Break through your productivity ceiling with the Tend program

Tend is a program for solo and remote workers: 8 weeks of structure and community to calm the overwhelm. I developed this program because it's what I need.

If you want to break through your productivity ceiling, watch the trailer above, or read on. I'll give you the highlights of the first workshop so you can get a flavor for what the Tend program is about.

Great productivity is a practice.

The key to productivity isn't information that you intellectually understand. It's built on a combination of systems and psychology: they each support each other. Great systems eliminate friction and make it easier to do what you need to do; psychology underpins all of the things that make productivity so hard, like procrastination and people pleasing.

Workshop 1 in the Tend program helps you to jumpstart your planning process. It's a two hour workshop that helps you create a multi-week plan.

Workshop 2 is about debugging your systems.

Workshop 3 is a chance to pause, reflect, and replan based on what you've learned over the course of the eight weeks.

The Tend program as a whole connects you with community, gives you lightweight structures, and provides accountability. Not creating a sense of obligation or burden, but a chance to tell your story and reflect on what you've learned.

Build a 6-week plan you'll actually use

The first workshop focuses on building a 6-week plan. (Why not 8? Because in the program, week 1 focuses on planning and week 8 focuses on reflection. So it's the middle portion that we need to plan.)

Here's what we cover in the first 2-hour workshop:

1. All actions are gambles, and action resolves ambiguity. You might recognize these two sentences if you've ever read Dr. Richard Cook's paper "How Complex Systems Fail." That paper is about failure modes in complex software systems, but we're going to be adapting a lot of those principles into the productivity space. We are, after all, complex systems, as much as any web application.
2. Plans don't eliminate the ambiguity, but they do help us to handle it. What I see in a lot of people that I work with is a tendency to go to one extreme or another. Either people see plans as an opportunity to get ahead of ambiguity and figure it all out in advance, and then they get frustrated when their plans don't work out exactly the way they wanted them to; or they figure out that plans can't solve all our problems in advance, so they throw them out entirely and take action willy-nilly. We're going to find a balance between those two: appreciating plans for their utility, but not overburdening the planning process.
3. Workstreams are an arbitrary but useful way to put some boundaries around the types of work that we're doing.
4. We'll look at the difference between action goals and outcome goals, and find a way to have these two support each other so that we are taking action and tracking outcomes, and again, not expecting outcomes to be something that we completely control.
5. We will be very intentional about our container for work. We'll do some analytical things like calculating the theoretical number of hours in a week and giving ourselves margin, thinking about capacity planning from the perspective of number of hours, because that has some utility. But we're also going to be very mindful of the fact that one hour when you are tired, hungry, and have been hunched over your desk all day is quite different from one hour when you are fresh, rested, well fed, and you've just had a great workout. Thinking about our energy flows is going to be at least as important as thinking about number of hours in the day.
6. We'll do stack ranking on the regular because it's a great way to help us make trade-offs and encourage ourselves to make unambiguous choices, even though the reality is a little bit messier than the stack ranking indicates.
7. Milestones will be the building block for the bets that we're placing each week.
8. We'll schedule our planning without getting lost in it. Some people love planning, other people hate it. Whichever camp you fall in, we'll give planning a container so that we are thinking things through but not getting paralyzed.
9. The difference between mindless repetition and useful iteration is whether we are stopping to make sense of the outcomes, make sense of the signals that we're getting from reality in the form of feedback from what we're doing.

In my experience, 6-8 weeks is the "Goldilocks zone" for planning. This did not originate with me! Lots of people cite this timeframe as a great scale for planning and taking action.

• Week 1, we'll focus on planning the actions we intend to take over the course of the program.
• Weeks 2-7 will focus on rhythms. We'll have daily check-ins online, a very short weekly zoom call where you can report on your progress to two or three other people, and we'll constantly adjust our action goals.
• Week 8 is reserved for review and adjusting our outcome goals for the next cycle based on what we've learned.

Interested? I'd love to have you join me. You have two options:

Option 1: Register for just the January 28 workshop. If you're on the fence, try Workshop 1 and see how it serves you. These workshops are normally $125, but I'm discounting that to $95 for the 2-hour workshop. (You'll be able to discount the price of the workshop off program registration if you sign up for Tend within 24 hours of the workshop.)

Option 2: Join Tend 8-week program, which includes all 3 workshops and a bunch more. Early bird pricing runs until January 15. Get all the details here: we10d.com/tend