How To Build Good Work Habits By Reducing Friction And Sparking Joy

Productivity writers often talk about reducing friction in workflows — essentially, how to be more efficient.

But what about having fun with work? Building elements of fun into your work not only makes work more enjoyable in the moment. It also supports good habits needed for long-term success.

Here’s how to do it.

Photo credit: AnastasiaDudka

Reducing friction

Let’s start with friction. An excellent way to support a positive habit is to reduce drag, release any “adhesions” — as a physical trainer might put it— and otherwise smooth out the system. 

For example, if you want to capture ideas more consistently, you need a quick and simple system, requiring the least amount of effort. Cal Newport recommends a simple text file on your computer — one that is always open — where you can type in ideas at once. There’s no fiddling around to find the right app, formatting text, tagging — or other forms of drag found in many capture systems.

To reduce friction when capturing tasks, I use OmniFocus. This app is admittedly more complicated to set up and manage. But my capture system is easy to use. For ideas and observations — anything I want to reflect on, potentially write about, or otherwise build on creatively — I use a combination of Drafts and Roam Research, a system I will elaborate on later.

My process feels frictionless. But more than that, it’s fun to use. And that, I realized, is what makes these systems work. So let’s look at the positive aspect of building workflows.

Sparking joy

Organizational guru Marie Kondo’s famously advises people to tidy spaces by pondering whether each possession “sparks joy.” If it doesn’t evoke positive feelings, people should gratefully discard the object — it no longer serves its purpose. And keeping the item dilutes the pleasure we experience from other possessions we value, by cluttering our closet, for example.

In designing our workflows, why not also ask, “does this process spark joy?” If not, maybe it’s time to redesign or replace it, or discard it altogether — like that sweater you haven’t worn in ten years.

Building positive habits

In Making Ideas Happen, Scott Belsky says, “the design of your productivity tools will affect how eager you are to use them. Attraction often breeds commitment.”

Thinking this way also supports good habits. In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that good habits are characteristically painful in the short-term and pleasurable only in the long-term. (Think: exercise) The opposite is true for bad habits. (Think: eating Doritos while watching YouTube on the couch). 

Thus, cementing a good habit requires us to strengthen an association between the good behavior and the long-term reward. But in the short-term — to build the habit initially — we must find ways to experience pleasure and associate it with the new behavior.

Workflows for good habits

So for our work, build in a little pleasure into what might otherwise be a drab but important task needed for long-term success. Don’t think only about reducing friction. Find ways to make the task enjoyable, if ever so slightly.

One way to do this is with technology: using Siri, Shortcuts automations, scripts on a Mac — even formulas in Excel. When we see technology magically accomplish something tangible, it’s immediately rewarding — do I dare say, possibly even fun?

Sparks can shine outside the digital world too. Take pleasure in writing with a nice pen in a quality notebook. Find running shoes you like, ones you will enjoy lacing up as they launch you onto your feet. Maybe splurge on a hardcover edition to get you reading that challenging book.

So try to build in some fun — things that may take time to set up but will create happiness — and ultimately increase productivity by supporting a positive habit.

How have you incorporated elements of joy and fun into your work?

How To Quickly Capture Ideas Into OmniFocus

Here’s my system for getting ideas into my OmniFocus task management system.

On my Mac, I use this keyboard shortcut:

To get this Quick Entry box:

I don’t have to complete all the fields. Rather, I type just enough to remember the idea, hit Return, and my task goes to the OmniFocus inbox. I can later elaborate on it, create a project and next actions, and so on. Similarly, if I want to capture supporting material along with the idea, I use the clipper shortcut:

This opens a Quick Entry box along with the highlighted text, URL, or email — the text or link is captured in the Note field. I also use this method for linking back to To-Dos in Basecamp. Very useful!

Away from my Mac, I dictate or type text into Drafts on my iPhone, then send it to OmniFocus as an action. Alternatively, I use Siri to dictate a Reminder, which gets synced with OmniFocus. I process the task when I return to my Mac.

No One Has Been Paying Attention For A While Now: What Recent Experiences With Remote Juries Tell Us About Our Distracted World

In Court, Everett Collection

Some California courts are holding jury trials during the coronavirus pandemic. Logistics have been a difficult challenge. But the biggest problem — one far more consequential than any technical issue and more pervasive than what happens in legal proceedings — is many people’s inability to pay attention anymore.

In one case, a juror left his computer to attend to food on the stove. Another juror could be seen lying in bed. Jurors switched focus away from court proceedings to other screens, kids, pets, and whatever else was happening at home.

In other words, jurors did what everyone does during video meetings. Juror distraction is merely a special case of a general problem.

Here’s what we can do about it.

(Link to full essay, originally published by The Daily Journal, September 11, 2020)

Minding The Gap: Why Great Storytellers Read

Beginning artists — all who create for a living — must first recognize that their starting work is not as good as the work they admire, the mature product made by others. To heighten this perception — and to replenish the drive to improve throughout a career — writers must keep writing. And they must read.

Photo: Ivan Ives. Reader, Reading Room, Mitchell Building, State Library of New South Wales, 29.10.1943, Pix Magazine, part of the ACP Magazines Ltd. photographic archive, ON 388 / Box 006 / Item 091

Recounting his journey as a storyteller, Ira Glass says:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. The first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. Okay? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has the ambition to be good, but it’s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you … You can tell that it’s still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people, at that point, they quit.

