When systems crash
What I've done when none of this stuff works
The main message that I preach around here —and to be fair, I do this with everybody—is that the most important thing for personal progress is to take small steps consistently, inside of coherent systems, that gradually accumulate to real progress over time. Half of that equation is the system itself. What you want, in an intentional approach to life and work, is a system that you can trust and inside of which you feel like it’s totally natural to take those small steps consistently.
You might get the idea that the systems I use daily are fully optimized and at this point mainly run themselves, and that the purpose of the Substack is to teach you about the system and show you how to use it. The second part of that sentence is correct. The first part is absolute hogwash. I am here to tell you today in concrete terms that there is no such thing as a fully optimized system, and even if there were, it would not run itself – or run at all – if put to extreme amounts of stress.
Why systems sometimes crash
Every system is by definition highly connected, has a lot of parts, and makes assumptions about inputs. The inputs affect the parts and how they interact; sometimes those inputs shut the system down because the parts can’t keep up.
Take the various systems in your body, like the nervous or respiratory system. These are generally quite efficient, but they can crash when the inputs go outside of parameters. Your nervous system is optimized to work well under certain standard conditions, but we’ve all experienced times when our nervous systems are overloaded and we lock up – or literally seize up.
Every productivity system, GTD or otherwise, makes assumptions about inputs and will fail when those aren’t met. We know the five stages of GTD: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. I even have a nice little flowchart for the Clarify process that I refer back to a lot. But there is an underlying assumption that the pace at which you are working and the backlog of stuff that you have to work with, are manageable under your present abilities. And I think anybody in higher education will tell you that this pace and quantity can overload one’s circuits on a regular basis, every semester, sometimes every week, rendering the entire GTD process a nice idea, but impractical in reality.
I’ll be honest: Sometimes GTD is impractical in reality. In fact, what I’m going to tell you about now are some situations I’ve experienced where the typical implementation of GTD is just not going to work, and I have had to pivot to something else.
Grading overload
I’ve written before about how GTD helps me handle my grading workload and I’ve done a better job lately of streamlining my assessments so there is not so much grading in the first place to do. But still, every semester, more than once, I will get to a point where the grading piles up, I’ve got way too much of it to do in the time that I have, and my entire well-laid plans for intentionality crash because the whole system has been spammed by grading like a denial of service attack from my students1.
The last time this happened to me was about this time last year. For whatever reason, I had not been as productive getting grading done and returned to my students, causing a snowball effect where there was more grading coming in, but the grading was not coming out fast enough… I don’t need to explain this to an audience of academics, right? But it looks and feels a little like this:
It felt as though I was making a water balloon and had filled the balloon with way more water than it had intended to contain – and the spigot was still turned on. My entire productivity system, so finely honed and optimized, was becoming distended with the amount of inputs that it had. One morning I woke up and had this incredible sense of dread at the amount of stuff that wasn’t going to get done, both grading and otherwise.
Here is how I handled that situation and every other time this overload happens. It is a variation on the idea of simplify, breathe, and listen that I wrote about a while back.
First of all, just put the entire task management apparatus away. Don’t look at the Next Actions list, don’t look at the flowcharts, don’t look at the calendar, or any other part of it. Take GTD, or whatever your system is, completely offline and put it out of sight. Because if GTD were capable of handling this level of overload, it would have done it by now.
Pull out a standard stack of Post-it notes and a pen.
From memory, write down everything you think you need to do regarding grading. Write in your standard size handwriting and then stop when the post-it note is full. Importantly, when you fill up the post-it note, there could still be stuff that you need to get done, but leave it out.
That post-it note is your entire universe until further notice, until the stuff on it is complete.
Then clear your calendar for the rest of the day and perhaps even the day after that and get the stuff done on the post-it note. Cancel meetings. I have even canceled classes before to do this. Remember that for the time being there is no other task in your world except what’s on that 2x2 inch piece of paper.
Once this is done, do a weekly review to factory-reset your main system. This may be in the middle of the week and you might be doing another in a couple of days, but pretend this is your standard review time.
