Some years ago, I read about a Dutch road traffic experiment in a busy town that took a radical approach to organizing traffic flows. The experimenters theorized that it was not a lack of roads that caused congestion and slowed down the traffic, but far too many junctions. Many Dutch towns are ancient and they are full of small roads. Wide roads, capable of carrying a lot of traffic are few and the pace and flow of traffic on those few roads is controlled by the cars turning onto and off of those roads into the smaller roads. In the experiment, they cut off the access of the majority of small roads to the main road and redirected traffic along longer routes but with fewer intersections. The result was freer flowing traffic and reduced journey times.

In business organizations, similar problems occur. Work flows freely in parts of the process where there are no dependencies upon other resources. If too many parts of a whole process must go through a resource restriction (similar to a road junction), then a bottleneck will occur and progress will grind to a halt until it makes it through the bottleneck. In project based work, this is a very difficult problem to handle because resources are limited and fixed routines that can be optimized are rare. This is because the size, type, speed and demands of one project to the next are continuously changing.

If you carry out detailed planning of a process, it often becomes clear where the bottlenecks are, so in order to reduce the impact of a limited resource you can do the following things:

1. Gain additional resource - this is the least likely to happen as it is not easy to come by, is generally more expensive and it might only be needed occasionally.
2. Streamline the processes within that resource so that productivity is improved for that operation.
3. Carry out more preparation prior to sending work through the limited resource (It never ceases to amaze me when working on projects in large organizations how often something is held up for the most trivial of reasons. The actual work content is low, but the preparation that remains to be done before that work can be carried out is often high. Every time that you can do that preparation upfront, instead of relying on someone else to take the initiative, you get the work done faster).
4. Remove the number of bottlenecks by routing work through as few individual resources as possible (as per the road traffic experiment - accept a longer route, if it makes the overall journey quicker).
5. Confer more responsibility for getting the task done to those people upstream of the bottleneck to reduce the load on the scarce resource. For example, where doctors are a scarce commodity, nurses can sometimes be further trained to do take on some of the lower skilled diagnosis and treatment work that was once only the domain of doctors.

If you work by yourself, then you are the only resource, however within your sphere of skills lie bottlenecks. These are the tasks where a lack of personal resource slows up the job and prevents it from getting finished. Time and money are common resource constraints, but another, often ignored, resource is your personal aptitude and ability to get done the tasks that you are responsible for. Where that is lacking a bottleneck can often occur. You will tend to keep doing what you can do, whilst all the while creating a log jam at the point where your abilities tend to be weakest.

To avoid this you can adopt similar principles to the above methods:

1. Outsource the work, or buy tools and services that can do it for you
2. Streamline the difficult process. This means taking a careful look at the real personal difficulties that you have in carrying out a particular task. Focus on those difficulties intensely and work out ways that you can eliminate them, minimize them, or learn how to tackle them. Accept that you have to tackle this and resolve to get on with it. The sooner that you handle the problem, by implementing an effective solution, the sooner you can increase your productivity and remove this stress raiser.
3. Do all of the easy and possible preparation that you can upfront of the difficult task. Since you might have use a lot of initial willpower to tackle the job, you want to ensure that once you are underway with it that you are not bogged down with minor and trivial problems.
4. Ease the load on the bottleneck by carrying out your personal work in batches. If a task requires five different sub tasks (one of which is difficult and personally challenging) and you need to carry out that initial task three times, then batch the sub tasks together. This means that you only have to prepare yourself to commence the difficult task once overall, rather than three individual times.

On a personal level, your bottlenecks occur where you have a weakness, or limitation, in your personal ability to get something done. Rather than ignoring this and hoping to battle through it, you can prepare, organize and develop yourself to move past this difficulty with the greatest amount of practical ease possible.

Related links:
Related road traffic experiment in Drachten, The Netherlands

Here’s a Quick Way to Boost Your Productivity - Batch processing

The Common Mistake with Getting Things Done - Lack of Preparation

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[Photo by Kliverap]

A big problem for most of us is that, when we get an idea for a pleasant desire, we immediately want to take action, because we want to have that desire RIGHT NOW! Or within a very short period of time at least. However, whenever you set out to do an important, or difficult, task, you generally have to do some element of problem solving. That means that some part of the task cannot be done spontaneously. It needs some thought attention preparation and organization to overcome the barrier to progress. Unfortunately, your brain would rather not do that.

