Happy Saturday!

Quick plug: Tana for Tasks Core (T4TC) launched!

My latest Tana for Tasks release, Tana for Tasks Core, is live. It is streamlined and simplified—if T4T2 seemed like too much to you, T4TC might be right up your alley. The price is “streamlined” too: only $37 regularly, and discounted to $29 for the launch celebration! Grab T4TC today! (Note that T4T2 users get T4TC for free automatically—no need to purchase it!)

Now back to your regularly scheduled newsletter….

There’s nothing new under the sun

If we’re doing something today, odds are we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. If we capture repeatable work and leverage it in the future, we save ourselves loads of time and effort.

Capturing recurrence is a timeless skill, on par with developing typing skills or learning to write clearly. Just like those skills, capturing recurrence improves the speed, accuracy, and quality of the work you do. But not only have most people not developed their capturing recurrence skills: most people are unaware that the skill of capturing recurrence exists.

The tools you use to capture recurrence are relevant only inasmuch as they are well-suited to the job. A checklist written on paper is captured recurrence. A 50-step automation built in Keyboard Maestro is captured recurrence. A life pattern you create in year 2045 in the app LifePatternsAGI is captured recurrence.

Yes, I made that last one up—but you take the point: Capturing recurrence mattered in the past, it matters now, and it will matter no matter what the future brings.

Productivity Bridges to the rescue!

As a refresher: Bridging is an action taken now to increase the speed, accuracy, or quality of future work. The result is a Productivity Bridge. A Productivity Bridge is an investment: spend a little time now building it, and save a lot of time later when you can skip the work that’s already done and get straight into action.

In this Weekend Upgrade, we’re going to talk about how we capture and leverage recurrence by building Recurrence Bridges.

💡 Capture Recurrence with Recurrence Bridges 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

In one sense, all Productivity Bridges are Recurrence Bridges. You can’t build a bridge for something you’ve never done before—you’d have no idea how to build it! For instance, you can’t automate a process that you don’t know how to do manually.

But for the sake of clarity, we’ll zero in on three particular types of recurrence: recurring tasks, procedures, and templates.

(1) Recurring Tasks

Recurring tasks are single tasks that recur daily, weekly, monthly, or some other regular period. Recurring tasks are Bridges at a fundamental level—you save time, effort, and mental bandwidth because you never have to re-capture them or remember them.

Recurring tasks are typically maintenance or preventative tasks—the day-to-day (or week-to-week, month-to-month, etc.) tasks that keep your work and life operating smoothly. They may also be prerequisite system tasks that facilitate other work you do during a day, week, month, or other time period.

Recurring tasks save us time and give us freedom, because we’re not tied down by the increasing residue of little things that we are not accomplishing.

(2) Procedures

Procedures are recurring processes, often in the form of a checklist. Like checklists, they can be “read-do” (use the list as you work) or “do-confirm” (work, then make sure you did everything). They improve our efficiency, effectiveness, and accuracy by making sure we’re doing exactly what we mean to be doing, and doing it correctly so we won’t have to redo it.

The word “procedure” carries a whiff of the corporate about it, but there’s a reason successful large organizations rely on procedures—it works. There’s nothing stopping us, as individuals, from leveraging the power of procedures.

The more we can get procedures into our lives—daily startups, daily shutdowns, the setup we do every time we run a Zoom meeting, etc.—the more we’ll ensure we don’t mess up and accidentally miss some of the things that we need to do.

(3) Templates

Templates are reusable work, lists, or information. Templates ensure that we never reinvent wheels, that we always start work half-done, never from scratch. Templates are the poster child for “Always Start in the Middle”.

There are three critical components of Templates: the Last Predictable Step, Placeholders, and Modular Variants.

The Last Predictable Step

The Last Predictable Step is the point up to which 100% of your work can be done in advance. You know everything about the reusable work up to the Last Predictable Step. You never need to do that work again.

It might be 90% of the body of an email you send to every new client. It might be 80% of a form you send out twice a week. Wherever that Last Predictable Step is, your template contains that exact work, already completed.

