Fundamentals
These are all the areas that make up Watership Planner and how they interact.
Concept Map
The system is divided into different components. Most systems focus on the opportunities part. Watership Planner goes outside the thought processes of listing todos by organizing and manipulating your thought patterns happening in other components with the intent of improving your concentration.
About the Different Components
Clarity
This is where you represent your ideas & schedules as items in the program.
What for?
Making concentration easier by having your thoughts out in front of you, instead of you being reminded of them.
Motivation
This represents the two main inputs for your attention:
The pace, which is set by your schedule.
The focus, which is the objective found by ranking your opportunities for the most promising use of your time.
Focus
This represents a cycle you enter of flow where you keep your attention on the current task at hand.
This is a set of commands that deflect unrelevant thought patterns for later, freeing you of distractive impulses so you can continue to make progress until the schedule signals to jump.
Breakthrough
Innovation stages that you work through to make progress in the project you are working on.
Metrics that let you know what is working and what isn't with your process.
Instant feedback that keeps your attention on what you've previously decided was important.
You use this to make sure you aren't stuck on any point.
Reducing Mental Complexity
Organizing Plans & Decisions
The most effective way at getting more results, is to work on more meaningful things. You have a limit on how much attention you have in a day, on how much you can produce. If you are deciding in the moment what to work on, on what is next, it is unlikely that you are getting the results that you could be.
The problem is that most of us, when deciding if we should do something, have an invisible threshold for if something is "important" or "not important." If it crosses that threshold, we do it. Only when looked upon in isolation like that, we usually convince ourselves that it is important enough. It is much easier to just try to sneak in some extra work than to kill it outright. To give some rational reasons why it is important.
These decisions done in isolation kill your productivity—not because they aren't important, but because of the opportunity cost between them and something even more important you could be doing. By choosing to do something less important, you are harming the other opportunities by not giving them attention.
Instead of scanning for something important to do, if you can rank opportunities against each other with something easy to measure, you can not only pick out important tasks, but the most important tasks. Slight changes in the decisions you make about your time can have huge payoffs for the results you are looking for. If you improve your decisions daily so that you accomplish an incremental 0.1% of value more, after a year that adds up to a 44% increase. If you can get it to 0.2% that is 107% increase.
In order to make comparisons, we need to know what type of plan we are talking about. For example, if you have an hour: should you work on a sketch of requirements for a new project that has been on the backburner? Or should you call up clients to see how they are doing? It is hard to tell, because they belong to different projects.
First you evaluate the projects against each other, how much more important is one over the other? Then you decide how much time you want to allocate to each one based on that. If one is twice as important, it makes sense to give it twice as much resources. Then you compare each task against the other tasks that belong to that project. If there are more important tasks, or dependencies that need to be addressed first, then they would replace the corresponding task above. Deciding between them in this case is simple, since they belong to different projects—you would decide based on how much time you allocated for each project that day, and how much you have already spent towards those projects.
