One thing at a time: pick an approach

"The mind is like water. When it's turbulent, it's hard to see. When it's calm, everything becomes clear." — Kobe Bryant 

Kobe Bryant was definitely onto something when he spoke those words. If you’re not in control of your commitments and have no idea what needs to be done next, you’re going to be stressed. And stress, like turbulent water, makes it hard to see where you should be spending your time. 

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Script | 395

Hello, and welcome to episode 395 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

What’s the point of learning how to be more productive and to be better at managing our time? Are we not just shuffling work around—work that will need to be done at some point anyway?

Well, yes and no. 

Historically, people went to work, often in factories, where they performed repetitive manual labour. When their workday finished, they “downed tools”, clocked out and went home. As there were no TVs or smartphones, people often played cards or board games with their families, read books or went to the pub. 

It was easy to leave work at work. It was easy to manage our time. There was personal time and work time, and the two did not mix. 

Today, it’s very different. Most of you listening to this podcast will likely be working in what is commonly called “knowledge work’ jobs. You’re not hired for your muscles. You’re hired for your brain. 

And this causes us a problem. Manual labour meant you did a hard day’s work, and when you went home, you could forget about work. In knowledge work, it’s not so easy to stop your brain from thinking about a work problem. 

I remember when I worked in a law firm, I caught the bus home and often spent most of the journey thinking about an issue with a client and trying to figure out the simplest way to solve the problem. In the past, people would have looked forward to getting home to their families.

When you’re mentally distracted in that way, it’s hard for you to switch off and enjoy that time with your family and friends. 

Today, it also means there’s no barrier—except our own willpower—to sending an email or a Teams message at any time of the day or night. 

In the past, the factory gates were locked, or someone else was doing your job on the night shift. It wasn’t possible to work beyond your regular working hours.

Time management was much easier. Not so today.

And that nicely leads us to this week’s question. And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.

This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, I’ve spent years struggling with time management, and it’s got to the point where I think there’s no point. As hard as I try, there’s always something that needs to be done, and I never get a chance to finish anything and end up with everything being urgent. Is there any point to all this time management and productivity stuff?  

Hi Michael, thank you for your question. 

In many respects, you might be right that managing time, or at least trying to, is a waste of time. (I think there might be a pun there) 

As I alluded to, with knowledge work and the explosion of communication tools over the last few years, things that could have waited a day or two now seem to have to be dealt with immediately. 

It’s not that the task is suddenly urgent; it’s a combination of people’s expectations and the delivery system. 

The problem here is that no matter how fast the delivery system becomes—or other people’s expectations— we are human. We can still only do one thing at a time. That is not going to change in our lifetime. 

And that’s where to start—understanding that you, as an individual, can only work on one thing at a time. 

In other words, if you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first. 

Now, you could come up with a complex, convoluted system for deciding which message to respond to first, or you could adopt a more straightforward first-in-first-out approach. Start with the oldest and work your way through your list of messages. 

What are we talking about here—perhaps a ten-minute delay for you to get to a particular message? Does ten minutes really matter? You’re not trying to save someone’s life in an emergency room, are you? 

Messages are often more time-sensitive than emails, and I find that responding to them between work sessions works best. 

For instance, if you were to protect 9:30 to 11:30 am for focused work. That’s two hours where you are technically not available. Once you finish that session, check your messages and respond to any that require a response. 

When I set these barriers of doing undisturbed, focused work for two hours a day, I used to panic every time my phone dinged. I felt I had to respond immediately. Of course, that was not true. It never was, and it’s still not true for any of us today. 

It took a few weeks to wean myself off panicking every time a message came in, but the results were fantastic. My productivity went through the roof, leading to fewer urgent tasks. 

Our brains are not good at handling interruptions to the flow of work. I’ve seen studies showing that even a minor interruption can take you up to 18 minutes to refocus and get back to where you were before. 

Think about that for a moment. Even if you were taking ten minutes to refocus and getting an average of six interruptions per day, you’ve lost an hour. Or to put it into a better perspective, that’s 12 ½ per cent of your work day gone. Wasted.

By responding to messages between work sessions, you avoid losing focus and get more work done in less time. 

And it’s there that you will find fewer urgent tasks to do. Because you are getting more done in less time, you will be able to stay on top of projects and other work without getting too close to the deadline. 

