Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

I've talked previously about managing oneself, and that was about Peter Drucker and Knowledge Work. That podcast is very popular, and it probably resonated with you. It's one of my biggest downloads. There's another aspect to Managing Oneself. I get a lot of questions like this: You might say "I'm pretty good at my Work, when I can find time to do it." This can be particularly challenging if you w...

Learning how to learn If we're going to be more productive, we have to learn new skills and get better at the skills we have. Knowledge is important, but we get paid for producing results. This requires skills.   I see people with limited desire to learn. And when learning does happen, it is usually more about knowledge than skill. I decided to think about why and what to do about it. So I picked...

Today, let's talk about confidence. In my season of life right now, my daughter is entering the career world. She's finished college and now has to find a job/career. She needs to enter conversations and situations that she's never experienced before.   Naturally, her confidence is not very high. This plays out in two ways: she tries to avoid certain situations, and she fears "being nervous". So I...

Ever feel like you didn't get much done? Like you were kind of stuck in the mud most of the day? Ever said: "The work just wouldn't get done"? I ran across Parkinson's Law on a podcast from Cal Newport and Adam Grant. You may not know it by that name, but you probably heard the Law. Parkinson's Law: the work expands to fill the time available. Cal actually turns it into a thought about his notion...

"Let me think about it" – Thought tools   This episode is about the need for, nature of, and development of thought tools.   I was having a conversation with my daughter. If you've listened to the podcast, you know my daughter is 23 and she's beginning her career, just having graduated college She's trying to figure some things out. She's confronted with some new issues that really have become ver...

What is the role of paper as a modern productivity tool?   Is our use of paper just a habit we need to get rid of is it something more? Is it still a useful tool, or should we be trying to break some sort of addiction to it. This is inspired by a LinkedIn post by Chris Mullen. He's talking about the glories of paper with respect to it's limited ability to distract us. And I think that's absolutely...

I talk about the three big enemies of focus and productivity. They are interruption, multitasking, and distraction.   They are in order from easiest to deal with to hardest. (But I'm faking that a little.)   The biggest pushback I get is around multitasking – people defend their ability to do it. Let's deal with that here.   What's our drive to attempt multitasking? What's the evidence that we can...

What to do if our primary tool is not really helping us? I argue that this is the case with our to-do lists. I'll talk about why and what you can do about it.   To Do Busy Right, we are fighting three enemies: interruption, multitasking, and distraction. Distraction is the most difficult to defeat. To-do list is another tactic to deploy in that fight.   Everybody knows about to-do lists; most ever...

Today, I'm going to talk about a pretty common feeling around our work and productivity…   Why do I feel like I didn't get anything done?   I think we've all experienced this feeling. We get home (or whatever we do in the WFH culture) and our significant other asks some form of "How was your day?" Sometimes we just say "Fine" and move on.   But once in a while, we get introspective and think "How...

I'm going to talk about remote work, and this is a topic that continues to be a source of significant debate among folks out there. It's fueled, in part, by people who are employees, who are arguing in favor of remote work.   There are various arguments, and we'll dig into it.   The point I want to make is to analyze the business model of the organization that you work with, and think about what t...

This episode is about the productivity paradox. The Productivity paradox has been around for a while, and it's the economist's way of saying "we don't see the productivity value from our investment in IT". So the question is, companies and people have invested a ton of cash in, I'll say, desktop IT. Over the 40 years we've been doing this, we're not seeing a productivity increase.   The background...

I think we get confused about efficiency, and I think this leads us away from actually becoming efficient. There are two concepts that can confuse us. They disguise the challenge that we really actually face around efficiency. And I'll talk about what all those things are, but if we've got the wrong mindset, it leads us to wrong action.   The notion of convenience and efficiency are real close cou...

