Matthew Lang

This is it. The last part of the Grass Roots Productivity process. Doing the work. Unfortunately there’s no quick fixes or hacks to this one. You either do the work or you don’t.

It doesn’t need to be as black and white as that though. There are things you can do to help you have a productive day. I always come back to Peter Bregman’s book, 18 minutes. He has a simple rule for getting something done.

If you really want to get something done, decide when and where you are going to do it.

— 18 minutes by Peter Bregman

When you decide where and when you’re going to do something you add structure to your day. This structure leads to a plan day for the day is more manageable. If you’re like me then the location will rarely change for most of your work. Time though is one thing that's a big impact on our day. So decide when you want to do a task so that you can split your day into more manageable chunks.

I’ve tried in the past to pick off items from the top of the list at the start of the day. This is the wrong thing to do. It often leads to confusion and the wrong things getting done at the wrong time. I’ve learned now that scheduling actions into my calendar ahead of time is a better way to get things done.

Doing the work is all about self discipline and honesty.

Discipline yourself so that you do the work set before you. Schedule in your calendar the tasks that matter. For every one task that needs to be done, there's four other that could be done. Never mind the other four and focus on the one.

And when it comes to reviewing your progress, be honest with yourself. If you could have done better then aim to improve your work and your progress on the next block of work.

This is the step where many people falter when it comes to using a process, but only you can make it work. So do yourself a favour and do the work.

We’ve looked at capturing and scheduling already in my little productivity process. The next step (not in order though) is the review.

For hundreds of years travellers have used different navigation techniques. The stars, maps, compasses and now the trusty smartphone can even help us get to our destination.

How do you get to the goals that you are working towards though?
Completing the items on your master list is one thing, but it’s all for nothing if there isn’t a goal to work towards. Most of us can remember to do the little things without the aid of an ongoing list to help us. If you’re keeping a track of your master list though, then you are most likely working towards a goal. How will you know though if you’re working towards that goal and making progress?

If the goal is the destination then the review step is our compass that steers us towards that goal. A regular review will help you ensure that you’re making progress towards an that goal.

My review process involves three stages.

1. Clearing the decks

In this stage I work through each of my various inboxes and convert any items into actionable tasks. It might be emails in my inbox, tasks on my CRM, or items I’ve captured in my notebook. I use this stage to bring everything together into my master list.

2. Review projects

I use the term project to review any amount of work that involves ongoing work. It might be generating content for my blogs, client work, or work for DailyMuse. This is where I review the progress of each project and ensure that I’m making progress towards it.

3. Planning ahead

Now that I know the progress made in the previous week or month, I can look ahead and plan for a similar timeframe. This involves scheduling actions into my calendar and setting reminders for the important ones.

Only my freelance work gets reminders as this is more important than most of my other projects.

And that’s all there is to it. I find it best to block off an hour a week to do my weekly review and three hours a month to do my monthly review. Done on a regular basis, the review step will help ensure that I'm working towards my goals.

I love this view on how people are split when it comes to technology.

We can make lists about how "there's two kinds of people in the world" and split them up into techie and non-techie, or computer literate or non-computer literate...but I'm thinking it's simpler. There's the curious and the not-curious.

— Is technology killing curiosity? by Scott Hanselman

I've tried a number of times to get Ethan interested in programming as I thought he would be curious about how his favourite console games are made. So far he's definitely in the non-curious group. Maybe it will come in time.

We've got a list of actions from a few days of capturing. Now what do we do? We schedule. And not by just putting whatever we want to do in any free space on our calendar. We schedule by putting the right tasks in at the right time.

Take a moment to look back at the last few days or even weeks of work you have done. When do you peak and when you do you plummet?

I work better in the morning. It's during this time that I like to work on more creative tasks. Building new features, sketching screens and of course wrditing. For these types of tasks, this is when I am at my sharpest.

In the afternoon I prefer to work on more problem-solving tasks. Debugging, refactoring and general problem solving through code. I find this type of work less intensive than creative work so I prefer to do this in the afternoon.

How you work is down to you. But you need to be able to identify when you're most productive. It's important to ensure that you are scheduling the right tasks in at the right times. Dropping tasks in your calendar is going to lead to unproductive days.

Now that you know when it's the right time to do the right tasks, you can start scheduling those tasks in. I've tried many ways of partitioning my day but the one for me that sticks the most is being able to work in 1 hour blocks. 50 minutes of work with a ten minute break. It's almost same as the Pomodoro Technique, I just opt to work in longer chunks of time.

I also only schedule in tasks that take no more than an hour. When it comes to any kind of work I break down tasks into one hour chunks of work so that I'm focused on one thing at a time. Once a task is complete I can move onto the next task for the next hour.

Scheduling is an important part the productivity process. Done right, it will help you work through the right tasks at the right time and give you the sense of making progress. And that's what being productive is all about.

(Trying something new. Mini posts on the last weekend of the month.)

Made a home cooked dinner on Friday night. Sat down with Jen to watch a movie.

Saturday morning bike ride with Ethan. Lunch and then a family walk with the boys on their bikes. Coded my own replacement for an online product I pay too much money for. Another home cooked meal on Saturday night.

Sunday morning painting the fence. Dropped Ethan off at the golf. Trip to the garden nursery for the rest of us. Tidy up the garden before dinner. Picked up Ethan from the golf. Sunday dinner. A couple of hours on the PS4.

Yip, the weekend was pretty great.

Everyone has their own preferred system for getting things done. Whether it's GTD, maintaining chains, the pomodoro technique or some other method there’s something out there for everyone.

Having tried just about every technique possible and a few hybrids of I’ve come to rely on four basic actions that help me get things done. I've come to call this Grass Roots Productivity.

The first step in this system is ensuring you know what you want to get done. This starts with the process of capturing.

Most productivity systems have the idea of an inbox. A place to collect the stuff you want to do. Without this inbox you would be as well just plucking stuff to do out of thin air. Capturing is an essential habit to get into because without it, there's second step to getting stuff done.

The capture process is something I go through numerous times a day. Links, actions, documents, text and other bits of data. Each of these types of data have their own respective inbox. On the digital side there is Pinboard, Instapaper, Todoist and a few other places. On the analog side I've got a notebook and a planner. While the digital inboxes have very focused types of data being captured, the notebook and planner act as loose fitting items that don't quite fit anywhere else.

The way I do this is to have easy access to each of those inboxes. For the digital inboxes I have either email addresses or keyboard shortcuts setup to quickly save to the respective inbox.

For the analog inboxes, I simply leave my notebook and planner left open on my desk, ready to record whatever I need to. I use the notebook for capturing items on the go. The benefit of this is that it's a simple action of recording the task and moving on. No distraction by other apps or notifications or any other distraction that digital devices are famous for.

Capturing is an essential but often overlooked step in any productivity system. Without capturing we don't have any sensible place to start and we always need a place to start.

Great advice for programmers and anyone building a product.

In this mindset, each day your task is to fight from failure to success. You no longer are so willing to compromise, or to sweep seemingly small challenges under the rug.

Instead, you aggressively seek out challenges and problems, and attempt to eliminate them in order to salvage the already failing project.

— Failing on Day One by Thoughtbot