Happy Saturday!

Quick Plug

I just launched the Early Bird registration for Cohort Eleven of Applied Action-Powered Productivity. This will be the final cohort of Applied APP.

I’ve been writing a productivity book for the last few months. Once it’s complete—aiming for the end of 2023!—there will be more room in my community for shorter, more specifically directed group sprints in place of longer, comprehensive cohorts. That’s why Cohort Eleven will be the last one.

Because you follow my writing, I thought you might be interested in joining the final cohort. It will be the last iteration of my Action-Powered Productivity content prior to the book’s completion, and all Cohort Eleven participants will receive Special Thanks in the book. You can save 15% if you register before November 12. The final cohort starts November 24. (NOTE: If you’ve attended past cohorts or purchased one of my Tana course/template products, see my other email for a further discounted link.)

Whether you’re interested in the cohort or not, I will of course keep you updated about the book!

Now back to our regularly scheduled newsletter….

A dangerous assumption

I talk a lot about efficiency. My Productivity Bridges approach makes your work faster, more accurate, and higher quality by automating manual work, building templates, capturing recurring tasks, creating procedures, and more.

There can be danger in efficiency, though. What happens if you invest time making templates and automations to become hyper-efficient, but then you discover you’re doing the wrong work?

So much for that investment. It is wildly unproductive to optimize workflows that accomplish the wrong work. Which means we have to grapple with this question: How can we be sure we’re doing the right work?

💡 Establish what’s Important using Goals and Strategies 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

To keep the scope of this newsletter focused, I’ll put aside the question of what types of Goals are useful and what types aren’t (though you can expect a future newsletter on this!).

Instead, we’ll explore how goals, and the strategies you devise to complete those goals, relate to the importance of your work.

Tactics and Strategy

To define strategy, let’s talk chess. Two key concepts to playing good chess are tactics and strategy. Here are a few tactics:

(1) Fork

One piece attacks multiple targets simultaneously. The fork is most often associated with the knight, but can be executed by any piece, or even pawns.

(2) Pin

A bishop, rook, or queen attacks a piece that is sitting in front of a more valuable piece. If that more valuable piece is the king, the pinned piece can’t move at all (because it’s illegal to move in such a way that it puts your king under direct attack).

(3) Skewer

The inverse of a pin. A bishop, rook, or queen attacks a valuable piece that has a less valuable piece behind it. If the more valuable piece in front is the king, it is required to move, and thus the less valuable piece will be exposed and captured.

For comparison, here is a common strategy:

(1) Control the center of the board

In most cases, the player whose pieces best control the center of the board is in better position to win. This is because there are more attacking opportunities for pieces in the middle than pieces on the edges.

The main differences between tactics and strategy in chess are immediacy and scope. Tactics are executed right now and usually directly affect only this move and the next. Strategies unfold over time and may encompass many moves, adjustments, and variations.

Strategies often employ tactics as they position pieces for attack or defense a few moves from now. If you understand tactics, but play with little to no strategy, you will play much better than beginners. But you will be trounced by players who assess the board and devise strategies that capitalize on their positional strengths and defend against their positional weaknesses.

Excellent chess requires both tactics and strategy.

Back to Productivity

When I talk about Capturing Recurrence and building Productivity Bridges, I’m talking about tactics. Bridges absolutely will make you more efficient—you’ll work faster and that work will be accurate. But without a strategy, there’s no way to know if that efficiency is pulling in the right direction.

Excellent productivity requires both tactics and strategy.

What is Strategy?

To answer that, let’s first define vision.

Vision is seeing the big picture and setting mid-to-long-term goals.

A goal might be to lose 90 pounds in 6 months. Or it might be to spend more time with loved ones. Or it might be to sell $250,000 worth of products in the first quarter of 2024.

Vision is the ability to see and clearly articulate those goals. (And, again, we’ll explore the value of certain types of goals in a future newsletter!)

Strategy is the method by which you will achieve a particular goal. Strategy allows you to convert goals into specific action.

Mechanically, a strategy is one or more projects pulling in the same direction. This echoes the relationships between tasks and projects. Tasks in a project pull toward the project’s outcome. Projects in a strategy pull toward the strategy’s goal. The only real difference is scale.

What’s Important?

One of the core tenets of Action-Powered Productivity is this:

That requires us to know what “important” means. Here’s my definition:

Work is Important if it aligns with a strategy that is directed toward one of your goals.

Defining importance as a function of strategy and goals sidesteps one of the pitfalls of productivity: personal vs. imposed goals. Colloquially, we see our personal goals as “more important than” goals imposed on us by our employer or some other external source.

This definition, though, makes no such distinction. Work is important if it’s in accordance with a strategy that contains action you must complete. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is yours or someone else’s. If your actions are part of that strategy, they’re important.

Naturally, this leaves open the question of whether those goals and strategies are ones you should be associated with. You can pursue that question as you set goals and select strategies. But “is this important?” is not a question to be asked at the time of action.

Also note that this definition of “important” makes no claims as to the existential importance of the work. “Establish world peace” may be a nobler goal than “Take two vacations to Jamaica per year,” but if those goals have strategies, and there are actions for you to take to execute those strategies, the actions are equally important.

The Matrix

Am I being unnecessarily pedantic about this definition of important? Maybe, but consider the Eisenhower Matrix.

Because you’re subscribed to a productivity newsletter, I’m betting you’ve heard of the Eisenhower Matrix. The concept is to organize work by importance and urgency. Ideally, you’ll live in Quadrant 2—Important, Not Urgent—as often as possible.

The Eisenhower Matrix has the right idea, but it fails in practice because it is a tactic masquerading as a strategy. Importance is not defined at the level of action—it’s defined at the level of vision and strategy.

That means you shouldn’t look at a list of possible actions at the moment of action and try to recognize what’s important. An action is important if it aligns with a strategy you’ve chosen to achieve a particular goal. That is defined in advance, not by sifting through a set of possibilities right now.

Worse, if you haven’t defined what’s important at all, you will adopt “urgent” as a proxy for “important” and just hack away at whatever is immediately in front of you, all the time. For many people, that will sound distressingly familiar.

The Eisenhower Matrix is useless without a definition of important that operates on a higher level. But, good news, if you follow the path I provide below, you’ll never need to use the Eisenhower Matrix anyway.

A path from Goals to Action

Putting this all together gives us a procedure. It’s high-level—there’s plenty of room to dig into the mechanics of establishing a goal or devising a strategy (and guess what future newsletters and my upcoming book are going to do!). But it’s still helpful to shape the direction of your planning.

(1) Establish a Goal

Nothing is important if it isn’t working toward a goal.

(2) Devise a Strategy

Goals are useless without a strategy to execute them.

(3) Create the Projects to execute the Strategy

Tasks require containers and often support materials. Projects provide that.

(4) Assign Tasks, as they arise, to the Projects

These Tasks are important by default—they are aligned with a strategy and goal. And if they’re important, they should be scheduled, and are therefore fully Tasks by my definition.

(5) Add Tasks to Agendas as they surface

If work is important—and again, these Tasks are—they must be added to an Agenda to be slated for completion.

(6) Execute the Tasks from Agendas

Once they’re part of a day’s plan, just do them!

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) Choose one of your goals, or set a new goal.

Ask yourself: What is my strategy for achieving this goal, and what are the projects that make up that strategy?

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:

Make sure your bridges are pointed in the right direction!

R.J.
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