The Mechanics of Managing Your Time: Part 2 of 3
Your to-do list represents promises. It takes a robust system to keep your word about so much. But there's a bonus: Greater productivity and lower anxiety.
This is the second article in a 3-part series about managing your time to be more productive and have a greater sense of fulfillment and peace. If you haven’t read Part 1, I strongly suggest doing so before reading this installment.
When you complete the series, you will have access to the insights, mindset and tools to increase your productivity. But getting more done is only a side benefit. The real deliverable is a life you love—one that represents your highest values and commitments. In other words, spending your time doing the things that bring you joy, love, fulfillment and satisfaction.
In the last issue, I laid much of the groundwork by pointing out unconscious beliefs that create our de facto time paradigm. In that paradigm, we spend time on unimportant trivia and rarely get to the things that matter.
Many of us also experience overwhelm and the feeling that we can never catch up. It regularly feels like we are forgetting something or must rush to get to something else. That contaminates our focus and keeps us from being fully present.
When we dispense with those beliefs, we attain some powerful insights:
Nothing exists outside of time. Said differently, every, single thing takes time.
Brains are bad at storage. They’re especially bad at remembering what to do and when to do it.
To-do lists are promises to ourselves.
Calendars track our promises about how we will spend our time.
By embracing the truth about time—that everything uses some of it—we confront how much of what we promise is BS.
The upshot of these insights is that all time management is about keeping promises.
An Integrity System
This entire approach to managing your time is, at heart, a system for maintaining integrity. By integrity, I mean the aspiration to have everything you say (on paper, calendars, aloud –EVERYTHING) match what you do.
From all of that, we can discern a powerful rule to apply to every chore, task, project, errand, commitment or promise:
Rule 1
Everything I intend to do is scheduled in my calendar with an adequate duration (or several).
Anything that isn’t in my calendar is something that I do NOT intend to do.
If You Practiced
If you read the article and did the homework to start applying Rule 1, you likely discovered that the tips I provided were apt.
Everything takes MUCH longer than we imagine. In general, when I do this work with clients, I tell them to start by doubling the duration for everything. Usually, they will still need to add even more time.
Don’t schedule every minute. In fact, if you can grab 3-4 hours a day for scheduled, focused work, you are doing well. The trick is to defend that scheduled time for dear life!
You can’t complete your to-do list in the next 10 days. Your time horizon must expand further into the future when scheduling tasks.
Focus and Energy
Before we dive back into the mechanics of the system, there is one more important idea that makes this system work. Although they suck at storing tasks and promises, our brains excel at nagging.
Every task that we stash in our brains comes with its own tiny unit of worry. And, because we store so many tasks there, we constantly nag ourselves not to forget them. That hoovers up cognitive energy.
When I store tasks in my mind (instead of in my calendar), I get a tiny voice in my head, constantly repeating tasks or names, or projects or goals. It sounds like a child learning the multiplication tables by rote.
That fear of losing an important task or thought keeps us from ever being fully present. It costs us the very things that allow for great work and true self-expression: Focus and energy.
The worry is apt. Our minds don’t nag about all things equally. Instead, they favor some things and forget others completely. That compounds our anxiety about forgetting things. And since we are always creating new tasks and ideas to remember, the loop is both vicious and growing.
It’s critical that we get things out of our minds as soon as possible.
But that won’t relieve the anxiety unless we KNOW that wherever we put them will be safe and accessible!
Capture Tools
A capture tool is a single repository where everything goes if it isn’t on the calendar. The capture tool works to relieve anxiety ONLY because it is part of a system.
The system’s purpose is to take things out of your mind and put them where they can come to fruition —into a specific duration of time.
Obviously, there are many more things that we mean to do or hope to do than we can possibly do. But we need to collect them all before we can do triage. The capture tool collects everything.
It doesn’t matter what you use as a capture tool. But it must be available to you all the time—and you can have ONLY ONE of them.
Post-it notes and scraps of paper don’t work. Inevitably, they end up scattered all over, on your desk, in your pocket —and not in your calendar! And your mind knows that. So now it nags you to remember where you wrote down that thing… Ugh.
I use Evernote. And I use it everywhere—on my phone, my desktop, my iPad—everywhere. I keep tasks on its scratch pad until scheduled and record everything else in notes (books, articles, writing ideas, plants I discover —everything).
Many of my clients use similar tools like Obsidian, Apple Notes, Notion, etc.
The key is to use the capture tool instead of your brain. Whenever something occurs to you —even a trivial chore—capture it.
Future-You Is Grateful
The technical term for scheduling all tasks is time blocking. It is not a new concept, but often it is taught as a productivity hack. In that form, it is shallow and fundamentally mechanistic.
