"How to stop burning", or the problems of the incoming flow of information of modern man

In the 20th century, the life and work of the people went according to plan. At work (simplifying - you can imagine the plant) people had a clear plan for the week, the month, the year ahead. Simplifying: you need to cut out 20 parts. No one will come and say that the parts now need to be cut 37, and in addition, write an article with reflections on why the shape of these details is exactly this - and preferably yesterday.

In everyday life, life was about the same: force majeure was a real force majeure. There are no cell phones, you can’t call a friend and ask for “an urgent visit to help solve the problem”, you live in one place almost all your life (“moving like a fire”), and to help parents even thought “to come in December for a week”.
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Under these conditions, a cultural code has been formed, where you feel satisfied if you have completed all the tasks. And it was real. Failure of all tasks - a deviation from the norm.
Now everything is different. Intellect has become a tool of labor, and in work processes it is necessary to use it in different forms. A modern manager (especially a top manager) goes through dozens of different types of tasks during the day. And most importantly, a person cannot control the number of "incoming messages". New tasks can cancel old ones, change their priority, change the very definition of old tasks. Under these conditions, it is almost impossible to formulate a plan in advance and then implement it in stages. You can’t answer the arriving task “we have an urgent request from the tax authority, we must respond today, otherwise a fine” say “I plan for the next week”.

How to live with it - so that there is time for life outside of work? And is it possible to apply some working management algorithms in everyday, everyday life? 3 months ago I radically changed the whole system of setting tasks and controlling them. I want to tell you how I came to this and what happened in the end. The play will be in 2 parts: in the first - a little about the ideology, so to speak. And the second is entirely about practice.

It seems to me that the problem for us is not that there are much more tasks. The problem is that our socio-cultural code is still set to perform "all the tasks planned for today." We worry when plans break, we survive when we do not fulfill everything that was planned. At the same time, schools and universities still function within the framework of the previous code: there is a given set of lessons, there are clearly planned home tasks, and the child has a model formed in his head that assumes that life will continue like this. If you imagine a tough version, then in life you actually start talking about geography in your English class, the second lesson instead of forty minutes takes an hour and a half, the third lesson is canceled, and in the fourth in the middle of the lesson your mother calls you and urgently asks to buy and bring home the products.
This socio-cultural code makes a person hope that you can change the incoming flow - and in this way to adjust your life, and the life described above is abnormal, because it does not have a clear plan.

This is the main problem. It is necessary to realize and accept that we cannot control the number of incoming messages, we can only manage how we treat this and how we actually process incoming messages.

You should not worry about the fact that more and more new requests for changes of plans arrive: we no longer work on machines (with rare exceptions), letters do not go for a month (yes, I am an optimist), and the landline phone has become an anachronism. Therefore, it is necessary to change the processing of messages, and accept the current life as it is, and realize that the old socio-cultural code does not work.

What can we do to make it easier? It is very difficult to “make a good website”, but with a clear technical task (or at least just a clearer description of the task), to achieve the right result (and indeed, to achieve at least some result) becomes much easier.

The best example is yours, so I will try to decompose my desires. I clearly understand that this is not the case with the processing of life and work plans: now it is “bad”, and I want it to be “good”.

What is “bad” and “good” at the “high” level of decomposition?

Bad: I feel anxious because of the uncertainty that I can do everything that I promised to do to other people or myself, I get upset because I just can’t get to things that I had planned for a long time, because they have to be postponed or due to burning tasks, or to them too difficult to approach; I can’t do everything that is interesting, since most of the time is taken away from work and life, it’s bad because I can’t spend time with family and leisure. A separate point: I am not in the mode of constant context switching, from which, in many respects, all of the above.

Good: I do not feel anxious, because I know what I will be busy with in the near future, the absence of this alarm allows me to spend my free time more qualitatively, I don’t feel a regular feeling of tiredness (the word “permanent” does not suit me, it is regular), I do not have to twitch and switch to any incoming communications.

In general, much of what I described above can be described with a simple phrase: “reducing uncertainty and uncertainty.”

