I’m naturally a late chronotype (or “night owl” for you animal lovers), and I need more sleep than most people I know, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to regularly wake up earlier. One of the first things I realized in my attempts to hack my mornings was that I was going to be tired at first. And, if you’re like me and you travel across time zones with some frequency, this isn’t a one-time thing. You will be tired every time you try to force your body to wake up earlier. Luckily, it’s a short-term loss for a long-term gain.
DEVELOP A MORNING ROUTINE
Getting up earlier isn’t all you need to set yourself up to win. After all, it matters immensely what you do in that morning time. Some years ago I started implementing a seven-step process I have come to call the Present Principle. This is a simple routine built around the acronym PRESENT, which helps me remember to implement the seven most important things I need to do each and every day to keep me present in my life—and to do those things in the mornings.
Here’s an overview of my routine. Remember that this is what works for me, and that you may not like all the steps at hand. Just ignore what doesn’t work for you, and always work toward the goal of finding something that sets your day up for success.
Ultimately, this takes me about twenty to thirty minutes each day, and I often find myself reflecting that it is the single best thing I do to start my day well.
In brief, the letters stand for:
Pray (for guidance, direction)
Read (usually something scriptural or devotional)
Express (put your thoughts on paper)
Schedule (sketch out an overview of the day)
Exercise (you’ll feel better when you move daily!)
Nourish (do something for yourself)
Track (at the end of the day, track your progress in how much of your routine you were able to accomplish)
(You can read more about this in my book The Better Life or at ClaireDiazOrtiz.com.)
Some days you won’t do every step, and sometimes you won’t do any of them. But trying to implement a routine such as this can be a powerful motivator.
ORDER YOUR DAY TO WIN
Writing, like dozens of other things people do each and every day, is a task that requires focus and concentration, and a task that usually requires your best work.
I’m an efficient writer and have always enjoyed being able to write quickly. That said, it’s critical that I know when I can write well and when I can’t. Because if I write when I’m not working well, I’ve no hope of efficient writing, and every hope of extreme frustration.
The other day, for example, I went to a coffee shop where I was going to spend a few hours writing. I know for sure that it’s easier for me to write outside of my home office. Writing at a coffee shop generally works for me, and I can plow through quickly to get a lot done.
But not that day.
That day, I arrived. I sat down on the couch I’m a fan of. I ordered a freshly squeezed orange juice. I pulled out the computer. And that’s where it went downhill. Somewhere between checking email, and then checking Twitter, and then rechecking email, and then reading an interesting article, I got all lost and tangled up. Pretty soon I was texting my husband, José: When are we going grocery shopping? Now, please?
Because I would rather go grocery shopping than write. Obviously.
In order to work well, you need to know when you are most effective and utilize those times to do your work. I would go further and say you don’t just need to know when you’re effective, you need to know when you are most effective for the specific task at hand. And so the fact that I wandered into the coffee shop on a holiday at 3 p.m. was never going to turn out well. I do my best writing in the morning, with a large decaf coffee with almond milk or after dinner, with a cool Kombucha. These are times I can write. The afternoon is not my writing time.
We all have times of the day and days of the week that work best for particular tasks, and it is essential to figure out what those times are and to make sure that we respect them to their holiest extent.
When José picked me up to go grocery shopping, I felt icky and annoyed. I had done very little work, and most of it was terrible. The wrong time of day, you see. I’d bungled it all up from the start and needed to remember my own rule. Only work when you can work well.
THE POWER OF FOCUS AND DECISION FATIGUE
If you’re reading this book, I’m betting this isn’t your first rodeo. You’ve probably read something about productivity and goal setting before, and if so, you’ve likely heard the now-common advice to do the hard thing first thing. Brian Tracy, author of Eat that Frog!, is one of the biggest proponents of this strategy, and his teachings have done much to convince folks that doing hard things first thing is essential.
Got an important memo to write? Do it first thing. Got a mission-critical presentation to finish? Do it in the morning before anything else.
That said, most folks don’t actually remember why this is so important. It turns out it’s not just about the fact that morning folks are more productive or about the fact that finishing one task helps you feel more productive and encourages you to keep going. Instead, I believe the key reason that doing the hard thing first thing is a good idea is all about warding off the energy-zapping power of decision fatigue and maximizing your energy to focus.
Listen up:
The reason you need to do your big job in the morning is that you will always have the most energy to focus before you get decision fatigue.
New to the term decision fatigue? Decision fatigue is that vitality-draining experience you get after spending an hour trying to decide on the best flight home to your parents’ house for Thanksgiving weekend (wake up early on Monday morning to fly home? Or pay more to fly back Sunday night?), or why you feel tired after an hour at the paint store trying to figure out what color to paint your bathroom (periwinkle? teal? cyan?). It’s even the reason why some life-hacking entrepreneurs swear by wearing the same thing each day, or eating the same thing for lunch! Decision fatigue is the exhaustion you get from making decisions, and it takes a real and present toll on our daily productivity.
