To make a 3-hour workday feasible, design the right environment to make it possible.
Behavior is the result of environment. If you have many apps open, you’ll be more likely to be distracted.
Eliminate the need for willpower. Think of willpower like a bank balance. For every decision you make, you spend a unit. Design the right environment, so you avoid depleting all of your willpower.
One of the most horrifying statistics for modern knowledge workers is how much time they spend on email. They send, receive, and respond to email for an average of 5.6 hour per workday. According to Cal Newport, our highest value work is rare, valuable, and cognitively demanding.
Studies show that employees spend more than five hours per day reading and replying to emails. While it may seem like urgent work, email is not the best kind of work.
Endlessly boring meetings. Frustrating clients. Work that seems to pile up endlessly and never get done. There's plenty of reasons to dislike work, but the state of stressful, near-constant distraction tops the list for many. Compare that to the state of flow, described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Being in flow means focusing your complete attention on the task in front of you. It is an underrated aspect of our happiness at work. Flow requires simplicity: if a task is too...
Hacking work is all the rage these days, along with tips for managing email, taking notes, and running meetings. But, at a higher level, what can we learn from analyzing the different types of work we do and how we allocate our time?
Reactionary work is the stuff that we do out of a reaction, like picking a phone because it is ringing. Checking email, replying to a text message, is all reactionary work. It is...
Planning work is time spent on listing, prioritizing and scheduling your work.
Planning helps us become efficient in our execution. Thus, allocating special time for planning work is crucial. Proactive planning can be exceptionally productive and beneficial in the long run.