a simple productivity habit I picked up in pilot training

Summary

productivity I picked up in pilot training. simple system, three symbols, used it for over a decade. here’s the origin and the application.

1. background. in Air Force pilot training, one rotating duty is the runway supervisory unit. RSU. think of it as a mini control tower. usually two seasoned pilots plus a few students. since these are training sorties, air traffic control isn’t directing every flight, the RSU is.

2. the system. aircraft takes off, gets a call sign written down, like “Raptor 23.” then he flies out, does his training for about an hour, and starts heading back. moment one, he makes contact with the RSU on radio. we draw a dash next to his name. dash means contact established, not yet here.

3. moment two, he enters the landing pattern. we add a vertical line through the dash to make a plus sign. plus means he’s in the pattern and has to land at some point.

4. moment three, he lands. we circle the plus. now it’s plus sign inside a circle. at the end of the duty, you scan the sheet. if everything is plus with a circle, everyone’s home. nothing left in the training area.

5. how I use it for tasks. I keep a journal. tasks come in from meetings, employees, partners, my own brain dumps. each task gets written down with a dash next to it. dash means I have contact with this task. I’m aware of it. doesn’t mean I’ll do it.

6. step two, I go through the dashes and put the ones I’m actually going to do on the calendar. record the podcast, Wednesday 2pm. add the vertical line. plus sign now. it’s in the pattern. it has to land. I use a tool called Reclaim.ai to help with this but I did it analog for years.

7. step three, I complete the task. circle the plus. when I look back through old pages, the plus-with-circle entries are done and I can ignore them. open dashes that never made it to the calendar tell me what wasn’t actually important enough to do. and the calendar trick has a side benefit. once you start estimating actual time per task, you realize how few three hour blocks fit in a week. saying no to the wrong work gets way easier. try harder.

Transcript

the runway supervisory unit

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And today I’m going to be talking to you about productivity, how to be a little bit more productive. And we all know that we have to be productive to some point.

I’ve been in periods of my life where I’m basically obsessed with productivity. And then you really have to realize at some point, leverage, you have to realize what’s the next biggest rock that I need to move to go after my goals, as opposed to just working every second of the day and being incredibly efficient with your time.

Nonetheless, I’m going to talk about something I’ve been using for a very long time to keep me productive and also focus on the bigger tasks. And if you didn’t know my background, I started my career in the United States Air Force as an officer in pilot training. And one thing I learned in pilot training was what one thing that you have to do.

It’s like an additional duty when you’re in pilot training is you have to go out to the RSU. It’s called a runway supervisory unit. And what you have to do when you go out to these, if you think of the control tower, right, like air traffic control, there’s a whole crew of people sitting in there. They’re telling jets where to go.

And if they’re clear to land, all of those kinds of things. Think of that on a much smaller scale. There’s typically about three to five people in this runway supervisory unit, this RSU. And we’re all sitting in there. And since it’s pilot training, like this is all training, right? It’s not a major airport, Dallas-Fort Worth or Atlanta or anything like that.

dash, plus, circle

We’re really only running training sorties out of there. And so air traffic control isn’t the one directing every single flight, every single student flight that’s going in and out. What it’s run by is actual the RSU, which is, again, it’s like a mini control tower. Typically it has two seasoned pilots in there along with student pilots who are listening to the radio.

And to be honest, the student pilots are doing most of the work and the seasoned pilots are just making sure that the student pilots don’t screw up. So when I was in pilot training, one thing that I learned, their little system, it was a simple system. Someone would take off. They would have to say their call sign.

They’d be like, this is Raptor 23. They would take off. You’d write Raptor 23 on the sheet and then they’d go fly. And so typically they take off, they leave, they go to a training area, they conduct their training for about an hour and then they come back. Now the coming back is where my productivity tip kind of starts.

So typically the first thing that they have to do is make contact with the RSU. So they make contact. And what I would do and what we were taught to do is when they would make contact, we already have them written down. We’d put a dash next to their name. So just a simple dash. And so dash means, hey, we have contact with this aircraft.

They’re not in the pattern. They’re not here yet. They are on their way back, but we have contact with them. That would be a dash. And then once they would come into the pattern, they’re flying around the airport they’re about to land, or they might be doing several touch and go landing, something like that.

Once they would get in the pattern, we would add a line down the center of our horizontal line, making a plus sign, basically. So the first line is a horizontal line. The second line is a vertical line straight through the center of the horizontal line, making a plus sign. So what we have now, one line means they’ve contacted.

how i apply it to my tasks

The second line means, hey, they’re in the pattern. That means at some point this plane is going to have to land. And then once they land, they call like full stop, hey, I’m going to be coming in. I’m going to be landing. We would circle it. So now it’s just a plus sign with a circle. And so when we look, when it’s time to be done for the day, done with the RSU duties, you could just look down this sheet real quick.

