All right, let's move on. Now we got a question from Frank. Frank asks, "What kind of processes you go through "to figure out what projects to commit to? "I feel that much of the conversation of productivity "is around figuring out how to tackle everything "that is on my plate.

"There is advice on working efficiently through that, "as well as ways to get some of the stuff off my plate. "This is all great stuff, but what about making sure "that the work that I get put on my plate "is the best choice for my skills and my goals?" Well, Frank, this is a perfect excuse for me to remind everyone about the productivity funnel, a concept from earlier in the podcast that I think is worth reviewing 'cause it's very relevant to your question.

So let me see here. I actually could draw a picture. In theory, I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna draw a picture of the funnel. So here we have, for those who are watching at home, we now have the screen back up. So just for those who don't remember, the productivity funnel has three levels, which I will expertly draw.

Keeping in mind all three levels is what's gonna be important for actually getting a good answer to your question here, Frank. All right, so if we're gonna label these levels, what are we gonna get? At the bottom is where we have, and people who are watching along at home, see, I have impeccable handwriting.

I'm still learning this pen. I don't know, Jessie, what would you think? That looks like someone having a stroke because they were drinking too much. And in the middle of that process, the drunk person having a stroke was writing the word. So I'll rewrite it. So what I was trying to write here is the word execution.

I'm labeling the bottom level of the three-level funnel. There we go, that looks better. - Yeah, that looks good. - With execution. Above that, the middle level of the productivity funnel, we can label organization. And then the top level, and this is where it gets relevant, Frank, let's just summarize, I call this different things, but for now let's call it selection.

All right, so we have this funnel. Selection, organization, and execution. Whoops, I just accidentally moved everything on the screen. Not to worry. Boom, now we're back. All right, and so what happens is you have a lot of possible things coming into this. Oh, man. I'm doing all sorts of interesting things on my screen down here.

There we go. Oh my goodness. There we go. I'm getting good at this. It's not riveting radio, but I'm actually making a lot of progress on this technology. So you have a bunch of possible activities coming to the top of this productivity funnel. And let me just scroll this up so we can see it.

And then what happens? Okay, all right, so now I have the whole picture drawn. Again, for those listening at home, I'm sure you love the riveting radio here, but I have a three-level funnel drawn. At the top, widest part of the funnel is selection. The middle level of the funnel is organization.

At the bottom is execution. And there's a bunch of stuff coming in the top of the funnel. These are potential activities. So when it comes to productivity, there's three parts to it. Selection is actually trying to figure out of these things that are incoming, of these things that are incoming to the funnel, which of them am I actually going to bring into my system and actually hope to execute at some point?

So a lot of the things coming in get blocked right at this point. We'll talk about more about this in a second, Frank, because it's at the core of your question. But just so you know how these pieces fit together, the things that make it through selection then have to be organized.

So where are they kept track of? Where's the information associated with them getting track of? Where is the plans that may lay out how they're executed? When do those plans get made? How do those plans get consulted? What role do they have in their life? All of that happens within organization.

So for example, this is where you'll have capture systems. This is where you're going to have your quarterly, weekly planning, your quarterly, weekly, daily planning, where you're figuring out big picture plans, that goes down to a weekly plan. You figure out what you'll be doing each day. So there's a lot of work that goes into organizing what's on your plate.

And then often missed is the bottom, smallest level of the funnel, which is execution. We figure out, well, now that I know what I'm supposed to be doing right now, how do I do it? Okay, and this is where things like deep work or the shallow work, minimizing context, switching rituals, locations, scheduling philosophies, all the things you do to actually execute your work at the highest level, that goes there.

This is also where tools that make you more efficient when you're doing shallow tasks that would benefit from efficiency, they would go here as well. All three of these go into this big picture idea of productivity. Now, Frank, based on your question, you're focusing when you think about productivity mainly on the middle level organization.

