“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them”, at least according to David Allen. This is all well and good, but why do my systems always end up with me still holding everything in my head?

It’s trust. It’s always trust. I lose trust in my systems. And then I burn them down and start again. It’s a pattern. Part of it, of course, is painting the hammer (“ooh, shiny new app!”), but I’ve started to notice a pattern behind the pattern.

See, every time I start a new system, there’s a honeymoon period. It does work. I do trust it.

Then suddenly, after weeks or months, I notice that it’s stopped working. The ideas have started to build up, unloved. The inbox is overflowing, the momentum is gone.

I wake at 3 in the morning, trying to remember if I added that critical task to the project. I grab my phone, it’s not in the inbox, it’s not in the project. Where is it? I add it to the inbox and go back to sleep, but it’s fitful. Will I really ever see it again?

See, the system has gone from a place of action to a dumping ground. Despite my best efforts to keep things “organised”, all I’m doing is shuffling tasks from place to place. The projects end up with a mix of things to do, ideas for things to do, notes that I think are important, and very little room for actual clarity on what the next thing to work on is.

I’ve gone from farming to gardening. It’s exhausting, leaving me very little time to harvest any crops. And I’ve returned to holding the important stuff in my brain again.

But when did it happen? This time, I found the trap.

The systems always start out the same: a simple list. A brain dump of everything in my mind. The pattern is familiar to anyone who’s spent a minute looking at productivity. Get it all out, then organise it into actions. Notice where an “action” is really a project, and break it down into actual actions.

So I did this, but decided not to do the breakdown. Not yet. What would happen if I just left the “get a new job” project as a task on the list, alongside “take out the bin” and “email changes to the bathroom refit quote”?

It was so crazy it might just work. It also aligned with the underlying idea of this system from Mark Forster, which he calls “resistance zero”. You just have one list, and work on whatever you feel zero resistance for. The hook is that you have to read the whole list, every time you’re choosing what to work on next.

I combined this with Kourosh Dini’s idea of a “visit”. Rather than thinking of “get a new job” as a binary “Only check it off when it’s complete”, I tried thinking of it as an invitation to do “something” on the project. To sit with it.

So, I started. Sat with “get a new job” and figured out there were four or five things I could do right now to move it forward. I added those things to the list, picked a couple, and worked on them.

All good.

The day wore on, and I made progress on the list. I was using Things at the time, just using the “anytime” view to see everything in one list. Ideas kept coming up for actions I could take to get a job, and I added them to the bottom of the list. Resistance remained high to them, so they stayed on the list.

Day turned to night, night turned to day, and in the light of the morning, I saw that I truly, really had a project on my hands. Half of the tasks were to do with the Get a Job project. I was glossing over them as a unit, and what I really wanted to do was see them all together. I wanted to work on “get a job”, to visit with it, to shut everything else out and work on that, to make progress on it. I wanted it to be organised, so that I could get a clear view of it.

So I made a project.

I moved all the related tasks into the project.

And though I didn’t quite realise it yet, the trap was sprung.

Projects feel inevitable. A project is just a list of related actions that build to an outcome. “Get a job” is not an action. I can’t “just” do that. I need to update my CV, find job adverts, write cover letters, write emails, consider what I even want to do, budget out how much money I need and so on.

So we create projects, whether it’s a page in the notebook, a heading in the text file, or an actual “Project” in the to-do app. This becomes a container for all the things, all the actions I listed above, and so on. The organisation feels like it’s progress, like “Okay, so now I can see everything I need to do”.

But all that’s actually happened is that we’ve created needless complexity. We’ve hidden all those actions behind the goal. We now have to work on two things: getting a job, and those actions. It can be easy to fall into the trap of just completing the actions, rather than heading for the outcome.

Worse than that, though, was what I had actually done. I had created an albatross. A shrine to the idea of the outcome.

See, by giving the outcome its own space, it had become separated from the bit of me that did the work. I now had two jobs: doing the work, and planning the work. This is fine when you have a team, but I’m just me.

Except I’m not just me. I am managing a team. I’m managing my workload right now, I’m delegating things to future me, and I’m picking up stuff that past me couldn’t get to.

But past me doesn’t know jack shit about my current context. They guess, but they don’t know. Those actions they left me: are they still relevant? Do I need to preserve them somewhere?

And what about future me? Sure, that idea past me had to reach out to my old boss and see if they have anything interesting I could help with, I don’t think that’s relevant just now, but what if future me loves the idea?

Better keep it around.

