As a busy professional, partner, and dad, sometimes the amount of information coming and going can be overwhelmingly difficult to action and keep track of. Getting bogged down in the wrong thoughts and actions can hold me back.
As a result, I use a variety of tools and mechanisms to attempt to keep track of it all. To-do lists, reminders, notes, delegation, routines, processes… these tools are available to me to wield if I remember to use them. If I choose to use them. If I leverage them to their fullest extent consistently, they become superpowers. If I don’t, they are just a collection of ideas gathering dust on the shelf.
Much like kitchen gadgets that make the act of prepping, cooking, and cleaning up the results of a meal more efficient, knowing how and when to use them properly is critical. I can instinctively choose to hand scrub those pots, or I can delegate the task to my kids, saving me time to read a few pages of that book I’ve been meaning to finish while teaching the kids how to do honest work. I can constantly check the chicken on the grill until it is ready, or I can rely on the a timer and meat thermometer to alert me when it is done.
Humans have evolved tools and processes over thousands of years for the sake of convenience. These “external structures” are what enable us to accomplish multiple things in parallel, commonly thought of as “multitasking”. In reality, humans are unable to multitask; we rely on external structures to free us up to focus on some other task, as long as we can trust the things we handed over to the external structures to get the job done.
AE Studio is big on external structures. So big, in fact, that “Growth Mindset with Effective External Structures” is our of our core values. Here’s an excerpt from our handbook:
External structures are whatever tools you can rely upon that allow you to be present and on task–from the notepad on your desk to the reliable colleague–because you trust that those structures are holding down the fort on your behalf. We insist on being excellent external structures to one another daily. We also place our employees in positions to stretch beyond prior experiences, then allow them to focus upon that next step of growth
How can I be an excellent external structure to my colleagues? First, I need to ensure my own external structures are in place so that I am set up to focus and complete high value items. Lately, this looks like relying on the incredible tools available to me in the AI space, such as Vowel, ChatGPT, and Github Copilot.
Failure to rely on external structures can take a many forms:
- trying to do everything myself vs delegating or asking others for help
- manually taking notes on every call vs leveraging Vowel to summarize meetings for me
- frantically searching documentation and writing new code from scratch vs leveraging copilot and ChatGPT to write clean and efficient code
- letting ideas and thoughts keep me up at night vs writing them down and acting on them tomorrow
- going down rabbit trails in meetings vs putting a pin in it and taking the action for later
- hastily jotting down a story and spending time explaining it later vs writing clear and concise AC’s that can be picked up by anyone
While I have a handful of external structures in place, I’m aware that there are many I’m not leveraging properly, and there are some that I’m unaware that I even need. Spending a few hours setting up a Zapier workflow, or remembering to use Universal Launcher instead of opening Slack and manually clicking a username can keep my focus steady, and in come cases free up hours per week. Time savings is one means to the ultimate end; exponentially growing professionally and personally.
I wouldn’t build a campfire to boil the pasta when I have a perfectly good stove. When I feel like I’ve plateaued, it’s probably time to evaluate my daily activities and attempt to discover new external structures.