The main reason I think this approach works so well for me is that there is great power in constraint. My productivity system crashes under grading overload because the inputs have broken free of their constraints. So I am creating an emergency backup system that imposes helpful artificial constraints. By doing a brain dump from memory, rather than transcribing it off of my next actions list, I’m letting my brain subconsciously pick the small number of most-critical tasks that I really need to get done before I can think clearly again. By doing it on a Post-it note, I’m only allowing that list to be about five to six items long. And something about doing it with my hands, with a pen, slows me down, calms my mind, and allows me to think a little more clearly than I was able to a moment ago.
Children doing children things
I never truly understood the concept of a random variable until I had kids. Mine are all basically grown up at this point and more or less self-maintaining. But when they were little, things were very different. On any given day, the inputs into the family system could be perfectly normal and unremarkable. Or they could go completely off the rails.
When I first started at my current institution, my son was a year and a half old. We are fortunate to have an on-campus daycare center, which made it easy for me to drop him off in the morning and then pick him up on the way home and not be too far away in case something was needed. It turned out during my first year, “something was needed” on a regular basis. I would get a call from the center telling me that I needed to drop everything, come pick him up, and take him home2. And since I was the person nearest to the center and because my wife works full time, it was my responsibility to do this and spend the rest of the day with him at home.
Now, I certainly don’t mind spending the day with my son. However, during my first year at this institution, I was having to leave in the middle of the day to do this, almost once every other week. I have no resentment about that, but it’s a fact that it was very disruptive to my work, and I was falling behind and getting overloaded, a lot, during the first year at a new institution where I was trying to prove myself. People were beginning to ask why I was “never around” and why I was canceling meetings, office hours, even classes at times.
I want to say a bit about not only what I did during this time to stay intentional and focused, but also what I didn’t do.
What I didn’t do is give up on my system or on weekly planning. Former US president Dwight Eisenhower famously said that “plans are useless but planning is essential”. Despite knowing that on any given day my plans could be completely blown to smithereens, I still felt, and still do feel, that weekly planning is essential for at least a first approximation at being intentional. The idea of ditchability comes in here: It’s not good to go into life or work with no plans and it’s okay to renegotiate those plans in the moment if life goes sideways. In fact, you should plan on having to renegotiate your plans. And the systems that we create for intentionality need to be easy to reprioritize in the moment, based on inputs you didn’t plan for.
What I would do in these situations with my son is, first of all, be a dad. All that work that I’m not doing at school will still be there when my son has gotten home, had a snack and a nap and possibly medicine, and we’ve read a book together. No matter how supposedly urgent my co-workers believe their emails and meetings are, they are not more important than being present for my kids.
Secondly, it’s important to focus only on the things that can possibly get done. This is where contexts in your GTD system come in. For example, there is no point expending one calorie of energy looking at my @campus context if I am stuck at home. Instead, I need to be looking only at things that are campus-agnostic, like checking my email, or which can only be done at home. If you use energy levels as a context, then that can be an important filter as well because there is no point attempting high-energy or high-concentration tasks when the vast majority of your attention belongs to your kid.
Eventually these situations calm down. The child becomes well and is ready to go back to school and so are you. At that point, you can get back into your regular system and look at the full scope of what needs to be done and renegotiate all the things. Give yourself the grace and permission to do that. But in the moment, focus on the most important thing, which is your child, then doing what you can with what you have once they’re taken care of.
Speaking of bodily systems
Even if you don’t have kids, or somehow manage consistently to keep on top of your grading load, your physical health will at some point get compromised. This adds its own brand of complexity and overload to your system. For me, the most common compromise until recently3 has been sleep issues: Insomnia, sleep apnea, and the resulting follow-on physical issues that come with it.
I usually do my weekly reviews on Sunday afternoons, making time blocks and weekly goals and so forth. Then, for whatever reason4, I would often have a horrible night of sleep: Two or three hours of sleep at most, never very deep and often coming in 30-minute bursts with 60-minute awake times in between. Then my alarm would go off at 5:45am, and by 7:00am — having not even left the house yet — I was already totally exhausted, with a full day of classes and meetings ahead.
Having to do an entire day’s work while totally sleep deprived is a bit of a combination of being overloaded and having to take care of a sick child, except this time the sick child is you.
