I Hate Fish

I don’t like fish.

“But Rands, have you tried…”

Yeah, I tried that. I don’t like fish.

“Wait, wait, wait, what you need to try is…”

Tried that, too. A couple of times. I don’t like fish.

“Rands, you haven’t had good fish.”

Yeah, I’ve had good fish. Many times. Girlfriends, good friends, bad friends. They’ve all taken a swing at my “don’t like fish” thing, and they’ve all failed. There was that time I thought I liked fish, but that was the six Sake bombs I drank at the Hard Rock in Vegas while consuming aforementioned good fish. In this state, I would’ve raved about a stale white bread half-eaten bologna sandwich I found on the floor of the casino.

I don’t like fish.

I don’t like productivity systems, either.

“But Rands, have you tried…”

Yeah, I’ve tried that. I’ve probably tried it a couple of times. I’ve also tried every other system, too. Complex ones, simple ones. My professional life contains a vast graveyard of productivity systems, notebooks, and processes. Friends, dear friends, have built businesses around productivity software. God bless them. Each time we meet, I’ll buy them a round of drinks and toast their success, but we aren’t talking about productivity software.

I hate it.

Hey so.

I am, once again, testing a productivity system. We have clearly established that I am a productivity system hostile, and I am clear that it has vastly more to do with me than with any single productivity system.

The Tool Rule

You are dependent on a set of tools to get work done. These include mail, Slack (or a Slack-like yard sale of mediocrity), a calendar, some robots, and a productivity tool, which might be a fancy digital productivity system or it might be a piece of paper full of unchecked boxes.

Let’s start with Rule #1 regarding these tools: if the work to maintain the given tool is greater than the perceived value it creates, I will ignore or stop using it.1 This is the failure state for most productivity systems. I become frustrated because the work does not justify the value. The details here are important.

Software-based productivity tools make it simple to capture and create ginormous lists of tasks. What starts as a list of ten critical tasks instantly bloats to 50+ in just a few days. How does one cope? Tags! Buckets! Sub-tasks! Colored prioritization! Deadlines! It’s an endless list of hacks designed to give you convenient ways to slice large lists of work. However, the addition of each mechanism created more smidge of work you need to consistently perform in order to keep your to-do list fresh and relevant.

Deviously, the act of performing this additional maintenance initially gives you the impression that you’ve completed a task — that you’ve done work. You haven’t. I mean, yeah, if my entire job was to maintain a productivity list, well, cross that off the list, but the whole point of a productivity system is to give you time to work. A productivity system is doing its job well when you aren’t using it because it’s created time for you to get work done.

Productivity system maintenance is a fact of life, but when the act of maintenance becomes an onerous task unto itself, I get productivity rage. I either passive-aggressively slowly stop doing the work over time or I rage quit the whole damned application, grab the nearest Post-It note, and start over.

Again.

“Rands, you’re doing it wrong. You just haven’t had good fish. You should…”

Stop. Just stop. I have. I did. I did again. It didn’t work. For me. Decades of doing it. So much rage. I hate fish.

Sorry about coming off hostile. I’m hostile with myself. I’m disappointed that after three decades of constant work, I struggle with building a system that consistently supports my style of work. I’m hostile… with myself.

So maybe my productivity should be hostile?

The Feature No One Would Use

I have a new system in place, which I’ll describe more in a moment, but here’s the initial inspiration:

No one would ever turn this feature on, but I’d like my productivity system to automatically delete — without warning — to-dos that are older than 30 days, have no status updates, and have no due date.

The idea was simple. Any item on my to-do list that is older than 30 days with no recent activity or due date would automatically — without warning — be deleted.

There is wisdom behind this feature that no one would use, and it’s based on the fact that my ability to prioritize at the moment a task arrives is hot garbage. Important to note that I don’t know this at the moment because you are in my face right now asking for what is clearly the most important thing and you are aces, so, of course… of course, I am going to prioritize your thing as urgent.

It’s not urgent. It’s urgent to you, and I’ve got mad respect for you, but your task is objectively not that important, and I’m not going to know that until time has passed. We’re doing other things now, and days later we’ll separately remember your ask for me and immediately recognize the passionate moment in business, but the task is irrelevant.

Irrelevant. Sitting there in my productivity system du jour, tagged as important, colored in red, with the note: “Maria needs this immediately.” She doesn’t need it. I shouldn’t do it. With the reasonable passage of time, I am capable of two pieces of analysis:

I’ve had time to understand the request fully. It has a more defined shape and scope in my head. I have intuition when the task is first provided to me, but it is usually imprecise.

I’ve also had time to see all the other things on my plate, so I can calmly, relatively compare this ask to the other forty-eight items on my list.

However, rather than having to do all this reflection, why not have the productivity system remove the irrelevance all by itself? I can feel your discomfort with this concept across the Internet, and I share it. What if it’s actually an important task and my prioritization is hot garbage?

