Happy Saturday!

Pursuit of “perfection”

There is a frustrating Catch-22 you can fall victim to if you’re not careful. I’ve encountered it often in my productivity coaching: “I’ll start using my system once it’s set up the way I want it” syndrome.

Nah, you won’t. Because your system will never be set up. Because the only way to set up a system is to use that system.

This is partly a psychological challenge—we fear system failure so we want it to be perfect and foolproof before we use it, and that’s understandable. But we’ve also been misled. GTD promises us a system we can trust in advance, but when we build a GTD system, it turns out we can’t trust it if we don’t solve the Inbox bottleneck and overcome the Weekly Review hurdle. Our lack of proficiency with GTD undermines our trust in it.

The fact is, “trust your system so you can use it” is backward. You use a system so you can trust it.

Which means we’ve unraveled the Catch-22. You must use it before it’s set up the way you want it. But aren’t we replacing one paradox with another? How can we use something we haven’t set up yet?

One step at a time

You build a productivity system the same way you adapt an existing one: One piece at a time. One workflow at a time. You solve little problems—many of them “just in time,” as you encounter them—and then your little solutions accumulate into bigger ones.

The term I use for these little solutions is Productivity Bridges. Bridging is an action taken now to increase the speed, accuracy, or quality of future work. The resulting Bridge might be a template, or an automation, or a recurring task reminder, or even a bigger-picture strategy.

Here’s an example. A lot of people have trouble handling email. Some emails contain tasks, some emails are themselves tasks (e.g., “Respond to this email”), some emails contain reference material, and so forth. If you haven’t built the Productivity Bridges required for every variety of email you receive, then you don’t know how to capture those tasks or the reference material quickly and easily. Your email is going to overwhelm you.

But if you build a small Bridge to capture a “Respond to this email” task, another to create a task that points to an email, and another to capture an email as reference material for a project, suddenly your email problems go away. Three little Bridges—in my own system a simple combination of Apple Mail, Hookmark, Keyboard Maestro, and Tana—and you’ve solved a major bottleneck.

Solve little problems, and big problems will go away.

💡 Link Small Bridges to do BIG Work 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

Eight Bridges working together

As an illustration of this “work small to solve big problems” concept, the rest of this newsletter will model a workflow I use every week.

I’m the Director of Liturgical Music at a nearby church, and I prepare the worship aid every week. At first, this took an hour per week, because I was—of necessity—doing it from scratch.

After about three weeks, though, I had enough of a sense of the work that I could capture it in a reliable template. Immediately the job went from an hour to about 30 minutes. In time, that template became several templates, optimized for different seasons of the year and occasional Holy Days.

And then, as the workflow surrounding the template locked in, I built another seven small Bridges to make it as simple as possible. I now do worship aids in an average of 12 to 15 minutes, saving 45 minutes per week over doing them from scratch. That’s 39 hours in a year.

Tools in the workflow

MacBook Pro, Tana, Hookmark, Adobe InDesign, Keyboard Maestro, Adobe Distiller, Arc (browser), favorites in Finder

The worship aid Bridges

Bridge 1: Recurring Task

The first Bridge is what reminds me to create the worship aid that week. This Bridge is in Tana and uses the #recurring task setup from my Tana for Tasks 2 (T4T2) template.

Bridge 2: Hookmark links to templates in InDesign

The recurring task also brings with it Bridge 2, a set of links to Adobe InDesign files. Each link points directly to a template for a specific church season or Holy Day. I click the one I need, and I’m immediately in the correct template, ready to work. No time wasted searching for the right file.

Bridge 3: Template file in InDesign

My templates contain 100% of the reusable work up to the Last Predictable Step—in this case, the structure of the Mass. Each different template is a Modular Variant of the main, which allows me to capture 100% of the reusable work in the variants—certain readings and responses, and some of the music. The rest of each template is made up of Placeholders, which hold a spot for the type of work required when I don’t know in advance what the actual work will be.

Bridge 4: Booklet print setting presets

In InDesign, I have a preset for the specific booklet-type printing required for the worship aids.

Bridge 5: Automation for printing to PostScript file

This is a Keyboard Maestro automation that chooses all the right options to create the PostScript file, convert it to PDF, and take me to where I need to be to send the final product to the church office manager for printing. (Note that, in Adobe InDesign, you can print directly to PDF in the normal Print dialog, but weirdly not in the Print Booklet dialog.)

Bridge 6: “In” folder watched by Adobe Distiller

PostScript files are placed in a folder called “In”, which is an Adobe Distiller watched folder. When a file lands there, Distiller automatically converts it to PDF.

Bridge 7: Messenger set as Ctrl-1, Cmd-8

In my Arc browser, Messenger is set as the 8th pin in the 1st space, which means keyboard shortcuts (trigged by the Bridge 5 Keyboard Maestro macro), can take me directly there.

Bridge 8: “Out” folder set as a favorite in Finder

The “Out” folder, where Adobe Distiller drops the converted PDF, is set as a favorite in my Finder app. That way I can immediately grab the file and send it to the office manager.

Bridge conclusion

None of these eight Bridges is complicated, but if I had tried to build them all at once—back when I started creating the worship aids—I would have made a jumble of it. Figuring out the flow manually, and then building little Bridges for individual aspects of that flow, created a seamless set of linked Bridges that combine into an efficient workflow.

This is how you should approach all of your workflows. Don’t worry, at first, about big overarching ideas or unifying patterns. As you build the little Bridges that increase the speed, accuracy, and quality of your workflows, those patterns will emerge. Your little Bridges will reveal how they can themselves be Bridged together into system-wide solutions.

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) Identify one workflow that would benefit from a few little Bridges like those in my worship aid workflow.

What tools can you use to build those bridges? Once you answer that, build those Bridges!

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:

If you wait until the “big bridge” is built, you’ll never get where you’re going.

R.J.
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P.S. Two BIG announcements!!

1. The Action-Powered Productivity Digital Conference speaker schedule is set, and I’m so excited! Lukas Kawerau (aka CortexFutura) kicks us off on Thursday, August 31, leading into a slate of speakers that includes Ev Chapman, Ramses Oudt, Fei-Ling Tseng, Tracy Winchell, Fis Fraga, Keli Fancher, Kara Monroe, and Eric Ho between August 31 and September 2. All live presentations are FREE in the Action-Powered Productivity community. Get FREE access and RSVP here: https://rjn.st/app-digital-conference-free​
2. Tana users—especially beginners or those who need a skills review: My first live Tana Jump Start session is next weekend, August 19 & 20. Tana Jump Start is a one-weekend intensive workshop to make Tana work for you. We learn and drill Tana fundamentals and next-level skills, and tackle common Tana challenges (as well as your specific Tana challenges). 7 hours, 4 live sessions, all recorded if you need to do the work later. Only 9 slots remain as I write this, so sign up now: https://rjn.st/tjs​