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The Intentional Day: How Top Performers Plan Their Time Differently
About this Episode
Podcast 369
What’s the most effective time management practice you can adopt today that will transform your productivity?
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Script | 369
Hello, and welcome to episode 369 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I’ve often answered questions on this podcast about the best or most effective time management or productivity system, but I don’t think I’ve answered a question about the best practices before.
A practice is something you do each day. It’s just what you do. You don’t need to think about it. It’s automatic. And there is something that the most productive people I’ve come across do each day, that I find people struggling with their management of time don’t do.
In many ways, becoming more productive and better at managing time is a two-fold practice. It’s the strict control of your calendar and being intentional about what you do each day.
Yet to get to those practices each day, takes a change in attitude and the squashing of some pre-conceived ideas.
And that is what we’ll be looking at in today’s episode.
Before we get to the question, just a quick heads up. The European time zone friendly Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming next weekend. Sunday the 18th and 25th May.
If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into the show notes.
Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life?
Hi Mark, thank you for your question.
This is something that has always fascinated me about the way people work. What is it that the most productive people do that unproductive people don’t do.
Surprisingly it’s not work longer hours. That’s usually the domain of unproductive people.
What the most productive people do is to have a few daily rituals that are followed every day.
Let’s start with the easiest one. Have a solid morning routine. It’s your morning routine that sets you up for the day.
Cast your mind back to a day in your past when you overslept and had to rush out the door to get to work. How productive were you that day? Probably not very. You will have been in a reactive state all day, treating anything and everything as urgent.
The “secret” is to use your morning routine to put you in a proactive state. That means looking at your calendar for your appointments for the day and identifying what you must get done that day.
Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work.
For instance, today I have seven hours of meetings. That does not leave me much time to write this podcast script. Yet, when I began my day, I looked at where my appointments were, saw I had an hour mid morning free and a further hour in the afternoon between 4 and 5 pm.
Two hours is enough to get the bulk of this script written. Now all I have to do is resist all demands on my time today so I can get this script written. That’s the challenge. Resisting demands.
Resisting demands on my time today is reasonably easy. Seven hours of meetings is about my limit anyway. So if someone requests an additional meeting, it’ll be quite easy to tell them I am fully booked today and I can offer them an alternative day and time.
And that’s a mindset shift I would recommend to you. Know where your limits are and to be comfortable offering alternative days and times. If the person demanding your time insists and is in a more senior position to you (does that really happen today?), then you can decide which of your other meetings you could postpone.
If your day is full of meetings, make sure you task list reflects that. What I see a lot of people doing is having a day full of meetings and a full task list. Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen.
For most of us the confirmed, committed meetings will be the priority. Tasks will not be. So, on days when you have a lot of meetings, reduce your task list. That will immediately remove anxiety and give you more focus for your meetings.
Next up, is to not use the excuse of a busy day to not do your communications.
Email and messages build up very quickly. Just one day neglecting these means tomorrow you will need double the time to get back in control.
The goal here is to protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. If all you have is thirty minutes, take it. It’s surprising how much you can do in thirty minutes. That’s a lot better than having to try and find two or three hours the next day to get on top of an out-of-control inbox.
Email and messages are the things that are apt to throw you off a well planned day. Yet, it’s surprisingly easy to get on top of these if you were to make it a daily practice to spend thirty minutes or more dealing with your actionable emails.
The next tip I’ve picked up from super-productive people is to group similar tasks together. This technique has a few different names. Batching and chunking are two of them.
What you are doing is grouping similar tasks together and working on them as one task. For instance, if you have a lot of messages to respond to, you would call that your communication time and do them all at once.
This is quite easy with email as you can stay within one app to do the work. You can do this with writing proposals. If you have five or six proposals to write, then schedule time for writing proposals. Don’t look at each individual proposal as a single task. See the activity of writing proposals as one task.
This way you are working with time. You could set aside an hour or two for doing your proposals and after your allocated time is up, move on to the next category.
For example, a sales person, may decide that between 9:30 and 11:00 am, they will do their follow-ups and prospecting, then from 11:30 am do their appointments for the day.
Sure, there may be days when a customer can only see you early in the day, and you can move your follow-up and prospecting time to a little later in the day, but what you want to be doing is trying to set up a structure to you day. It just makes your life that little bit easier.
The problem with most to-do lists is that they are just that— a list of random things that may or may not need to be done today. If you were to allocate time for doing different types of work, you’re going to be pretty much up to date with most things.
It’s unlikely you will be able to avoid backlogs completely. But if you are consistently doing your important work, nothing is going to get out of control.
I think of this very much like running an airport. You’ve got flights taking off and landing all day. Yet, in the air traffic control centre, you can only land one plane at a time. This means around all commercial airports you will see what is called a holding pattern. This is where planes are circling waiting to be given permission to land.
Once a plane is given that permission, it comes into land.
Well, you are like that airport. You can only work one piece of work at a time. Everything else waiting for your attention needs to be held in a holding pattern.
And like an airport, aircraft in difficulties or running low on fuel will take priority over others. You too, will have little emergencies and urgencies, and you can decide which piece of work has the priority while you are working on the category you are currently working on.
This is why ultimately your calendar is your most important productivity tool. That’s directing your day. It tells you where you need to be at what time. It also tells you where you have time for doing your tasks.
If you leave things open, it’s likely to be stolen by low value stuff or other people. Making it a practice to plan your day using your calendar, ensures that you have the time to do what needs to be done and if you don’t do it, there’s only one person to blame—you.
Never ignore your calendar. Reschedule, by all means, but never ignore it. It’s your calendar that will ensure you know when to leave to pick your son up from school, and what time that appointment with an important client is.
The final part is to know what your non-negotiables are. These are the things you will never miss. For example, three things I will never miss are writing my journal each morning, taking my dog for a walk and my thirty minutes of exercise each day.
Start with your personal life. What are you non-negotiables there? Then look at your professional life. What are you non-negotiables at work.
For example, with the exception of my calls days, I will ensure I spend at least two hours working content each day. If you were a designer or engineer, that could be spending a minimum of two hours designing or engineering.
Ensuring you have a few hours each day dedicated to doing the work you were hired to do, will put you ahead of most of your colleagues.
When you have non-negotiables, you find planning your day is easy. I know Louis needs his walk, I know also that when I wake up, after making my coffee, I’ll be sitting down to write my journal. I don’t need to think about these things. The only thing I need to decide is where Louis and I will go today. We try to go somewhere different each day.
I also find towards the end of the afternoon, I begin thinking about what exercise I will do today. There’s no question about whether I will exercise or not. Exercise is a non-negotiable. All I need to decide is what I will do in my thirty minutes.
Non-negotiables can be anything that is important to you. I’ve had clients who would never miss their meditation session, or go to the Synagogue, or temple in the early morning. Others won’t miss their Saturday morning family breakfast.
The key here is to identify what your non-negotiables are and then do them.
I hope that has helped, Mark. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Hosts & Guests
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