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by
Chris Bailey
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January 10 - February 25, 2018
According to the most recent American Time Use Survey, the average employed person aged twenty-five to fifty-four with kids spends: • 8.7 hours a day working • 7.7 hours a day sleeping • 1.1 hours a day on household chores • 1.0 hours a day eating and drinking • 1.3 hours a day caring for others • 1.7 hours a day on “Other” • 2.5 hours a day on leisure activities
I think a lot of people make meditation out to be way more complicated than it actually is, but I won’t get too technical here about the ritual (I talk about meditation more on this page if you’re curious). Basically, I simply sit on a chair or a cushion—usually in my work clothes—and observe my breath. I’m not into rituals like chanting or focusing on my “third eye” (whatever that means). I simply focus on my breath for thirty minutes, and when my mind inevitably wanders away from my breath to focus on something more interesting, I gently bring my attention back to my breath. I continue to
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Meditation had such a profound effect on my productivity because it allowed me to slow down enough so that I could work deliberately and not on autopilot.
When you work like a monk, you work too slowly to accomplish much of anything, and when you work like a stock trader, you’re too hurried to step back from your work to identify what’s important so that you work smarter instead of just harder. The most productive people work at a pace somewhere between the monk and the stock trader—fast enough to get everything done, and slowly enough so they can identify what’s important and then work deliberately and with intention.
When you have more to do than ever before, less time to do it, and unparalleled freedom and flexibility with how you get it done, productivity is no longer about how efficiently you work. Productivity is about how much you accomplish. That requires you to work smarter instead and manage your time, attention, and energy better than ever before. Somewhere toward the end of my project, I arrived at an epiphany: every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.
are. For example, getting enough sleep requires more time, but it boosts your energy and ability to manage your attention. Eliminating noise and distractions also takes time, but helps you manage your attention better because it provides you with more focus and clarity throughout the day. Changing your mindset takes energy and attention, but will let you get more done in less time.
perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from this experiment was just how important it is to deeply care about your productivity goals, about why you want to become more productive.
I think the best way to measure productivity is to ask yourself a very simple question at the end of every day: Did I get done what I intended to? When you accomplish what you intend to, and you’re realistic and deliberate about the productivity goals you set, in my opinion you are productive.
The more time, energy, and attention you invest in your most significant tasks, the more you accomplish in the same amount of time, and the more productive you become.
Productivity isn’t about doing more things—it’s about doing the right things.
The rule is dead simple: 1. At the beginning of every day, mentally fast-forward to the end of the day, and ask yourself: When the day is over, what three things will I want to have accomplished? Write those three things down. 2. Do the same at the beginning of every week. The three things you identify then become your focus for the day and the week ahead.
Research shows that your brain’s prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for creative thinking—is the most active immediately after you wake up. That means that even if you’re low on energy after you wake up, if you do a lot of creative work, you may want to consider working in the morning instead of when you have the most energy, focus, and motivation. To me, it also feels incredible to tackle your important tasks at the beginning of the day—you’ll feel like you’re unstoppable for the rest of the day.
Procrastination is human. The biggest reason your highest-impact tasks are so valuable is that they are often more intimidating; they almost always require more time, attention, and energy than your lower-impact tasks. They’re typically also more boring, frustrating, difficult, unstructured, and lacking in intrinsic rewards—which all act as triggers for procrastination.
there are six main task attributes that make procrastination more likely. Those are whether a task is one or more of the following: • Boring • Frustrating • Difficult • Unstructured or ambiguous • Lacking in personal meaning • Lacking in intrinsic rewards (i.e., it’s not fun or engaging) The more of these attributes a task has, and the more intense these attributes are, the less attractive a task will be to you, and the more likely you’ll procrastinate on it.
It’s important to think about why you’re procrastinating. As Tim put it, “sometimes procrastination is just a symptom that your life just doesn’t match what you’re interested in and…maybe you should do something else.”