By the same token, doing your hard thing requires focus. I believe that one of the biggest reasons we procrastinate on our big work and spend far too much time in email and meetings during our work days is because when we lack focus, we do the thing that doesn’t require that much focus at all. Email, it turns out, is a great candidate for that—so one of the great reasons to not get engaged in email first thing is to keep your mind energetic for your big task. Meetings can also fill time on doing things that don’t require your maximum focus. Doing hard work, it turns out, requires focus. You will always be most energetic, and most likely to focus, before decision fatigue sets in. Although I’m betting you’ll be more energetic earlier in the day, let’s find out for sure.
WHEN IS THE RIGHT TIME OF DAY TO WORK?
My try-hard-do-little day at the coffee shop attempting to churn out some writing was an abject failure. Despite the fact that I am generally someone who can put pen to paper with particular speed, that day I did nothing of the kind.
But what I did do that day was confirm, once again, how important it is to know the time of day I’m best at a host of regular activities in my life.
Things like:
Exercising
Relaxing (yes! There is a time of day for this!)
Leading meetings
Taking conference calls
Giving presentations
Doing my daily PRESENT time
Emailing
Brainstorming
Doing research
Chatting on the phone with family and friends
Having difficult conversations
Reading
If you want to work toward having more productive days, it is essential to figure out the best times of days to do the activities that either make up your Best 20%, or are otherwise required for you and your family to live a
great life, and then to build a loose schedule around it. You won’t be able to choose things perfectly, but trying to create your schedule around your best times—and knowing why something isn’t working well if it’s out of order—is just as essential.
Here are a few steps to try to build these better lives we’re after using this strategy:
1. Refer to your ACTIVITIES list and look at all the items in the “First Priority: Best 20%” column and the “Third Priority: Things Only I Can Do” column—so, the two columns of ACTIVITIES made up of things that you personally are going to keep doing on a regular basis.
2. Now think about when you’re best at each of those things. Really think. Don’t answer right away, but rather take some time to think about it. If an answer doesn’t come, keep watching to notice how you behave at different times of day, and how certain activities sit with you. It took me a long time to realize, for example, that attending meetings was a far better use of my lower energy afternoon time than leading presentations, which for me was best in the morning. Watch yourself as you live your life, and think about it, over time. Remember the importance of the Power of Focus and Decision Fatigue when deciding these times, as most people’s Best 20% activities likely need that high-energy time before decision fatigue takes away their powers.
Slowly but surely, you can start to build a life designed around living at the right time of day for you. Even if you aren’t someone with a detailed schedule day in and day out, this can still work incredibly to give you the broad-strokes picture of how you should run your days.
KNOW WHEN TO STOP FORCING YOURSELF
Learning about what time of day you are best suited to do specific work is essential. But there’s a corollary lesson that is also important to learn: Sometimes, it’s best to stop working.
Or, sometimes it’s best to stop forcing yourself to do work you’re not doing well. In the story I told you, about me at the cafe not doing the writing I was supposed to be there for, I left out an important detail. That detail is the moment I realized that I needed to stop trying. All our lives, we hear again and again about the importance of not giving up. Truth be told, though, most of the advice we receive about the importance of trying hard is not that useful.
Because, in reality, we all need to know when to stop trying.
And I don’t mean in some large sense of the word—when to quit a job, when to put down a project, when to admit something has truly failed. That’s a very valuable thing as well, but right now I’m just talking about the importance of knowing when to stop trying on any given day when you’re in the middle of a particular project or activity.
For me, the answer is all about flow.
In certain types of work I do, flow is critical. Otherwise known as “the zone”, this popular positive psychology term named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is the mental state when you are completely immersed in what you are doing with intense focus and energized engagement. Writing, for example. Brainstorming, for sure. The act of creation in general, often. Most people report that these tasks go better when they’re in the zone. And most of us know very intimately when we feel like we’re there, and when we feel like we’re not.
The reality is, when you’re not in a state of flow, it’s rarely going to be to your benefit in terms of time effectiveness to keep going. Now, often that doesn’t matter. Say you have a presentation to prepare for in three hours’ time and you’re not feeling the flow. Too bad. Keep working. But if you do have a choice, that’s when you can really make headway. Take the example of writing. If I am in a productive state of flow, I can crank out in two hours something that might otherwise take five.
The same goes for a host of other activities—from doing a spreadsheet to building a house to producing a podcast.
