Control the "hydrant", or How not to drown in the flow of information and tasks

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Corporation, once said that getting information from the Internet is like drinking from a fire hydrant. Matthew Lowry, an expert in online communications, took this topic further and called the continuous flow of information that goes to the PC and phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and never ends, "firehose". How not to drown in the flow and use your time rationally - read in an adapted translation prepared by Lifehacker.

With hydrant, your to-do list is never empty. Because the "hydrant" is not just information, it is a factory of new tasks. Some items on the to-do list are explicit, such as emails from your boss or clients that require attention. But many are not clearly expressed.

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It doesn't matter how many hours a day you are involved in small business. The main thing is that they do not see the end and the edge. This is the "hydrant".

And this concept is much broader than just a list of tasks. And, unfortunately, there are still 24 hours in a day.

Lark

If you are like me, all creative and challenging work progresses well early in the morning. There are many reasons - psychological and physiological - why this is so. But the "hydrant" is deeply indifferent to your inner rhythms. Because while you sleep, the amount of information continues to increase.

After breakfast, you open your inbox, and the stream from the "hydrant" shatters the screen, which was under the pressure of letters in the mail, accounts in Bitrix, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Basecamp, JIRA, Trello and the like. Your calendar contains meetings, requests and instructions from your boss, partners, clients, subcontractors, colleagues. And what was not on the list of tasks yesterday is burning today and requires immediate execution.

The Hydrant won't be waiting for you. It loudly demands your time and attention.

Suddenly it's 11 am and you've already lost the best part of your day.

How to respond to this state of affairs? Usually two options are offered: either change behavior or use technology. But why not use technology to create the foundation for behavior change?

How do you manage information, tasks and ideas efficiently? You need to understand that the flow of information is continuous, and in general, it is several flows: information comes from emails, social networks and media, websites, newspapers, during meetings, from friends and even from your head. It is impossible to cover everything.

Do you have to process messages, decide what to do with them: react, use, share, save for later use, or delete? When to do it? And how do you find the time to deal with all this?

Unfortunately, the multitasking mode, when you try to do everything at once, does not work. You do not control your schedule, it is difficult for you to find free time, distract from mail and focus on something for more than 5 minutes. If so, check out my method of organizing time to be most productive throughout the day - this may be the way to go.

Three techniques and additional tools

Daily ritual. At this time, we are engaged in organizing and planning, focusing on important and small tasks.

Learning - Queuing - Stock Information - Distribution. We transfer the flow from the "hydrant" to the material with which you can work. We form a list of tasks, a personal library of useful resources, a stable feed of information from social networks and the media.

Getting things done to the end. We manage the list of tasks and our own time.

Work according to your inner rhythms

Only you can figure out your own set of productivity enhancements - all I can do is share my own.

I allocate the best time to solve the most important tasks

In the morning, when my brain is at its best, I set aside 2-3 hours to work on the Most Important Task, and I’m not distracted by anything else. Research shows that workers who are distracted - or are distracted by themselves - at least once every 3 minutes, take a minimum of 20 minutes to get back into the task at hand.

It is worth starting the day with a difficult task, even though it is human nature to start with something easier. During the day, unforeseen circumstances will surely arise, additional meetings - and the tasks of paramount importance will not be completed.

I indicate pauses

Be that as it may, usually after 60-90 minutes concentration decreases, so I divide the morning period of work into two parts, taking a short break, during which I must leave the workplace.

Scientists claim that a sedentary lifestyle leads to heart problems, poor posture, and some types of cancer.

Even if you sit in one place for only 30 minutes, your metabolism will slow down by 90%.

In the evening

Energy levels drop dramatically after lunch, which is why many people prefer to get some sleep during this time. After lunch, I try:

• meeting people: I am sure that I can hardly do my job well at such a moment, and communication gives an additional boost of energy;
• tackle small, simple and organizational tasks.

Morning and evening ritual

You need to decide what exactly to do during these hours. This means you need to open mail, translate some of the messages into a list of tasks and find time for them among other projects.

The problem is that the messages that flood your mail are real vampires who feed on your time. Taking them apart takes more time and effort than you think. And the worst thing is that, no matter how annoying it may be, part of you always wants to check your inbox.

The solution is that those who enter should be treated as dangerous animals, which most of the time need to be kept in a cage, but still, from time to time, so that they do not escape on their own.

I deal with incoming work twice a day - during the morning and evening rituals. I became so accustomed to such an order that working with incoming ones became for the mind the same automatic task as for the body the need to eat and drink.

Between these two periods, I don’t worry about whether something has arrived in the mail and whether I have forgotten something important - I trust my system. Therefore, having closed the mailbox, I go to work with a fresh head.

And since the morning ritual is usually short-lived (most of the organizational issues are left for the evening ritual), I pay more attention to the Most Important Task.