Placeholders

You can save time and effort even beyond the Last Predictable Step. If you don’t know the exact information required but you know the type of information required, your template can contain Placeholders for that information.

Placeholders, unsurprisingly, hold the place for information, but they’re also useful reminders to keep you accurate. You won’t forget to include the information if you have a placeholder.

In your 90%-done email for every new client, you’ll probably need placeholders for their name, email, and maybe a dollar amount of a proposal, their invoice, or a specific booking link for them.

Modular Variants

Often, people give up on creating Templates because there are just too many variables. But if you can capture those varieties into Modular Variants, your templates are back on track!

Modular Variants press your Last Predictable Step deeper into your Templates by capturing 100% of different varieties of the template. The more work that is 100% done when you start, the less work you have to do!

Imagine you have several different types of clients, and each gets a few different paragraphs in those emails you send out. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a template—it means you need Modular Variants: paragraphs that you can swap in or out as needed.

Common fears about capturing recurrence

We tend to avoid recurrence for a few reasons.

(1) We’re afraid recurrence will give us more work.

Recurring tasks, we fear, will pile up. They’ll distract us from what’s important. But here’s the thing: if they’re not important enough to do, don’t create them as recurring tasks. If they are important, you’re actually losing time by not doing them. Systems are slipping out of alignment, breakdowns that could be prevented aren’t being prevented. Recurring tasks fit the expression “a stitch in time saves nine”—do a little work now so you don’t have to do a lot of work later.

(2) We’re afraid recurrence will lock us into particular work.

Aren’t all these recurring tasks, procedures, and templates, tying us down to work and preventing us from focusing, in the moment, on what really matters? No—it’s the opposite. In fact…

If you don’t capture recurrence, recurrence will capture you.

You capture recurring tasks so you can do that work without having to recapture it. You capture procedures and templates so you can do that work better and faster in the future. If you don’t capture it, you’ll be tied down by work you missed that’s now beyond urgent, as well as work you’ve done sloppily that you have to do again. Capturing recurrence frees bandwidth for other work, it doesn’t restrict it.

(3) We’re afraid we’re wasting time by capturing recurrence.

Why take time to create a procedure or a template? If we press forward and focus on “real” work, we’ll get more done than if we stop to capture recurrence. Right? Wrong. You might “save” time in the moment, but you’re losing future time and wasting future effort—lots of it.

(4) We’re afraid our creativity will be constrained by our recurring structures.

How can I be creative if I’m following procedures and templates? Am I not trading creativity for efficiency? I’ll not go into a lengthy sermon here about how constraints facilitate creativity (though that’s definitely true and worthy of a sermon), but I will say this: Even if I do feel templates limit me when I use them, using them will make that work faster and leave me more time and effort to focus on free-form creative discovery, if that’s what I prefer.

There’s no conflict between productivity and creativity—and, honestly, given what we know about the habits of the great creative forces in history, I’ve never understood how we could slip into that assumption. Capturing recurrence in Recurrence Bridges doesn’t restrict creativity: it enables creativity!

How do I build a Recurrence Bridge?

The tools you use will vary, but while capturing recurring tasks is simple for most any task app, capturing procedures and templates is not a common feature. For me, all three of these Recurrence Bridge structures are built in Tana, using my Tana for Tasks Core task app. You can check out these quick YouTube overviews of how I use recurring tasks, procedures, and project templates.

Of course, building Recurrence Bridges is more than just the mechanics—you have to recognize the opportunities for recurring tasks, procedures, and templates! That’s something we cover in depth in the Action-Powered Productivity (APP) community, especially in Applied APP cohorts. Cohort 10 is underway and Cohort 11 hasn’t been announced yet, but joining the $9/mo. APP Pro community will give you access to past cohorts and discounts on future ones.

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 10 recurring tasks, 5 procedures, and 3 templates in your work and capture them.

Once you have them in your system, you’ll accomplish the associated work much more quickly in the future!

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 recurrence so it doesn’t capture you!

R.J.
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