Productivity 401: Moving Beyond Time Management

There are enough “The 10 Best Ways to Manage Your Time” articles out there.

Chances are that you’ve read them and implemented time management advice you’ve read here on Medium or elsewhere. You keep a to-do list and do your best to manage your time. You may also have come across articles describing “energy management.” Put simply, you do your most important work when you’re at your best, and you do your least important work when you’re tired.

If you manage your time and energy well, you’re a productive person, no doubt. I’m not here to suggest that they aren’t important components of a personal productivity system. In fact, they’re arguably the most critical.

But time and energy are not the only resources at-hand.

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

–John Burroughs

In addition to Time and Energy, we have:

• Focus, our ability to match intention with action;
• Length of time we can devote to a particular task;
• Lapses between work on a particular project;
• Organizational efficiency;
• Nimbleness, our ability to pursue long term objectives even when the short term world gets in the way; and
• Grit, our ability to persevere despite the voices in our head and the challenges in our path

Let me elaborate on each in turn.

Increasing and Strengthening our Focus

We can have infinite time and infinite energy, but if we aren’t focused on a particular task, we will accomplish nothing. For example, I woke up 2 hours before my wife and daughter and poured a cup of coffee. A solid block of time and the first-caffeine-of-the-day rush… yet I squandered most of it by making trivial writing decisions rather than focusing on actual words written.

The more focus we have, the more effective we are. If I had more focus this morning, this would be about my 1000th word written instead of my 252nd.

Focusing is a decision made in the moment but it’s also like a muscle; it can be trained. The more we focus, the easier it becomes to focus in the future. The fruit hangs low:

• You can turn your phone off, reducing the chance of disruption. (Or, at the very least, you can turn the sound and Notifications off.)
• You can keep your workspace clear of clutter so our mind doesn’t wander.
• Coffee. God bless it.
• Good foods, or more importantly, not bad foods. (Try focusing after eating a bunch of pizza — doesn’t happen. At least for me.)

At a higher-level, we can also keep the peace with our family members and friends so emotional drama remains low.

We can also improve our focus by precisely defining what our objective is before we begin a work session. Our minds are not unlike dogs; if we fence in our mind, we give it less space to wander.

Maximizing Length of Time Devoted to a Project

In two important respects, time is not zero-sum. Every time you switch tasks, you pay a cost. Inevitably, when you switch tasks, your brain must process what you just did and where you left off in Task A, and then must become reoriented to Task B. This is why “multi-tasking” is a bad idea. I use quotes there because you’re not doing multiple things at once — you are actually just switching back and forth from task to task. Think of a person trying to learn how to juggle — that’s you.

The longer you focus on a particular task — what Cal Newport and others refer to as “Deep Work” — the better off you are. Less task-switching, more task-doing.

Let me provide an example. Compare spending 5 minutes on a project on 12 consecutive days (1 hour) to spending 30 minutes on a project on two consecutive days (1 hour.) Which is better?

The latter. In the former, you will spend most of the 5 minutes figuring out what to do, and little time actually doing it. In two 30-minute sessions, you will be able to think deeply about your project and make progress.

Minimizing the Lapse Between Sessions

If I change the example and make the two 30-minute sessions several days apart, the advantage has been lost. It is probably still better than spending 5 minutes over 12 consecutive days, but you will no doubt have to spend time during the second session remembering where you left off. You will inevitably cover the same ground twice.

The shorter the lapse between sessions devoted to a particular project, the better off we are.

When our focus sessions are long, and the lapses are shorter, we can enter a “flow state.” In such a state — which is rare, at least for me — you can become like Michael Jordan shooting hoops, knocking down your tasks and making progress on your goals with unprecedented amounts of efficiency and effectiveness.

It’s pretty awesome when it happens, so give it an opportunity to do so.

Organizational Effectiveness

Great ways to waste time and energy: Trying to remember where you left off, looking for papers in a pile stacked on your desk, searching for a file somewhere on your computer. If we spend just 10 minutes a day shuffling the same papers around to clear our desk, that’s 3,650 minutes a year, or about 60 hours, or about 1.5 work weeks.

