There’s something very elusive about actually getting work done. It really is baffling how good we are at not managing life. The key is realizing what’s holding you back. It’s a matter of waking up to how we waste our time and how we can combat it. It doesn’t take a class or a book to zero in on ways to instantly save hours of your day. The concepts apply to home life, but really shine when you realize your current 8 hour work day can be accomplished in two. Only a couple months into testing lifestyle design and I’ve seen what it looks like to cut out the fat and develop effective productivity in all areas of my life. I’ve gained hours in my day, stopped doing things that were simply unnecessary, and doubled on some work days what I’ve usually accomplished in one. If you’re looking to break free like we are, add some hours to your day, or want to be highly valued at work, here’s how…
Actions: Take at least three huge steps to cutting out time wasters and ineffective productivity at work. Replace the time with three practices that actually get work done.
Goals: Free at least one hour a day and then invest that time in reading about or acting on automating income or living your dreams.
What we waste our time on:
E-mail, ineffective work conversations, meetings, the web, managing bills/money, TV
When the workforce isn’t wasting 2 out of the 8 hours (salary.com) reported working, or watching the average 4 hours of TV (A.C. Nielsen Co) when they go home, they actually consider themselves to be working. The above categories are what inhibit producing reportable results while doing so. If you take a look at your workload honestly and imagined no red tape in the way, could you get everything done in 4 hours, in 2, in 1? I didn’t thinks so and I was wrong.
Before jumping on this life design road, I considered myself a very efficient person. Now I know I’m efficient, but mostly at wasting time. I bet you’re somewhat similar. The 8 hours a day we spend trying to produce results is amazingly cluttered with completely useless information and processes. We don’t know any better so we never switch channels.
Ready to change your life?
The concepts explained here will seem unreasonable. I assure you, they aren’t, I’m now living out each one. They take some practice getting used to, but save hours and hours, and take little more than a calendar to do.
Batch everything. Batching is the process of taking something you do more than once a day and performing it at planned specific intervals. Save hours a day example: Check your work e-mail twice a day, for a half an hour each time. That’s it. If you are in any type of corporate world this will seem impossible, it will also change your life. Immediately after attempting this, you start a cold sweat. After doing this for two weeks, I realized no one cared. I even told my boss who applauded me for the time management. His comment is below.
Rob:
Excellent strategy and definitely “Mission Control”.
You’re mileage might vary, you might need to set up an auto-response politely explaining how you are extremely busy right now and you’re currently check your e-mail twice a day, or to contact you through phone if its an emergency. You might need to start at 3 times a day. Advance tip, do the same thing with phone calls, explaining in your voicemail greeting that you check your voicemail twice a day, and if its an emergency to please call you on your cell phone. Currently, I almost never pick up the phone, I have my voicemails routed as audio files to my e-mail and check my e-mail twice a day, once at 11, and once at 4. This tactic alone saves me at least an hour and a half every day at work. I have not been confronted it about it, nor do I think I will be. I’m being more effective at work by doing so. Try batching your cooking, your cleaning, laundry, social time, you’ll be amazed at how much time you spend doing nothing.
Selective Ignorance, non-finishing and funneling. People inherently don’t want to get work done, so they will do anything they can to postpone it, including distract you. Lifestyle design takes some training, it reprograms your inherent want to do nothing and replaces it with habits for getting things done. Along the way you’ll need to develop a few tactics to help move through people’s inherent time wasting nonsense. Here are three easy examples to start practicing right now.
- Selective Ignorance – Everything is not important. You can understand this first by defining your goals, and secondly by realizing you can’t make everyone happy. Hit delete, tune out un-needed information. A low information diet feeds thoughtful reflection, do not be a pack rat. You will not gain anything worth the effort in wading through the junk. Start ignoring now.
- Practice Not Finishing – There is no better time waster than reading a book simply because you started it. If something sucks, stop doing it. If you’re half way through this article and realize it’s not going to be directly helpful to you, go away. There is something in us that says we have to unlock every mission and color in every box. The 80/20 rule shines clearly here. Only 20% of what you are doing produces 80% of the result…stop wasting 80% of your time getting 20% of the results, practice not finishing when its not directly useful to the task at hand. You can always come back to an article, video, project, etc.
