6
Planning for Freedom
Plans are the easy bit. Honest. Execution is the difficult bit; and even that's a lot easier with some strong planning. Also, notice what's happened here: an easy bit of planning has eased us into some doable execution – and on we go until the next bit of required planning. Too often we try to kickstart our endeavours with some frantic activity, which relies on our willpower to keep going. Willpower that soon collides with a small setback – or interruption – and disappears, almost as quickly as it's conjured.
Instead, we should kick-start our new endeavours, not with frantic activity – or ‘busy-ness’ as Stephen Covey calls it in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) – but with manic planning. And if we get distracted after 10 minutes – so what? We've had a good 10-minute planning session that we can build upon (as long as we've written it down). In fact, after 10 minutes we should do something else, and then come back and check that our plans still make sense.
Of course, in our enthusiasm, we may have written nonsense. Yet this is nothing to beat ourselves up about: nonsensical plans are a good start, as long as they're replaced at some point with executable ones. As a writer, I know that first drafts are far more important than perfect first drafts (which don't exist). Even terrible first drafts are a strong document to work from: a start, a structure, as well as some text that can be reorganized and rewritten.
If nothing else, we've managed to eliminate an unworkable idea. The process of unravelling or capturing thoughts and ideas, and placing them in the correct order using the right language, has begun.
The same goes for planning: bad ideas are great because they're a step towards good ideas that we can execute.
If our plans are not nonsense, however, we can spend another 10 minutes adding some flesh. In fact, this may be an effective work pattern in the early stages: 10 minutes of intense thinking (not action) and writing (or sketching), followed by a short break or (not too diverting) alternative activity, followed by a further 10 minutes of concentrated work.
Indeed, why not actually time it – perhaps using one of those alarmed kitchen timers?
No, I didn't invent this. It's called the Pomodoro Technique and it's a favourite of time managers the world over, although the brainchild of Italian Francesco Cirillo.
Named after those tomato-shaped devices used in most Italian kitchens, the Pomodoro Technique breaks all activities into intense work sessions of no more than 25 minutes followed by a break. Yet we're happy to make it 10 minutes because we're planning, which is more thinking than doing so therefore more mentally taxing.
This immediately generates a strong and doable work rhythm. In Cirillo's view, the very act of winding-up the timer creates an urgency that triggers action, as does the gentle whirring or ticking and the impending alarm. For the disorganized person the technique establishes the relationship between time and activity – creating an intensity of concentration and an intolerance of interruptions (as well as a time-zone for allowable interruptions). And why stop with the work? Why not time the break the same way – making resetting the alarm our first and last action during the 10-minute work period?
Cirillo also suggests a low-tech approach, at least at first. In his view (and mine) early planning stages should be scribbled using pen and paper. Perhaps a later 10-minute session can convert the paper notes into an electronic format, although this should be seen as part of the editing process. For now, uninterrupted thought is the key requirement so anything that potentially distracts us – including electrons emitting from a screen (thus straining our eyes) – should be avoided.
In fact this rhythm – in this case 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off, 10 minutes on again – is an important concept because such rhythms run right through any universe focused on getting things done. Disorganized and unproductive people are simply those that miss the upbeat of the rhythm. We start, we break, we start again: with the second uptake of work often the problematic point for the inattentive or distracted person.
Well here's a reminder to restart work which, even if we do 10-minutes on and 20 off, still means 20 minutes of intense work each hour, or nearly three hours per working day: enough to get anyone well on the road to strong productivity (although the aim should be to slowly expand the up-time to Cirillo's 25-minute preference).
In my view, Cirillo's simple contribution is immediately transforming – recruiting both unproductive time and disorganization to our cause because they now have their place, which mirrors the rhythm of our lives.
‘One reason why people resist getting organized is that they think it is a static condition’, writes Dr Marilyn Paul in Why Am I So Disorganised?
By this, Paul means that being disorganized is just another part of productivity. At the right moment we simply need to use it as a lever to swing on to the next stage – a process Paul describes thus:
A battle analogy is perhaps the easiest to visualize. Neat ranks of soldiers engage with the enemy and, before long, the battlefield is a ragged and messy place. Yet with the battle over the ranks can reform, march back to barracks, rest, and then ready themselves for the next engagement. And if a war analogy is not to our taste we can think of team sports that begin with neat formations that dissolve into chaos, requiring the periodic restoration of order as the game proceeds.
Of course, it's that restoration that troubles the unproductive mind, although it's a natural part of the rhythm: just the next step. Desks get messy, our creativity dissipates and projects go off on tangents. So we need to ensure we periodically restore order – perhaps a task for the last pomodoro session of the morning.
With a working rhythm established, and the need for planning understood, the obvious next step is to write (or at this stage sketch/scribble) some plans. Yet we need to be aware that plans can be disabling documents for the unproductive person. The last thing we should create is a mental prison from which we immediately want to escape. Indeed, this feels like a catch-22 situation when it comes to planning: we need plans to become productive but plans are the very thing unproductive people rebel against.
How do we get beyond this? Not easy, given the self-sabotaging thought process we're likely to have adopted thus far. Yet we clearly recognize that such poor thinking has betrayed us, which should put us in the right frame of mind – as long as we can tailor planning to our individual style.
That said, we must first accept certain truths about planning.
So, what should our planning include? Well this is where we start our journey, so our key need is a destination. Stephen Covey made his second habit ‘begin with the end in mind’ which, I think, is a worthy starting point for any planning. His first habit, by the way, was ‘be proactive’, which should, by now, be well understood. It's the direction of our proactivity we're trying to establish.
