Good Life Project - How Prioritize Your Projects: A different Approach

Episode Date: February 3, 2016

Last week, Jonathan shared a GLP Riff about how he prioritizes major projects.He talked about his move away from "batching" tasks and parallel creation to taking a longer view and adopting a Serial Creation approach to getting big projects done better, faster and more humanely.Apparently, that spurred a lot of conversation. And, it led to a lot of questions, one of which was...With between 3 and 10 substantial projects that are calling us at any given time, how do we choose what to work on, and in what order?That made us think. How DO we choose? Turns out, there is a bit of a step-by-step process involved. Whether it's right for you, only you'll know. But, in this week's GLP Riff, Jonathan responds to the question of one awesome listener with some specifics about how he prioritizes what to work on and when.In his answer, he also references the work of productivity savant, Charlie Gilkey, along with the 4 Tendencies developed by The Happiness Project and Better Than Before author, Gretchen Rubin. You should check them both out, tons to be learned from these wizards of optimal living. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it.

Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at one you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. So for this week's Good Life Project riff, I am actually going to respond to a question that came from one of our listeners named Joanna. So Joanna was asking me about a recent riff called Serial Creation. And here's what she wrote in to me. She said, I'm incredibly inspired by your latest Serial Creation podcast and have a clarifying question. How did you decide which project to focus on first? What was it about the book that got you to say yes to it being your first three-week fierce

immersion? Was it based solely on your deadline or were there other contributing factors? It sounds to me like all of your projects have competing deadlines. If that's true, how do you decide what's most important to you when it all feels important? And have you been prioritizing your other projects as you've been going along? Or did you schedule all of the projects within the three months ahead of time? Really great questions. And they're questions that I'm actually in the middle of really thinking through myself because I am pretty fiercely trying to figure out the answers. And I'm doing in the middle of really thinking through myself because I am pretty fiercely

trying to figure out the answers and I'm doing a lot of experiments. I'm doing a lot of testing. So I recently shared that podcast about my switch or my transition, which is going to take a couple of months to serial creation rather than parallel creation. So if you haven't listened to that, definitely just take a few minutes and jump over and listen to that because it'll really inform what we're talking about here. But the thumbnail is that instead of batching my days between different things, I'm transitioning to taking a much longer lens, three months, sometimes even six months, asking what are all the most important projects that I need to get to a particular moment or particular outcome or deliverable in that window, and then working on each one as full-time as possible rather than switching between them. So the question is, how do I prioritize? So first and foremost, number one, get clear on what really matters to you. So what am I talking about here? Think about the outcomes that you want to create in your life, in your work. Think about the people that you love to create with or create for, create around. Think about the values. What do you actually hold

important in your life? Think about your strengths. Think about the activities that you love to do and ask yourself with all of these different things, will this particular project, look at each potential project and ask, will this project allow me to work in fierce alignment with those different elements? And the idea is we want to start to get a lot of clarity around what really matters. Because if you have 10 different projects, I can pretty much guarantee that of those 10 projects, probably two or three are seriously important. Two or three are fiercely aligned with what truly matters. The others will be moderately aligned, and there's a good chance that half of them will actually be fairly unaligned or misaligned with those things. In which case, you can really kind of eliminate probably half of what's on your list

right away and send that over to the someday bin, which may or may not ever happen. And hopefully, eventually, just the hey, let somebody else do this bin. So that's sort of the first cut for me. The first cut is not really how do I prioritize the projects? The first cut is, how do I actually do a deeper dive into myself and figure out what matters? Get really clear on those things. Outcome people, value, strengths, activities. There are probably more that go into my mix. Those are the ones that are kind of popping into my head right now. And then go project by project and say, does this stuff really move the needle with all of those different things? And if it doesn't, it's not something you should be working on right now. From there, there's something that I would do, which a good

friend of mine, Charlie Gilkey, who runs a company called Productive Flourishing and podcast and consultant does all this other stuff. But he's amazing at figuring out how to get the most out of people. And he's also amazing at helping people figure out where to focus their energy to actually get the right stuff done. And Charlie has, I'm playing on the exact words, but he calls them either creative or productive blocks. So he suggests that you basically look at your time, you know, to start with a week and chunk it into blocks and know that, you know, you have a certain amount of blocks in your waking hours and you have a certain amount of blocks that are going to be available for life and for relationships and for sleep. Then you have a certain amount of blocks that are going to be there for you to do your work, to work on your projects. So first do that, because you got to get realistic about how much time you really have. Many of us actually massively overestimate the amount of time that we truly have,

and at the same time massively underestimate how long it's going to take us to do anything. So step one is really get a lot more clarity around how many of those blocks you actually have available to do the work. Then from there, you would go on and look at the different projects. You know, once you get rid of the projects that really aren't all that well aligned with your outcomes, values, people, strengths, activities, focus on the two or three, one, two, three, four, that really matter, the needle movers in your good life. And then ask, well, how many blocks would each of these projects take, you know, over a window of time to get to a certain point to get to x point, how many blocks would it take me? Now, granted, remember what I just said, we tend to massively overestimate the amount of time we

