Business Insight Zone

The point of this post is NOT to recommend a 100% complete “capture tool” for your tasks, like David Allen would. (David’s right, mind you, but it’s not my point at the moment.) The point is to get you thinking harder about how you spend those tiny slices of your career that get doled out to you moment by moment every day.

You probably need this exercise only occasionally, in bursts. Here’s how it works:

For every single thing you do at work, write down a descriptive to-do for it, before or after the fact.

Simple, right? The power of this comes not from any complexity, but from what it tells you about yourself and your working conditions. It basically works as a time diary, but I find it heightens the absurdity to write things as imperatives: not “Processed e-mail for two hours” but “Spend two solid hours processing e-mail, with no discernible results.”

You can leave out calls of nature. You can leave out walking back to your car because you got to the door and realized that you left your ID tag in the glove box. (Not that that ever happens to me.) But everything else, no matter how banal, goes on the list.

Some things will be outright productive:

• Update the team via e-mail about the bid process — 4 minutes.
• Answer 4 e-mail queries re affiliate program — 15 minutes.
• Schedule quarterly review meeting with the boss for next week — 2 minutes.
• Compile budget estimates for 2009 and circulate for review — 95 minutes.

Slap yourself on the back for these, and don’t worry too much about the run-of-the-mill detritus that crops up along the way:

• Fetch coffee from break room — 6 minutes.
• Attend department meeting — 50 minutes.
• Stand in hallway gossiping after meeting — 12 minutes.

Some items, when you have to write them down, will strike you as obvious wastes of time:

• Watch a video of a dog bouncing on a trampoline — 2 minutes.
• Graze Internet aimlessly — 45 minutes.
• IM with friends — 25 seconds x 41 exchanges.

Silly though they are, these are at least things you understand well, just like you know that eating three scoops of Rocky Road won’t help you get back into the outfit you wore to your senior prom. (Hey, I don’t judge — I love Rocky Road.)

But here’s where I want you to get serious: be merciless when you write down the hidden land-mines in your day. In other words, don’t write this:

• Meet one-on-one with Mitch about project specs — 40 minutes.
• Take online training module — 60 minutes.

Write what you really mean instead:

• Argue in circles with Mitch about project specs — 40 minutes.
• Suffer pointlessly through ill-conceived online training module — 80 minutes.

Sure, it’s just a trick of language, but language is a powerful thing. Words have real meaning, even when we write them only for ourselves.

Maybe by writing things down this way you’ll come to admit that you and Mitch have been talking in circles, and it’s been going on for weeks. Maybe this will lead you to figure out whether the problem lies with you, Mitch, departmental politics, bureaucracy, or whatever. Heck, maybe this will get things rolling so you and Mitch can team up and take on the bureaucracy like Jet Li and Jackie Chan took on the Jade Warlord in The Forbidden Kingdom. (Totally underrated movie, by the way.) The point is, it might get your thinking unstuck.

Which would be worth it, right?

We can all use some thinking-unsticking sometimes. Give it a try. Tell me what you think.

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(Photo by luc legay.)