Integrity and Time: Part 3 of Managing Your Time
Reducing overwhelm and increasing productivity is great. But there is more available: A life you love and a path to becoming the person you want to be.
👋🏻Hi. Amié here. Welcome to Beyond Better Blog. Every other week or so I share new ways of thinking about strategy, leadership and management for becoming an extraordinary founder, leader or contributor.
☄️Work with me one-on-one, as a team or a whole company for coaching, consult with me about your strategy, or check out my book, Powered by Principle: Using Core Values to Build World-Class Organizations.
If you haven’t subscribed, you missed these recent articles.
Managing Your Time (parts 1 and 2). How to amp productivity and peace of mind.
Say No (More). We should all quit more stuff. Why and how.
Resilience Trumps All. It’s the only way to survive constant uncertainty.
My goal is to provide you with thinking worth MUCH more than the time you spend reading or listening.
Subscribe to get access to all of those and every new post!
We all want to spend our time in ways that nurture our lives and forward our goals. But that is hard to do when our days include a steady stream of alerts, urgent requests and Zoom meetings.
Our time becomes fragmented. More importantly, it feels like we are never focused on a single thing. Instead, we fit small intervals of pseudo-thoughtful work into the spaces between trivial tasks and interruptions. Sometimes it seems as though we would do the same quality of work while concentrating only at red lights!
The first two articles in this series offered a new lens through which to view our choices about how to spend our time. In this model, we view the relationship between what we intend to do and what we actually do as a "matter of integrity". That changes everything—the way we think about ourselves, our intentions and our calendars.
Specifically, to-do lists become promises to ourselves instead of hopes. And our calendar becomes a tool for fulfilling promises, instead of a list of where others expect us to be.
Because it is our word that we are giving, we must choose explicitly what to promise and what to not promise.
In article two, I provided a workflow for managing your intentions and your calendar. It included tools and behaviors. The Notes section (at the end of this article) summarizes the system and contains a workflow diagram you can download.
If you only apply those principles and that system, you will increase your own productivity and peace of mind. That will ensure a higher level of integrity between what you care about and what you do to fulfill those promises.
Promises Kept
As I've said repeatedly, my goal was to offer you a way to spend more time on things that matter to you. When our activities match our commitments, our lives express our deepest ideals. Ultimately, that is the pinnacle of integrity. It is also likely to give you a life you love.
That's not coincidental.
If you have been practicing working this way, you have experienced the sense of power you get from doing what the calendar says to do, when it says to do it. That creates a sense of freedom and satisfaction, a tiny jolt of joy at completing exactly what you promised. It is rare that our words precisely match the future they describe. And the delight of that rare event happening is intensified by knowing we are fully responsible for it.
Living with this kind of integrity demands something many of us only vaguely recall how to do.
Deep Work
Without doubt, if you plan to fulfill your commitments, it will demand deep work—probably much more of it than you currently have time to do.
It's especially galling that focused work has become so much rarer in a world that requires much more of it. Our hours are consumed with trivial work, even though our roles require the opposite.
Non-trivial work requires thinking, and thinking well requires focus. It's true whether you are a product designer, a coder, an executive, a strategist or other professional. It's also true if you are an artist, a car mechanic, a violinist, chef or landscape architect. Most work of any consequence demands focus.
But to do deep work well, you need more than focus. You need energy. Think back to studying for exams. For university students, studying through a haze of fatigue or a hangover is drudgery. It's also less productive.
We need energy to bring our full engagement to our focused work. That energy increases when we have dedicated time to work. Because our focus ebbs and flows in the course of a work session, our energy acts as a lever to pull us back to our task at hand.
Setting the Stage
The first component of deep work is sufficient time to become engrossed. That's why it's important to schedule enough time. If you only have twenty minutes, you won't become fully engaged in that work. So, schedule long blocks of time that tell your brain it needn't watch the clock. Use shorter time blocks for undemanding work—administration, email, Slack, and so forth.
Here's a sobering fact: Interruptions—regardless of how small—require as much as 26 minutes more to regain full engagement. Our brains are not built for quick focus.
Texts or Slack messages pull you out of sustained concentration. The solution will sound Draconian.
Eliminate everything that could break that concentration. That includes every alert: email, Slack, texts, IMs and whatever else you currently receive. Schedule times to check those platforms. Make them frequent enough that no one must wait more than is culturally acceptable in your workplace.
If you are subject to genuinely urgent requests, leave one alert on—the one that people least like to use. That is usually the telephone. There's a reason most people text "can you talk?" before calling—the phone demands immediate attention in a way that feels almost rude. Use that reluctance to your advantage.
Ecstatic Focus
Focus has a distinct quality, and that's why it is both so valuable and so delightful. While deeply focused, it is almost as though our identities disappear. Our thinking, writing, cooking, or playing becomes indistinguishable from our personhood.
Said more mystically, we become one with the work. Time ceases to exist. And interestingly, even if you take a break to go to the restroom or make a cup of tea, your mind often continues working.
Said less mystically, our brains undergo specific changes when we are in a ‘flow” state. Our prefrontal cortex locks out most distractions and external stimuli. Hence, our loss of the sense of self or of time passing.
