How To Have A Productive Day.
A mistake I see many people making is spending too much time organising and planning. While managing your stuff and planning have their role, that role should be tiny in your daily activities.
Becoming more productive is about taking the resource of time — a fixed resource — and maximising activity within that time. (The only part of the time management equation we do have control over.)
Spending twenty-five per cent of your day organising and planning takes a large chunk of time away from doing activities. So you want to reduce the time you spend planning and organising to its absolute minimum.
This is one of the reasons I moved away from a Getting Things Done (GTD) based system to a more fluid one. One that required less time reviewing, so more time could be spent doing the work.
There are several ways you can make your days more productive and ultimately more fulfilling, but these ways will require some form of back-end work that most people resist doing.
Here are a few ways to maximise your doing time and reduce your planning and organising time.
Establish what your core work is.
Our core work is the work we are employed to do. Salespeople sell, teachers teach, and managers manage. Once you know what activities you need to do to maximise your sales, teach your students or manage your department effectively, those activities need to be listed out, placed in your task manager or calendar and repeated as often as they have to.
We all have a set of core activities we are employed to do. That could be a set number of calls each day, lesson preparation or assigning work to our team. Whatever those core activities are, schedule them into your calendar (or task manager) and make sure you complete them when they are due. These will always be your priority while at work.
You should not be planning these. Instead, they should be fixed, recurring tasks that come up when they are due.
Establish your areas of focus.
We all have eight areas of focus that are important to our lives. These are:
Family and relationships
Career/business
Health and fitness
Self-development
Finances
Lifestyle and life experiences
Spirituality
Life’s purpose.
What these mean to you will be different for everyone, and what activities flow from these each day and week will be different. However, it is vital to know what these mean to you and what you need to do to keep them in balance.
Too often, we treat time management and productivity as the sole realm of our work lives. But that is not true. You need time if you want to redecorate your house and take your kids to football practice or swimming lessons.
Establishing what is important to you, pulling out the regular action steps and setting them up as recurring tasks in your task manager ensures you are focused on these areas.
Again, these need to be set up once. They repeat when they have to repeat, and you do not need to be planning them every week.
(If you want to learn more about establishing your areas of focus, I have a mini-course that will take you through the process of setting these up and building them into your life.)
Establish your routines.
Like your core work, routines are things you must do but do not necessarily move your life or goals forward. Cleaning up your computer’s desktop at the end of the day and spending a few minutes moving files and documents to their rightful folders would be an example of a routine.
Equally, spending a few minutes clearing your task manager’s inbox and moving tasks to their appropriate time sector — does a task need to be done this week, next week, or later this month?
All these routine tasks should be placed in a separate routines folder in your task manager and set to repeat as frequently as necessary. For example, I have a recurring task every Saturday to remind me to clear my office’s rubbish and wipe down all the surfaces. Spending one day a week cleaning my office keeps everything in order and only takes around twenty minutes. If I waited until the office became a tip and the rubbish overflowing, I would waste an entire morning cleaning the office. Not the best way to spend a morning. Far better to assign twenty minutes a week.
Plan your day the day before.
It’s easy for our days to be hijacked by other people’s issues and crises. If you have no plan for the day, you will spend the first part of the day looking for crises to get involved in, and they are rarely crises we need to be involved in.
If you know when you begin the day what your objectives are — the things you want to get completed that day — and where you will start the day, you reduce the chances of your day being hijacked by other, less important things.
Don’t do this in the morning! Wasting valuable time in the morning trying to decide what must be done means spending your most creative and focused part of the day doing something you should have done before you ended the previous day. You are using up valuable mental energy for something that is not doing work.
Not having a plan for the day when you start risks your day being hijacked by an email or a colleague’s seemingly innocent request for help.
Do a weekly planning session
No more excuses! You can find twenty to thirty minutes on a Saturday morning to plan the following week. Even if you have to wake up thirty minutes earlier, do it.
Why Saturday morning? You want to avoid spending your weekend worrying about everything you might have to do the following week. Plus, the week gone by is still fresh in your mind. You can collect everything you need to do next week, set the days you will do them and ensure your week is balanced. Once done, you can sit back and enjoy your weekend without worrying or stressing about what you might have forgotten.
I’ve tried many different times to do the weekly planning session. Friday afternoons don’t work because there’s always a chance the time I set aside for doing the session will conflict with a meeting or an important call. Sunday nights are the worst because you will spend all weekend worrying about work issues.
Saturday morning is by far the best time to plan the following week. Decide what your most important tasks will be for the week and what you want to get accomplished.
Once done, go and enjoy your weekend with the people you love and care about.
These daily and weekly planning sessions may seem contradictory to spending more time, but they are essential if you know that what you are doing is the right thing. With no plan, you will waste valuable time on unimportant, trivial things that leave you feeling empty and drained.
If you follow these guidelines, the total planning time will be seven ten-minute daily planning sessions (just over an hour a week) and one thirty-minute weekly planning session. In all, out of the 166 hours we get each week, you spend a little over an hour and a half planning. That’s under 1% of your time.
Doing the work now will free up so much time later. This is about ensuring the important things in your life are set in stone so you are not allowing yourself to be pulled away on unimportant tasks.
It’s the ‘secret’ to making each day productive and fulfilling while freeing up time for more enjoyable activities. It clears your mind from worrying about what you are missing and leaves you with time to get on and enjoy your life.
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