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Frenzied to Focused: Getting Started
Time and again I see clients struggling to complete work because they struggle to find enough contiguous time to complete a meaningful piece of work. I empathise, since I experienced this for the first time when I began to establish myself as a technical leader at IBM. As more people sought my advice, my time became more fragmented, and within months I found it difficult to focus on any task. Interruptions became the norm, rather than the exception, and I never felt comfortable about that. How I wish I’d known more about bottleneck theory then!
If you find yourself in this situation, then you likely already know that in order to get more work done, you need to reach levels of focus that you no longer find easy to reach. You used to achieve high focus by taking several hours to work on a single task, but when you look at your calendar, you don’t see more than a 30-minute window available any time in the next two weeks. You simply don’t feel like you can get anything done in that time. (As Paul Reiser once noted, everything in the world takes four hours. Minimum.) You need four hours; you have 15 minutes; what to do?
Some people, even me, suggest splitting your tasks into smaller pieces, but that takes time and effort to learn and to apply, and completing smaller tasks probably wouldn’t satisfy you right now. You need another technique that you can try right now.
Of course I have one, otherwise I wouldn’t write this article. First, I digress.
In the early years of XP, among all the ideas that interested me, one spoke to me even more loudly than the others: stop thinking, “I don’t have enough time”, and instead start thinking, “I have too much to do”. Transpose the problem, as you would a matrix, and consider what new possibilities it gives you. It worked for me. I propose using this transposing technique to deal with the problem of “I can’t get anything done in 30 minutes”. Instead of “my tasks are too big”, think “I need to work better in short bursts”. Transpose the problem and work with what you have. You have maybe four 15-minute slots available; how can you get more work done in that period of time? You probably need to overcome the inertia that comes from believing that you can’t get anything truly useful done in 15 minutes.
Try this
At the beginning of the day tomorrow, decide which task you want to work on during your tiny slivers of time. Spend 5 minutes, which you can squeeze out of anywhere if you have to, writing down any information relevant to completing that task. Just jot down notes: facts you’ve been carrying around in your memory, references you need, people you have to talk to, that kind of thing. Put it all on a sheet of paper or a stack of index cards.
Now forget it and start dealing with the craziness of your day. When you have your next 15-minute time slice, set a timer for 12 minutes, start it, grab your sheet of paper, and start working. Don’t worry if you can’t think of a concrete intermediate goal that you can achieve in the next 12 minutes; just work.
Now for the really hard part. (I’m not kidding about that.) When the alarm goes off, stop. Breathe. Grab your sheet of paper. Write down everything you’ve juggled in your head while you worked. Keep writing until nothing else comes out. I hope that only took 3 minutes, because your next meeting has already started.
Now forget about that stuff and continue dealing with the craziness of your day.
Repeat.
This technique helps you develop the ability to accomplish tasks in short slices of time. It has at least two beneficial side effects: you become more comfortable working in short bursts, and your subconscious starts looking for more concrete, achievable, intermediate goals that you can actually achieve in 12 minutes. You don’t have to work at it consciously just yet; practising this technique will suffice.
I hope you’ve noticed the key part of the technique: spend the last 20% of your time slice (3 minutes out of 15; 6 minutes out of 30) getting information out of your working memory so that you don’t waste energy worrying about that stuff the rest of the day. I can’t stress this enough: developing the discipline to get information out of your working memory matters much more than the amount of work you achieve during the first 80% of the time slice. You need time to adapt to this way of working, so focus on the parts that differ from what you’d normally do.
If you practise this for two weeks, then I believe you’ll notice a difference. It works for me. Ask questions or offer your own suggestions in the comments.
