Case Study: QuietSpacing(R) In Action
Christopher S. Tuttle
The other day I a received a very rewarding email. Chris Tuttle - friend, former client, and intellectual property attorney at Alleman Hall McCoy Russell & Tuttle - lobbed a completely unsolicited QuietSpacing(R) case study over the fence. I asked him if I could post it here to demonstrate how people actually use QuietSpacing® in their hectic day-to-day lives. He agreed! So, after confirming that the images displayed don’t disclose any sensitive information, here is what Chris had to say.
Before
My inbox was a vast untamed wilderness, with high-priority items buried in a giant pile of everything else: personal items, junk mail, things to read, unfiled client matters, etc. It was totally impossible to survey my inbox and figure out what truly needed my attention. In an attempt to impose some order, I would make other folders for items of medium or high importance. Sometimes I would label these folders with a date, to indicate that I had to read and process all these emails by the specified date. All this accomplished was creating another “bucket” of stuff, and one that would be easy to overlook during the daily exercise of treading water. There were other things I did to try and stay organized, but they all suffered from problems similar to those of my email “system.” The only thing my system was truly efficient at was generating gasoline-fire levels of anxiety.
What Changed
Several years ago I met Paul and learned about his QuietSpacing® productivity method. Since that time, I have adopted and adapted numerous aspects of QuietSpacing® to help me manage my day-to-day workflow, be it electronic or physical.
Now
I am surfing the big waves with panache. At the moment my inbox only has 4 emails in it:
Screen Shot 1
I treat my email inbox at work as my master collection “bucket”. Virtually everything I have to do is initialized through an email. If I’m out riding my bike and a I see a cool show advertised on the side of a bus, I send myself an email (this actually happened on Monday — 2 hours later I pinned down a babysitter and was at the box office buying tickets). If I have to go pick up dinner on the way home, I send myself an email. If I talk to a co-worker about something, I ask them to send me an email. These are “artificial” bucket items in the sense that I specifically generate the emails or have someone else generate them so the items get into my system. But the far more usual case is that it’s totally automatic, for example an email from a client asking a question. This is automatic in the sense that there is no extra step of me sending an email or asking that one be sent. My first touch is the email itself.
So that’s gathering. What about assessing/producing? Basically I plow through my email two or three times a day, at a minimum. If there’s no way it can be addressed in one day or less, I’ll tuck it away somewhere and turn it into a task or calendar item or some other way of reminding myself later that I have total confidence in. A lot of the time, if the email is internal from a co-worker, I will just reply to them and ask them to remind me again in a week. Then I delete the original message and voila! – I’m no longer thinking about it or being pestered by it. My co-workers are now conditioned to take total ownership of the reminder and deadline when I do this. It’s great to have someone thinking about this stuff other than me. Trust of course is a huge sticking point but I have great people working for and with me.
Some days, it’s just all email, all day, meaning that I’m constantly receiving, reading and sending email. I do this on days when I just decide that it’s OK to not focus on any particular thing and just instead deal with whatever happens to be sitting there. On other days, I just look at my master bucket a few times and I make sure that it’s out of sight and out of mind for the rest of the day. This allows me to more deeply focus on work that would be totally compromised and inefficient if I allowed the interruptions to interrupt me. My recent experience with this QuietSpacing®-inspired approach is that I’m able to do a project in 5 hours that would previously have taken 10 or 15. This really happened recently. I wrote a patent application in 5 hours. That’s unheard of for me. That case is pretty dramatic, but even so my general productivity is through the roof compared to where it was.
The other thing I look at several times a day is my task list. There is a close relationship between my email and my task list. For example, a lot of my tasks originate from me dragging an email onto the task icon in Microsoft Outlook. This causes automatic generation of a task item with all of the email content in the note/memo field of the task item. For emails that pertain to an already-existing task, I might make note of the email and date in the memo field of the task item. For example, I have an upcoming trip to China and there are various things I have to do to get ready, including gathering information from various sources. Someone sent me an email the other day with information about my visa application. So I made a note in the memo field of my China Trip task item: “9-1-10 — email from Larry re: visa”. So the task items are often akin to what Dave Allen will refer to as “projects,” i.e., they often represent a group of action items or communications. For this stuff, I partly use the note/memo field of the task item as a “chron file” that allows me to quickly see all the major events and communications that have happened in connection with the task/project.
The coolest thing about the task list is that I use the Outlook categories field to tag the task items. They are tags in the sense that a particular task item might be tagged as belonging to two or more categories (e.g., “Client” and “Business Development” categories). Some of the categories loosely relate to the “contexts” that Dave Allen talks about. He is big on the idea of reminding yourself to do something at the moment when you are most able to do it. For example, if you’re ready to go run errands, that is the perfect time to be reminded that you need to pick up some light bulbs from the hardware store. In fact, in my system I have a task category entitled “Errands.” I look at those tasks whenever I get ready to leave my office, so I’ll remember to stop by the bike shop, pharmacy, cleaners, etc. I also use a couple categories to keep important things front-and-center in my consciousness. For example, I use the category “1 – Now” for things I have to deal with today. The “1” prefix ensures that it will be near the top of my task list, which is sorted by category in my default task view. The task list has the potential to get a little out-of-hand lengthwise, but I am able to take a quick lap through it in less than 5 minutes even when it gets pretty long. My regular perusals of the task list give me a 10,000 foot view of my total workload. Here is what my task list looks like right now:
Screen Shot 2
Between my email “bucket,” task list and calendar, I’m now on top of a bomb-proof system for making sure I can focus deeply and maintain a very high level of productivity. And the peace of mind is golden. Never again will I wake up at 3:00 in the morning thinking about something I have to do!
Editor’s Note (by PHB)
One of the greatest features of QuietSpacing® is its malleability. The method was designed to be elegant and simple, meaning that people can incorporate its principles into the way they like to work, instead of the other way around.
If anyone would like more information on how QuietSpacing® works in the real world, or if you need a great intellectual property lawyer, feel free to contact Chris at Chris@ahmrt.com or (503) 459-4141!
© 2010, Paul H. Burton. All rights reserved.
Related posts:
- Case Study: Trapped in the Window Seat
- Show Me The Money: Prioritizing Tasks
- Stating The Should-Be-Obvious: E-mail Is Just Correspondence
