By Charlie Gilkey, the CEO of Productive Flourishing, a podcaster and a speaker. His next book, Team Habits, is available now for pre-order.
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Many people mistakenly look at their to-do list as the culprit for why they’re not getting things done at the rate they expect—when they should be looking at their daily schedule instead. A lot of people’s daily schedules look like misshapen hunks of swiss cheese filled with random holes with unusually dense clumps elsewhere and places that everyone would rather avoid.
It really doesn’t matter what’s on your to-do list if what’s on your schedule works against your efforts to get those items done. A chopped-up, incoherent day leads to chopped-up, incoherent work. Before work-from-home and the pandemic, lots of people were already taking their work home with them and playing endless catch-up—only to repeat the same chopped-up, incoherent work patterns as they multitask between chores, childcare and media.
Rather than trying to create more time in the day, a simpler place to start is to rearrange the day. It’s often the case that there is enough time to get momentum going on what matters most; the culprit is often how people are using that time.
Here are some ways to make your days more coherent and effective:
1. When you can’t outright avoid meetings, propose times that make more sense for you. The person proposing the time often gets their choice; use this to your advantage. If you’re the best version of yourself as a human in the afternoon, propose afternoon times when it’s time to meet and keep offering afternoon times until whoever you’re meeting with offers those times as options.
2. Batch your tasks as best as possible. This is part of the principle of time blocking. You can do administrative tasks, like managing email, in dedicated admin blocks. Rather than checking email every five minutes, check email during dedicated blocks and actually process it. Doing so can help you eliminate context shifting, reduce your cognitive load and break the expectation that people should expect an instant reply from you.
3. Use the two-hour rule to make progress on your most high-value work. This is another major time-blocking principle. About two hours of focused time is enough to create some momentum on that hard-to-get-to work that’s going to make the biggest difference come performance review time. Make sure to align these two hours with the times of the day you have the best energy for this type of work. Claiming under-used portions of the day like the hours before or after lunch (like 10:30 to 12:30) can be a particularly effective strategy since there’s slack in the system there already.
Depending on your work context, in many cases, it’s better not to constantly update other team members throughout the day, but rather to be intentional about the precise moments and how you communicate what’s necessary. Instead, use the quality and quantity of the work you’re finishing as justification to lock in the changes that will make your schedule work best and be most coherent for your needs. It’s easier to negotiate from a place of proven success than from a place of possibility.
Which of the strategies above seems like the best for you to start with? If you’ve tried one of them, what happened?
