Time Management & Productivity

Learnings and Personal Reflections on Time Management and Productivity

Personal Reflections

I recently read a handful of book summaries on some of the most classic books about time management and productivity. Much of the information in these books was common sense and/or covered things I already do. Nonetheless, I found this to be a valuable experience, and I did take away a few new strategies to try out. Here are my personal reflections on this material.

Things I Already Do That Work

There are several time management techniques and productivity hacks that I have already established as automatic habits in my life. Many of these practices were reaffirmed by these books. Here are the strategies that have worked for me, continue to work for me, and were validated by these books.

Use A Timer: Before I begin a Deep Work session, I set a timer for 90 minutes. Pressing ‘start’ on the timer signals to me that I am commencing a Deep Work session. This practice helps to foster Deep Work by creating a ritual around the session’s start. I don’t need to dwell on how challenging it might be to focus for 90 minutes; instead, I just focus on the ritual of starting the timer, and the Deep Work naturally follows. Additionally, keeping the timer in view acts as a sort of accountability and motivational tool to maintain my focus.

Create a Ritual at the Start: I begin each Deep Work block by making myself a pot of tea. This ritual is something I enjoy, and over time, my brain has started to associate preparing a pot of tea with the subsequent Deep Work session. I believe the specific nature of the ritual isn’t very important, as long as it effectively signals to your brain that you are about to commence a Deep Work session.

Block Calendar Time: Deep Work should be prioritized over meetings and Shallow Work. Therefore, I block out time on my calendar specifically for Deep Work sessions and decline any meetings that conflict with these times. As an added bonus, scheduling these calendar blocks at the same time each day helps reinforce the habit of conducting Deep Work sessions.

Daily Habits Not Weekly Habits: I have never found success with weekly habits; I just don’t get enough repetitions of a weekly habit to maintain it consistently. Therefore, every habit I develop is based on a daily practice. I find the most success when each day is as similar as possible to the next. This approach reduces the mental load of planning your day and frees up more mental energy to focus on doing really deep, challenging, and important work.

Work with Intensity: During a Deep Work session, it’s important to work with high intensity and to put pressure on yourself. Just as it’s not very helpful to go to the gym and not exert yourself, it’s similarly unproductive to do Deep Work without really pushing yourself hard. You should move with urgency during a Deep Work session. If you do not feel tired by the end of a 90-minute Deep Work session, it indicates that you did not push hard enough.

Focus in 90 Minute Blocks: I find that 90 minutes is the ideal duration for a Deep Work session. Anything shorter than this, and I feel like I’m not fully utilizing my mental capacity. Conversely, anything longer, and I tend to lose focus.

Turn Off Notifications: This might seem obvious, but it’s crucial to turn off notifications during a Deep Work session.

New Ideas from These Summaries

Daily Highlight: An idea that repeatedly emerged in these books was the concept of setting a daily highlight. A daily highlight is a single, challenging, and significant task that will leave you feeling proud once accomplished by the end of the day. It’s crucial to set only one daily highlight; setting multiple daily highlights dilutes their value too much.

Do Your Daily Highlight First: Several books also recommended that once you have planned your day and selected your daily highlight, you should tackle it before any other tasks. While it’s tempting to knock out a few small, easy tasks first thing in the day, these books suggest that starting with the harder task can significantly increase your productivity.

Building Time for Reflection: Another recurring theme in these books was the importance of building in time for reflection. Different books recommended various types of reflections, but all agreed on the significance of incorporating a daily or weekly habit of reflection. Activities for this reflection time can include reflecting on your life mission, considering your goals for the quarter/month/week, deciding on your daily highlight, contemplating your recent accomplishments, and/or scheduling calendar blocks for Deep Work.”

Don’t Overhaul Your Systems All At Once: It’s tempting to read self-help books and then attempt to overhaul several of your existing systems all at once. However, such changes are unlikely to be sustainable. It’s more effective to select a few lessons that you are genuinely excited about and focus solely on implementing those.

The Value of Exercise: I’ve never been fond of exercise and have struggled for years to maintain a consistent exercise habit. One challenge for me is that exercise takes a lot of time and I find it somewhat boring. However, a breakthrough realization I had while reading these productivity books is that exercise is crucial for achieving my other goals. For instance, to be the best software engineer I can be, exercising is actually important. Regular exercise keeps me sharp, improves my sleep, and helps reduce stress, all of which enhance my job performance. So, my breakthrough was to view exercise as part of my job duties, necessary for excelling in my profession.

Impose Time Pressure: To advance in your career, it’s essential to continually increase the speed at which you work. More experienced professionals can accomplish more in less time compared to their junior counterparts. The key to improving your efficiency is to self-impose time pressure. This can be achieved by setting artificial deadlines and using timers. The goal isn’t to create a sense of being rushed or stressed, but rather to cultivate a sense of urgency. This urgency sharpens your focus on what truly matters and pushes you to improve at completing tasks more quickly.