Here’s the funny.

When I started writing this article, I intended to pitch you on a fully paper-based system. A single piece of paper that captured all my work and home tasks. Work on the left. Home on the right.

Revolutionary, right? Paper-based task list. Here was the trick: I required myself to rewrite the list each day. Often twice. The rewrite forced me to examine each task and first make sure I was clear about what the task was, and then, more importantly, quickly ask myself, “Is this actually important?”

I was in love with this system for a total of three weeks. I liked the act of the rewrite, I appreciated the forced re-caching and re-prioritization of all the tasks, and I felt good when I revisited an item and judged it: “Nope”. After almost a month, the list was getting longer, and I could sense myself approaching the Rands Productivity Rage Threshold™, but then the system broke down completely in a moment.

I left my paper list at home.

Easy recovery. Just get someone at home to send me a picture of the list and perform the rewrite. Solid.

But I left it at home again two days later. Too much work. Fragile.

So, I rage-quit another productivity system. Again.

Let’s Remember Mail

Are you still struggling with your email inbox? I’m not. It’s been years. And the fact that I conquered email after decades of productivity frustration was at the front of my mind. The thought: “If I can design a set of habits that tamed email, then I can do the same for a productivity system.”

Before I enumerate my mail habits, let’s go back to our very first rule: if the total work to maintain a given tool is greater than the perceived value it creates, I will stop using it.

The mail rules:

1. All irrelevant emails are addressed immediately.

The spam robots have mostly solved the firehose problem, but they don’t cover all irrelevant emails. It is stupidly trivial to sign up for email while traipsing around the Internet. I do it all the time, usually when purchasing from a new vendor who tucks a clever double-negative into their request to send me mail as part of a purchase. I blame myself. However, the moment I see this mail appear in my inbox, I act. I act immediately. I unsubscribe instantly. I hate fish. If this is a subsequent mail after I’ve already unsubscribed, I aggressively block. Right away.

I act on every item in the list. Progress, however small, occurs, and my list signal improves. It took months to get my Inbox into high signal shape, but the combination of the robots keeping the spam out and my aggressive unsubscribes has left my Inbox with blissfully high signal. This is actually our next habit…

2. All relevant emails are acted on. Without fail.

If a mail has passed through the robots and my block list, it is likely a mail I care about, whether it’s a mail to me, a newsletter I enjoy perusing, appointment confirmations, account updates, delivery notifications, or other essential emails. After digesting the mail, I will choose one of three actions to perform on each email:

Delete.

Respond.

Schedule for Later. WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER

DELETE: This is pretty easy and equally satisfying. Goodbye mailing list. No, I am not interested in this robot-generated job inquiry. Delete. Mistakes can be made here, yes, I didn’t see this was from an actual human, and you bet I am a world-class skimmer, but more often than not, this mail deserves to die.

RESPOND: Trickier. This is going to involve work, and I’ve got to make a quick call. Do I have time to respond, or should I do this later? The difference between “it will require solid think time for me to respond” and “It’s easier for me to do this later” is subtle, but after years of self-reflection, the difference is obvious. Informed laziness. I glance at the mail, and I can instantly size the amount of work required. It’s either more work than I want to do at the moment or — and this is the devious one — it’s not instantly obvious to me how to make progress or respond, which makes the perceived work much larger and unattractive.

So now I mostly default respond. Kicking and screaming. I respond. God, I hate fish.

LATER: Slippery. If I’ve done an honest mental assessment of Respond, Later is a valid choice. There are very good reasons to schedule a response for Later, such as the complexity of the topics or the need to consider a response deeply, but Later compounds. One Later — not a big deal. One hundred Laters is an immense pile of work, a compounding management task that will eventually prevent you from doing actual work.2

I’m happy to report that the above list of actions consistently applied to my inbox has resulted in endless months of inbox zero. There are days when I get a little behind, but most nights I go to sleep with nothing sitting in any inbox.

The Productivity Rules

With the mail rules in mind, the Productivity versions are familiar:

Understand & Prioritize.

Commit.

Later.

UNDERSTAND AND PRIORITIZE: Similar to mail, each task can represent significantly different amounts of work from minutes to days3, and I need to understand that work before I commit. Remember Maria’s task from the above? The sky-is-falling-one marked RED and URGENT. Well, it’s been three days, and I haven’t heard a peep from Maria regarding this allegedly important work. With respect to everyone who walks into my office with an emergency, my job is not to confuse urgent with important. I won’t say this to your face, but I’ll write it down here. Yes, I alerted Maria that this does not seem that important, yet, and yes, she agreed.

Every morning, every task is passed through my is this important to complete filter. If there are tasks where I am stuck, my half-move is to spend 30 seconds editing or rewriting the task. The act of passing the task through my fingers either gives me perspective or reshapes the task to be more understandable. For tasks that I’ve Latered a lot, this editing pass is especially important because it’s currently written in a fashion that makes it disposable.