Thus, the technical task becomes something in the spirit of:

• Modification of the processing of incoming tasks - so that the context is switched.
• Working with the system of setting tasks - so that at least current affairs and ideas are not forgotten and someday processed.
• Setting the predictability of tomorrow.

Before changing anything, I have to understand what I can change and what not.

The difficult and huge task is to understand and acknowledge that I cannot change the incoming flow itself, and this flow is part of my life in which I found myself in good faith; The pros of such a life outweigh the cons.

Perhaps you, at the first level of solving a problem, should think about: do you even want that place in life in which you find yourself, or do you want something else? And if it seems to you that you want something else, then perhaps it is in parallel to work this out with a psychologist / psychoanalyst / psychotherapist / guru / call them by any name - the question is so deep and serious that I will not come here.

So, I am where I am, I like, I have a company of 100 people (I always wanted to do business), I do interesting work (this interaction with people, including to achieve working goals - and I was always interested “Social engineering” and technology), business is built on “problem solving” (and I always liked to be a “fixer”), I feel good at home. I like it here, except for the “side effects” listed in the “bad” part.

Given that I like this life, I cannot change (except for the delegation of tasks, which is discussed below) the incoming stream, but I can change its processing.
How? I am a supporter of the concept that it is necessary to go from the smallest to the largest — first, to solve the most painful problems, at the same time being solved by simple changes of the problem, and to strive for greater changes.

All the changes I made can be summarized in three ways; I will list them from simple (for me) changes to complex:

1. Processing and saving tasks.

I have never been able (and still can’t normally) keep paper diaries, write down and formulate a task is a very difficult thing for me, and regularly sitting in some kind of tracker is so hard.

I accepted it, and my basic concept was that the matters that I have in my head are the most important.

Task processing took place in this mode:

• the task about which I remember - to execute, how hands will reach;
• incoming task - if done quickly, execute immediately as received, if done for a long time - promise what I will do;
• tasks that I forgot about - to do only when they were reminded of them.

With this more or less normal life lived for a certain amount of time, until the “tasks that I forgot about” turned into a problem.

This turned into a problem in two ways:

• Almost every day the forgotten tasks that the edge had to do today arrived (hardcore who finished sms from bailiffs about writing off money from the accounts for the traffic police fine before flying to the States and urgently need to figure out whether they would let me fly at all).
• A huge number of people consider it inappropriate to ask again about the request and keep it in themselves. People are offended by the fact that you have forgotten something, if this is a personal request, and if this is a working request, it eventually turns into a fire that must be done today (see point one).

I had to do something about it.

As we were unusual, I began to write down all the cases. Generally all. I was lucky to think of myself, but in general, the whole idea is very similar to the concept of GTD .

The first step was simply to unload all the cases from my head into the simplest system for me. It turned out to be Trello : the interface is very fast, the task creation procedure is minimal in time, there is a simple app on the phone (I later switched to Todoist, but this is in the second, technical part).

Thank God, for 10 years I somehow have been doing management at IT and I understand that “creating an application” is a doomed task, just like “going to a doctor”. Therefore, I began to break down tasks into decomposed tasks as actions.

I clearly understand that I am a person who is very dependent on a positive feedback, which in the form of a “see how much you did today” feedback I can give myself (if I see it). Therefore, the task “to go to the doctor” turns into tasks “to choose which doctor to go to,” “to choose the time when you can go to the doctor”, “to call and make an appointment”. At the same time, I do not want to strain myself: each of the tasks can be done on one of the days of the week and be satisfied that you have already completed a certain stage in the task.

Key point: decomposition task and record task in the form of short actions.

As long as the task is in your head, as long as you think that it needs to be done sometime, you will not be calm.

If it is not recorded at the same time, and you have forgotten it, you will suffer when you remember it and remember that you have forgotten it.

This applies to all cases, including household: go to work and on the way to remember that I forgot to throw out the garbage, not at all cool.

These experiences are simply not needed. Therefore, I began to write down everything.

