Do I Have a Context Problem? - DBR 060

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

Anytime you talk about task management, you talk about actually doing things. It's one thing to know you have something to do. It's another thing to prioritize well and what I have to say will have something to do with prioritization. But actually doing things has a lot to do with the third thing which is, given a prioritized task, will you do it? The challenge here: What do we know about context, and how can we organize our thoughts around tasks, having context and us entering into that context before we attempt to task. So we'll explore context today, and I think it's an important concept to understand as we try to orient our lives towards actually completing tasks and delivering results. These are the foundations of creating value and getting paid. In the modern workplace, a lot of us have gotten the idea that we can work from anywhere. And there are a couple problems with that. The one we’ll deal with today is: not all work environments are created equal. What is context?

• One category of differences in work environments is what we’ll call ‘context’.
• Context examples grocery store, phone availability, etc.
• When we're prioritizing our tasks, I think we might overlook the notion of context.
• However, context is important to our productivity
• Context is malleable to some degree
• One: There is some risk in selecting context – it can change on us
• Two: What's the cost of that malleability?
• There are two associated notions:
• One: Knowing the context, being aware of the required context.
• Two: Developing/creating that context.
• If we're in the wrong context, we'll have subpar results from our work.
• “Battlefield surgery”, but that shouldn’t be the norm

Five components

• Physical or 'hard' environment
• Energy level - the mental energy we bring based on circadian or other rhythmic
• Mental - our 'stick brain' - can we batch tasks?
• Quasi-physical - are your tools and information available?
• Social - are the right people around)?

What happens if we're in the wrong context?

• Spectrum of effects that we could see from the wrong context (“a little bit harder” through “the power’s out”)
• Procrastination at the lower levels?

Operationalizing context - Work blocks

• Scheduling work blocks with context in mind
• Sequencing work blocks with context in mind
• Some rules/parameters for batching
• Postponing tasks is another good time to to think about context

Bring context into your planning arsenal A key point about Attention Compass: context is baked in to the Daily review workflow – we develop habits around dealing with context well. Hit me up and tell me what's on your mind: [e-mail] or LinkedIn (mention the pod when you connect, please).