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How to Be More Productive by Hacking Your Perception of Time
Evolution of time management in 5 stages
- The Clock-Slave: you are either begging for the clock to speed up or slow down.
- The Time Tracker: some find it an excellent way of ensuring they stay on track. But when combined with excessive time pressure, it becomes unhealthy.
- The Smart Breaker: you use like the Pomodoro technique or the Ultradian rhythms.
- The Free Spirit: you opt for a more spontaneous and free life, and avoid keeping a rigid schedule at all costs.
- The Enlightened One: you understand that scarcity of time is an illusion. That enemy does not exist.
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Evolution of time management in 5 stages
- The Clock-Slave: you are either begging for the clock to speed up or slow down.
- The Time Tracker: some find it an excellent way of ensuring they stay on track. But when combined with excessive time pressure, it becomes unhealthy.
- The Smart Breaker: you use like the Pomodoro technique or the Ultradian rhythms.
- The Free Spirit: you opt for a more spontaneous and free life, and avoid keeping a rigid schedule at all costs.
- The Enlightened One: you understand that scarcity of time is an illusion. That enemy does not exist.
The scarcity spiral
When you are time-pressured, you see time as a precious and scarce resource. This triggers a stress response, which can improve motivation in the short term, but often at the expense of morale in the long term. And an unhappy worker is a less productive worker. With lower productivity, there is even more time pressure to get things done.
And on goes the cycle.
The inner tyrant
When a time constraint is placed on you, it will play on repeat in your head: “Get to work!”. If a task takes longer than expected, thoughts like “What is taking so long?" might appear. And at the end of a chaotic day, you might find yourself thinking “You have done nothing today!”.
But you can overthrow this tyrant.
The abundance spiral
Without the time pressure, you view time from an hourglass half-full perspective.
This perceived abundance of time improves wellbeing, which in turn increases productivity. When productivity is high, there is less time pressure, and time feels even more abundant.
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We assume that the amount of productive output we create is directly proportional to the number of hours we input. But the truth is that most thoughtful, brain-intensive work does not unfold like this. The only work that is linear is really basic, repetitive stuff.
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Doing Everything
As more and more people work from home, there is a new kind of pressure: Maximum Productivity. In the middle of a worldwide crisis, the Internet is filled with stories of people organizing...
Always On Work
The ‘Always-On-Work’ culture makes the people's identity tied to their job and there is an unspoken belief that every minute of one’s lives must be commodified and turned into profit or self-improvement.
Most youngsters carry this impulse to optimize every minute of their lives. There is a tendency to keep ‘doing’ stuff, instead of just ‘being’.
We All Are In A Spot
One has to realize that all kinds of people, upper-middle-class, middle or working class, have their job and livelihood at stake right now.
It is best to be compassionate and grateful and not let the feelings of fear, panic or stress creep into the mind. Keep yourself cheered up with small pleasures and endure this ‘At Home’ time.
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Key Ideas
Denying you have a problem
Stop saying that you don't have enough time to complete your commitments.
Admit that you need to get better at managing your time and start searching and trying techniques that will help you ...
Not planning your day
It's important to have an idea of what your daily priorities are and tasks you need to complete, preferably the night before.
Also, make sure you prepare in the evening the outfit you're going to wear and the meals for the following day. Doing this will save time in the morning, and reduce decision fatigue.
"Urgent" vs "Important"
Take all of your tasks and place them into four quadrants:
- To do first: the most important responsibilities that need to be done today or tomorrow.
- Schedule: important tasks that are not urgent.
- Delegate: essential items that are not important.
- Don't do: tasks that aren't important or urgent.
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The Planning Fallacy
We all have busy schedules, but we are incorrectly planning our day around the time we have, not around priorities.
Our estimates on how long certain tasks will take are almost always ...
The 4 Kinds of Priorities
The Decision Matrix on how to approach tasks has 4 quadrants:
- Quadrant 1: The Urgent Problems which are important.
- Quadrant 2: Not Urgent but important tasks
- Quadrant 3: Urgent but not really important
- Quadrant 4: Distractions and time-wasting tasks.
Prioritize the important (Quadrant 2) to attain maximum benefit from your work.
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Introduce some greenery
One study found that workers in spaces with plants showed a 15 % higher productivity compared to those in plain...
Show appreciation
Creating motivation and making your team feel appreciated is a critical part of long-term productivity.
Encourage your team to keep gratitude journals - writing down a couple of sentences about what you are currently grateful for a couple of times a week. This practice improves productivity by increasing happiness.
Create some privacy
If people can't focus on their work, they are less effective in areas like collaboration and learning, and they are less likely to be satisfied with their jobs.
Workplaces with a balance between individual focus and collaboration are more innovative, creative and encouraging.
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