It gains its real power when we understand it as an integrity facilitator.
If you have worked off a to-do list for most of your life, you’re familiar with the hit of pleasure that comes from checking an item off your list.
Because we are so driven to get that burst of dopamine, we tend to do what’s easiest or urgent rather than what’s hardest or most important. Of course, the hard things are also usually the high value tasks.
Working off a to-do list skews your actions away from high-value work and toward low-hanging, trivial tasks.
But when we time block, we employ reasoning—what Danny Kahneman calls System 2.
We’re not deciding what to do now—or what to start so as to tick it off a list. We’re deciding when to do what matters. That temporal distance facilitates choosing based on commitments rather than our desire for dopamine. [Click to tweet this thought]
In the future—when that scheduled work rolls around—no decision-making is needed. You simply obey your calendar—which is really obeying yourself.
Emptying the Capture Tool
The capture tool will constantly grow. So, it needs to be emptied. Don’t do it haphazardly. Schedule a single time every day to deal with captured items.
That process includes deciding what should get scheduled, and what should not.
We needn’t schedule everything we capture. Some ideas are less interesting the next day —or less compelling when you consider sacrificing something else to do them. We need a way to sort between them.
I suggest 3 categories of captured tasks.
Definitely, Someday, Never.
Definitely Tasks
Definitely tasks are the ones you intend to complete. They go directly into the calendar. If they are small chores, bundle several together.
For Definitely projects that have many steps, determine when they should be complete, and then schedule all the blocks backwards from that end date.
Create much more and longer time blocks than you think are needed. (Remember Hofstadter’s Law)
For Definitely tasks that are not important enough to do within the next month, extend your time horizon.
Digital tools can go into the distant future. Maybe you want to take a trip to Australia but simply can’t do it until the kids are out of the house. Schedule it for 6 years from now with a reminder 6 months in advance to book the tickets.
You will likely live for many more years, so cast your intentions into that future and schedule your bucket list.
Someday Tasks
These tasks are iffy. You’re not sure if you want to do them, but they are tempting or interesting. For now, you aren’t willing to dedicate actual time to them.
These get their own home —on a single list in your capture tool (a different list than your daily capture list).
If you are using any kind of digital capture tool, you can create a note called “Not Doing Yet”. For myself, I have a repeat appointment every quarter to look at my Not Doing Yet list and either schedule, delete or keep the item on the list. I suggest you try something similar.
In my experience, most of these end up being deleted within a year.
But I had “learn to play violin” on that list for years, and I finally scheduled it a few years back. So, every now and then they rise to the level of a Definitely task.
Never Tasks
Even though they were worthy of capturing, as you look at these tasks and at your calendar, you realize that you are never going to do anything about them. You don’t need any reason. For those, delete them. When I look at my capture tool every day, there are a LOT of these.
They become easier to delete when you remind yourself of our first big insight.
Everything happens in time. So, if you aren’t willing to spend time on it, delete it.
Download for a Quick Reminder!
System Dynamism
Earlier, I suggested that you only schedule 3-4 hours of focused work. Please take that to heart. Every day, lots of unexpected things will happen. Requests, invitations, emergencies, etc. You need the remainder of the day to administer recurring tasks, respond to the unexpected, and to move scheduled tasks when conflicts emerge.
Even in as uncomplicated a business as mine, clients regularly request meetings during scheduled work sessions. I move the work session and accommodate the client.
But notice, I move it. I don’t delete it.
Moving it isn’t too hard because I haven’t booked every moment of every day. If your calendar is like the most challenging game of Tetris ever, you will not be able to adjust as needed.
To keep that dynamism alive, follow the recommendations here.
Extend the time horizon when you schedule. Look out into the next 3 or 6 months—or longer for more significant projects.
Keep at least 30 minutes free between time blocks. That allows you to handle quick reactive tasks, and to move around or go to the restroom.
Schedule repeating blocks for administrative tasks like checking email (3 times a day), emptying your capture tool, reviewing your Not Doing Yet list and more.
Turn off all alerts except for those to begin or end a scheduled task. You won’t need the alerts if you schedule admin and check for urgent messages between time blocks. Without Slack, email, and other alerts, you will have greater focus and energy!
If you use a tool like Calendly, be selective about what you make available. Control your time so that you preserve blocks for focused work.
In the next and last article, we will discuss some of the questions that inevitably arise.
But we will also cover one more critical insight that will further alleviate anxiety.
The goal of the series is for you to spend your days doing what matches your concerns and priorities; in other words, to create a life you love!
Strategy For Uncertain Times
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