The goal is to, having trained in oneself the unloading of all (absolutely all) cases to any tracker, the next step is to start thinking about the recorded cases in the head.
When you realize that everything you thought about to do is written down and sooner or later you will get to that - for me personally, anxiety goes away.

You stop twitching because in the middle of the day you remember that you wanted to change light bulbs in the corridor, talk to an employee or write a document (and immediately rush to write it).
By minimizing the number of forgotten (in this context, unwritten) tasks, I minimize the anxiety that arises when I recall these most forgotten tasks.

Not to write everything down and not to remember, but if before there were 100 such tasks, then by a certain moment there are 10 of them, and just the number of “incidents” of concern becomes less.

Key point: write everything, in general everything, even if you are sure that we will remember.
Do not remember everything: no matter how stupid it may sound, I write down everything, even “walking the dog.”

What did I decide in this way? The anxiety from the fact that I was constantly afraid to forget something (I went over plans, promise tasks, etc.) was altogether reduced, and on the whole, too much switching in my head about “thinking what I could promise” was lost.

2. Decreased reactivity.

We cannot reduce the incoming flow, but we can change the way we react to it.

I have always been a reactive person and I got a buzz from it, immediately answered the man’s request to do something on the phone, tried to immediately accomplish the task set in life or in life, was generally as fast as possible, felt the buzz from it. This is not a problem, but it turns into a problem when a similar reaction turns into an instinct. You cease to distinguish where you really need right now, and where people can wait.

The problem is that negative feelings are generated from this: firstly, if I didn’t have time to do something or forgot about what I had promised to respond, I was again very upset, but this was not critical. It became critical at that moment when the number of tasks to which one instantly instinctively wanted to respond, became more than the physical capabilities to do it.

I began to learn not to respond to things right away. At first it was just a purely technical solution: for any incoming request “please make”, “please help”, “let's meet”, “let's call each other”, I became instead of a reaction and even instead of analyzing when I did, first the challenge is to simply process this incoming request and schedule when I execute it. That is, the first thing in the tracker is not the task to accomplish what they asked for, but the task “to read tomorrow what Vanya wrote in the telegraph, and see if I can do it and when I will, if I can.” The most difficult thing here is to fight with instincts: a huge number of people by default ask for a quick reaction, and you, if you are used to living in the rhythm of such a response, feel uncomfortable, if you didn’t answer the request right away.

But a miracle happened: it turns out that 9 out of 10 people who ask to do something “yesterday” may well wait until tomorrow when you get to their business, if you just told them that you will get to it tomorrow. This, together with the recording of affairs and the fulfillment of promises to get, makes life so easy that you begin to think that you now live in a structured plan (and perhaps this is true). Of course, we need a lot of training, but, in fact, in the conditions when you adopted such a rule for yourself, this can be quickly learned. And this greatly solves the problems of context switching and non-fulfillment of the set plans. I try to put all the tasks for tomorrow, all the requests that I reacted to reactively before, and I also put it on tomorrow, and already “tomorrow” in the morning I figure out what to do with it and when. Plans for "today" are becoming less floating.

3. Setting priorities and fixing sudden cases.
As I said at the beginning, I recognized for myself that the flow of tasks of each day is more than I can accomplish. The set of reactive tasks still remains. Therefore, every morning I understand the tasks set for today: what really is time to do today, what can be transferred to tomorrow morning, to decide when they should be done, which should be delegated, and which can be thrown out at all. But this is not limited to this.

A huge frustration arises when in the evening you realize that you didn’t do a critical business today. But most often it arises because today unplanned cases have arisen, to which, despite the maximum efforts to postpone the reaction, it was necessary to react today. I began to write down all the things that I did today, immediately after I did them. And in the evening I watched the list of completed tasks. A lawyer came to talk - he wrote it down, the client called - he wrote it down. There was an accident to which it is necessary to react - I wrote it down. I called the service station and said that the car should be brought exactly today, so that it would be repaired by Sunday, ”he wrote. This makes it possible both to understand why I did not get to the tasks set for today and not worry about it (if the sudden tasks were worth it), as well as to fix it where I could handle the incoming tasks less reactively (tell the service that I’ve failed and I I will bring the car only tomorrow, and find out that, nevertheless, it will be possible to do it by Sunday, having given it even tomorrow). I try to record absolutely all completed cases, up to “signed two papers from the accounting department” and a minute conversation with a colleague.

