Single-Tasking

The choices we make to ‘borrow’ our personal time to get work done works against us in the long run, just like the money borrowed from a credit card has to be paid back with interest in the future. This means more work or expenditure of resources in the future to get things back on track.

**Time debt has to be paid back, and the interest paid is focus and attention, which has been robbed from us with the time we have loaned out to other tasks.

You need to find out just where your time is going currently. You can use a pen and paper, a spreadsheet, or an app to visualize where you spend most of the hours in your day.

• Block your time for specific types of work, not individual tasks.
• Block your time for core work like coding, designing or writing, for shallow work like daily tasks and maintenance, for meetings and emails, and fill it with frequent breaks to replenish yourself.
• Give yourself space between blocks so that you can decompress and keep your energy levels high.

It states that we are overly optimistic about what we can hypothetically get done in a given day. So we overschedule and create further time debt.

Start filling your schedule with the really important tasks, and take care not to put all the time-debt activities back in. Sometimes the seemingly urgent work isn’t important, but we do it, because it is in front of us.

Stop doing everything except mission-critical tasks that cannot be avoided at any cost. If you have ten tasks in your priority list, only do the top few, and see if anything is broken.

Your ability to use your time depends on you being healthy, stress-free and happy. If you aren’t at your best, your entire life ecosystem will fall like a house of cards.

You need to rest, recharge, recover, and also pursue a work-life balance.

Incomplete and pending tasks take up space inside our minds.

This may include our unfulfilled desires and dreams, conversations that we haven’t had, projects that need to be wrapped up. We can help ourselves with this by writing down the draining and incomplete tasks, crossing off things you cannot control and creating an action plan for the doable stuff.

We need to be open and transparent to our peers and bosses, and refuse certain tasks that seem to take us away from our core priorities and seem obligatory or repetitive.

We can also defer them or try to postpone them, examining the true urgency or importance of the request.

Certain habits are time-multipliers. They are simple tools, hacks and work-flows that optimize your work environment and get more things done in less time.
This includes prioritizing your to do list geographically, clubbing of errands and routines, and ensuring your main task is done with full focus, achieving a state of ‘flow’.

Delegating tasks is a hidden hack that, if used can free you up with loads of free time. Studies show that many knowledge workers spend 41 percent of their time on tasks that can be easily delegated to others.

The 30X rule says that even if the time taken for you to train someone and delegate the task is increased by 30 times, it still eventually gives you a 733 percent increase in free time.

• Sending and replying to email feels like work, but in reality, it is pseudo-work. Do not be available on email and chat all the time, setting aside time-blocks in a day.
• To get into the ‘flow’ mode, you have to prioritize focus, blocking all outside distractions, by silencing your phone, and disabling those annoying notifications from apps that were never meant to send you any in the first place.