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Making Individual Work Automatic
Automatic processes aren’t just applicable to streamlining work
conducted by teams; they can also apply to regularly occurring
efforts that you typically perform on your own. As with the team
processes, the goal remains to minimize both the cognitive energy
and the back-and-forth communication required to finish your tasks,
only now, the steps of the process are entirely under your control.
For example, back when I used to write student advice books, I
suggested that students create an individual automatic process for
each type of regular assignment: problem sets, reading assignments,
lab reports—anything they knew in advance they were going to have
to do again and again throughout the semester. At the core of these
processes was timing. I recommended that they designate set times
on their calendar for when they’d accomplish each type of recurring
work. Maybe Tuesday from four to six is when you write up your lab
reports for BIO 101, and you tackle your statistics problem sets in the
free blocks between classes you have on Mondays and Wednesdays
from ten thirty to eleven thirty, and so on. I then recommended
detailing how this work gets done during these set times, including
where on campus you go to work, as well as any methods or
materials you regularly use. The key was to reduce cognitive energy
wasted on planning or decision making, allowing the student to focus
simply on execution.
This advice often proved revelatory for the students. Whereas
they used to wander through their week, always guilty that they were
behind, driven by impending deadlines into all-nighters, they could
now confidently execute their automated schedule, secure in their
knowledge that what needed to get done would get done, week after
week. The reduced overhead and cognitive toll made the same
amount of work suddenly seem to require a lot less energy.
There’s no reason why this approach cannot also apply to non-
academic knowledge work responsibilities. If there’s a particular
outcome or result that you’re individually responsible for producing
again and again, there’s probably nothing to lose by trying to come
up with a more structured process that specifies when and how you
tackle this work. As in my student example, start with the question of
timing: add set times on your calendar, which you can treat like
meetings attended only by you, for the specific steps you know have
to get done. Then put in place some rules about how you execute
these steps, searching for optimizations or hacks that can make each
step a little easier to dispatch.
Crucial to this optimization is to minimize the back-and-forth
communication associated with your processes. Consider, for
example, a consultant who is responsible for producing a weekly
report for a client that describes the hours her team spent on the
project. Assume she needs to gather these hours from her colleagues
on the team. Further assume that she needs to give her boss a chance
to look at the report before sending it out.
Once our consultant puts aside a set time to work on this report
each week, she can begin to optimize the communication required to
complete it. She might, for example, create a shared spreadsheet
where her colleagues can enter their hours. Two days before the
report is due, she can send a reminder to her colleagues about
entering their hours. In fact, she doesn’t even have to send this
message manually, but can instead schedule it to be sent
automatically (many email clients, including Gmail, offer this
feature).
Similarly, because the consultant now knows when she’ll work
on the report each week, she can have a standing agreement with her
boss about when the report will be ready for review. For example:
“I’ll always have the report ready for your review in our shared
Google Docs directory by 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday; if you have any
comments, add them to the document during the day; I’ll check for
any notes at 4:00 p.m. before I send off the final version to the client
at the end of the day.”
A weekly task that might have once generated multiple back-
and-forth urgent emails now adds no extra messages to our
consultant’s inbox. It also takes up much less cognitive energy. Our
consultant sees the standing solo meetings on her calendar and
executes the same steps every time: no urgency, no frantic
messaging, no late-night worries about forgetting key steps.
This is the promise of introducing automatic processes into your
individual professional responsibilities. Whether you’re deploying
complex automation or just following handcrafted procedures, these
processes will reduce your dependence on the hyperactive hive mind
workflow and reward you with extra cognitive energy and mental
peace. Make automatic what you can reasonably make automatic,
and only then worry about what to do with what remains.
Chapter 6
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