Project-focused productivity: the path to consistent progress

Jan 28

Focusing on projects instead of tasks is a more effective way of driving progress at work and in life. Projects are initiatives that can’t be completed in one sitting, as Tiago Forte puts it in simple terms. Tasks are the most minuscule, actionable items you need to do in order to complete a project. Focusing on projects corresponds to detaching and looking at the big picture. Getting stuck in the minutiae of tasks is zooming in on the details of the project. Both states are necessary for knowledge work and project management. Neither state is sufficient by itself.

When you step back and look at the project, it may feel overwhelming and scary. You may encounter psychological resistance. “Writing a book”, or “Building a CRM system” are examples of projects. By themselves, they seem insurmountable, also depending on whom you ask. Tasks can bring a sense of order into the chaos. Defining all the milestones for those projects allow you to have actionable next steps. No more than that. Action still needs to happen. This is the funnel of productivity, as Cal Newport posits in this article:

Activity selection (what to do) — this can happen at the quarterly and weekly planning level, as well as at the daily level when choosing the focus of the day.
Organization (how to do it) — this can happen at the creation of projects and can be part of the weekly planning or admin blocks of work
Execution (doing it) — this is the action that happens, following tasks laid out in step 2 above

Giving some attention to all of those elements is crucial for balance and a “deep life”. Leaning toward one of those elements to the detriment of others can kill productivity and enjoyment. For some projects, tasks are well-defined and simple to identify. Writing a book, for example, requires you to consistently show up to write, or edit. That’s it. In such a case, tasks are mostly process-oriented. You can establish a habit out of them (e.g., writing every day for 60 minutes; writing 500 words every day).

Other projects are difficult to break down into well-defined tasks. Defining the tasks is an activity that requires focus in itself. You will never know exactly all the tasks required, and that’s ok. Starting is the key, and keeping the momentum is crucial to figure out the direction you need to take and the tasks to complete. You’ll lay out the tasks along the way.

For example, you may need to develop a specific feature of a software or create automation using APIs. You may have the automation flow sketched out, but you don't know exactly how to develop it. The task involves getting started and coding/building. Once you begin, you'll figure out the actionable next steps. Writing up these steps in a system is beneficial, as otherwise you may forget them the next day. Starting from something is better than starting from nothing.

Each step of the productivity funnel has its role and timing. When you do activity selection, you can philosophize about your projects and goals. And you do this regularly and not too often (i.e., quarterly, yearly, maybe monthly). Because activity selection is crucial but doesn’t produce progress on your projects in itself. At this stage, you may want to implement principles from Stoicism and philosophy on how to choose, what to say “no” to, or what determines a “deep life”. There are multiple sub-levels within activity selection. Each level corresponds to a time period. You can select your activities yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily. At the daily level, you can pick which exact projects you intend to focus on, choosing from the list you drafted during your yearly, quarterly, and monthly activity selection process. That’s because you can only focus on a few things each day.

Then you get into organization (step 2 of the productivity funnel), which is how to go about tackling the projects you selected in the previous step described above. This can happen at the quarterly, monthly, or weekly level. For me, this often happens ad hoc for client projects. When a new client project arises, I will schedule it into my system and begin laying out its main milestones and tasks, if any. Then the project sits in the system, until the right time to begin action arrives.

That is execution, the most impactful driver of project progress. You selected your activities and organized them into milestones or tasks as best as you could. Now go figure it out. Execution can happen in focused work bouts, interleaved with strategic attention diversification and admin-work blocks. Define your focus of the day keeping in mind your finitude. Then let go of everything else and schedule regular admin check-ins (i.e., checking emails and other messaging tools) so you don’t detach yourself from the world completely, and you can feel reassured that you will get back to people and they won’t exclude you from society if you don’t reply to their messages within 1 hour.

This is a similar system to what I implement in my daily life and have been refining for the past 3 years. There are multiple levels to the system, as described throughout this post. In practical terms, activity selection, organization, and monitoring can happen in a task management system or a text editor. One useful practical feature aligned with project-focused productivity is an automatic daily refresh of your projects focus. In this video, I show how to achieve this in Notion and Coda.