Take small steps within coherent systems
A look a the second core principle of intentional academia
This month I’m writing about three core principles that undergird most of what I think about productivity and purpose in academia, and therefore most of what you’ll see here at this newsletter. I consider these to be the axioms of the blog, and of my own personal practice.
The first was control the controllables: In our life and work, we need to figure out what is withing our control and what isn’t, and exert control – with confident intent – over the former. It is a reformulation, maybe a clarification, of an earlier axiom I’d written about, which is you are responsible for your own career. Bringing controllable things under your control is not something that’s going to be done for you — it is something only you can do. I also wrote that although different people have different spheres of control, nobody’s sphere has a zero radius. There is always something that you can do.
It’s the “doing” part that doesn’t sit well with many. It can seem like an impossible amount of work, and this is work that can seem unfairly distributed. That’s where the next axiom comes in.
Take small steps within coherent systems
You know what else sounds like an impossible amount of work? Going from being completely sedentary and out of shape, to running a 5K.
Running five kilometers, which generally means jogging at a reasonable pace for 30-40 minutes straight without stopping for breaks, isn’t complicated — you just move your legs and breathe — but it’s not easy. If you’re out of shape and don’t move much in your daily life, then trying to run a 5K “cold”, just hopping off the couch and putting on shoes and hitting the road, is likely to result in failure, serious injury or worse. For people in that situation, the idea of running a 5K can feel about as realistic as jumping to the moon.
That feeling of impossibility happens often when we try to think only of the end result, and not about the process of getting there. But it’s the process that’s key. And almost every journey from an undesired state to a desired state that involves a major change happens by taking small steps, one at a time, within a coherent system.
The best example I know of a coherent system that involves taking small steps, is something called the Couch to 5K (C25K) program. Like it says, this is a program in which, over an 8-week period, a person can guide themselves from literally being on the couch all day to running a 5K. It looks like this (source):
On each workout day, which is just three days a week, you take 20-30 minutes and split it between intervals of running followed by walking. Initially, the split is 60% walking and 40% running: 60 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeated 8 times. A person might not be able to come from living on the couch to running 5K directly; but lots of people can run, albeit slowly maybe, for 60 seconds. Then breathe for 90 seconds; then do it again, and again. These are simple steps that won’t kill (most of) the people trying them.
Then in week 2, the run/walk split shifts: Run for 90 seconds, walk for 120 seconds, and repeat. After six “reps” of running followed by walking at that length of time, you’re at 21 minutes (not 20 as the graphic shows). The entire time is about 57% walking and 43% running. Then in week 3, the split shifts again: An even 50/50 balance of running and walking for 20 minutes again. And so on.
You can see what’s happening: The program starts off at a level within the grasp of the average couch-dweller, and then gradually dials up the proportion of running and dialing back the proportion of walking. By week 6, there is almost no walking, and it completely disappears in the last two weeks and the emphasis becomes adding time (and therefore distance): an extra 5 minutes, then an extra 10 minutes. You can do this because the system has leveraged small steps to build up your cardio to the point where adding time to the running is doable.
In short, C25K is a coherent system. It holds together. It takes those simple steps and makes them accumulate to a result that would be hard to imagine if you just ran directly at it.
I first encountered C25K, 15 years ago when I turned 40. As one does at 40, I contemplated getting older for the first time, and I didn’t like what I saw: I was overweight and out of shape, had no energy for my three young kids or for my students, and was beginning to manifest some medical issues with my heart. I decided I was going to do something about it and found the C25K program, starting it the day after my 40th birthday. I had never been an “athlete” and was always the fat nerd kid in school. So I wasn’t sure I’d stick with this program. But sure enough, it worked, and I ran my first 5K in August 2010. I didn’t come in first place by any means, but I survived and did what I set out to do.
I think the reason it worked for me, and for so many others, is that on the micro level, C25K was not a big lift. I just had to take 20-30 minutes three times a week1, and at first you are never running for longer than 60 seconds. I figured I could put up with anything for 60 seconds.
If it just stayed at this intensity level, though, C25K wouldn’t work overall. It’s the coherence of the system that makes it all work: The gradual, intentional accumulation of small steps, no one of which is a big deal, that eventually propel you to something that seemed impossible before.
Coherent systems for intentional academia
So what is the “Couch to 5K” program equivalent for intentional academia? I don’t believe there is just one. But Getting Things Done, or GTD, has been the system that has made the most sense for me, and for many others.
