Breaking the Chain of Mistakes
How the smallest of the errors can cause an adversity and what can you do avoid them.
“I don’t have time for that”! , that’s usually the first thing we say whenever a new task gets added into the pile. Unable to prioritize them, and ultimately making things worse, these accumulate until it reaches a breaking point. Paying a bill on-time, taking care of a dental problem, cleaning up the house, doing the dishes, you name it. Today we get things added to to-do list from all fronts, personal, family, work, plus all our aspirations. But what happens when we continuously avoid these seemingly meaningless tasks ? What happens when our procrastination could put lives in danger?
One good example of this type of event is narrated by Julian Sacton in his book Madhouse at the End of the Earth and the exploration vessel The Belgica 1850. Led by the Belgian Navy officer Adrien de Gerlache, a very young crew of inexperienced sailors and scientists, decided to embark on a journey to discover Antarctica. While crossing the Drake passage, they faced a storm and suddenly the galley started to flood knee deep. The improper storage of coal caused the drainage to clog and prevented seawater from escaping. Panic ensued, and the crew unsuccessfully tried to push the lump of coal from the inside. One of the sailors asked permission from the captain to try to push the coal from the outside, but the captain did not answer which the sailor took as a ‘yes’. This turned out to be devastating, the sailor was pushed overboard from one of the sudden rocking movements of the boat. Attempts to rescue the sailor were unsuccessful, and the sailor drowned and sank in the freezing waters of the Antarctic.
At first glance we might blame the captain for his lack of leadership or the crew for their inexperience. But there is something deeper to draw from this: people’s inability to make decisions quickly and take actions on problems that require immediate attention.
The ripple effect of putting off tasks can be seen even today in the work place. Although the implications are far less dangerous and these mistakes seldom put lives in danger, the core of the problem is still the same. The lack of having a framework to make a decision when an activity needs attention puts us in a position of either not prioritizing the activity correctly, leading to dire consequences, or just forgetting the activity completely.
A good methodology that can help with the quick decision making process, is the Getting Things Done by I David Allen in GTD. He proposed a framework that could have helped the Belgica crew easily avoid losing a crew member. Here are the quick five steps he suggest:
Capture: We trust our brains to remain us of the things we need to do. This can work well, but unless we start some of the tasks we want to do, eventually we will forget. The brain is exceptionally good at remembering uncompleted activities. This is called the Zeigarnik effect, which is what we do when we create the famous to-do list.
Process: On their own, todo lists have their own problems , additionally they can cause stress, and even worse, decision paralysis. Instead, we should try to reflect on the nature of the list item and ask the following question for each of the items on the list:
Is this actionable?
If the answer to the questions is yes and the task can be completed in 2min or less, you should do it. If it is No, then create an action list. I know, this sounds like another fancy name for another todo list, but it’s not.
Organize: For the action list to be effective, we need to add a couple of classification axes:
Project: Group tasks that are aligned to the same outcome. Example: cleaning the cabin of the boat, securing the coal.
Time: Actions that have a time bound constraints should be added to a calendar.
Context: This involves grouping tasks that have a similar action. For example: phone calls, emails, journaling.
Review: Weekly, Daily, to make sure that the day-to-day and unexpected things are getting the attention they need and in case it is needed we can tune-up. Is everything where it is supposed to be. Are we in the right direction?
Engage: Ultimately, we need to do what we put in paper (or bytes) and by using the list we already created with time, priority and relationships we need to go and execute them.
Final Thoughts
It will be very difficult to go about in life always thinking what could go wrong. Still, I think it is important as we go with our day to day, to try to adopt decision making processes that can help us to intuitively reduce the cognitive load to complete an activity, ultimately helping us to live a with less stress, use our thinking process to solve problems and avoid woeful chain of events in work and in life.
