All right, we have another question here. This one comes from Sam. Sam says, "Does having occasional productivity leaks "mean that there might be an undiscovered system "that might work even better than what you're doing?" So productivity leaks, what Sam means by this is some things get forgotten or you fall off the system for a little bit.

And in his elaboration, he makes clear, he wants to know, is this a problem? And he was struggling. He went through some hard periods with time block planning. So that was his particular motivation for those questions. He was like, "Is there things better? "Does that mean time block planning "is not the right system for me?" So Sam, I would say, usually the answer here would be no.

So unless your work is very repeatable and rigidly defined, I mean, you just do one thing and you do it in the same way every time, you're never gonna have a consistent, perfect match with your productivity systems. There'll be periods in which, let's say things are missed, there'll be periods where you fall off of the system for a while.

Like, so maybe you get crushed all of a sudden with some unexpected, big, urgent work, or there's a family emergency, or you get sick. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can happen that are gonna knock you off of some of your productivity systems. None of that's a problem.

None of that, I think, is a sign that your productivity system is somehow wrong. That's to be expected. Again, unless you're super rigid. I write one book every two years. All I do is I write every morning. And like, if you're super rigid, then maybe you worry about it.

But otherwise, there will be unforeseen circumstances and events in your work when your systems won't fully rise to the challenge. So what you are supposed to do in that situation is recover and regroup when you next get a chance. So you're crushed by this emergency that happens at work.

You fall off of your systems. The emergency concludes. You take a slow half day in the morning to get back on track. Let me clear out things, get my new weekly plan, get my task boards up and running, or whatever it is that you're using. Get back to doing my time block planning.

You recover and you regroup the next time you are able to come up for air. A corollary of that is don't beat yourself up during the hard time. Oh my God, why am I not time blocking? Oh my God, why am I not time blocking today? What about tomorrow?

Hey, when you're in the emergency, when you're in the hard period, when you're in the unusual circumstances, just you do what you need to do. The advantages of these systems aggregate over long periods of time. It's not a chain that if you break it, you lose everything. So you recover and regroup.

Now, when you do that regrouping, sure, that's a time when you can ask, is there tweaks that need to be made? You might look at your overall system and say this little piece of it here, I'm consistently not coming back to that, or that's not really helping, so let me get rid of that.

Or, you know, here's why I'm falling off my time block plans. Now that I have time to recover and regroup, I see what I'm doing is I'm over blocking. I'm building these impossible plans so the slightest issue makes them fall apart and it's so dispiriting that I don't even bother blocking anymore when things get even a little bit hard, so I need to be looser in my blocking.

Or I need to automate more so that my schedule's easier to handle. So when you recover and regroup, you might tweak. Now, what are the signs that your system is truly broken? You might need to really rethink how you do your work. If you stop using it altogether for long periods of time that persist past acute circumstances, that is a warning sign.

So if you just don't go back to your system at all, even though you're not in some sort of emergency, you're not crushed by a workload, there's not some unusual things happening, you just find yourself not using it months at a time, now you might need to rethink what you're doing.

Similarly, if you're using it but it feels completely ritualistic and arbitrary, like the equivalent of doing prayer beads and setting up crystals in your office. Like, I don't know, I have these lists that I write things on, I have to color code them and I move things over this thing, I'm just kind of doing it rotely, it's not really even impacting how I work, that's another sign you need to change your system.

So there are signs that your system is truly broken, but if you just have temporary leaks, that's just normal. That means you have a normal job. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)