Happy… Sunday? Or maybe just Happy Holidays would be better!

The Rhythms of Productivity Sneak Peek and AMA

I’m a little behind on this newsletter release—not because I haven’t been writing, but because I’ve been incessantly writing! The Rhythms of Productivity is almost fully drafted now. Only a few thousand more words to go (I’m around 70,000 already!) and then I’ll trim and tighten it before release.

Next weekend, on Saturday, December 30, at 11 a.m. US Eastern time, I’m hosting a sneak peek into The Rhythms of Productivity that includes an AMA (Ask Me Anything). APP Pro members can attend via Zoom, but anyone can watch the session for free broadcast live on YouTube. The countdown is on the YouTube page.

The Rhythms of Productivity teaches you how to reclaim your time and effort by Taking Action and Capturing Recurrence™—building templates, automations, procedures, and more to make future work easier. In this Sneak Peek and AMA, I’ll share an actionable overview of the book’s content, read a few significant passages, and answer questions you have about The Rhythms of Productivity or about productivity in general! I’d love to see you there.

The text below is sort of a sneak peek, too. I adapted this edition of the newsletter from two passages in the Recurring Tasks chapter in The Rhythms of Productivity. Enjoy!

The dissonance of the spheres

There are two ways to surface recurring work to your attention. You can surface it simply “as needed”—e.g., you’re running a particular report, so you access the appropriate procedures, templates, or automations for it. Or you can surface work by time period, reminding yourself of certain work every few days, once a week, once a month, and so forth.

As implied by the examples, the “as needed” method can be well-suited to templates and procedures. But for recurring tasks, we need to define a time period to determine when we will see it next.

There’s a problem with time periods, though: our human methods of measuring time beyond the length of a day are not really compatible with one another. Take these (humorous) examples.

How many seconds in a minute? Sixty. Minutes in an hour? Sixty. Hours in a day? Twenty-four. So far so good. We’re on a roll.

How many days in a week? Seven. Nailed it.

How many days in a month? …uh…

…oh. Okay. Just a small setback. Let’s keep going.

How many weeks in a month? Four. I mean, sort of. Roughly. Almost four and a half depending on the month.

How many weeks in a year? Fifty-two… -ish.

How many days in a year? This one’s easy! Three hundred sixty-five. Except for every four years, when it’s three hundred sixty-six. Except for the end of every century, when it’s back to three hundred sixty-five. Except for the end of every four centuries, when it’s again three hundred sixty-six. Obviously.

Here’s our problem: everything at the day level or shorter is based on one rotation of the earth. Everything at or above the day level is based (sometimes loosely) on the interaction between the rotation of the earth, the revolution of the moon around the earth, and the revolution of the earth around the sun. The relationship between those timeframes is tenuous at best.

Before I come to my point, let’s enjoy one aspect of this: the number of days in a month is so arbitrary that the little mnemonic poem doesn’t even bother to rhyme the middle couplet: September / November at the beginning; four / more at the end; and the brazenly brilliant one / eight in the middle.

💡 Stop howling at the moon 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

When you’re dealing with the outside world—putting out trash for pickup, paying bills, giving birthday presents—you have little choice but to tie yourself to weeks, months, and years, no matter how arbitrary some of those options may ultimately be.

But when you’re dealing with your own recurrence, stop howling at the moon. Do things every eleven days, or seven weeks, or five months. This isn’t to make a countercultural statement. It provides two significant benefits:

(1) Work will be more fluid and efficient if its cycle is tied to the requirements of the work rather than the interaction of orbits in our solar system.

How often you need to perform a task is unlikely to have any substantive relationship to timeframes like weeks or months. For example, some reviews of my system need to be done every four days to keep things running smoothly. Others may only need to be done once every nine days. There’s no need to round both of these to “once a week”—and indeed, that would have an especially negative impact on the work that needs to be done every four days!

(2) Non-astronomical cycles like five or thirteen days help keep work from unnecessarily piling up.

Why pile every bit of recurring work on one day? That’s the downfall of the Getting Things Done Weekly Review. There’s no need to do all that work at once—it becomes daunting and overwhelming, so we skip it. Spread it out instead, don’t pile it up!

The Rhythms of Recurrence: Recurring Tasks as our System Engine

When you have recurring tasks prompting you to do the right work at the right time, your system becomes a tapestry of cycles. Something happening every four days will only land on the same day as something happening every thirteen days once every fifty-two days—about seven times a year. Once you add in all of your weekly, monthly, and annual tasks, you may notice that the overlapping rhythms of recurrence are dense and complex.

Don’t let this make you nervous. You will almost never (and maybe actually never) engage with your recurring tasks from the system-level perspective. The complexity of the overlapping rhythms has no impact on the complexity of your work.

Why is that? Because a recurring task will only surface to your attention when it is scheduled to surface to your attention. You’ll see it when you need it, not before, not after.

Consider comets that are visible to the naked eye from earth. Halley’s Comet, for instance, returns every 76 years. I was 6 years old on its last pass, and I’ll be 82 the next time around (here’s hoping I get to see it again!). The Comet Hale-Bopp came through in 1997, and I’ll probably not see it again, as it won’t be back for approximately 2,500 years.

When we mix in the orbital periods of another few dozen Great Comets, we’ll find that, while they always exist, and professional astronomers keep tabs on them, they only become relevant when we can see them. Going outside tonight to check out Halley’s Comet will do you little good, unless you’re re-reading this newsletter and it’s currently 2061.

Our recurring tasks always exist, and the dense tapestry they weave may be impressive when viewed from the “solar system level.” But it’s also likely to be overwhelming from that perspective.
This is a critical point for working with a productivity system. Almost all your fears are tied to thinking of the system as a whole. Thankfully, you practically never have to do that. When you capture a recurring task (or anything), all that matters is the context in which it needs to surface. And when it surfaces, all that matters is that you can take action with it.

The layering of recurring tasks creates complexity, but you needn’t engage with the complexity. The recurring tasks themselves are simple, and your interaction with them is simple. 99% of the time, be a layperson, not an astronomer. Engage with the comet when it comes around, not when it’s out in the Oort Cloud. Your overall system’s rhythms of recurrence may be elaborate, but the rhythm of your work will be exactly what you need it to be.

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) As recurring tasks surface to be completed over the next few days, review them.

Could you change the recurrence period to better reflect the work? Or to help prevent them from piling up with other recurring tasks?

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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