As a handful of people wrote in to protest my prior post, just wanted to clarify that I’m not done with posting about productivity, just done with doing so when Jess is making fun of me in the background.

Fortunately for you, I’m in the office today, so I can point readers towards Mark Forster’s beta test of his new “Autofocus Time Management System”.

Mark’s books, Do It Tomorrow and Get Everything Done are in my productivity ‘top three’ (along with David Allen’s Getting Things Done).

Forster, unlike Allen, acknowledges that in real life, most of us fall prone to procrastination, and that a lot of the challenge of work isn’t just making a list of what you need to accomplish but actually doing things on that list. And, also unlike Allen, Forster is willing to keep changing and improving his system over time, based on what works for him and for his clients in the real world.

His new Autofocus approach seems almost stupidly simplistic, but it’s producing great results thus far – for me, and for the thousand or so people in the beta test. But don’t take my word for it; head to his site, sign up, and try it yourself.

Two weeks ago, with the initial frenzy dying out, and lines at the Apple Store once again down to reasonable lengths, I picked up a 3G iPhone.

Then, a few days ago, I left it in a cab on my way home from the gym.

At which point I discovered that, as I’d bought the phone with my American Express Platinum card, it was completely covered by their Purchase Protection Plan. A five minute conversation, a quick fax of the receipt, and they had credited the full cost of the phone back to my account.

Set aside the access to airport lounges, the free companion tickets on domestic flights, and the excellent, excellent concierge service (which, on my bachelor party trip to New Orleans, got us tables for seven at two restaurants – Chez Paul and Luke – that had claimed to be totally booked); the iPhone refund alone made using that card and that card alone totally worthwhile.

Don’t leave home without it, indeed.

Coming shortly, a long, long (and possibly multi-part) screed I’m writing up about the good, the bad, and the ugly of productivity classic Getting Things Done, and how some of the ideas in the considerably more obscure British Do It Tomorrow deal with the shortcomings of the GTD approach.

In authoring that, however, I stumbled across this great quote worth sharing:

“Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.”

Which is dead on.

Or, at least dead on at a philosophical level. At the cognitive level, however, research has made increasingly clear that people can’t really multitask – do two tasks a the same time. Instead, they either background task – say, listen to music while working out – if one of the tasks has a very low cognitive load, or they switchtask – alternate back and forth between two different activities.

And, in short, research has also increasingly shown that each time someone alternates, they incur a bit of cognitive ‘switching cost’ – extra time spent catching back up to their place in a IM conversation, or re-reading the last few lines of an email draft after each switch.

So per the zen saying, “when you are chopping wood, chop wood; when you are carrying water, carry water.” You won’t just be more present and do both tasks better, but you’ll take considerably less time doing them than you would trying to do both at the same time.

Productivity guru Mark Forster points out in his excellent Do it Tomorrow that falling behind on work stems from three, and only three, possible problems:

1. Having too much work
2. Having too little time
3. Doing work inefficiently

This is, of course, blindingly obvious, yet also something I tend to forget.

Most time management seems to focus on that third category – efficient working – yet there’s an upper limit to how much improved efficiency can help squeeze into a day. Sure, you can reduce the amount of time you spend replying to the average email from, say, three minutes to thirty seconds. But if, like me, you receive about 300 emails a day which warrant some kind of response, that thirty-second average still adds up to a full two-and-a-half hours of email time, with little chance of further whittling down.

The next cause of trouble, then, is simply having too much work. Time management systems try to skirt this through prioritization, but, as Forster points out, the idea of priorities is a bit of a red herring. If you’re going to get something done today, it doesn’t really matter if it gets done first or last. The order only starts to matter once you’ve tacitly agreed not to complete all of your work. At that point, order becomes crucial, because it’s the latter items that don’t get completed at all. The ‘C’ task today is usually still a ‘C’ tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and therefore never gets done. So, in short, the right place to prioritize isn’t at the level of tasks, but at the level of commitments. You already fill 24 hours each day with something, so fitting in new obligations requires getting rid of an equal amount of time’s worth of old.

