Getting out of your own way.

The 3P's: A simple system to help you get in the right place to focus on the right things, and then actually do them.

Oh the irony. 

I get so much done, yet I am a master at not doing stuff.

Deep down I have always known this, but it became an unavoidable problem when I started doing my own thing.

Set free from warm embrace of a large organisation, with its focus and systems (many of which I had helped to create), I was suddenly faced with something I had never really experienced: The freedom to set my own agenda.

This was lovely, it was liberating but also very strange and surprisingly difficult. I hadn’t realised how much of my existence had been defined by others, by organisational agendas and culture. To suddenly be released from these constraints meant I was quickly confronted by a tricky question: What was I trying to do, and how do I structure my days to get those things done?

A question that was quickly followed by an awkward realisation:  My capacity to not do what I probably should be doing is remarkable.

The solution took a long time to emerge, but once it did, it has remained very stable. I use it everyday, it has three parts, in a particular order: Priming, Prioritisation, Production.

Priming

If I am not feeling great, or at least not feeling ok, I struggle to do any meaningful work. I can do the obvious functional admin stuff ok but not the important stuff. In fact it is worse than that, it stops me from being able to work out what was the important stuff in the first place. I tried lots of ways of tackling this, but found two that I now religiously do to get me into the right place:

Wim Hoff Breathing: This is something I have been doing for over 10 years but hadn’t realised how useful it was to my mind as well as my body. For those who don’t know it, it’s essentially this: you do active deep breaths and shorter natural exhales 40-50 times, then exhale and hold your breath, and you then repeat this 4-5 times. After doing this for while you’ll find you can often hold your breath for 2-3 mins: this sounds weird but you are essentially hyper oxygenating your blood, and you just don’t need to breath in the way you normally do. You end up in a kind of super alert, yet calm state. It’s like someone has cleared away the cobwebs and prepared you for gentle action. This takes 15-20 mins depending on how my body feels, and depending on how much time I have (1-2 rounds can often be enough).

3X3 Gratefulness exercise: I got this system from a therapist I had when I was young and it’s as simple as it is powerful. I ask ‘What 3 things am I most grateful for?’, for each I answer 3 questions and do so in whatever way feels right to me there, then, in that moment:

It starts with a statement about what it is: For example, this morning my first one was: Time with Justine, Tom and their kids Petra & Hector (I am one of their godfathers), who live close by.

Why am I grateful? Feeling part of something beyond my family, a sense of belonging that comes from deep relationships decades in the making, and seeing the result of great parenting (Petra and Hector are just amazing) + lending Hector a suit for his Prom: made me very proud of him and what he has become. All of these feel even more important when I am away from Amelie (my wife).

What would someone I deeply trust say about this? You are the company you keep. They represent the best of us, so you must have something akin to that somewhere in you + being a godfather means they trust you to be there when their kids need it most, that is significant, important.

What does it mean? (an open question, let what comes, come): You are a good person, in the moment and overtime. It’s not really a surprise so many people you love and respect have asked you to be a godfather to their kids.

These things they can be big things, they can be small things (like sitting on the balcony with a coffee and watching the world go by), they can be in the past (our wedding day comes up quite a lot, and unsurprisingly Amelie comes up a great deal), they can be in the future, about something I am looking forward to. I don’t try and shape them, I just let them come.

When I do these things, even on the darkest, most difficult of days, I change, I feel better and I often end up feeling more than ok, I feel good.

Prioritisation

I then ask myself three questions:

What should I be doing, but aren’t?

This will often give me some urgent things that need to get done. But it will quickly get to the stuff that is important but that I have been putting off. 

It will get me to the things that are making me most anxious, stuff I am most uncomfortable about. Sometimes it’s things I am excited about but are difficult, or where the consequences of failure are high. I have found that is usually a good proxy for the really important stuff. This is especially true if I track it over time, I begin to see patterns, begin to see things I am consistently not doing.

I’ll also ask a further question of each item on this list: what is the smallest thing I could do to move it forward? So, is there anything I could do now to move it forward? As we all know, breaking things down into more manageable chunks is a good place to start anything, this will help in a later question.

What am I doing, but probably shouldn’t?

This will usually get me to the distractions, the things I am doing that are replacements for the stuff in the first list. 

For me some of them are going to be complicated because they are often ‘good' things, like exercise. This is not to say I shouldn’t be doing them at all, quite the opposite, they have their place, it’s just recognising that they are being used as a diversion from other things. I find it’s the recognition that’s most important. 

If I just did this one thing…

What is the thing that will have the maximum leverage? What is the one thing that if I do it, other things will either go away or become easier? If I did this one thing, would I be satisfied with my day? This often results from doing one of the things from the first question, I find it easy to imagine a small sense of achievement at doing it (it’s about overcoming something as well as doing something).

There will sometimes be a bit of confusion, some debate and I’ll end up with 2 or 3 priorities, I’ll also often have a sense of guilt at not doing them before, I follow that guilt and it help me choose one thing.

I ask these three questions every morning, and I begin to see the stuff that’s not being done that should, the stuff that’s being prioritised but probably shouldn’t, and then do what really needs to be done.

Productivity

So, by this point, I am feeling in a good place and have a good sense of what I need to do, then comes that last piece in the puzzle, arguably the hardest bit for me: the doing.

I have three ways of maximising my chances of success:

Ring fence my vices 

I can lose a great deal of time reading the news (feels kind of positive so can find ways to justify it to myself, one of those positive distractions I mentioned before), checking emails/responding to non urgent things. I know what those things are, and I commit to not doing them for at least 90 mins. There are good psychological reasons for using a 90 minute window, and I find it works for me, I can’t do much more than that without wanting desperately to do something else.

I have a broader frame for social media generally: I’ll try look at certain platforms like Instagram only at the weekend, and only in the afternoon of those days.

For both of these it’s about boundaries that help me control my urges to distract around particular things, it’s never perfect, I often fail, but I find it really helps. 

Go-No-Go

I have recently integrated this into my system, I got it from an Andrew Huberman podcast, the way I understand it and use it is this: There are moments when you want to reach for your phone, or do something that feels innocent enough, the ‘I’ll just quickly do that…’ sort of thing. But it takes me forever to get back to where I was and into a place of focus again. When I have that urge, I’ll check myself, I want to do it, but I pause and then that’s usually enough to stop me. Huberman suggests allocating 20 of these ‘Go-No-Go’ moments a day, I find once I start doing it, it get’s easier, it’s like training your focus muscle (I have already used it three times writing this).

Short meditation

If I am having particular problems focusing, and this might sound a bit odd, I do something I find more difficult, even if for 5 mins, then when I return to the thing I am trying to actually do, it’s much easier.

For me that’s meditation, even after 20 years of almost daily practise, I still find it hard, 5 mins is often enough to make me want to get back to what I should be doing.

Rather appropriately, this article is the result of this system: I have been putting it off, even though I know it’s important (to me and I know from many conversations I am not alone in this struggle), and this morning it became my ‘If I just did this one thing…’ the rest allowed me to actually do it.

So if you are anything like me, try Priming - Prioritise - Production, it’s as simple as it is effective.