The Different Levels of Thought
| Process Level | Task Level | Project Level | Goal Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| What | |||
| The habits and rules for how and where you allocate effort throughout the day | The actual steps or actions needed of you to move a project forward | The plans to achieve certain results | The values and goals that will give you the experiences you want out of life |
| Example | |||
| Write every morning for 1h before checking E-mail | Write rough draft for the Blake article | Learn the history and culture of Turkey | Move to Turkey to become a writer |
| Why | |||
| To spend your effort wisely | To set an anchor for your attention and complete a step | To get the most results from your effort | To get the experiences you want out of life |
| How | |||
| By setting a pace of work & breaks, with boundaries for the different areas you want to allocate your attention to | By navigating and breaking down ideas, ideally until the complexity is just right to push you into flow | By discovering barriers, generating paths around them, and calculating the highest return on investiment | By working through the projects until you find the right combination that give you the results you want |
| Where | |||
| Time mapping, calendar | Clapperboard, timers | Projects, ROI prioritization | Values, roles, graphs |
| Metric | |||
| Am I spending my time in the right places? | Is my attention on the current task at hand? | Am I getting the results I'm expecting? | Am I having the experiences I want out of life? |
| Possible Symptoms When Lacking | |||
| Procrastination, long distractions on low value tasks, indecision to get started, frustration at the day's end where you feel "you haven't done anything" | Feeling stuck, overwhelmed, resistance, difficulty focusing, forgetting what exactly the next step is | No results, things seem to take too long, getting caught up in unimportant details, not knowing where to begin with so many options | Stress, knowing you "should" but not feeling like doing it, feeling like you're busy doing things you don't really want to be doing |
| Analogy with Pablo Picasso's Working Style | |||
| Picasso believed that creativity required consistent effort, he had a disciplined routine that he stuck to, of work in the mornings and a dedicated inspiration period in the evenings | Picasso would break down and explore trains of thought, completely focusing on the task at hand | Picasso would sketch his ideas in notebooks, planning how best to express what he wanted, blueprinting the themes and symbols he would use | Picasso was clear about what he was trying to achieve. As confusing as his work is (to me at least), most of it is the exploration of different perspectives—as in moving around looking at the same thing and trying to draw all those points of views onto the same canvas |
To begin to make sense of all your ambitions, we first divide them into two groups:
Opportunity Group
These are all the things that you can do with your life. They begin with an initial value or set of values that you want to experience. Two mountain climbers may both want to climb the same mountain, but they may have different reasons for doing so. One may value the challenge and feel more alive when she is on the more technical faces. She may unconsciously select more difficult mountains, but if she is consciously aware of what she is really after when climbing, she is more likely to set things up so that she can get it.
The other climber may value health and intellect. And so he is more fulfilled by taking an easier route that emphasis endurance without requiring his attention, so that he can redirect his thoughts on a book he is reading.
The alignment from value down to task keeps the present moment rewarding. Most people who make the change to go to a gym, do so after a life changing event: they are going through a stressful situation, they have gotten a reality check from the doctor, or have become frustated and commited after a setback or rejection. Yet most people will stop going after a while, not because they don't see the results in their mood or body, but because they forget about the real reason why they began going, and focus on how unpleasant the actual task is. By just reconnecting to your original "why" you set an anchor for your focus. When you are busy thinking about how good you will feel when it is over, you can't think about why you don't like it. Then the step is to actually enjoy the task you are doing—even if it is unenjoyable on the surface—which brings me to...
Process Group
This is how you work on your tasks. If you have a goal to write a novel, then a process item could be a the commitment with yourself to write for half an hour a day. These are the strategies you build for making it easy to naturally put in the effort you want into the projects. The awareness you build to put yourself in situations that make it easy to do the right thing. By asking yourself questions like: "How can I make it easier for me to work on this?" "What are my sticking points or triggers that take my mind away when I work on this project?" "Knowing myself, what are some possible problems or situations I may find myself that would make it easy for me to get off track, and how can I handle them so that I do the right thing anyway?"
What is the point of separating this? It is difficult to change all your habits all at once, the limited awareness you have throughout the day isn't enough to spread over to all the trigger points that would lead you back to your original habits. Think of this as a different part of the mind, a practical part that is skeptical about how much effort you can put into something. By working through this process part—the skeptical part—it becomes more integrated in you as a person.
Why can it be so satisfying to just list the things that you need to do? Because the part that generates a list of ideas is satisfied just getting it out on paper, to make sense of it. It takes another part to bring it to completion. The process part can then get overwhelmed with the things that you would like to do. This seperation lets you adjust the balance of work you have. Some people would benefit more from generating more ideas to make better use of their time, others would benefit from working on what they already know they should be working on, not simply thinking or organizing it more.
By tracking them in a system, you do three things:
- You build your awareness skills—the currency or energy for changing habits
- You systematically focus on one habit at a time, overwhelming it and them moving to the next one
- You silence thoughts about what you should be doing, instead focusing on getting the effort in allowing yourself to get deep
Description of the Different Levels of Thought
Goal Level Opportunity Group
Main question
What do I want?
Deliverables
Values and goals
Feedback
Am I getting the experiences I want from my life?
The focus is on what you want. At this level you are connecting with and making order of who you would like to become as a person. You are discovering the hidden reasons behind things that motivate you, and setting goals to move you towards more of those experiences. The purpose of goals isn't to reach some state, it is to give you something to focus on that gets you to demand more of yourself, making the present moment better.