Once you start to do something that requires problem solving that you haven’t yet done, you will come to a point where can go no further. At this point, your mind will react and think “I can’t do this. It’s not possible.” Doing the impossible is generally a difficult and painful business and so this triggers a response to do anything that avoids pain and moves into pleasure. It is at this point that into your mind will pop an idea and an impulse to do something easier, more pleasant, problem free, instantly attainable, and free of responsibility. For the part of your brain that is focused on survival, the basic default response is that pleasure is good and relatively risk free and that difficulty is bad and brings with it the risk of pain. Consequently, if you don’t understand this point, then you will find it hard to resist temptation, because your nervous system is doing everything that it can to improve your chances of survival at that particular moment.

The number of distractions available to us is myriad and so many of them seem just perfectly designed to soak up huge amounts of time and to deliver us from having to solve problems: TV programs, films, books, video games, lunch dates, sleep, sex, whatever. These things are easy, pleasant, problem free, instant and responsibility free (well, on reflection, perhaps I should remove sex from that list as it doesn’t quite meet all of those requirements). You will never remove or escape all of the distractions that are available to you, because indulging in distractions and in procrastination is just the response to the symptom - a present moment difficulty.

The cause of the symptom is your desire to have, or to do, something that you can’t have or do at that moment. To remove the symptom and hence the response to indulge in temptations, then either give up on the desire, or work out how to make the next step possible.

When the impulse to indulge in a distraction hits you, then before you act upon it, recognize that it has happened because you have reached a stumbling block with the other thing that you are doing. Identify that point of difficulty, describe it clearly and then work out a way to solve it, or move around it. Do that before you indulge in a distraction. This is a vital habit to develop, because what it means is that, when you stop indulging in the distraction, you can return to the task at hand and make immediate progress. If you don’t do this, then when you return to the task you will still think, “I can’t do this!” and the distraction impulse mechanism will be triggered once again. It is only once you stop to figure out how to get beyond the barrier that you can make productive progress once more.

If you find yourself frequently indulging in procrastination, then this effort to solve the problem at hand, at least in principle, before bunking off is one of the most important habits that you can ever develop. It’s the most basic and most practical principle to get you back in the saddle with the minimum of delay. After a while, it becomes a habit to delay the distraction in order to solve the problem. Think of what this will do for you. Instead of your problems dominating you, you turn the tables and dominate your problems. I can tell you that it is a sublime feeling of personal mastery when you can do this. When you do this habitually, you know that you TRULY ROCK!

Related Articles:

Do You Recognize These 3 Warning Signs of Procrastination? 

Procrastination

Possible in the Moment

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[Photo by K_Vohsen]

Prediction makes us feel good as it gives the illusion that we know what will happen in the future and that conveys certainty and less risk. I once read of how the first weather forecasting service in Great Britain started in the 1700s, or thereabouts. It was hopelessly incorrect, being wrong on almost every occasion and so the service was stopped. However, there was such a backlash of complaints (and remember, this happened back in the days that you had to put pen to paper, buy a stamp and post your complaint, so the public must have been really riled), that the service was reinstated. Such is our thirst for the certainty that we think that prediction can give us.

Most personal and business plans focus heavily on predicting how long it will take to get something done and to finish it. Most of the time these predictions are wrong, but few people learn from this and do something about it. However, there is an enormous downside to inaccurate prediction that generally goes unnoticed.

When we create time estimates for when things will finish, we set up new objectives and expectations. When we fail to achieve these objectives we end up feeling bad. We then either rage against reality for not meeting our predictions, or against ourselves for proving inadequate. These are, in fact, ridiculous stances to take, but it happens very commonly. The real problem is that creating a plan based primarily upon time estimates and expecting it to be right actually designs failure into the whole effort.