Because the project is a safe haven for cruft. It’s separate from the “main list” of stuff to do, so all manner of crap can accumulate in the projects. It hangs around “just in case”, because I’m sure past me had some good intentions.

But by over-indexing on past me, I’m dooming future me to drown in shit.

And guess what. Future me, at some point, is going to say “yeah, fuck that” and stop even looking at the project. They’re going to go back to holding it all in their head.

Trap sprung, future me fucked.

So what now? Am I consigned to concluding that we can’t complete complex things? Obviously not. Well, hopefully that’s obvious.

The problem isn’t the complexity. It’s not even the projects. It’s the accumulation. Projects just make it easier to hide the accumulation.

Ultimately, it comes down to curation. It comes down to editing. Past me just comes up with ideas, suggestions. That’s all the list is: Suggestions from past me.

Dini talks about “honouring” the past self by at least showing up to those suggestions. Deciding not to do them is absolutely a valid course of action.

But I wasn’t even showing up. I was kicking the can down the road, and I was giving myself permission to do this because they were all tied to “get a job”. So everything remained on the table till that project was completed.

My solution? Stop organising.

When I keep everything on the one list, there’s not only nowhere to hide, but I start to feel it when the list gets too long. There’s always going to be more I could add to the list, and I will likely add it, but by adding it to the one list, it makes it more obvious what stuff I can cut. What stuff I can show up to and say “thanks past me. I’m not going to do this now, but if it comes up again future me can add it back”.

So the project process now is quite simple:

1. Decide to work on “get a job”;
2. Add some actions to the one list;
3. Work on some of those actions till I decide to stop working on “get a job”;
4. SCORE OFF “GET A JOB”, and then add it to the end of the list again for future me to work on when they want to;
5. SCORE OFF ANY REMAINING ACTIONS FROM 3. If future me needs them, they’ll come back.

Because it turns out the trust isn’t only in the system holding the ideas. It’s in trusting the system to hold the ideas only as long as they’re useful, in trusting present me to weed out which ideas are not worth holding on to, and in trusting my brain to have more ideas in future.

After all, having ideas is what it’s for.

That horrifying moment when you’re working from the coffee shop (or, let’s be honest, the pub), and you nip to the bar to get a top up, and you leave your stuff on the table because, you know, you trust that people are generally good and honest, but more to the point you can still see the table and besides you’re also between the table and the door, so that if anyone grabs the laptop you’ve got a comfortable amount of time before they run past to position yourself to tackle them to the ground before the even get near the outside.

And you take your drink gratefully from the bartender. Or barista, perhaps. And you amble back to the table, basking in the glow of the general honesty of humanity, and feeling warm and fuzzy in the way toddlers do when they’re cuddling their toy dinosaurs. And you sit to write, but then you realise you need the loo.

And now you’re sitting in the stall, trying to go as fast as you can because you’re convinced that the old boy at the back has been eyeing your kit for hours, and now is his time to strike. He’s downed his pint, wiped the froth from his grizzled chops, and has snatched the laptop, the expensive laptop that you bought with the advance on the work that’s currently sitting on it, and he’s working his way to the door, furiously shuffling, the laptop in one hand, walking cane in the other. And so you pinch it off and wash hands and burst forth from the gents.

And the old boy is, indeed, gone. And the table is empty.

It’s fucking empty.

You’re unsure whether to laugh or cry, slightly stunned by the accuracy of your deepest paranoia, are you perhaps psychic? The table is clear. Everything has gone. Jacket, laptop, backpack, even the drink you just got. They’ve even changed the flowers.

And then you notice you were looking at the wrong table, and your stuff is still there, and the old boy is standing next to you, looking like he’s about to pee himself.

You jump, startled.

“Excuse me”, he says, motioning to the loo. “But are you finished? I’ve been waiting…”.

Sometimes mornings need to unfold on their terms. You go to bed the night before with Plans, to wake up, feed the dog, read, meditate, shower, work out, then go for a walk before starting the day.

But the morning has its own Plans, mainly involving sleeping and being grumpy about the amount of light that is infiltrating your cave of a bedroom. Sometimes the morning needs fought, beaten to submission.

But sometimes the morning brings a big stick and you take one look at it and say to hell with that fight, I didn’t even want to meditate anyway.

And then it’s nine o’clock and there’s not even any coffee yet but the bed is warm and it’s a Sunday anyway and frankly you must have needed it.

