The picture connects
Part 3 of Rebooting the Systems
Now that we're solidly into the new semester, it's a good time to bring this current series of posts to a close. In the first and second posts, I described a situation I encountered last year that is all too common among higher education faculty: A loss of a sense of purpose in what I do, without a corresponding drop in stuff to do, so that the working day became just a series of checking off boxes with no subsequent sense of momentum toward a goal. You can live like that for a while and not get burned out, but it doesn't last forever.
The crucial step, it seems, to getting beyond this state is to rediscover and get clear about your fundamental values in life, which in Getting Things Done terms involves taking the Horizons of Focus idea seriously (and not skipping over that part because you want to play with apps and make to-do lists). Where we left things last time, I'd formulated these values into something I called the Four Fundamentals, informed by various notions of virtue and values from both religious and secular sources. The final piece of the puzzle was to connect those values with goals and actions. That's what today's article is about.
The real key to it all
What this connectivity should look like, is a direct line of sight from each of the following to the one just above it and the one just below it:
Your overarching values and beliefs -- what gives you purpose as a human being (Horizon 5 in GTD language)
Your vision for how you enact those values and beliefs over a 3-5 year or more time span (Horizon 4)
Your goals and objectives for attaining your vision over a 1-3 year time span (Horizon 3)
Your areas of focus that put boundaries around how you work toward your goals (Horizon 2)
Your specific projects and priorities (Horizon 1)
Your calendar and actions lists ("Ground level" or Horizon 0)
Example: Last week I wrote an outline for this blog post (a task in Horizon 0) because it's part of the specific project Publish September 13 article at Intentional Academia (Horizon 1), and that project exists because this blog is an ongoing area of focus for me (Horizon 2), and it's an area of focus because I have a goal of reaching 600 subscribers to this Substack by the end of 2024 (Horizon 3), and that's a goal because I want to make writing and productivity coaching a significant activity when I retire in a few more years (Horizon 4), which is an important vision for me because it lies at the intersection of all Four Fundamentals (Horizon 5).
A well-connected system, on the day-to-day level, is situated on Horizon 0 but it's clear skies all the way up to Horizon 5. If I ever had a doubt about why I should do something boring like write an outline for a blog post, I could just meditate on that upward chain of purpose for a minute and see where it all leads.
This was precisely what was missing from my experiences last year.
This sort of thing goes way beyond merely having a "productivity system". It's not really even about "productivity", unless by that term we mean producing a life that is embedded in a rich network of meaning. It's why I keep saying that GTD is not about playing around with apps and tools, and it's not about having a bunch of Instagram-worthy to-do lists. Tools, apps, and lists will not make this whole thing work! If anything, they will merely distract you. What it’s all really about is managing your attention and commitments so that they are consistently focusing on doing the right things.
When I was thinking a lot about all this during the summer, the real key to making it all work became clear to me: It's about having consistent reviews. No, I don't mean having course evaluations that are always in the 4-5 out of 5 range. I mean engaging regularly, without fail, in the various review stages that GTD recommends.
Weekly reviews
The only review that the GTD book discusses is the Weekly Review. I wrote about Weekly Reviews in early 2023 and included my own spin on the "canonical form" of these. What is supposed to happen at a weekly review is this:
Get clear on your physical space, your electronic spaces, and your headspace by tidying up around you and doing a brain dump and then running through the Clarify process to get all inboxes to zero.
Get current by updating next actions lists, the calendar, Waiting For lists, and your projects.
Get creative by spending time with the Someday/Maybe list and brainstorming crazy ideas to try.
That's what's supposed to happen. What was actually happening, for me, was simply setting up projects and tasks and adding deadlines to them -- or if not actual deadlines, then going through all the stuff I felt I "needed" to do and flagging the ones that "needed" to be done in the upcoming week.
I would invariably end up with 60-80 tasks flagged as "This Week". This is way, way more than I could ever possibly complete in a single week but I was inured to the idea that the "This Week" list was never going to be completely done. Inured, yes, but also demotivated and discouraged when it didn't all get done. I was doing all the "right things" like time boxing, and my system was very organized, but I was merely setting myself up for failure (especially when I couldn't get important stuff done even though I was "doing everything right").
When I look at it now, what I realize is that I was getting current without getting truly clear first. My "getting clear" was missing what I now see as the most important part of the process: Reconnecting with my fundamental values, my vision, and my long- and short term goals. In other words, I wasn't looking up from Horizon 0, just working head-down.
During the summer, I rewrote all the documents that I had which spelled out my Horizons 3, 4, and 5. Then I instituted a simple change that made a massive difference.
Previously, I'd read and reflect on those higher-horizons documents toward the end of the weekly review, just before the "Get creative" phase. I decided to move this part to the beginning. So before anything else happens in the weekly review, I am taking a moment to remind myself of who I am, who I want to be, and where I want to go in life. And the results are top of mind, guiding me as I decide what stuff is truly worth doing this week.
In retrospect this seems so obvious that I'm a little embarrassed to share it. Of course you're going to pick a bunch of things to go on your next actions list that don't belong there, and fail to put things on those lists that do belong, if you aren't clear on why you're doing them first. What I was missing, and what I think a lot of people miss, is that clarifying values and purpose is not an optional step -- it's the most important one, and needs to be done first.
