Happy Friday!

The phone rings…

You’re deep in thought—or, you were, until the phone rang—powering your way through a report that was due three days ago. You’ve gotta finish before 5:00, and it’s 4:34. You can’t afford another interruption, because—

The phone rings again.

—because it always takes you 20 minutes to get your mind refocused on work after interruptions. You never remember what you were doing, or what you need to do next, and to add to that, you’re always struggling to remember what the damn phone call was about—

Speaking of phone calls… it’s still ringing.

You have to answer it. That’s part of your job, too. And it’s not going to ring indefinitely. How are you going to save your place in this report—not just the physical spot on the page, but your thoughts, your plans? And after the call, how are you going to remember—

Ring.

You pick up the phone.

Maybe ChatGPT will write the report for you….

Twenty seconds

Short-term memory lasts about 20 seconds, 30 at most. It is distinct from working memory (at least, some scientists make that distinction). Working memory lasts longer, because your attention is focused on the work. Your short-term memory is being constantly reinforced.

Unfortunately, once the phone rings (or another interruption occurs), you’re on the clock. It’s not working memory anymore, because your attention is elsewhere. You have about 20 seconds to capture your current thinking—what you just did, what you intend to do next—and save it so that you can pick it up effortlessly after the interruption is over. And if it’s a phone call, short-term memory isn’t your only time constraint. The phone isn’t going to ring forever!

When the call ends, you again have twenty seconds of memory to capture the relevant tasks or ideas from the call before you forget what they are. Or, worse, before you start working on tasks from the phone call instead of the work that was originally interrupted. Which means you need quick capture skills for the content of the call, too.

Capture & Surface

In Weekend Upgrade 35: Surface Tension, I suggested that capture is “too easy.” Jotting an idea down is so easy that we never see 95% of what we’ve captured again. It’s in a pile of notepads, or lurking in a file we’ll never open. I asserted that if we’re going to get any use out of our systems, we need to capture not only the task or idea, but also the information needed for it to resurface to our attention—and we need to do that at the moment of capture.

But it can be time-consuming to capture everything needed for surfacing. It might need a date attached to it, or to be assigned to the correct Bin or Project. It’s not quick to capture something and be certain we’ll see it again.

Are we at an impasse? Is it impossible to capture, within twenty seconds, everything we need to efficiently resurface work to our attention?

💡 Build a Capture Bridge 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

If you’ve followed my last few newsletters (36, 37, 38, 39), you know that Productivity Bridges are the result of an action we take now to increase the speed, accuracy, or quality of future work.

Our goal here is to improve the speed and accuracy of capture, so a Capture Bridge is the solution. The question is: What kind of Bridge? And what tools are we using to build it?

Those answers depend on your personal toolkit, but here’s what I do.

Capture Open Loops using Tana + Keyboard Maestro

I use Tana as my primary productivity driver. My tasks, projects, and relevant notes are all in Tana. Which means that just about anything I capture needs to find its way into Tana.

But I’m not always working in Tana, and the time it takes to get to Tana, open Quick Add, type a task or capture an open loop, tag the node appropriately, and fill out any necessary fields can easily exceed the amount of time available.

That’s where Keyboard Maestro comes in.

Let’s imagine I’m writing a newsletter in Craft and I get a phone call (one of the rare non-spam calls from someone I actually know). I trigger a Keyboard Maestro macro that prompts me for what I’m working on and what I intend to do next with that work (which I can even dictate by voice, for speed), activates Tana, opens my Quick Add popup, and uses the “Tana Paste” format to create an Open Loop in my system. And since I have a live search of existing Open Loops in my Tana sidebar, as well as an end-of-day search for undone tasks from that day (#open loop is an extension of #task, so those show up too), I’ll never lose my place in that work.

But it only took me 10 seconds to capture.

What does that look like?

Here’s the Keyboard Maestro macro itself. You’ll note it does what I listed above: prompts me for the Open Loop info (what I am working on and what I intend to do next), then activates Tana and its Quick Add popup, then uses “Tana Paste” to insert the task. The details of the Keyboard Maestro macro would vary depending on the apps you use, but the basic mechanics—and the effect you’re aiming to achieve—would be the same.

Here’s what the process looks like in a quick video. You’ll note the time it takes in this video (which includes a mistype and correction!) is only 11 seconds—well within our time constraints. (Also, if you ever wondered where I write these newsletters, now you know: “Often in my car outside my kids’ Occupational Therapy sessions.”)

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Capture any task, fast

The principle at play here extrapolates to any kind of task you might want to capture. From anywhere in my system, I can capture any task, triggered by a keystroke and requiring only as long as typing the task to complete.

And once I have one Keyboard Maestro macro built, building another similar one is as simple as duplicating the first and tweaking it. This Open Loop capture macro took me less than five minutes to adapt from the more generic “Add task to Tana” macro I had already built. There’s potential for exponential time savings here—each new macro takes less time to build, but the accumulation of specific macros saves more and more time. Even small Productivity Bridges, when applied to work you do often, have a surprisingly powerful impact on your overall productivity.

Fast Capture isn’t a “vanity metric”

I used “the phone is ringing” as the lead-in example, but there are millions of ways to be interrupted. If you can, in a few seconds, capture the Open Loops those interruptions cause—what you were doing, what you plan to do next—it will save you minutes of time coming back to that work. And if you also capture, in mere seconds, any tasks the interruptions create, you are far less likely to fall victim to the Urgency Illusion and do that work now “just so you won’t forget it.”

Capturing fast, with surfacing requirements attached, is not a “vanity metric.” I’m not “proud” of how fast I can get tasks in my system. I work more efficiently, and I save time—time I can give to my loved ones at the end of the day!

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) What is your process for capturing Open Loops when your work is interrupted?

How could you streamline and/or automate it to take less than 20 seconds? (Alternatively, if you don’t have a process at all, build one!)

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:

Capture fast, but capture everything you need, too!

R.J.
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P.S. The first ever Action-Powered Productivity Digital Conference will be Thursday, August 31 through Saturday, September 2, 2023. We have nine impressive speakers lined up, and all their live presentations are free to attend! (Replays and the follow-up Build Sessions require an APP Pro membership or a one-time paid conference registration.) More details will come, but you can already join the community space (for free) and see who’s speaking!