Chapter 8:
Gene is taming the chaos
Gene was at his desk on Tuesday morning, working through a brief. Stuart’s request to shorten turnaround times was fresh in his mind. He had decided to follow Rob’s example and batch his admin work for Wednesday mornings, which meant he could focus entirely on core work today.
Being in his ‘focus bunker’ last week had helped him power through a pile of paperwork, so today he was trialling it for technical work. He enjoyed the deep analysis his role required, but he was typically interrupted by calls and walk-ins. Today, however, he was back in the bunker with his door closed and phone on voicemail. It felt good.
He needed the focus; the brief was particularly complex and one he’d assigned to one of his senior policy officers, Graham. Gene had taken Stuart’s advice to build some support for himself and Graham had expressed interest in doing more, so they’d included leading on complex briefs in Graham’s performance plan.
Graham was a smart guy who was open to feedback, so was great to work with. The draft was solid, but reworking something was sometimes more difficult than starting from scratch. Gene took a breath, reminding himself that hoarding his knowledge wouldn’t be helpful to anyone—including himself.
After ninety minutes of steady progress, Gene stood up to stretch. He had tackled the most complex part of the brief and needed one more hour of concentration before lunch. He opened his inbox for a quick triage and saw ten new messages on top of the other unanswered ones waiting for his attention. None of them seemed urgent.
There was, however, an email with an interesting article in his technical field. He loved reading a good research article; he knew if he opened it, he would disappear down a rabbit hole. He resisted, telling himself he could read the article after he finished the brief, as a reward.
He was about to close his inbox when a reminder from HR popped up: ‘Module 2 – Working more strategically’ was due by the end of the week.
Crap. I forgot all about that, he thought.
He decided to tackle it tomorrow morning during his dedicated admin time. He sent quick emails to Stuart and Rob, asking if they were free for catch-ups on Thursday or Friday to fulfil the course requirements.
He returned to his brief, feeling very organised indeed.
***
On Wednesday morning, Gene worked through the ‘Back to basics’ worksheet. It was a breeze—he was familiar with his role and appreciated the logical layout of the exercise.
He identified his focus areas: protecting time for his university lecturing, staying on top of admin and improving turnaround times on across-government policy briefs. He wrote: Protect Thursdays for uni work. Tackle admin. Stop being the bottleneck on joint briefs.
The bottom of the worksheet focused on execution. It included a link to a video called ‘Setting yourself up for success through sustainable habits, rhythms and routines’.
Probably some kind of productivity video, he thought, clicking the link.
The video was short. Its key message was that generic productivity advice was rarely helpful. ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Gene muttered, remembering the dozens of planners and systems he had tried and abandoned over the years.
The narrator suggested a proactive, three-phased ‘Performance cycle’. The Planning phase was about setting up systems that accounted for personal strengths and weaknesses. Execution was about ensuring the right work got done. And Review was about tweaking the system to keep it sustainable.
Gene had never thought of his work as a cycle. He realised that for him, ‘execution’ usually just meant reacting to whoever shouted the loudest or doing the thing he was most interested in. He needed external accountability to stay on track.
He glanced at the corner of his screen. It was 9.45 am and his external accountability person would arrive at 11 am. He had recently established a recurring Wednesday morning meeting with Gwen to wrap up weekly admin together. That gave him exactly seventy-five minutes to finish this exercise.
The video also suggested seeing the week as ten half-day blocks and ‘theming’ those days to reduce the mental cost of switching tasks. Interesting…
He had been here before, learning about a shiny new productivity approach that was usually abandoned by week three. But maybe this time would be different. The half-day blocks felt simple enough that he might actually stick with them.
He opened his calendar, scanned the past few weeks, then closed it. The mess of scattered appointments was too distracting—he needed a clean slate.
He took a sticky note and wrote his new rules: Mon & Tue: core work. Wed: AM admin, PM core work. Thu: lecturing day. Fri: AM core work and PM weekly review.
He stuck the note to the left corner of his monitor and smiled.
He decided to take it a step further. Although his university gig didn’t start until next week, he wanted to start building the ‘Thursday habit’ immediately. He opened his calendar again to block out the day as a recurring appointment.
Then he froze.
Right there, in the middle of his ‘sacred Thursday’, Stuart’s EA had booked the next three catch-ups related to the course, starting tomorrow.
He stared at the appointment. If he kept that meeting, he was already breaking a promise to himself.
He picked up the phone and dialled the EA’s extension. He was tired of disappointing himself to accommodate everyone else.