Give Your Processes Time To Work.

How long did it take to learn to walk unaided when you were a child? How long did you have stabilisers on your bike before you could ride a two-wheeled bike without falling off?

Most people learn to walk by crawling first, then pulling themselves up on a chair, only to take a step and fall over. We have to repeat that process over and over again until one day as if by magic, we can walk from one chair to the next without falling over.

The one thing you did not do was give up because you fell over. We pick ourselves up and try again. It’s a tried and tested formula. Why don’t we do that with building a productivity system?

There are several reasons why we feel our first attempt resulted in failure, so we have to find another solution. One of those will be associated with seeing other people effortlessly getting through their work each day without any issues. Then there’s the pernicious FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) we experience when our favourite YouTubers rave about another new notes app or task manager. Any one of these would make us feel uncomfortable and question our system.

However, if you do a little research on people like David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) or Tim Ferriss, you will notice these people do not spend time switching apps. They find something that works and stick with it. David Allen and Tim Ferriss use Evernote to collect their notes, and they have done so for years. David Allen has used the same task management system for over twenty years (e-Productivity by Lotus Notes).

Interestingly, if you watch carpenters or saddlers doing their work, the tools they use every day are old — very old. I’ve seen hundred-year-old scissors and fifty-year-old hammers and chisels being used by some of the most skilled people I’ve ever observed.

For your time management and productivity system to work effectively, you must give it time to mature. The steps you take to engage with your work each day must be part of a process you follow every day. When you repeat your process every day, you learn to use it effectively.

When I read Getting Things Done for the first time, I realised that a weekly review was a massive part of becoming better at managing my work and time. That first weekly review I did took three hours! I followed the book’s recommended checklist and meticulously went through every inbox, project, and note I had collected. I consciously had to think about each step. When I had finished, I was exhausted.

Yet, today, fourteen years later, my weekly review takes no more than forty minutes. I’ve repeated the process every week for fourteen years, with few exceptions, and I know exactly where to look; I can review projects without consciously thinking about the review process. It’s automatic.

But it wasn’t always automatic. Those first few reviews took hours. I was new to it, I was unfamiliar, and I had to think about each step.

The best productivity systems disappear into the background and, in many ways, become boring. From the moment you decide to do something, you put it into your inbox. From there, you process that task into your task manager and the task appears on the day you want to do it. Any additional steps only add complication and will ultimately slow you down.

There is a saying in the US and UK special forces; “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. This refers to practising a process repeatedly until it becomes automatic and smooth. You will inevitably screw up, make mistakes, and drop the ball to get to the smooth stage. It’s a repeated practice that will make you so smooth you become effortlessly fast at doing it.

I’ve practised processing my email inbox the same way for the last eight years or so. I can process 100 emails in around twenty-five minutes. I clear out the unnecessary (delete), archive the emails I want to keep and move everything I need to act on to an Action This Day folder. But when I started doing this system, it took me over an hour to process thirty emails.

By focusing on the process, taking it slow and building the ‘muscle memory’, I can now effortlessly process my inbox in no time. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

You can read books and blogs and watch YouTube videos on productivity systems all day. At some point, though, you need to create your own system and make it work. All systems work, but each system needs work. So you have to make it work. A tremendous amount of energy and effort is required to build the necessary muscle memory and repetition for your system to work. But it’s worth it. When doing your work is automatic, you can focus on the work itself rather than having to think about how to organise your work.

I recently watched an upholsterer sewing a cover onto a classic Egg Chair. The upholsterer explained what she was doing, and when she came to the final sewing, she said this was one of the most therapeutic parts of reupholstering. I watched in awe and imagined myself trying to do that sewing. It would be anything but therapeutic. But then, I don’t have over twenty years of experience in sewing every day.

“Repetition is the mother of mastery”, so whatever time management or productivity system you use, give it time to work. Repeat the process daily, and make minor adjustments, but don’t give up because it’s hard work. It will be hard work at first — you’re changing habits and routines — but it will be worth it.

Enjoy the journey because you’ll become the standard-bearer for others to follow when it finally clicks.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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