At the same time, our brains receive additional neurotransmitters including norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin and endorphins, all associated with high performance and pleasure.
It's also worth noting that focus need not be "consequential”. I have had some of the most selfless, near transcendental experiences while deeply focused on washing dishes or stuffing envelopes. A friend of mine, a successful architect, told me that he came to a spiritual awakening while meticulously organizing his tool shed—three hours of sorting screws and bolts led to a breakthrough in his faith.
The experience of losing oneself can apply to any work, if we do it long enough and with sufficient concentration.
Working within a state of deep focus can feel magical. And you have the power to create many more such experiences for yourself. [Click to tweet this thought]
Thinking Deeply and Diffusively
Do you have any scheduled time blocks on your calendar dedicated to thinking? It may sound like a strange question, but for every significant project you undertake, thinking is a critical component.
I tend not to schedule thinking per se, but I do schedule blocks to work on solving problems or designing solutions. Much of the time is for thinking.
Thinking suffers in a high-interruption environment. Even the most brilliant people have fewer insights and ingenious ideas without open time to ponder things. But while deep work is one portion of the thinking equation, it is far from the only one.
Lots of inventors and innovators report having solved a challenge while doing something unrelated: taking a shower, jogging, at a movie, while building a pizza oven. According to Gregory Burns, Richard Feynman kept a notebook titled "Notebook of Things I Don't Know About." He'd fill it with random observations and half-formed thoughts during his wandering time. Many of his breakthrough insights came not from his focused research, but from connecting dots he'd scattered across those meandering pages.
When I sit down to develop something for a client, I often spend several hours focused on that work. But at some point, I get stuck.
Later, while walking the dog, or smelling flowers and picking stray weeds in the garden, I will have an insight or see a new way to approach the problem. It is like a cartoon lightbulb. I reach for my Capture Tool to save it.
This kind of experience is common. Our brains work all the time. When we focus on a task, engaging our prefrontal cortex, we are applying knowledge, critical thinking and experience to the task. That often works to solve problems. But just as often, we can't quite grab the insight we sense is there.
But when we are relaxing, or engaged in less intellectual activity, our minds wander. That's when they make new and innovative connections. Diffuse thinking is an important component of problem-solving and strategy. So, along with scheduling blocks of time for deep work, schedule blocks of time to allow your mind to wander. Those can be open blocks, or you can earmark them for exercise, stretching or (as I do), weeding and dog-walking.
Integrity Everywhere
Although we may reliably begin a task when our calendar alerts us to do so, many of us (including me and my clients) sometimes ignore the alert to stop that task. It's easy to do.
We tell ourselves that we are on a roll and must seize the opportunity of that momentum. It feels productive—like we're really getting somewhere.
But the integrity of the system is holistic. Every task's beginning and ending, every break and every email-checking block—they are all part of the whole. If you don't stop when alerted to do so, you violate the integrity. And like all integrity breaches, it has a cost.
Something else that you promised will languish. Even if it is merely a walk, stretching your legs, or calling your mom. They too are promises you made to yourself.
Obviously, sometimes you will continue to work beyond the alert. But when you do so, fix it. If you missed stretching to finish a presentation, do it now, or schedule it for later. But also, ask whether you could plan better next time. Perhaps you need longer work blocks.
Think of it this way: A symphony conductor doesn't let the violins play longer because they're "on a roll." The music works because every section starts and stops precisely when it should. Your day works the same way.
Profound Integrity
Throughout this series, I have referred to integrity as a match between our promises and our actions. Of course, I've been talking about to-do lists, calendars and how we spend our time.
But this idea of integrity has a more expansive application. If you are like most of my readers, then you are in the ongoing process of crafting your life and enterprise. You are a leader, maybe an executive, certainly a thinker. So, you have probably pondered the purpose of your life, or what kind of person you want to be.
Whatever kind of person you want to be, you become him or her by ensuring that each moment of your life is consistent with that. Start by viewing that ideal—the person you are committed to becoming—as a promise. And like every promise, hold yourself accountable for keeping your word.
You will fail often, just as we all do.
But every time we fall short is an opportunity to restore integrity by creating a plan for how to keep the promise next time. And then, remake the promise.
Integrity is a pathway to living the life you choose.
Love it? Hate it? Haven’t decided but have some feedback? Let me know! I read every comment, message or note.
Notes
System Components
Rule 1. Everything I intend to do is scheduled in my calendar with a specific day, time, and duration. Anything that is not scheduled in my calendar is something I intend not to do.
Rule 2. One and only one Capture Tool.
Tools
A Capture Tool for to-dos (or anything else)
A Not Doing Yet List (perhaps a note in your capture tool?)
A calendar
Behaviors
Put everything you want to remember in your Capture Tool. Immediately.
Capture Tool triage. Sort everything you have captured during the day into three categories:
Definitely
Someday
Never.
Schedule all Definitely Tasks into the calendar.
Put all Someday Tasks into Not Doing Yet list.
Maintain several repeating appointments to manage the system:
Scheduled times to check email and other messages.
Daily Capture Tool triage and scheduling.
Quarterly review of Not Doing Yet list. · Conflicts.
Reschedule tasks if unavoidable conflicts arise.
Never delete a scheduled task unless you plan never to do it.
Workflow Diagram
