BALANCE FRAMEWORK

Previously, we talked about how to effectively create a “time budget”. However, this is only one-half of the time management equation. The other part of the equation is how to create more time in your day. While you can’t add extra hours to the day, there are methods to make 24 hours seem like a whole lot more! So how do we go about adding more time to our day?

The first way to create “more” time is through focus. While this might sound obvious, it might be harder than you think. Work accounts for at least 8 hours every day. However, how much of that time are you actually working, 7, 6, 5, 4, or even 3? This is because you can very often get distracted and lose focus. Very often the way to make up for this is by working longer. So how can we get into a “flow” state of focus so that we can use our time most efficiently? One of the best ways is to create your ideal working environment free from distractions. This includes installing site blockers to restrict access to websites during work hours and avoiding context switching.

Another way to create more time is through bundling. Don’t confuse this with multi-tasking. Bundling is a way to combine complementary tasks. An example of this could be listening to a podcast while going for a walk.

Delegating is an important part of time management. The best way to think about it is to focus on what you are best at. For everything else, delegate the tasks.

Building upon this previous idea is the power of saying “no” and automation. You might feel like you need to have your hands in every pie, but very often it means that you end up not having any time.

Lastly, while it might sound counterintuitive, taking off time actually will help you gain more time in your schedule. Overwork leads to stress. Stress from work leads to a lack of focus. Therefore, by prioritizing relaxing, taking breaks, and a proper work/life balance, you can actually use your time more efficiently!

So now that we talked about ways to create more time in your day, what are the tools that can help us do this?

One of the best tools is a to-do list. For example, Todoist is a great digital to-do list tracker that helps you monitor what needs to get done in a day. To get the most out of a to-do list tracker, make sure to include everything you do in a day, both professional and personal so that you have full visibility on what you need to do each day.

By combining your to-do list with a calendar app, you can closely monitor and ensure that your time blocks are reflecting your priorities and goals.

Lastly, using a time tracker to monitor your activities is a great way to self-audit your time. You can monitor and realign your tasks and priorities accordingly.

In conclusion, there will inevitably be times when we are asking ourselves where has the time gone? However, by using these time management principles and strategies we can reduce the amount of time wasted and fill it with the things that matter to us the most!

Do you have a lot that you need to accomplish; however, also happen to be someone who is easily distracted? Fortunately, there as some things that you can do to optimize your task system so that you can accomplish the most amount of tasks in the most efficient manner possible.

The most important thing is that you should have a dedicated space devoted to only “work”. This can include a desk, writing utensils, and anything else you need to accomplish your tasks. However, it shouldn’t have anything else. In other words, you want everything you need to work, but nothing that will distract you.

Next, it is important to print out easy to read and nice to look at infographics to externalize your self-management processes. This can include things such as your daily tasks, personal affirmations, and your spouse’s regular schedule. They are there to gently remind you what you need to do when your mind starts to wander.

So how does this look in practice?
One of the most important things to do is put everything you need to do in one app the moment you think of it.

Now that you have a list of things that you need to do, at the beginning of each day take this list and physically put it next to your daily planner. Go through the items one by one and schedule the important ones into your planner. The easier ones can fill in the empty spaces in your day.

When populating your digital calendar, only put down date-specific events. For example, a reoccurring event, should not be included. Additionally, if you have a family calendar, make sure that it is an analog version and only put shared impact events on it.

Lastly, at the end of each day, review your planner and either place the unfinished tasks back on your digital to-do list or roll them over to the next day.

In conclusion, this task system doesn’t exist to condemn you. Rather, it is your guide. Even if you don’t feel like doing it every day, trust in the system and keep pushing forward. If you need to, talk it out with other people, change it up a bit, make it yours. What is most important is that you continue to use it. By using this system for the past 6 months, I have been able to increase my number of completed tasks per day by 2. That means over the course of the week, not including weekends, I have been able to complete 10 additional tasks.

In other words, it turns out, focused is fast!

Many employers like to demonize working from home. They often think that you won’t be productive unless you work in the office.