But it’s the third area – not enough time – that really gets short shrift in my own approach to managing time. I look at an open stretch of days on my calendar and think of them as ’empty’. But, of course, they aren’t. The’re full of all the work I have to do. Usually, that’s fine; even with a few meetings and calls wedged in, I still have time to pack in the rest of my tasks. But, on weeks like this one, when my calendar spirals far out of control, and I’m left with only odd fifteen-minute chunks unbooked for days at a time, I find myself falling further and further behind on life, and feeling more and more stressed out as a result.

So, to combat that problem, a new policy, inspired by the trusty Roadie’s Rule (no heavy drinking two nights in a row): no full days of meetings back to back. Or, in the simplest implementation of that I could figure out: no meetings, none, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That way, no matter how bad my Monday, Wednesday, or Friday become, I’ll always have at least one day in between to get back on top of life.

Back in 2001, while I was a senior at Yale, I picked up a hardcover copy of a new book called Getting Things Done. And it changed my life. For the first time, I went from a lose-track-of-everything mess to the kind of guy who owns a label-maker.

Ever since, Getting Things Done has served me very well. In particular, I’ve loved its emphasis on getting everything out of my head, and into a trusted system. And I’ve loved the structure of the GTD workflow: collect – process – organize – review – do.

My problem, though, has always been with that last step. After helping readers craft a list of their context-appropriate next actions, GTD author David Allen basically tells them, ‘now do those actions’, and assumes everything works from there.

Which might for Allen. But, for me, actually doing actions has a relationship to the instruction ‘just do it’ much akin to the relationship between the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and their notation in the original script as “they fight.”

Most problematically, after years and years of Getting Things Done, while I had gotten to be very good at knowing exactly what I should be doing at any given moment, at that moment, I was usually doing something else entirely. I still procrastinated terribly. I still felt overwhelmed and behind. I was much more organized, but I’m not sure I was actually that much more productive.

Until, recently, I stumbled across a book called Do It Tomorrow, by the lesser-known UK-based Mark Forster. Forster explicitly recognizes that our well-intentioned rational brain isn’t always in control. And, more importantly, he offers strategies for coping with that fact in our jobs and lives. Strategies that, for me at least, work.

Because Do It Tomorrow also places a strong emphasis on limits and on reducing randomness, a Do It Tomorrow day feels almost the exact opposite of a Getting Things Done day. It’s more structured, less reactive. And I leave at night knowing that I’ve finished everything I set out to for the day, rather than with vague ongoing guilt from the giant list of next actions still hanging over my head.

I’m still fairly new to Do It Tomorrow, so I can’t yet say if the approach will permanently supplant Getting Things Done for me; I’ll weigh back in next month with further thoughts on that. In the meantime, though, as it’s easily the best productivity book I’ve read in the last five years, and is available on Amazon for $16, if you have even passing interest in dorky time management stuff, I’d highly, highly recommend you pick up a copy for yourself.

Cyan’s email addresses are suddenly and inexplicably bouncing. Which leaves me, in short, with absolutely nothing to do today until they come back online.

In the meantime, gmail calls me joshuanewman, should anyone need to urgently track me down.

Update: things are fixed; feel free to once again hit me and my colleagues at cyanpictures.com addresses per usual.

I’ve recently deduced that I’m far, far less productive when I have house guests, or when I’m one myself.

So, this morning, I was thrilled when my brother, much as I love him, headed back out of town.

For the first time in weeks, without the easy distraction of cohabiting family or friends, facing the boredom of otherwise just sitting quietly and staring off into space, I’m again getting down to getting things done.

Or, at least, getting down to blogging. Which, it seems, falls squarely between the boredom of space-staring and the pain of actually doing productive work.

As I always have trouble remembering whether the forks go on the left or right side of the plate, I was particularly thrilled to note over dinner last night that, when properly placed, the utensils are in alphabetical order: **f**orks, **k**nife and **s**poon.