(The following is an excerpt from the book, Hacking Normal by John Stevenot available on Amazon.com)
In order to be efficacious, you need to be effective (focused), efficient (fast), and productive (reasonable results).
Hacking the work environment, in terms of time, simply comes down to getting the most out of what you do. I have given you two tools so far: evaluating trade-offs and task-recycling.
The last tool I would like to present to you is time-blocking.
When it comes to optimizing your time, there are dozens and dozens of strategies. For me, I had the best success at reclaiming my time, thus using it as I want, when I implemented time blocks.
Time-blocking is the process of looking at your schedule and finding/creating chunks of time (any amount of time) to dedicate to certain tasks.
Successful people get the right things done.
Successful people get them done without distraction. It’s straightforward. One of my major problems, when I started working, was that I didn’t have daily disciplines for my work.
Don’t get me wrong, I was willing to work hard and learn new things, but I lacked a system. I lacked the ability to set sail in a specific direction. Instead, my priorities and daily tasks shifted, depending on how the wind was blowing at that moment.
I remember that I would wake up each day with every intention of being productive. I wanted to change the world with my skills. I’d get to work, start chipping away at projects, and then, without warning, a notification would pop up on my computer. Suddenly, my day quickly turned into a rat’s nest of overlapping tasks, meetings, and chaos.
I lost control.
My day was swiftly placed at the whims of everyone else’s design. A successful person would never let their daily priorities fall prey to the onslaught of distractions like I did.
I didn’t learn this until I read the book, The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Successful people, according to Gary and Jay’s research and experience, carve out times to focus on the one thing that matters most in their day (and eventually their weeks and months).
This partitioning of time is called time-blocking.
How ingenious, right?
The secret to making the blocks of time work is that they are 100 percent distraction-free. That means no calls, texts, emails, conversations, noises, news, and, most importantly, other projects.
The blocks of time are designed to give you the ability to completely absorb yourself in whatever needs to be done. It’s a time for complete focus.
When I hear people complain about not getting their work done, I often hear them say that they wish they had more time. Whenever I hear that phrase, my gut instinct is to recoil and ask myself, “Do they really need more time, or do they just need better focus?”
Often, these individuals just need more focus.
The process of time-blocking gives you that ability.
Before we get into the gritty details of time-blocking, let’s talk about some of the benefits. I want you to be able to see how it can change your work life, before I start showing you how to block your time.
More Results
First, blocking your time will make you highly effective. In fact, what you may find is that you’ll run out of things to do. It’s amazing what a distraction-free environment will do for your work tasks.
Second, you’ll begin to understand what tasks matter. This helps a lot with your ability to prioritize (trade-off evaluation) your daily activities. And, as you become more adept at prioritization, you’ll start to see patterns that you can stretch out into weeks and months.
You’ll have control over your workdays, rather than someone else having control.
It’s a Game
You may find that as you get more and more comfortable in your time blocks, you start to compete with yourself. I know I did. This may be a dramatic example (a.k.a., results may vary), but I try to complete multiple days of work in one block of time.
That means, on Monday, I may try to do Tuesday and Wednesday’s tasks as well, just to optimize my time and free up my week for other activities.
Sometimes, I can get an entire week of work done in a four-hour time block.
Things That Matter
You will become a person who wants to work on the things that matter. Because you are blocking your time, you don’t want to waste it with nuanced B.S.
The desire to respond to every little inquiry and every phone call starts to slip away. When the phone rings, you get more comfortable letting it go to voicemail, or you shut down your email completely while knocking out today’s major concerns.
The distractions that everyone else “stays on top of” may no longer matter to you because you know your time will be better spent on things that move you and your business forward.