However, according to research by Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, there is was a 13% in productivity in workers who worked at home! This doesn’t mean that working from home is easy. In fact, no matter where you work there will be some adjustments that you need to make. So what can you do to make working from home, work for you?

First, when we talk about working from home, what we really mean is working remotely, in other words, not in the office. This can mean working from home, in a coffee shop, the library, etc… In fact, according to Carl Newport’s book Deep Work, by changing our normal environment coupled with making an investment in money or effort, we can increase the perceived importance of a task. What your specific work environment looks like is really up to you. What is most important is that you are enhancing your overall well-being.

Second, preparation is vital. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” This is especially true when working from home. Very often you are balancing many different tasks or jobs. Therefore, it is important that you properly plan everything.

This includes setting up quantifiable and measurable medium-term goals for the next three to six months. These allow you to have the necessary tunnel vision on a clear target without becoming too scattered.

After you have set your medium-term goals, break them down into monthly goals. For each medium-term goal try to break it down into 1 to 3 monthly goals.

From here, every Sunday you can start to break down your monthly goals into weekly goals.

Breaking it down even further, make sure to plan your day the night before. Plan to have 6 to 7 hours of concentrated work each day with about 3 of those hours being deep work.

Lastly, review your progress each month.

When looking at doing the work, there are many different ways to go about it. One great method is the Pomodoro technique as the short breaks help you enhance your overall attention span.

Additionally, there are two schools of thought at tackling a task: goal-oriented and process-oriented. In a goal-oriented approach, you only care about reaching the final destination while in a process-oriented approach you focus on only working on a task for a specific amount of time each day. Each has its positives and negatives.

The last and often overlooked part about working from home is the before and after hours. Needless to say, since you are working from home, your work and personal life often will bleed into each other. Therefore, it is extremely important to set a routine that works best for you where you can “unplug” from work. This could include having a nice breakfast every morning, exercising, or taking 2 days a week off for your weekends.

In conclusion, working from home can come with a steep learning curve. However, with proper preparation, you can not only succeed but excel.

Perfectionists strive for excellence. However, this endeavor can often be self-sabotaging. If your goal is perfection, very often the first victim is your productivity. However, it is important to recognize that productivity isn’t about getting more done, but about what you get done. So how can you recognize the factors of perfectionism that are negatively impacting your productivity and address them?

The first factor that affects a perfectionist’s productivity is their inability to designate any decision as “unimportant”. Ideally, for unimportant decisions, you should be able to either quickly decide or outsource the decision-making process.

However, for perfectionists, it is nearly impossible to define any decision as unimportant. They get extremely frustrated about any small mistake; thus often micro-managing everything. In our modern world, this can lead to intense decision fatigue. The best way to convince a perfectionist to let go of the unimportant” decisions is to show them the extreme relief they can feel by giving up some of the decision-making burdens. A great way to do this is through heuristics, a quick mental shortcut, to quickly decide or delegate a decision. An example of this could be if you have already thought about doing something 3 times, just go ahead and do it without further thinking about it.

The second factor that affects a perfectionist’s productivity is that they feel morally obligated to over-deliver. For example, they might aim to provide 1.5 times or 2 times the value for their services. This often comes from anxiety or imposter syndrome.

They don’t want anyone to be disappointed in them and the best way to prevent this is by overdelivering. However, this can often have negative consequences such as the loss of energy, attention, and willpower for other activities. So how can you prevent this from happening? The best way is to have a plan made ahead of time in how you will course-correct if you start to notice these over-delivering patterns. For example, in 3 out of 10 situations you might over delivery, but in the remaining 7 don’t.

The third factor that affects a perfectionist’s productivity is when they are excessively annoyed when they aren’t 100% consistent with good habits. Perfectionists usually fall into one of 3 categories when starting a new habit: biting off more than they can chew, avoiding starting unless they are 100% sure they can hit their goals, and only doing things they can stick to no matter what. To best way to avoid these pitfalls is to have a mechanism in place to check if you are doing a habit just because you want to show you are self-disciplined. In other words, don’t continue doing an activity just because. You need to continuously reassess your mental and physical energy and optimize your behaviors accordingly.