Another area that can make us feel that managing our time is a waste of time is focusing on the number of tasks rather than the time we have available.

Again, this is linked to the fragility of being human. We are affected by how much sleep we get, our mood, and our diet. 

Have a bad night’s sleep, then a fight with your kids over the breakfast table and a sugary doughnut as a midmorning snack, and you’re not going to get a lot of work done. 

You have a sleep debt, you’re worked up by the argument, and that doughnut is going to give you a massive energy crash. 

This is why estimating how long a task will take is challenging. 

I’ve been writing a 1,000-word blog post every week for around ten years now. You’d think I would be able to estimate reasonably accurately how long writing 1,000 words would take after writing over 500 blog posts.

Ha! No chance. Some days I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes, other days it can take me two hours. 

The biggest effect on how long it will take me is sleep. If I get my seven hours, I know it’ll take me less than an hour. Less than six hours, and I’m struggling to do it in two hours. 

A better approach is to allocate time for doing groups of linked tasks. For example, group all your actionable emails and set aside 40 to 60 minutes at the end of the day to deal with them. 

This way, it doesn’t matter how many emails you have to act on; you do as many as you can in the time you have. 

If you’re doing this every day, you’ll soon find you have no email backlogs.

What amazes me is the people who try this for a few days and give up because their huge backlog of actionable emails is not getting significantly smaller. Well, of course not. If you’re starting with six hundred actionable emails, it’s going to take you a long time to get that under control. 

What you could do is set aside a one-off period to get that backlog under control first. Then set a time each day to keep it under control. 

Or make sure you have a “net-gain” with your responses. For instance, if you get 20 actionable emails in a day, respond to at least 21. That’s a net gain. If you do that consistently over a few weeks, your backlog of actionable emails will reduce significantly. 

You’re not going to lose the holiday weight you gained in a few days. It might have only taken you a few days to gain that weight, but it’s going to take you a few weeks, if not months, to lose it. (Life’s tough, isn’t it?) 

Most of the reasons why so many people quit making necessary changes, whether in their work or personal life, are linked to the initial difficulty of change. 

All change is difficult at first. You’re changing. But soon that change becomes your norm, and then it becomes easy. It becomes “just what you do”. 

There’s a time and place for the things you want to or must do. This is where your calendar comes into play. 

Scheduling time for play, rest and exercise is just as important as scheduling meetings with your clients or boss. Trouble is, we don’t do that. We prioritise work over other essential things in our lives. 

As Jim Rohn said, “When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two”

Ask yourself, where’s your boundary? If you don’t have one, you’re not managing time; you’re allowing time to manage you. 

There are many ways you can take control of your calendar. 

You could, for example, limit the number of hours you spend in meetings each week. If you work a typical 40-hour week, you could set the maximum time you spend in meetings at 15 hours. That will leave you with 25 hours dedicated to doing your work tasks. 

Most people I talk with have no idea how much time they are spending in meetings each week. They say “yes” to every meeting request. WOW! If you don’t have control of that, you’re “up the creek without a paddle”. 

Managing time is about managing your calendar and doing the hard things, like saying no to additional meetings that won’t help you do your work. 

This is one reason why the old-fashioned paper planners were so good. Because you had to handwrite your appointments into your diary, there was no way you could double-book yourself. Sadly, that one simple feature does not exist in digital calendars. 

I’ve seen people with four appointments all scheduled at the same time. Come on, you cannot be in two meetings at once, let alone four!

You can also protect blocks of time for doing your most important work each day. It’s not difficult, and with shared calendars, doing so indicates to other people that you are not available at that time. 

And most important of all, you can do a short daily planning session where you look at your calendar to see where your commitments are, then curate your to-do list so that the number of tasks you have for today is realistic, given how much non-meeting time you have. 

Yet none of these are tool issues. These are human decisions we need to make, and we need to be strong enough to follow through with them. Blaming our boss, colleagues, customers, or tools won’t improve the situation. 

Only by being strong enough to say “no, not then, how about this time”, can you ever regain control of your time and see a corresponding increase in your productivity. 

So there you go, Michael. Time management and productivity systems can and do work, but they only work if you are willing to make the difficult choices that come with them. 

Be consistent in trusting your calendar. Allow it to structure your day between your work and home life. 

Don’t allow someone else’s “urgent” to become your urgent. Respond to messages appropriately, but within your time frames. 

I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.