Over the last few months I’ve slowly developed a few habits that have allowed me to quantify the progress on goals I’ve set for myself. It’s been working really well for me so far, so I thought I would share as it may be helpful to others. Consider this a ‘how I work’ post.
Personal productivity is inherently personal
Tim Ferriss during an interview in You 2.0, a documentary on life hacking
First and foremost, have some goals. I recommend coming up with a mix of personal and professional goals for yourself, it will keep you balanced and happy. Here are some of my goals for the year. I tweaked a couple since writing that but you get the idea. I’ve also accomplished several of them already (more on that later).
Keep them infront of you. I use a to-do app for Mac called Things and the corresponding iPhone and iPad apps that all sync together. In Things I add goals as projects. I keep most projects as ‘Inactive’ until I’m ready to focus on them. Projects go into ‘Areas of Focus’. In my case they are Personal, Obsorb, and AllRendered (my 2 companies). Each task relating to the goal goes inside that corresponding project.
Identify what is moving the ball forward. This is the most important part. When I add any task I tag it with either ‘proactive’ or ‘reactive’. If you write things on paper, just put proactive or reactive next to the task, its as simple as that.
Reactive tasks = a task that you need to deal with that doesn’t pertain to a goal you set. It’s incoming work.
Proactive tasks = a task that, once completed makes you one step closer to accomplishing a goal that you set.
One important thing to note is not all tasks inside of a project are tagged ‘proactive’, even if they’re for a goal. For example, I have a monetary goal for AllRendered. Landing a very large animation contract and getting it going was all proactive. Responding to incoming questions about progress on it was not. That was reactive work. Tagging each task requires a second of thought.
You’re going to have to deal with reactive tasks, its just not possible to eliminate all reactive work. What you can do however is measure the proactive to reactive task ratio you accomplish. Successful people live purposeful lives by doing work that moves them closer to what they want. The ones that just get by are stuck on reacting to the incoming stuff.
Give yourself some feedback from data.
Every Monday, I look at the log of all of the completed tasks from the previous week and add up the proactive and reactive tasks. I input this data into a google doc’s spreadsheet. Each day has a column for the # of proactive and reactive tasks completed. There is then a percentage breakdown of proactive and reactive tasks completed for that day. (ie, on 2/25/11 75% of my tasks completed that day were proactive, 25% was reactive.) That daily and weekly percentage is your crucial feedback, monitor it.
None of this is really new. I’ve simply pulled from many different things that I’ve read and tried over the years. This works for me. If you do one thing from this post, monitor your breakdown.
The goal is to keep the proactive totals and percentages high. I shoot for 70% or more of tasks completed to be proactive.
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April 29, 2011