have to do things, and massively underestimate the amount of time we have to do things and massively underestimate the amount of time it will take to get something done. So whatever you estimate, it'll take you to get a particular project to a place where you can basically set it free or, you know, it's done or give it to a team and the rest of the people who then can take what you have and run with it. In my mind, it's usually a safe bet to double or triple that because that is the reality on the ground. So at least double it and then look at your schedule and say, okay, you know, do I have time for this and do that for like the smaller number of projects that you now know really matter, you know, and then you want to, you want to really figure out

like in that process, what are, are there any hard or semi-hard deadlines or deliverables that I need to meet? So if one of these projects, if one of them is, let's say you're working on an illustrated book and you're the illustrator, and you love illustration, you love this book, you love working with the author and the writer and the publisher, but they're waiting for you. And you know that there's a pub date of X date and you have to reverse engineer out. There's going to be writing, editing, copy editing, and all this other stuff. So if there are a series of dependent deliverables and dependent deadlines that all lean on you hitting a certain date, then that becomes really important. You got to figure out, okay, what are those things? What are the dependencies that rely on me making something happen?

And that will always factor into where I'm going to spend more of my creative blocks also and what I'm going to put first, second, third, fourth, fifth. If there aren't, then I really, I focus on, you know, I kind of like, well, if over a three-month window of time, I'm really confident that I can get all of these to the place that I want to get them, then I kind of close my eyes. And I get out of hard data mode and I go into intuitive data mode and I just do a gut check and say, what do I feel like? What am I massively excited to work on right now? What am I jazzed to work on? What can I conceivably see myself just pouring the vast majority of my energy into for the next few days, weeks, or even months?

And I'll very often really kind of lean on a softer metric, more intuitive data to make some of those decisions. Now, this is a lot about how to prioritize those projects. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some of my own things that I do, but that's kind of the general approach that I tend to take to doing those projects. There's one other thing I want to bring up too, and that's around accountability. And it's really fascinating. So a friend of mine, Gretchen Rubin, who you may know, wrote the Happiness Project, Happier at Home, a whole bunch of really fascinating books. And her last book was a book called Better Than Before. And in that book, she identified what she calls the four tendencies. Now, what are these things?

These are basically our tendencies about how we behave, how we create habits, how we create rituals, and how we get stuff done. I'm sure she would tell you that there's much, much more to that. And, you know, she created these 10. Well, 10. Well, she didn't, she identified them and figured out how to actually test for them. The four tendencies, by the way, are rebel, upholder, obliger, and questioner. If you're interested which one you are, Gretchen actually has an online assessment that you can take to figure it out. It's over on her website. So go check that out. We'll throw a link in the show notes just to make sure that you can link there quickly and easily. Now I took that assessment and I was really surprised because I've always considered myself a little bit of a rebel, a little bit of a questioner. I don't like being

told what to do and I don't like following other people's rules. But I came out as an obliger. And when I really think about it, it actually made sense because one of the defining characteristics of an obliger is that I am great keeping my commitments and promises to other people, but I am not as good at keeping my commitments and promises to myself. So one of the things that I've learned is that if I have something that I really want to get done, even if it doesn't necessarily require commitments and promises externally, I will sometimes find a way to make those to other people. I will promise that certain thing will be done by a certain date, and I will give a reason. I'll put stakes on that so that there's a reason that we're both counting on it being done by that date, because my tendency is that if I do that, I'm more likely to then hit

that than I am if I don't. So, Joanna, going back to your original question, you know, why did I start this experiment when it was time for me to finish the manuscript for my last book? Well, and why did I choose that when simultaneously I had a massive web design project, I had product development projects, I had all sorts of other stuff to do. Well, if I'm really honest, the reason I chose that was because I had an external deadline. I committed to my editor, my publisher, my agent to make this happen. And I also knew that this had been a massive long-term looming project. And until it was out of my head, I wasn't going to be able to give all this other stuff the attention that it needed. And I also knew, referring back to the early part of the conversation, there were a series of dependencies that relied on my hitting a certain deadline. It goes from me to my editor and then back to me and then back to the editor and then to copy editing and then through a series of things that all get triggered by my ability to hit an external deadline. So when I take that and the fact that this is my tendency, according to Gretchen's four tendencies, it made a lot of sense for me to actually choose that and elevate that

as the one I want to work on, even though, honestly, starting into it was really hard, and it wasn't the thing that was intuitively calling me to be worked on. My externalization of accountability overcame that, especially because it lined up with my tendency. So play with that. Play with these ideas. Think about your values, what really matters. Think about your productive blocks. Think about your deliverables and any dependencies. Close your eyes and think about intuitively what's just really strongly calling you to be worked on. And then go jump over

to Gretchen's website and figure out which of the four tendencies you are because that also may be really helpful in helping you create mechanisms that allow you to do your best work on a more timely basis. I hope that's been helpful. I'll see you next time. Hey, thanks so much for listening to today's episode.

If you found something valuable, entertaining, engaging, or just plain fun, I'd be so appreciative if you take a couple extra seconds and share it. Maybe you want to email it to a friend. Maybe you want to share it around social media. Or even be awesome if you'd head over to iTunes and just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered.

Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.