- Funneling useful information. Often times in communicating with people, there are several completely useless pieces of information. I have nothing against being personable, in fact its the best form of customer service, but if you’re focused on producing, you are not ready to shoot the breeze. We somehow have taken on a habit of thinking we can do both, or each half way. The art of funneling is to get at the point of what matters in a conversation quickly. The biggest time saver for me while in a work relationship is asking the simple question, “what can I do for you”. When someone is positioned with a questioned they innately want to answer. This process skips the how are you, oh I’m sorry your cat just died, what are you doing for the weekend conversation. Funnel through effectively selected word use. The action here is to take a minute to think about why you are speaking with someone to avoid the 5-10 you’ll end up wasting yammering on to them about nothing. Test these funneling methods below.
- “I have a meeting in 5″ | ” i’m in the middle of something, whats up?”
- Don’t make friends when productivity is involved
- Avoid all meetings without clear actions
- Use headphones, always be busy so you can focus on productivity
Multi-tasking. There is no such thing. There is only being present to several things for small amounts of time in succession. Stop having 12 windows open, stop chatting, surfing the web, using excel, word, powerpoint and the phone at the same time. You are not multi-tasking, you are moving an inch in every direction when you can be moving a mile in one. Study’s prove that after being distracted from a specific task it can take up to 40 minutes to “zone” back in. You are only slowing yourself to a crawl when you try and “multi-task”. I’ll use a technical example to demonstrate what I mean. When you use a computer, you generally understand that the more things you have open, the slower your computer goes. Eventually when you’ve opened the 23rd Internet Explorer window or Word document, the whole thing freezes and you start to flip out. Your brain is just like that, if you try to open more than one task at a time, all your doing is cutting productivity in half each time. Singular focus is the the second most important time saving concept I’ve learned behind batching. It’s easy and we don’t do it.
Ask yourself these questions:
- If you could only work two hours per day what would you do?
- R – if i was really at work, i’d do only core projects on my calendar, ignore e-mail and voicemail, and people for that matter. if i was redesigning life, i would at this point, do nothing but research niche groups that i am a part of or could speak intelligently about
- B -video tape myself 1st and 2nd and show it to the rest of the class
- If you could only work two hours per week what would you do?
- R – geez. at work i would speed through tasks that i had to do, do tasks that effected everyone or the partners only. deny everything else. if i owned or were planning a company i would come up with a directive and outsource all the work?
- B –I would locate instructional videos that were interesting. And create classwork assignments and powerpoints. Have students teach more sections of the chapter and create assignments that my TA’s could grade
- If you had to stop 4/5 of time-consuming activities what would you remove?
- R – at work, it would be almost all verbal communication, e-mails that weren’t defined with tasks. at home..i’d eliminate anything i don’t use every 2 days.
- B – stop grading as much or in as much detail. stop following the news. stop watching any tv or movies
- What are the top three things I fill time with to feel productive?
- R – at work, time sensitive tasks or requests, zeroing my inbox, helping when someone calls with an issue. at home, research/reading, supporting friends and family with tech stuff, creating resources for people, working out.
- B -working out, getting through a to do list, creating a new lesson plan
- How do you invent things to avoid the important
- R – i schedule them instead of just doing them. i make up rules for myself that things need to be clean or organized before doing something completely unrelated.
- B – at school I consistently avoid big tasks (putting them off makes them even less effective though i.e. grading, curriculum binder)
Finally, Get a calendar. We all have more than a few things to do in a day, here’s a thought, schedule them, write them down, and honor the occasions to do them. If something comes up in the middle of doing one task, capture it on paper or the computer and have time scheduled to take what’s on that paper and put it into a calendar. Repeat process as needed. I no longer use a “todo” list because of this concept. Capture it, schedule it, forget it.
All these principles can be molded to fit your specific situation, and these certainly aren’t the only ways to go about saving time, but they’re the most effective I’ve found so far. Please add your two cents in the comments.
A big part of lifestyle design is learning how to live minimally and effectively to directly impact both life and business. I’ve picked up on these key time savers and practices that have easily added up to a few days (yes around 60-70 hours) of time since trying them out a couple months ago. I do have one caveat though. I’ve noticed a trend in my research with some lifestyle designers is to move out of the country (USA) all together for its affordability and the general mobility of working through the web. I’m not doing this, nor will I post on it. Although I really applaud the efforts, I personally don’t see that as a fulfillment of my dreams. It’s a great way to give singular focus and cut back on permanent living costs and time wasters, but I view it as a workaround for allowing income generation to appear bigger than it is. The ultimate goal of designing my mobile life is to create the ability for me to work independent of location at leisure, not as a cost saver. (Like many reading, I’m committed to a job for now, and several people in the states, I’m not leaving for any longer than a celebratory escape from the 9-5 mini retirement!)
Go forth and be effective.