The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
In my one of my conversations with Chris Crouch we talked about how hard we should be working for sustainable productivity. As I summarized in
my interview with him (scroll to the section
Personal workload capacity), Chris questioned the conventional (?) wisdom of working at or near our maximum. I took it as a smart way to be productive but not burn ourselves out. This is controversial: We are expected (by ourselves and others) to work harder - put in more hours, sacrifice time with loved ones, all to accomplish "more, better, faster." As Laura Stack
[1] says in
Leave the Office Earlier, most professionals have a backlog of 200 or more hours of uncompleted work. Whew!
As you may have read
[2], I've been playing with the idea of how our
inputs (things we've invited into our lives requiring our attention) balance with our
outputs (conversion of intputs into work we do).
I love how Nicholas Carr frames it in
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google:
All living systems, from amoebas to nation-states, sustain themselves through the processing of matter, energy, and information. They take in materials from their surroundings, and they use energy to transform those materials into various useful substances, discarding the waste. This continuous turning of inputs into outputs is controlled through the collection, interpretation, and manipulation of information.
Cool.
After a bit of thinking I came up with a little surprise. Consider your rate of inputs ("I") vs. rate of outputs ("O"). We have these possibilities:
- I >> O (far more coming in that going out)
- I > O (a bit more coming in "")
- I ~= O (approximately equal)
- I < O (a little less coming in "")
- I << O (far fewer incoming than outgoing)
Questions: Which is your most common state? and Which do you think is ideal? At first blush 3 or 4 seems best. But let's name each one and do a brief analysis:
- Drowning and desperate. This is that "utterly out of control" feeling, the sense that you'll never, ever be able to catch up. This is the source of big backlogs of email and paper. Work is falling through the cracks, and you have a reputation of "Better follow up in person or it probably won't get done." Grievously unsustainable
- Sinking (maybe slowly, maybe fast). This is the sense of "I just can't quite keep up," and leads to an overall anxiety about work. Your inboxes are increasing, with occasional "binge" emptying happening. Unsustainable
- Steady state, but brittle. You're just able to keep up if it's "a good day," but the slightest lag in work means you start falling behind - a day or two, say. And vacation or a trip? You'd better block out a good chunk of time blocked out to pay your "vacation tax." Brittle (one of the 10 GTD "holes" I identified)
- Smooth sailing. You've got some amount of buffer built in to your life. You can afford a few days of letting things pile up, and emptying is not usually a problem. Sustainable
- Couch potato/proactive monster. You have plenty of buffer. You can take off a week or two, say, and catch up with no sweat. Coasting
Thoughts? I'm sure you can come up with better names, but clearly #5 is most interesting. I see two extremes. First ("couch potato") is the unchallenged case. Not much going on, possibly bored. The other end ("proactive monster") is (you guessed it)
The 80/20 Principle applied. It's "kill your TV" and don't read the news (bustin' it
4HWW-style). You have no problem picking up the phone and talking to almost anyone you want, and finding time to read and write is
not what's holding you back. You're a Hedgehog
[3], and things are aligned in your life.
Living #5 goes against common wisdom of "working hard, very hard" being a top three success factor, and I want it. Naughty? Likely. Final questions: What do you think? Is this even possible in modern work, or as an employee/cubical dweller?
References