Things I Want to Try Out

Reading these books has sparked a handful of ideas and techniques that I want to experiment with. While it’s uncertain whether these methods will work for me, I’m eager to give them a try.

Improved Working Space: During my parental leave, I invested time in enhancing the appearance of my office. I painted an accent wall, installed some shelves, and tidied up unsightly wires. I also plan to introduce some plants and get a new desk, which I’m excited about. My hope is that by making my workspace more pleasant, I will enjoy work more, and as a result, become more productive.

Daily Planning: Every morning, as the first part of my workday, I will dedicate 5 to 30 minutes to planning. On Mondays, this planning will involve setting my goals for the week, and on the first day of each month, I’ll decide my goals for the month. With my weekly and monthly goals in mind, I will determine my daily highlight for the workday. This daily highlight will be a challenging, rewarding, and important task that I will feel proud to have accomplished by day’s end. I will aim to size my daily highlight so that it can be achieved within a single 90-minute Deep Work session.

Physical Todo Lists: I am going to try out a physical todo list rather than a digital todo list for my daily, weekly and monthly tasks.

Updated Calendar Blocks: I already had Deep Work blocks scheduled in my calendar, but I’ve now updated one of them to occur first thing in the morning and have moved my workday start time up by an hour. This first block will be dedicated to completing my daily highlight. By placing it at the beginning of the day, I am following the advice from several books to focus on your daily highlight first. Additionally, by starting work earlier, I decrease the likelihood that my teammates are online, which reduces the chances of interruptions.

Exercise: I have attempted to establish an exercise routine in the past but often struggled to maintain it. This time, I’m trying a few different strategies to foster the creation of this habit. First, I’ve scheduled my exercise block right after my final Deep Work session of each day. I’m usually mentally tired by this time, so I’m more inclined to step away from my computer. Second, I’ve signed up for OTF (Orange Theory Fitness) and prebook my classes each week. Missing a class incurs a penalty, creating a financial incentive to attend. Third, I’m reframing my view of exercise, considering it a crucial part of my job rather than a time sink. I believe my job performance will improve as a result of exercising, making it a net positive for my career if the performance gains outweigh the time invested. Fourth, by attending workout classes instead of self-guided workouts, I shift the habit from exercising to commuting. In a group class, the peer pressure and instructor’s guidance significantly reduce the need for self-discipline to complete the workout. Lastly, I’ve blocked out my workout times on my calendar and set it to automatically decline meetings during these periods.

Book Summaries

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is not a book about time management, but several of the habits do relate to time management. Lets double click on the habits related to time management.

Habit 2 — Begin with the End in Mind: Successful people reflect on where they are trying to get to and what they are trying to achieve. It is worth carving out time to intentionally think about where you are going and then make a plan to get there. This should be done both at the macro level (e.g where are you going in life) and at the micro level (e.g what is your plan for the day).

Habit 3 — Put First Things First: Tasks can be organized into four quadrants

• (I) Urgent things that are also important. These tasks include things like crises and projects with tight deadlines. Tasks in this quadrant need to get done out of necessity.
• (II) Important things that are not urgent. These tasks include things like relationship building, long term development and planning. This is the quadrant that successful people prioritize spending time in, and it is also a quadrant that can easily be neglected without intentional investment.
• (III) Urgent things that are not important. These tasks include things like interruptions and email. Tasks in this quadrant are necessary but successful people strive to minimize/timebox them.
• (IV) Items that are neither urgent nor important. These tasks include things like watching TV or checking social media. These tasks should not be given time.

Habit 7 — Sharpen the Saw: Successful people invest in their own development, health and wellbeing. There are four dimensions that should be kept sharp: physical, spiritual, mental and social. The physical is kept sharp by eating right, exercising and getting good sleep. The spiritual is kept sharp through practices such as prayer or meditation. The mental is kept sharp by continuously learning and doing mentally challenging things. The social is kept sharp by intentionally investing in relationships and genuinely loving people.

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less

The central idea in Eat That Frog, is that you should start each day with your biggest, hardest and most important task. By developing the habit of starting each day by eating the frog, you will create momentum to enable you to be productive for the rest of your day and over the long haul you will accomplish a lot. Really the whole book is just a series of practical pieces of advice on how to eat the frog early in the day. Some of the 21 tips I found useful and others I did not. Here are the tips I found useful.

Plan Everyday in Advance: Keep three lists of tasks —tasks for the month, tasks for the week and tasks for the day. Then each night review your lists and make a plan for the daily tasks you are going to take on in the following day.

Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything: Resist the urge to bang out the small tasks first. While this can feel rewarding you need to start by eating the frog.

Consider the Consequences: The law of forced efficiency states that there will never be enough time to do everything you need to do, but there will always be enough time to do the most important thing.

Use the ABCDE Method Continually: The ABCDE method is a way of figuring out what you should do in a day. First you write down all the tasks you would like to do in the day, then you write A, B, C, D or E next to each task. Your A tasks are your frogs, your B tasks are things you should do but could be delayed. Your C tasks are nice-to-have tasks that can be delayed without consequence. Your D tasks are tasks you can delegate. Your E tasks are tasks you can eliminate all together. After you have ranked each task make a plan for the day which includes starting with your A task.

Focus on Key Result Areas: Your weakest key result area sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and abilities. So invest intentionally in developing your weakest area.

Upgrade Your Key Skills: Continuously learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.

Put Pressure on Yourself: You need to put pressure on yourself before others put pressure on you. Putting pressure on yourself means holding yourself accountable to improving on your weakness, moving with a sense of urgency and getting ruthlessly aggressive about prioritizing the most important thing.

Create Large Chunks of Time: Divide time on your calendar into 30, 60 and 90 minute blocks and hold yourself accountable to these blocks. Each of these blocks should be allocated to a single task with no multitasking.

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

Make Time outlines a time management technique which centers around four daily habits.

Highlight: You should pick a single focal point for the day. This is a hard, important task that you will be proud of yourself for achieving by the end of the day. Ideally, the focal point is an important task that is not urgent. Tasks of this nature are prone to being postponed, so by intentionally gravitating towards important, non-urgent tasks you will reduce procrastination. You should allocate 1–2 hours to be laser focused on your highlight task for the day.

Laser: You should be laser focused on your highlight task. In order to achieve this laser focus you need to block time on your calendar to focus on this task and turn off notifications.

Reflect: Take time to reflect on what is working well and what needs adjusting. You are not going to figure out perfect systems the first time around and with changing life circumstances, systems will need to be adjusted. Get in a habit of reflecting and iterating on your systems.

Energize: It is important to take care of your mind, body and soul. This involves eating right, working out, sleeping well, meditating, having good relationships and learning new things. You cannot be productive without being healthy — so take time to energize yourself.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Essentialism is about rejecting the idea that everything can be done and instead embracing a few core truths — (I) You are the one that gets to choose what to focus on. (II) Avery small set of things actually really matter. (III) You cannot do everything. My personal reading of essentialism, is that it basically boils down to the time management system equivalent of minimalism. Minimalism strives to reduce physical items to the set that are absolutely required — and so to does essentialism try to reduce tasks to the small set that is actually truly important. There are a few learnings stemming from this core idea that are worth highlighting.

• When planning/scheduling, the right question is not “How do I fit in everything?” The right question is “What problem do I want to solve?”
• You need to aggressively push against the belief that you can do it all. You cannot do it all, and even if you can now, you will just get more responsibilities until you cannot do it all. Accept this truth, and instead focus on figuring out what problem you want to solve.
• Not doing it all implies saying no to people. This means you cannot be popular with everyone all the time.
• Essentialists will get prioritization wrong sometimes. When this happens, do not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Instead have the confidence and courage to cut your losses and walk away from the project that was incorrectly prioritized.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Deep Work is an activity performed in a distraction-free, concentrated state that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limits. Shallow Work on the other hand, is non-cognitively demanding work which is often performed while distracted. Deep Work generates new valuable things or learnings, whereas Shallow Work results in “getting things done” without creating enduring value.

This book suggests doing Deep Work for 3–4 hours / day, 5 days / week. In order to consistently do this Deep Work, good intentions are not good enough! You need to establishes systems and rituals that will convert this Deep Work time into an automatic habit. Pulling from other bits of past learning, the systems/rituals that are useful for establishing this habit of Deep Work are —

• Set a Timer: Signal to yourself that its time to concentrate for a fixed period of time by starting a timer.
• Get a Drink Before Starting: Create a ritual around getting yourself some beverage before starting a Deep Work session. I use the act of getting a pot of tea ready to signify starting a Deep Work session.
• Block Calendar Time: Block time on your calendar for these Deep Work sessions and decline invites that conflict with this time.
• Turn Off Notifications: Turn off notifications before starting a Deep Work session.
• Take a Break After: After a Deep Work session take a break to completely unplug. I like going for a walk after a Deep Work session.
• Push Yourself: Deep Work should be cognitively hard. It should feel like a workout for your brain. Just like you need to push yourself in the gym in order to have a productive workout, you need to push yourself during a Deep Work session in order to make the most of it.
• Limit Block Length to 90 Minutes: Its hard to focus beyond 90 minutes, so divide Deep Work sessions into 90 minute blocks. Typically I aim to have two 90 minute blocks per day.

