Focusing on the fundamentals

Part 2 of Rebooting the Systems

Photo by Thomas Schaefer on Unsplash

This is the second installment in a series about my efforts this summer to reconnect the millions of day-to-day tasks I do, with a higher purpose. In the first article, I wrote about a troubling realization from last academic year: Although I was getting a lot of stuff done, none of it seemed to connect with anything beyond my daily next actions lists. Lots of tasks checked off of lists, but not much of an idea of what any of it meant. 

I wrote that this disconnect wasn't really something deficient in my systems but rather in the execution of those systems -- what in GTD language we call Engaging or Doing. I ended with the realization that I needed two things: A coherent picture of what matters to me, and habits of connecting that picture to my daily work. The first of these is what I’m writing about today. 

A more coherent picture

It's actually not completely true that I had no clear picture of my higher goals and purpose. I did have such a picture, in two documents I wrote a couple of years ago and which I update regularly. 

One of them is titled The Persona. It is a list of bullet point statements that describe the kind of person I would like to be and how I want to present myself to the world. Despite how it sounds, there's nothing terribly private in that note, so here’s a sample: 

Snippet of “The Persona”

I look at this document at every weekly review and, like the Daily Examen that we use in the Catholic Church, ask myself "Is this statement true of me?" And if it isn't, I think about why.

The other document is called The Ten Commitments. These are ten big ideas that I believe guide my life and work: Generosity, Charity, Leadership, Balance, Health, Curiosity, Adventure, Humor, Persistence, and Faith. The note lists these, along with a short description of what I mean by each one¹. The Persona is supposed to be what The Ten Commitments look like when concretely lived.

So that's all well and good: It's nice to have those ten guiding principles laid out, along with a guide for how they should look when made visible through my actions.

But when I took that full day retreat at my favorite brewpub/coffeehouse, which I mentioned last time, to lay everything out on the table, I found an important issue: Although I review those two notes weekly, and although they are supposedly the distillation of what I am about and how I want to live my life, I couldn't remember at any given moment what those notes said. Even just now, I tried to recall what The Ten Commitments were, and could only come up with five or six of them. If this stuff is so important, why can't I remember it?

I decided that I had a clear picture of my purpose, but not a coherent one and certainly not a simple or memorable one. Therefore my new goal was to take what I had distilled before, and simplify it.

On the Horizon(s)

There's a lot that gets written about the processes of Getting Things Done, like the Clarify flowchart or methods of Capturing. But there's a part of the GTD philosophy that, as I learned this summer, I frequently skip over and have never actually written about: Horizons of Focus.

Put simply, David Allen's GTD book refers to six Horizons of Focus, using the analogy of an airplane that has different views for different altitudes. A picture says it best:

The Six Horizons of Focus

(Source)

What was certainly true for me, maybe for you as well, is that I typically operated at and below Horizon 2 most of the time and never really thought much about Horizons 3-5. I was heads-down and neck-deep in tasks, meetings, and projects with a very occasional look at my Areas of Focus². But visiting Horizons 3 and 4 was rare for me -- about the only time I thought about my longer-term goals and objectives, or the vision for where I want to go in the next 10+ years -- was at quarterly or annual reviews, and then it was only cursory. And looking at my overall purpose and principles, the rarefied air of Horizon 5, was a once-a-year event.

My main problem, in other words, was that I was not getting enough altitude on a daily or weekly basis.

Allen writes in the GTD book a lot about "working bottom-up" which means that you inductively determine what your values are, by looking at your daily work and seeing where it points you. But I needed the opposite: I had plenty of daily work and it was just spinning me around in circles. I needed a top-down reboot, starting with a restatement of my values.

A Valuable activity

Before I get into the details of this, why is it important? Isn't this just gratuitous navel-gazing reserved for the most privileged among us?

No, it isn’t — it’s a vital activity and important for everyone. Because every decision you make eventually depends on the values you have. In the Clarify process, how do you decide what to put on a next actions list, versus making it Someday/Maybe, or just trashing it? How do you decide what to say "yes" to and what to say "no" to? The only way is to align those choices with your values, your vision, and your longer-term goals. And if you don't have clarity on those, you'll be saying "yes" to everything, often the wrong things or the right things for the wrong reasons. This is just doing what's on someone else's to-do list, and living someone else's life.

I retreated back to my brewpub/coffeehouse remote office and spent an entire morning shaping Horizon 5, my overarching lifelong purpose and principles, starting with what I already had (The Persona and the Ten Commitments) and aiming to reshape these into something leaner. I had stashed a couple of items in my notes that provoked some thought:

• The Seven Virtues. This is a notion from traditional Catholic teaching. They are the opposites of the Seven Deadly Sins: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Actually those are technically the seven "capital" virtues; there are also seven "heavenly" virtues, namely prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and charity. There is a lot of overlap there, obviously. I mention these because they came up in my mini-retreat and because they correspond closely to The Ten Commitments (in fact I used them to come up with that list). Although somewhat old-fashioned -- I mean, who thinks about "temperance" these days? -- they all still resonate strongly with the kind of person I want to be.

