And speaking of getting back on track:

In his excellent [*Do it Tomorrow*](http://amzn.com/0340909129), British time management guru Michael Forster observes that, on average, the number of incoming tasks, emails, whatever, that come into your life each day needs to line up with the number you can process, respond to, etc., over the course of that same average day. Otherwise, you end up progressively further and further behind with each day passing.

Once you’re behind, it’s increasingly tough to catch back up. It’s like bailing water out of a ship that’s already flooded. So Forster puts out an excellently elegant solution: declare a backlog, and move everything that’s come in prior to right this second to a separate list (or, for email, folder). Then focus, first, just on making sure you’re keeping up, day after day, with the new stuff as it comes in from here forward. After that, as time allows, then whittle away at the backlog.

Due to a slew of factors, which mostly boil down to me trying to juggle too much all at once, I realized earlier this week that I wasn’t even close to keeping up. My to-do list had hit 200 items – well beyond what I might hope to accomplish in a day, or even in a month. So, on Monday, I called shenanigans, and declared a backlog. I’m hitting new work as it comes in first, and slowly whittling away at those 200 items as the rest of my day allows.

If nothing else, it’s a good chance for me to watch carefully how much work comes in, and how much I can get back out, in a given day. If I can’t stay at inbox and task list zero, then I have to toss some commitments, or otherwise whittle away at the demands on my life.

Somewhere over the past couple of years, Gmail solved spam. I’m not sure when it happened, precisely, but by now spam in my inbox is so rare that it actually catches me off guard. How did that get through?

Still, about six months back, I realized that nearly half of my email was what’s sometimes called ‘bacn’: those notices, newsletters, updates and alerts somewhere between spam and the ‘ham’ of real, human-sent emails. Shipping notices from Amazon, connection requests on LinkedIn, investor updates, retweets on Twitter, bills due to ConEd, Time Warner and AT&T, server status pings, all piling up at alarming speed. And though I wanted to at least glance at all those emails, few were crucial, few warranted immediate reading or response.

Still, because of their sheer volume, those bacn bits quickly gummed up the works, making it harder to spot and corral the messages that really did deserve quick attention.

So, using Gmail’s filter system, I fixed the problem:

I created a label called “!Robots” (with the ‘bang’ / exclamation point to alphabetize first).

Then, over the course of a month or so, as any email came in that wasn’t a personalized message from a real person, I’d click the little arrow at the top right of the message, choose “Filter messages like this”, then choose “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the Label: !Robots”.

Voila.

Now, once every day or two, I head to the !Robots folder, and crank through the hundred or so messages that have inevitably accumulated. Most require nothing more than a quick glance. Others – say, an expiring domain – need a minute or two of action. Still, I can usually get through the folder in well under ten minutes.

And then, the rest of the time, when I check my email – whether in Gmail, in Sparrow, or on my iPhone – all I get is the good stuff. No weeding necessary.

Turns out, taking out the bacn has been as much of an improvement as taking out the spam.

Dangerously close to real life.

I’ve been reading some kinesiology texts of late (yes, really), and stumbled across an interesting paper by Dr. Richard Schmidt [Motor Learning, 1988] about acquiring motor patterns through repetition.

Schmidt’s extensive research focused on the amount of practice necessary to learn a movement, to make it habit. A new pattern learned from scratch, he discovered, seemed to reliably take between 300 and 500 repetitions to become permanent. But new patterns learned to correct and replace an old, less efficient pattern instead consistently took between 3000 and 5000 repetitions – a literal order of magnitude difference.

I’ve thought about that recently as I’ve worked out, looking at the ways I move in basic exercises. But I’ve thought about it even more, looking at how I ‘move’ through the rest of my life.

Over the years of running companies, I’ve developed work habits, communications styles, and basic approaches to business. Most of those, on inspection, have served me very well. But a handful have not. And, indeed, I’ve increasingly noticed that I spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy undoing the problems cause by those handful of inefficient, bad patterns.

I’ve been focusing on correcting those patterns, replacing them with new, better, more efficient approaches. And, for the most part, I’ve been moving forward. But, of course, like with anything new, from time to time I misstep.

Before, I’d always believed the business self-help book saw that it takes 30 days to make a new behavior a habit. And, perhaps, in some cases, it does. But Schmidt’s research makes me think that time has nothing to do with it. Instead, it’s about volume of practice. And, in the case of re-learning something, it’s about a very, very large volume of practice.