By the way, are you interested in gaining back 13.6 years of your life in an instant? Quit watching TV. According to Nielsen, the average American adult watches 5 hours and 4 minutes of television every single day. Assuming you live until eighty and start watching TV at ten, that adds up to 13.6 years of your life.
If I found myself putting off doing my taxes, I might sit down and make a plan to change those triggers. For example, if the trigger is: • Boring: I go to my favorite café for an afternoon on Saturday to do my taxes over a fancy drink while doing some people watching. • Frustrating: I bring a book to the same café, and set a timer on my phone to limit myself to working on my taxes for thirty minutes—and only work for longer if I’m on a roll and feel like going on. • Difficult: I research the tax process to see what steps I need to follow, and what paperwork I need to gather. And I visit the
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Rita Emmett, the author of The Procrastinator’s Handbook, summed this up well in what she labeled Emmett’s law: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”
The more disconnected you are from your future self, the more likely you are to do things like: Give your future self more work than you would give your present self Agree to unproductive or pointless meetings far off in the future Keep ten uninspiring documentaries around on your PVR that you’ll “get around to watching” Continually transfer aversive tasks to tomorrow’s to-do list Save less money for retirement
Every day I shut my smartphone completely off between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.—one of my favorite daily rituals—so I can ease into and out of each day without wasting valuable time. This is especially powerful at the end of the day, when I have less willpower to resist distractions. And whenever I can, I switch my smartphone and laptop into airplane mode to hunker down on my most unattractive and high-impact tasks.
The more impulsive you are, the more you procrastinate, because your limbic system is that much stronger than your prefrontal cortex.
I find this fascinating. Even though humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, we have only been living by the clock for the last 175.
if you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention.
Managing your time becomes important only after you understand how much energy and focus you will have throughout the day and define what you want to accomplish.
Some days, I schedule my entire day, and I’ve found that doing so makes me incredibly productive—especially when I form a strong intention about what I’m going to get done. But I only ever plan out my day after I account for how much attention and energy I will have, and most important, what I intend to accomplish.
But in practice, working longer hours means having less time to refocus and recharge, which leads to more stress and lower energy.
By controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it.
After thirty-five to forty hours of work, studies show that your marginal productivity begins to drop, until “at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.” The same study found that with seventy- and eighty-hour weeks, you reach the same breakeven point in just three weeks.
productivity “falls off a cliff after 55 hours—so much so that someone who puts in 70 hours produces nothing more with those extra 15 hours.”
Tracking your time and energy levels for a few weeks is admittedly a pain in the ass—especially when you cut out caffeine, alcohol, and sugar during the process—but the insights that the challenge I suggest in Chapter 4 will give you are incredible and will last decades. If you absolutely cannot stomach the experiment, at the very least set an hourly chime on your phone, and observe how your energy levels fluctuate over the day.
After calculating when I had the most energy, I made sure to block off my BPT in my calendar every day, not only to set that time aside for high-impact tasks, but also to keep that time open in case another vital task came my way.
The same holds true for structuring your downtime and weekends. It might sound counterintuitive (and not very fun) to structure your time away from work, but research says that doing so makes you more focused, creative, active, motivated, happy, involved in what you’re doing, and a lot more likely to achieve “flow,” that magical state where time seems to pass so quickly it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all. I don’t believe in strictly structuring work or free time (where’s the fun in that?), but some structure is helpful. For example, during my project I discovered that I always had more energy
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My Maintenance Day ritual is incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful: throughout the week, I simply collect all of my low-return maintenance tasks on a list—everything from going grocery shopping to cutting my nails—and instead of doing them throughout the week, I do them all at once. I finally felt like I was no longer treading water by working on tasks throughout the week that didn’t move my life forward. And I had much more time, attention, and energy for tasks that were actually important and meaningful throughout the week.
Try setting a time limit for how long you’ll work on your maintenance tasks, to get more done in less time. Just make sure you don’t work on them during your BPT—that time is sacred.
