If there were an Alcoholics Anonymous-style 12-step programme for people addicted to tinkering with their "productivity systems" – to-do lists, calendars, email-management techniques, all that stuff – I'd have been a member for some years. (Though I'd probably have spent my time wondering if it shouldn't really be 10 steps, or 15, and whether to store details of the weekly meetings in a Moleskine notebook or Google Calendar.) The quest for the perfect system all too easily becomes a "personal fetish", as the erstwhile productivity guru Merlin Mann put it in a guilt-stricken post on his website, 43folders.com, which did much to exacerbate the problem. The field of productivity books and blogs, he argued, had become "a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a Ritalin and a hug". For we desk workers, especially those with some autonomy over our schedules, tweaking the system easily becomes a substitute for actual work – and an especially insidious one, given it feels so much more constructive than, say, gazing out of the window while eating crisps.
I've found, though, that there's a third and oddly serene phase of the addiction, beyond the initial heady quest for a perfect system and the subsequent disillusionment articulated by Mann. The realisation dawns that a productivity technique needn't last for ever, or even very long at all, in order to be useful. As long as you don't waste half your life fiddling with your to-do list, test-driving new ways of working can be galvanising, freshening stale projects. Then, when their power fades, switch to another. In that spirit, here are three approaches I've been experimenting with recently. Spoiler alert: none constitutes the eternally perfect system. But then nothing ever will.
1 Eliminate distractions by embracing them. "Here are the rules: All work must be done in blocks of at least 30 minutes," writes Cal Newport (at is.gd/beAFDq), explaining his method for attaining what he calls "forced focus". You're free to abandon your most important work whenever you like, in favour of emails, minor errands and the like, but with a caveat: if you switch, you must stick to such "small stuff" for 30 minutes. The double benefit is that you "batch" your smaller tasks, clearing the decks more speedily, while creating a disincentive for getting distracted from the major ones.
2 SuperFocus. Mark Forster has been honing his systems of "closed lists" for some time (at markforster.net). The underlying principle: write your to-do list over several pages of a notebook, then cycle through the pages, doing whatever "stands out" and feels ready to be done – but you must do at least one thing per page. The result is creative tension between the rational and intuitive parts of your mind. Scheduling work too rigidly results in procrastination, as we rebel against the straitjacket we're seeking to impose, but just acting on impulse means unappetising tasks get left undone. Closed lists balance the two.
3 Spend an hour making choices. A lot of things masquerading as "things you have to work on" are really decisions you need to take, notes Steve Chandler in his book Time Warrior. Many can be taken instantaneously; the notion that you need to gather more information is often an avoidance technique. Make it a game: challenge yourself to take as many decisions as you can in an hour, and see how many items you can nuke from your list. It's weirdly energising. And if it doesn't work, there's always Ritalin and hugs.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com; twitter.com/oliverburkeman