And the trick then, what you absolutely must not do, is relitigate the fight you avoided earlier. No, it would not have been better if you’d taken on the morning, armed as it was to the teeth. You made the right call.

So enjoy the warmth of the bed and the chirp of the birds outside. Let the morning have its victory.

You both deserve it this once.

Something that comes up a lot in my recent reading of job ads is this desire for candidates who “focus on outcomes, rather than processes”. I get it. I have seen plenty of projects bogged down or worse by onerous process. The need for fifteen people to sign off on a typo being fixed, or a ten page memo required in order to secure those additional three days of work.

But it got me thinking about what really makes them “bad”? And why do I believe that many processes are “good”, with some being “essential”?

A question of intention

Let’s start with something simple: how do you make a good coffee?

Perhaps you have opinions about this already. You tell me about your preferred grind settings for the beans, about the perfect temperature to give the right extraction and so on. You’ve spent a lot of time learning this, and you know your coffee is pretty good.

Then I add some context. I have a couple of minutes before I need to leave for a flight.

See, on its own, your process isn’t good or bad. It’s only when we clarify the intention that we can start to evaluate the process. It’s not a bad process, it’s just the wrong one.

At this point, the goal has gone from “make me a great coffee” to “I need a coffee in about two minutes”. That changes everything.

Notice as well that this presents a new challenge. Do you even know how to make a good coffee in about two minutes?

Process is learning manifest

Let’s say you have an Aeropress lying around, and a takeaway cup. You grab those, make a damn tasty coffee, and I’m on my way.

The assumption here is that you not only have access to the tools to achieve the new goal, but that you know how to use them.

Specifically, that you have a process for using them.

This is the real power of a process. It’s a way of transforming learning from an abstract concept into a tool that can be used. And not only used, it can be shared. I could watch your process and replicate it myself. Or perhaps you could text it to me as I sit on the tram sipping my (delicious) coffee.

So processes are really context dependent tools.

Process all the way down

How did you learn this process in the first place? Maybe someone gave you the tool, just like you’re texting it to me as I arrive at the airport. Or maybe you built it yourself, through practice, trial and error, and reflection.

That sounds like a process to me. A process to build processes.

A process to learn.

This learning process enables all other processes. It’s the one process we can’t avoid, but also the one we’re often least aware of. In fact, we often don’t see it as a process at all.

But a process it is, and as such it too can be evaluated against its intended outcomes. How much does our learning process change our future behaviour? How much does it produce new processes that are useful to us in achieving our outcomes and goals?

Does this insight get us any closer to resolving this tension between outcomes and processes? It’s clear that any process is only as good or as bad as its support of intended outcomes, but learning itself is a process which is also open to change and modification as we evaluate its effectiveness.

How does this lens help us refocus those job descriptions?

Starting up

I most often see process skepticism in job postings from startups, or startup-like organisations. Why is that?

By definition, these organisations are seeking to do something new. This means they’re working in uncharted territory, land for which there are no maps, no established ways of doing things. There are no processes, because if there were, would they truly be doing something new? This fear is the first source of process skepticism.

However, this life in uncharted territory means that every day is a school day. Every team member is learning fast, every hour, and so their learning process needs to be razor sharp. They’re building new tools to solve every problem they come across.

The challenge, though, is channeling that learning. If everyone is facing problems, hacking their way through metaphorical undergrowth, learning what works and what doesn’t, that can be hugely inefficient. Each team member must learn the same lessons independently, and some will learn different lessons from the same problems. Some will disappear off into the weeds, following a learning trail that doesn’t support the team’s outcomes.

The result? Chaos. Everyone pulling as fast as they can in the direction they believe is the right one.

The solution? The team needs to define and share its learning process, and check that it actually supports its goals. This could be a daily check in or a weekly gathering. The details don’t matter so long as it is a deliberate practice for surfacing and distributing useful learning.

Many teams at startups follow some form of this. However, it’s often not used as a learning exercise, and so doesn’t change behaviour that much. Even where it does, though, it can still lead the team into trouble, the other source of process skepticism: the dreaded process swamp.

The problem here is that process development is seen as a one way thing. That process that saved their butts in week two is still being followed in week four, despite it now holding them back.

To wade out of the swamp, the learning tool needs to not only be sharp, it needs to be continually applied to all processes. Learning needs to focus not only on what tools need to be adopted, but which are no longer useful given all that has been learned since.

While startup teams often embrace this idea of focusing on outcomes rather than processes, in reality they are among those most in need of both a process for learning, and a process for ensuring their processes still support their outcomes.

