Where does your hectic feeling come from?

It is the source of stress that people try to keep track of their job responsibilities in their minds without looking for an effective system (whether in paper or electronic form) to record them for constant scrutiny.

This is the interview with James Fallows, a journalist Fallows, of time management guru David Allen, to let us know why we are getting busier and talking about productivity improvements. In Thursday, we will post tips on time management: Time management in multiple project management. Let you in the workplace, in the face of multiple project management, will not fall into chaos.

People profile

David Allen (David Allen) worked as a writer, lecturer and consultant for more than 30 years. He summed up an agency-oriented "stress-free work" approach, called GTD (Getting Things done, or "handled"), which was widely sought after in the world. His book, "Fix: The art of stress-free work" (Getting things) has sold 1.5 million copies since 2001, and his Twitter account (@gtdguy) has more than 1.2 million followers.

James Fallows, a journalist Fallows, attended Allen's workshop and later tried to apply GTD to life. 8 years ago, Fallows wrote about it in the Atlantic Monthly. It is the source of stress that people try to keep track of their job responsibilities in their minds without looking for an effective system (whether in paper or electronic form) to record them for constant scrutiny. And the rationale for the Allen approach came from this. In the following, Fallows asked Allen about the way of life that is always online today. At the same time, Alan will also be imagining how our work efficiency will develop.

Did you get into a busy crisis?

Fallows (JF): I bet most of the people who read this discussion feel they have a "busy crisis" in dealing with emails, texting and 24x7 networking. Is it a new phenomenon that people are experiencing stress today?

David Allen (DA): Everyone has a busy time, there is no time to bend the brain. I just read that Bach has 20 children. Today's people complain: "I am too busy with my children." "So, take 20 kids and see what you're going to do?" If you are a musician, or a writer, your workload will always be more than others. So I don't know if it's going to be different for people who are engaged in open careers or have a wide range of interests.

There is another reason why many people feel at a loss, because people do not really want to be like our ancestors, truly in a crisis of survival mode. In the case of the crisis, it is interesting to note that the crisis creates a sense of serenity. Why? Because in a crisis, people have to integrate all the potentially relevant information, they must quickly make a decision, and then have to quickly trust their intuition to make judgments. They must act. They have to adjust again based on constant data. And they're very focused on some of the results, and they usually live--that's survival. Don't screw it up. Don't get killed.

But once you are out of the crisis, the world that you filter out of the survival model will come into your mind. Now you have to worry about how much tax deduction, worry about whether the car to change tires, worry about "I have a cold", worry about "broken printer broken." Now, the stuff that's pouring into your brain is switched to electronic form, and it's 7x24-hours uninterrupted.

To deal with this, you need to learn some executive skills and quickly decide how you can allocate limited resources. There is no new thing in the sun. What is different is just the number of people who need to make such an executive decision. You feel too busy, just that you underestimate the need for implementation.

No information to load this thing

JF: What about the amount of information we need to deal with today? Is this not a change in the degree to which a change is made?

DA: There's no information overload. If you had, you would have died in the library, not to mention the Internet.

In fact, the most abundant information in the world is the most relaxing place, that is nature. It has a variety of landforms, rich in detail, even in the form of input. In fact, if you want to go crazy, then get rid of all the information you receive: This is called sensory deterioration.

Nature contains a wealth of information, but the meaning of it is relatively scarce-for people, it may be berries, bears, snakes, storms, poisonous oaks, and the like. It is the scarcity of things that makes us change our behavior and make decisions. The problem with e-mail is that it's not just information, it's a need for potential behavior. Berries, snakes, and bears are information, but they are embedded information and you don't know what the specific information is. But email is not, it is characterized by the positive reinforcement of randomness (positive reinforcement), which is also the root of its addiction.

JF: Can you explain that again?

DA: Let's say you get an e-mail from your mom, or you get an e-mail from your boss-they all contain snakes, berries and bears, but they don't have a clear view, unless you read the email. Now, which of your brain is subconsciously thinking, "This might be useful, it's probably useful, it's not going to work, it might change what I'm doing, it's just that I don't want to decide ..." and then you're going to expand the idea to hundreds of times, even if it's not that much, it's going to be a hundredfold. "

The ability to make decisions is just like the muscles, and the things that are waiting to be decided will kill your energy. If you've been through a long time and you've made a lot of decisions, you won't have much willpower to deal with the rest of the day. So, we will take the anxiety pain (gnawing Sense of anxiety) with "there may be something more important than the one on hand". You don't remember what the more important thing is, but it's more important than what you're doing, so you're distracted. So, when you're at work, you worry about your family, and when you get home, you worry about your work--anyway, you're a Cao. No wonder your productivity has plummeted, and no wonder your stress is the same as the mountain.

What's the difference between now and the past? In addition to the frequency of this situation, there is nothing different. In the last 72 hours, you and I have handled more changes and priorities than your parents did in one months, or even a year. When I read the 1912, people complained about the phone and complained about the content of the emails today: "God, my quality of life is ruined"; Calling is just a formality, meaningless ";" The phone only brings distractions and distractions! " Read it as it is now. I heard a similar complaint in 1983 when Lockheed first approached these issues. In those years, if you had a schedule in your pocket, you would definitely be regarded as an obsession with productivity freaks. Unlike in the past, there were only a handful of people who experienced this tension, and now they are the majority of all walks of life.

And as the hierarchy of organizational structure becomes more and more flat, the "responsibility for execution" is more and more in all walks of life. In the army, how many decisions does a corporal make on today's battlefield? If I were a junior officer, caught in the "Black Hawk Fall" in the situation, CNN got a microphone poked in front of me to interview me, then what should I say what should not say? This is the USAF Military Academy (Air War Eton) Even the global political and environmental perception of what a general needs is taught to students. The more flat our society is, the more professionals we need to have the skills we have just talked about.

How to deal with busy situation?

JF: What happens when we deal with "busy" in the future? Because technology gets better? Or will it get worse because of overload? Or is that both?

DA: I think, always make you flustered, struggling to get rid of the "busy trap", its degree and depth will continue to increase, because more and more people will be affected by it.

What you are dealing with in your mind needs to be externalized-capture it in a way that you trust. You have to capture things that are potentially meaningful, you have to figure out what these things mean to you, and you have to sort them out into a mind map so you can look at the problem from a broader perspective. With the advent of better technology, I want to have a mind map that can comb through my mind maps. And then I might say, "Well, which mind map do I have to deal with now?" have relatives come over for dinner, do I have to deal with the family mind map first? Then you can continue to deal with "Oh, my niece is coming, she likes to eat this, she likes pink best, her dog barks ..." sort of thing. And then you put it aside and say, "How much is this mind map processed, and what is the next thought map?" Or: "Forget it, read some poetry." ”

These problems are actually old problems. But we can find better tools to make our brain comfortable.

Last words:

We always rely on the brain to record our tasks, but often in a busy crisis, at a loss, we will complain about the task too much or too much information, which can not be an excuse. David Allen tells us that things that are handled in the mind need to be externalized-captured in a certain way of trust. You have to capture things that are potentially meaningful, you have to figure out what these things mean to you, and you have to sort them out into a mind map so you can look at the problem from a broader perspective.