A lot of people make that same distinction. So the nuts and bolts of how I keep track of and schedule and organize everything on my plate, people often think about that's what productivity means, but that's just the middle part. You need it, without it, it's chaos. You're the list reactive method, just pulling things off of your inbox and trying to keep your head above water.

But it is not by itself gonna give you a complete approach to being productive. That is having a transition from possible inputs to outputs that matches whatever criteria are important to you. You're gonna need that activity selection to come in place first. So what I'm trying to do here with this funnel, Frank, is emphasize that figuring out what to bring onto your plate or not should be at the core of any thinking about productivity.

And this is deep thinking. I mean, this is figuring out like, what do I do for a living? What is my role? What are the things I'm gonna focus on on my role? What are the things that are overwhelming me? What is the work volume I can actually manage?

And where am I now? And am I beyond it? And how do I figure out how not to go beyond it? This is where you have the hard conversations with your boss. It's where you do deep to shallow work tracking and use those metrics to say, this is too much on my plate.

It's where when you move something from just individual messages in which work is implicitly attached, you move over towards something transparent, like a task board, where you can see all of the work that needs to be done and who's doing what. So you can point to that and say, look at how overloaded this is.

This is where you, when you switch from push to pull, okay, I have another free slot. Hey, everyone, what should I do next? As opposed to just send me stuff when you think of it and I'll take care of it. All of these things fall under the rubric of activity selection.

And it is the part of the funnel that gets the least amount of attention. Organization is like the meaty, sexy stuff, right? Oh my God, I have my notion thing set up and I'm using Trello in the sophisticated way. And I have these different planners. That's like the meaty productivity prawn stuff.

Execution, that bottom part of the funnel, that's the real fun stuff. That's the, you know, I built my deep work shed and I go through the hike through the woods. That's really fulfilling and fun. It's the try to in the moment getting the most out of your work. But activity selection gets ignored.

Even though it's the very top of the funnel. So it impacts everything that comes below. It's what gets ignored. And a lot of the issues we have right now, I think in knowledge work, the burnout issues, the overload issues all comes from ignoring activity selection. And instead just letting stuff fly at us, randomly doing our best to keep our head above water and occasionally calling uncle when it becomes too hard to stay afloat.

So Frank, I want you to emphasize activity selection. I want to encourage you to keep in mind that this is hard. I want to underscore the notion that there's many different things that go into trying to figure out that activity selection piece of your funnel. It's not just a simple strategy you can put into place tomorrow, but I'm glad you're thinking about it.

And it's what you really need to be focusing on. I'm getting better at this, Jesse, I would say. I still have quite a few bumps in my pen handling, but I like this tablet. And also I'm a fantastic artist. I think people who are listening and not watching the YouTube video, so they can't confirm this.

Let me just say what I drew, the productivity funnel was beautiful, perfectly proportional, well-shaded. My handwriting is fantastic. And for those who can see this on the video, don't tell them, that's not nearly true. - Related to golf, it's like, but you're also like using other people's clubs. So like once you get your Apple Pen, you'll be, you know, cruising.

- That's true. So I teach with the same software. So when I teach in the classroom, I was a blackboard teacher because I do theory and mathematics and I don't want to show PowerPoint slides. There's a natural pacing to writing, but my handwriting is very bad. And a lot of the chalkboards at Georgetown are no good.

They're pitted, so you erase them once and the whole thing is white. And so I figured out it was really the pandemic that forced me to switch over to this technology. During the pandemic, I began when we were doing Zoom teaching using my iPad as a whiteboard. And then I would share the screen on Zoom.

And so then when we got back into the classroom last year, I realized, oh, I could project my iPad on the big screen at the front of the room. And so now I'm writing on my iPad, but it's projected up on the big screen. So it's equivalent to me writing on a big whiteboard, except for it's on my iPad and I can save all the notes and send them to the students.

And I can scroll and go back to things I wrote before. So we're using the exact same setup here for the show. So you think I'd be quicker at it, but I am using Jesse's pen. - Yeah, which isn't as good as your pen. - That's true. - I have a good pen.

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