Here are the 2 Signs that Your Productivity System is Broken

00:00:00.000 | All right, we have another question here.

00:00:02.600 | This one comes from Sam.

00:00:04.240 | Sam says, "Does having occasional productivity leaks

00:00:08.960 | "mean that there might be an undiscovered system

00:00:11.960 | "that might work even better than what you're doing?"

00:00:15.420 | So productivity leaks, what Sam means by this is

00:00:19.240 | some things get forgotten

00:00:22.120 | or you fall off the system for a little bit.

00:00:24.120 | And in his elaboration, he makes clear,

00:00:25.960 | he wants to know, is this a problem?

00:00:27.960 | And he was struggling.

00:00:29.120 | He went through some hard periods with time block planning.

00:00:32.240 | So that was his particular motivation for those questions.

00:00:34.480 | He was like, "Is there things better?

00:00:35.320 | "Does that mean time block planning

00:00:36.280 | "is not the right system for me?"

00:00:38.480 | So Sam, I would say, usually the answer here would be no.

00:00:42.640 | So unless your work is very repeatable and rigidly defined,

00:00:49.040 | I mean, you just do one thing

00:00:50.400 | and you do it in the same way every time,

00:00:52.640 | you're never gonna have a consistent, perfect match

00:00:55.860 | with your productivity systems.

00:00:57.520 | There'll be periods in which, let's say things are missed,

00:01:00.600 | there'll be periods where you fall off of the system

00:01:02.880 | for a while.

00:01:04.320 | Like, so maybe you get crushed all of a sudden

00:01:06.480 | with some unexpected, big, urgent work,

00:01:08.860 | or there's a family emergency, or you get sick.

00:01:12.400 | I mean, there's all sorts of things that can happen

00:01:13.800 | that are gonna knock you off

00:01:14.880 | of some of your productivity systems.

00:01:16.640 | None of that's a problem.

00:01:17.920 | None of that, I think, is a sign

00:01:20.520 | that your productivity system is somehow wrong.

00:01:23.600 | That's to be expected.

00:01:24.480 | Again, unless you're super rigid.

00:01:26.840 | I write one book every two years.

00:01:29.640 | All I do is I write every morning.

00:01:31.520 | And like, if you're super rigid,

00:01:32.880 | then maybe you worry about it.

00:01:34.200 | But otherwise, there will be unforeseen circumstances

00:01:37.120 | and events in your work when your systems

00:01:39.680 | won't fully rise to the challenge.

00:01:42.680 | So what you are supposed to do in that situation

00:01:45.280 | is recover and regroup when you next get a chance.

00:01:48.160 | So you're crushed by this emergency that happens at work.

00:01:52.160 | You fall off of your systems.

00:01:54.500 | The emergency concludes.

00:01:56.960 | You take a slow half day in the morning

00:01:59.120 | to get back on track.

00:02:00.260 | Let me clear out things, get my new weekly plan,

00:02:03.200 | get my task boards up and running,

00:02:04.800 | or whatever it is that you're using.

00:02:06.080 | Get back to doing my time block planning.

00:02:07.840 | You recover and you regroup

00:02:09.240 | the next time you are able to come up for air.

00:02:11.640 | A corollary of that is don't beat yourself up

00:02:13.800 | during the hard time.

00:02:15.440 | Oh my God, why am I not time blocking?

00:02:17.160 | Oh my God, why am I not time blocking today?

00:02:18.560 | What about tomorrow?

00:02:19.960 | Hey, when you're in the emergency,

00:02:21.280 | when you're in the hard period,

00:02:22.200 | when you're in the unusual circumstances,

00:02:24.020 | just you do what you need to do.

00:02:26.320 | The advantages of these systems aggregate

00:02:28.620 | over long periods of time.

00:02:30.880 | It's not a chain that if you break it, you lose everything.

00:02:34.280 | So you recover and regroup.

00:02:36.400 | Now, when you do that regrouping,

00:02:38.640 | sure, that's a time when you can ask,

00:02:40.440 | is there tweaks that need to be made?

00:02:42.240 | You might look at your overall system

00:02:44.760 | and say this little piece of it here,

00:02:46.960 | I'm consistently not coming back to that,

00:02:49.000 | or that's not really helping, so let me get rid of that.

00:02:51.160 | Or, you know, here's why I'm falling off

00:02:52.800 | my time block plans.

00:02:53.800 | Now that I have time to recover and regroup,

00:02:55.580 | I see what I'm doing is I'm over blocking.

00:02:58.520 | I'm building these impossible plans

00:03:00.140 | so the slightest issue makes them fall apart

00:03:02.220 | and it's so dispiriting

00:03:04.680 | that I don't even bother blocking anymore

00:03:06.360 | when things get even a little bit hard,

00:03:07.680 | so I need to be looser in my blocking.

00:03:10.280 | Or I need to automate more

00:03:11.520 | so that my schedule's easier to handle.

00:03:12.940 | So when you recover and regroup, you might tweak.

00:03:15.800 | Now, what are the signs that your system is truly broken?

00:03:18.760 | You might need to really rethink how you do your work.

00:03:21.920 | If you stop using it altogether for long periods of time

00:03:25.040 | that persist past acute circumstances,

00:03:29.580 | that is a warning sign.

00:03:31.000 | So if you just don't go back to your system at all,

00:03:34.960 | even though you're not in some sort of emergency,

00:03:36.600 | you're not crushed by a workload,

00:03:37.800 | there's not some unusual things happening,

00:03:39.560 | you just find yourself not using it months at a time,

00:03:43.300 | now you might need to rethink what you're doing.

00:03:45.760 | Similarly, if you're using it

00:03:47.200 | but it feels completely ritualistic and arbitrary,

00:03:50.080 | like the equivalent of doing prayer beads

00:03:53.400 | and setting up crystals in your office.

00:03:55.120 | Like, I don't know, I have these lists

00:03:56.680 | that I write things on, I have to color code them

00:03:58.600 | and I move things over this thing,

00:03:59.960 | I'm just kind of doing it rotely,

00:04:01.160 | it's not really even impacting how I work,

00:04:03.120 | that's another sign you need to change your system.

00:04:05.020 | So there are signs that your system is truly broken,

00:04:06.960 | but if you just have temporary leaks, that's just normal.

00:04:10.920 | That means you have a normal job.

00:04:13.620 | (upbeat music)

00:04:16.200 | (upbeat music)

Here are the 2 Signs that Your Productivity System is Broken | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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