At this level you can imagine the parallel of Picasso stating to himself his idea for his masterpiece Guernika. Connecting with how he wants to express the situation of the bombings that happened in his native country.
Project Level Opportunity Group
Main question
How will I get what I want?
Deliverables
Project outlines, with ranked tasks
Feedback
Am I getting expected results from the time I invest?
The focus is on how to get what you want. Once you discover the what you are really after, have a balance set for how much time you want to spend working towards that goal, and habits that you are building that nurture that. You will want to make concrete projects that are the best uses of your time to achieve that. When faced with a creative project, you want to move it through these stages of the problem solving process. At different points, the project will stick. So you want to switch projects then. The level above you, that is setting the pace and is used to keep you from getting stuck in the details. Because at this level, you are will be deep in details and it is natural to get carried away. Switching levels of thought involves clearing out your working memory, it is uneffective to do this on your own.
At this level you can imagine the parallel of Picasso exploring what exactly he wants to express. The structure, the symbols, the focal points. Picasso filled 9 notebooks before beginning painting.
Task Level Opportunity Group
Main question
What is left to do to lock down this task?
Deliverables
Completed tasks, stray ideas as logged tasks, alarms for things you need to remember later but don't want to think about now
Feedback
Am I keeping my attention on what's in front of me?
The focus is on losing yourself in the current step the project needs. When you are at this level, and you know that the details above you are aligned and solid. This allows you to focus single-mindly on the current task in front of you. At this stage, things should be working more intuitively and entering flow. This level is about manipulating your attention to keep you in flow, and producing great results that are aligned with the project.
A good measurement for the size of these tasks is by duration, no more than 30m. And the more complex the tasks the shorter they should be. Complexity brings in things into your working memory, so breaking these down into little pieces, or cutting them up as you go, is great for letting the unconscious fill in the details, instead of consciously thinking about how best to go.
Any thought or train of thought should get logged immediately and dropped. You are training your concentration when you do this, and ensuring that you keep generating ideas—the next might be an even better idea for the task that you are working on. This can take getting used to, the energy level when you have these ideas pulls you in to follow them. Being objective when you have them is difficult. But the idea if logged with some trigger words is like a teleport to that state you were in, and the ideas will still be there when you review them later. Later though, you will have more objectivity.
At this level you can imagine the parallel of Picasso getting into his trance as he painted in the details of his plan—the ideas he explored in the notebooks—directly on the final canvas.
Process Level Process Group
Main question
What is the best use of my time right now?
Deliverables
Habits that would have the most impact for how you work, role balance, month / week / day plans that sketch out where you want to spend your time
Feedback
Am I spending my time well?
The focus is on investing the right effort. You are thinking about how you can become more effective in your thinking, and the quality of the time that you invest. Artists and mathematicians—among others—don't know when their ideas will fall into place. They don't have a plan for when they will make a great discovery. What they have is a system they build of how best they work, a disciplined method of doing things that frees them up to have creative thoughts and breakthroughs. They carefully observe their process and continously improve it.
At this level you can imagine the parallel of Picasso's disciplined working habits. He would spend the first half of the day painting without distractions. Then in the evening he would socialize, feeling that they would inspire him with ideas for the next day.
Planning Items
| Level | Item | Description | Typical Time Frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Goal | A desired state you want to achieve that will move you towards fulfilling your values |
1 year - 10 years |
| Project | Project | A solution that will remove an obstactle that is preventing you from being at your goal |
1 month - 3 years |
| Project | Milestone | A concrete step that begins to bring value to the project |
1 week - 4 months |
| Project | Folder | A set of related tasks |
1 hour - 2 weeks |
| Task | Task | A step with a single outcome—ideally one that you can do in a single sitting and that when you read, you unconsciously know how to accomplish it |
5 minutes - 2 hours |
Mental Resistance—What To Do About It
Breaking Procrastination
Without ROI prioritization, you have a list somewhere with great ideas on it. Everything is important, and you can see the benefit of each of them. And so you keep pushing them to the next day. But you are working with a list without a clear finish line that pushes you slightly outside your comfort zone.