Ultimately, the key to doing your best work in the least amount of time is to find those times that you do specific activities best, and do as much of those activities in that time period as possible.
KNOW WHEN TO JUST DO IT
Sometimes, you’ve just got to sit down and do the work. In Ann Patchett’s memoir, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, she talks about how to make yourself write when you don’t want to. As Patchett says, you’ve got to show up. You’ve got to sit yourself down at your desk for two hours each day without books to distract you, or an open Internet connection. You’ve just got to sit there. Doing nothing. And after a week—or maybe two—you will either start writing because you are so bored out of your mind from not writing, or you will get up out of the chair, go watch television, and never write again.
Now, I believe this advice is not limited to writing, and in reality works for anything you’re trying to do. Are you trying to make yourself do the one thing on your list that you never get to because you’d rather come up with a million excuses for how busy you are or how many useless errands you have to run?
Here’s what you need to do: Sit yourself in the chair and do nothing. At the right time of day when you know you should be productive. Day after day. Until you do that thing.
It’s worth a try.
And not just for writers.
BATCH WORK
One powerful concept that is essential to add to your productivity arsenal is to make sure you are batching your work. Most individuals do a number of different things in any given hour of the day, with no regard to the fact that switching back and forth between activities—calls, emails, writing memos, coding, doing design layout—takes a huge toll on our productivity. In fact, studies show that we lose up to 40 percent of our time in any given day by switching back and forth between tasks.7 You can reap huge rewards and make yourself infinitely more productive by batching your work to do similar tasks in bulk.
For example, I work hard to keep my meetings and calls batched into certain days of the week and times of day, and my creation days batched into others (this also addresses the issue that creation tasks require more focus). So, for example, if you determine you have about fifteen hours of meetings a week for work, you would try to schedule those as much as possible to fit within two or three days. Especially when working within a large organization, this requires you to make an art of calendaring your meetings well, but as I’ve seen even within the busy meeting environment of Silicon Valley, it is very possible, and it pays off remarkably.
This works for all manner of tasks, and you’ll likely find that most of the things on your ACTIVITIES list will work within this strategy—from running errands, to going to doctors’ appointments, to managing email, to doing creation-based work.
As I’ll talk about further, I make sure to also process email in batch as well, another huge time-saver.
PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR
My friend Erik Fisher has a podcast called “Beyond the To-Do List.” When I first heard about this podcast, I thought Erik had drilled into my brain to create it, as I can’t think of anything more fascinating than spending half an hour a week listening to how other people try to be productive. One time when I was on his podcast, he was talking about how to use a calendar smartly. Erik told me that Jerry Seinfeld has said that he became a better joke writer by ensuring that he wrote a joke each and every day. To maintain this discipline he used a calendar with the whole year on one page, and he hung it on a wall where he would always see it. Whenever he did his work for the day, he’d use a big red marker to check off that he’d completed his task.
Some folks say that if it’s not on your calendar it won’t get done. I agree, and tell folks to calendar as much as you can to encourage yourself to do what you need to do. This is most essential, I find, when talking about things you wouldn’t normally think to block off time for on a calendar.
Like your, ahem, work.
Let me explain:
In your work life, you likely spend 40 percent of your time on email.8 If you work in an organization with other employees, you probably spend 35–50 percent of your time in meetings.9 In a forty-hour workweek, this means that you might have as little as four h
ours a week to do the rest of your work!
The only way to get this done in this day and age (aside from editing what you need to do, as we’ve discussed) is to be sacred with your time, and sacred with your calendar. Keep appointments with yourself to “work” as religiously as you keep appointments with your boss. Finally, make sure that you batch similar activities into similar blocks of time.
TAME YOUR EMAIL
At face value it seems like email is the biggest blow to productivity the world has ever seen. But first impressions can be deceiving.
The reality is that emailing is necessary to our work lives, and we need to email to succeed in our careers. We are expected to exchange emails with clients, partners, and coworkers, and to do so in a timely manner.
Furthermore, since email is not something that can just be “fit in” at the end of the day around “real” work, we need to acknowledge the massive amount of time we spend on this task and make it a part of our work hours. So, if you wondered why you didn’t feel restored after your Sunday “off,” consider how that ninety minutes of emailing factored into things.
That said, email is a special kind of work.
The vast majority of email is not creation-based and does not lead to tangible results. Email doesn’t write a book or a record a song or cook a gourmet meal for thirty. Hundreds of emails strung together do not lead up to a finished project. Instead, email is a fishbowl of semidistracted people pinging each other back and forth ad infinitum. As Jon Acuff likes to joke, can you ever be done with the Internet? Do you ever log off and say, “Yup! I finished the Internet today”?
Design Your Day Page 5