COVID-19 has changed the way how many people work. Rather than working in an office, many people are working remotely from home. However, how can you adapt to this new environment and successfully keep your team connected?

First and foremost, it is important to understand that not all meetings are created equal. A team meeting requires a very different approach than a one-on-one meeting. Additionally, not everyone is the same. For example, some people like to use multiple monitors, some like standing desks, some like structured days, etc. Therefore, it is important to take the following ideas and personalize them to what your team needs in their remote work environments.

When running remote team meetings, it is very important to examine your company’s culture. A good rule of thumb is that if an in-person meeting is terrible then the remote one will be exponentially worse. Remote meetings tend to highlight the practices that are problematic when working in person.

So how can you run a good team meeting?
First, ask yourself if you even need the meeting. If not, eliminate it.

Second, make the meetings short and plan for distractions such as kids.

Third, consider unconventional meeting lengths such as 50 minutes instead of 1 hour.

Fourth, reduce the meeting size to no more than 12 people.

Fifth, eliminate the “admire the problem” meetings. In other words, don’t just have meetings to talk about the problem. Rather, have meetings that solve it.

Sixth, understanding the cultural differences will be further highlighted when working remotely.

Seventh, as the meeting leader, try not to speak more than 50% of the time. The rest of the time should be dedicated to collaboration by the rest of the team. This means that it is very important for the meeting leader to make sure everyone has a chance to speak.

Eighth, team meetings shouldn’t always be about the task at hand. Especially in the current times, it is important to check in with everyone to ask them how they are doing.

However, individual meetings are a little bit different. It really depends on each employee. For some, having a meeting once every two weeks might seem like too much; however, for others, follow is start by asking about their health, then their family, and only then start talking ab they might want to have meetings multiple times a week.

However, no matter who the individual employee is, some things are the same. Namely, when running a one on one meeting, avoid jumping straight into business talk. A good template to follow is start by asking about their health, then their family, and only then start talking about work.

Additionally, it is even more important to pay close attention with new employees. When working remotely, they don’t have the opportunity to create new relationships with colleagues. As such, proactively set up one on ones as well as help them meet other employees.

In conclusion, while remote work can be difficult, with proper preparation and inclusion, you can still build a strong team.

Why are some people able to accomplish many things while others can’t seem to get anything done at all? We all know what we need to do; however, very often we don’t even get started! Rather, we spend our time on inconsequential things that burn away our time. So how can we rewire our brains to perform these difficult tasks that we don’t necessarily want to do?

A great example of this time sink is the mobile game Candy Crush Saga. According to data, over 9 million people play the game for 3 or more hours every day! However, at its core, it is quite a simple game. So why do people waste so much of their time playing it? The simple answer is dopamine. When you win, you get a hit of this chemical, associated with motivation and reward, in your brain. Using the psychology concept of variable ratio scheduling reinforcement keeps you coming back for more of that rush.

While dopamine is your brain’s way of rewarding yourself for a task, too much of it can also have a negative effect. In a study, mice would get a hit of dopamine every time they pressed a lever. In fact, they liked it so much that they wouldn’t even eat, drink or sleep! What was even more alarming was that continuous overexposure to dopamine changes the brain. Over time, your brain produces less dopamine and you feel less excited about the things that used to give you so much pleasure.

Knowing this information, how can you get your brain to focus on the difficult important low-dopamine tasks while avoiding the easy low importance high-dopamine tasks?

First, you must start your day off right! Rather than scrolling through social media right at the start of the day, focus on your most important tasks first. When you cross off the most difficult high-priority tasks right at the beginning of the day, it makes the rest of the day feel so much easier.

Second, make sure to include low-dopamine tasks into your daily schedule. For example, the moment you think that there is something that you should really do, make sure to mark it in your calendar. In fact, your daily schedule should be composed of low dopamine tasks such as finishing the project. As your brain gets weaned off the high-dopamine tasks, it will come to appreciate the slower pace activities.