• The Six "Values in Action". This is a more modern and secular approach to enumerating virtues. They come from an instrument called the Values of Action Inventory of Strengths, which is a survey (you can take it for free here) that helps people discover their personal strengths. The six Values in Action are: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance (there it is again!), and transcendence. I'm including a screenshot from the Wikipedia page because the synonyms for each of these virtues give insight:

The six “Values in Action”

I spent the entire morning reading about each of these abstract ideas, with the goal of identifying which ones resonated with me the most, splicing and recombining these, and getting down to a short a list of ideas that I can bring to mind in a moment, at any moment, to remind me what I'm about.

I landed on four main areas:

• Growth: Valuing knowledge, wisdom, and experiences over physical things and accomplishments. Related concepts: Creativity, curiosity, adventure, learning, perspective, open mindedness, balance, continuous improvement.

• Humanity: Valuing others at least as important as myself. Related concepts: Charity, leadership, kindness, love, social and emotional intelligence, justice, fairness, mercy, forgiveness, generosity, hospitality.

• Temperance: Centering my actions and choices on moderation and self-discipline. Related concepts: Persistence, focus, humility, balance, chastity, self control, self discipline, self regulation, simplicity, patience, moderation, minimalism and essentialism, physical fitness and health, deliberate practice.

• Transcendence: Being constantly aware that there is more to life than me. Related concepts: Faith, hope, humor, perspective, humility, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude.

I immediately started calling these The Four Fundamentals and drew this Venn diagram:

The Four Fundamentals and where they intersect

In the common intersection of the Four Fundamentals is the note "Zone of Maximum Purpose". Any task, goal, or project that lands in all four of these fundamental ideas simultaneously should get an immediate "yes" from me unless there is a really good reason not to. And anything that doesn't, needs to be scrutinized before bringing it into my life, and the default should be to leave it out.

Coming up with The Four Fundamentals was like an LED light suddenly coming on in a dark room. A lot of items that had been rattling around in my brain and in my next actions lists suddenly became highly clarified. A couple of examples:

• For some months, I'd been debating giving up writing altogether -- blogs, books, all of it. It's hard work, it's not part of my core job responsibilities, and I didn't feel like it was making anybody's life better. But upon closer review, writing is right there in the Zone of Maximum Purpose: it's creative (Growth), it's an act of sharing ideas with others (Humanity), it forces me to buckle down and write and do it well (Temperance), and it forces me to see things from other peoples' perspectives (Transcendence). It's precisely the sort of thing that has a claim on being in the center of what I do.

• While I was doing all of this, I got an invitation to speak at a university in Saudi Arabia. In fact, if all goes according to plan, I'll be leaving on Sunday. I kind of wanted to say "no": it was a lot of travel right before school starts, it's intimidating doing a solo trip to such a different part of the world, and it's not necessarily the safest place for Americans right now. But the more I looked at, the more I realized that once again I'd found something right there in the four-way intersection of all my core values. So it was a "yes" and I am very glad I did it.

So, at last, I had a statement of my core values and life purpose that was not only clear and correct, but simple and easy to remember – therefore easy to bring down to the everyday level. The next step: Build habits that make the connection between Horizon 5, Horizons 3 and 4, and everything below it. That’s what I’ll write about in a couple of weeks in the next installment.

Now You Do It

Before school starts back, block off 3-4 hours on one day – morning, afternoon, late night, whatever works for you. Brainstorm a list of values that resonate with you. What ideas, what principles, inspire you to live up to them? Capture those. Then start to combine, consolidate, and splice these together to come up with your own short list of guiding values. 

Etc. 

• We’ve all faced the choice of forcing yourself to complete a task versus letting yourself off the hook. Which is best? It’s complicated. 

• If you need a tool for tracking time, or for doing the pomodoro method, and you don’t like digital tools or ticking clocks… how about an hourglass?

• Music pick: Treat yourself to a little mid-70s-era James Brown on the TV show Midnight Special. Just don’t be like the audience, who embody the exact opposite of the title of this song.

1. And since these notes are in Obsidian, there are links to "maps of content" for each one, which provide a list of more links to all other notes in my system that are tagged with these concepts. For example I have a MOC for Persistence which uses the Dataview plugin to give me a list of every note in my vault that has the #persistence tag.

2. These are general areas of commitment, not exactly projects but places where tasks can be grouped. For example, I have a fellowship in our president's office that spins off projects and tasks, but the fellowship itself is not a project, it's an area where I need to give consistent attention.