Without those, they risk everyone hacking their own paths to chaos, or blindly marching a path that stopped being useful weeks ago. Either way, they just end up lost in the woods.

How do you learn?

So let’s go back to those job postings. What should we make of those who deploy this rhetoric against processes?

My belief is that a general fear of process betrays an incomplete process for learning. If that existed, it would ensure that any process that was no longer useful would be modified or killed in short order.

Again, a process is simply learning that has been turned into a tool, and that as with any tool, it’s when and how it is used that determines its effectiveness at achieving your outcomes. To revisit the “fifteen person sign off” example, the typo it was deployed to approve was in a Key Information Document for a regulated pension investment product.

Does that still seem like a bad process to you? Or one that has an important role to play in keeping the copywriter out of prison?

So yes, a focus on outcomes is essential, but the key question to ask when presented with this dichotomy of outcomes or processes is “what is your process for learning?”

Because without a solid process for learning, the most ambitious outcomes will remain out of reach of even the most capable of teams.

When did you last feel like you had “enough time”?

There’s something depressing about the question, some implication that this is a rare occurrence. You may have to reach back to that one project, years ago, where you managed to disappear into the work, lost in a state of flow. Or maybe you have to reach further back to childhood, when days stretched forever.

Even then, though, the experience was cut short. The flow was broken, the childhood day interrupted by being called in for dinner.

When we look a little deeper, we see there’s also something not quite right about the question. A lack of enough time feels like a common human experience, but… “enough time” to do what, exactly?

Complete your to-do list? Read all the books? Be with your family, with people you love and who love you in return? To finally write that book, to organise those projects, to send the emails, to go out for that run, to record that podcast?

The reality is that while it’s a common idea, “enough time” is an impossible concept. Still, we feel that sting of time poverty, of not even having enough time to do the basics, never mind the nice-to-haves.

Maybe we mean we don’t have enough time for ourselves, enough time to be ourselves. I think this points at an underlying truth, but we can still look a little deeper.

A recent interview I watched (with Joe Hudson) suggested a root cause: it’s not time we lack, but something else. We take the kids to school, but spend half the time worrying about finishing off that presentation. We then work on the presentation, spending half the time worrying about presenting it. We then present it, worrying about the other project we have neglected while working on the presentation, and then worry about going shopping for dinner while catching up on that project.

And of course we wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about how little time we are going to have for all the things we need to do the following day. Or, perhaps, we feel regret about how little time we spent on the important things the day before, how distracted we were during the school run, how little we could focus on the presentation and project work.

If only we had more time, maybe things would be different.

The actual problem, of course, is staring us in the face. We are spending half of the limited time we have for a thing worrying about a completely different thing.

You may only have half an hour on the school run, but if you’re spending half of that watching the road, and the other half worrying about the presentation you’re going to work on next, there’s very little time to hear the kids telling you what they’re excited about today.

And it’s not like those fifteen minutes you’ve “spent” on the presentation during the school run have got you a head start. You’ve spent the time worrying, and you probably have to spend another five minutes calming down again before you start. And even worse, you spend half of that hour you’ve allocated worrying about actually delivering the presentation.

So it goes, the whole day. You allocate an hour, but spend less than half of it on the thing you’ve allocated it to. Over and over.

It’s exhausting, demoralising, chronic. But it’s not a lack of time.

It’s a lack of presence.

To be completely present on a task means to focus all of our attention on it. It means we can use all the time we have set aside on the actual task. But typically we don’t. We spend half of our time lost in the future, and the other half is part spent in the past, addressing the anxiety we built up anticipating this moment.

Presence is the antidote to a perceived lack of time. It’s like the old joke about meditation, where you should meditate for at least an hour a day, unless you don’t have time, in which case you should meditate for two hours.

Here’s the thing: when you’re suffering from a lack of time due to a lack of presence, being more present can create more time. This is what flow does, it creates time. The hour you set aside to finish that presentation suddenly feels like two hours, because what you’re used to “an hour” feeling like is actually just half an hour. This bears repeating:

Presence can create time.

If you need convincing, notice how easy it is to find hours to spend on Instagram or TikTok. Those platforms hack your attention to force complete presence (much like slot machines, variable reward is like superglue for your presence). This is actually why, when we feel like we have no time, when we are overwhelmed, we find these platforms so helpful. For all the harm they cause, they do provide us with a limitless source of presence.

Now that’s all well and good, but how do we harness this ability to be present for ourselves, for the experiences we want, rather than down on TikTok’s attention farm?

