CoStructure

I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning.

Sure, there are the predictable reasons-- it's Monday; I'm getting up earlier than usual; I have to travel from Philly to NYC to start my week; I just had a great weekend. But I also knew that getting out of bed meant having to face all of the responsibilities of my "real" life, and I would much rather put them off for the length of just one more snooze button.

But if I'm to have a properly balanced life, I have to find a way to be happy not despite the work I do, but because of it. Ideally, I should wake up on a Monday morning excited for the opportunities in front of me. 

So what's got me stressed? 

I have a huge to-do list.
This is true. I have a ton of things to do, Things I've been putting off, things that will be difficult, things that will be risky, things that will be time consuming. 

But my to-do list will always be long. I wanted it that way. When I had few things on my list a few years back, I got really antsy until I could find things to put on the list to keep me busy. I like being busy.

So let's take another look. There are a lot of things I want to do, a subset of things I have to do, and a smaller subset of things I really ought to do as soon as possible.

Then there's the set of things I can get done today. While several portions of my day have already been allocated, it's only 9am and I don't expect to go to bed until about 1am. That's 16 hours of time, which even after subtracting obligations should be an ample amount of time to have a perfectly satisfying day of crossing off to-do list items.

Which is why, when I get to NWC today, the first thing I'll do is make a list of the things I want to accomplish today, and limit the list to the tasks I think I can complete within the time I have available to me.

So I've got that covered. Why else don't I want to get out of bed?

I'm going through a life transition.
A lot of changes are coming, in various aspects of my life. There's a lot of uncertainty and there are some big decisions to be made, and I don't feel prepared to address them.

All the uncertainty is stressing me out, so let's address it. I'll dedicate more time to thinking through the questions I don't have the answers to yet, even if just to get a better understanding of them.

In New York, there is a tremendous and constant pressure to achieve. To win. To succeed. To make money. At least, that's my perception.

The reality, though, is that everyone just wants to be happy, and I'm getting better and better at understanding what makes me happy. 

Happniess is in constant transition.

The to-do list will always be long.

There will always be uncertainty and big changes looming.

Mahna, mahna. 

It's time to stop hitting the snooze button.

Let's do this.

Loading mentions Retweet

Something remarkable happened today.

For the first time since I can remember, I finished all the items on my day's to-do list.

It took 14 hours (with ample breaks in between), and I only inched forward on some of the less desirable items, but I made forward progress nonetheless.

The winning formula? A combination of a 9am/5pm CoStructure call with Whitney, and use of the Pomodoro method.

Accountability to someone else and accountability to myself.

Between the two, I managed to find sufficient motivation to get done both the top-of-mind items on my list as well as a few things I had been avoiding.

Even if there is something of a placebo effect here, if I can be more relaxed and satisfied with my daily life and maintain the same level of productivity, I'd consider the effort a huge success.

But, just like getting one's body in shape, getting one's mind in shape entails an ability to sustain the fitness over time.

If I can continue to improve and continue to get undesirable things done and be happier doing it, then I must be doing something right.

Loading mentions Retweet

I'm taking a keen interest in mapping out my week. I've avoided trying to impose more structure in my week in the past because I believed there were too many extrenal variables outside of my control that would preclude me from doing so.

But when I sat down today and sketched out what my weeks look like, I realized that's not nearly as true as I believed.

In a given week, I might do a dozen meetings, mostly over the phone, at widely varying times of day. Sometimes the conflict, sometimes they are stacked right on top of one another, and sometimes they're just inconvenient. 

But I accept those times when they're proposed, or, worse, I set the times myself with only a passing evaluation of how it might affect my day's flow. If I don't agree to a meeting time that isn't optimal for me, then the meeting doesn't happen.

It takes two to make a meeting.

There are, of course, many external forces that impose things upon us. The most obvious external forces are usually the ones that pay our bills, whether a single employer or many clients. Myself and others have used this big external force as an excuse to not try to better structure our time, because we perceive ourselves as having very little control. 

But it's often not as true as we lead ourselves to believe. When I took a critical look at how my time gets scheduled, I found that I had much more control over what happens when than I realized-- not total control, mind you, not even close-- but more control than I was giving myself credit for.

Identify the external forces 

I realized, too, that my days follow a fairly consistent pattern-- the mornings are quieter, when not a lot of people are at New Work City yet and I've only received a fraction of the emails I'm destined to receive for the day. After lunchtime, more people show up, more emails arrive, and more tabs are open on the browser. I can say with near certainty that my ability to think and work lucidly on creative "maker" tasks at 9am is far better than it is at 4pm. 

I can work on changing that dynamic, but I can also learn to work with that dynamic. If I know I'm going to end up distracted after lunch, then that's when I should be setting my meetings-- when I know I'm going to be dealing with communicating with other people anyway. It's probably not that hard to do, either, because shifting suggested meetings to the afternoon from the morning is rarely a problem for others. 

