Time Management #4: Avoid the ‘Sisyphus Effect’ of Endless To-do Lists

Imprisoned in the ancient Greek underworld as punishment for his earthly crimes, Sisyphus was famously tortured by a never-ending task. He was condemned to roll a huge rock up a hill – only to watch it roll back down and have to start all over again.

Sound familiar?

Let’s have another look at the scenario from the beginning of this series:

So you start the day full of enthusiasm. You’re excited about a new piece of creative work and itching to put your ideas into action. Firing up your computer, the familiar stream of e-mails pours into your inbox, burying the ones you didn’t get round to replying to yesterday. Scanning through the list, your heart sinks – 2 of them look as though they require urgent action. You hit ‘reply’ and start typing a response to one of them… 20 minutes later you ‘come round’ and realise you’ve got sucked into the e-mail zone, and have been sidetracked by interesting links sent by friends, and getting involved in issues that aren’t a priority for you. You minimize the e-mail window and get back to your project…

After 15 minutes you’re really enjoying yourself, getting into your creative flow – when the phone rings. Somebody wants something from you. Something to do with a meeting last week. You rummage through the papers on your desk, searching for your notes. You can’t find them. Suddenly your heart leaps as you lift up a folder and find an important letter you’d forgotten about – it needed an urgent response, several days ago. ‘Hang on, I’ll get back to you’ you tell the person on the phone, ‘I’ll ring you back when I’ve found it’. You put the phone down and pick up the letter – this needs sorting immediately, but you remember why you put it off – it involves several phone calls and hunting through your files for documents you’re not sure you even kept. By now, you’ve only got half an hour before your first meeting and you’ve promised to ring that person back. Your design stares at you reproachfully. The e-mail inbox is pinging away as it fills up – already there are more messages than before you started answering them. Your enthusiasm has nosedived and the day has hardly begun. Creative work seems like a distant dream.

There are two big problems with this way of working:

1. You are at the mercy of interruptions

Whenever you sit down to focus on your own work, you never know when your concentration will be broken – by an e-mail, a phone call, a request from a colleague, or even by yourself, when you suddenly remember something important that you’ve forgotten to do. Almost as bad is as the interruptions is anticipating them – you can never really relax and focus, because you know you could be derailed at any moment.

When I trained in hypnosis one of the things I learned was that if you want to create amnesia, you should keep interrupting people and/or change the subject. The hypnotic explanation is that memory is dependent on your state of mind, so when you change your focus, you’re changing your state of mind – which makes it hard to remember what you were thinking about before. Think of a time when you were chatting to a friend in a restaurant or at a party and someone came over and interrupted you with a question – when they left, you both turned to each other and asked ‘What were we talking about?’.

The bottom line is that interruptions destroy your concentration. And loss of concentration = loss of creative work. If you’re not careful, you can end up in permanent ‘reactive mode’ – spending your time responding to others’ demands and all the things you ‘have’ to do instead of the one thing you really wanted to do today.

Let’s face it, the interruptions aren’t going away anytime soon. If they did, it would be a bad thing – it would mean you had no clients, colleagues, customers or collaborators. Obvious short-term fixes are to close your e-mail application, switch your phone onto answerphone mode and put a ‘do not disturb’ notice on your office door – as recommended in my previous post on how to Ring-fence your most creative time. But you can’t do this all the time – and it doesn’t solve your second big problem…

2. The ‘Sisyphus effect’ – a never-ending to-do list

The ‘Sisyphus effect’ is the result of endless to-do lists, which in turn are created by a constant stream of incoming demands. We start the day full of enthusiasm, but by the end of it, we’ve taken on so many new commitments that the to-do list is longer than when we started.

Productivity expert Mark Forster makes an excellent and (to me) surprising point about motivation:

What is the best way to motivate yourself for your daily work? Obviously, enjoying your work and having a clear vision are very important, but I don’t believe they are the most important things for keeping going during the daily grind. On the contrary, I believe that what gives us the most energy is the feeling of being totally on top of our work. If you are totally on top of something you have the energy to do it even if you don’t particularly like the work.

I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but on examining my own experience, I think he’s right – when I’m faced with a limited number of things to do in a day, even if they aren’t all particularly exciting, I generally feel motivated enough to get through them. But if I’m faced with a vaguely-defined, open-ended list of tasks, I can feel a sense of hopelessness and my energy drops. I can even find myself paralysed by inaction when faced with 3 or 4 really exciting pieces of work, if I don’t think there’s time to do them all.

You need to give yourself room to breathe!

Faced with the twin problems of unpredictable interruptions and the Sisyphus effect of never-ending tasks, you need to give yourself room to breathe, keep a clear head and stay focused on what you want to achieve. In short, you need to install a buffer between others’ demands and your response. Otherwise you’ll end up in permanently anxious and unproductive ‘reaction mode’.

On the other hand, you need to find a way of fulfilling your commitments and giving others what they need from you within a reasonable timescale. Otherwise you’ll quickly gain a reputation for unreliability and pay the penalty.

How can you manage this? I’ll present one solution in my next post – a surprising and counter-intuitive idea that has transformed my own working life…

Questions

• What effect do interruptions have on your creativity?
• Do you recognise the Sisyphus effect? What does it do to your motivation levels?
• What difference would it make to your working life if being derailed by others’ demands was the exception rather than the rule?
• What difference would this make to your creativity?