Intuitive Productivity
Recently, I’ve been reminded of something David Allen says in Getting Things Done. He is addressing the following question: “so now that I’ve got all my stuff in a trusted system, how do I decide what to do at any given moment?” Allen’s answer: “trust your intuition.”
Sounds so simple, right? But I think I spend too much of my time not trusting my intuition. As a result, I sometimes find myself trying to compensate for that lack of trust by refining the system to make it more trustworthy. The system sets up some rules for me, which helps. These guardrails often keep me out of the ditches. But the rules can also bind me and leave me feeling guilty if I don’t follow them. That guilt itself hinders productivity.
I’ve marveled before at those non-GTD people who just do what seems best at any given moment. Frankly, I’m suspicious that such a method is too susceptible to the tyranny of the urgent, and I think it truly is. But on the other hand, they enjoy a certain kind of freedom in “going with the gut.” So, again, there is the possibility of freedom (going with the gut), and the possibility of bondage (enslaved to the tyranny of the urgent).
So here’s my musing for the day. Perhaps an appropriate tension between these two is: use the trusted system to educate the intuition, making the intuition more trustworthy. Then work from intuition.
Part of my thinking comes from Hogarth’s book, Educating Intuition, where he claims that intuition is something that can be trained. I also think of it as “calibrating the intuition”. I can calibrate it by feeding it the right data.
The trusted system is used to feed my intuition data about my work. Without it, the only data-diet my intuition has to feed on is the raw environment. And the environment is full of urgency. The system allows me to feed in the data that don’t come from the environment–my goals, mission, vision, priorities, values–as well as to modify the data that come from the environment–for instance, “ASAP” might really mean “end of week”. This balanced data-diet is more nutritious for my intuition. So when I’ve fed it well, I can rely on it more often and more freely when it comes to deciding what to do in any given moment.
Having said all that, the reality is that my trusted system still only works at a fairly superficial level to educate my intuition. What is much deeper and has much more impact on every choice I make about work is whether I’m inclined to worship God in each of those moments of decision, or whether I’m inclined to worship everything and anything but God, including myself.
Because the real truth is that I’m prone to what the Bible calls selfish ambition. I want what I want more than I want what God wants, even if I have to step over your dead body to get it. If I believe that God is good, then I will also believe that what he wants for me is better than what I want for myself; that it will be most beneficial to those around me; and that it will ultimately bring me the most joy. But in a moment of selfish ambition I can be utterly blind to all of that and convinced that what I want will make me most happy. And you might say that in that moment, my intuition deceives me, despite my efforts to build a trusted system. I will want to do things that I really don’t want to do and I won’t do things that I really do want to do. I need a way out of this maze. In Christ, I can get out of this mess and be free to do what pleases God.
So, it’s garbage in, garbage out. Underground, at the root level, lurk the deeper matters of the heart like: “what am I really about?” “what really is the meaning in what I’m doing?” “who am I really working for?”. My answers to those questions shape my intuition most profoundly–without a doubt. Up at the ground level lives this GTD trusted system, a tool that, at best, serves to further calibrate my intuition to make wise choices about my work.