When you look up the word ‘plan’ in the dictionary or thesaurus, no mention of time is given. Most descriptions and synonyms refer to process and organization. An action plan should not initially focus on the time taken to do something. It should focus on the process required to get something done. You can only get a job done by carrying out every single point of the process that gets the whole job done. If you overlook any single part, then the job will not get done.

Where most people go wrong with personal planning is that they set an objective and then give a time estimate for how long it will take to complete the job. If you have never done a particular task before, or if it’s something that you’ve done before but it requires new aspects of problem solving, then your time estimates will, more often than not, be very inaccurate. In my experience, most people underestimate the time by by half, i.e. it takes twice as long to do as they expected.

With this kind of plan, you set off with a poorly thought out process in place for getting things done, encounter all sorts of problems, get waylaid and frustrated, fail to meet your targets and then end up feeling annoyed, or even miserable with yourself. Once again, reality failed to bend to your will.

If you want to create a useful plan, then proceed as follows:

• start by identifying and describing your objective very clearly
• work out the major activities, or subtasks, required to reach the end point
• split those those activities into the different types of work needed. For example, when working alone, think of the different modes of thinking that you require (creative/imaginative, analytical, compositional, procedural, organizational, productive) and divide the work accordingly
• consider the resources needed (skills, materials, equipment, services and so on) and their availability

As you go through this process you are, in effect, carrying out the task, in principle, in your mind and as you do this you get a better idea of the order in which things must be done as well as what you need to get things done. The most vital thing to take note of are the foreseeable difficulties. These are the things that will block your progress, usually because you don’t have a possible solution to move you forward, or you lack the personal skills, knowledge, experience, process necessary, or you don’t have the physical resources necessary to get the job done. If you don’t identify these things in advance, then when you reach them you will grind to a halt - guaranteed.

When you have planned, i.e. designed your process for getting things done, in sufficient detail that you know all of the things that combine together to create the finished thing and you have identified and solved the foreseeable, or likely, problems, then you can start. You might still feel the urge to put time predictions onto things for the convenience of planning your day, or week, but never let the time estimate determine whether you feel successful, or not. Success comes from getting the end result, and that is done by completing the whole process that takes you there. The prime focus is always upon progressing with the process. If it takes longer than you wanted, then you either have to accept the lateness, or else give up when the time runs out.

Accurate time predictions for things that you’ve never done before, or don’t repeat often, is fiendishly difficult. By focusing on designing a full and accurate process for getting the work done, you focus on planning for an accurate reality, rather than stressing yourself out with imaginative, but highly inaccurate timescales as the determining factor for how you carry out the work and how your judge your performance.

The most important thing to identify and focus upon with your planning are the real hard difficulties that you will have to get through. This is where planning has the greatest effect for allowing work to progress smoothly. By identifying these problems in advance and by working out solutions for them, in principle at least, you prepare yourself to cope with the worst of what is to come. Most people don’t do this. They pay little attention to these things and then, when they reach that point where progress is impossible, they find themselves frustrated. This leads to the generation of negative emotions, which tend to drive people into procrastination and into feeling inadequate. In the worst case, it can lead to putting in a lot of effort, only to arrive at a hold up that is just too big to overcome. This is leads to paralysis and very often it finally leads to quitting. If you have already put a lot of effort into something, then this a tragic event.

On a day to day level, the ‘How To Do‘ list turns an ordinary ‘To Do’ list into an effective process for getting things done during the day and it focus on that especially important point of identifying and dealing with barriers to progress in advance of going into action.

Related Articles:

The Journey

Pinnacle Goal-Setting Doesn’t Work

The Planning Trap

If you would like to receive more fundamental insights into better living, then subscribe to the nickpagan.com newsletter and you will receive a FREE copy of the ebook ‘Understand How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly.’ Please use the form at the head of the page.

[Photo by Tom1]

I live in Berlin and I have a lot of ex-pat friends here. One of them is an English girl, Natasha, that I know well and we were discussing art recently and I said that I could paint her portrait, if she wished. At first she was incredulous that I could even paint (it seems that engineers are famed as being autistic, not artistic) and so I showed her a photo of a painting that I did some years back and which is displayed in this post. She still said no to the idea, but then as she thought about it the whole thing became more and more appealing to her and she talked about it more and more. I haven’t done any painting for several years so I suggested that we take a look at some contemporary portraits to get an idea of what she liked, what I liked and what I thought I was actually capable of producing. On a recent visit to London, I visited the National Portrait Gallery and viewed the winners of the BP Portrait Award 2008. I was surprised by how outstanding the work was and so I bought a book full of the reproductions and brought it back to Berlin to show Natasha.