And if every single one had a plus with a circle around it, you know that you didn’t leave anybody out in the training area. You didn’t forget about anybody, right? And so you would check all that. And yeah, like you’d have a full sheet of paper, all these people, yep. I have all pluses with circles around them.

Everyone has landed. Everyone is back. We are good to go. We can leave. And so that’s what it would do. And so I tell you that entire story to let you know that’s what I’ve done to maintain my productivity with tasks. So let me tell you how it works for me when I’m trying to manage tasks. So I’m in a lot of meetings.

I have employees tasking me with things that I need to do. I’m talking with business partners who task me with things I need to do or I’ll just think of things that I need to do when I do a brain dump and all this stuff, right? There’s always, Hey, I need help with this or whatever. There’s always something going on between me and employees and business partners and not on top of all of my normal stuff, my life stuff.

There’s a lot of things. We all have it. We all have it. And so what I typically do is I take a journal like a piece of paper and then I will write these things down. I will write dash. So I will have that horizontal line dash and I’ll write the thing down, dash, write the thing down, dash, write the thing down.

So this is nothing more than making a list, right? So this can be like a brain dump at the beginning of the week or in a meeting, I’ll dash all of these things out. And then what I do from there, that means I have contact with them, right? This is a new task. I’m aware of it. I have contacted it. It’s not, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do it, but it is something that needs to be done.

if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t happen

And so I have contact with that. Now the second thing that I do is once I have that task, I’ll look through all of these tasks that have a dash next to them and I will go to my calendar and I will start putting them in the calendar. Okay. So I will be like, okay, this task is going to take me about an hour and I’ll just put it on my calendar somewhere.

Another piece of software that I use to actually help me do this a little bit more efficiency efficiently is called reclaim.ai if you want to check it out. But even before I used reclaim, I would just do it this basic way. So then I would put it on my, I’ll put it on my calendar. So let’s just say I needed to record a podcast.

So dash record a podcast right now. It’s something I know I need to do, but it’s just made contact in my brain. Now once I put record podcast at Wednesday on Wednesday two, 2pm, it’s on the calendar. I put that vertical line through it. That means it’s in the pattern, right? Like it has to land now because it’s in the pattern.

It can’t leave and it’s back. And so for me, that task is on my calendar. Once it’s on my calendar, it has to happen. Now I’m not going to say that every time something’s on my calendar, I absolutely get it done. But the fact that I can see it on my calendar means if I know if I’m not doing that thing at 2pm right now, then I can move it over to the next day or whatever.

And then I’ll start playing that game on my calendar where it’s all crap. This didn’t happen. Move it to the next day, move it to next week, or just get it done at the time, the scheduled time slot that you have, which is the goal most of the time. And then once I’m done, I completed the task, I’ll put that circle around it.

So now when I go through my notebook, I don’t have to re-read through every single page and think, oh, did I do this? Did I do that? Let me review. I just feel like that’s a huge waste of time. Once I know it’s on my calendar and I’ve completed it, I can put that circle around it. Now I’m just, I’m done.

the side benefit, knowing when to say no

So I can look through old pages of notebooks and just see all these plus signs with a circle around it. And I know that it made it to my calendar. I completed it. It’s done. I can ignore this entire sheet of paper. Now, if I see some open dashes, oh, hey, this never even made it on my calendar. What is this?

Oh, that wasn’t that important. Let’s scratch it off. So that is it. That is this simple productivity hack I’ve been using for a long time. And I found it very effective because it frees up a lot of brain space because we can all write crap down. We can all have these massive to-do lists, but a massive to-do list, really all the massive to-do list is a major stressor.

At least for me, it just stresses me out to have this list of a thousand things. But if I have the list and then I also start putting it on the calendar, then I will get better and better at getting these things done. And I’m not stressed about it because I know that task has a date and a time that is scheduled.

So I’m not going to worry about that thing until I get to it. And it also helps me realize how much I’m actually capable of getting done. I think that’s the most beneficial thing of putting things on the calendar because I can be like, hey, this task is going to take about two hours. Let me block off two hours for it.

But you only get so many two-hour tasks in a day, right, before you start running out of time. And so you start to really be able to estimate what you can also say no to. So you’re making sure you’re moving the big rocks forward because if someone asks you to do something, you’re like, that’s a three-hour task, it has nothing to do with my goals right now, there’s no way I’m going to do that.

You got to start saying no to stuff. Or you’re going to have to push things way out. Normally, if I’m scheduling something like a month from now, that means I just don’t even want to do it and realistically probably won’t get it done. So you’ve really got to focus on the big tasks that are going to move you forward.

So make sure nothing makes it on your calendar that’s not going to inch you closer towards your goal. But also maybe use this productivity tip to make sure that you have things on your calendar and you are getting them done. If you don’t feel very productive most of the time, then I only have one piece of advice for you.