Problems with contexts and projects

Podcast 414

"Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'."

That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week. 

Let’s go, 

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Script | 414

Hello, and welcome to episode 414 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

How do you organise your work? 

There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc. 

Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them. 

Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk. 

All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off. 

Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work.

Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage. 

Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method?

Hi Ken,

Thank you for your question. 

I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail. 

They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised.

You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy. 

The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on. 

This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week. 

Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens)

To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning. 

Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer. 

But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel overwhelmed. 

This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing. 

Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”. 

Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list. 

The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious.

And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list. 

So where do you put it? 

So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there. 

That isn’t really the problem. The problem is you don’t have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work. 

Soon, that project list is out of control. 

Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours. 

And let’s be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects? 

For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do. 

In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist. 

Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken. 

On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic? 

And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks. 

Hmmm, but does it work?

Well, no. 

For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards. 

The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day. 

Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you’ve got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel. 

Then there’s the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food. 

Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food. 

This is why it’s easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go. 

While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn’t know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence. 

This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do. 

Instead, we’ll crash on the sofa or take a nap. 

And so your low-energy list will keep growing. 

Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean? 

It’s likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them. 

The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done. 

Let’s go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June. 

Given that you want to do this with your partner, it’s likely you will do this task when you are with your partner. 

If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don’t put it on your list for this week or next. 

As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don’t need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June. 

Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them. 

The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists. 

Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list. 

The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions:

What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note?

What do I need to do to complete it? 

And, when will I do it? 

In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists. 

Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large.

The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do. 

To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today’s world. 

I will put links to both in the show notes for you. 

So there you go, Ken.

There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That’s all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks. 

Things that don’t need to be done today should never be on your daily list. 

Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it’s not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu. 

What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you’ve been meaning to contact for the last three weeks. 

My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something. 

I hope that has helped Ken. Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.