I have written a lot about GTD in academia. It’s kind of the operating system on which my academic career and personal life run. If you are new to the concept, I have an entire page here at this newsletter that has more info, and links to a five-article series on GTD for academics that I published in 2023:
GTD for Academics
I won’t go into the details about GTD — that’s what my article series was for — but I have stuck with it for many years because, like C25K:
Practicing GTD involves simple steps: Capturing a passing thought into a notebook; looking at a single email in your inbox to decide what to do with it; setting up a sensible system of folders on your computer; spending one hour a week reviewing the system; executing on one item on a next actions list. None of these individually is hard or complicated. They are the “run 90 seconds then walk for 2 minutes” of personal and professional work.
It is a coherent system: It’s not just a bunch of lifehacks randomly thrown into a bag. Each of the simple steps taken in GTD leads to something. You capture the passing thought because it gets your attention; clarifying reveals whether that thought is nothing major or something important; organizing keeps important stuff from falling through the cracks; reflecting puts all the important stuff in proper relation to each other and to your higher sense of goals and purpose; and engaging actually gets you to the point of experiencing things that are important to you in their fullness.
GTD is way more than just zeroing out your inbox and twiddling with apps.
Small steps within the system
Often at this point in a post I have a “Now You Do It” section, and that’s what this section will be. But I’m phrasing it as: What are some appropriate small steps that a faculty member or other academic type can take that work within the GTD system?
You can build a habit of capture. As academics, we live in a world of ideas. Moreso than many non-academic types, thoughts and ideas come to us unexpectedly and almost constantly. When one such idea — or even something more mundane, like realizing you need to clean the garage — comes into your head, don’t trust your head to remember it. Write it down instead. You can start doing this right now with a notebook, some post-it notes, or your phone’s notes app: When something gets your attention, capture it. Then tell yourself you will think more about it later because the idea is to not get derailed by a passing thought, but bring it under your control and review all of them at a designated time later (like at the end of the day or in a weekly review). Try doing this for 48 hours.
You can learn about the clarifying process and practice it on your email inbox. In GTD, “Clarifying” means deciding what a thing (email, captured thought, etc.) means to you: Is it junk? Is it useful but just information? Is it actionable? Is it a single action, or more like a project? The article on Clarifying describes the whole process. And you can practice that process by closing this web page and going through your email inbox, from the top down, and clarifying as many things as you can in 10 minutes. Then stop after 10 minutes.
You can set up a coherent system of folders in one spot. You probably have folders on your hard drive or in Google Drive/One Drive, maybe in your email client. Are they set up according to any kind of coherent system of their own? Many times they aren’t. I recommend using Thiago Forte’s PARA system, which involves setting up four main folders (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) on every digital system you use and then organizing stuff using those folders. I’ve applied the PARA system everywhere: Outlook, Gmail, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. and having the same folder setup everywhere has given me back hours of my life.
You can pick one thing that you need to do that probably takes 2 minutes or less and just do it now. This is the Two Minute Rule: Anything that takes 2 minutes or less to complete should be done the moment it’s clarified2. You can pair this off with the second bullet point and power through a lot of work very quickly.
You can schedule time with yourself to figure out your higher goals and values. In this post I went into detail on high-level considerations of GTD, namely your passion and purpose. Having clarity on what drives you fundamentally as a human is essential for intentional academia and for doing GTD well. It wouldn’t be a terrible use of time to carve out two hours on a weekend and write out a Life Plan and documents describing your Horizon 4 and Horizon 5.
The full power of these simple steps doesn’t become apparent until you do them inside the coherent system of GTD. But, you can do them in isolation and experience some real improvements.
Etc.
Not enough people know about the Average White Band, so here they are doing their mega-hit “Pick Up The Pieces” live. The bassist here (I think) was Alan Gorrie. Who knew Scotland could be this funky?
Which is not always easy! I still find it hard to make time for exercise. All the more reason to control the controllables to eradicate time-wasting and be able to make this work. Note that we make time for this — we don’t “find” time for it.
You might have been expecting that to say “the moment it’s captured”. But I think that might lead to a lot of unnecessary work, because if you haven’t clarified a thought that’s been captured, you don’t know yet whether it has any meaning to you. And if you act on it before you know this, you end up spending time doing something efficiently that maybe shouldn’t be done at all.