The Action Machine (TAM)

In my efforts to use my time more effectively, I’ve become convinced that the morning hours are my most productive time, and that anything worth doing, is not only worth doing well, but it’s worth doing in the morning. But I ran across someone who thinks that if it’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing with extreme focus (because you’ll do it better, and faster, and feel more of a sense of accomplishment).

Derek Franklin built The Action Machine (TAM), an Adobe Flash application that he promises will help me (and anyone) towards amazing increases in productivity. I have a friend who uses it and really likes it, so I decided to buy it and have a go. No risk, as he offers an 8 week guarantee. (Well, the only risk is the loss of the difference in exchange rates: he sells and refunds in US dollars. When I buy it and pay with GB pounds, I lose a small amount. When he refunds me in US dollars and I have to convert to to GBP, I lose a little more. But never mind. That’s certainly not his fault.)

Here are the highlights of my experience:

  1. It stands alone. By this I mean that there is no facility for importing tasks from Outlook or Remember the Milk, or any other Task Management system. I use Outlook for task management, in a David-Allen-Get-Things-Done sort of way, and that approach works really well for me. Re-entering tasks seems a waste of time, which is annoying. I contacted Derek to be certain that there was no way to import tasks from another application. He confirmed that to be the case. What it can do is import tasks from another instance of the same application. I haven’t figured out how that would be useful, unless you have a PC and a laptop and regularly work at both workstations, perhaps.
  2. The current date is displayed in the ambiguous 6/5/2010 format. Americans do their dates one way, and nearly all of the rest of the world do theirs differently. To Americans, 6/5/2010 is the 5th of June. To me, it’s the 6th of May. I contacted Derek to see if he could format his date in some kind of unambiguous way, perhaps 5 Jun 2010. No, he wasn’t going do that. (For more on asking and saying no, see my post on Askers and Guessers). He said he hadn’t really worked with date formatting before, but that he’d take it on board for future development
  3. One morning I entered all my activities into TAM, and put in the estimated time for each activity, and hit Go! for the most important thing that day. I had a set of reports to finish and send off to a client. I set to work, and was well into it and making very good progress (this application makes it fun to focus!), when my PC beeped at me. I had a message that my time was up and this task was marked “Complete”. But I wasn’t done yet. I looked for a Give-me-10-more-minutes-please button, but there wasn’t one. In order to get 10 more minutes, I had to add the task again and assign 10 minutes to it and then Go. If you are aware of the loss of mental flow when a task is interrupted, you can appreciate that this isn’t an “undocumented feature” that I like. I want a snooze button.

I learned that I focus my efforts on completing taks, rather than spending time on an activity. For example, I will want to score 4 Leadership Development Profiles. Or I need to complete the Performance Reports and send them off. Or I need to learn how to upload a Flickr photo to my blog. I don’t work along the lines of “Spend 45 minutes on marketing”, or “Do some scoring for awhile”. Well, there are times that I work on activites rather than tasks: I can spend an hour watching TV, or soaking in the tub, or reading a novel. But some people will rather “watch Grey’s Anantomy”, or “read a chapter of Vanilla Beans and Brodo (which is excellent, by the way). But when I’m focused on being productive, I’m focused on completing tasks, not on spending a certain amount of time on that activity.

So, bottom line, I have a different mental model of what I need to do to feel more productive. I need to finish tasks. When my tasks seem to big for one sitting, I break them into smaller pieces. But the important thing, to me, is to finish it.

After all, if I say at the end of the day that I delivered proposals to two potential clients, it feels like I accompished something meaningful. If I say that I worked on some proposals today, well, it just doesn’t.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing

Life is complicated. So many demands on our time and attention, and it’s too easy to get lost and forget what it is you were trying to do. Have you ever gone out to the kitchen, and once there, you can’t remember what you came out there for? Life can be like that at times. Only bigger. And more important.

Productivity experts have lots of advice about how to get things done. They also have advice about how to decide what’s the main thing, what’s the most important thing for you to be focused on.

But I think the biggest challenge is this: once you’ve decided, then you need to keep your focus on the main thing and not be distracted. You need to keep the main thing the main thing.

How can you do that? Here are 8 tips:

  1. Print out some colourful, relevant posters and hang them strategically around your home of office.
  2. Every day, the first thing, do something related to your main thing.
  3. Every week, determine what actions you need to take on your main thing. Add these actions to your diary , so that you have the time scheduled to do them.
  4. Ask a friend to remind you once in awhile. They can email, or IM you: Hey Debs! Hows that project going to get the ooompha off the ground? (I’d shared that my main thing at the moment is to get my ooompha off the ground.)
  5. Every night, just as you turn off the light to go to sleep, ask yourself, “What was the best thing you accomplished today with regard to the main thing?”
  6. Every morning, while you shower or shave or brush your teeth, ask yourself “What’s the most important thing for me to do today about my main thing?” (That colourful poster on the mirror should help remind you.)
  7. Think of some object that’s related (in your mind’s eye) to the main thing. Set up a search for it in ebay. (When ebay finds it, ebay will email you! How brilliant is that?!)
  8. List the top 7 things you do as distraction activities. Here are some examples: play solitaire, play sodoku, read Facebook, BBC news, watch TV, read DebbyHallet.com, read something in my pile of ‘things to be read’, answer un-urgent emails. You get the drift. Anything that you spend significant time doing when you really should be doing something else, is a distraction activity. Postpone them! Those dishes certainly need to be washed, but is is more important right now than the main thing?

Good luck. Let me know some of the things you do to keep the main thing the main thing.

Rocks, gravel, sand

Think of all the things you have to do in a day, and metaphorically divide them into rocks, gravel and sand.

Rocks: the most important things, where the outcome matters to you. They might be big things, or not-so-big, but they are important and you want to be sure they are done today. There probably are only a few rocks in any given day.

Gravel: less important things, but they still matter to you. They probably require some time to get done. These need to be done, although not necessarily today. If you take care of some of the gravel bits each day, it doesn’t pile up so as to become an insurmountable mountain.

Sand: either not that important, or don’t take more than a few minutes. Possibly not important at all.  There may an almost limitless amount of sand. The grains of sand are low priority; they may be fun, or interesting, or shiny and new.

Imagine that your day is a good-sized glass jar. There’s room for a lot of rocks, gravel and sand in it. But, since you can’t fit it all in, it matters the order in which you put them in.

Your unproductive day: first sand, then gravel, finally rocks. You can’t easily judge how much sand you can get away with before you fill the jar too full to hold much gravel or any rocks at all.

A pretty normal day: some gravel, some sand, some more gravel, and then if there’s any room left, maybe one rock.

Your effective day: The biggest rock, then possibly other rocks, then a scoopful of gravel to fill in some nooks and crannies, and finally, pour in some sand to fill in all the smallest spaces.

In your effective day, you got the most important things done, quite a few of the next most important things, and still had some time left over for fun and games.

If you regularly have important things that you don’t get done, try a different approach.

Rocks, gravel, sand.