I’ve been listening to a lot of the Cal Newport podcast and “Confronting the Productivity Dragon” has been coming up quite a bit, and I’ve been relating to this problem (more tasks than could be accomplished in the time available) so I decided to look closer at what he meant. So far it aligns with what I already thought and attempted to practice, the only issue is the capture and reviews take time. 😓
On Confronting the Productivity Dragon (take 2)
An overwhelming number of tasks captured in a system that you regularly review will generate a fraction of the angst spawned by trying to instead pretend that those same tasks don’t exist.
When you instead just battle your inbox all day, switching haphazardly between the easy and unavoidably urgent, you can convince yourself that you’re simply busy and need to hustle harder.
…if you can see all 400 obligations in one place, then you can choose the five or six that will have the biggest impact. This is almost certainly better than just jumping on whatever caught your attention most recently.
I told this podcast listener not to confuse the systems with which he organizes his work for the actual quantity of work with which he has been burdened. Abandoning the former won’t reduce the latter