We often associate being productive with doing things—with hard work, or “doing the doing”. And so we push ourselves to get to work on tasks quickly. Hence the ubiquity of the to-do list. But because of that, we miss a key distinction—one that’s important to understand if we want to become more productive, instead of just better at doing.
I’m talking about the distinction between doing and deciding.
Two Distinct Kinds of Work
For most of us, we aren’t handed a list of discrete, well-defined tasks to do in a predetermined order. Rather, we are responsible for outcomes. So it becomes our responsibility to decide several things: How we’re going to get to those outcomes, what tasks will need to be completed in order to get there, and when those tasks will be done. That’s a heck of a lot of responsibility. It takes some serious thinking to make those kinds of decisions. Then once those decisions are made, you still have to do the actual doing that you decided needs to be done.
It’s no wonder we so often find ourselves avoiding certain tasks. We see the task on our list. It looks deceptively simple. We think that we simply need to roll up our sleeves and do. But in actuality, we need to decide. And in the back of our mind we know that we haven’t decided yet. This thing we think is just a simple task is actually built of several sub-tasks. And in the back of our mind, we also know we’re not sure what those subtasks actually are, or which one needs to be done first—because we haven’t done the deciding. So we get overwhelmed, and we either procrastinate or choose a different task to work on.
We need to set aside separate time to do this deciding. It needs to be time devoted exclusively to that type of working—that intellectually intensive, focused work. When we don’t do that, we end up not doing the work to the extent we need to. And we fail to set up a series of well defined tasks that we can get to work on right away. Our to-do list becomes populated once again with items still in need of some amount of deciding. So there’s cognitive resistance built into those tasks. It’s a surefire route to more procrastination and overwhelm.
A Golden Ratio
When I was learning video editing in high school, my teacher told me that for each one minute of finished video, approximately an hour of editing will be required. And while I wouldn’t quite say the same ratio holds for deciding versus doing, we should definitely set aside more time than we think we need to do the deciding. It might be more like a one to one ratio; for each hour of work you think you need to do, you should spend close to an hour deciding what work is involved, how it needs to be done, and when it should be done.
If one hour of deciding per hour of doing seems like too much, consider this. On almost every occasion where I’ve devoted considerable time and almost every occasion where I devoted considerable time planning and making decisions about my work, I ended up significantly reducing the amount of work I thought I had to do. I either came up with a more efficient way to get things done, or I figured out that there was work I thought I had to do, but didn’t actually need to.
Even if the work of deciding doesn’t reduce the amount of doing you need to do, there’s almost always another benefit to it. You end up saving a lot of time and energy that you would’ve normally spent procrastinating or not being clear on what you needed to do. You end up more efficient. Since you’ve done the deciding already, you can just sit down and get to work. You can simply “do the doing“.