YouTube Videos

How I Manage My Time — 10 Time Management Tips

Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber with a focus on time management and productivity. In this video he covers the 10 time management tips that have withstood the test of time for him.

1. We Own All of Our Time: Ultimately, you decide how your time gets spent. Your family, bosses and friends can make demands of your time, but you decide how your time is used. In this sense, its never true that you don’t have time for something, rather you are deciding to prioritize one thing over another thing.
2. Hell Yeah, Or No: If something is not a “hell yeah” for you then you should not spend time on it.
3. The Daily Highlight: Each day you pick a daily highlight. Your daily highlight is something hard, rewarding and important that you will be proud of accomplishing by the end of the day. You should aim to accomplish your daily highlight early in the day to set the stage for the rest of your day.
4. Use a Task List: Make a task list at the start of the day. This list should include your daily highlight task. He recommends using a physical task list. A physical task list is more visible and frankly its more satisfying to cross something off of a physical list then it is to check a checkbox in an app.
5. Time Blocking: This suggests blocking time on your calendar for everything you want to do.
6. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it. So the advice is to leverage artificial deadlines and work with urgency. You need to put pressure on yourself.
7. Protected Time: Block protected time that you will use for deep focused work. If anyone tries to schedule over your protected time you should just decline.
8. Delegation: Don’t be afraid to delegate tasks where you can.
9. Automating Scheduling: Use an app to enable people to book time on your calendar rather than going back and forth on scheduling.
10. The Choice to be Satisfied: For productivity nerds its easy to feel unsatisfied with your productivity at the end of the day. But that is not going to change how much got done. Its better to feel positive about what you did accomplish and not beat yourself up.

I Read 107 Productivity Books. Here’s What Actually Works

This is another YouTube video from Ali Abdaal which I found useful. It is a nine point summary of all of the books he has read on productivity.

1. Set Your Goals: There are three levels of goals he suggests setting. The first level are long term goals. Long term goals are more like a life mission statement — its the stuff you want written on your grave stone. The next level are medium term goals. Medium goals describe the place you want to be in 3–5 years. The last level is short term goals. For short term goals he recommends creating goals that are one year out for three pillars of life — work, health and relationships. You can think of short term goals as the thing you want to be celebrating a year from now in each of these three key areas.
2. Break Them Down: Next figure out a plan for what you need to do on a weekly basis in order to achieve your goal.
3. Create Time Blocks: Schedule time blocks on your calendar to ensure you create slots to achieve your weekly tasks. You should think about these blocks on your calendar as a container. It is required to create the container, otherwise you won’t end up having the space to do what you need to do. However, creating the container is not an end onto itself — you still need to act.
4. Plan Your Day: Set your intentions as the first thing in the morning. A key point in planning your day is you really want to create your daily highlight — the single, hard, valuable and important thing you want to achieve. Even if you don’t do anything else that day, you should be able to feel proud of accomplishing your daily highlight.
5. Just Get Started: Now that you have created a plan, the next question is will you actually follow through on that plan. For this he recommends that just getting started on a task is actually way harder than doing the task. A tip that I took out of this, was to really focus on the the start of the task and turn that into an automatic ritual. Then the actual follow through of the task happens fairly automatically.
6. Stay Focused: Once you are actually doing the thing you said you were going to do, the next step is to actually just stay focused on it and push yourself to your very best without multi-tasking. You already did all the hard work of making the space for the thing and showing up — now you need to execute with focused intensity in order to really make the most of your time. The tips in this space are around turning off notifications, keeping your phone out of reach or using apps that disable you from accessing social media.
7. Make It Feel Good: Underpinning the above system is figuring out what you can do to make your work feel good. If you feel positive about your work you are going to be more productive. So figure out the things that will help you feel better about your work. For some people this will be listening to a cool sound track as they work or for others it will mean having lots of plants on their desk. The goal is to feel like you are lowering the stakes of your work and fostering a feeling of play in your work.
8. Recharge: Now that you have done all this work you actually need to recharge. Interestingly, truly recharging activities tend to take some amount of input energy. Activities like watching TV or scrolling through social media might feel like the only thing you can do when you are tired, but they actually do not recharge you. The things that truly recharge you typically take some small amount of energy to start doing. These are things like going for a walk, reading a book or going to the gym. So be honest about the things that recharge you and make space for those in your day.
9. Reflect: Lastly, it is important to reflect on your goals. You should set monthly, weekly and daily goals. Take the time to reflect on these goals to make sure the daily goals level up to the weekly goals and the weekly goals level up to the monthly goals. This could be done as part of a morning routine of figuring out your daily highlight or it could be done as part of a weekly reflection.