So we went out for dinner and I was expecting to go through the book with her and discuss what was good, what was bad and what was possible. Natasha invited two of her German girlfriends along and insisted that we would speak German all evening. That didn’t do much for my mood as discussing the creation of a portrait with a prospective sitter is quite a personal thing, plus I only have survival level German and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to communicate any of the finer points of portraiture that way. As expected, the dinner conversation between the girls was beyond me and Natasha was only half interested in what I had to say as she found the conversation of her friends much more interesting.

They were talking about a subject of perennial interest to women: how to describe men in such a fashion that one explanation fits each and everyone of them. I sat there feeling bored and ignored apart from the occasional question, one of which was, “Are men embarrassed to admit that they met their girlfriend over the internet?” and “Do men think that women should wear a man’s boxer shorts, or not?” I gave my usual answer to such questions, which is basically that some men are/do and some men aren’t/don’t. My answers were clearly unsatisfactory and after a polite nodding of the head they then went on to more talk of “Men do blah, blah, blah” and “Men are blah, blah, blah” until I finally got thoroughly annoyed and raised my voice at them (Natasha says that I shouted at them, but I later found out that her definition of shouting is far removed from mine).

I said to the girls that one of the little known factors that has an enormous influence on how well people do in life and how content they become has to do with precision. I said that the more precisely that you describe a problem and that the more accurately that you describe the solution, the better in life that you do. I said that the more you attempt to make individuals fit into a generalization, the less well you will be able to interpret and respond to the actions of a single individual. Instead of accepting reality and responding to it effectively, you end up denying reality, because it doesn’t fit your rules and your concept for how things should behave, and hence the more baffled, confused and problem prone you become.

One of the girls smiled awkwardly and nodded agreement with me and the other said that she could classify men that way. I said “All of them?” and she said, “Yes, at least 90% of them.” I attempted to explain that it was the other 10% that would always make a mockery of her efforts to come up with perfect generalizations but she was totally unmoved by my proposition. Exasperated, I gave up and ordered another beer.

I don’t often get annoyed in that fashion but I was irritated by what I considered the futility of their actions and also, how such thinking had caused me countless problems in the past. My efforts to untangle the mental mess that I got into over the years really began to turn the corner when I read “People In Quandaries” by Wendell Johnson. In the book he explained, in relatively simple terms, how the principles of a school of thought called General Semantics work. One of the principle tenets of Generals Semantics is to bring accuracy of verbal description into everything that we do. The problem for humans is that although we receive sensory input from the real world into our bodies, we can mostly only consciously think about things by converting those sensory inputs into words.

For example, right now I’m looking at a cup. Cup is the word used to describe what is a porcelain receptacle, about three inches in diameter, and three inches tall, with a slightly flared rim to make sipping easier. This particular cup is colored white with a glossy glaze. It has a handle in the shape of a large ‘C’ with the top surface flattened so that you can put your thumb on top of it and I could go on and on. Words become a shorthand for reality (would you really want to use that description each time you wanted to talk about a white cup?). The problem is that words remove accuracy. That doesn’t have such a big impact if you only ever talk about real world objects and things that you can point to and that people can see, hear, touch, taste and smell for themselves. However, these days, the world of humans is rarely that simple. We have to convey abstract concepts. These are things that cannot be assessed by our physical senses. Instead we we create these things in the mind.

As we construct things in the mind we seek to both explain something and, consequently, to predict possible outcomes. I find prediction a very fascinating subject. When I think about religious ideas, beliefs, scientific theories (as opposed to scientific laws) and the girls’ dinner table conversation, all of this effort, discussion and speculation is all designed to come up with accurate predictions for how things work.