COMMIT: With a cached understanding in my head, I decide today or not. If it’s today, it stays right where it is. Things allows me to move tasks to the evening, which is mostly “This is a home task, and I’ll do it when I’m home” commitment. Not for today? You know the drill…

LATER: Ok, not today, but when. Same buckets as above: tonight, near future, or distant future. Wait, I’m still trying to figure it out. I can’t commit nor schedule, so let’s move it to the Someday bucket4.

Same warning as above, it’s easy to punt a task to later, so this part of the process involves the most thinking. In the hostile productivity software I’m invariably going to vibe code, I want to see two bits of data for each task: days since the task was created and the number of times this task has been rescheduled. I do this in my head, but I know I lie to myself. I know I have very little clue that this task has been here for over six months and has been rescheduled dozens of times because there is either something interesting to me inside of this task, or there is a threat, a consequence to not completing it.

Remember the productivity truth: you will find less and less signal in an ever-growing list.

The scheduling bit is 100% the same as mail: today, a date in the near future, a date in the distant future, and, if I’m brave, never. You should probably read this footnote5.

I’m Hostile with Myself

I don’t actually hate fish. It’s a bit. I’ve learned over the years that folks have this intriguing reaction when they learn I don’t like fish, so I lean into it.

“You don’t like fish?”

“I don’t, and do you know why? Fish pee in the ocean.”

It’s a bit.

But, yeah, I don’t really like the taste of most fish. Someone once told me that I’m a “super taster” and that fishiness taste that everyone hates in old fish? Yeah, I taste it sooner than most folks, so BOOM — I work that into the bit. “Folks, I’m a supertaster, and I know when fish is bad before you!”

Mostly, I am disappointed that I find what others consider to be a delicacy to… taste like salty old sadness. Neither do I hate productivity systems, but I need my productivity system to be hostile.

I’m a stimulus-driven creature. New productivity tools (or any new tool) come with a wave of enthusiasm, but that enthusiasm fades with time, and when it fades, I still have all the same work to do. Without my enthusiasm, I will quickly develop habits that start laborious and then become ludicrous.

Also, sans enthusiasm, I go through the motions on other habits. *Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need to do this… can I do the bare minimum? Move to tomorrow and done, right? I want to work on something interesting. This gets the task out of my way, but this eventually creates a pile of moderately important tasks that I am forever moving from now to later. Without a constant pruning function and without critical thought, I start pushing a pile of tasks that I never finish and only increase with time.

The system collapses, and the cycle continues. I become hostile with myself.

It’s not the tool or tool features (or the fish). It’s entirely me and my ability to have the stamina to follow a reasonable set of habits. Stop blaming your tools for the fact that you’re lazy.

That’s it

No tags, no colors, very few rules, no priorities. This temptation applies to a great many knobs and dials that Things provides, but each time I consider one of these features, I ask myself: Do you want to complete this action for every single task in your future? It’s not three seconds it takes to add a tag, it’s three seconds multiplied by the next 1000 tasks. That’s almost an hour of my time. Still interested? Ok, how much closer does adding this habit get us to Rands Productivity System Collapse?

This morning in Things, I have 38 tasks. It’s a Saturday, and I haven’t triaged that list at all. Let’s do that now.

Ok. That took two minutes, and I’m down to 24. These are 24 tasks I am intending on doing today. The ones moved were a combination of: stuff I completed last night, tasks I am scheduled to do later (either Monday — beginning of work week or Saturday — beginning of weekend). I will likely only complete half of these tasks during the course of the day, but come the evening, the goal is always the same: a blissfully empty list.

Your job is to push through the work. To find the essential work that creates the most value. For every action that creates an additional signal in your to-do list, there must be an opposite reaction that removes something else. Your most valuable asset at work is your time.

And the Bigeye Tuna Pizza at Yellow Tail in Vegas is excellent. I highly recommend it.

Hey, this is me. I’m not you. You love productivity systems. That’s cool. You know what I love? Getting work done. ↩

Superhuman rules. Mails scheduled for later are removed from the inbox. The tool matters a lot to support the habits. See the last footnote. ↩

Important productivity hygiene note. I do not put ginormous tasks as individual items into my productivity system. For example, if it’s performance review season, I don’t create a single “Finish All Performance Reviews” task. I create a single one for each review that I need to write. Two reasons: parent/child tasks are yet another productivity management overhead that ends up needing to be maintained, and wasting my time. Also, big tasks and projects usually already have a program manager, HR human, or VP who is the connective tissue for the effort. ↩

Yeah, Sometime is Never, but shush your brain — keep moving. ↩

Possibly the most important footnote. For whatever system you use, the triage system must be lightning fast. Scrubbing my inbox first thing in the morning with the most emails (or Slack) takes five minutes maximum. Same for the todo list. Every single bit of friction in this process will accumulate into fish-hating, productivity-damning rage. ↩