Third, keep high-dopamine activities out of reach. Look at your word space. Is there an entertainment system nearby? If so, move or hide it from view. The more difficult it is to easily reach those high-dopamine activities, the less likely you are to do them.

In conclusion, fun things should be a part of your life, just not 100% of it. If you overexpose yourself to high-dopamine activities, they will eventually lose their appeal and difficult tasks will become nearly impossible. By training yourself, to appreciate the difficult tasks, you will learn to love the rewards that don’t come from immediate efforts.

Managing our time better is always one of the top goals for people come New Year’s resolution time. In fact, it is one of the most desired skills in the workforce. However, this is much easier said than done! There is no shortage of books, advice, and apps that claim to help. However, no matter how good these tools are, they won’t help. That’s because the skills that make someone good at time management come before using any of these tools or apps. In other words, you could use the best apps for time management out there and still not be good at time management. So what are these skills and how can they help us better manage our time?

First, it is important to define time management. Simply put, it is a decision-making process that structures, adjusts, and protects your time in response to changing environmental conditions.

According to research, the 3 most important skills that separate time management success from failure are: awareness or the ability to realistically think about your time and how it is a limited resource; arrangement or your ability to organize your goals and schedule to most effectively use this limited resource; and adaptation or your ability to monitor and adjust your time accordingly due to interruptions or changes in priority.

So how can you improve these skills? First, it is important to accurately self-assess your time management skills. This can be done in several ways including feedback from peers and gauging versus baseline behaviors.

Second, recognize that skills, not personality, are the most important malleable attributes that will see the greatest ROI.
Third, you must identify and prioritize the skill you need to improve.

For example, when developing your awareness skills there are several things you can do such as finding your peak performance time during the week, treating your time like it’s money, timing how long you spend on each task, and avoiding the “sunk cost fallacy”.

When developing arrangement skills, you are taking control of your life by structuring your work around it. You can develop this by prioritizing activities and obligations, avoiding the “mere urgency effect”, using a calendar app, scheduling protected time, reducing underestimation errors, and trying half-sized goals.

Developing adaptation skills help you handle difficult situations without getting upset, anxious, or distracted. Some great ways to go about this include habit stacking, focusing your efforts in short bursts, using checklist apps, creating contingency plans, and reducing time waters.

In conclusion, when looking to become a better time manager, it is not just about using the best tools. Rather, it first starts with getting away from the quick fixes and assessing the underlying time management skills. By building this strong time management foundation, the rest will follow.

Working from home can be a challenge. The constant distractions and inadequate working environment can make it very difficult to get anything done. This is why it is more important than ever to properly plan your week. By recognizing the advantages and disadvantages of working from home, you can focus on where you need to put your attention. So how can you properly schedule your week for maximum productivity?

Making a weekly work plan helps you to see the bigger picture. To do this, first, create a list of to-do items. It doesn’t matter how big or small they are. Next, figure out which items you really need to get done this week. A great way to categorize them is through color-coding. With Wrike’s “My to-do” feature, you can automatically organize, label, and update your task list. The items that don’t fall in this list can be eliminated or delegated. Don’t forget to write deadlines next to projects that have hard deadlines when placing these tasks on your calendar. A great way to monitor your progress is by creating task phases such as “working”, “in review,” and “done” to help keep track of your projects. For the remaining items on your to-do list, be honest with yourself and determine if you have the time and energy to work on them. It is important to set realistic goals at this stage so as not to discourage yourself later.

When making your weekly plan, it is important to personalize it to work for you. Everyone has a different rhythm. Don’t push yourself over the edge by trying to follow someone else’s. Don’t forget that when you are making your weekly plan, you need to consider your daily reoccurring personal schedule such as waking up, eating, etc… It is important to track how long each task takes. Make sure to block out times of your day for these activities. Afterward, you can fill in the rest of your calendar with your work tasks. Additionally, it is a great idea to plan at least one ten-minute break every hour. You never know when something unexpected might happen or even if you need a quick nap! After you have populated your schedule, if there is still some time left, you can sprinkle some of the remaining to-do list items.