If we bring great accuracy of investigation and description into our theories and models, then we can get excellent predictive results. This is the great advantage that the scientific method brings us. It is the best tool that we have for problem solving. Theories are developed and increasingly refined as new information from real world results is assessed, understood and included. The great question for me is, “Why do we insist on making generalizations (which are inherently inaccurate and hence cause difficulty), when a more accurate description could allow us to respond much better?”

My conclusion again stems from my point of view that we should essentially see ourselves as biological mechanisms almost 100% devoted to surviving and the game of survival is inherently a risky process. Most of our personal, internal struggles in life come from attempting to do things that go against our deep-rooted survival instincts. Consequently, anything that can allow us to predict how things will behave in a given situation can lead to a survival advantage. It means that we can assess the risks involved before entering into a situation and it means that we can prepare for them, if necessary.

My own experience is that a lot of fears develop initially from real world reflections upon threatening events. If you have ever experienced doing something incredibly risky, or devastatingly humiliating or painful, then you have probably replayed those moments over and over again in your head. I speculate that what is happening here is that the brain is attempting to learn from the experience and that it is attempting to link causes and effects together. The mind will then come up with a belief, i.e. an imagined fact about what cause leads to this effect, in a somewhat desperate effort at prediction in order to avoid coming into risk and harm again. By imagining this happening over and over again this creates fear as a painful emotional response that prevents us from taking risks. Our survival drives are so strong that we will cling to any number of irrational and limiting beliefs and fears, because surviving is so much more important than being right.

To prove that you are right, usually means that you have to put yourself at risk again in order to validate whether your theories about cause and effect, and hence prediction are accurate or not. For our nervous system, this is simply too risky a proposition. This means that an inaccurate description and an inaccurate prediction that works (basically, by being overly risk averse) is much more likely to lead to survival and hence reproduction in the next generation. This then favors more spurious conclusion making until it becomes ingrained as a beneficial process in the whole species. It usually takes rationalization and a deep and accurate questioning of fears, and the beliefs that support them, in order to undo them.

Coming back to the girls’ insistence on attempting to pigeon hole men (and I know; men do it to women too) and my question, “Why do we insist on making generalizations, when a more accurate description could allow us to respond much better?” The answer is that we willingly adopt ineffective methods if, by default, they enhance the chances of survival. Consequently, generalizations must have more advantages for survival than accurate analysis of problems and accurate responses more often than not. That tends to favor inefficiency and ineffectiveness for the general public, but, for the wise and enlightened readers of this blog, you now have a new insight into this situation and so you can take advantage of it to live your life better.

Generalizations are fine for describing and predicting the movement of rocks and trees (unless, of course, you happen to specialize in those fields, in which case you will need more accurate descriptions). Generalizations can work fine for large thronging masses in many circumstances, but when it comes to describing your loved ones, please be ever willing to throw out the generalizations when they don’t fit. The sooner you accurately describe your loved one as he, or she, is and the sooner that you accept that reality, then the sooner you can get on with adapting yourself to that reality and the sooner you can get on with responding to that reality. Any time that you sit there pondering why so-and-so doesn’t fit the general model and “What’s wrong with him/her?” you are more likely to lose. Any time that you think, “Well, that’s my reality, how can I use it to my advantage?” you are more likely to gain. The ceaseless desire to predict is ingrained and you won’t overcome it easily, but you can at least choose to predict with greater accuracy those things that are the most up close and personal to you. That will bring advantage to you.
Related links:

General Semantics: Deferring to reality brings us sanity

BP Portrait Award 2008 - Exhibitors

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In today’s wired and gadget filled world, we are increasingly expected, and sometimes obliged, to carry out tasks simultaneously. On one level, there are distinct advantages in carrying out tasks simultaneously, but it has to be done in the right fashion. The longest way to carry out a complex series of tasks is to only start and complete one task at a time. For example, if you want to make a cup of tea, the longest way to do it would be to prepare the mug, prepare the teabag, fill the kettle, boil the water, poor the water, let the tea brew, remove the teabag, get the milk from the fridge, poor the milk, return the milk and then drink. A quicker way would be to fill the kettle first, then boil the water. Whilst waiting for the water, you can prepare the mug, teabag and milk. In project management terminology, when you carry out tasks whilst another task is undergoing completion it is called parallel working.

