Focus Archives – J. David Stark

How to Put More Focus beyond Email

Reading time: 8 minutes

Focusing is like balancing.¹ It’s not something you do once but continually. And amid conflicting demands on your attention, focusing more on what actually matters takes the form of four steps:

Eliminate what is not important and not urgent (Quadrant 4).
Separate yourself from what is urgent but not important (Quadrant 3).
Abbreviate the impact of things that are both urgent and important (Quadrant 1).
Concentrate on what is important but not urgent (Quadrant 2).

To make these 4 steps more concrete, however, let’s take the example of email.

Email as an Example

For good or ill (or some of both), email is ubiquitous in biblical studies.

Sometimes, important things happen in email like submitting a journal article or responding to reviewers’ comments about it. But nobody gets into biblical studies from a desire to read and write email. So, it’s a good candidate to walk through the 4 steps with.

For each step, I’m not suggesting that you should only deal with email that falls into that bucket. This is especially true with email from Quadrant 1 (important and urgent) and Quadrant 2 (important and not urgent).

You particularly need to address the former because it’s there pressing for a response. You need to address the latter so that it doesn’t become urgent.

So, the 4 steps aren’t necessarily sequential chronologically. You might toggle back and forth among them depending on what email you have. But the steps are logically sequential if you want to get the focus-improving snowball working for you as it rolls downhill.

Quadrant 4: Eliminate email that’s not important and not urgent.

Over the years, you’ve probably gotten onto more email lists than you can remember. But how many of them do you actually find valuable? How many of them just clutter your inbox with offers and information you’re better off ignoring?

Where that’s the case, it’s okay to unsubscribe from those lists. Not only is it okay, but you have a responsibility to unsubscribe. You have a responsibility to avoid letting this kind of email pull your attention away from where it needs to be.

But maybe you can’t unsubscribe fully because it’s an email list managed by your church or institution. Even in that case, though, your email client probably has a filter (Gmail) or rules (Outlook) feature.

For Quadrant 4 email that you can’t unsubscribe from, use this feature so you never have to interact with it again. That way, unless you just go looking through your archived or deleted items, you’ll be just as free of these Quadrant 4 messages as if you had unsubscribed.

Quadrant 3: Separate yourself from email that’s urgent but not important.

You can separate yourself from Quadrant 3 email in two ways—automation or delegation.

Separation by Automation

Automation can mean various things. It might mean putting a process on autopilot so it runs without human involvement. Or it might mean creating a standard process sequence, checklist, or template.² In this case, when someone does the activity, the sequence, checklist, or template helps him or her move through it more efficiently.

To leverage automation for your Quadrant 3 emails, think about the process that ends up producing those emails. Can parts of that produce email be put on autopilot? Or can you help document workflows or create templates that answer questions ahead of time and eliminate the need for the extra emails?

Separation by Delegation

If you just happen to have someone reporting to you whom can pass email off to, that’s certainly an option for delegating it. But there are other ways to delegate that don’t require you to have this resource.

Perhaps you’re involved in a monthly process with a coworker, and email currently drives that process. You get an email, you do the thing, you respond in another email.

But there’s probably nothing necessary about that email-driven workflow. So, you could have a conversation, decide that you’ll deliver the thing unprompted by x date every month. There’s then no need for you to get the email that used to trigger the process because you’ve delegated the function of that email to a better process.³

Or maybe you’re nominally involved in a given working group. But you don’t normally have much meaningful to contribute to its efforts. In this case, you might help the group be more effective if you stepped back. (Smaller teams can often move with more agility.) So, you could help the whole group by trusting its core members to press ahead without needing to be sure they keep you in the loop as well.

Quadrant 1: Abbreviate email that is both urgent and important.

To abbreviate email, you might not necessarily need to write shorter messages, although that might be helpful as well.⁴ The point is to abbreviate the number and complexity of the messages you receive that fall into this category.

Decreasing the number of urgent cries for your attention that land in your inbox has obvious advantages. But decreasing their complexity is also an important way of abbreviating these messages’ impact.

A Quadrant 1 message requiring only a concise, clear-cut “yes” or “no” response presents a much lower impact than does a more complex question, perhaps with strong emotional entanglements.

As you look to abbreviate your Quadrant 1 email either in its amount or in its complexity, you’re again looking for what’s unclear or broken behind those emails that made them seem necessary. The messages are important, but what steps weren’t taken (or what missteps were) such that whatever important issues have now also become urgent?

