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:
- 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.
- 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
- 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.