How to Get the Work Done that You Don’t Want to Do
On Daniel’s suggestion, I’m writing this article on my personal approach to getting stuff that I don’t want to do, done. I’m a huge fan of “Getting Things Done” and “The Four Hour Work Week,” but for the severely attention-challenged, such systems have their own difficulty in implementation. Somewhere between my ADHD and the need to reduce ideas to their simplest, most effective forms, I’ve come up with my own essential rules for doing the stuff I don’t really want to be doing (or even the stuff I do want to do). I think these ideas are universal in practice, but I also think they may not make much sense to people who don’t have attention problems.
1. Do one task at a time.
Does this need explaining? Multitasking is a myth, no matter what your boss thinks. This is the critical step for getting a task done.
2. Do not go on to another task until the ball is completely out of your court on the current task.
This is where the magic happens. Notice I didn’t say “until the task is complete.” You might not be able to finish a task without input from another party. This rule says put the ball completely out of your court. You have no further action to take on the overall task until someone returns control of the thread to you, having completely done their part. For my job, I’ve identified the possible outcomes for the tasks I perform, so I more easily recognize when I’ve reached one of those points. Like David Allen says in GTD, this makes it so you just have to ping the other party on a regular interval, reminding them that they’re holding the ball. Putting the ball completely out of your court means doing all the tedious things that go into making that happen. Fill out paperwork right away–don’t put this off until later, in that imagined time where you’re going to churn through all the little stuff that needs to be done to put the ball out of your court.
GTD does a perfect job of explaining how most tasks are made up of smaller tasks, so I won’t reiterate that here. It’s something to be aware of if you’re faced with long-term tasks that could take weeks, months, or be perpetual (which is job security–you’re not supposed to work yourself out of a job, unless you’re a consultant, in which case I suppose the same rule still applies). Even with long-term tasks, the same rule works, except you get more granular with it and apply the rule to the sub-tasks that make up the whole.
My job made me miserable a few months ago. The stress of pulling up in the office parking lot nearly kept me from walking in the door each day. It’s a busy environment, with a lot of inputs that have to be managed. At some point, I came to the conclusion the stress came from open loops. Tasks in states of incompletion, the consequences of which brought on stress. Worry about what I was forgetting and if there were any new ramifications from the things I knew I hadn’t completed yet was the source of what made me most unhappy about my job. Symptoms I think a few of my colleagues shared. So, like GTD says to do, I started closing those loops using these two rules. It wasn’t the volume of work, it was all the open loops that caused the stress. I think I actually handle a higher workload now with these rules.
GTD and 4HWW definitely take these ideas further, making one even more efficient and effective. But, like I said, this is the starting point to me. Controlling your workload by being able to say “no” to too many tasks and all other ideas flow outward from these two rules. I’m not saying they’re the only things that will improve how you work, I just think they’re the primitive shapes that need to be mastered before layering on any other improvements.
I shared these ideas with some of the people I work with a while ago, and they have been positive in the response. My friend Daniel had similar issues (handling the mundane paperwork type tasks he didn’t want to do), and he says that so far, my approach is working for him too.
Keeping it simple, and hoping this works for someone else out there…