‘To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination’, writes Covey. ‘It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.’
Covey states that it's easy to get caught in the ‘activity trap’, in which we work harder and harder to climb a ladder that's leaning against the wrong wall.
‘It's possible to be busy – very busy – without being effective’, he states, invoking the vision of explorers cutting their way through the jungle towards their stated goal only for the leader to climb the tallest tree, survey the terrain, and shout down: ‘wrong jungle!’
‘Shut up!’ others reply, ‘we're making progress.’
Our primary planning exercise, therefore, requires us to find the right jungle. In itself, this may be a difficult endeavour given the unproductive person's propensity for self-sabotage and avoidance. Indeed, our core aims – at this stage – may be purely negative: of not wanting something (conformity perhaps), rather than wanting something.
Yet, given a turnaround in thinking, even this situation can open up positive possibilities. We simply need to reframe the language.
For instance, if we examine the negative and rebellious statement ‘I don't want to conform’, we could reframe it to the more positive ‘I want to express myself freely’. This means we've immediately generated a framework that has the ‘end in mind’: we want to do our own thing.
Then, if we look at what we're good at or what we like (utilizing Hill's notion of desire) – art, maths, IT or English (for example) – we can perhaps add to the statement: ‘I want to express myself freely in art/maths/IT/English etc.’
This certainly gives us something positive to work towards. Going back to my own chaotic youth this would probably have been English, given that I loved writing essays. So, taking this exercise to its conclusion: my first pomodoro planning session would have concluded with the statement: ‘I want to express myself freely in writing English’, which should lead me to think about the possible avenues for making that desire a reality. These include becoming a novelist, script writer or a journalist – perhaps choosing journalism because it offers a strong training and opens the door to further, even freer, literary expression later on.
All of a sudden, I've a 10-year goal – not to become a journalist (that's a mere milestone), but to express myself freely as a writer: perhaps writing feature articles or commentaries, or even branching out into TV documentaries or non-fiction books. Wow! That's one hell of an end result – and one easily conjured from the mere reversal of our negatively framed urges.
Such reframing is an easy exercise and one we should all undertake, no matter where the negativity lies or how far along a particular career path we've travelled. It's also a great first action on our journey towards productivity – not least because it marks a major moment of transition between the id and the ego of Freud's early organizational impulses, as well as between negative and positive thinking and between unproductive and productive endeavour.
But what then? Getting beyond the desired end result can be a painful process, because the more detail we add the more it feels like our warm, soft, fluffy desires are coming up against the cold hard rocks of reality. Yet it's way too soon for such catastrophic thinking – not least because it's probably the result of too little planning.
Becoming over-enthused by one idea, and then headlessly charging forth is the quickest and most needless way to slam against those rocks of reality. Needless, because stronger planning, and a greater calculation of future actions, would have shown us how to deftly navigate such barriers.
According to David Allen, in his influential book Getting Things Done (2001), there are five phases to what he calls ‘natural planning’, although – in our Covey-inspired enthusiasm – we've somewhat corrupted his process.
These are (with some thoughts of my own):
‘Consistently managing your next action for each [project] will constitute 90 percent of what's generally thought of as project planning’, says Allen.
Next actions are therefore a key outcome of planning, although – please note – this is the last element of planning once we've corralled all the elements we need. It's also the first time we should add the word ‘how’ to our thinking – although only for the first action along what is now a linear and sequential to-do list.
For me, the most troubling element of the above is brainstorming. This is what Allen calls the ‘how’ mechanism, although focusing on how something is to be achieved can be immediately disabling. Our poor self-beliefs may generate fear and doubt the instant we try to calculate executable paths for our goals. Yet Allen isn't suggesting we rationalize our thoughts into doable actions (at least, not yet) – just that we come up with options: as many options in as many directions as we can muster (again, we'll edit them later).
Mind mapping is Allen's preferred visual aid for brainstorming. Coined by British psychology author, Tony Buzan, this popular method results in a spider-like graph with the core notion at the centre and with limbs going in all directions – spouting their own legs as ideas proliferate.
The example Allen uses is of a project to move offices. The stated aim is circled in the centre of the page, with major limbs given labels such as ‘timing’, ‘budget’, ‘location’ and ‘address changes’. Subsidiary branches develop the supplementary thoughts these produce. For instance, on the ‘address changes’ branch Allen includes ‘new stationery’, ‘business cards’ and ‘notifying clients’ – all thoughts taking the project an executable stage further on from the original ‘move office’ objective.
To me, mind maps are no more than a good starting point – helping us capture and structure random thoughts and perhaps unblock constrained or problem-seeking thinking. To become useful for execution, however, mind maps need to become a written-up action plan under various headings.
But that's just my view. Others may love the visual and spatial freedom they provide – like an explosion of thought that still manages to record sequences and actions, perhaps on its outer edges, like stars in an expanding universe.
A final thing to remember about brainstorming: it's not creative thinking, which may be a later part of the process. Sure, brainstorming can aid or promote creative thinking, and most certainly it's inspirational. But its main aim is to generate ideas and concepts that revolve around a specific problem or project. Creativity is therefore no more than a branch of brainstorming, while another branch will be the practicalities of achievement, or timing concerns, or required resources or permissions. As Allen states, the aim of brainstorming is the ‘quantity not quality’ of thoughts.
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