In her book on the business of writing, Jane Friedman advises:

If you can’t perceive the gap — or if you haven’t gone through the “phase” — you probably aren’t reading enough. Writers can develop good taste and understand what quality work is by reading writers they admire and want to emulate.

In his memoir, Stephen King describes a typical day — intense writing and editing in the morning, followed by reading in the afternoon and evenings, when he hones his sense for language and character. Reading fuels his writing. He admonishes the young writer: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write.”

For creators, the gap is persistent. The skill of the masters is elusive. The old work continues to arouse and enlighten — to enrich the new work. It cannot be attained or surpassed.

As we improve in our craft, our taste improves too. The finishing tape keeps moving, and we can never break through it. Someday, we might finally think our work is no longer “sort of crappy.” But we’ll never be satisfied either. That’s what keeps us learning.

John Henry Reviews Documents

Integreon has an interesting discussion on a recent study pitting humans against machines.  No this isn't about supercomputers and Jeopardy! It's something much practical:

The underlying study by a trio of recognized experts in cognitive science, information management, and e-discovery, Herb Roitblat, Anne Kershaw, and Patrick Oot, is described in detail in their journal article, Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery: Computer Classification vs. Manual Review, published in the January 2010 issue of theJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology [link available at the Posse List].

It raises - and partially answers - the important question whether we are approaching a breakthrough in terms of the capability of automated review tools to render ‘consistent’ and ‘correct’ decisions, as measured against an existing standard, while classifying documents in a legal discovery context. The study pitted two teams of contract attorneys against two commercial electronic discovery applications to review a limited set - 5,000 documents - culled from a collection of 1.6 million documents. The larger collection had been reviewed two years earlier by attorney teams in connection with a Second Request relating to Verizon’s acquisition of MCI. The authors’ hypothesis was that “the rate of agreement between two independent [teams of] reviewers of the same documents will be equal to or less than the agreement between a computer-aided system and the original review.”

The study set out to test whether an automated review tool would show similar levels of agreement with classifications made by the original reviewers as did the two contract teams. The two re-review teams agreed with the original review on about 75% of document classification decisions; the commercial automated applications fared slightly better.

There a number of obvious (and not so obvious) flaws in the study, which the Integreon post nicely lays out. My first reaction is that "rate of agreement" is a lousy benchmark, since the measure conflates too many significant variables.

I'm also fascinated by this quest for the document review holy grail: total automation. Contrary to lean principles, these managers seek to automate the process without fully understanding how it works manually. Just exactly how and why do review document reviewers make different calls?

And what about a hybrid approach?

A potential hybrid model would have senior attorneys review representative sets of documents and the tool analyze features of the reviewed documents to identify and auto-tag “like” documents in the larger collection. As the review proceeded, the tool would ‘percolate’ to the review team’s attention subsets of documents from the collection dissimilar from those already reviewed. Based on the reviewers’ decisions as to these documents, the tool continues to apply tags to more of the collection.

The attraction of this approach is two-fold: human attorneys are still making initial determinations but the application magnifies the effect of their determinations by propagating decisions to similar documents throughout the larger collection. It has been suggested that, in the proper context, this approach would permit a single attorney to “review” a vast collection of documents in several hours. A test of that claim is warranted and, if the premise were proved, it would be impressive and could directly influence the increased use of automation in review, even if, for all the reasons stated above, wide adoption of such processes would take a while.

As a lawyer who likes to tightly control processes, I'll admit the attraction of this approach. As one moves down the hierarchy in any litigation team, deep knowledge of the client and issues is inevitable lost. If technology can leverage the knowledge of the most engaged, the better the result, theoretically.

(cross-posted at California E-Discovery Law)

Does Automation Diminish Our Basic Skills?

Photo Credit: Rui Caldeira

Pilot Patrick Smith has another interesting article on cockpit automation and flight safety, something this blog has considered before.

Has automation reduced pilots' basic "stick and rudder" skills?  His answer:  "Probably, yes."

But the more interesting discussion is how automation has grafted a new technological skill set onto basic flying:

[A]utomation is merely a tool. You still need to tell the airplane what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. There are, for example, no fewer than six different ways that I can program in a simple climb or descent on my 757, depending on preference or circumstances. The automation is not flying the plane. The pilots are flying the plane through this automation.

A fitting metaphor for other knowledge work.  Technology hasn't changed what we do, as much as changed how we interface with machines to get it done.  The tools have changed.  The work, fundamentally, has not.

Of course, interfaces are complicated and can even add to our overall workload:

If you ask me, the modern cockpit hasn't sapped away a pilot's skills so much as overloaded and overburdened them, in rare instances leading to a dangerous loss of situational awareness.

A danger for all of us.  Alarms, notifications, badges, and our ever-expanding landscape of electronic inputs, distract us from real work.  Whether that's landing a plane, or delivering a project.

This has given birth to a meta-skill: the ability to sift, filter, and organize the elements of our work.  Our first challenge, then, is to maintain situational awareness in a complicated world.

Update:  Interesting post on maintaining situational awareness in e-discovery.