4. Delegation.
The most difficult topic for me. And here I am even, rather, glad to accept than give advice. I'm just learning to do it right.

The problem with delegation lies in the organization of delegation processes. Where these processes are built, we easily transfer tasks. Where processes are not debugged, delegation seems to be either too long (compared to when you do the task yourself), or simply impossible (no one except me can perform this task for sure).

This lack of processes creates a block in my head: I don’t even have the idea that I can delegate a task. Just a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to switch from Trello to Todoist, I found myself transferring tasks from one system to another for three hours without even thinking that someone else could do it.

The main experiment for me now is to overcome my own bloc and ask people to do something when I am sure that they will not agree or don’t know how to do it. Spend time explaining. Accept that things will take longer. If you share your experience, I will be very happy.

Traps

All the above-mentioned changes are described by quite technical recommendations for working with software, which I will write about in the next section, and in the conclusion of this, about two traps I got into during all this life reorganization of my life.

The concept of fatigue.
Due to the fact that we are working not physically, but mentally, there is a huge and unexpected problem - to understand and catch the moment when you start to get tired. This makes it possible to take a break in time.

The conditional worker behind the machine had no such problem in principle. First, the feeling of physical tiredness is clear to us from childhood, and besides, it is rather difficult to continue to do something physically when the body is not capable of it. We cannot, having made 10 approaches in the training apparatus, do another 5 “because it is necessary”. This motivation will not work for obvious biological reasons.

With thinking, the situation is somewhat different: we do not stop thinking. I did not solve this sphere, but in general the following hypotheses:

• A person who is in constant stupor, mental fatigue is not noticed immediately. This does not happen in the form of “I can no longer think, I lie down” - at first it affects the emotional spectrum, the thinking abilities, then the perception, only here you can feel somewhere here that it has rolled.
• In order to shut down from the stream, it is not enough just to stop working. I noticed that if I, for example, stop working, I lie and stare at the phone, I read, I look and still the brain continues to work, fatigue does not let go. It really helps to lie down and force yourself not to do anything at all (including poking into the phone). The first 10 minutes is very difficult to get out of the flow of activity, the next 10 minutes a million ideas come to mind, how to do everything correctly, but then it’s already clean.

It is important and necessary to give the brain a rest, and since it is very difficult to catch this moment - you just have to do it regularly.

Time to rest / life / family.

As I already wrote, I am dependent on a positive feedback person, but I can generate it myself: this is both a bonus and a problem.

From the moment I began to track all the tasks, I praise myself for the completed. At some point I got from the state of “settled working life”, to the state of “now I am a superhero and I can do maximum things”, having reached 60 tasks a day.

I balanced work and household chores and put them in the daily list and chores, but the problem is that these are works. And you need to have time for rest and family.
The worker is expelled from the workshop at 6 o'clock, and the entrepreneur also gets a buzz when he works. It turns out about the same problem as with the inability to catch the moment of “mental fatigue”: you forget that you have to live, in the high of fulfilled tasks.
Falling out of the stream when everything turns out and you catch the buzz from it is very difficult, you also have to force yourself.

Fatigue comes not by the desire to “lie down”, but by a disorder of emotions (“everything has been annoying since the morning”), complexity of perception of information and deterioration of the ability to switch contexts.

It is critical to allocate time to rest, even if it is very fragile. It is important that this does not affect you. It’s not cool for two months to enjoy your performance, and then be in a state where everything is zadolbalo and you can not see people.

In the end, we live not only for the sake of performance, there are a lot of interesting and amazing things in the world;)

In general, such approximately considerations as, in general, it is worth (re) organizing work and non-working processes. In the second part I will talk about the tools that I used for this and what results were achieved.

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PS This topic turned out to be so important to me that I even started a separate telegram channel, where I share my thoughts on this subject, join - t.me/eapotapov_channel