Studio Non Troppo

The project facing you is huge. Complicated. Overwhelmingly immense. How do you respond? Terror? Anger? Procrastination? A Zen laugh?

Photo: Yogi

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re looking at the mountain in front of you. But exactly how you look at the tangle of tasks can make the difference between responding (i.e. acting) and merely reacting.

How do you think about tasks and time?

Consider the difference between:

1. There are many things that I need to have done
2. There are many things that I need to do right now

#1 leaves you with no chance of feeling good about yourself. You’re already behind! Depending on your personality, this may or may not demoralize and paralyze you.

#2 leaves you open to a persistent case of information overload. With so many things to do right now, you’ve unwittingly given yourself yet another thing to do: figure out which of these zillion things you should really do right now! I know I don’t function well under this kind of pressure. You might be able to, but I’d still like to recommend another approach.

Spend a little time to decide, “what do I have to do first?”

Notice I didn’t say, decide what to do first, second, and third. This is not a plan-a-thon; it’s a survival strategy. You could think of it task triage. The first benefit is that you remove the additional pressure–the information overload pressure–of not knowing which of the many tasks facing you to address first. That’s pretty nice, already. But there’s another benefit that may trump any other you could think of.

With only one thing in front of you to do next, you will be able to start.

You have many choices in how you define that first task. Don’t make it too big. “Just sit down and write the novel” is too big. “Sit down and write the first chapter of the novel” is also too big.

Watch yourself: “Buy a ream of paper” might be too small, or, rather, it may just be you procrastinating. Or…it may in fact be the first thing you need to do before you can make any other forward progress on your novel. You’ve got to be honest with yourself here.

Once you have decided what it is you have to do first, and then after you have accomplished that task, the next step is clear: you decide (again), “what do I have to do first?”

Photo: James Jordan

It used to be the “mailing list.” Now, it’s generally just called “The List.” Building and maintaining your List takes time, especially if you’re aiming for 10,000+ list members.

I find it helpful to have reminders at hand as to what I’m doing and why I’m doing it when I’m working on a long-term project, so here are four properties of a list that I hope will help you keep on track when building or maintaining your own List:

1. The List is a form of capital

Your list is a resource, but don’t think of it as a consumable. It generally takes other resources (time, at the very least) to build the list, and some ways of building a list are more expensive than others. If I offered to paint a wall-sized fresco of the Albuquerque downtown skyline (actual size) for anyone who will sign up on my list, I’d run out of time, money, and the willingness to look at the Albuquerque downtown skyline long before I had a list built.

Alternatively, if I gave away a PDF file with blueprints of my own design for a 1/20th scale model of the Duomo in Florence in exchange for a signup on my list, I’d have much less work on my hands. After I’ve put together the PDF, there’s no more effort involved in providing 20,000 digital copies than there is in providing 20.

Once you’ve built your list, it has an intrinsic value, regardless of how much effort went into building it. At that point, knowing how much time and effort was required to build the list, you will gladly put in the time needed to maintain your list capital.

2. The List is principal – don’t fritter it away

This goes along with the non-consumable nature of the list. Don’t sell out your list, and don’t squeeze the list for money. If you do, some members might still buy something from you, but they won’t like you for it, and they’ll leave. Instead, by providing value to the members of your list on an ongoing basis, you can expect to receive dividends in return. It’s a longer-term outlook. Think in terms of mutual benefit, and you’ll do well.

3. A business is made up of relationships, and that’s exactly what The List is

Selling a single product can bring some income, but getting orders for a product isn’t nearly as important as getting re-orders. If you’re getting re-orders, you have a business. And the only way to get re-orders is by building relationships. That’s the heart of the List idea.

4. The List isn’t a community in itself

Through your list, you have a relationship with each member. In general, however, the list members don’t have direct relationships with each other. Now if you work at it, you can bring some of the trappings of community to your list, by sharing selected members’ comments and questions with the rest of the list, for example.

There are different community/list mixtures available if you want to experiment. A blog with comments enabled will still have you at the center of the discussion, but participants can relate to one another directly through the comments. A discussion forum that you moderate would be still more community-focused. Besides the limits on your time, there’s nothing to keep you from building a list, running a blog, and moderating a discussion forum if you want to.

What questions or concerns do you have about building a list? Are they “why” questions, “how” questions, “when” questions? Or maybe “whether” questions? Please post your comments by clicking on the “Comment” button or in the comment window below this post. If you’re reading this post through an RSS or email feed, please stop by the studionontroppo.com site and share your thoughts. I look forward to your comments and questions!

Photo: jeremyfoo

I’ve written before about the virtues of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. I still think there’s nothing like it for taming information overload and actually “getting things done.”

But it’s not easy for most mortals to keep the GTD machine purring along, day in and day out. There are times when I find myself adding more and more to my inbox without taking the time to process all the new material coming in. Soon, I have dozens of parallel projects that aren’t behaving.

They all seem to shout, “take care of me now!”

It can take me awhile to see that my GTD system needs a tune-up. Over the past couple of weeks for example, the tasks and projects kept piling up, and I thought I had everything organized well enough to manage them. But then I noticed how I was feeling: frustrated, overwhelmed, and under too much pressure.

I realized I hadn’t done my GTD “weekly review” for about three weeks.

The weekly review is where all the inbox items get processed. It’s a housecleaning of the mansion of projects. Not a full-blown spring cleaning, but the kind of cleaning where you at least go into all the rooms to make sure you know where you’re living.

When life is especially fluid, when projects are being born or morphing structurally every day, it can be moving too quickly to take good notes. But these are the times when it’s especially critical to regroup by doing your GTD weekly review.

I’m going to do mine today.