Beyond Productivity Hacks Part 1
A systems approach to managing your health and your life
By Michael McShea
High performing families, couples and individuals tend to run their lives as a system of systems, to create space to have more energy to focus on personal wholeness, fulfillment, and wellbeing. This is a key insight from the first round of ethnographic research that kicked off the Digital Health Collaborative’s 2020/2021 annual research. The focus was on how family's, couples, and individuals of varied backgrounds, ages, and means live their lives. The first round put the spotlight on highly functioning households. One thing that stood out is that these high performers were much more likely to have created systems to manage day-to-day tasks with less effort and friction, to make their lives more enjoyable, rewarding and less frustrating. As illustrated below, these high performers manage health and wellbeing as both a system in itself, and the outcome of their many other life systems.
Stepping back from how we live our lives and taking stock of the systems we have built to support our every day demands is a good thing to deliberate on during the COVID-19 pandemic era. Have your systems changed? Whether you deliberatively designed your systems before the pandemic or not, they probably have evolved to adjust to the new situation.
Chances are you have been deliberate about adjustments to how you eat, for example, and how you work. You almost certainly eat out less, so your eating systems are now more about grocery shopping, food preparation and take out. You have probably settled into new patterns, whether consciously or without thinking about it. Setting up your work place and work routine has hopefully been deliberate as well, since for most of us our system has been relocated to our homes, whether we were well prepared for that or not. Chances are if you are reading this, you are one of the ultra-productive types, and have deliberately adjusted your systems for safety, health, finances, family, entertainment, and more.
Frameworks and Systems, Jobs To be Done (JTBD), and Modes
There are four intertwined concepts that are coming together for both the Digital Health Collaborative (DHC), and its consumer sibling, the Meaningful Experience Collaborative (MXC). The first concept is frameworks. Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy and a contributor to the DHC and MXC is a master at creating frameworks as a method of interpreting the world. Joe has taught many companies how frameworks enable you to move from a “list of stuff” to a strategic tool that both describes what is going on and prescribes what to do about it. Joe is so good at this that he trained a room full of healthcare innovators to design systems for behavior change in 20 minutes! See my prior LinkedIn article that came out of that exercise, To Increase Personal Health Engagement, Start with Why.
Systems take the notion of frameworks to a different level. Donella H. Meadows, the author of Thinking in Systems – A Primer, defines a system as “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.” Simple enough. The elements of the system together with the unique relationships between those elements give a system its purpose.
Meadows also points out “We fool ourselves by seeing the world as a series of events. Events are the outputs, moment by moment, from the system. Events are the most visible aspect of a larger complex – but not always the most important.” That means that paying attention to the underlying elements and relationships between elements that actually produce the outcomes – events – points you to how to affect your systems. While a framework is a strategic tool, it is static. It makes sense, then, to think of a system as one way to bring a framework to life. As a systems engineer by education and training, this is something I can get jazzed up about.
The performance and quality of the system to produce the desired outputs reflects how well we have designed and operationalized our systems. This brings us to Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) theory and modes. The performance of the system at least in part should be measured by how well it aligns with the JTBD, and how much energy that takes to actually get the job done. The focus on energy here goes back to the original insight from DHC ethnographic research – the idea is to minimize the energy in our system of systems so we have enough energy to focus on higher order personal needs, or at least to minimize friction. The high performers had this perfected to the point of getting as much of their lives as possible in the tedium category on autopilot.
Think of the quality of life improvement you get from having a system to handle mail so it does not pile up on the counter, or for keeping up with email in your inbox. Good working systems make life better. If the system is too hard and takes too much energy, it falls apart (and the mail piles up and bills get missed). The quality and performance of the system and how much energy it takes is especially important for systems related to your health. Easy to follow systems are essential to putting healthy behaviors on autopilot.
Modes have emerged from DHC and MXC research as a way of describing a mindset and pattern of behaviors that consumers (or patients) use while they are in that mindset. As outlined in What Mode are you In, a whole chapter in Digital Context 2.0, Dave Norton lays out how we are unconsciously but constantly switching modes. When the systems we have created to accomplish the JTBD are well aligned with modes we can easily get into, the quality and performance of the system output improves. More on modes later, but for now, think of it as another thing to consider when designing your systems. If the system is designed to work well in modes you are naturally in, the JTBD will take less energy and system will perform better.
Productivity Frameworks to Improve Your Life Systems
One way of viewing the performance of a system is in terms of productivity. Productivity, in plain English, is the efficiency with which your system produces the desired outputs based on the inputs to the system. If the input to your life systems is the energy that it takes to get to the desired outcomes (JTBD), then high performers are trying to minimize that energy for everyday living tasks, in order to have more energy left for personal fulfillment and wellbeing. By energy here, we are talking about the constraints of our physical, mental, and emotional capacity.
This is especially important when it comes to health. An example of a system that takes very low energy could be thought of as a routine. Near zero energy? A habit. It takes little to no mental energy, and just becomes automatic. A system that relies on a lot of willpower is more likely to fail. The brain is only 2% of our body weight but it consumes 20% of the body’s available glucose-derived energy at any given time! This is according to Sugar for the brain: the role of glucose in physiological and pathological brain function. If there is only so much glucose to go around, it is a zero sum game. Systems that require as little willpower (mental effort) as possible have a much better chance of succeeding.
