Pre-decide core work and protect focus

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way.

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Script |428

Hello, and welcome to episode 428 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. 

If you’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements. 

If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically. 

And this is important. 

Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”.

And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real

The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions. 

When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions. 

In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling. 

And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks. 

It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should. 

When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed. 

When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex. 

And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice. 

This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day? 

Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question. 

When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided. 

Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day. 

If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions. 

And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow. 

So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there. 

However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything. 

This is where routines, processes and rules come into play. 

Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions:

• What deserves my attention?
• What can wait?
• What should I ignore?
• What should I delegate?
• When is “good enough” truly good enough?

If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves. 

And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up.

This is why pre-establishing what your core work is matters. Once you know what your core work is and what that work looks like at a doing level, you are pre-deciding what deserves your attention. It’s the work you are employed to do. It’s important and must be done. 

Now, all you need do is decide when you will do it. 

And with core work, given that the type of work you’re doing will be the same, you can pre-block time each day for doing it. 

For example, you could protect 10 am to lunchtime for doing your core work each day. That means you are no longer deciding what to do each day. You’ve pre-decided; it’s blocked on your calendar, and all you need to do now is turn up and do the work. 

It’s always fascinated me that the most stressed-out people I’ve come across in my professional life are the ones who’ve told themselves they can’t do that, and that they have to be available for everyone immediately they ask. 

Complete nonsense, of course, but there really are some people who believe that. 

In this situation, a person is constantly having to decide whether they should respond to this person or that person. Who is more important? Should I call my boss, or perhaps send her a text message? “Oh shoot! This person’s been waiting 10 minutes. I must call them immediately!) 

It’s also why the least stressed-out people are the ones who are comfortable turning on Do Not Disturb on their devices when they sit down to do some focused work. 

They’ve made the decision that for the next hour or two they will work on a specific type of task. If something was a genuine emergency, they would be told somehow. 

I remember last year, when we were changing our car, that the sales manager we dealt with was wonderfully laid-back. Within a few days of starting the process to change our car, I worked out that he would respond to our messages between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm or between 4:00 and 5:00 pm, depending on when we messaged him. 

It was consistent, and I was hugely impressed. 

When I picked the new car up, I asked him about it, and he said he gets so many messages and emails each day that he wouldn’t be able to do any work if he responded instantly to everything that came in. So, he does an hour before lunch and an hour before he finishes the day. 

Brilliant. And I bet you he never gets any complaints about it. 

So, having a process for dealing with your communications is just as important as having time protected for doing the work that matters each day.

Then we come to your routines. If you were to have a small fifteen-minute closing down routine at the end of the day, this would again minimise the decisions you need to make. 

For example, at work, I will close down by clearing my desktop and tidying up my desk. I clear out Todoist and process my inbox. Then I open up my daybook and plan out tomorrow by writing in my appointments and the most important things I have to do tomorrow, and that’s it. Done. 

It tells me that my workday is now finished.

There can also be other things you might do too. For example, at home, perhaps before you go to bed, you load the dishwasher and turn it on, or if you don’t have a dishwasher, you wash all the pots and mugs before going to bed. 

That’s a routine. A going-to-bed routine. Pre-decided, and after a few weeks, you would feel uncomfortable if you didn’t do that. 

And then there are your rules, or standards. 

Again, this helps you make pre-decisions so that, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t have to. 

For example, I have many of my coaching clients make a commitment to respond to their emails within a specified period of time. 

Let’s say you set a rule to respond to all your emails within 24 hours. This means that any email that is close to your time limit must be responded to today. Anything else can wait. 

For emails that will require you to do a lot of work, the response time still holds, but the response is to reply with something like: “Thank you for your email. I will get it back to you as soon as I can”

This way you filter out the genuinely urgent from the non-urgent. If the person you’re responding to comes back to you saying they need it by such and such a date, now you know it’s important, and you can prioritise it accordingly. If they respond with, “Thanks”. You know it can wait. 

The difference between a rule and a routine is that routines happen automatically. You do the same thing at the same time. A rule is conditional. A sort of “if this, then that”. 

If I have a presentation to do this week, I will protect an hour the day before for preparation, for example. 

Processes are pre-decided methods for doing the different types of work you do. For example, “if I get a sales enquiry, this is the process I follow.”

What these routines, processes and rules do is they reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day. This helps to prevent you from overloading your decision-making abilities, which in turn reduces the amount of mental fatigue and tiredness you experience at the end of the day. 

Daily planning the day before is a decision-reducing routine. When you plan the day before, it leaves you knowing exactly what you need to do when you begin the next day. No decisions to be made. You know exactly what needs to be done and when you will do it. 

You can then preserve your energy for the decisions that may need to be made if something changes and you have to decide what you will work on. The new circumstances. 

This is why NASA’s Mission Control in Houston in the 1960s practised every possible eventuality before any mission. It was this practice that enabled the brilliant people in Mission Control to get the Apollo 13 crew home safely in April 1970. They had practised that eventuality so many times that the decisions required were already made for them. 

So there you go, Fabian. I hope that has helped. 

Turn your daily planning into an end-of-day routine. Create a checklist to guide you (again reducing decisions). This daily planning will also help reduce the decisions you need to make the next day, which in turn will leave you feeling less exhausted at the end of the day. 

Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. 

Don’t forget, my Productivity Academy is now open, and we have a date for our first live event. Sunday, 30 August. The topic will be where to start and a general Q&A session. Not to be missed. Joining now will give you plenty of time to do your homework before the session. 

I’ll leave the details of the Academy in the show notes for you. 

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