chaff

I have come to realise that defining much of what I actually do as Chaff is useful.

What is chaff?
Chaff is the stuff that you just sort of end up doing. It is generally not stuff that you really intend to do. You don't generally wake up in the morning wanting to do chaff.

Where does chaff come from?
Chaff in comes via all sorts of ways. It might just be little jobs around the house that need doing, mail that comes through the door, paperwork, or unexpected phone calls. But right now, most of all, chaff seems to come through the email.

Who wants you to spend time on chaff?
Well sometimes you want to do chaff, just to keep things ticking over, you need to get more paper for the printer, or answer the door for the postman. Often chaff is something that someone else wants you to do, it might be part of their grand masterplan, but generally it is not part of yours.

Is chaff unimportant then?
Well not really, it includes routine maintenance sort of stuff that you know needs done, and helping out other folk, and even just being a sociable person. Bump into someone and have a ten minute conversation you were not expecting, then that was chaff.

What is the problem with chaff then?
The problem is that unless you are careful, you easily end up spending all your time on chaff. You are bogged down with chaff before you leave home, commute in, chaff again, spend half the morning on endless emails, get interrupted and lose the plot, attend a meeting that seems pointless, commute home, big pile of spam and TV programmes that you end up watching every week but don't know why. All your day has been caught up with chaff, and then there is no time for what you deep down feel you ought to be doing.

So chaff is evil and we should avoid it?
No one can avoid chaff, it is a fact of life. You might be able to delegate it. If you did not do any chaff, then you would end up a jobless, unthinking robot with no friends.

How do you deal with chaff?
You need to find your own ways of dealing with chaff. For example by devoting fixed amounts of time to chaff, for example only check your email periodically and then only for a set amount of time. Knowing that it is time limited, encourages you to get through them quickly. Tackle a pile of chaff at the same time, rather than letting it interrupt you all the time. Don't be afraid to try different approaches to constraining your time spent on chaff.

One thing that I find works well for me, is when I draw up my task list for the day, I divide it into two columns, chaff, and everything else. So all the stuff that is chaff goes into the chaff column, and the rest goes into the other column. When doing work, I then try and alternate the different columns, so that a chaff task, is followed by something from the 'productive' column, and then back to the chaff. That way nothing completely grinds to a half.

Do you get extra time then?
You probably won't end up with extra time, but you will at least be taking control of the time that you do have. For example if you can ring fence time in your diary for something and are prepared to stick to it, then you can have that half day to read that important report you always meant to.

Why not skip chaff altogether?
You need to work with other people, if you simply ignore anything that does not fit in with your masterplan, you will end up starving and alone. However you can avoid chaff taking over your life. The important thing to realise is that how well you tackle chaff says very little about you, it is how you tackle the big issues that says something about you. Find ways of getting chaff out of the way as quickly as possible to let you devote your time and energy to the big stuff, rather than simply leaving the leftover time and energy to the big stuff, if you are lucky.

So remember chaff is not your friend, chaff makes you feel busy without being productive.

Bully chaff, treat it badly, take back control of your life.