The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

by Chris Bailey

in practice, working longer hours means having less time to refocus and recharge, which leads to more stress and lower energy.

accomplished only a bit more working ninety-hour weeks than I did in my twenty-hour weeks.

When I invested more time in my work during my insane weeks, my work became a lot less urgent; on a minute-by-minute basis, I invested less energy and focus into everything I intended to get done.

But when I had a limited amount of time in my twenty-hour weeks, I forced myself to expend significantly more energy and focus over that shorter period of time so I could get everything done I had to do.

By controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it.

It’s hard not to feel productive when you’re busy all day long. But busyness does not translate into productivity if it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.

learn to invest more energy and attention into your work, so you can get the same amount done in a fraction of the time.

shrinking how long you’ll work on the task is also a great way to warm up to difficult tasks that you are more likely to procrastinate on.

For example, on days when I really don’t feel like exercising or meditating, I simply shrink how long I’ll meditate or exercise for in my head until I no longer feel resistance to it.

Over the course of my project, I settled into a nice equilibrium of working forty-six hours a week, which was enough time for me to get everything done, while taking needed breaks to recharge my energy levels and attention over the course of the day.

One study found that when you work sixty-hour weeks, in order to accomplish one more hour of work, you need to work two hours of overtime.

Since your time, attention, and energy all contribute to your productivity, working long hours can destroy your productivity because doing so compromises your energy and focus.

the knowledge economy, the most productive people don’t only manage their time well—they also manage their energy and attention well.

When you work consistently long hours, or spend too much time on tasks, that’s usually not a sign that you have too much to do—it’s a sign that you’re not spending your energy and attention wisely.

The best time of day by far to work on your highest-impact tasks is during your Biological Prime Time.

When you work on your highest-impact tasks during your prime time, you complete them faster, get more engrossed in them, do a noticeably better job on them, work on them with more resilience, and begin to work smarter instead of just harder.

I quickly realized that my BPT was worth spending intelligently, and defending religiously.

With the daily routine I settled into by the end of my project (and still have today), I would meditate, disconnect from the internet, work deliberately, work out, get enough sleep, and unwind after work. Yet some days the stars would align and I found myself writing thousands of words and reading hundreds of pages, while on others I would sit at my desk staring at a blank screen, with no energy or will or focus to do either.

To work more deliberately, awareness is key.

As a rule, I try to manage my time as little as possible, and because I take on as few commitments as possible (this page), this lets me adjust as the day goes on.

Managing your time becomes important only after you define what you want to accomplish and understand how much energy and focus you have throughout the day.

people in the knowledge economy have two types of schedules: a “maker’s” schedule and a “manager’s” schedule.

“[t]he manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals.

if you’re a maker, the opposite is true—your days are naturally far less structured because you don’t have people or projects to manage.

Asking yourself whether you’re a maker or manager will show you your baseline; that is, the amount of structure that you should come to expect based on the nature of your job.

But beyond accounting for your prime time, intentions, and nature of your job, any additional structure will tend to make your day more rigid and will make you feel less in control of

your day.

Some time management is inevitable, but you’ll accomplish a lot more when you work on your most meaningful tasks when you have the most energy—not when you have the most time.

maintenance tasks, or Maintenance Days, are essential if you want to have a life that’s healthy and productive.

Maintenance tasks are essential, because they support your personal life and work, but minute for minute they provide you an abysmal return compared to your most important and meaningful tasks.

maintenance tasks are essential if you want to live a healthy, happy, socially engaged, and productive life.

My Maintenance Day ritual is incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful:

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.

Here’s the curious thing about maintenance tasks: although they require a good amount of time to complete, most of them use almost none of your focused energy or attention. In fact, you can do most of your maintenance tasks automatically, without much thought.

it’s possible to multitask and become more productive with maintenance tasks simply because they require almost none of your attention and your energy.

Although it’s not possible to eliminate all the pesky maintenance tasks from your life, it is possible to spend your time on them much more intelligently and fruitfully.

Having a Maintenance Day helps you eliminate both physical and mental clutter, so you can approach each new week with more clarity and energy. Plus, it feels freaking amazing to accomplish ten or fifteen things at once, and check them off your to-do list.

Lumping together your maintenance tasks—whether on a Maintenance Day or with a maintenance list—helps you eliminate spending too much time on them. And it gives you fewer lower-return tasks to waste time on throughout the week, which gives you the time to focus on what’s actually important.

By creating more time and space around your highest-return activities, you become more creative, focused, and productive.

For me, support tasks are almost as pesky as maintenance tasks, because like your maintenance tasks, they can eat up a ton of your valuable time, attention, and energy—which you would have otherwise spent on more valuable and meaningful things.

But there’s a more nuanced cost to spending too much time on low-return tasks: they’re much easier to work on.

The more open space you have in your schedule, the more flexibility you have for when you work on tasks, and since your focus and energy fluctuate so much over the day, the more productive you can become.

By simplifying how much you take on, you create more attentional space around your high-return activities,

so you can focus on them much more deeply.

Even though I felt productive because I was so busy working on them, they didn’t lead me to accomplish anything meaningful.

“Parkinson’s law” states that your work expands to fit the amount of time you have available for it.

Because your limbic system puts up such a fight against working on your more challenging, highest-return tasks, the low-impact tasks that support your work ...

most effective answer to shrinking low-return support tasks was to • become aware of how much time and attention I spent on support tasks, and • shrink the tasks by setting limits.

study found that most people check email about every fifteen minutes—which adds up to thirty-two times over an eight-hour day.

When you check for new email thirty-two times a day, that’s thirty-two times your attention is derailed from what you’re supposed to be working on.