But there’s a more nuanced cost to spending too much time on low-return tasks: they’re much easier to work on. They’re the “watching Netflixes” of the work world; your limbic system puts up less of a fight against checking your email one more time, arranging one more phone call, or attending one more meeting. It’s pretty easy to convince yourself in the moment that your low-impact tasks are more important than your real work, even though they provide you with a much smaller return on your time in the long run.
Every single support task in your work can be either shrunk, delegated, or even, in a few rare cases, eliminated entirely. After you have a better grip on how much time and attention you spend on your problem tasks, the maintenance tasks in your work are a lot easier to deal with.
Just as a Maintenance Day creates structure around the support tasks in your life, setting limits for support tasks in your work makes it much harder for them to expand and take up more of your time or attention than they need to.
One illuminating study found that “in the majority of [email sessions,] users were simply checking their email without acting on it.” Don’t check your email unless you have enough time, focus, and energy to respond to what-ever might come in.
How much would I be willing to pay in order to buy back one hour of my life?
found that the value of my time has orbited around four things: • How much money I earn • How valuable my time is to me • How valuable money is to me • How overwhelmed I feel
The 90 percent rule is simple: when you look at a new opportunity, rank it on a scale of 1-100 on how valuable or meaningful you think it is. If it isn’t a 90 or above, don’t do it.
Examining the commitments you take on and reflecting on their return will let you simplify your work and life, and free up even more of your time and attentional space for commitments that are the most important to you. These commitments include things like the following: • Full- and part-time jobs • Industry associations you’re a member of • Owning and maintaining a home or a second home • Educational commitments (e.g., attending university or college, or taking courses part-time) • Relationships and friendships • Clubs you’re involved with • Skills or hobbies you actively spend time on
Takeaway: Externalizing your tasks and writing them down is a powerful way to free up mental space and get organized. Performing a “brain dump” not only reduces stress and helps you focus, it also motivates you to action.
The very first productivity book I bought, about a decade ago, was David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). The premise of this book lies on the same principle: that your mind is not the best place to store everything you have to get done. Allen pioneered a system for getting all your tasks and projects out of your head into an external system—incredibly, before a wealth of research came out over the following decade that validated how powerful getting unresolved open loops outside of your head can be. As David Allen told me, “Your head is not for holding ideas—it’s for having ideas.”
As Allen explains, “The first thing to do is to capture what’s got your attention, then decide if it’s actionable or not, and if it is, decide what the next action on it is, and do the action right then if you can.”
Right now, I can say with near certainty that you’re waiting on several things you’re simply storing in your head, things that may slip through the cracks if you don’t follow up on them. On a given week, my Waiting For list contains everything from packages I’m waiting for from Amazon, to important email responses I’m expecting, to money I’m owed, to important calls and letters I’m waiting for. I put pretty much everything on my list.
Another great way to capture what you’re waiting for: After you send important emails that need responses, drag the message into a Waiting For folder. This also helps you catch any important email responses that might land in your Spam folder.
Right now, I have individual notes for trips I’m planning, speaking engagements I’m prepping for, and even one for writing this book. Every project note contains information about each project that I need to keep in mind to move the projects forward, and most important, the very next actions I need to take with each project. Having a separate note for each project not only lets me externalize the projects I’m in the middle of, but it also lets me logically plan out the next steps I need to take to move each project forward. The titles of all my project notes start with “PRO,” so they’re all in
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An Inbox Review When you look around, you quickly realize just how many “inboxes” you have. I define an inbox as any place where you store the expectations other people have of you (such as responding to emails, tweets, Facebook messages, voicemails, LinkedIn invites, physical letters), or any place you store the expectations you have for yourself (such as listening to podcasts, sorting the papers on your desk, or going through research you’ve bookmarked). I’m a completionist at heart and like to stay on top of the messages people send me. But like many people, the number of inboxes I’ve built
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Takeaway: Doing a weekly review of your tasks and accomplishments not only gives you a better perspective on your wins and the areas you need to improve, it also gives you more control over your life. Adding in “hot spots” is a powerful addition to this technique that will keep you on the right path.
