10. Dim and dimmer

Throughout these emails, I’ve been touting the intentional design of work. My belief being that by improving the environment within which people operate, we’ll not only contribute to a more consistent approach to performance improvement, but we’ll pave the way for effective AI integration. Thus becoming indispensable in the process.

But I’d like to start getting closer to what I mean when I say ‘designing work’.

So, where to start?

Well, maybe at the beginning… 

I’ve always struggled with waste. Listening to the teacher drone on about algae when I could be playing football. Watching documentaries about World War II and trying to comprehend the scale of human loss. Throwing away a coffee cup that’s only been used once. 

I’m not sure why this bothers me so much, but I think it comes down to unrealised potential - what could humanity achieve if we didn’t waste so much of our time and resource?

And that’s probably what turned me into a productivity nerd. 

Yep, I’m the guy with remote controlled switches on all the lamps in the house, so he can activate mood lighting at the flick of a button (I also have a setting for Aston Villa matches and the kids' bedtimes). 

At work, this translated into a fascination with how I work. Looking for opportunities to improve my process, so I had more time to create. And I guess, more time to fulfil my potential. 

In my twenties, I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s an excellent productivity book, written before the days of digital tools, which introduced me to the concept of systems thinking. 

I still use many of the ideas today, including: 

• Capture. When you create/receive an input (idea, to-do, email, meeting notes, letter) capture it into a single inbox, ready to process later.

• Process. Do one of four things with each item when you process your inbox - delegate it, do it (if it takes less than two minutes), delay it (put it into your calendar or to-do list to action later), or delete it.

• Inbox Zero. Never keep emails in your inbox. Process them as per the above rules and then archive the email. 

I tried to integrate GTD techniques into several digital productivity tools, only to find them too restrictive. 

One of the first I made progress with was Evernote. Upon first inspection, it seemed flexible enough to allow me to customise its setup, to incorporate some of the systems thinking principles I was looking for.

I created a task notebook, added all my tasks, and implemented a complex tagging structure - the intent being to surface what I needed at the exact moment I needed it. 

For example, assuming I’d been diligent with the capture and process steps mentioned above, I could select a saved search and see any tasks tagged with either ‘high priority’ and ‘office’, thus providing clarity on what to do when I arrived at work. 

What I was trying to build was a ‘satnav for work’. I yearned for a dashboard that constantly guided me on what to do next. 

And whilst it kinda worked, there were a couple of problems I couldn’t reconcile.

First, the only way to add dates to tasks was with reminders. This wasn’t ideal, because a reminder is like an alarm clock. It interrupts you at a specific moment. But I didn’t want an alarm clock. I wanted a daily agenda - a list of everything I’d decided to do today, sorted by priority, where completed tasks disappeared once I’d checked them off, and anything unchecked stayed visible until they’d been done.

Also, when priorities changed, I had to manually update the reminder date for each task individually. This quickly became unmanageable. 

The second problem related to viewing tasks. The only way to do this was with tags. And whilst this provided some level of control, Evernote had a single, flat tagging structure. This meant there were tags for:

• Status-Active, Status-Waiting, Status-Someday

• Priority-High, Priority-Medium, Priority-Low)

• Location-Office, Location-Home, Location-Errands

• Project X, Project Y, project Z

• Person-Ant, Person-Wife, Person-Manager, Person-Debbie in accounts

But these seventeen tags were mixed up together!  My clever naming convention didn’t allow me to sort or filter by priority or project, for example, because Evernote treated all tags in the same way. 

Very quickly, it turned into a hot mess. 

To be fair to Evernote, it was never designed as a task manager, nor was it designed to deal with the level of complexity I needed. 

But because of the lack of a suitable alternative - and boy did I search - I had to settle for this Frankensteined excuse for a task dashboard. 

And so, away I toiled, spending more time maintaining the system than doing the work. 

Which basically defeated the purpose…

I should mention, throughout all this, I hadn’t made any connection between these productivity experiments and my role as an instructional designer. After all, at that point in my career, I thought my job was to create jazzy looking training - I hadn’t grasped I was responsible for employee performance.

But looking back, it’s clear this was my first foray into designing work - I was trying to design an environment that would improve my own performance.

And I was failing!

But then, I stumbled across something that shook my world…

Yours,
- Ant