Thirteen and a half years ago, Marc Andreessen posted his guide to personal productivity, which is most notable for his recommendation to avoid keeping a schedule. Amusingly, in an interview from May 2020 with The Observer Effect he fully reverses course on his advice, and in this republished transcript of that conversation you'll see what appears to be a screenshot of his detailed schedule appear after a couple hundred words. What changed his mind? Andreessen offers his own explanation, but I think I can add to his response - it's a necessary adjustment made by someone whose contribution has changed from being an individual to being part of a team. A way I think of this goes back to something I remember reading a few years ago - a leader should be efficient with things, but effective with people. A highly efficient way to work from the perspective of an individual's production is to maintain the freedom to work on the most important thing at any given time, but this doesn't quite work as well in the context of effective collaboration - there is no guarantee that a colleague will be available in the moment you suddenly feel like working, so at minimum the schedule serves to protect a period of mutual availability.
In a broad sense, Andreessen's reversal is an important demonstration of the necessity of making adjustments in order to get the most out of our time and effort. It's with this lesson in mind that I recommend both of the above links to anyone interested in personal productivity, regardless of whether or not you feel productive at this moment, because the key to productivity is making the constant adjustments necessary to account for ever-changing circumstances. I think anyone will find at least one new idea in those links that will make them more productive in 2021, which is a great return on around thirty minutes of reading investment.
I pulled three ideas I'll try over the next few months:
1. Keep the schedule but throw out the agenda
I think some people hear advice like "keep a strict schedule" and extend the recommendation until every minute of the day is planned to the tiniest detail, so I present this as a reminder that adding structure is often a premature optimization. Idea #1 has familiar tones to advice I've leaned on for writing (don't make detailed outlines), conversation (it takes a while, maybe a half-hour, before anyone knows what's being discussed), or eating (don't ignore a satiety signal just because you decided ahead of time to have "a big dinner").
The main point is that although we should avoid determining the exact details of how to use our time until we're in the moment, it's recommended to have dedicated blocks of time on the calendar at the start of each day for the most important activities. A great example of how to put this into action is in the context of a meeting - the broad objective and a talking point or two should help organize the time, but too much planning will prevent the group from shifting focus if an unanticipated but critical topic comes up halfway into the discussion.
2. Keep four lists: to-do, watch, later, and today
Andreessen presents these across two separate sections without explaining what I consider the most important result - the structure allows us to preserve the purpose of a list, which is to keep us from overlooking, forgetting, or losing track of important things, without succumbing to the temptation of using it throughout the day as a cheap source of endorphins.
This is based on my experiences with the standard to-do list, which tends to start innocently enough but eventually accumulates tasks and projects that can't progress without some external influence (often a person, an event, or just the passage of time). It seems like at this point the list is on its way to becoming an overflowing parking lot of stuck items, which starts to undermine the point of the list - rather than organizing and tracking, it becomes a source of anxiety. The lack of control over stuck items, the sheer volume that makes effective prioritizing impossible, the nagging but growing sense that the list will expand indefinitely - these factors combine to start making the entire exercise seem like a giant waste of time and effort. The common response at this point is a final, desperate attempt to take back control of the list by routinely adding trivial tasks to the top, which allows for the steady satisfaction of crossing off mundane items - the laundry is DONE, the toilet is FLUSHED, and those constantly arriving emails are filed into an inbox subfolder deceptively named READ LATER. This final step always feels great at first, but I've learned that once a list becomes a repository for the daily tasks I don't need to write down, then it's only a matter of time before the to-do list project will be scrapped - it's become too interruption-driven to serve as a useful reference for long-term considerations.
The approach I'm going to try for a few months divides the standard to-do list into four relevant subsections. The to-do section is everything in my control, which means I can prioritize it, while the watch section is pending some external step and will be organized by my best guess regarding completion of that step. The later section is for anything I merely need to remember, which I'll organize as they come to my attention. The final section - today - is a list of the few things I'm going to do on that day. I'm optimistic about using these four subsections because it restricts each of the problems I've highlighted above to one area - prioritization is strictly for the to-do section, lack of control defines instead of undermines the watch section, endless expansion is the point rather than the plague of the later section, and the joy of crossing out completed items is the sole function of the today section. My plan for the start of 2021 is to try and update these lists at the start of each day.
One last thought about the watch section - Andreessen notes how he uses Apple's concept of a "directly responsible individual" to help him keep track of who to check with for project updates. I can confirm from experience that this is a useful detail to include in the watch section. If you keep track of this detail over an extended period of time, you'll also have some data that you can use to spot patterns for common bottlenecks, which can be critical if your colleagues are routinely causing delays or missing deadlines (1).
3. Work on email exactly twice per day
There's nothing new about this one - I shudder to think how many productivity posts would return on a full TOA search for "email" - but it's an important reminder because I often slip from my own standard. The reality of remote work means I'm constantly checking email, so for me the primary emphasis on the above is "work on" - sorting and filing, reading long messages, or sending nonurgent responses would all qualify in this sense. The approach I used for the latter half of 2020 was productive - at the start of each day I got in the habit of clearing out my main inbox, while during the day I learn to leave as "unread" any item that required more action than just filing - so for me Idea #3 is more about a 10% increase in discipline rather than the start of an entirely new approach.
And a little extra advice from the Business Bro...
One additional note about email - there are at least one million different articles, podcasts, and books out there describing the optimal way to file emails. My recommendation is to file them according to the way you look for them, which of course means every person will have a different strategy. But I think this is the best way because for most people their inbox is a living, breathing, and forever changing personal library of information, which means it should follow the ethos of the library in the way you can find what you are looking for without a massive amount of manual effort. The way I organize email will soon mirror the lists I described in #2 - I'll have folders for to-do, watch, and later, with subfolders organizing items by project. If the email exists outside those categories, it means I need it only for future reference, which leads to a separate level of organization under one of the following categories - meetings (individuals, cross-functional groups), completed projects (ordered by start date), ongoing processes (organized by subject) or recurring communication (such as weekly updates, monthly FYIs, procedural memos, etc). I do it this way because, again, that's how I look for things - by project, by meeting, by communication frequency, etc.
Footnotes
1) I used to call my watch list the domino list, a label I used in the sense that one event would allow me to knock off the next item. This was an evolution from the original name, trigger list, which had the same ethos - one event would trigger the next one. The way people started using the word trigger forced me into the change because it turned my list into a possible source of confusion ("what do you mean, my confirmation email triggers you?"). I'd say watch list is a good label, and hopefully it will be the last time I change the name of this list.
Endnote
If you aren't sure about whether you could benefit from improved organization, ask yourself two important questions - do you know where to find everything, and can you find everything in a reasonable amount of time? If either answer is no, you need to be better organized, and a good starting point is to review your organization whenever you don't find something in the first place you look; a logical follow-up step is to adjust your organization so that you are able to find things wherever you initially look for them.
