusting your sleep time to what you really need.
Hardcore disciplinarians just need to remember to place the clock across the room before retiring. Others can buy Clocky, an ingenious device that lets you snooze for up to ten minutes, then wheels itself off until it finds a place to hide, where it carries on beeping.
If you’re happy with the hours you’re spending in bed, but just wish they started and finished earlier, you need more light at both ends of the day, according to the psychiatrist Daniel Kripke. Exposing yourself to fading light will prepare your brain for coming sleep.
Alternatively, though it’s unpopular advice in self-improvement quarters, you might consider giving up. You’ll rise earlier as you get older anyway. And besides, half of those overachievers who claim to rise at 3.30 a.m. may be lying. Several years ago, Kripke attached motion-sensors to his subjects and found that none of the people who claimed to be up at 4 a.m. actually were.77 Using the methods above, I’ve been getting up regularly at 6 a.m., which is early enough for me. Assuming I’m telling the truth.
I’m a Virgo. No, wait! I promise I’m not about to get all astrological on you – credulousness must have its limits. But the problem with being a Virgo who’s convinced that horoscopes are nonsense is this: I really am a Virgo, character-wise. Those born under most signs get to be brave or loving or wise; Virgos get to be ‘neat and tidy’. I bear my burden stoically: after all, it can’t be everyone’s destiny to win wars, or set hearts aflame, otherwise who’d be left to line up all the pens at a precise right angle to the side of the desk? I have some non-astrological theories on this – about Virgos being the oldest kids in their school years, and feeling responsible for keeping things orderly. But the point is that I am a neat-freak, and it’s only right to acknowledge this before leaping into the topic – delightful to me, but maybe not to you – of filing systems.
Of course, it isn’t just neat-freaks who use filing systems: we all have some way of organising our email, bank statements, office files, books and CDs, even if our chosen method is ‘in a stack on the floor’. At work, many of us have to grapple with systems created by others. But what makes the subject so uninteresting to non-neat-freaks, I think, especially to people who pride themselves on being ‘spontaneous’, is that filing things away is a question not just of effort, but of effort with no clear payoff. Cooking a meal, putting up shelves: these require work, but at least the benefit is tangible. Spend 30 minutes putting your credit card bills in chronological order, as many books on ‘getting organised’ would have you do, and it might, one day, save a few seconds. But it might not. So we try, then we lose heart, instead creating that testament to self-deception, the ‘to file’ file.
But neither the neat-freaks nor the spontaneity-lovers are quite right. On the one hand, a good filing system will help, not hinder, spontaneity. When your brain trusts you’ll be able to find things when you need them, you let go of trying to keep a mental handle on where everything is, freeing your head for creativity. On the other, almost all filing systems are indeed pointlessly laborious. Here’s a middle way, which includes some borrowings from the productivity bible Getting Things Done and numerous blogs:
1. For paper files, a simple A–Z system is best. If you like, keep a list of filenames on computer, for easy searching.
2. For electronic documents, you really don’t need to worry about a detailed filing system: as with your email archive, any decent computer can search it all, lightning-fast.
3. The degree of orderliness should be proportional to the likelihood of needing to locate things. Some documents might theoretically prove crucial, but probably won’t ever be needed; throw them in a box and forget them. Don’t bother imposing order on the mess until they’re required – if they ever are.
4. File less; discard and recycle more. If you probably won’t need a document – a magazine article, say – and could probably find it online, why keep it? Heretically, it’s even worth considering junking books: if you could buy them again in an emergency, might you benefit more from the freed-up space?
Self-discipline, as human virtues go, is a pretty bloody annoying one. It has a pinched, goody-two-shoes, pleasure-denying air about it; it is the voice of the moralising teacher, or of the right-wing newspaper commentator who prescribes it as a remedy for every social ill but whose private life, one suspects, is a quagmire of neurosis and self-hate. Put it this way: you don’t look forward to a big party at the weekend because you’ve been told all the self-disciplined people are going to be there. And yet – this is the annoying part – it’s arguably by far the most important quality to cultivate. With enough of it, most desirable things (fulfilling relationships or work, happy moods, lots of money) are attainable; without it, none are. Even a committed hedonistic life requires plenty of self-discipline: you need it even to book the flight to Bali, to obtain those recreational drugs, or to arrange the circumstances for wild sexual encounters. Otherwise inertia will out, and you’ll end up on the couch, half-dressed, watching reruns of Antiques Roadshow and eating baked beans. I speak, as ever, from experience.
It’s with all this in mind that I’ve been testing the Pomodoro Technique, a productivity method that its originator, Francesco Cirillo, has been teaching for ten years, but that has spawned a serious fan following only recently. (It’s online at pomodorotechnique.com.) Adherents use words such as ‘godsend’ to describe its effect on their ability to focus. In truth, it’s unmiraculous, but then so are most genuinely useful things.
Here’s what you do: you pick a task, then set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes, no exceptions. Cirillo uses a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, and is Italian, hence ‘pomodoro’. Do your work. When it rings, stop for five minutes. Repeat three more times, then take a longer break. That’s just about it. Yet it works.
Half of all those reading that last paragraph will blink in confusion: ‘Why do you need a technique? Why can’t you just do stuff?’ But the rest of us know that such tricks can be hugely effective, slowly strengthening the self-discipline muscle. They are, literally, tricks: the ticking clock takes an internal desire to get something done and fools some part of the brain into thinking it’s external, that the clock must be obeyed. (Stopping dead at 25 minutes also creates useful momentum for starting again five minutes later.) Even the hokey language – Cirillo calls each 25-minute period a ‘pomodoro’ – helps the process, by making the time-blocks seem like ‘things’, out in the world. Another geeky productivity scheme with an online following, Autofocus (markforster. net/autofocus-index), achieves something similar using cleverly structured to-do lists to ‘force’ the user to confront the tasks they’ve resolutely been avoiding.
The illusion, which we voluntarily swallow, is that choice has been removed – and that there is now something stopping you from simply choosing to abandon your focus and default to whatever inertia would have you do: daydream, websurf, beerdrink. Some people take this too far, establishing inner dictators who yell at them all day, sapping the joy from life. Judiciously applied, though, this mental trickery is too useful a resource to ignore. Our brains are so easy to fool that it’s borderline embarrassing; you might as well salvage some self-respect by exploiting that fact.
71 J. Harriott and J.R. Ferrari, ‘Prevalence of procrastination among samples of adults’, Psychological Reports 78 (1996): 611– 616.
72 The definitive resource on the Hawthorne experiments is on Harvard Business School’s website at www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hawthorne/.
73 For example, see ‘Survey finds workers average only three productive days per week,’ Microsoft news release, 15 March 2005, at www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-15threeproductivedayspr.mspx.
74 R. Buehler et al, ‘Exploring the ‘planning fallacy’: why people underestimate their task completion times’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 366–381.
75 Most terrifyingly, see www.flickr.com/photos/hawk express/sets/72157594200490122/.
76 Mary Czerwinski, op cit. (See note 64.)
77 Warren St John and Alex Williams, ‘The crow of the early bird’, New York Times, 27 March 2005.