Learning to be more productive can seem complicated. If you’re looking to get more productive, chances are you’re already overwhelmed by a lot things that need to be done, and not enough time to do them. It can seem like there’s no rhyme or reason to help you decide the next thing to do.
But there is a rhyme, and a reason. In fact, there’s a hierarchy to being productive. There’s a set of basic components to being productive, and a relationship between those components. It goes like this:
- Values
- Goals
- Projects
- Tasks
Each one of those components can serve the one above it, but not vice versa. Tasks serve to complete projects. Projects serve to achieve goals. Goals uphold values.
It’s that simple. Anything worth planning and working on will fall into one of those categories. The work of personal productivity is to take the noise of your daily life and place it into those buckets.
The Work of Getting Productive
Actually, the work of personal productivity is to make sure that the noise of your daily life fits into those categories, and that they all link up to the level above them.
We all have a lot of tasks on our task lists. Some of them support big projects, which serve important goals, which are based on deeply-held values of ours—which serve to make our lives rich and fulfilling. That’s full linkage, full integration. That’s the ideal.
But there are plenty of tasks on our plates that aren’t integrated. They don’t link up to goals and values. They’re filler; they’re noise; they’re froth on the wave. Whether or not you do them will have virtually no impact on the most important goals and values in your life.
If there’s any uncertainty about which tasks on your plate are integrated into goals and values, and which aren’t—that’s your most important task for today. That’s item #1 on your Today Card. Getting clear on which of your tasks integrate into the hierarchy will yield a kind of focus, excitement, and decision-making power that you just can’t get anywhere else.
That’s why something beyond a mere list of tasks is important. That’s why the Today Card has a scoring system that gives the most points to the most important tasks in you day. And those most important tasks should be the ones that integrate all the way up the hierarchy. They should be part of a project that serves an important goal of yours—which promotes one of your core values.
If you do fill out a Today Card each day, and place big important tasks on top, that’s great. You’re a step ahead of most people. But to really get better at this whole productivity thing, you need to be confident in your integration.
You need to keep a list of tasks that goes beyond the superficial categories of “to do” and “done”. The tasks need to be connected to larger things, like projects, and then goals and values. Whether a task is connected to goals and values or not is the primary criteria for its relative priority. Disconnected tasks have the lowest priority.
The Integration Process
If you’re reading this, you probably have a list of tasks you need to do. You may even have them ordered in some sort of rough priority order. But let’s take it to the next level. Let’s help you more quickly and effectively prioritize your work, and do so continuously—as other stuff keeps coming at you.
1. Solidify and Number Your Goals
First, take a few minutes, and write 3-5 goals for yourself. These are things that you’d like to happen in your life over the next 1 – 3 years that you can significantly influence.
As you finish the goals list, make sure that they energize you. This is critical. If you look at a list of goals, and it makes you want to get started on making them happen, that’s perfect. But if you’re reading the goals, and you feel overwhelmed, and unsure where you’d even begin—take a little more time and scale it back.
Goals are utterly useless if they don’t get you excited to make them happen. If a goal is too big, it will overwhelm you. So scale it down a bit. Losing 40 lbs. this year may be what you want, but your written goal may need to be a bit smaller at first, to get you energized about it. Maybe make the goal related to the activity you know you need to do in order to lose the 40 lbs. Perhaps the goal will be to do a 30-minute cardio workout every day for 2 months. Work that goal until you achieve it. Then perhaps you can put the larger goal of losing 40 lbs. this year on your goals list.
Once you’ve got a goals list that energizes (not overwhelms) you, number them. You can give them numbers in order of importance, or just arbitrarily. Which goal has which number isn’t important. But each goal having some number is important for the next step.
2. Build a Project List
Next, build a list of your key projects, as well as other random ones. Simply defined, projects are outcomes you’re responsible for that require more than 2 actions, and take more than a week to complete.
This will depend on your own knowledge of how you work, how you plan, and your general habits. Some people need even small things to be projects—so they can break them down into very small tasks that can be handled here and there.
For some people, getting their oil changed is a project made up of several tasks—beginning with researching where to take the car, looking for coupons, calling to schedule an appointment, and remembering to take the car there at the right time. For others, that same “project” is just a task that they can easily just do in a day with little thought.
3. Integrate Your Projects
As you build your project list, make it clear which of your goals they’re serving. Because if it’s not clear which goal they’re serving, you may want to reconsider whether you need to work on them at all.
You can do this fairly easily by going down your list of projects, and writing the number of the goal they serve next to them. If a project doesn’t serve a goal of yours, leave it blank.
4. Sift Through Your Tasks
Here is where you can really see the benefit of the work of making goals and projects. As you decide which tasks to do next, you can simply ask which project on your list they relate to. If it’s not clear which project they serve, that’s an indicator that the task may not be important. If you feel it is important, it’s probably because it falls under a project that you forgot to put on your projects list. It happens, simply add the project, and number which goal (if any) it serves.
As you identify tasks on your list that don’t link up to projects, ask if they serve one of your goals as stand-alone tasks. This does happen. If the answer is yes, then the task is important. It should be treated accordingly. If the tasks isn’t related to your goals, consider eliminating it—or simply deprioritize it.
As you look to fill out your Today Card each day, the top items—the ones worth the most points—should be tasks that serve your goals.
A Note on Values
You may have notice that the top of the hierarchy is values, but I didn’t discuss them much here. That’s because values are a bit tricky. Values can either be static and evergreen or dynamic and subject to revision. That will all depend on where you are on your own journey through life.
Some of us are in a place in our lives where our values are clear. They keep us grounded and serve as anchors that keep us from floating away into harmful tendencies that we know we’re subject be tempted by.
Others are in a place where they’re trying to figure out what matters to them, who they are, and find a mission and purpose. So for them, values are subject to change, and are more expressive than guiding or aspirational.
In either case, your written goals should be bounced off your values somewhat regularly. But an explicit system for this isn’t quite as important as it is for projects and tasks as they relate to goals.
Values and goals are both highly emotional in nature. Projects and tasks are not. That’s why it’s important to have a process for making sure projects and tasks relate to goals. You’re crossing a border from more concrete and mechanical entities to more abstract and emotional ones. So you need the clarity that comes from a categorization scheme and process.
