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Part 11 — Correcting Your System to Match Your Task Volume

This superpower will keep your system ever-evolving in the right direction

The Problem

If you have been adding more tasks than ever to your overall commitments, you may have noticed some unexpected changes. You have less unscheduled free time available. More defects (Part 2) occur.

But you don’t exactly know what to do about it. Some suggest you should reduce your task volume by cutting back on projects and commitments, but that’s not a viable solution for you. A more effective response is to add capacity, but that’s easier said than done, especially if you have some Type A tendencies in your task management.

Why Is This Important?

Ambitious people want more out of life than their counterparts, but this demand can turn destructive if it’s not channeled in the right way. In fact, a constructive response requires deliberate choices. It also helps to have knowledge of time demands (Part 1), Type A tendencies (Part 10) and task volume limits (Part 8).

Think back to when you first started to make task management improvements. You took a class or read a book, and picked up some new behaviors, which over time became new habits.

One way to explain your success is to say that you increased your capacity. To use the jargon of Part 8, you increased the size of the box containing your balloon full of tasks. Therefore, you could accommodate a bigger balloon.

So, the good news is that you have done this before…perhaps unconsciously. As a teenager, you used your budding time-awareness to make improvements to your task management that increased your capacity. And while you can’t go back in time and make the same changes, you can find comfort: most teens are able to figure out this transformation on their own.

Not so for adults. Instead, their amnesia on these matters leaves them confused. Now, they need to be reminded of progress they made, even if it was many years ago. Then they need to appreciate that their beginner’s luck has run out. Adult improvements require greater awareness.

The best place to start? Develop a personal baseline (a profile) of your current capacity. One method is to analyze your skills in each of the 13 fundamentals introduced in Part 9. Armed with this self-knowledge, you can decide which precise Pareto Improvements to make (Part 5).

What’s the Link to the Rapid Assessment Program (RAP)?

The RAP creates the opportunity to determine which improvements to make, and a plan to make them. But these aren’t random changes.

Instead, they are based on a very quick self-diagnostic, and a new understanding of how task management works in real human life. This approach sets you up to make corrections to your task management system at any point in the future.

Find out more about the MyTimeDesign Rapid Assessment Program in this webinar.

Part 11 — Correcting Your System to Match Your Task Volume was originally published in 2Time Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Part 8 — Why There’s Always a Limit to Your Capacity to Manage Tasks Effectively

And what happens when you try to exceed it

The Problem

Like most people, you probably wish you could make one, final, ultimate set of changes to your task management system that would last forever. What kinds of changes? Maybe a behavior change to adapt (like a new habit, ritual, routine, or practice), or a new app to download, or a device to acquire.

But experience (and research) show that there is no final solution that lasts forever. Why? Part of the reason is that unwanted symptoms, or defects, show up whenever the volume of tasks you are trying to manage nears your personal limits.

Consider a balloon trapped inside a box. The balloon’s size can be increased or decreased at will, as long as it never touches the sides of the box.

However, if you increase the volume of air in the balloon past a certain point, the walls of the two objects start to touch. Eventually, the balloon loses its shape and deforms. If even more air is added, it bursts.

Now imagine that:

• the box represents the upper limits of your task management system, made up of your behaviors, apps and devices.
• the balloon pictures all the tasks you are trying to manage at a given time.
• its changing shape reflects your total task volume in that moment.

When your personal task volume increases to a certain point — before it reaches the capacity of your system — you don’t have a problem. But once it hits a certain limit, unwanted symptoms or defects occur.

This relationship between task volume, your capacity, and unwanted symptoms is a fact of life — the reality of managing tasks. (The analogy to the balloon in the box is only partial.)

In this context, understanding each of these three components in isolation is just the beginning. However, as a connected system of psychological objects, there is a new level of comprehension that’s possible that makes all the difference when you seek to make improvements.

Why is This Important?

If this model is true for all functioning adults, it could explain a few things. For example, even after we make a number of critical improvements to our task management, unwanted symptoms will probably recur.

To most people, this is bad news. In their minds, a problem they had solved has returned. Unfortunately, some use this evidence to invalidate their progress and those who give advice. For example, Getting Things Done by David Allen is disparaged by many who see the return of unwanted symptoms. They see it as a sign of the guru’s failure. Or their own.

But some escape the trap: for a handful of advanced productivity enthusiasts, the re-emergence of old symptoms is nothing more than an indication of proximity. It has no more significance than the sound a car’s sensor makes as it reverses to a wall.

As such, when unwanted symptoms re-appear, they take the occurrence as a sign: it’s time to perform a fresh diagnosis. The fault is no-one’s.

But they also realize that the solutions they used as a beginner, or last year, or last week, can’t be recycled. Hence the need for a new assessment, and perhaps even better diagnostic tools.

What’s the Link to the Rapid Assessment Program?

In the training, you learn how to use a unique diagnostic toolset to understand your current system. Plus, you are given a full list of unwanted symptoms to work with and a way of mapping them to their behavioral causes, which sit inside your current setup.

These are lifelong tools which apply to all levels of task volume. While better diagnostics will undoubtedly appear in time, you’ll have already made “The Switch” from taking the general advice of others, to using personalized insights based on your self-evaluation.

P.S. While I have used the term “tasks” in this article, I mean “time demands”.

Find out more about the MyTimeDesign Rapid Assessment Program in this webinar.

Part 8 — Why There’s Always a Limit to Your Capacity to Manage Tasks Effectively was originally published in 2Time Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why you are already using diagnostic techniques to improve your task management, but might not know.

The Problem

One of the ways in which pedagogy (the teaching of children) should be different from andragogy (the teaching of adults) lies in the fact that learners think differently as they mature. With more years of experience, and greater age, the adult brings a higher degree of discernment to the interaction than a child.

Today, you don’t pretend to absorb everything someone tried to teach you at face value. Right? But what do you do instead?

Well, in task management, you hear new advice to change a behavior or pick up a new technology, and…then you pause. While the teacher may want you to simply follow orders without question (like a child) you probably can’t. Your mind won’t let you.

Instead, you perform a brief, but possibly imperceptible diagnosis.

Checking over your current system, you consider areas of weakness and the difference their specific suggestion might make. If it passes your internal test, you apply the change. If not, you don’t.

Why is This Important?

Being a great diagnostician may be a novel idea, but the truth is everyone who considers themselves a productivity enthusiast already employs this practice. So does everyone reading a book, taking a training or listening to a podcast in the area of task management.

The challenge is to make this skill explicit. And to get better at it while doing so.

Even the gurus are challenged by this goal, as evidenced by the paucity of their teaching on this subject. Almost all of them are great diagnosticians, but they don’t talk about The Switch they made.

I don’t think they’re hiding anything — just sticking with the simple-to-explain themes beginners resonate with the most.

What’s the Link to the Rapid Assessment Program?

In this training, you explicitly develop your skills as a task management diagnostician….a self-coach. In a short time, you gain an understanding of the fundamentals of task management, how they work together, and some basic principles to apply in any diagnosis.

It sets the groundwork for you to make The Switch to nurturing lifelong diagnostic skills.

Find out more about the MyTimeDesign Rapid Assessment Program in this webinar.

Part 7 — Why You Are Always Already Diagnosing was originally published in 2Time Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many folks who think about migrating from GTD-style task management to time blocking struggle with contexts at some point.

A few abandon their use altogether, but the idea relies on a useful principle that shouldn’t be thrown out.

Instead, a deeper understanding is called for as I describe in this article: