Rebooting the systems

Part 1: The heart of the matter

Photo by Tine Ivanič on Unsplash

Welcome, or welcome back, to Intentional Academia. 

The last time I posted here was a little over nine months ago. Why did I stop, and why am I starting again? The second part is easy to answer. I am more convinced than ever of the urgency of the core message of this Substack: Professionals in higher education do not have to choose between having a great career and a full life -- by taking consistent, disciplined steps within coherent frameworks, we can have it all. The responses to this recent post at my other Substack, Grading For Growth, convince me there's still a "market" for this message, and perhaps that article is what brought you here.

As to the first question, well, that's going to take a series of posts to unpack, and I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks. It's a story that starts with one of the worst years of teaching I have ever had and the soul-searching that resulted.

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It seems like many college faculty struggled in the 2023-2024 academic year, but like Tolstoy's unhappy families, we were all unhappy in our own ways. My particular malaise was that very quickly during that year, I was getting lots of things done, but I had no idea why I was doing them. It was just a lot of running around, checking things off my list, day after day with no perceptible impact. I was frantically busy but without an overall sense of purpose.

I can't really call it "burnout". Burnout is “a state of emotional. physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress”. I was never really exhausted last year, or even excessively stressed. I just remember one day last Fall, I was standing in front of my class, and in a flash my life (such as it was) passed before my eyes. And when I say "life" what I really mean is my next actions lists. I could see all the projects, tasks, and next actions I had committed to, but could not connect a single one of these to anything that really mattered to me. In fact I could not, at that moment or afterward, really say what did matter or where I wanted my life to go. 

In the days that followed I couldn't stop thinking about that sobering moment, and my thinking did not result in clarity. As I slogged through Fall and into the Winter semester, trying to apprehend what was at the root of all this, I realized that it wasn’t my systems. I was doing all the right things: capturing, clarifying, organizing, engaging, and reviewing all according to orthodox Getting Things Done (GTD) practice. For a complete look at GTD for academics, go to the landing page I have set up for this important idea that is central to most things on this blog:

GTD for Academics

And yet, it wasn't adding up. Something was missing. And I realized, as the year mercifully came to a close, that my #1 priority for the summer was to figure out what it was, or else I’d be stuck in a doom loop.

Back to the beginning

As soon as Winter semester ended, I started a deep critical examination of everything I thought I knew about “productivity” — every system, every tool, every practice, every underlying assumption was on the table. The goal: Reboot my entire productivity approach so that there is a constant, direct line of sight from any single task I have on a list to a principle, value, or goal that provides a north star to my life.

Aside: I don’t intend this post and the ones that follow to be some form of therapy¹, and I don’t mean to over-share. I intend two things: First, to let you all know that airtight productivity habits and systems in place are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having a full, purposeful life; and second, to share what’s been working or not working for me as I come to terms with the shortcomings of those systems in that sense. This blog’s purpose is to highlight simple steps taken within coherent systems to arrive at excellence in both work and life. But the systems themselves do not, indeed cannot, do all the work, and my story here is a cautionary tale about managing expectations and what this “work” looks like. 

Anyway: I started with my tools — the apps, devices, platforms and so on that I use. The tool shapes the hand, after all, so maybe the tools were getting in the way of finding my purpose, and a simple changing of the guard could unlock something. At the time, for example, I was using ToDoist as my task manager. I switched over to TickTick for a time because it has built-in features, such as an Eisenhower matrix view and a habit tracker, that seemed useful for connecting tasks to larger purpose. 

You won’t be surprised to learn that the tools weren't the problem. In fact I dropped TickTick because it has so many features that I distracted myself by screwing around with them too much. I learned a valuable lesson here that everyone taking productivity seriously needs to know: Tools will not solve your problems. Tools tend to create more problems than they solve, especially if they are "feature-rich" because having more features makes it easier for you to take your eye off the ball. The problem, if there is one, is usually deeper than your tool stack. Focus on fundamentals instead.

The fundamentals

And those fundamentals are clearly laid out in David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy. There are five stages or steps: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Review (or Reflect), and Engage (or "Do" as I like to think of it). If you're new to these ideas, the links you see here are to articles that go into great depth on each, and I encourage you to go read those first before continuing.

Early in the summer, I spent a day at my favorite brewpub/coffeehouse brainstorming my current practice in each of these areas, looking for weak spots.

Capture: I realized that I had more inboxes than I truly needed, and after a while was able to trim that number from six down to three. So that's good. But it also wasn't really the root of my problems. I had good tools and habits in place for ubiquitous capture and nothing was leaking out.

Clarify: I went home and drew up this flowchart (based on the one from David Allen’s GTD book, summarized here) with my practices in the all-important Clarifying stage:

Whiteboarding my current/future Clarify process based on a similar diagram in the GTD book.

