Just yesterday I was working on something and received a call from an old friend. I forgot to turn on my Focus Mode so the call came through. At that point, I had two good options and one bad one. I could have politely asked to reschedule the call or stepped away from my computer and just talked to my friend. I also could have decided to multitask. I chose poorly. I said to myself, “Self, you can totally talk to this friend and continue this work. You got this.” So off I went for a while, multitasking.

Then I hung up and thought about the advice I gave my friend, that wasn’t as good as it could have been … because I was multitasking. Then today I discovered that the work I was doing at the same time had some errors in it … because I was multitasking.

I think the next time I catch myself multitasking, I’m going to slap myself.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my work. One of the advantages of journaling is that it gives you a way to check in with yourself and find out what’s on your mind. Sometimes that feedback isn’t all positive. A few months ago, I went back and read several journal entries. What surprised me most was the sense of urgency that seemed to permeate nearly all of my recent journal entries.

Somehow, I’d drifted into a mindset where every day felt like a race for my life, and my journal entries reflected that. The Eisenhower Matrix explains that we can put most things in a two-axis grid.

If you ever go down the rabbit hole of productivity literature, this is one of the first things you’ll stumble across. The critical point here is that the Important/Unimportant axis is entirely separate from the Urgent/Not Urgent axis. Indeed, one of the big lessons of the Eisenhower Matrix is that doing important work that is not urgent is one of the best places you can spend your time.

I knew and understood this, but looking back at journal entries, it became clear that I’d turned the Eisenhower Matrix into the Eisenhower line in my head.

I got in the habit of thinking of all critical work as urgent and all unimportant work as not urgent. This mindset led to all sorts of bad habits on my part:

1. I was looking at all my important work as urgent. That’s silly. Most of my important work is not urgent at all. Nevertheless, I’d been adding a level of anxiety for no good reason.

2. With the increased anxiety, I felt more stress than I should. That made me think I should back off so much “urgent” work. Think about that for a moment. I told myself to do less critical work because of this urgency/important trap I’d laid for myself. I was tying myself in knots over that because I’d forgot to separate urgency from importance.

3. I had some small personal items fall through the cracks. They were not essential tasks, but they had some urgency. My linkage of priority with urgency worked in the opposite direction, too, at my own peril.

The truth is that there is no relationship between importance and urgency. Those are two attributes entirely separate from one another. So I’ve taken steps to disabuse myself. Specifically, I’ve added to my journal prompts the question, “Where have I created false urgency?” Forcing myself to answer that question daily has helped, and things are more in balance again. I’ve turned the line back into a matrix.

So often, we get hung up on little things like this that wreak all sorts of havoc. The difficulty isn’t usually course-correcting once you find the problem; the difficulty is noticing and identifying the problem in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about the many emails I have received about my recent posts about my status board. I wrote about this on Monday, but that only spurred another round of email from folks that can be summarized as a concern for useless complexity.

In summary, I already have systems to manage projects and tasks, but recently I’ve been using a personal status board to give me an overview of what’s on my plate and its current status. This is all data already in my existing systems but not as accessible to my visually-biased brain as a big diagram.

All of these folks writing to me are not coming from a place of criticism so much as legitimate curiosity. Why would I add one more thing to managing projects rather than spending that time doing projects? From my perspective, this status board was born out of frustration (and underlying anxiety) that, despite my systems, I didn’t have a way of quickly seeing everything and where it stands. I have many oars in the water, and the various threads of my life are very different. I added the complexity of the board to address this problem. The status board is, for me, what I would call ”useful complexity”.

I understand the drive for simplicity. A simple solution is, nearly always, superior to a complex one. But at the same time, a simple solution can also only get you so far.

While in law school, I had one job: stay in the top 20% and keep my scholarship. I thought about it every day. I didn’t have a job. No wife. No kids. Really no commitments except testing in the top 20%. To make things even more interesting, in law school (at least my law school), there was only one test at the end of the semester. Particularly at the beginning, I had no idea if I was any good or bad at being a law student. None of us did.

So with a single goal every day, my system was pretty simple. I wrote three things down on my napkin each morning. I stuck it in my pocket. I didn’t go to bed until they were done. Trust me, I came to appreciate the benefits of simplicity during those years.

Now my life is much more complex. I have clients that rely on me, customers that buy things from me, partners and team members that depend on me, and a family that needs me. Complexity in obligations begets complexity in management.

Ultimately, that led me down the road of creating one more bit of complexity in how I manage my projects. It was not some desire to fiddle, but a genuine need for another tool to make sure I don’t blow it.

Whether something like a status board makes sense depends entirely on where you exist on that spectrum between 1991 and 2021 Sparky. I think the real lesson I’ve taken from all this feedback is not to be afraid to add useful complexity, provided it is actually useful. So long as the bang is bigger than the buck, you‘re okay. I probably spend less than 30 minutes a week managing the status board, and in exchange, I no longer feel that where-the-hell-is-everything anxiety.

Maybe one day, things will slow down for me, and I will be able to turn the complexity knob down with some of these tool. But for now, they are making me better, not worse. My lesson is not to be biased toward simplicity or complexity but instead to be intentional about where I draw those lines for myself.

Where are you drawing those lines? Are you always looking for the most complex solution? Are you worshipping at the church of simplicity only to fail at your commitments? These are both slippery slopes and only something you can manage if you pay attention.