This is like a boxer training with a long list of things that would make you a better boxer. It has things like: jump rope, hit punching bag, do sit ups. All good ideas.
But where to start? Where to finish?
After you've run some laps and are feeling exhausted, who is running your mind?
The rational you that weighted the options and set a solid plan and objectively knows what is best for you?
Or the envigorated you that has tasted the blood of productivity, and will not know when to stop. Leaving yourself overexerted and wondering the next day why it doesn't stick. And Friday you are back to your old way of doing things, looking for the next idea that will inspire you.
Or the exhausted you that is in pain that is looking for an excuse to quit? You could look down at your list and see "get new boxing gloves." And without thinking you pick that, because it is easy, and because crossing things off your list feels great. It feels like you are doing something, after all you are getting the list down.
You need a way out of this, by not only knowing what to do, but the value of your time when you work on things. From there you can make time for these hard but important tasks. You put a stake in the ground where you commit towards making it to the finish line. Then when you get there, you stop, rest. This means doing less work, but spending a little time to leverage so that you get the most out of your time. This isn't intuitive, and so you are naturally drawn to being busy, but on tasks that your tired self can handle because you aren't training correctly.
Overcoming Distractions
Improving Concentration
Knowledge work in the current day is tricky. Access to information is faster than before, and yet that information has weakened our ability to concentrate. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. - Herbert Simon Traditional time management software is built from familiar paper methods. These can summarize the things that you should be working on, but don't do much to help you grow your productivity or concentration skills. Watership Planner has designed a system that paces you throughout the day for maintaining optimal levels of concentration. Like a heart rate monitor helps cardio training by removing the guesswork of how hard you should be working, Watership Planner's set of flow commands help you establish a consistent level of concentration throughout the day.The Focus Cycle
What you want to do is concentrate completely on a single project for a set amount of time, then just before your momentum begins to dip, you walk away completely and do something else. The metrics from these sessions is available to you so that you have a number to compete with.
How to use the focus cycle
Step 1. Select a task as your focal point. This is to anchor your attention in case you wander away from it. Usually this is the next task in your day schedule.
Step 2. Set an alarm for amount of time you want to concentrate. This can range from:
Step 3. Commit towards complete concentration on this focal point until the alarm goes off. If during this focus period you lose track of your attention, you use the flow commands to redirect your attention back towards the current focal point.
Step 4. Once the alarm goes off, you leave a bookmark for yourself and then you take a quick break. The breaks are essential for improving concentration. The bookmark is to jump you back into the state of mind you were in when you made it. Writers use this technique to overcome writers’ block by ending their writing session with an incomplete sentence, so that when they come back they left some momentum to get them going again.
Step 5. Repeat, switching projects when you feel blocked.
Why You Get Stuck Waiting For The Right Ideas
Key Ideas:
- Distractions are a hunger or craving when we release there is a gap in our knowledge, but it can be deflected by just writing it down for later (later usually never comes but it probably wasn't very important anyways)
- Resistance is normal, and you can learn techniques to break through it
- At the most basic level, if you continously put effort into something, at some level you are guarenteed success.
The Stages of Innovation
Problem Solving
To identify the areas needed so that you can do this, we use George Polya's 4 step model for problem solving. George Polya was one of the twentieth century's most influential mathematicians. His book on problem solving: "How to Solve It" has been frequently cited and quoted by other mathematicians. It has also made its way into other disciplines—in the early 90's Microsoft would give each of its new programmers a single book: Polya's problem solving book. Marvin Minsky—once director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—felt that anyone doing artificial intelligence should be familiar with his work.
I know what you might be thinking, how is math going to help me? You did 4 years of math in high school, some more in college and you don't use any of it day to day. You can't even remember half of it.
But problem solving is different. Problem solving is about going from a starting situation—like where you are now in life—to a desired situation. How you take the inputs—or the existing resources that you have—and make the most of them get you to your desired situation.
Poyla's Problem Solving model is a simple model we can use to understand the entire problem solving process.
If you are trying to do something new with your life—or in your profession—that you have never done before, then you are solving a problem. Watership Planner walks you through that.