This is the 'set up' meeting in a typical AC coaching engagement - the first of eight weekly meetings. As a coach, I'm still motivating the work that my client will have to do. I'm also explaining mindset kinds of things. There should be a lot of knowledge you can take away.   Chris's approach - Chris is an accomplished coach. He works with people on mindset and new knowledge - trying to help peop...

We all try to help our organization be flexible. We hear about the benefits of flexibility, responsiveness, and flat organizational structure. In addition, we all hear about the power and benefits of teams. We feel that fast communication is good (fast information exchange). So, we avoid structure in the belief that this benefits our organization and allows our people to have autonomy. We feel tha...

In this episode, I'm going to refine our definition of productivity in knowledge work. If you think you know the definition, there's a good chance you'll be surprised.   I have my customers tell me their definition of productivity; I believe that the typical definition is broken. I've seen it lead people to over-think, hesitate, or even procrastinate on tasks. If you want to think clearly about be...

This will be a review of Cal Newport's book, Slow Productivity. By the way of introduction, if you've listened to much of my podcast, you know that I pay a fair amount of attention to Cal and what he's doing, because I think he's really bright, really focused on the idea of productivity. If you don't know who he is, you should take a look. He's written several books over his career. He did a Ph. D...

When I talk about task and attention management, I usually talk about wastes of attention. And there are three primary wastes of attention that I've been able to identify with my clients. They are, in order of easiest to deal with to hardest to deal with: The first is interruption - external things in the world that attempt to catch our attention. The second one is multitasking. Multitasking, for...

Let's talk about email, and communication metaphors. You're not going to be shocked when I tell you that we don't handle email well. It's not that we don't know how to use the app that produces email; that's pretty straightforward. And I'm not arguing that we don't know how to deal with emails as items of information, although I believe that's often true.    We know this is important because Cal N...

I try to help you think about how you're using your attention and, thus, how to manage yourself. What you need to manage is your attention. So, when I see systemic waste of attention or weak self management practices, I try to call them out for you so you can begin to think "do I really need to do this?" If you're spending a lot of attention and time on setting and tuning goals, and if that raises...

In the podcast, we study knowledge work and how to get better at it. This touches on a lot of different disciplines, notably management. Typically, I discuss management as how we should manage ourselves. So, when I talk about managing knowledge work, I usually mean how do we manage ourselves as knowledge workers. I believe that we are increasingly called on to manage ourselves but covered that in...

David Allen on Information Overload - if it were real, then when you walked into a library, your head would explode. Let's consider that idea in the context of Attention Overload.   When we feel overloaded and overwhelmed, we can't just blame that on the increasing amount of information. It's true that the amount of information has been increasing for about 500 years, maybe even longer. It's not r...

I talk about how information storage and access is changing. Note that it is changing in ways that mean our old metaphors (and their associated 'affordances') are now inaccurate in a couple of meaningful ways. We don't want our metaphors to constrain our organizational thinking, particularly if they're inaccurate or push us toward the wrong affordances.   Send me an email - Larry@DoBusyRight.com ....

I was talking to a prospect about Attention Compass. Her primary objection seemed to be a misunderstanding of the role of formal planning in our work management system needs. She had tried to implement bits and pieces of legend and lore. Nothing had worked. She felt that work wasted and had given up to some degree.   I think that we've seen and heard so much about productivity that we're jaded, ti...

Systems and creativity – managing the Operational Aspects of your life   I talk about Attention Compass as a system and a set of workflows. A lot of people say, hey, look, I want to be creative, I want to be spontaneous. I don't want to be rigorously structured. I don't want to, you know, feel regimented, right, all these kinds of ideas come up. So we'll talk about that, in this episode, I'll help...

What is "Calm Productivity"? I've spent a few episodes letting you know how to implement Attention Compass, but why would you WANT TO do that?   I'm constantly talking to people about this idea of calm productivity, because that's the payoff for Attention Compass. But, in lots of episodes I find myself getting into the technical details of how Attention Compass works and how you should go about im...