Should You Ditch Your To-Do List With a Slow Productivity Mindset?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.000 | Let's start as always with questions about deep work.

00:00:10.000 | Our first question comes from Brandon.

00:00:14.000 | Brandon asks, "Does adopting a slow productivity mindset

00:00:20.000 | mean you should ditch your to-do list and capture systems?

00:00:24.000 | Am I doing too much if I need a full-fledged capture system?"

00:00:28.000 | Well, Brandon, in an ideal world, where you had complete control

00:00:34.000 | over what your working life looked like and you had no concerns about money,

00:00:38.000 | you were independently wealthy, so you could completely control your working life,

00:00:41.000 | I would say, yeah, it would be great if you didn't need all the things I talk about

00:00:46.000 | when I talk about time management.

00:00:49.000 | You don't need complicated capture systems.

00:00:51.000 | You don't need weekly and daily time block plans.

00:00:55.000 | That would probably actually be ideal.

00:00:58.000 | And there are some people who do actually more or less accomplish this.

00:01:02.000 | The example that I like to give comes from probably the first article I wrote

00:01:06.000 | that began to scratch the surface on some of these ideas.

00:01:10.000 | It's also one of the favorite articles I've written in the past two years.

00:01:14.000 | And it was for The New Yorker, and it was called

00:01:16.000 | "The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done."

00:01:20.000 | And the narrative spine of this article was Merlin Mann.

00:01:25.000 | So this name is familiar to a lot of Deep Questions listeners,

00:01:29.000 | but Merlin Mann, in the 2000s, started this blog called 43 Folders

00:01:33.000 | that was all about using modern technology to build these hyper-optimized,

00:01:39.000 | digitally enhanced productivity systems.

00:01:43.000 | He had a job as a project manager that he took in the '90s,

00:01:47.000 | that as we fell into more and more of a culture of constant communication

00:01:52.000 | and constant email and constant work overload,

00:01:55.000 | the culture I talk about in my book, "A World Without Email,"

00:01:58.000 | he got more and more overloaded, and he stumbled across David Allen

00:02:01.000 | and getting things done, and he was a real tech guy.

00:02:04.000 | So he was like, "Man, I think if we could just build the right tools,

00:02:08.000 | I could stop feeling this way, where I'm completely overwhelmed

00:02:12.000 | and completely stressed out."

00:02:14.000 | And so he started writing about trying to build those tools,

00:02:16.000 | and a lot of other people felt the same way.

00:02:18.000 | So that website got very popular, and he became a real leader

00:02:21.000 | of the productivity movement.

00:02:23.000 | Eventually, he was doing that website full-time and giving talks about it,

00:02:26.000 | and then he got a book deal to write a book about it,

00:02:29.000 | and that's when the wheels came off.

00:02:32.000 | And this is the narrative that was the spine for that article,

00:02:36.000 | is that Merlin Mann eventually figured out,

00:02:40.000 | "I can't fix this problem by organizing better

00:02:45.000 | the deluge of things that are coming towards me,

00:02:48.000 | by having better tools, having better systems,

00:02:52.000 | better processes for dealing with the deluges coming with me."

00:02:55.000 | He said, "Ultimately, I can fix this problem by reducing the deluge.

00:03:00.000 | That instead of having a better system for having too much to do,

00:03:03.000 | what if I changed my notion of work so I didn't have that much to do,

00:03:07.000 | so that having these productivity systems that are so complex

00:03:10.000 | would be unnecessary?" And that's roughly what he did.

00:03:13.000 | He shifted into podcasting pretty early on.

00:03:16.000 | He's like, "This is just what I'm going to do."

00:03:19.000 | And the way he explained it to me when I talked to him about it

00:03:22.000 | for the article was he doesn't really need those systems

00:03:25.000 | because his life is really simple. He has a recording schedule.

00:03:29.000 | "This is when I need to be in the studio to record my podcast."

00:03:32.000 | And that's kind of it.

00:03:35.000 | Now, he keeps to-do lists for household stuff.

00:03:38.000 | "What do I need to buy at the grocery store?" or whatever.

00:03:41.000 | He basically simplified his working life down to the point where

00:03:44.000 | he didn't really need to manage it. So I think, yes, kind of ideally,

00:03:47.000 | a slow productivity ideal would be such that you're working

00:03:50.000 | on a small number of things one at a time. It's clear what you're working on.

00:03:53.000 | There's not that much to track. You don't have to squeeze

00:03:56.000 | as much as possible out of an 8-hour day because you're juggling

00:03:59.000 | 16 different tasks and projects, and you have to make progress on each

00:04:02.000 | without losing your mind. You don't need 6 Trello boards each

00:04:05.000 | for different roles because you only have one role.

00:04:08.000 | That's the thing you need to do right now. You're writing, or you're recording.

00:04:11.000 | So, yes, I think, Brandon, you're on to something. Ideally,

00:04:14.000 | you would not need all of these systems. Now, in the real world,

00:04:17.000 | it's hard to get all the way to that point.

00:04:20.000 | If you can't get all the way to that point, then having all these systems

00:04:23.000 | is what you absolutely need.

00:04:26.000 | This weird step function here.

00:04:29.000 | So if you've simplified things, but there's still a non-trivial amount

00:04:32.000 | of work on your plate, by taming that with systems,

00:04:35.000 | you can actually get closer to the slow ideal.

00:04:38.000 | So having more systems is actually

00:04:41.000 | important when you're close to the slow

00:04:44.000 | productivity ideal, but not quite there.

00:04:47.000 | I've been working through some of these thoughts recently about slow productivity.

00:04:50.000 | I mean, I think, for example,

00:04:53.000 | part of what you can do with systems if you're trying to be

00:04:56.000 | embrace more slow productivity is you can be much more automated

00:04:59.000 | about your small tasks.

00:05:02.000 | With the right systems, you can push these small

00:05:05.000 | tasks into certain times on certain days so that they're not weighing

00:05:08.000 | on your mind elsewise. So you can't get rid of them, but you can

00:05:11.000 | tame them, you can automate them and control them and move them

00:05:14.000 | into certain places where they only take your time three hours

00:05:17.000 | a week at these set times. That requires a lot of systems, but

00:05:20.000 | that's compressing the impact on your schedule.

00:05:23.000 | It's compressing the impact so your mind can be free

00:05:26.000 | in other times. I think being very careful about tracking

00:05:29.000 | what you're working on is critical if you're going to reduce that because

00:05:32.000 | you can figure out what is my limits, what is the limit

00:05:35.000 | of work that I can handle easily.

00:05:38.000 | You can't figure that out if you're not carefully tracking this and tracking

00:05:41.000 | your time. So systems are critical for slow

00:05:44.000 | productivity. If and when

00:05:47.000 | Intel you reach the slow productivity ideal, then maybe you don't

00:05:50.000 | need them anymore. Most of us aren't going to get there. So Brandon, most of us need

00:05:53.000 | systems. We want to be careful about our time so that we can protect

00:05:56.000 | that time. And then if we're lucky,

00:05:59.000 | we'll end up in a Merlin man type situation

00:06:02.000 | where we don't need the systems anymore. But until we get there, I think

00:06:05.000 | systems help make you do the best

00:06:08.000 | with what you can.

00:06:11.000 | [Music]

Should You Ditch Your To-Do List With a Slow Productivity Mindset?

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