I know what some of you are thinking: But I get interrupted. I get distracted.
But there’s a way to deal with interruptions — even if you don’t have a Secret Service detail to keep people out of your office.
3) Set Up Filters
Every morning the President gets a top secret document with everything he needs to know from the agencies beneath him.
What’s key isn’t what the document contains, it’s what it doesn’t contain: 50 status updates, 100 tweets, 10 cat pictures and 1000 unimportant emails.
He can focus on what matters because he isn’t distracted by what doesn’t. Meanwhile, you probably feel overwhelmed by information.
Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed. Successful people— or people who can afford it— employ layers of people whose job it is to narrow the attentional filter. That is, corporate heads, political leaders, spoiled movie stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff of people around them who are effectively extensions of their own brains, replicating and refining the functions of the prefrontal cortex’s attentional filter.
“I have information overload!”, you scream. But as technology visionary Clay Shirky says, “It’s not information overload; it’s filter failure.”
Your attention is limited and valuable. You need less information. You need good filters.
Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired. Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue…
A good low-tech solution is to hide for part of the day. I’m as serious as a heart attack. Go where people cannot reach you and get solid work done.
That’s not an option for everyone. I get it. No problem. But people who feel technology has left them overloaded with information are using it wrong.
Use technology like a DVR to time-shift your communications. People should reach you when you want them to, not when they want to.
Handle all communications in specified “batches“: a set time when you check email, voicemail, etc.
Some people say, “I can’t do that.” But you probably can do it more than you think, especially early and late in the day.
Maybe your boss wants you ridiculously responsive. Fine. Set up an email filter so only the boss’s emails get through immediately.
…you can set up e-mail filters in most e-mail programs and phones, designating certain people whose mail you want to get through to you right away, while other mail just accumulates in your inbox until you have time to deal with it. And for people who really can’t be away from e-mail, another effective trick is to set up a special, private e-mail account and give that address only to those few people who need to be able to reach you right away, and check your other accounts only at designated times.
So you’ve got reminders and filters and you’re not running around worried anymore.
But when you sit down to work you realize there is still just too much to do. How can you keep calm when there are so many decisions to make?
4) The Incredible Power of “Good Enough”
The President doesn’t make little decisions. The thousands of people working under him handle those so only the big stuff bubbles up to his agenda.
But given you don’t have thousands of people working under you (or maybe any for that matter) you handle every decision, business and personal.
What is satisficing? It’s the art of quickly picking the option that is “good enough.” And research shows it’s the path to productivity — and happiness.
Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it. Warren Buffett can be seen as embracing satisficing to an extreme— one of the richest men in the world, he lives in Omaha, a block from the highway, in the same modest home he has lived in for fifty years… But Buffett does not satisfice with his investment strategies; satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.
Will this decision result in you losing your job? No? Then opt for the “good enough” solution and focus on what matters most.
Your boss’s priorities change midday. More stuff keeps getting added to your list. How can this not throw a monkeywrench into your well-laid plan?
5) “Mr. President, There’s Been A Change…”
When changes come up for the Commander-in-Chief he shifts seamlessly because his aides have already revised the day’s plans. So he stays calm.
You can stay cool too, but it requires a little bit more effort. New things will come in, priorities will change and you need to process and adapt.
Always have your notebook ready to capture new ideas and to-do’s.
And throughout the day you need moments of triage and “active sorting” where you restructure the list from your big brain dump.
“Your brain needs to engage on some consistent basis with all of your commitments and activities,” Allen says. “You must be assured that you are doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. If it’s on your mind, then your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind…” That trusted system is to write it down.
When you know which category everything fits into, you can attack the list in a prioritized way.
Okay, you are master of your schedule, your mind is empty and you’re ready to focus… Now what?
6) Have A “War Room”
Ever seen a picture of the President’s desk? Does it have piles of papers and 1000 random post-its? No.
You don’t need to be a neat-freak but when it’s time for you to stop planning and be the VIP, have a separate work area designed for focus.
One way to exploit the hippocampus’s natural style of memory storage is to create different work spaces for the different kinds of work we do. But we use the same computer screen for balancing our checkbook, responding to e-mails from our boss, making online purchases, watching videos of cats playing the piano, storing photos of our loved ones, listening to our favorite music, paying bills, and reading the daily news. It’s no wonder we can’t remember everything— the brain simply wasn’t designed to have so much information in one place… The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you’re working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset button on your brain and allows for more productive and creative thinking.
According to productivity guru Tim Ferriss, focus is just the product of removing distractions.
So you want your VIP work area to have what the VIP needs. And nothing else.
A germane finding in cognitive psychology for gaining that control is to make visible the things you need regularly, and hide things that you don’t.
I can hear the whining already: But I don’t have two offices! I barely have one!
This isn’t about real estate, it’s about mental space. Your desk can be where you plan, but the VIP works on the couch.
Or your desktop computer is for preparation, but the VIP works on your iPad (which deliberately lacks apps for Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
When it’s time for VIP work you want everything you need to get the job done — and nothing else.
So how do we pull all this together?
Sum Up
The steps to being as organized and calm as the Commander-in-Chief:
- Get your to-do’s out of your head and onto one document.
- Lock in your calendar and set alarms so you don’t need to think about what’s next.
- Use “batching” and filters so you only get the info you need when you need it.
- Opt for “good enough” on the little decisions so you can focus on the big ones.
- Regularly capture, triage and prioritize new items.
- Have a “War Room” that contains what you need — and nothing else.
You used to need a secretary vigilantly monitoring the phone all day… then came answering machines and voicemail.
Technology has come a long way since then and with some planning you can use it to keep your cool and accomplish great things.
It’s hard at first. And, yes, you’ll stumble. You’ll need to tweak and customize. But with time you’ll evolve a personal system that works.
And you’ll learn the lesson that every VIP knows:
