Before 2025 kicks off in full gear, if you already feel an approaching overwhelm with all the things already on your plate or that are about to pile on, I'd like to share a process that helped me a lot towards the end of last November to get on-top of things.
We'll call it Taming the Productivity Dragon - a concept from Cal Newport, responding to his readers and listeners asking how to tackle a feeling of overwhelm.
In ep 277: From Chaos to Calm (in 1 Day), he lays out a prescription of steps for the very first day of getting organised. If you're already somewhat organised but, like myself, are plagued by the sense that you're missing things because your list has run away from you to one degree or another, this should also be a very helpful process for you.
You can also find the method laid out with some visual aids in the YouTube upload of the same episode under a different name: How To Stop Wasting Time: The 5-Step Productivity System To Organize Your Life
The 5-Step Process to Taming That Dragon
You may want to set aside the better part of a day to do this. If you have a relatively clear weekend coming up, give yourself Saturday morning & early afternoon to go through it, for example. Time required will of course depend on the size of your "dragon".
Step 1: Face It
Prepare yourself psychologically to face whatever you find in this process.
As Cal hyperbolically advised in this clip from 2021, if you have 400 obligations that are all due tomorrow, you're still in a much better position if you know what they all are and can look at it all without shying away, even if the only thing you can do at this stage is prepare yourself for the catastrophe and make a plan for what follows.
For many of us, while the situation may not be so imminently dire, there are still a lot of things on our plates that we instinctively want to retreat from and not face honestly. Our palaeolithic brains like to pretend something doesn't exist if it's not physically in front of us. Come into the process steeling yourself against that reluctance, and trust that the situation will be better at the end of it.
Step 2: Set Up Your First Storage System
The place that will gather and make sense of all these things you have to do. The system requires just a few things to work:
The ability to create lists.
The ability to rapidly add, update, or move items between these lists.
The ability to efficiently append information to individual items.
This could be achieved with a simple text file, but better would be an app built for rapid outlining such as Workflowy, or a Kanban/task-board app like Trello (in preparation for step 3).
The larger point is this process is tool-agnostic, so use whatever you are comfortable with. Don't let tool-selection slow you down.
Prep the lists/statuses/columns
The lists will denote the status of each obligation you capture. Cal recommends six lists/statuses:
Ready - Things that you intend to get to in the next week.
Backburner - Things that you've committed to, but you're not working on yet. When more information comes in about them, you can throw that into the appropriate item in this list so you won't forget it - it's all in one place.
Waiting - A very important list for stress reduction. This will contain every obligation that you're waiting to hear back about, whether you've just asked someone a clarifying question, or you're waiting for work to be done before you can continue on your end. Items here can include information like when you handed it over, to who, and when you want/need to hear back about it.
To Discuss - For items that you want or need to discuss with someone at the next appropriate meeting.
Clarify - If when you look at an obligation you think, "I don't really know what this means", it sits here. An extremely useful status.
Scheduled - For non-simple tasks that you schedule on your calendar with either a link to the item or the same appended information added to the description section on the calendar event you've set as a reminder.
Step 3: Braindump Everything
This is the fun part.
Write out everything you are obligated to do, and everything that you want to take on in the future - everything you can think of. Clear the mind.
Then go through your inbox. Get to inbox zero. This doesn't mean replying to or taking care of each email. Rather, you're translating them into items in your system. By the end, you'll probably have a bunch of items that seem very small or simple, like reply to X about Y, as well as very large items. That's ok. Just get it all into the system first off. Single-task this process, don't let yourself get derailed down work-tangents.
Look through your calendar. Are there reminders, or things that represent complicated tasks or projects that should be an item on this list?
And at the end, scour your mind for anything you else might have missed.
Braindumping Advanced Tips:
A "WorkingMemory.txt" file can help with this process (a plain text file used to temporarily throw information into, cleared at the end of the day). Especially when clearing email inboxes. It can help you to consolidate many things into fewer number of things, because although it's very fast to add things to this text file, when you go through it later, slower, you can be more deliberate, batch things, and then see what should be combined into one.
Lean heavily on the Clarify list. Especially when you're doing this for the first time. Don't try to work everything out during the middle of this process. That comes later. For now, you just want to make sure you haven't forgotten everything.
The key rule for this system to work is every obligation gets only one item in the system. If you're working on something, and you email someone about it, it must move into the waiting list. You're not generating new items for one obligation that live on multiple lists. Every obligation can only be in one list (status) at one time. This means that all the appended information you've collected about an obligation will move with it as its status changes. If the information lives in different places, things will be missed.
Step 4: Initial Configuration
This step is also somewhat fun. Maybe even more so, if your braindump looks like a terrifying mountain of work. The initial configuration is where you'll reduce that mountain by making sense of all the things in your new system. Start to clarify things, remove redundancies, write up little plans of action and figure out where other people need to be notified or brought in to help.
1) Go through the clarify list and clear/move as many as you can.
Often, it will require sending off an email. If so, it moves to Waiting.
Maybe you can discard some items on the clarify list entirely.
Some things might be obvious. Either schedule a time to meet with someone to move it forward, and move the item to Scheduled, or To Discuss, or if you can/should just start working on it move it to Ready.
2) Triage the Backburner
Do you really need to do all the things listed here? Should they be delegated to someone else?
"Sorry triage" messages might need to be sent. For Cal, if someone reaches out (as long as it's weeks in advance) to say sorry that they said yes to something but actually their schedule can't handle it - this proves that the person really has their act together, so don't shy away from this out of embarrassment.
3) Add things to the calendar
If it's just a simple thing, put it on cal and delete from list. If complex, add the info to the calendar event and move it to scheduled in the system.
4) Look for batching opportunities
This is never possible when you're in a purely reactive mode. By taking stock and organising the mess in this way, great opportunities for efficiency will reveal themselves, often in the form of noticing several items that can be cleared faster if they're combined into one item or scheduled together in a batch.
Step 5: Maintenance
If you stop trusting this system it will fall apart.
If you find yourself unwilling to move something out of your inbox and into one of these lists, for example, that means you don't trust the system or, more likely, you don't trust yourself with the system.
Do the following practices for at least the next four weeks, starting the very next workday after you do the initial set up process.
Daily Practice 1: Review the system every morning when you look at your calendar
Use it to help make your plan for the day. Remind yourself of all these things. Only need take 5 minutes. You don't go into detail here, but you at least see everything on your plate.
Daily Practice 2: Review during shutdown
When you're shutting down the work-day, review the system again. Anything that's "floating around" must get nailed back into the system every day without fail.
Weekly Practice: Re-do step 4 configure
Return to the configure process (step 4) at the beginning or end of each week. Clear out your inbox completely. Make sure every item is completely up to date.
Closing Thoughts
Dragons are notoriously difficult to keep under control. If you work a complicated job that relies on a lot of digital, asynchronous communication, I believe you should treat your workload with the same caution and respect. How we interact with our little systems is as much a part of them as the software you use or the checklists you have written down. The first four steps of this process are wonderfully clarifying and stress-reducing in themselves, but the never-ending fifth step must be a critical part of your ongoing routine to maintain that same sense of clarity and control into the long-term.