Transcript
Planning is the key to everything, because it’s not the number of things on our to do list that is the problem. It’s this switching of energy between different tasks. So if I’m writing a report and then my email pings up and I’m like, oh, I just dip into that and I’ll respond to that and I come back when I’m looking at takes me a good 10 to 15 minutes to get back in the flow of it. And if I do that multiple times, I am wasting so much time switching between the two. So yes, we have to plan but we also have to focus on the task that we’re doing as well to make it effective. And we can also, it’s called batching for energy matching, but we can tag on all the activities a similar energy to the end of something. So, if I’m looking at my financial reports, then I can tag on my home finances, I can tag on chasing invoices cause they’re all a similar energy and I can do a good time block to do that.
And so we can actually become way more productive or fruitful with the amount of time we have, even if we have less time than we had before by really concentrating on what we have available, the tasks and focusing in on that particular thing and not being distracted by the multiple other things that we have around us.
I have two things that I would recommend. Two books, actually. One is called “Eat That Frog” by Brian Tracy, and it’s that kind of what’s the easiest way to eat a frog? Well, one bite at a time. And if you have to eat a frog and eat the ugliest one first, you know it’s a great book. And also, “The One” thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, and they talk about having, you know, at the start of each day asking yourself this question, what is the single biggest thing that if I did this thing today, it would make everything else easier or unnecessary?
So, those two would be great place to start.
So I use something called the energy allocation process. But in short, this essentially is coming down to big rocks. So it’s great to do a brain dump of everything that you’ve got on your plate because the feeling in your brain you’ll have after doing this is amazing. Your brain will be like, “Oh my God, everything is out of my head”. So start with the big brain dump and then, we’re going to label each thing in terms of, big rocks. So A: absolutely has to happen today. B: it would be brilliant if it happened today, but no drama if it’s tomorrow and C: well, we’ll see if we get to it. It’s that kind of, you know, when you’ve heard the floor, it’s still going to need hoovering again sometime in the future. Those kinds of tasks. And then you start in on the A tasks. Ask yourself that Gary Keller question, what’s the single biggest thing that’s going to make everything else easier or disappear? I’m going to make that your A1 task and break things down. [A1,A2,A3,A4, A5]
Put timeframes on everything. Because when I first started, I would say, okay, I’ve got a webinar to create. I’m going to block out one day to do that. That’s loads of time. I’m totally going to achieve it. And then it took me three days for each new webinar. So, now I know, you know, this is the time block I’m going to need for this particular activity. And we get a lot better at time management when we get realistic because we think we can achieve so much in a day and then get disappointed when we don’t do it. That’d be to completely underestimate how much we can earn 30 days. So, those would be my biggest tips to start with, as well as using that process of batching those tasks together with similar energy and putting time blocks. But also tuning into your energy.
So in terms of, we don’t want to be thinking about productivity, we want to be thinking about fruitfulness. So, tuning into your natural cycle in terms of your monthly cycle, your weekly cycle. So you might be good for certain things at the start of the week. You might be quite snappy and productive. It might be great for people at the end of the week, you know, doing those conversations. There’s one to ones, so tune in in the weekly sense for a good four on different days and in the daily sense do I work best in the morning, mid morning, afternoon and put your single biggest thing that has to get done that day in the time slot when you’re best in flow for it.
I think yes, I have covered a little bit of this before, but the number one time management mistake is trying to squeeze more out of every minute of the day. We actually don’t get taught this stuff at school. We don’t get taught this stuff at universities and if they do teach it, it’s this old paradigm where you’re thinking of productivity as if I’m this machine from a hundred years ago, you know it actually originated from the industrial revolution, so a hundred years ago the industrial revolution happened and we started to pay people in hourly rates. So how much you could pay someone to own an hour of your time and overtime, people, there was this old adage where if you want to get paid more, you just have to work longer and harder than the person next to you. Well, you know, does that mean that people who work 18 hour days are more important? and it’s completely culturally celebrated. And we know in our heart sense this is not true, but we don’t have to extrapolate or scratch the surface too far to know that as a culture we are celebrating busy-ness and, you know, people wearing busy-ness as a badge of honor, you know, when did I become crazy busy, become a badge of honor? When did martyrdom become sexy? You have to change this old paradigm way of thinking. And so, this is why we need to shift into energy management is so important. Tapping into energy, nature, rhythms, rituals and cycles. So my last tip on this would be bridging rituals between home to work and work to home. And it can be really simple, but it helps you switch from mommy mode into work mode. So, I have a client who in the old days before Covid, who used to cycle to work and back. Her bridging ritual was to stand in the garden and listen to the birds just for four minutes before going back in. And it was enough to switch her from work mode to “I’m in mommy mode when I get home”. Other people use, you know, hand creams and smell it or, have a shower to finish the day, or I’m going to finish the day with some exercise and when I come home, that’s the end of that. Or just writing a simple to do list is helpful for people, but find the bridge that works for you.