In the field of project management and planning, the quickest way to get a complex group of tasks finished is to organize them so that they run in parallel. If you have five tasks to do and each task takes two weeks to complete, then if you carry them out in series, it takes ten weeks to finish the whole job. If you can do them all in parallel, then it only takes two weeks to complete the task. This is a highly effective planning method assuming that you have the manpower, equipment and other necessary resources available to allow this to happen. For most individuals working on a complex group of tasks this is generally not possible.

Attempting to carry out multiple of tasks simultaneously just doesn’t suit the way that our brains work. In fact, research shows that multitasking reduces your intelligence more than smoking pot (I could have given you the link here, but then you would have to multitask and lose attention, so I’ve put it at the end of the article for you =) ). This happens because the brain can only truly concentrate properly on thing at a time (And it terms of ADD, writing this post is taking longer than I expected. I put out some bird food on my balcony and I now have three sparrows and three greenfinches outside of my window and they are now fighting each other! That wasn’t what I planned on. Now then, where was I?). It takes a while for the brain to assess the task at hand and what has to be done to complete it. Certain tasks require a lot more concentration than other tasks because they require a creative response to the stimulus at hand.

For example, if you receive an e-mail, you have to work out who it is from, whether it is a new communication or whether it already refers to a previous history that you have to remember, you have to process the latest information or request and then formulate a response. Formulating the response could prove very time consuming and highly involved if it requires some deep problem solving. Even if it doesn’t, you have to translate your thoughts into written words and doing that spontaneously often requires reworking it several times. Spontaneous responses are often cluttered and don’t get to the point. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Sorry that I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have the time to write you a short one.”

Multitasking has a very severe and detrimental effect upon productivity. We carry out complex tasks most effectively when we can think clearly about the problem at hand, take the time to think through possible solutions, decide upon a solution, prepare and organize the resources necessary to implement the solution and then get on with that implementation without interruption. Detailed preparation carried out before setting to work on a task is one of the most effective ways to boost productivity. A start/stop approach is one of the most effective ways to reduce productivity. It’s bad enough when those stops occur due to genuine problems that prevent progress. It’s even worse when we allow the additional factor of distractions to enter into the equation.

Distractions such as e-mails, answering the phone and people turning up at your desk unexpectedly will grab our attention, because they seem urgent. Very often though, they are relatively unimportant. If you truly want to boost your productivity, then turn off your e-mail, put the phone on mute and if you really want to get things done, then put a sign on your desk saying “Do not disturb. Available at 3pm.” I know that in the office environment that it can be very difficult to make yourself unavailable, but do what you can to introduce a trend of having concentrated, uninterrupted blocks of time and guard those sessions well. Your productivity will soar and that will give you more time to give focused attention to those other issues that people want to involve you in.

Coming back to the issue of parallel working for people working alone, the way to organize yourself is to have two or three sessions of concentrated activity on separate tasks per day, or if it suits you, devote a whole day, or days, to doing a batch of work per week. I personally like to get my head down and blitz a task so that it is started and finished in one session. Sometimes I’ll do things in a batch and devote a whole day to that batch of work. Often though, it is important to keep up with progress and momentum on a number of diverse tasks, so I assign periods of time and do what I can in that time period and accept that I will not get it all finished that day and will continue with it very soon.

Finally, is effective multitasking possible? I would say “Yes” but only in a very limited way. For tasks that we are fully adept at, that don’t require any problem solving and that can be done on ‘automatic’ then multitasking is possible. For example, many people can drive a car and listen to the radio at the same time. A trained musician can play piano, or guitar, and sing at the same time. I, myself, can even walk and chew gum at the same time. If it’s easy, or if it’s trained through repetition, then it’s possible, but for new and unique tasks, then forget it.

Related Links:

Multi-tasking reduces your IQ more than smoking pot

Survey: Women better at multitasking than men

Here’s A Quick Way to Boost Your Productivity - Batch Processing

Human Multitasking

If you would like to receive more fundamental insights into better living, then subscribe to the nickpagan.com newsletter and you will receive a FREE copy of the ebook ‘Understand How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly.’ Please use the form at the head of the page.

[Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com]