Using Your Task Management Profile to Focus Changes
Everyone is walking around with self-taught skills in task management. As such, skill levels vary greatly but everyone would like to know where their areas of weakness might lie. In this episode the ProductivityCast team looks at the ways to build a task management profile and how one might interpret a self-assessment.
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In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Using Your Task Management Profile to Focus Changes
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
MyTimeDesign ProfileHow Next-Action Thinking Changes Over Time (Episode 025) - ProductivityCastHolmes-Rahe Stress InventoryLife Events Inventory
Raw Text Transcript | Using Your Task Management Profile to Focus Changes
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:20I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:21I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:23 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24And I'm marquel. wicks. Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to everyone listening here to productivity cast. Today, we are going to be talking about something that's a little bit unique, something that's interesting that I think you'll all find fascinating, which is a task management profile that Francis has put together. And to kind of explain a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. Francis, can you give us a little bit of background in terms of what you've devised.
Francis Wade 0:49I used to be a triathlete. And people who are brand new to triathlon think that trap on is a matter of being a good swimmer, being a good runner and being a good cyclist. And as you progress in the sport, you realize there's a few other dimensions that you also need to be good at, such as lifting weights, nutrition, and rest. So there's at least six disciplines that you need to be really, really good at to be decent triathlete that somebody who doesn't get injured and is able to complete races and starts to be competitive at a particular level. And most of triathlon training is based on individual sports and triathletes Think of how good am I at a given sport? And how can I get better at nice my weakest sport, and I don't need to focus so much on my strongest sport. So they tend to think in terms of separate disciplines? Well, I took the idea, the basic idea of becoming better at a discipline, the idea of breaking down one event into disciplines and took it over into task management, and said, okay, task management is also based on disciplines. And within each discipline, there are particular best practices. And within each best practice, there are levels of accomplishment ranging from people who do things unconsciously. And you could even you could apply that conscious unconscious diagram, where you start off being incompetent, and unconscious, all the way up to being conscious and competent. You may you could apply that to this example. But the idea is that someone starts off just doing and at some point, they become an expert, or someone who is at a world class level. And once I divided task management, so to speak, into different disciplines. I said, Okay, how can you focus on one at a time, because you probably can't improve more than a couple at a time anyway. Because we're just not able to improve that fast in so many different areas. If you knew the different areas, maybe you could focus your efforts and get better faster. And also be somewhat immune from the shiny, shiny object syndrome, where you get distracted by some tip that you've picked up on Reddit, and you're off to the races, perhaps trying to improve something that actually would make no difference overall. So the basic idea started in terms of how can you get better faster? I wanted to talk about two things. One is, how do you figure out your profile very, very quickly, because I wanted us to get over the hump of how do you find out what your profile is. And as an aside, I wanted to, I think I'll put up the simpler version of this chat that I have here, the one that only has the first seven fundamentals, so capturing through listing, but not the others.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:45So we'll post that in the show notes.
Art Gelwicks 3:47Okay, so here's, here's where I go with this. So if you want to talk about every about getting better, faster. The first aside from listening to a Daft Punk song to do that, you need to first I would think, know what you're trying to get better get better at, what are the measuring criteria, that you're going to those areas that you're going to focus? And then what are the thresholds? You describe this as being a triathlete I for some reason I keep picturing this in my son who used to run track ran hurdles for quite a while. And each one of these is a hurdle to get to that end goal. So you have to understand what are the not only the measures? I mean, if he's running 400 yards, that's the measure. But what are the hurdles in the way of getting to that end measure? And each of these different categorization areas, has their own hurdles, they're not all the same. Some people can blew right through them, other people can really struggle with them. So I'd say the first thing is, what are the lanes that we're evaluating? Are you implying that they're the same for everyone or are they different for everyone? Or is there some commonality?
Francis Wade 4:59Right, that's great question. it the way you were, you'd say that a car, every fuel combustion engine, German car, the Stewart from the electrics and any other exotic cars, every car has a fuel system, electrical system, and air system if they have the same basic components, although they may work differently. And in task management, we all have the same component, so to speak the same seven components that are in the diagram in the show notes, essentially capturing, emptying, tasking, acting, those storing, scheduling and listing. And we all perform them, regardless of a Well, once we get into our teens, we're all performing them to some degree. So they all need to work together in order for us to manage our task from the moment of creation, to the moment when the task is complete, and to manage multiple tasks. So where sort of stock so to speak, in this task management world of our own creation, in which we're trying to get stuff done. So yes, it's a bit like seven disciplines, which are all we're all trying to manage at the same time. But without a heck of a lot of awareness, because we're primarily self taught.
Art Gelwicks 6:18So if we take those seven disciplines, then and I'm just going to pull one that you mentioned off the top of my head, the capturing one, let's start with that. One is the example. How, how do I determine what quote level? My capturing skill is at right now? Because I have a perception. But if I sit here, and I look around at all the different ways I capture information, depending on the criteria, I could either be really good at it or terrible at it. I'm not sure what the what's the measure?
Francis Wade 6:49We actually have talked about this on our shows, how does someone know how how well they're doing in anything. So the most expensive ways to have somebody assess you and tell you, which is sort of the doctor patient model, where you're not able to measure your you can't do any, most people can't do an EKG of themselves. So you need someone outside of you to tell you how good you are. So let's call that the first option, option one, an expert does an evaluation. So in terms of capturing it would mean someone is actually watching you do your capturing and then telling you how well you're doing. Most of us can't afford that particular option. So we go to a second one. The second one could be someone says, Well, here's what capturing is, at a very basic level. How well do you think you're doing? Let's call that an initial analysis where you just sort of hear the idea for the first time. And you kind of decide, okay, I think I'm at this level. So someone who reads for example, GTD here's a description, and then makes a determination as to whether or not they need to focus on that area or not. The book doesn't tell you to do that. But that's basically what everyone does. If you figured out you're already doing really well, you say okay, and you put a mental check beside the list in your head, and then you move on to the other areas of the book. Another thing you could do, which I have explored, the ones I'm about to describe, is to put together a quiz. So I have a quiz that you could do where you ask for the five questions,
