Design your own life — designing the day (4/5)

Design goes beyond a pixel perfect user experience. I asked myself the question: “Can I apply design thinking to my own life?”. Today part 4

Designing the day

Agenda everything

Designing your life is all about time management, planning and picking the right goals. I come to believe that your agenda should have a central role in this. If you live from your agenda, you can manage your time more efficient. Where a to-do list only is giving an overview of your tasks it lacks planning. It doesn’t give you a good perspective of how long tasks take are actually going to take. I have struggled a lot (and still do) with estimating tasks and projects. Me being an optimist will estimate that a certain task will take a day when instead it takes more than a week to finish.

Planning is all about intention. Just like working on a project you will need to think of the specific things you want to get done. Planning your week is all about getting to know yourself. To make optimal planning for the week you will have to think about when you are most productive. Is it the morning, do you get energized by meetings or is the opposite the case? Thinking about your agenda helps to decide how long tasks are really going to take. An agenda works so well because time is limited. Oppose that to a to-do list where you crank as many things in as you want. By planning your hours on your agenda you protect yourself from overbooking. If you don’t plan your own time other will do it for you. Meetings with colleagues, incoming emails or last-minute requests all have an influence on how you are going to work on your projects.

Any valuable creative work requires long uninterrupted stretches of focus. But by letting apps and notifications dominate your life you can never get to that deeply focused work. So what’s the alternative?

Doing deep work

Think strategically about your day and it will have a big impact. Cal Newport, author of the book Deep Work makes the distinction between shallow and deep work. Ever heard of the Pomodoro timer? It’s a technique to lay off everything and just focus on one thing specific. For 25 minutes you just focus on one task and after this, you can take a 5-minute break. These Pomodoro sprints are very effective. For the simple reason that you only choose one task and just focus on that for a fixed amount of time. No switching between different tasks allowed and just the sole attention of getting that one task done. People love multitasking, but does it work? Busy people multitask, productive people focus.

Try it for yourself. Write down ‘I am good at multitasking’ and the numbers 1 till 20. Now try the same text but blend the two things together like I1a2m3g4o5o6d7 etc. Almost everyone takes twice as long for the latter. You probably made a few mistakes, had to think about it really deeply which takes a lot of energy. And still, people love multitasking. It is an easy way out when a task gets hard. Instead of going in to focus more on your task there as these easy way out towards email, going through notes, or distractions like social media. Deep creative work also has a huge ramp-up time. If you complete 90% of a deliverable and say you’ll “do the last 10% later”, you have to ramp all the way up again just to finish the last 10%.

So instead of constantly going back to doing shallow work like checking your email, it is better to batch this into designated time slots. In these time slots, you are more than allowed to do this work. By planning these sessions into your agenda, (remember agenda everything) you can keep yourself to it. So start with planning three short sessions into your agenda. Define these sessions so you have a clear idea of what you are going to do. Make a simple list of what you are allowed to do.

Mine looks like this:

• Check email
• Check Instagram
• Check Twitter
• Check Linkedin

Outside of the shallow sessions, you simply don’t do them. This way you’re not letting these small tasks creep in throughout the day, and when you’re doing them, you’re completely focused on getting them done. No more wasting time on them, and no more losing your focus to them.

There are certain apps you can use if you still struggle with implementing it because you open your email or Twitter nonetheless. For example, use the app Cold Turkey to block certain websites outside your time slots. There is also a setting in Gmail where you can let your emails only flow in on designated times.