TIPS, TRICKS, AND LIFE HACKS
LETâS GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS
âAre you really going to be upset because youâre really busy? Some people are not busy and are praying that they could be as busy as you are.â
âJANELLE MONĂE
Here come the productivity-minded tips and tricks. The brass tacks of time management that can help you reclaim your time. All are interdependent with a change of mind-set.
As you read about these strategies, imagine yourself deploying them. Think about which might fit you and which might notâwhich might solve your particular problem, and which are just not your cup of tea.
But remember, if youâre tempted to think âthat sounds great, but I couldnât pull it off,â pause and reconsider. Empowering yourself to pull it off might be exactly what you need.
PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR
âMake it a recurring appointment in your calendar and plan on sticking to it.â
âANAHAD OâCONNOR
Perhaps the number-one thing we can do to make time for a particular activity is to put it on our calendar. It doesnât matter if weâre talking about making time to jog or to draw or to volunteer or to work on a long-term project at our job. Whatever that priority of ours may be that we find ourselves struggling to make time for in our days, this is quite likely the solution.
Look hard at your calendar and figure out the best time to do the thing. Should you focus on that work project for an hour first thing when you start work in the morning a couple of days a week, before you check email? (Much more about email starting on page 85.) Can you make time for exercise before work, or after? Is there a particular evening of the week you could block out for that personal creative project? A recurring weekend slot when you could fit in time for that family activity or social justice cause?
A few tips to really make this work:
Once itâs on your calendar, you have to believe it. The same way youâd believe a calendar appointment that popped up for a dentist appointment or a meeting with your boss. Things on your calendar are real and youâre really going to do them on the day and at the time the calendar says you are.
And, remember, to find these pockets of time you previously didnât know existed, youâre going to have to use your prioritization skills and make use of some of that good kind of procrastination. What can you move or scrunch or let go of entirely in order to make time for these higher-priority things?
Is that half hour you collapse on the sofa when you get home with your phone and a beer essential self-care time? Or could that time be better used for something else? Only you know the answer to that question, and you only really know it if youâre willing to be brutally honest with yourself.
SYNC UP YOUR TO-DO LIST AND YOUR CALENDAR
âSo many people trip in front of them because theyâre looking over there or up ahead.â
âKAMALA HARRIS
A to-do list that floats in its own isolated bubbleâbe that bubble a notebook or an app or something elseâjust sitting there waiting for you to come and choose a task whenever you have a moment to spare, is not only oppressive (who wants to be followed around by a bubble full of things-you-really-ought-to-be-doing all the time?), itâs also not terribly effective.
After all, much of the time youâll be called upon to do things other than whatâs on the list. This is how you can have something like âmake optometrist appointmentâ or âchange 401(k) allocationsâ sit on your to-do list for literally years. There was always something more important. It was never that thingâs turn.
Plus, every time you do have time to do something from the list, you end up wasting precious time looking up aheadâfor example, going over the list and figuring out which of the various things on it you ought to do.
Many of the most productive people avoid this pitfall by hybridizing their to-do list and their calendar.
This can be done in any number of ways:
- Perhaps you take ten minutes each morning to insert to-do list items, as appointments, into all the open slots in your calendar for that day.
- Perhaps each time you add an item to your to-do list you assign it a do-date rather than a due-date (that is, the date you actually plan to do it, and when you foresee having enough time to do it, as opposed to the date itâs due).
- Maybe you jot down calendar notations for your eveningsâwhich night youâll do laundry, which night youâll work on your taxes, which night you know youâll just want to chill.
- Maybe you even go so far as to get rid of your to-do list altogetherâevery task that arises going immediately onto the calendar instead. This works best with electronic rather than paper calendars, since inevitably things end up needing to get moved around.
Whatever particular system you employ, the underlying win is the same. Youâre weaving the stuff you need to do and the time you have to do it in into a cohesive whole in your mind. Tasks and time become teammates working together rather than opposing teams duking it out in the arena of your brain.
THE DREADED IN-BOX
âPeople live too much of their lives on email.â
âTRACY MORGAN
Oh, email. If you work in an office or an otherwise correspondence-heavy industry, chances are you regularly (or always) feel like youâre drowning in your in-box.
In her book Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, Jocelyn K. Glei tackles our collective problems with emailâfrom our obsession with checking our in-boxes to the elusive etiquette of writing good messages. Perhaps most valuable of all are her insights into crafting a daily email routine.
Numerous experts agree these strategies are effective. Numerous happy workers have discovered their merits. Yet, until you try them, such ideas sound nearly impossible. Youâll read what comes next and think, âOh, sure, thatâs great for someone else, but I could never do it.â But the thing is you can. You can put reasonable limits on email and use the time you gain back for other, more important work. You really, really can. Three tools, drawn from Gleiâs research, show us how:
1. Donât do email first. Glei suggests spending the first hour of your day on âa task that advances your meaningful work goals.â Make it one of those calendar appointments from page 80. Set your email program to open not to your in-box but to your calendar. So the first thing you see when you sit down to work will be that appointment telling you to do that important work now.
2. Corral email into two or three blocks of time per dayâeach block a half hour (or at most an hour) long. Put the email blocks on your calendar as appointments and, once again, treat those appointments as commitments. Start working through your in-box when the appointment time starts, and stop when it ends.
3. Donât have your in-box open on your desktop while youâre working on other things. Either switch it to show your calendar or shut the program down entirely.
Another useful thing is to decide on your own personal nonresponse rate. Articulating to yourself, âOf the emails I receive that could warrant a response, I respond to 95 percentâ (or 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever feels right) will be liberating. As author Mark McGuinness puts it: âItâs better to disappoint a few people over small things than to surrender your dreams for an empty in-box.â
DO THE REAL WORK FIRST
âThe single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second.â
âMARK MCGUINNESS
OK, so if weâre not doing email first, what exactly are we doing first?
McGuinness writes that âcreative work first, reactive work secondâ means âblocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and email off. I used to be a frustrated writer. Making this switch turned me into a productive writer. Now, I start the working day with several hours of writing. I never schedule meetings in the morning if I can avoid it. So whatever else happens I get my important work done.â
He is a writer so the creative work he needs to do first is, not surprisingly, writing.
But this doesnât apply only to those who work in creative fields. Just like a writer should write first and email later, an executive ought to lead first and do spreadsheets later, a retail worker helps customers first and restocks the shelves later.
Nor does it apply only t...