Polya's Method for Solving Problems
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. Understanding the Problem | Understanding what the situation is. Introducing the proper words or concepts to describe the situation. Defining what exactly we would like our desired situation to be. |
| 2. Devising a Plan | This is the creative part. Listing the problems of why it isn't solved, and bringing in possible techniques that may solve it. |
| 3. Carrying Out the Plan | This is the persistence part. Working through the steps and checking our results. |
| 4. Look Back | Reflecting on how we did and asking what we could learn from how we approached the problem. |
Spoiler Alert: How to Focus and Achieve Your Goal The Steps for Concentrated Thought
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. Understand | Knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve, and why you want it. This connects you emotionally with a hidden inner drive that you have, making it easy keep your mind on it. When you hear stories of how much hardship a person went through, just to achieve their goal—understand that they did that with certain inner-pleasure, with a feeling of righteousness. To them the decision is clear to make. When the meaning behind what we are doing changes, our perception of the situation changes. |
| 2. Devise | Discovering the path of least resistance that pulls you towards taking action. When you have a list of many posibilities, it is easier to get pumped about working on what you feel is the best course of action. After looking at many car ads, or house ads, when we see a good deal—we immediately jump on it. |
| 3. Carry Out | Keeping your attention on one detail at a time, overwhelming the task as you put the details in their place. When the above steps are in place—that is you know why what you are doing is helping you, and why it is the best use of your time—it is easier to keep your thoughts on it. You can be comfortable and relaxed getting in this deep state without needing to look up for a while. You have set the conditions in place to allow clear focused thinking. |
| 4. Look Back | Measuring to see if you are on the right track, to discover adjustments that can have big results. You are usually trying to grow yourself in some way in life, to do something that you haven't done before. So these are experiments, with informed guesses of what is needed for success. Through looking back at the process, you can begin to notice new opportunities. |
Putting It All Together
Key Ideas:
- When we measure, the mind will automatically adjust itself to maximize what you measure
- When you are tired, or feel resistance, your current mental models are saturated and need time to reorganize—switching to another project is just as good as taking a break
- Balance effort with results—new projects have uncertainty because you are achieving something new to you, but you have a good deal of control over the effort you can put in
Program Boundaries
Opportunity Group What you want to achieve. The steps.
| Stage 1: Understand | Stage 2: Devise | Stage 3: Carry Out | Stage 4: Look Back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goal Level | Life Planning | Goal Setting | Drop into Project Level | Goal Review |
| Project Level | Goal Planning | Project Planning | Drop into Task Level | Project Review |
| Task Level | Task Timer | Break Down | Clapperboard | Task Completed |
Process Group How you will allocate your time to achieve it. The pace.
| Stage 1: Understand | Stage 2: Devise | Stage 3: Carry Out | Stage 4: Look Back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Process Level | Role Balance / Habits | Day / Week / Month Planning | Focus Cycle | Day / Week / Month Review |
Example How these two sides interact.
In this example you see the structure of the opportunities on the left in the gray areas, and the pace set by the process side on the right in a blue shade.
Point A: When we begin working on the project #1 session, we pick up our place where we last left in this project. That would be the task folder under milestone #1. This means that we are thinking through the project planning level, or point 4 in the opportunities diagram. We fill in the tasks needed to address this task folder, respresented by the blue arrows coming out of the task folder.
Point B: With the task folder now filled in, we continue through the innovation steps by working through these tasks. We begin a task timer on them to concentrate on one at a time, break them down, focus on each step, complete them and then move towards the next task. This is all in the task level, or points 5-8 on the opportunities diagrahm.
Point C: We have finished our task folder from point B, and now begin filling in milestone #2. This involves looking back at how we did in milestone #1—what we can learn from it, and listing what is still needed. Then we begin planning out the project to address the goal objectives. These steps takes us through points 9, 3, and 4 in the opportunities chart. At this point we don't know what the detailed tasks are, we are just ranking our opportunities to find what areas we should begin detailing our plans to carry out. This project planning perspective is shown by the task folders created under milestone #2.
Point D: Later in the day we begin work on the project #2 session. Here we last left off on a task, and so work through the task level on these tasks.