Organization comes naturally to some people, but not everyone. I’m in the second camp. If you’re camping with me, you’ll need to design an organizational structure that allows you to work effectively. It is difficult in a world where spam crowds our inboxes and possessions accumulate like dust in an attic. But it can be done.

A system need not be complex. Even small changes reap disproportionally large benefits. For example, spending just a few minutes to write down where you left off (“breadcrumbs”) will save you significant amounts of resources in the long term and stress in the short term.

Nimbleness

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

— Marcus Aurelius

Ten or fifteen minutes here, ten or fifteen minutes there. It happens throughout the day. On the train, when a coworker is late for a meeting, when you are waiting for class to begin. You can either check Facebook or Twitter on your phone, or you can do something productive.

5 minutes here and there, added up over several weeks or months, is a nice chunk of time. However, since these opportunities are fleeting, we must be prepared for them. Otherwise we’ll spend 4 of the 5 minutes deciding what to do.

Nimbleness requires being prepared to take advantage of these opportunities.

Here are some ideas:

• Often we just need to make a decision on something. At the very least, a few minutes of silence will give you the chance to get the wheels moving, if not make the decision itself.
• E-mails you can quickly reply to.
• A bag you can organize.
• A few thoughts you should jot down.
• Edit a single page of something you’re writing.
• Don’t reply to texts as they come in — reply when these opportunities present themselves.

There are innumerable others, specific to our selves and our particular projects and goals. The key is to just be prepared for when the opportunities come.

When other resources are lacking, nimbleness can really help.

During my hour-long commutes to and from the college I taught at, I learned how to dictate effectively using my phone. After a few weeks, I was proficient enough to start drafting my book, a draft I completed a couple months later. What would’ve been time spent listening to NPR, music, or whatever classic rock station was still on the air, was converted into something useful.

Another example: I put on running shoes, about to announce my intentions to fit in a run before the rainstorm, when the wife asks me to keep an eye on the napping baby while she runs to the store.

I could easily check my Twitter feed while the daughter sleeps… Or I can do push-ups and sit-ups, maybe some yoga, while the baby sleeps. Seems like a better choice.

Though I didn’t go for a run, I still got a bit of a workout in. And in the long-run, that’s what counts. I can, and should, cross my task off guilt-free.

Once you get in the habit of thinking like this, it becomes much easier to identify and take advantage of opportunities.

Grit

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

— Clementine Paddleford

The other resources exist before they are called upon. We can develop and strengthen these resources proactively. However, grit is made at the moment just before it is used.

When we sit down to complete a task, we feel varying amounts of motivation and resistance, usually in inverse proportion to each other.

Motivation is the desire and willingness to get something done. Resistance has many forms: procrastination, indecisiveness, anxiety, fear, among others. These two wage war in our minds — the proverbial angel and devil on our shoulders.

Think of this as our “default” state when we begin pursuing a goal. Sometimes the battle is hard, other times it is easy, most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle. But each time, we choose the actions we take, and determine whether the Resistance will win, or whether we’ll show the “grit” necessary to power through.

REVIEW

7 Resources:

• Time
• Energy
• Focus
• Longevity/Lapse
• Organizational Effectiveness
• Nimbleness
• Grit

[In other words: TEFLON (grit is represented by the word ‘Teflon’ itself.)]

TAKEAWAYS

• Manage your time.
• Use your energy levels wisely, completing the most energy-intensive tasks when energy levels are highest.
• Some tasks require more focus than others. Choose when to do them based on how well you’ll be able to focus.
• Certain tasks really require “going deep,” a few hours of uninterrupted time. But the opportunities for lengthier sessions are few and far between. Treat them as the valuable commodities that they are.
• Consider, too, how the lapse between sessions can be minimized. Our most important projects require that we spend more time doing, less time trying to remember what we previously did.
• Organization matters.
• Nimbleness is the most difficult of the resources to define, the most individualized, and the most elusive. It comes in many forms and must be created by the individual person in the individual moment. For these reasons, it is also among the valuable of our resources.
• Grit is the hardest resources to mine yet is also the only inexhaustible of our resources. It’s there — you just gotta dig it up.

This is excerpted in part from Long Term Person, Short Term World.