The Productivity Cycle

March 12th 2007

productivity circle plan do complete reward Last week I finally visited my local library and took some books out, one of which was Your Best Year Yet by Jinny Ditzler. My prime motivation for picking it up was because I considered some sections of it could be nicely worked into GTD. One such feature was the cycle of productivity. However, the book doesn’t go into much actionable detail on it so I’ve decided to take the basic principles and expand them to make it more productivity related. The diagram on the left demonstrates the cycle and is broken down into four sections - plan, do, complete, reward - which are detailed below.

Plan
This is where our project begins. All but the most simple of tasks requires good planning beforehand, especially if you want things to run smoothly in the other stages of the cycle. At the very least we need to ask these four questions:

Why are we doing it ?
We always need to ask ourselves why we are doing something. If you have a clearly defined list of personal roles (father, home-owner, you job), this should be easy to answer; does the task fit with your responsibilities and if not is it really necessary to do? If you have it laid out, refer to your 20,000ft level in the horizon of focus as mentioned in Getting Things Done.
When is it going to be done?
When are we going to do the task? Having a clear schedule is important for staying focused and minimizing procrastination. If you don’t have a schedule clearly defined for the project, it will float around in your mind as you second-guess when it is a good time to do it, and more often than not you will end up doing the project at inappropriate times.
How are we going to do it?
How we are going to do a task is pretty self explanatory. What tools do we need? What research do we have to do? Who do we have to talk to? What are the next actions you need to do that will see the project move forward?
What are we going to achieve?
Define what the final goal will be from doing the task. Like having a schedule you need to define what you want from the project otherwise you will constantly be questioning yourself as to whether the task is good enough, what the cut-off line should be, how far you should take it etc.

The danger with this stage is the temptation to get bogged down in planning. It’s important to know where to draw the line and actually start using the preparatory work. If you have too many tasks stuck in this phase, then they linger on the mind as incompletes, and if GTD taught us anything it’s to get stuff off your mind.

Do
This is typically the largest chunk of any project and should be strongly tied to what was laid down in the planning stage. Very commonly people get bogged down at this point due to lack of proper planning. If you don’t have a coherent plan tied to a solid schedule your mind has to fill it in for you and the problem with that approach is it will result in fuzzy, unclear thinking.

Remember the circle can work anti-clockwise too. If you haven’t done enough planning or the planning you have done turns out to be unsuitable go back to the first stage again. At any time you get bogged down in a project, ask yourself what next action you would have to do to move the project forward.

Complete
This section may be debatable to some but there is a clear distinction between doing, actioning and working through the main bulk of a task and knowing when it is complete and can be signed off. This relates strongly to the planning stage. If you have it clearly defined what you want to achieve right from the beginning, you help to avoid the situation that no doubt sounds similar to many of you, where you keep tweaking bits and pieces, adding features and changing aspects of it when you don’t really need to. You end up in that dangerous situation where you don’t know when to stop and declare something as done.

Reward
A key element of this productivity circle is the reward. As mentioned in the planning phase, I would strongly suggest asking yourself what the reward would be for completing the project, and if there is none, come up with one. I’ve stressed the importance of rewarding yourself before as a way of discouraging procrastination, but at the very least you need to acknowledge the completion of the task. Congratulate yourself, pat yourself on the back. If you don’t reward yourself, you will just jump straight into another project and that’s not a good habit. As I mentioned in a previous post, the body is like a battery. Rewarding yourself for completing a project - besides discouraging procrastination - also helps you to recharge and recharging yourself does not just involve getting your energy levels back up, it also gives you that extra kick of motivation and encouragement. You are then in the top physical and mental state to start your next project and begin the productivity cycle again.