I have 2,000 weeks left to live — time to download that productivity app!
It’s getting hot in here
It’s the hottest day of the year (ever!), the ground is burning and we’re all going to die. Fact.
And yet I can’t stop beaming as I go for a daily dip in the sea after work, living the kind of Mediterranean lifestyle that I yearn for throughout the year. While I can agonise about how I (/we’re) not doing enough to save the planet, I also find solace in focusing on how I can meaningfully approach the days I have left in life. Focusing exclusively on what’s possible right now within my space rather than on trying to achieve the impossible. It’s one of the healthy ways I’ve found of embracing my own mortality.
Oliver Burkeman’s latest book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, makes a strong case for accepting the fact that we’re never going to get everything done because time is finite. And the sooner we embrace that realisation, the happier we will be. Spending time efficiently is a construct from the Industrial Revolution (clocking on / clocking off) and is, he suggests, the primary cause of widespread anxiety (as well as a money pit for productivity app developers and self-help authors). In short, Burkeman tells us it’s ok to construct a meaningful life by embracing and not denying its limitations. It’s ok to miss out on good stuff (it’s a given). It’s ok to make choices that don’t please everyone and say ‘no’. It’s ok to bin that neverending to-do-list.
I relate in many ways to Burkeman’s approach but I’ve been wondering lately how valuable (if at all) it is when thrown into a work setting.
You will not get everything done…ever
You will never get everything done. There will always be more work. New cards will always appear in your Asana pipeline board. New Slack notifications will always pop-up. Emails will never end. And remember meetings? Lots of them. So how should we go about doing meaningful work while embracing the fact that the working day/week/month/year/life is limited?
I find applying Burkeman’s approach in a business context a little trickier. Other than my wedding vows, I don’t have a formal contract with my family, hobbies and the beach. I can choose to spend as much or little time as I want with them, whatever makes me and the people I love happiest. But I do have a formal agreement with my employer to fulfil my work duties. So while I can voice the working conditions, values and needs that will enable me to be a good employee, there are some obvious dependencies in the workplace. And I’m keen to fulfil my part of the contract. So if I want to be able to strike a healthy balance of meaningful work, family time and leisure, I need to make sure that I approach my working week as ‘efficiently’ as possible.
4-day working weeks: tracking time does help
A part of embracing the ‘now’, I switched to a 4-day working week just over a year ago. I get paid less but I live a much happier life, mainly having fun by the sea with my young children. I also follow with interest the 4-day week global campaign which is making the case for ‘100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity’. So I’ve been keen to test out the evidence that you can be as productive working 4 days (instead of 5).
While going down to a 4-day week, my workload hasn’t really shifted. What has had to shift though is my ways of working, including my time management. If ‘productivity’ is making the best impactful work within a finite time, then in a work setting at least, I do need to find ways of measuring my productivity — this might be the amount of time spent on a project, removing pain points or bottlenecks.
Project management, timetracking and productivity tools give you at least some measure of how much good work one can do in a week. I’m currently testing out a bespoke timetracking tool called Toggle Track. It’s easy to use and it integrates nicely with Google Calendar. It’s validating some stuff I already knew (everything takes longer than you initially think) and springing up a few surprises (how much time I actually spend on admin/systems/tooling). It’s helping me get a better idea of how much time I actually spend working on different projects versus the assumptions I made about each project. I’ll also be in a better place to prioritise and park some work that is less urgent. And it also helps me to distinguish between requests that are ‘urgent’ or (just) ‘important’.
These tools aren’t so much there to remove stress (remember, the stress has been partially removed by embracing the fact that you will never get your to-do-list fully under control!) but to give you a measure of what’s doable. And more importantly, what’s not doable. It’s helpful as it gives me a baseline upon which to start making more informed decisions. And to ‘rationalise’ that unspoken assumption — that something does have to give somewhere in order to be extra productive!
So while I’ve embraced Burkeman’s idea that I won’t ever get everything done (phew), I find it helpful — in the workplace at least — to understand better what I can actually get done within a definite time constraint. I can then set some expectations both on a personal and collective level. And hopefully live happily ever after!
The great DigiShift team recently ran a session with Oliver Burkeman — check it out here.
