Divide divide divide & conquer
7 tips to break your workload in manageable bits
My high school Spanish teacher (Hola, Señior Niemeier!) called it “painless studying.” He advised us to carry our vocab sheets with us and study when we had nothing better to do.
Waiting for mom to pick us up from basketball practice. Standing in line. Heading to school on the bus.
The idea was use 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there and you won’t have to spend a late-night cram session before the test. It was a better use of your time — and it wouldn’t even feel like work.
I’m not sure how many 16-year-olds used this advice. But because I‘m a geek, I took it to heart. I became obsessed with spending my downtime productively.
I didn’t just limit it to Spanish. These were the days before smart phones, so I carried around sheets of paper to have my track teammates quiz me on US history, or clipped articles from the newspaper to pull out from my back pocket and read.
Looking back I took it way too far, like when I read newspaper articles between sets at the Strokes concert in college. Sometimes you have to let it go.
But today those skills have paid off as I juggle family, freelance writing, part-time teaching and full-time work. I even managed to write a textbook for the social media analytics class I’m teaching in my “spare time.”
Here are some tips that work for me to divide, divide, divide and conquer.
Stalk the moments
You have to know the circumstances you’re looking for, like a hunter tracking his prey. Then when you see it, POUNCE before it gets away! Keep a mental list of moments when you can work for 5-10 minutes, like the morning before the family wakes up. I’m typing this in the bathroom as quickly as I can while my 3-year-old daughter takes a bath. She’s currently pretending to be a mermaid, but who knows how long that will amuse her? The clock is ticking.
Stand up
Without a stand-up desk, I’m now typing this with my laptop on my 3-month-old son’s dresser drawer. Standing up helps me quickly go from typing to changing my son’s diaper to back to typing without too much fuss.
Keep your tools handy
Be ready at a moment’s notice to get some work done. Did the baby just fall asleep in your lap. Perfect! Instead of checking Twitter on your phone for the 1,087th time, can you actually get some work done? For my book, I synced everything to an Evernote folder so I could write, edit or add notes whether I had my laptop, iPad or iPhone.
Bundle your tasks
Recognize that something has to give if you want to carve out some extra time. Multitasking gets a bad rap, but can you bundle tasks together? I like to run my errands, for instance. I mean literally running mail to the post office. I also like to run or bike commute when possible. Exercise with a purpose!
Steal like an artist
When I’m deep into a project, I tend to see the rest of the world through that lens. I don’t just block out another time to do research. Instead, I actively approach all that I do with the purpose of learning something to apply to my work. When I wrote my book, I read through articles on Pocket with the intent of finding examples to add to my concepts. Austin Kleon calls this “stealing like an artist,” or finding inspiration wherever you look.
Call for back-up
Ultimately, nothing is more helpful than having a tag team partner that gives you a reprieve from the grind. It could be a boss that lets you duck out of a meeting so you can finish up another project. For me it’s an understanding wife and in-laws that give me time to focus.
Count the small victories
You can feel like you’re spinning your wheels if you don’t see progress. I track my small daily victories — from editing a chapter to finishing a blog post—with iDoneThis. Taking time to remind myself that I’ve made incremental movement (no matter how little) is enough to propel me a little further. It gets me 10 minutes closer to the goal.