Task list

To organize your day and stop the flow of inbox sucking all the juices from your life, you need to use techniques and tools.

One of these effective techniques is "Learning - Queuing - Stock of information - Distribution", which translates a haphazard flow into:

• easy-to-use list of tasks,
• a personal library of useful materials that are saved for later work with them,
• a collection of materials to share with colleagues.

Ideally, this should be done during the morning and evening rituals. Let's take a closer look at this process.

Study of incoming

Your inbox is everything from emails and Twitter messages to your voice recordings.

First, remember, no incoming calls require an immediate response. We have all learned to send and receive quick responses to emails, but this is wrong: anyone who expects this is placing additional obligations on you.

Secondly, it is absolutely ineffective to open every email and reply to it. You will be more productive if you do one thing. For example, just view your inbox. Our brains are not very good at tying multiple tasks together. When people think they can multitask easily, in reality they are just quickly switching from one task to another. But this negatively affects perception and concentration.

So when you open your inbox, just look at it. This is the classic single-task "Get it done" model:

• if you can view your inbox in less than two minutes, do so;
• if you can't, add it to the list of tasks that you need to return to later;
• you can just ignore the file.

Even if you open your queued inbox right after you view your messages, you still have time to rebuild.

View your inbox in the morning only when absolutely necessary.

When you look at messages in the morning, ask yourself the question: are they urgent? Real urgent messages are your number one enemy, as they take up precious time that you would like to spend on the Most Important Task.

Otherwise, you just need to include the item "Check messages in the evening" in the list of tasks.

Queuing

Place non-urgent tasks that take more than 2 minutes to complete in one of two sections of the queue:

1. Things to Read: Online resources to read and think about can be added to. You can return to these materials later and from any device.
2. What needs to be done: incoming messages are redirected directly to the task list using the help.

Of course, you can also create a list of tasks manually, but I find applications more convenient.

Reading and distributing materials in a personal library

During the evening ritual, I go back to the task list and check the materials in the queue for reading. Since I use Pocket, I can view them while traveling on the subway, while waiting for a meeting, or at any other free moment. Therefore, I usually quickly deal with this list.

If the material is really worthwhile, add it to - my online library of useful materials. It can be tagged, so notes are easy to find the next day, a month, or even a year later. And special thanks to Diiogo for the opportunity.

The l8r tag (that is, later - from the English. "Later") puts the resource in another queue, which I call during the nightly check of the list of tasks.

Plus, Diigo automatically saves a copy of any text I add to the note box. I can edit this note, insert remarks, ideas that come in handy when I want to share material with someone.

Share this

Some tags in Diigo allow you to publish your asset anywhere. For which thanks to the magic:

• with the Like tag, the material is submitted to my Tumblr as a quoted post,
• if you select the Tweet title tag and the post link is sent to Twitter,
• you can customize tags for other accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook …

With this method, the entire stream from the "hydrant" is sent to the task list and personal library, and the selected resources, in turn, can be shared. And all this without losing attention.

Evening ritual

Since I want to focus on my creative work in the morning, the evening ritual is the cornerstone of planning for the day.

How I start the evening ritual

By time after lunch:

• I have already completed my Most Important Task in the morning;
• unread messages accumulated in my inbox, which I received when I was busy working on the Most Important Task;
• the queue in the task list contains the tasks that I put there in the morning, and the standard tasks that I do during the evening ritual every day.

Current daily tasks

As mentioned earlier, the evening ritual includes tasks such as:

1. View. This is a complete inspection of everything: I deal with everything possible, even with those materials that will take more than 2 minutes to work with.
2. Read, distribute, share. Working with all the cool stuff I've added in the last 24 hours.
3. Monitor the task list. I open my turn of tasks and, based on the progress made in working on the Most Important Task, I:

• I decide what I will do this evening and what I will postpone to tomorrow,
• decide which task will be the Most Important Task of tomorrow morning, and determine how much time will need to be devoted to it,
• I include time for rest in the schedule (or postpone it for later or sometime).

There are a few more ongoing things to do, such as answering emails received yesterday, or keeping track of finances, and others. Some of them only appear on a special day. For example, I check the aforementioned Diigo every Wednesday and Saturday.

Weekly check

Every Monday you need to include the item "Make a list of goals for the week" in the list of tasks. Therefore, every night during the week, I keep these goals in mind: it will come in handy when I need to decide what to do today and what to leave for later.

Every Friday night, I mentally revisit these goals and critically assess them.

And only then comes the rest time

Since it is easier to manage my schedule in the evening and more difficult to work on difficult tasks, then during the day I will probably be engaged in reviewing and adding tasks and materials to the queue. Even so, your inbox will be closed for at least half a day.

My day ends with the task "Study - Queuing - Stock of Information - Distribution", so I can start a new day without a load of unfinished business.