The first answer is the one you don’t want to hear: spend a few years meditating. Meditation is, in many ways, a gym for your presence muscle. There are many benefits to meditation, many techniques, but they all require and hence strengthen a form of presence.

But let’s say you can’t go back in time and tell yourself to start meditating. What else can you do?

I have been experimenting with a rather drastic approach to encourage myself to be present, but before I get to that, let’s start with a game:

What time is it right now? Go ahead and find out, I’ll wait.

Got it? Okay, my assertion is that this was not a difficult thing for you to find out. I’m going to guess that, for almost all of you, the answer was already staring you in the face, on the same surface you’re reading these words from. A smaller number might have had to glance to a wrist or a wall, or call out into the air “smart speaker, what time is it?”. Maybe a few of you called through to a friend or colleague to ask.

I will guarantee that nobody was unable to answer the question.

Think about that. You know, to within a staggering level of accuracy, exactly how far round in its daily rotation the earth currently is. You know when the sun will set. You know how long it is till dinner time, how long till you need to go to bed. You know how many minutes you have till Strictly comes on, or how many days are left till the weekend. Depending on how you’re reading this, you may have information that not even I have access to right now: how long you have left before you reach the end of this article.

You know what time it is. And I’m going to suggest that this is the worst possible thing you could know in terms of your ability to be present.

You know how long you have to wait before you can start on that presentation, then how long you have to wait before you can deliver it, which also tells you how long you have to wait before you can get back to that project. You know how long you have to wait before you can get out to the bus, to the shops, then to dinner, and then to bed.

Each of these pieces of information, available for you to update with millisecond accuracy at any time, utterly destroys your ability to be present. Glance at your watch, right now, and tell me there’s not a pang of concern about how long this article is taking to read. You have other stuff you need to be doing, dammit. Important stuff!

That feeling: the feeling that there is important stuff which you can’t get to yet, is the source of your sense of time scarcity. It’s the result of constantly living in the future, facilitated by your constant access to how long it is till that future arrives.

Knowing how long you have left to be present immediately checks you out of the present.

So the solution? The experiment I’m conducting?

Replace the clocks with alarms.

Because let’s be real: you still have to have things done by a certain time. You can’t just lose yourself on the school run, being so present with the kids that you go and get ice cream before eventually turning up half way through period three. I mean that sounds quite awesome to me actually, but you get my point.

So you still need to know the time, but you don’t need to know it all the time.

For example. If you know you need to leave for school at 7:50am, you’ll probably start checking the time at 7:40am so you can ensure everyone gets shoes on, gets in the car, and is ready to leave on time.

How would that look if, instead, you set two alarms: one for 7:40, the other for 7:50? “Is it time to leave yet?” becomes a question you don’t even need to ask. You can be completely present on whatever until that first alarm goes off.

What about the work on the presentation? Well, the alarm goes off when you need to start, and then another goes off maybe ten minutes before the presentation. Between those alarms? No checking the clock, just complete focus on the task till the alarm goes off. If you feel like you might want a “ten minute warning” so you know when you need to wrap things up? That’s another alarm.

The key here is to start noticing how often you check the time, and how many of these checks actually give you useful information (“You have ten minutes left, start wrapping up”), and how many give you harmful information (“OMG, remember all those other things you still need to get to after you finish this?”), and set alarms for the former so you can stop having an excuse to trigger the latter.

It also only works if you do your best to remove all ambient sources of time. Get rid of the clocks where you work, hide the menu bar on your computer, and (my favourite), if you have an Apple Watch, switch to a watch face that uses numerals that you can’t read (I’m partial to Urdu, myself).

Having been giving this a go for the last week or so, I can report that it’s surprisingly effective (this article is proof). My recommendation is to set more alarms than you think might be needed, and to set them ad-hoc (so before you start the task, consider how long you’ll need to wrap up before the next thing, how much of a break you need between this and that, whether you want any check-ins during the time and so on). The goal is to think of everything you can which would cause you to check your watch, and set an alarm for it instead.

And no, this isn’t just pomodoro: the other key is that these are alarms, not timers. You shouldn’t be able to glance at a timer and see that you have five minutes left. You just wait for the alarm.

Give it a go, let me know what you find out, and remember: if you’re feeling short of time, know that we’re all short of time. The important thing is that we get to choose what to do with the time we have. Spending half of that time chronically worrying about the future seems like a poor choice.

And who has enough time for poor choices?