Here’s another topic on being productive. And, yes. You read the title correctly—say NO to time-management. Well, not totally, but instead of managing your time, manage your ATTENTION. The key in this exercise is to find the proper environment to have the right amount of focus in the task at hand. Simply managing your time by allotting minutes to a certain task doesn’t directly equate to a high level of productivity.
In Leadership IMHO #35, I talked about creating chunks of time in your calendar to complete a task. This article is not to contradict what I said there, but instead, it’s meant to supplement it and take that to the next level. Managing your attention helps you find the right chunks of time to do a task. Simply determining a portion of your day to write a 800-word blog post is not good enough. You need to know which portion of your day is most conducive to write, read, create, or do mundane (but necessary) tasks like signing time sheets.
Here are some tips on how to do just that:
Map it out
Prioritize and Discriminate
Segregate and Compartmentalize
Map it out
Know when and where you do your best work—when and where are you most creative, when and where are you most tactical, when and where are you most strategic, or when and where are you more personable. Once you’ve mapped out when and where you are these things (creative/tactical/strategic/personable), schedule your tasks accordingly. If you have to prepare a presentation for a keynote and you’re most creative first mindset is in the morning in front of your big-screen desktop, schedule this task at the beginning of your day at your office. If you’re writing a book with a goal to write 10 pages a day, which is about 3,000 words, and you’re most productive in writing on a small laptop in a public area with lots of white noise, take your laptop with you and find a spot in a coffee shop. (I’ve done well even in our local mall’s food court.) I think I‘ve made my point, right? Know the when and the where, then align that with the what.
Prioritize and Discriminate
At a particular time, there is that one task that rules them all—the super-important task that matters the most to you. Once you’ve identified when you’re most productive, be sure to drop that most important task in that time slot. If you’re trying to learn something new or achieve something that’s difficult to do, schedule these tasks during these times as well. You’ll find that using your A-Grade fuel for these critical tasks can help you achieve the best output in the long-run. Prioritizing which task goes first and discriminating the important ones to the not-so-important tasks are necessary steps this in part of the exercise.
Segregate and Compartmentalize
If you’re like me, you have many micro-tasks that are of the same category. For instance, I conduct at least one one-on-one session with each of my direct reports per month. I also accept coaching and mentoring sessions with individuals across the organizations. This type of activity requires a special type of attention and mindset. I find that my coaching mindset is at its peak between 11am-2pm—right around lunch. During this time of the day, I most likely have already achieved good milestones in project tasks. (Those that I do first thing in the morning.) Many stakeholders in different time zones also try to avoid these hours to schedule meetings. So, by design, my mind is free from thinking about other tasks and from thinking about operational and strategic initiatives that I have to tackle. This is where segregating and compartmentalizing comes in. I would try my best to cluster all my one-on-one and coaching sessions during these hours. Outside of the lack of mental distractions, I’m also in the proper mindset to coach. Keeping these types of meetings together also allows me to stay in that mindset for a much longer time to achieve a level of effectiveness. Meaning, I don’t have to keep switching my mindset to coach, create, strategize, then back to coach again. It keeps the engine warm for a particular task, without the need to start cold in short spurts of time.
After you’ve applied these three filters into your attention-management exercise, you’re now free to sprinkle all the mundane (but necessary) tasks across your calendar.
Some key action items:
Identify your most important and most difficult tasks, then align with the when and where you do your best work;
Map out and categorize your different tasks—creative, tactical, strategic, mundane, and people-oriented;
Cluster together tasks of the same category to minimize shifting of mindset;
Sprinkle the mundane around the other stuff;
Crowdsourcing FTW
What categories of tasks do you have in your current role? When/where are you most creative, tactical, strategic, and people-oriented? Please share how your typical day looks like? Is it creative work in the morning, people-specific tasks in the mid-day, and more operational tasks in the afternoon? Looking forward on how you manage your focus across the day.