It also needs to be done every week, without fail. Some people skip weekly reviews, and I have never understood this. If I miss a weekly review, usually because I am traveling and don't have the tools or the unbroken attention it needs, I feel like I haven't brushed my teeth in a week. If you are new to GTD or curious about it, just realize that doing a weekly review, consistently, without letting life get in the way, is the single most important thing about this philosophy and the only thing that makes it work. And it needs to start with making sure you're plugged in to your values and purpose.
But wait, there's more
I've also discovered that although David Allen only discusses weekly reviews in the GTD book, there is great value in having different kinds of reviews at different time scales. Specifically: Yearly, quarterly (or trimesterly), monthly, and daily. Each of these merits its own article, so for now I'll just briefly describe how I do each of these.
Daily reviews are very short, 15-20 minutes at the end of each day. I do them before I leave work for the evening. I clear out my inboxes, update my progress toward goals I set at my weekly reviews, and then list: Three "wins" from the day, three challenges I encountered, three things I learned, and one thing I am grateful for. Then I write down what I plan to do with the evening1. There's not a conscious rumination on vision and purpose, but I like to look over my daily reviews when I do my weekly review, to remind myself what happened in the week and what I learned and experienced.
Monthly reviews take about 1-2 hours and I do these on the first day of each month. These, like the weekly reviews, now begin with a review of my fundamental documents that have details on Horizons 3-5. Then I write about what I learned in the past month, what worked best and worst in terms of meeting Horizon 3 and 4 goals, important events coming up this month, what I'm looking forward to and what challenges I'll have in the new month, and some other similar writing prompts. I end with setting specific sub-goals for the month that feed into my quarterly OKRs.
Quarterly reviews are day-long retreats that I take every three months. I've written extensively about those here back when I used to do these every four months2. I haven't really changed this formula much other than the introduction of OKRs as a means of goal-setting. This was the one review I did, and still do, consistently where a reconnection with values, purpose, and high-level goals was front and center. Essentially all the changes you read about here are attempts to implement that approach at different scales, especially weekly.
Yearly reviews are new for me and I've only done one of these so far, on New Year's Eve afternoon 2023. They are a lot like the monthly reviews in structure: I reflect on the year that's coming to an end (What were my biggest wins? Biggest lessons? Biggest failures? Biggest blockers? Etc.), then look ahead to the year that's about to begin (What would I like to be my biggest win? What would I be most happy about completing? What am I looking forward to learning? Etc.). Then I set goals -- bigger and more abstract ones than my quarterly OKRs -- and identify an area of focus for the year and an area I'd like to explore in the upcoming year. And of course the whole thing begins with a review of those higher horizons.
Moving forward and how it all connects
I'm happy to say that so far, three weeks into our semester, even though there are parts of the academic faculty job that are just never going to be wonderful (grading still basically sucks, most meetings still could have been emails, etc.), so far I have had no sensations of being a hamster stuck on a wheel, going round and round but never getting anywhere. The thinking and experimenting I did over the summer really seems to have yielded a reliable framework of purpose, that allows me to say both "yes" and "no" to projects and tasks with the confidence that it's the right call whichever way it goes.
The two big takeaways from this series are:
Everyone in higher education, especially faculty but not only faculty, really needs to devote significant investment to clarifying higher horizons: What your fundamental values are, what your mission is as a human being on this planet, how you see these playing out over the next several years. This is not mere navel-gazing. It's more like gazing at the stars, when you are navigating a ship on the ocean and having a clear sense of direction is literally a life-or-death matter.
Everyone needs to give intentional time and space for regular reviews, without fail, that involve connecting the result of the first point to the tasks and projects we take on. Skipping or missing a review because you're "too busy" or "life got in the way", is not an option. If you want to be intentional in academia, as the title of this blog suggests, then these simply must happen, consistently. Period.
Now you do it
If you haven't already written up a document that describes what gives you purpose, take an evening or Sunday morning to do that.
Do the same if you haven't ever written a document for Horizon 4 (3-5+ year goals) or Horizon 3 (1-3 year goals).
Do a weekly review on Sunday or Saturday. (Some people like Fridays.)
Etc.
If you're looking for a minimal to-do list app, focus.txt is about as minimal as it gets.
This article is, on the surface, about how to have productive practice routines as a classical musician. But it's really about deliberate practice in general and is full of great nuggets of wisdom.
Pino Palladino is on my Mount Rushmore of bassists, and this NPR Tiny Desk concert he did with jazz guitarist Blake Mills is just so good.
Sometimes the answer is "nothing", or "sit around and watch YouTube" and that's OK in moderation
I switched to having these reviews once a quarter, from once a trimester, because I felt four months was just a bit too long for a cycle of OKRs and the slightly faster pacing of quarterly reviews was helpful. But in 2025 I think I'm going to switch back to trimesters because that pacing fits better with the academic calendar: Once at the end of Winter semester (April), again at the end of the summer (August), again at the end of Fall semester (December).