Do you need clearer patterns for resolving thorny issues (e.g., having a live conversation rather than firing emails back and forth)? Do you need better planning for things you know are coming down the road? Or do you need larger buffers so that, when the unexpected happens, you’re still able to tend to what’s important without things going sideways?

Quadrant 2: Concentrate on email that’s important and not urgent.

There are two sides of Quadrant 2 as it applies to email.

More Focus on More Important Emails

The first is that, as you whittle down the imprint of email from Quadrants 4, 3, and 1, you’re left with less email. So, you can focus more on the messages that are more important.

According to the Pareto principle, only about 20% of your emails account for about 80% of what’s actually important in your inbox.⁵ So, the more focus you can bring to that 20%, the better results you’ll get on that correspondence.

More Focus on More Important Work outside Email

But the second side is even more important and comes back to the idea that nobody gets into biblical studies in order to do email. If you’re concentrating only on email that’s important and not urgent and if you don’t have less of that to begin with, then you’ll have more bandwidth to put your focus on things outside email.

Email is part of academic life, but it’s not the most important part. On the whole, email doesn’t fall in the 20% of activities that will get 80% of the results in moving the needle on your scholarship (though some individual messages could).

So, the goal of working on your email process (or whatever else) temporarily is to decrease it’s footprint, to get it out of the way. That way, you have more space to put your focus on the 20% of activities that will move the needle.

Conclusion

Email’s ubiquity makes it a useful example of how make the space to put your focus more where you need it to be. But it’s just that, an example.

For you, the lowest hanging fruit might be elsewhere as you seek to put your focus where you need it. Wherever that is, however, the four key responses to the four quadrants can help you gradually bring that target into clearer view.

Header image provided by Zachary Keimig. ↩
For suggesting these various kinds of automation, I’m grateful to Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 117–38. ↩
On the power of better processes to reduce email load, see Cal Newport, A World without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2021), 135–214. ↩
See Newport, World without Email, 205–8. ↩
For an introduction, see Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less (1999; repr., New York: Doubleday, 2008). ↩

How to Put More Focus Where You Need It

Reading time: 3 minutes

Life in general contains a lot of noise.¹ That’s no less true for academic life.

All of the noise can make it hard to know where to put your focus. And if you do identify where you need to focus, it can be still harder to put your attention there and actually focus.

Focusing Is Like Balancing

To some extent, there’s no avoiding this challenge. Like balancing, focusing isn’t a one-and-done effort. Having focus in your work means focusing “the way our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision.”²

But optical focus happens naturally and without thinking about it. In academic life, there’s no such automatic process. So, the question becomes,

How do you put your focus where you need it to be among the ambiguities and often-conflicting demands of academic life?

Answering this question can be challenging in theory and sometimes more so in practice. But there’s a clear, 4-step process to help you grapple with it.

Four Steps to More Focus

The 4 steps to help you put your focus more where you need it emerge from the four quadrants of the “Eisenhower Matrix.”³

These quadrants, their characteristics and their appropriate responses are as follows:

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Quadrant 1 Characteristics: Urgent, Important Response: Abbreviate	Quadrant 2 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Important Response: Concentrate
Not Important	Quadrant 3 Characteristics: Urgent, Not Important Response: Separate	Quadrant 4 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Not Important Response: Eliminate

The 4 steps to put your focus more where you need it then begin with the response to Quadrant 4 and work clockwise through the responses for the remaining quadrants.⁴

It may seem counter-intuitive to begin improving your focus by starting with Quadrant 4. But the point is that the very existence of Quadrant 4 items drains focus away from what falls into the other quadrants.

So, by starting in Quadrant 4, you get the clearest gains as you eliminate the “focus leaches” that lie there. Then, as a snowball gets larger as it rolls downhill, you can focus more on each successive step in the process with ultimate goal of concentrating more fully on Quadrant 2 work—the important things that all too easily get swept aside by the urgent.

Conclusion

Focusing means adapting. Amid the swarming demands of academic life, it can feel disorienting as you look for where to even begin.

But there’s a 4-step process that you can work consistently over time with, for example, something like email (which I’ll discuss next week). And as you do so, you can gradually find yourself able to put more of your focus beyond the minutiae and on what actually matters.