In these situations, first thing in the morning I will rearrange time blocks. For example, if I’m sleep deprived on a Monday, I’ll often look ahead to Tuesday. If I had planned a time block on Tuesday that doesn’t require heavy concentration (like filling out paperwork), I might swap it with a time block on Monday I had set aside for a higher-energy task (like grading)5. If I’m sleep deprived on a Monday, then there’s a fairly good chance I will sleep well on Monday night and be a little more peak-human on Tuesday, so it makes sense to just double up on the high-energy stuff when I’m a bit more recovered.
Secondly, as with the sick child situation, I’ll get clear with what is truly important to me, and operate in contexts that make sense for the moment, for example those involving low energy. I actually have a context called @brainless that I use to tag tasks that can be done in a zombie-like state. Sometimes I’ll take the factory-reset approach using a post-it note and a pen to write down just a small number of very simple tasks that don’t require much more than a lizard brain. When you’re sleep deprived, or if you’re sick with the flu and so forth, what your brain is craving is simplicity and rest.
It’s also okay in these situations to just do absolutely nothing. Go ahead and call off the whole day, go back to bed, and drink a lot of water. Just like with a sick kid, all the stuff that you need to do will still be there when you are better rested and in a better position to be fully present. And despite what other people say, their stuff is not more important than your physical health.
This is real life
Notice that none of the instances I described above are one-time singular events. They are recurring situations that any person who is living a real life in the world will experience, over and over again every year. You will get sick. You will lose sleep over something. You will get overloaded in your work. You will have surprise outside commitments that require serious and immediate renegotiations.
The Law of the Whole Person says that, since these imperfections are an inherent part of being alive, they cannot be separated from everything else, but instead your efforts at intentionality should allow for them. I think the common theme among the three situations I’ve described here is that you have to be aware of what’s important to you, not just what other people think is urgent for them, and be prepared to plan and act accordingly. Any system that doesn’t allow you to change the rules on the fly is not sustainable, because all these things are facts not only of academic life but just life in general.
Etc.
Tools: I’ve had to teach remotely this week because of winter weather, and the MVP of the situation experience was a modest, open-source command line tool called SCRCPY (”screen copy”). It lets you stream a live copy of the screen of an Android device into a window on the macOS desktop. With it, I could use my Android tablet as a whiteboard, appearing as a window on my laptop screen, then shared out to students with Zoom. It even works the other direction, I can control the Android device from my laptop via the live window. Very simple, no bloat or spyware, has a targeted single purpose and does that one thing well, and it’s free. That’s that kind of ed tech I can get behind!
Music: I have a goal this year of making 100 short recordings where I make up a bass line along with a drum track, or a backing track with instruments. I am trying to get better not only at playing music written by other people but also writing riffs and grooves. Here is the second of these records (out of 3 total so far, the fourth one is almost ready). It’s heavily inspired by the classic track “The Chicken”, hence the name.
Of course, it’s not my students’ fault that I have so much grading to do, it’s my fault, because I’m the one who assigned those tasks to myself.
Unfortunately, the director of the center at the time had no interest in actually working with children. Her first and apparently only reflex was to have the parent come pick the child up and would simply quarantine sick or misbehaving kids (often together) in a corner of an office until the parent arrived. That’s a whole ‘nother rant.
I’m happy to say that these issues are no longer omnipresent with me, and it’s primarily because of my diet. As I noted at one point here, I recently was on a weight loss program and lost 40 pounds, and once I lost the weight and cleaned up my diet, all of my sleep issues went away.
I do not believe in the “Sunday scaries” — I don’t get scared of work. It’s more a case of my mind getting a headstart on being “switched on” and I am unable to switch it off.
The smarter thing to do, which I eventually started doing, is avoiding working on high-concentration tasks or projects on Mondays altogether.
The post-it note trick is genius. Forced triage through physical constraint beats trying to mentally prioritze when you're already overloaded. I've used something similar with a rule where if a task list doesn't fit on one screen without scrolling, it's not actually a plan, it's anxiety disguised as organization.
Timely post, as this has been one of those weeks.
My MIL is hospitalized, so my SAHP partner is out of town supporting her (and took our only car), and I suddenly am managing all the household logistics that are usually his. On top of that, there's only two days of K-12 school this week, and one of them pivoted to virtual because of weather. Lots of triaging the plan to bare essentials and asking for help.