Five thousand is an inordinate number of times to face a decision, and to make the right choice. In that context, those missteps seem inevitable. How can you do something new correctly five thousand times in a row?

And, just as important, in that context, it’s clearly only worth setting out for change when you’re ready to buckle down for a long-haul commitment, when you’re ready to start even knowing that you aren’t aren’t ‘done’, you aren’t finished thinking about your actions, until you’ve got things right again and again and again, three thousand to five thousand times.

Recently, I stumbled back across a blog for students, called Study Hacks, that’s written by my friend Cal Newport. After getting sucked deep into the archives, I can definitively say it’s not only a great and well written site, but also one that’s genuinely and broadly useful for even those of us well out of college and into the ‘real world’. Go give it a read.

In particular, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about his Law of Action Planning: that no rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete.

As Cal observes, (and as I have in the past) productivity largely boils down to two problems: capturing and organizing the stuff you have to do, than actually doing that stuff.

But, Cal goes on, while a simple system can solve that first ‘capture/organize’ problem for years and years with little change, it’s the second ‘do’ problem that constantly needs new solutions to keep up with the realities and demands of our lives.

Previously, I’d taken that as either a flaw inherent in a given system (like, say, David Allen’s Getting Things Done), or in myself. Now, I’m starting to see it’s perhaps just the way human brains are wired to work.

Admittedly, that doesn’t really change anything in terms of my actual productivity output. But it does, at very least, allow me to skip from one form of time management to another without all the mental angst. Don’t worry, I can tell myself; it’s a feature, not a bug.

There’s a great story about a guy who attends a Tony Robbins seminar, and complains to Robbins that, despite trying everything, he can’t lose weight.

“You’ve tried everything?” asks Robbins.

“Everything,” the guy replies.

“What were the last hundred things you tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” the guy admits, “I haven’t actually tried a hundred things.”

“Then what were the last twenty-five things you did?” asks Robbins.

“I haven’t tried twenty-five things, really, either,” the guy responds.

“So how many things have you actually tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” says the guy, sheepishly, “maybe five or six.”

Perhaps it’s an artifact of America’s Protestant work-ethic roots: when we fail, our first response is to try the same thing again, just harder, and with more resolve.

Problem is, that rarely works. If the strategy didn’t work the past five times, the sixth isn’t likely to work either, no matter how much energy, commitment, and enthusiasm you throw behind it.

Just observe the number of people making the same New Year’s resolutions year after year. If you’ve been vowing to lose weight each of the past five January’s, odds are good, by the next one you’ll still be a fat fuck.

As the old saying goes, if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. Or, in Einstein’s more eloquent words, “the thinking which created today’s problems is insufficient to solve them.”

So as you embark on this new year’s old resolutions, do some new thinking. Brainstorm about what you’re going to do differently, smarter. How you’re going to change your strategy. Because trying the same thing again – this time, with feeling! – just isn’t going to work at all.

Even with the best of daily blogging intentions, even on a long holiday weekend, it appears I couldn’t keep my re-start streak going for three straight days.

But, at least, it appears I’m not alone. In one of his earlier books, productivity guru Mark Forster relates this exercise:

All you have to do is pick one task which you are going to do the next day without fail, and then do it. If you succeed at that task, then you pick another different task for the following day and make it just a little bit more difficult.

And so you continue one day at a time, picking one task which you will do each day – each day a little bit more difficult. Once you are confident that you can carry out any task no matter how difficult without fail, you then repeat the process with two tasks.

It doesn’t matter whether the tasks are meaningful or completely nonsensical. The idea is to do them for no other reason than because you have decided to do them.”

As easy as it gets. Yet, as Forster points out in his later Do It Tomorrow, that simple game “has in fact proved too difficult for just about everyone who has tried it.”

Clearly, I wouldn’t fare particularly well on Forster’s exercise either. But I do increasingly believe that mastering it, achieving that sort of conscious self-control, is at the heart of productivity, and most other life successes.

So, perhaps, that simple exercise is worth working on. Perhaps it’s less about will, and more about skill. Perhaps practice makes perfect, and self-control can actually be learned.

Or maybe not. Either way, I think it might be worth the effort to find out.