Header image provided by Zachary Keimig. ↩
Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 66. ↩
For this framework, see especially Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 154–92; see also Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 91–158; McKeown, Essentialism, 215–24. ↩
This way of using the Eisenhower Matrix then becomes essentially identical to the alternative “focus funnel” metaphor developed by Rory Vaden, Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time (New York: Perigee, 2015). ↩

6 Steps to Block Your Time for More Focus in a Digital Workspace

Reading time: 9 minutes

Time blocking is a great way of budgeting time because it shows when you’ve spent time and whether you’ve spent it on what’s important.¹

And whatever approach you adopt to how you block your time, there are 6 simple steps you can take to make that process pretty seamless in a digital workspace.

Identify your main types of commitments.
Decide how much time to spend on different types of commitments.
Build a default weekly schedule.
Roll with the punches.
Condense multiple calendars.
Protect your focus.

Or should you use a paper calendar?

Before I get to those 6 steps, however, I should stress that time blocking doesn’t require anything digital. That includes a digital calendar.

If you prefer to keep a paper calendar, however, you can definitely still block your calendar and reap the rewards of budgeting your time.²

Every approach has its upsides and downsides. And time blocking isn’t something to do for its own sake but for the sake of what it enables.

For me, a digital approach centered around Google Calendar is simplest and easiest to maintain. These factors have gone a long way in guiding my choice of tools. But even if your selection differs, you should still find some of the ideas here helpful and adaptable to your preferred toolset.

1. Identify your main types of commitments.

For most people, time blocking probably shouldn’t replace a task list. Routinely spending time to block out 15 minutes here, 7 minutes there, and so on for smaller tasks would use up more time than it would be worth.

So, to start time blocking, identify the main types of commitments you have. What are the big “buckets” in which your commitments sit?

For example, during the workweek, I boil most of these down into “focused work” (which includes activities related to teaching and research) and “administration.” If you’re a student who’s also involved in full-time church work, your main buckets might be “study” and “church.”

Use however many buckets with whatever labels you need to capture your commitments. But don’t use more than you need. Doing so will just make your time blocking more complex without any extra benefit. And over time, you might want to change what buckets you’re using.

For instance, in the past, I’ve tried to have “preparation” and “grading” blocks for class. But it’s proven simpler just to include these activities under the one heading of “focused work.”

2. Decide how much time to spend on different types of commitments.

Once you’ve identified what your main types of commitments are, you’ll want to identify how much total time to devote to each type.

As you do so, remember that you have a limited amount of productive work in you each week. So, whatever work you do in excess of 50 hours per week tends to be increasingly less productive.³

How you go apportion this productive working time will vary depending on your context. For example,

If you’re solely a full-time student, you could start by roughly dividing your time among the courses you’re working on. You might then give a bit larger proportion to one that might seem more intensive. Or you could start by dividing your time according to emphases laid out for you in your performance review forms. Or
If you’re negotiating academics with work outside the academy, you may simply need to budget 40 hours in the week for your regular job and then determine how much school can fit around that. Or it might be helpful to talk with your work stakeholders (e.g., church leadership) to work out how should apportion your time.

As you start working on this schedule, you’re sure to find things that need adjustment. That’s a good thing. It means you’re learning how your reality differs from your prior understanding of it. So, make the necessary adjustments, and press ahead.

3. Build a default weekly schedule.

A default weekly schedule is simply a plan for how you would want a typical week to go if you could fully control everything in it.⁴

3.1. Use the time blocking approach that works for you.

For this step, you’ll need to have decided on a particular approach to blocking your time. If you opt for the journalistic approach, you might not have set times for particular activities within your default weekly schedule. But you should know how much of that activity you want your week to include.

To illustrate, you might allocate 10 hours per week to the class you’re taking. In a standard workweek, you could get to this number by working

2 hours per day from 8:00–10:00 am (a rhythmic arrangement),
8:00–9:45 Monday morning before staff meeting, 3:00–5:00 Monday afternoon, and 8:30–2:45 on Tuesday after your breakfast meeting (a journalistic arrangement),
8:00 am–5:00 pm Monday (9 hours) and 8:00–9:00 am Tuesday (1 hour, a bimodal or combination arrangement), or
whatever else works with your schedule.

3.2. Make and arrange the appointments you need with yourself.

As you decide how you want to spend your time, create corresponding appointments for yourself. If your calendar is shared with others, be sure you mark yourself as “busy” during these times to show what time is already spoken for.

In this process, you’ll probably need to move or resize some blocks more than once. That’s to be expected. One advantage of time blocking on a digital calendar is that you can move blocks around more easily than on paper.

Work through your calendar layering in your different types of commitments identified under step 1 above. If you’re using a non-journalistic approach to time blocking, also set up your blocks to repeat every week. That way, your default weekly schedule will roll forward with you from one week to the next.

4. Roll with the punches.

Having a default weekly schedule doesn’t necessarily mean you have to rigidly enforce it. Instead, it gives you a starting point, or home base, from which you can tackle whatever one-off demands a given week might contain.

So, unless you’ve adopted a “monastic” approach to time blocking, feel free to work out from this home base to accommodate the demands you have in any particular actual week.

5. Condense multiple calendars.

If you have multiple calendars that you need to manage, you can often manage them together. For instance, you might

Invite yourself to your time blocks. If your main calendar is under your personal Google account, but you also want your school calendar to show a time block, just invite your school email address to the time block you create. Doing this will also update your invited calendar whenever you change a time block on your main calendar.
Use Zapier or IFTTT to copy meeting requests from one calendar to another. Inevitably, you’ll get a meeting request in one account that your other account isn’t invited to. Rather than copying these events manually, set up a “zap” or “recipe” to copy these requests automatically to another calendar. The events won’t be linked. So, if a meeting time changes, you’ll need to update your other calendar separately. But this kind of automation can still help reduce the time you spend keeping multiple calendars in sync.
Use Todoist’s Google Calendar integration to pull onto your calendar the specific tasks you’re wanting to complete in a given larger bucket. This integration provides a convenient way for you to layer particular activities on top of your default weekly schedule blocks. Once set up, you can see and manage everything from one place.

6. Protect your focus.

When budgeting your finances, it does little good to create a written plan and then not to live by it. The same is true with your time.

Of course, you do need to roll with the punches as in step 4 above. But this means being intentionally flexible to accommodate how life doesn’t always conform to a predefined plan. What you want to avoid getting unintentionally distracted from what you’ve committed yourself to in a given time block.

If you think of something you need to handle that’s unrelated to your current time block, write it down, and keep moving. After that block is done, come back to the things you’ve jotted down, and arrange how you’ll address them later.

To avoid getting distracted by software, try using Freedom to schedule digital discipline for you that coincides with your time blocks for the day.

For instance, I currently have a Freedom session that runs every weekday morning, 5:30–8:30.⁵ Somewhere during this time, I look over my calendar for the day and schedule any additional Freedom sessions I want to run that day based on the kind of work I’m doing.

Conclusion

In the end, you want to get the most out of your time that you can. That starts with planning your days, living by that plan, and discerning when and how it needs to change.

Whether you work digitally or on paper, time blocking can help ensure every minute counts. That way, you can look back in satisfaction on how you spent your days rather than wondering where they went.

Header image provided by Zan. ↩
For thoughts on how to time block on a paper calendar, see Cal Newport, “Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day,” weblog, Cal Newport, 21 December 2013 or the Full Focus Planner. ↩
Bob Sullivan, “Memo to Work Martyrs: Long Hours Make You Less Productive,” CNBC, 26 January 2015. ↩
For this reason, Michael Hyatt dubs the concept an “ideal week.” Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 161–82. ↩
For instructions on creating a recurring Freedom session, see “Start Later and Recurring Sessions,” Freedom Help Center, n.d. ↩

5 Ways You Can Block Your Time to Focus on What Really Matters

Reading time: 7 minutes

Especially in knowledge work contexts like biblical studies, what is and isn’t actually on your plate can easily bleed together.¹

Day to day, there can be a hectic scrum of incoming requests and possible opportunities. Amid all of this, time blocking can help you ensure you’re prioritizing what matters to you. There isn’t one right way to block your time, but there are five basic ways you can approach it.²

Monastic
Bimodal
Rhythmic
Journalistic
Combination

And with some thought and experimentation, you can find what approach works best for you.

1. Monastic

In a monastic approach, the main idea is to eliminate everything except focused work. You avoid anything that doesn’t fall in a very specific, narrow range of activities (e.g., writing).

This approach is possible for some. But it’s not particularly feasible if you have a broader slate of essential responsibilities.

Somewhat ironically too, time blocking is probably a less useful technique under a monastic approach. Your calendar only ever has one activity, and others know you don’t allow interruptions to this schedule.

So, actually blocking your calendar may be more trouble than it’s worth. The monastic approach blocks your calendar simply by adopting it.

2. Bimodal

The bimodal approach is like the monastic strategy in periods you devote to focused work. But if you block time bimodally, you’ll deliberately intersperse other periods specifically to address less demanding activities.

The idea in the bimodal philosophy is to batch focused work together into larger chunks, to do the same with work that requires less focus, and to keep the two quite separate. In this way, you get the efficiencies that come with longer, uninterrupted stretches of a particular kind of activity. But you also don’t commit yourself to ignoring everything else.

On the scale of a week if you’re a student who’s also in full-time church work, this might look like having

Mondays blocked out for class reading,
Tuesdays assigned to writing papers,
Wednesdays allocated to hospital visits,
Thursdays reserved for meetings, and
Fridays set aside for sermon preparation.

Then, when you’re doing a specific kind of work, you try to push aside other responsibilities.

3. Rhythmic

The rhythmic approach is similar to the bimodal strategy, but it involves more frequent alternation among different kinds of activities. So, for instance, within a given day, you might do the same activity at the same time each day or on specific days of the week.

With this structure, the rhythmic approach allows times for different kinds of activities to come up more regularly. So, this approach may be helpful if you don’t think it best to batch different kinds of work as strictly as you would in the bimodal approach.

4. Journalistic

The journalistic approach operates by “fit[ting] deep work wherever you can into your schedule.”³

Thus, in this case, you might leave mostly white space on your calendar leading up to a given week. But once you come to planning that week, you allocate your remaining time to accomplish the focused work you have to do.

This strategy imposes the least structure on your calendar ahead of time. That can be good if you need that flexibility to accommodate irregularity in your schedule. But the more of your calendar you leave blank, the more you’re inviting that whitespace to find something to occupy it.

So, if you’re going to use a journalistic approach to time blocking, you might want to set yourself a “budget” for how much of a specific kind of activity you’ll allow in a given period.

For instance, you might decide you’ll allow eight hours of meetings per week. After those hours are spent in a given week—wherever in that week they occur—other meetings have to find a place in a following week.

By capping how much of a given activity you’ll include, you ensure you still have the time you need for other commitments. But you can stay flexible with exactly when you address them.

5. Combination

Of course, there isn’t a “purist police” for time blocking approaches that allow you to use only one of them. What’s important is to time block in a way that helps you focus on what matters most.

For instance, the basic approach I’ve used for about a good while involves elements of each of the bimodal, rhythmic, and journalistic strategies:

As in the rhythmic approach, each workday begins with a startup routine that includes primary literature reading—mostly Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament—and ends with a shutdown routine that includes email and administrative activities.⁴
As in the bimodal approach, I block the bulk of any given day into as large a chunk as I can (e.g., devoting those hours to teaching, class preparation, or writing on any given day).
As in the journalistic approach, I don’t hold rigidly to the same schedule every day. Instead, I’ll adjust as necessary to accommodate other essential activities that come up.

Do You Need to Block All Your Time?

To this point, I’ve discussed time blocking primarily in a professional context. But what about your personal time? Do you need to block that too?

In short, yes. You need to block all your regularly occurring time, but you don’t need to block it all in the same way or to the same degree.

To take another personal example, when I’m at work, I have a pretty detailed plan for those hours. When I’m at home, however, that’s not the case, but the time is still blocked.

It’s likely just blocked in large chucks of “with family,” “at church,” “sleep,” and so on. What those large general blocks contain could vary quite a bit from day to day or on the spur of the moment.

If these blocks are firmly ingrained as habits for you, you might not need to put them on your calendar. Simply by seeing 6:30 pm on Tuesday, you know what that block holds.

The important thing, though, is to visually block on your calendar anything commitments that are softer and more liable to get bumped by less important things.

For instance, if I’m in the middle of something at the end of a workday, it’s all to easy to spend “just a few more minutes” tying up the loose ends. But those “few more minutes” quickly eat into time I’d planned to spend elsewhere.

So, while I don’t have explicit “family time” or “sleep” blocks on my calendar, I do have a block for “Leave the Office” to help ensure that happens when it’s supposed to.

Conclusion

In the end, whatever time blocking approach you adopt, the important thing is how time blocking helps you spend your time deliberately.

Even (and especially) if you have too much on your plate, you can’t afford to have what’s most important at the mercy of what’s simply latest and loudest.

Header image provided by STIL. ↩
Cal Newport discusses the first four of these strategies under the rubric of “deep work philosophies.” Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central, 2016), 100–17. I’m here focusing on these general ideologies in terms of the specific time blocking practices they imply. ↩
Newport, Deep Work, 115. ↩
On “workday startup” and “workday shutdown” routines, see Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2019), 116–21. ↩

Pro Tips for Busy Writers: David DeSilva

Reading time: 5 minutesTo the series “Pro Tips for Busy Writers,” I’m pleased to welcome David DeSilva.