We can all probably think of people in our lives who we think are highly productive. Applying all the elements of the DHC/MXC framework defined above, one way to talk about that productivity is that these individuals have built a high performing system of systems that requires the minimal expenditure of energy to achieve the JTBD. This leaves more physical, mental, and emotional energy to apply to more meaningful engagement.
I saw an in interesting YouTube video recently on Twitter about Elon Musk's approach to productivity. It got me thinking more about frameworks and systems for productivity. One particular productivity tip from the video is the concept of batching. To Elon Musk, batching is grouping activities together that require the same mindset – e.g. mode. This is an excellent example of aligning JTBD with modes to create a system that is high performing for productivity. While I do not fully buy into his use of batching – being with his kids and doing emails for example, reflecting on how I live day in and day out, I realized that I do batching subconsciously all the time, and I would venture to guess that if you have read this far, you probably do to.
Here are some of my modes that are conducive to batching and help with my productivity:
“Wake up” mode over my first cup of coffee (ok first pot of coffee) when I check the weather, look at my calendar for the day and organize my thoughts over how to prepare for various meetings, e.g. when to take the dog for a walk, check email, and think of what needs to get done today.
“Administrative mode”, when I am looking at mail and paying bills for example, which very nicely matches “financial planning” mode which also includes expense reports (remember those?).
“Creative mode” is when I am feeling in the zone for deep thinking and when the relationships between concepts reveal themselves. This is a good time for writing and reflection--and may have been happening as you read these words. Editing mode is quite different (the mode I am in now).
“Dinner making” mode is when I transition from work to family, but also try to tune back into who needs what. It is also when I think of personal to-dos for the day that still need attending to, look at today’s mail, and check in on the news and what is happening in the world.
“Sunday Football” mode is where I pick a few things that I can do without a lot of mental capacity around the during the 3-hour game (e.g. what can I batch?). Of course, this assumes that the Baltimore Ravens are adding energy vs. taking it away as their game against the Chiefs a few weeks ago did.
“Golf mode” is where I truly let go of everything, empty my mind and just enjoy being in a nice outdoor environment, hopefully with others that I enjoy being with and thinking more socially.
“Work out mode” is when I am usually getting lost in music and thought about a very specific topic or challenge, but at the same time letting go of the details and letting inspiration in.
Batching is just one example of how systems, JTBD, and modes all come together. Why does it work? I would like to think that it works because we can actually manage to execute several of our life systems at the same time if they can be executed in the same mode. It is well established that multi-tasking is a myth – rather than truly having the mind focused on multiple tasks at one time, in reality the mind is switching attention back and forth (see this article for details). The energy required for “task switching” actually depletes the brain faster, and studies have shown that it can make you 40% less productive. Perhaps this needs another look given how we naturally switch certain modes with little effort. Maybe the key to multi-tasking is to do it for JTBD that require the same mode. With this system design thinking, we can construct highly efficient life systems.
What’s next and what does this have to do with digital health?
Analyzing my own system for productivity against the constructs of frameworks, systems, JTBD, and modes I realize it is built off multiple frameworks I have learned and experimented with over time. I hope you will read my next blog, where I will dive more deeply into 5 productivity frameworks that have shaped how I have built my life systems to be more effective and productive. Consider this next installment a bunch of Lego blocks you can assemble in a way that will improve your productivity. Being proactive about designing these systems to minimize the energy needed to manage life day in and day out preserves energy and capacity for more fun.
Since our health is such a fundamental aspect of our wellbeing, it is critical to take a more proactive approach to designing our systems around healthy living. As digital health solution designers, using frameworks, and designing systems around JTBD that are efficient in the modes they require will lead to more successful solutions that can really help improve health outcomes. Building digital solutions that present health consumers with a variety of tools that work well in modes they are naturally in will help them engage with their health and build a healthier lifestyle.
Now that it is clear that thinking in systems, JTBD, and modes are all related, the DHC will also be looking at the low performers. In healthcare, the very intriguing idea is that if we can help people build effective systems around the JTBD of staying healthy, it will take less energy for them to stay on track, and adopt new healthy habits and behaviors. Then we can build our digital health solutions to be even more effective at creating the right outcomes – systems that help people become high performers at staying healthy.
Stay tuned for more insights from this year’s Digital Health Collaborative research. In this year’s first round of ethnographic research, high performers reported that when their systems were working they were less anxious, experienced less frustration, felt more in control of their emotions. They were more able to relax and generally felt more balanced, carefree and adaptable. Who wouldn't want that? Studying high performers and how they build their life systems is just the start. We will also be studying low performers for clues as to how digital solutions can help them improve their systems.
Of course, high performers are not resting – they are retooling their systems to allow them to be more decisive, intentional, efficient and disciplined; they have built not just good systems, but good feedback loops within those systems. There are also some clear patterns emerging on different strategies that we use to design our systems, which will be the subject of on-going research for the remainder of this year’s collaborative. Stay tuned!