Like with Capture, I discovered some inefficiencies². But also like with Capture, I concluded that my fundamental process was sound. I knew when something was actionable or not; I knew how to identify the next action if it was, and how to set stuff up as a project if there was more than one action; and all the rest. 

Organize: Again, I found some opportunities to simplify. For example I realized I had six different Google Calendars for family events, that I was able to consolidate into one; and project information spread around between Google Drive and OneDrive³. But again... organization was not problem.

When I got to Engage, that's when I found the problem.

Disengagement

In a strict sense, in GTD to "engage" just means "do something", in one of three modes: You can be doing predefined work (stuff on your next actions lists), doing unplanned work as it comes up (no explanation needed there), or do things to define what your work actually is (scanning your situation, going through the Clarify process, and determining next actions). In any event, how it works is that you have lists of next actions⁴. Then, in the moment, you size up your situation -- the time, energy, and tools available as well as constraints like your location -- and pick something out of the Venn diagram of next actions that results, and do it.

That's where my problem was. I had all the lists, carefully manicured and tagged and even color-coded. And no matter what, I never really wanted to do any of it. I was dis-Engaged.

Why? Because, I learned after some soul searching, I would sit down to engage with a task and just couldn't get past the feeling that it was pointless. Why was that task even on the next actions list in the first place? For the majority of my tasks, I had no satisfying answer for this⁵.

Stuff was on my lists merely because it met the criteria of things that should be on a next actions list: actionable, taking longer than 2 minutes, and need to be done by me and not someone else. But I had no means of knowing whether or not any of these tasks connected to anything higher and more important than simply getting things done.

In fact when I looked at my system, I had no way of deciding what "important" even means. I had a Life Plan, but only touched it at quarterly reviews, and only then just looking it over to remind myself of my big commitments. I had quarterly OKRs, but at any given moment, I could not tell you what those were. If you make a Life Plan and OKRs but then forget what they say, how important could they possibly be?

So what I realized I needed were two things. First, I needed a coherent picture of what matters to me, and how those meaningful things instantiate themselves on different time scales: Lifetime, 3-5 years out, 1-2 years out, in the next quarter, the next month, the next week. Second, I needed to install habits where my Clarify process is inseparable from intimate knowledge of this big picture.

Without these, the problem I faced in 2023-2024 would just get worse: I'd continue to get lots of stuff done, but my life would go nowhere. I would wake up, day after day, with well-maintained systems and plans, but simply watch my life go by. There is no point having all these systems if they don’t help connect day-to-day tasks to lifelong purpose.

And so this was the start of a full-scale reboot of my approach to getting things done, and to Getting Things Done. I didn't feel right blogging about any of this until I felt I had something to report that could be useful; hence the nine month silence. I still don't have it all figured out and probably never will, but I've made progress, and in the next couple of posts I'll share what I have come up with.

Now You Do It

Do you share my situation where you feel there's a disconnect between your work and everything else -- like your life purpose has leaked out somehow? If so: Take it seriously, and schedule one hour to explore this and journal about it. What do you learn? What is the problem, and what isn't the problem?

Etc.

Finally, a few random shiny items for you:

• Cal Newport's newest book is called Slow Productivity and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Academic people especially need the message of this book urgently.

• The Personal Productivity Club is "a digital community of personal productivity enthusiasts, experts, technologists, and creators".

• Chris Bailey shares his five favorite email tactics.

• Rick Beato's YouTube channel is a fascinating collection of content about popular music and music in general. This video especially really has me thinking, and it fits with the concept of "slow productivity" in a lot of ways:

And a parting reminder: I intend on keeping all the content on this Substack free to access for everyone. However, if you would like to help support my writing financially, you can become a patron by signing up for monthly, yearly, or founding subscriptions starting at just $5 per month. Your patronage will help me provide you with useful and high-quality content on a regular basis. Click here to learn more, and thanks for considering it.

1. I have been in exactly two therapy sessions in my entire life, both of which were worse than the issue I was in therapy for. So, trust me on this one.

2. For example, I realized that there are a lot of tasks that I put into a Next Actions list that really should go into Someday/Maybe; the difference being that Next Actions are commitments to complete a task as soon as possible, whereas Someday/Maybe items are just things that would be cool to do at some point. I might go into this in a later post.

3. Partially owing to a head-scratching decision by my university many years ago to use GSuite for students and Office 365 for faculty, rather than making a decision to use one and not the other. That's higher ed for you.

4. That's lists, plural, because in standard GTD practice you will have several of these: Actions lists for projects, plus individual mini-lists organized by contexts.

5. "Because I'll get fired if I don't" was true, but not satisfying.