your work. Keep in mind that though much of this methodology will be within the arena of your professional focus, I'm using 'work' in the universal sense, to mean anything you have a commitment to making happen, personally as well as professionally.
These days, daily work activity itself presents a relatively new type of challenge to most professionals, something that it's helpful to understand as we endeavor to build the most productive systems. As I explained earlier, during the course of the workday, at any point in time, you'll be engaged in one of three types of activities:
• Doing predefined work
• Doing work as it shows up
• Defining your work
You may be doing things on your action lists, doing things as they come up, or processing incoming inputs to determine what work that needs to be done, either then or later, from your lists.
This is common sense. But many people let themselves get wrapped around the second activity—dealing with things that show up ad hoc—much too easily, and let the other two slide, to their detriment.
Let's say it's 10:26 A.M. Monday, and you're in your office. You've just ended a half-hour unexpected phone call with a prospective client. You have three pages of scribbled notes from the conversation. There's a meeting scheduled with your staff at eleven, about half an hour from now. You were out late last night with your spouse's parents and are still a little frayed around the edges (you told your father-in-law you'd get back to him about. . . what?). Your assistant just laid six telephone messages in front of you. You have a major strategic-planning session coming up in two days, for which you have yet to formulate your ideas. The oil light in your car came on as you drove to work this morning. And your boss hinted as you passed her earlier in the hall that she'd like your thoughts on the memo she e-mailed you yesterday, before this afternoon's three o'clock meeting.
Are your systems set up to maximally support dealing with this reality, at 10:26 on Monday morning? If you're still keeping things in your head, and if you're still trying to capture only the 'critical' stuff on your lists, I suggest that the answer is no.
It is often easier to get wrapped up in the urgent demands of the moment than to deal with your in-basket, e-mail, and the rest of your open loops.
I've noticed that people are actually more comfortable dealing with surprises and crises than they are taking control of processing, organizing, reviewing, and assessing that part of their work that is
In fact, much of our life and work just shows up in the moment, and it usually becomes the priority when it does. It's indeed true for most professionals that the nature of their job requires them to be instantly available to handle new work as it appears in many forms. For instance, you need to pay attention to your boss when he shows up and wants a few minutes of your time. You get a request from a senior executive that suddenly takes precedence over anything else you thought you needed to do today. You find out about a serious problem with fulfilling a major customer's order, and you have to take care of it right away.
These are all understandable judgment calls. But the angst begins to mount when the other actions on your lists are not reviewed and renegotiated by you or between you and everyone else. The constant sacrifices of not doing the work you have defined on your lists can be tolerated only if you
If choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice, based on your best call, that's playing the game the best way you can. Most people, how-ever, have major improvements to make in how they clarify, man-age, and renegotiate their total inventory of projects and actions. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgencies of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you're
In addition, when the in-basket and the action lists get ignored for too long, random things lying in them tend to surface as emergencies later on, adding more ad hoc work-as-it-shows-up to fuel the fire.
Many people use the inevitablity of an almost infinite stream of immediately evident things to do as a way to avoid the responsibilities of defining their work and managing their total inventory. It's easy to get seduced into not-quite-so-critical stuff that is right at hand, especially if your in-basket and your personal organization are out of control. Too often 'managing by wandering around' is an excuse for getting away from amorphous piles of stuff.
This is where the need for knowledge-work athletics really shows up. Most people did not grow up in a world where defining the edges of work and managing huge numbers of open loops were required. But when you've developed the skill and, habits of processing input rapidly into a rigorously defined system, it becomes much easier to trust your judgment calls about the dance of what to do, what to stop doing, and what to do instead.
The Moment-to-Moment Balancing Act
At the black-belt level, you can shift like lightning from one foot to the other and back again. While you're processing your in-basket, for example, your assistant comes in to tell you about a situation that needs immediate attention. No sweat—your tray is still there, with everything still to be processed in one stack, ready to be picked up again when you can get back to it. While you're on hold on the phone, you can be reviewing your action lists and getting a sense of what you're going to do when the call is done. While you wait for a meeting to start, you can work down the 'Read/Review' stack you've brought with you. And when the conversation you weren't expecting with your boss shrinks the time you have before your next meeting to twelve minutes, you can easily find a way to use that window to good advantage.
You can do only one of these work activities at a time. If you stop to talk to someone in his or her office, you're not working off your lists or processing incoming stuff. The challenge is to feel confident about what you have decided to do.
So how do you decide? This again will involve your intuitive judgments—how important is the unexpected work, against all the rest? How long can you let your in-basket go unprocessed and all your stuff unreviewed and trust that you're making good decisions about what to do?
People often complain about the interruptions that prevent them from doing their work. But interruptions are unavoidable in life. When you become elegant at dispatching what's coming in and are organized enough to take advantage of the 'weird time' windows that show up, you can switch between one task and the other rapidly. You can be processing e-mails while you're on hold on a conference call. But you must learn to dance among many tasks to keep a healthy balance of your workflow. Your choices will still have to be calibrated against your own clarity about the nature and goals of your work.
Do ad hoc work as it shows up, not because it is the path of least resistance, but because it is the thing you need to do, vis-a-vis all the rest.
Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. But at a certain point, if you're not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your effectiveness. And ultimately, in order to know whether you should stop what you're doing and do something else, you'll need to have to have a good sense of what your job requires and how that fits into the other contexts of your life. The only way you can have that is to evaluate your life and work appropriately at multiple horizons.
The six levels of work as we saw in chapter 2 (pages 51-53) maybe thought of in terms of altitude:
