The easy way to get things done.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

Monday morning. Determination is my middle name. This week I’m going to make real headway on Möbius Project. I get to the office early so I have at least a little uninterrupted time to work. It’s blessedly quiet as I sip my coffee, clicking my way into all the necessary programs. But ah, I should have known… the emails. Oh, the emails. Okay, I’ll start on Möbius Project after lunch. No big deal. (I am resilient. I am boundless. In a parallel universe, I’m a mom blogger with a book deal and beautifully dressed twins.) I’m a quarter of the way through my inbox when my coworkers start filtering in and, strangely, congregating in the next room. Shoot, that meeting. I forgot about that meeting. I do not allow myself to consider anything like defeat. It’s cool. Today’s my Get-Stuff-Out-Of-The-Way-So-I-Can-Start-On-Möbius-Project-Tomorrow day. Clinging to hope, I gather my notes and join my colleagues at a conference table where I’ll spend the next two hours lengthening my to-do list and mentally revising my timeline for the project that, like so many others, would deliver real value to our customers but because its completion will require long stretches of concentrated focus, continues to take a backseat to all the “little things.”

Friday evening. I don’t have a spunky middle name; I have takeout and insecurity. How is it that I can be this busy all week and have so little to show for it? Why can’t I get things done?!

One year later. I’m waiting for the bus that will take me to work. I cannot stand the standing here, doing nothing, so I fish my phone out of my pocket and scroll through my Instagram feed. After 52 weeks of following notifications, alerts, and interruptions around all day, I no longer know how to exist without distracting myself. Nor do I particularly want to — and that’s the most alarming aspect of this perverse dependency I’ve developed. I want the products of my focus, certainly; but I don’t want to actually focus. To do so would bring me face to face with some discouraging facts:

• I never did finish that project, not how I envisioned it anyway. I cobbled together a subpar, placeholder version that, purely by default, became the real though not-anywhere-near-my-best thing.
• The more potential for value a project has, the more likely it is to meet that same sad fate.
• I have no idea how to fix this.

As of this writing, another year has passed. I am not that dispirited woman at the bus stop anymore, and, if I could, I’d whisper back through time into Former Me’s ear, “It’s okay. I know exactly how to fix this.”

1. Lower the bar.

Forget the twins and the book deal and the blog. Or whatever your personal metaphor is for the breezy, beautiful productivity that’s packaged and served in heaping, obscene portions each day via advertisements, email, and social media. Maybe it’s a tattooed, bearded dude with incongruously white teeth and a wildly successful photography studio he started after motorcycling across Australia and aligning himself with his true passion. Maybe it’s the quirky juice bar downtown that’s supposedly raking in the dough despite steep commercial real estate costs and the comparatively low price of “detox” drinks because, as the darling married couple that owns it claims, “Success is a mindset.” Whatever the metaphor, the life it represents isn’t real. Or, if it is, it isn’t mine. For me, getting things done requires, above all else, humble acceptance of the fact that I cannot get all the things done or even most of the things done and not a single one of them perfectly. And whether or not Beyoncé and I have access to the same 24 hours each day, the fact remains that my former dependence on distraction was nurtured by that very comparison. I tried to accomplish as much as possible and, in doing so, compromised my ability to focus long enough, deeply enough to accomplish anything all that well.

I am not, in fact, boundless; I am finite and cannot say “yes” to every request for my time. To truly serve people, I need to sustainably serve them. That means saying, “yes, but later” and, “I wish I could help, but no.” It means taking the energy I spent running helter-skelter delivering substandard work to everyone who asked and using it instead to deliver my best work to a handful.

Of these four habits, this one is the least comfortable. It takes courage I’m not always sure I have to reject a vision of myself as a commodity in a professional landscape teeming with personal branding advice. I have to lower the bar almost daily; the dang thing keeps inching back up when I’m not looking. But it’s here on more humble ground that I can actually get things done.

2. Use a project management tool.

Emails and meetings and interruptions from coworkers aren’t, in my opinion, categorically distractions. They became distractions because I abdicated deliberate choice, allowing those things to boss me around like so many fickle, power-mad managers rather than making mindful decisions about what to do now, what to plan for later, and what to put in the hopper for consideration at another time. Or, as Georgetown University professor and bestselling author of Deep Work Cal Newport explains, “Distraction […] is not the cause of problems in your work life, it’s a side effect.” To address the cause — for me, reactive work habits — I need some tools, beginning with project management software.

I use Pivotal Tracker, but there are plenty of options. Tim Herrera, editor of The New York Times’ Smarter Living section, writes that he “… religiously use[s] a mix of Trello and Google Keep to organize my work life around lists that make sense for me and how I structure my days.” Whatever your tool of choice, Herrera’s comment highlights the goal: to organize your work life.

With a project management tool, I have a place to capture everything that needs doing along with notes about those things, as well as a way to prioritize and break them down into smaller tasks. Instead of hordes of file folders, I have a tidy, searchable digital container where I can drop meeting notes and add tasks, which frees me from the compulsion to jump on new requests immediately for fear of forgetting them altogether. It also keeps the connections between my various projects visible and allows me to categorize and label them, all of which comes in handy when it comes to the next habit: planning.

3. Plan each workday.

One of life’s more inarguable facts is that the shower I take on Monday doesn’t work on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. So it is with flossing, eating, exercising, and — at least for me — planning. It’s laughably unrealistic to think that deciding vaguely, albeit doggedly on Monday to “make headway” on something or other is all it takes to advance my goals. No wonder I felt unfulfilled; I wasn’t charting a course towards fulfillment.

These days, I close each workday by sketching out a flexible plan for the next one. I rely heavily on my project management tool to assess my priorities, but it’s not as if I snub other channels — email, calendar, Slack, etc. I weigh it all and, crucially, do the weighing daily, before a neglect-induced sense of urgency has had time to accumulate. Then, I add tasks to my day plan that make the most sense given my time and resources. And sure, unexpected things come up. When they do, I add them to the plan and adjust accordingly. The idea isn’t to cultivate rigidity or refuse to get my hands dirty with mundane chores; it’s to create a blueprint on which I can mindfully build rather than just showing up and plowing headlong through the day.

One of life’s more inarguable facts is that the shower I take on Monday doesn’t work on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. So it is with flossing, eating, exercising, and — at least for me — planning.

If you’re reluctant to plan your days, you’ve probably got good reason. (I know I did. My experience with day planning had always been too constraining to be of much use, what with all the discrete time blocks, inadequate space, and limited capacity for rerouting on the fly.) Even so, I cannot stress this enough: It is worth your time to find a day planning method or tool that suits you. Some possibilities:

Day Planning Methods

• Cal Newport’s time blocking method
  This is a highly structured approach that I find suffocating but others swear by it.
• The Ivy Lee method
  This is very close to how I plan, but I work more loosely, giving myself the freedom to move back and forth between tasks if I choose to.
• The 18-minute method
  This approach includes the end-of-day review that I do but suggests planning in the morning, which doesn’t work well for me.

Day Planning Tools

• Daycast
  I’ve used this for a little over a year now.* I like it because it combines day planning and time tracking. It also integrates with Pivotal Tracker, my project management tool, which makes planning easier for me.
• Timely
  You can’t tell from the website, but Timely’s set up like a calendar, a familiar format that a lot of people might appreciate.
• FocusList
  Based on the Pomodoro technique, this app works exclusively with Apple devices. I haven’t tried it (not a fan of interrupting my focus every 25 minutes), but for folks that use Pomodoro, this could be quite useful.
• A paper planner
  For those who prefer writing by hand, there’s Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Planner, this Japanese planner with a die-hard fan base, or one of these options to name just a few.

Pick something. Try it. I beg of you. This one habit will make a world of difference.

4. Track your time.

Gone are the evenings when I’d wonder, bewildered, how I could be so exhausted and yet unable to list what I’d done to get me in that state. Because I track the time I spend on each task in my plan, I always know precisely where the day’s gone. No guessing required. This is beneficial in more than one way:

• After a year of tracking, I’m better at estimating how much time a given task will take.
• Which means I have more realistic expectations about what I can and can’t accomplish in a day.
• Which means, more often than not, I end the workday having done most of what I set out to rather than the other way around.

Time tracking also helps me focus. A disruption occurs when, for example, I’m preparing an analytics report and a coworker calls about something else entirely. The focus-breaker isn’t necessarily the call; it’s the internal fear of losing my place — a fear that time tracking helps prevent. Because I clock into and out of tasks as I work through my day, I don’t have to worry about forgetting where I was. My time tracker is my pin.

Easy ≠ Comfortable

For years, I smoked cigarettes. When I was trying to quit, I read a book called Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking. Carr rejected the notion that cigarettes soothed anxiety or heightened mental clarity — both of which most smokers would agree certainly feel true — and insisted that smoking achieves only one thing: to set in motion the next cigarette craving. Similarly, all distracting myself achieves is the craving for more distraction.

Addressing these dependencies is pretty straightforward. To stop smoking, you don’t ever light the next cigarette. To get focused, you do the four things outlined above and keep doing them (that’s what works for me, anyway). It’s not complicated. It requires no books or special classes. But it isn’t always comfortable. I offer you the following encouragements:

• Be patient. If you’re like me, these four habits will increase your capacity for focus, but it won’t happen overnight.
• Be forgiving. If you’re distraction-dependent, you may find yourself reaching for your phone when that thing you’re working on gets difficult. That’s fine. Really. Just add it to your plan and track the time you spend on it. If there’s no way to mark time unbillable in your time tracker, set a separate timer or just keep an eye on the clock. The point is to be aware of what you’re doing, not to beat yourself up.
• Have faith. The ability to focus and get things done is not the magical purview of only a superhuman few. If I can do it, anyone can.

As I write this, it’s a Friday evening. Another work week is at an end. Soon, I’ll get takeout. I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel insecure — about some things, I do. I spent more time on a particular task this week than I’d have preferred to, for instance, and I can’t help but wonder if someone with more talent than I have would’ve executed more quickly. But along with that mild sense of self-doubt is the pleasure of fulfillment. I got things done.

You can too.

*Full disclosure: I’m part of the team that creates Daycast. That said, It’s become an indispensable part of how I get value from my days and if I ever move on, Daycast is coming with me.