David is the Trustees’ Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Greek at Ashland Theological Seminary.

David has published or in press more than 15 academic books and another 13 for popular audiences. Beyond this, he has contributed upwards of 50 articles and essays to journals and edited volumes.

For more about David, see his personal website.

Larger projects (e.g., a dissertation, a second monograph) can be more important but less urgent than others (e.g., conference papers, book reviews). How do you avoid letting good-but-less-important projects push out or cause you to procrastinate on those that are more important but less urgent?

I’m personally not very good at this, but the key is, first, to say “no” to conference papers, invitations to contribute essays, and especially to book reviews (and usually invitations to respond to questionnaires that aren’t about one of my projects!).

[Given this principle, my special thanks to David for his decision not to say “no” to participating in this interview! 🙂 ]

I think I’ve done five book reviews in the last decade. When I do think about conference papers or essay invitations, I try to make sure they are in line with my current (or anticipated) project so that my head keeps swimming in the same pool.

When you’ve worked on multiple projects concurrently, what processes, principles, or practices have you used to be sure you’re making good progress on all fronts?

To be honest, I don’t really work on projects concurrently. If necessary, I set the one aside and get the other done, then return to the first one.

I find immersion to be the best way for me to make progress on something.

Do you divide your process between research and writing? If so, how?

Yes, I tend to try to do the bulk of the research first, take a plenitude of notes, and shape them into the orderly progression that will become the article or book.

Of course, new questions arise in the course of the actual writing. But those tend to be rather specific things that I had not anticipated having to dig into and don’t stall the writing process too much.

What do you do to help you avoid overcommitting yourself either on timelines that are too short for their projects or on how many projects you take on? How do you avoid undercommitting?

Undercommitting has just never been a danger for me. I’ve used those rare occasions when I’ve had free time between projects to be creative in other ways, like composing anthems or arranging organ music for my church work.

I have a serious problem with overcommitting, and I’ll simply say that it’s better to err on the side of undercommitting—and having some good free time for other interests or just for the tasks of home ownership and yard maintenance!—than on the side of overcommitting.

The Hebrew Bible image for enjoying covenant blessings was sitting under one’s vines and trees, not incessantly working on them.

When working on multiple projects concurrently, what tools do you use (e.g., filing systems, project management tools, apps)?

When I can’t avoid working on multiple projects in the same time frame, I tend to compartmentalize and devote, say, Monday and Tuesday to the one and Thursday and Saturday to the other (before our kids were grown, however, Saturdays were sacred to playing!). That way, I can keep my focus in one place at a time.

But in these cases, they’ve also been significantly different kinds of projects, e.g., working on the Greek handbook on Galatians (so a lot of very technical and not-so-creative work) alongside writing my novel, Day of Atonement.

Organization is, of course, essential. I’ve never used “project management tools.” I just put all the physical books I need for one project on one group of shelves and those for the other on another group of shelves. I divide all my notes and drafts into appropriate folders on my computer desktop.

How has your approach to concurrent writing projects changed over time?

I have accepted my tunnel-vision approach and try not to work against myself.

What are two or more projects you’re particularly excited about that you’re now working on concurrently?

I’m excited not to be working on two or more projects concurrently!

What closing advice (if any) would you offer to (post-)graduate students and new faculty as they try to become comfortable and competent for themselves in making progress concurrently on multiple writing projects?

Publish articles and present papers on the way to completing larger monographs. If there are key new works that you must engage to do your own research, target those (and only those) for book reviews. (This is essentially advice not to get involved in concurrent projects, but to get the most out of a single project.)

Don’t stress yourself out about the quality of what you’re writing. Just keep working at the level at which you were working as you successfully completed your dissertation.

What you did once, you can do again—and again. Your skills will naturally grow with use and exercise, particularly as you keep engaging the research of your peers.

What’s your biggest take away from this interview?

Header image provided by Freddie Marriage via Unsplash

Daily Gleanings: Atomic Minimalism (6 December 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutes

James Clear and Cal Newport discuss the symbiotic relationship their prior work has in terms of fostering focus.

In particular, Clear and Newport situate Clear’s program for habit formation as an excellent way of making operative the program Newport has articulated for the need to foster focused work.

It’s a rare thing when authors of two productivity-related lines of thought sit down for such a mutual exchange, and the full recording is well worth the listen.