Not Doing

The morality of productivity teaches respect for the task list and getting every line ticked off. So anything written down quickly acquires the status of an obligation, even after it has stopped making sense.

That is wrong. Some tasks should be deleted.

Before starting, it helps to ask:

What happens if this doesn’t get done?

The answers vary:

• nothing;
• something unpleasant, but acceptable;
• someone else will do it;
• the situation will disappear on its own;
• nobody needs the result;
• the task supports a process that ought to be stopped altogether;
• the consequences will be serious.

Only the last answer automatically makes the work necessary. The rest call for thought.

The biggest time sinks are tasks that exist out of inertia: a report nobody reads, a meeting with no decision, a spreadsheet duplicating another spreadsheet, buying a present out of mutual fear of not buying a present, fixing a detail that doesn’t affect the result, and taking part in an argument that will outlive everyone in it.

Dropping a task doesn’t always mean doing nothing. Sometimes you have to change the system, come to an arrangement with people, or accept the consequences. Even so, that can be cheaper than doing the task.

Saving time doesn’t start with working faster. It starts with reducing the amount of work someone decided to treat as compulsory. The fastest way to do an unnecessary task is still slower than not doing it.

Better to test by experiment than by argument. A weekly report that eats three hours can simply not be sent once. Two outcomes follow. Either someone asks about it the next day — the report is being read, and it is worth finding out who needs which three lines of it. Or nobody asks, and a month later it turns out the mailing goes to eleven people, four of whom have a rule filing it straight to archive, and the person who once demanded the report left two years ago.

The unpleasant part is not the hours spent but the fact that a task list serves as proof of being busy. A cancelled task reduces not only the work but the visible volume of labour. Which is why doing it is usually easier than defending its cancellation.