Happy Saturday†!

🚨 Limits

One reason we build productivity systems is to reduce limits on our ability to work. Time limits us, so we leverage our time. Chaos overwhelms us, so we organize our tasks and projects. Anxiety freezes us, so we balance the anxiety of work with the comfort of rest and leisure—and build more comfort into our work.

In this newsletter, I will focus on two specific limitations—not enough time and not enough energy—and explore ways to work through those challenges.

Four Thousand Weeks

The book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman presents a realistic assessment of productivity workflows. No matter how impressive our system is, we’ll still face hard choices about what to do or what not to do. And we only have about 4,000 weeks—80 years—in which to make those choices.

While that may sound bleak, Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting book. Accepting limitations is paradoxically freeing, because the reality is this: we’ll always have limitations, and we’ll always face hard choices. Our goal is not to create a productivity system that eliminates choices. Our goal is to create a system that embraces limitations and allows us to work without being overloaded.

💡 To do more, do less 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

We all recognize the problems of not enough time and not enough energy. We face them every day. While you can’t create more time or manifest more energy, you can leverage Capacity Constraints to get work done with the time and energy you have.

What are Capacity Constraints?

Picture a bathtub. Water comes in through the faucet and goes out through the drain. If the drain is plugged, the bathtub will overflow. But even if the drain is flowing, excessive water from the faucet could still overwhelm the drain’s outflow and flood the bathroom.

Our normal approach to keeping the bathtub from overflowing is to make sure the drain is not plugged. Which is to say, any good productivity system must ensure that its output is consistent and flowing. (Ignore, for the sake of the analogy, that the water then goes to the sewer—our work is not sewer-bound!)

But, you can also affect the water level in the bathtub by managing the input. That is what I mean by Capacity Constraints. We restrict our lists so that our system is never overwhelmed—and we’re never overwhelmed either.

Capacity Constraint Solutions

Because nothing is higher leverage than a high-quality Agenda, I’ll use your Agenda as the primary example in this newsletter. Capacity Constraints help you create consistently high-quality Agendas.

Time constraints: Set daily intentions in an Agenda

By “set intentions,” I don’t mean anything esoteric or philosophical. An Agenda is simply an answer to the question “What do I intend to do with my coming day?”.

Many people go into tomorrow without the slightest sense of what they intend to do. Since you’re reading a productivity newsletter, though, your problem is more likely to be overloading your Agenda. This is where Capacity Constraints can be powerful.

Our biggest mistake when we fall behind or feel overwhelmed is scrambling. “Let me just schedule everything for tomorrow,” we think. But of course this is destined to fail. Having a lot we need to accomplish does not magically mean more time will exist.

Instead, be realistic about the time capacity of your Agenda. How much can you actually accomplish in the coming day? Unexpected interruptions will arise—be realistic about that, and don’t pack in more than you can reasonably complete. If you like having a little extra planned, in case you get ahead, that’s fine. But make sure to note that they’re “stretch goals,” so those tasks don’t themselves become distractions.

My Agenda capacity is around 3 to 4 events (appointments, meetings) and 10 to 15 tasks. Take a big grain of salt there, though: very large or very small tasks can dramatically alter that capacity, as can very long or very short events. Every day brings unique challenges, but over time I’ve gotten good at recognizing what I’m likely to accomplish and what I’m not.

You’ll get good at it too, if you enforce Capacity Constraints. When you set each day’s Agenda, review it with the perspective of “time realism.” Will you actually be able to accomplish all the work, or are you setting yourself up to fail?

Then, over the course of a few weeks, review your planning process to see if you’re truly realistic about your time. Has work been building up? Do you feel even further behind? Or is important work mostly getting done?

Energy constraints: Organize your Agenda to leverage energy

When you assemble an Agenda, start with your events. What’s on the calendar at specific times? Add those first. That will (hopefully) leave gaps throughout the day into which you can slot some tasks.

But which tasks? One helpful heuristic is to consider when, during the day, your energy is best suited to particular types of work. Then you can leverage Capacity Constraints based on the level of energy required for different work.

For me, I need deep mindful work in the morning, but relatively mindless work in the afternoon. That means I can do creative, energy-intensive tasks early in the day, but if I try to do that in the afternoon, I have little hope of accomplishing them. But I can often review or edit that morning work in the afternoon. It’s a different kind of work that requires a different type of energy, and knowing that helps me better plan what work fits where in my day.

In productivity, “energy” doesn’t just mean “high energy.” It’s also important to track what kinds of work require very little energy from you. Those low-energy tasks are often critical for maintaining your system and improving the quality of your work overall. But if they’re supplanting high-energy work because you’re doing them at the wrong time, they may do more harm than good.

Rest and recovery are critical for your productivity, too. Rest is productive. If the quality of your work will suffer because you have no energy or focus remaining at all, better to reschedule work until you can do it well.

Capacity constraints improve quality

To keep things clear above, I focused specifically on your Agenda. But capacity constraints apply everywhere in your system.

Have you ever abandoned a system because the sheer quantity of projects became overwhelming? Have you left captured ideas unprocessed because there were too many of them? Have you compiled a “To Read” list with so many books that you stopped looking at the list altogether?

Let’s take the To Read list as an example of how Capacity Constraints will improve other lists.

Say you set a constraint: “I will never let this To Read list be longer than 8 books.” The number shouldn’t be arbitrary—pick a quantity that represents a month or two of reading for you. Now, every time a new book interests you, ask yourself, “Does this book belong in my top eight?” If so, demote book 8 to a catch-all repository of books you might read. If not, put the new book on the Might Read list. This Might Read list will look a lot like your original, out-of-control To Read list, except you’ll only go there if you exhaust your new To Read list. It’s not something you’ll review regularly, so it’s less likely to overwhelm you.

This is the key point: because you are always comparing your interest in new books with the existing list, the quality of your To Read list, and its value to you, will increase over time.

Now let’s tie that back to the Agenda. When you observe realistic time and energy capacities as you create your Agenda, the quality of your Agendas will increase day after day. It will always be a reflection of your most important work, and less important work will give way to more important work over time.

How can Tana help?

I use Tana to create my daily Agenda, drawing on the task system I teach in my Tana for Tasks course.

I combine that daily practice with weekly and monthly reviews. Those reviews primarily examine the capacity of other lists in my system. How many projects are lingering at various phases of progress? How many tasks have accumulated in my Available or Delayed Horizons? If I enforce Capacity Constraints on those lists (maybe not hard limits, but a general sense of what’s too much), the overall quality of my system will improve.

Many tools will work for managing the capacity of your task lists. But Tana does it exceptionally well, provided your system is well-organized and you have recurring tasks to prompting regular reviews. That’s something I’m happy to help you build in Tana or your tool of choice. Just reach out to me!

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Prepare an Agenda for your next day with specific focus on time and energy constraints.

After a week, review this process and see how that practice has improved your work!

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

You can only do one thing at a time anyway. Don’t schedule twenty!

R.J.
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† Apologies for the day’s delay this week. My wife’s grandmother passed away last Sunday, so there were family and funeral obligations.

P.S. I had originally intended to focus on capacity constraints for knowledge as well, but it became clear it was out of scope for this newsletter. I’ll return to that topic in a future edition!