Optimizing your day and week
As I stood in a very long line on a recent Saturday at CostCo to return a faulty monitor that I had purchased there, I thought to myself: what a waste of time. I had picked the busiest day of the week to visit CostCo and, as a result, I was spending a significant amount of time simply waiting.
Obviously, I was not optimizing my time and my day.
Fast forward to a few days later. It’s mid-afternoon – the time of day when I’m least effective with sit-still “thinking” activities – and I’m trying to write an article for The Productivity Edge, but my mind keeps drifting and I can’t seem to produce meaningful prose with any efficiency. It’s taking me twice as long as it normally does to write the article.
Once again, I was not making the most effective and efficient use of my time.
Sound familiar? Without proper planning and discipline, it’s easy to fall into traps whereby you are not fully optimizing your time, talents and energy. The pressure in today’s society to do it now, have it now and have it all exacerbates the situation. By planning ahead and rationing our impulsive urges, we are better able to optimize our limited time and energy on a daily basis.
Here are some suggestions to help you optimize your time and energy…
- Make lists of the tasks you need to do, people you need to call and items you need to purchase. This may seem obvious, but many people don’t make lists, or they limit list-making to grocery lists and such. But list-making is a fundamental productivity tool, and it forms the basis of most of the suggestions below…
- Submerge the urge for instant gratification. Once you’ve added something to your list, let it sit there for awhile (unless, of course, it’s truly urgent). In many cases, what seemed like a great idea at the time is a waste of time or money in retrospect. Also, by letting items sit on your list for awhile, you’re well positioning to more efficiently work through the items on your list.
- Group like activities together. By breaking down your list into subcategories, you can group like activities together so that you’re able to knock them off of your list more efficiently. Obvious groupings are lists of grocery items or items that you need to pick up at Home Depot. But you should also group together tasks associated with specific projects. For example, we keep lists of changes to make to our SalesDoc Architect software (our configuration, pricing and proposal generation tool), but we don’t consider each suggested change as it comes up. Instead, we analyze the entire group of changes at specific times of the month so that we can better prioritize them and, in many cases, address several issues and suggested changes in one fell swoop.
- Plan ahead. Proactively plan your day and your week so that it works for you and enables you to efficiently get through grouped activities. Planning ahead also applies to buying ahead: don’t wait until you run out of a specific item before restocking; replenish the item before it becomes an emergency. When you plan ahead, you’re also able to…
- Schedule yourself to accomplish task groupings at the most optimal times for you…
- Schedule activities according to your energy patterns. For me, my best creative thinking occurs between 6am and noon, and my lowest energy point is mid-afternoon. As a result, I try to schedule sit-still creative thinking tasks for the morning, and active out-of-my-chair tasks for the afternoon.
- Schedule your activities during off-peak times relative to the rest of the world. For example, don’t go to Costco on a Saturday afternoon (as I did). Go grocery shopping later at night. Call technical support in the mid-morning.
- Schedule your day so that you can focus on task groupings. Sometimes you simply need to schedule time with yourself (on your calendar) to complete certain types of tasks, especially the most important ones. Don’t let incoming phone calls and (especially!) emails derail your focused thinking and dictate your day. Turn them off so that you can really focus!!
- Don’t save tasks until the last minute. Part and parcel with planning ahead and scheduling is the mandate to not procrastinate. When you procrastinate, tasks become emergencies that must be completed at sub-optimal times…when your energy is low, when the rest of the world is trying to do the same thing, and when you’re not able to accomplish a task in conjunction with like activities.
With a little list-making, some planning and a dose of instant gratification denial, you’ll be surprised at the number of productive hours you’ll be able to add to your week!