At the end of each week, make sure to review your schedule and see what did and didn’t work for you. It is important to continuously optimize and update your plan as priorities change.

In conclusion, making an effective schedule when planning your workweek from home is all about getting the information out of your head and into a visual format that you can easily organize.

Teaching yourself to not get distracted, is a difficult goal to accomplish. This is even truer in our modern world. With things such as Facebook and Youtube, you can quickly find that half of your day has flown by without you even noticing or accomplishing anything! So how can you learn to sharpen your focus?

It is important to note that avoiding distractions is tough, if not nearly impossible. However, there are several things that you can do to help focus your attention.

First, it is important to keep your vision and ultimate goals in mind. This will help you to push through the boring parts as you know the final destination that you want to reach.

Second, reduce the chaos in your daily life. This means that you shouldn’t be trying to accomplish too many things every day. Rather, focus on working on 2 to 3 important tasks every day. Don’t burn yourself out too quickly by trying to do too much at once. In other words, slower is faster.

Third, now that you have identified the 2 to 3 most important tasks, do them as soon as possible. By waiting to finish them later in the day, you are inviting more chances for distraction whether that by emails, social media, children, life…

Fourth, when looking at big goals, break them down into manageable parts. Very often, these big tasks take a while to complete. If you only focus on the big picture, you can very often become overwhelmed and discouraged; therefore, never finishing the task. Rather, break it down into manageable chunks.

Fifth, visualize yourself working. By visualizing each step of the process before you do it, you are preparing your body for the things you need to focus on.

Sixth, learn to control your internal distractions. Great ways to do this include having a dedicated working area and deadlines.
Seventh, remove external distractions. While it might seem obvious, it is still important to mention. For example, if the TV is on, make sure to turn it off.

Eighth, skip the parts you don’t know. In other words, don’t let something that you don’t know slow you down or make you lose your momentum focus. Rather, focus on what you do know. After you have finished that, come back to the more difficult parts.

Ninth, improve your discipline with focus practice. Some great methods include meditation and the Pomodoro method.

Tenth, manage your momentum. Simply put, momentum is like the lubricant of discipline. In other words, it is much easier to keep doing a task than to use discipline to restart it. This means that every day, even on weekends, you should take tangible steps to achieve your goals.

In conclusion, preventing distractions is much easier said than done. However, following the 10 steps that we have outlined, it can start you down the path of sharpening your focus.

Procrastination is the king of self-sabotage. Why is this the case? Simply put, it is the gap between intending to do something and doing something. In the gap, you and your decision-making reside.

You would think that it would be easier if the reasons and desires to do an action would be enough to motivate the action.

However, they are not. If it were so, we would be a machine and there wouldn’t be any free will. Rather, we must make a conscious decision to bridge this gap.

Procrastination is a-rational or without reason. This is because intellectually we know we know we should act right now, but emotionally we choose not to. In other words, our emotions focus on short-term gain for long-term pain. When procrastination becomes chronic, we end up wasting our whole lives.

So why do we procrastinate knowing that it can be so bad for us?
The most common reason we procrastinate is that we find something unpleasant. In other words, we procrastinate on things that we don’t like. While this makes sense, in life we regularly face things that we might not like; therefore, it is not a very practical way to live. To avoid this, we need to recognize that by giving in to feeling good now, we are sabotaging our long-term goals.

Additionally, we often procrastinate because our intentions are weak. For example, rather than saying exactly when we will finish a task, we might just say that we’ll do it later. By setting such vague goals, it is impossible to regulate your behaviors accordingly.

The third main reason that we procrastinate is that we are easily distracted and highly impulsive. In other words, with constant notifications popping up all the time before you even realize it the day has passed you by. In a world that is constantly vying for our attention, we need to be careful where we place it. Our time is a limited commodity and we need to invest it wisely.

In conclusion, self-deception and procrastination go hand in hand. We constantly tell ourselves little white lies when we think up excuses to procrastinate. However, deep down we understand that we are just hurting ourselves in the long run.