And it's not about absoultes-- if half of my 12-ish meetings are currently in morning time slots in a given week, reducing that from 6 to 2 would open up my creative pre-lunch time considerably. 

Speculative meetings

As described in Paul Graham's great post, speculative meetings are those which aren't directly related to things on your critical path. Usually the phrase "grab a coffee" or a drink is involved. These meetings, while useful in aggregate and in the long term, can be a terrible distraction from your day-to-day obligations, when not scheduled properly.

So often I've had a call or meeting with someone, just to get to know them better, at a time when it was horribly inconvenient and I felt that I could not give that person my full attention. Same goes with catching up with a friend. I hate feeling like I want to avoid hanging out with friends simply for fear of being too distracted when the time comes because of the events unfolding that day.

So I either avoid setting speculative meetings, which makes them pile up, or I schedule those meetings and hope it works out. If, instead, I can identify an ideal time to have these meetings, and schedule everything I can into those slots, I might be able to improve this situation.

I've noticed that, once I hit 5pm, odds are that whatever anyone is expecting of me is going to be able to wait until tomorrow-- so a lot of built up pressure from the day is relieved. I may likely not be able to return to a creative mode, however, so right at this point is an ideal time to schedule low-priority meetings and calls.

Make a plan

Given my evaluation of my week's structure, my plan is as follows:

- Creative "maker" work before lunch. Aim to accomplish 6 Pomodoros before lunch, and be happy if I actually pull off 4 or more.
- Meetings after lunch. If it's up to me to decide, the meeting will be at 2pm. 
- Do speculative and personal phone calls and meetings at 5 or 6pm, when I am in full social/"manager" mode and the pressure is off.

I'm starting with this, and I'm accepting that I'm not going to be able to stick to it 100%. If I try to do that, I'll fail and give up. 

I'm aiming for 80%. If I can enforce the above structure with 80% efficacy, then I have to conclude I'll have a much more efficient, manageable daily life.

Loading mentions Retweet

In my bedroom this morning, I sat on my chair to put on my shoes as part of my regular morning procedure. While sitting there, I noticed my hand-drawn log of pushups I've done as part of the One Hundred Pushups program. I'm overdue for my next round of pushups. 

But I've got so much work waiting for me at work, and I've already killed too much time reading policial blogs in bed on my iPhone. I don't need to be at my desk at a particular time this morning, but feel the weight of the huge to-do list I wrote out yesterday weighing down on me.

But the pushups take ten minutes. What difference is that ten minutes going to make in my day's productivity?

Break the cycle, I tell myself. Stop hiding behind your to-do list as your excuse for not doing everything. Getting in shape. Cleaning my room. Going to the dentist. I can avoid damn near anything if I'm "too busy." 

So I do the pushups. Ten minutes later, I'm feeling invigorated, and head off to work.

And I put another ten minutes into sharing the experience with you, because it's worth the ten minutes to share it.

And now for that to-do list!

Loading mentions Retweet

Today, Whitney and I tried a "pair structuring" concept. At 9am, we got on the phone and discussed three things we wanted to get completed by the end of the day:

Tony
- Finish preparations for a contract meeting tomorrow
- Get fitted for a tux for friend's wedding (will do this after hours, but will find location where I'll get fitted during daytime
- Schedule a dentist appointment

Whitney
- Clean out closet
- Complete a persona deliverable
- Revise a sitemap

At 6:00, we got back on the phone to discuss whether we got our stuff done. I didn't get to scheduling my dentist appointment before the office closed, and I knew that I would be accountable not just to myself but to Whitney for it-- so now I'm more likely to stick to it.

Now, if I don't schedule my dentist appointment tomorrow morning, I have to buy Whitney lunch. 

That appointment's getting scheduled!

One of the most interesting findings of today's excercise was just how much fun our morning and evening calls were. When we got on the phone, we didn't just rattle off three tasks. We conversed a bit about our day and what's going on. We gave each other some context and, in the process, compelled ourselves to think about our days in that context a little bit as well.

This is an interesting finding. I wonder whether just talking about what we're going to do in a given day helps us structure it better. 

It reminds me of a quote that I may or may not have made up: "Start every day as if it were on purpose."

Do you start your day with a plan of attack, like it's on purpose? Or do you let the day's events dictate what you do? Who's in control of your day?

Loading mentions Retweet

Independents have it made, right? Being in charge of one's own schedule is both a blessing and a curse-- while one is no longer compelled to go to an office when the boss says so, one is also left with the responsibility to self-impose proper balance. Without an external force being applied to help structure one's life, the balance is hard to achieve and harder to maintain.

Loading mentions Retweet