How to get work done
A friend of mine asked me how I get so much done?
Truth be told, I don’t really feel like I’m a shining example of accomplishment. And compared to my wife, I feel like I’m practically standing still half the time. Still, what I said seemed to help my friend. So I thought I’d pass this along.
Honestly, a lot of what I do is try to be more like my wife. I know, that doesn’t help much, but just stick with me for a min. I promise it’ll make sense.
Nearly everything that she does, maybe all of it, is reproducible. It will take discipline, probably a lot of it at first, but it can be done.
The one thing that might actually be hard to replicate that she does, at least for some (yup, I’m one of them) is writing well, and fast.
If you need to do work that requires you to write a lot of good copy, this is the one point where my advice may be to take a class. There are a lot of good techniques out there to be learned. But even here, you can probably train yourself to come up with ideas and then just write them down, then edit later. Hey, it worked in Finding Forrester! Well, kinda anyway.
Ok, to the main topic at hand.
You ever have a day at home, where you had planned to get a lot accomplished, only to find that by 6pm you really hadn’t done much of anything? Maybe you had a list of 10 “to-dos” and you only got 2 or 3 completed?
I sure have. Been in that boat a few too many times.
Well, the first thing to changing that is recognizing that it happens. You’re reading this so I guess you have an inkling.
There are actually a couple of things you can do. First, if you play video games or use social media a lot / surf the web doing non work related activity you need to limit it. Or stop it all together. It might be fun but it ain’t helping you tackle your list.
The next is to do what you’re doing while you’re doing it.
But, you say, I can do more than one thing at a time. And it’s a great way to maximize time!
I’m sure you can. And it sure does seem like it. But probably not all that well, or at least not as well as if you had focused just on one thing, and then the next.
Here’s an example: you need to call your bank and also finish writing a paper. While talking on the phone to the rep, you might write a couple of good things down, but probably you didn’t really focus on what you were writing. How could you, you were trying to talk to someone and get info from them!
Or maybe you focused more on the paper and less on the conversation, forgot got to ask one or two of the questions you actually meant to ask, and now you’re having to call back again. Hmmmm, not sure how much time that saved…
That may not be the best example, but I think you can get the idea. If you actually focus, really focus on one thing at a time, you’ll actually do a better job with that task, and it will likely go faster. If it’s not, find ways to speed up your process.
The last piece of advice, is to finish something… TO A DONE. This is the most important point of them all. And this is where I really try to emulate my wife.
Complete one task, then another, and then another. If you take out the trash, when you get back in don’t start washing the dishes and THEN put in a new trash bag. Do the bag first, and then the dishes.
Here’s an extreme example, where you are in the middle of typing an e-mail. You remember the mail may have arrived, maybe there was something you were expecting and you go and get it. On your way out the door you see a package that you ordered on the doorstep, and grab that too on your way back in. Temporarily putting the mail aside, you open the box, grab your item (let’s say some tech gadget) but it’s too much to deal with it at the moment so you put it and the box aside. Back to the mail. Sorting through it, you find one or two things that catch your attention and you open them.
On of them is a letter from a friend that you want to respond to, so you start to respond to it. You can’t quite think of what you want to write and put it aside, then open the other piece of mail, but then you remember that you’ve only got about an hour or so before you need to leave for an appointment and the lawn still needs to be mowed and it’s going to be dark before you will be back. So you put the mail away and go out to mow the lawn.
On your way to get the mower - maybe it’s in the shed - you see some weeds you really need to pull, so for 5 or 10 minutes you weed pull before realizing now you REALLY need to get mowing!
OK, let’s see. We now have SEVERAL things we were doing that are incomplete (the e-mail, the box and tech gadget, the mail, weed pulling) which means we will have to revisit them, get into whatever frame of mind again that we were in before, just to start working on that task again. And each start and stop takes TIME.
Before you know it, all of these little half-done tasks add up to minutes and then hours. You may even have felt that you were SO BUSY, but when you think back you can’t remember what you really actually got accomplished!
So here’s the key: when you are doing something, FINISH IT! BEFORE starting the next thing. Maybe you’re writing a book, and obviously you’re not going to write the whole thing in one sitting, but you could have a definite target of a page, 5 pages, a chapter, whatever.
If it’s cleaning the bathroom, CLEAN THE BATHROOM. Don’t clean the sink and the floor, then read a magazine for 20 minutes, or do the dishes, maybe make some lunch and then clean the toilet and shower. All that back and forth, it’s wasted time.
Operate like this in your life, going from one done task to the next and you’ll start to find that you can get a lot more done, while actually having even more time than you did before.
Give it a try!
(Thank you to my wife for being the inspiration for this blog post and for being such a fantastic example of how to get work done!)