tl;dr
- All failures are steps
- Work with what’s available
- Find themes
- Take what works and leave the rest
All failures are steps
I’ve spent a lot of my time working on one thing or another. Ever since I kicked my ass into gear about halfway through my undergraduate degree, I haven’t been all that satisfied with the bare minimum. I understand that some things just need to get done, don’t get me wrong, but I also believe that some things require a little more time and attention than others. It’s not always easy to find out what exactly requires that little bit extra, but I usually find out once I’m deep into it.
I’ve also tried different working strategies, time-management-wise in particular. I’ve done the early morning thing, and I’ve also done the late evening thing. Hell, during South Africa’s lockdown earlier this year, I would work through till midnight and that was the only way I felt I could work. At the time that felt natural. I had no external cues that forced me to budget my time, so I just worked all the time. It had it’s drawbacks though, one mini panic attack after another and trying to find a way to deal with the overwhelm that was enveloping me. I also didn’t know how to take breaks, because they felt like a guilty pleasure I had a hard time wrapping my head around.
Granted, that was a very difficult and strange time of the year, but that particular strategy didn’t work for me. There was just simply too much to do. And spending so much time on one thing was great until I realised I had let the rest fall to the wayside, almost always to their detriment. I felt like there was something to this, though, but that I was just taking the whole thing too far. So I dug a little deeper and found something that did work for me. For now, this is my silver bullet.
Work with what’s available
I’ve struggled with perfectionistic work in the past, and I will likely continue to do so. I always want to do more and do it better, and I’ll often spend time and energy trying to perfect something that will either change later anyways or be so inconsequential that only the purest definition of wasting time applies. Some things are just not worth it.
I struggled with this so much that I would jump between having too much time on my hands to not having enough. I had to find a middle ground, and it took a little while, but I eventually did. I found a theory called Parkinson’s Law.
This was a game-changer for me. I’ve written about it already, so I won’t go into that in too much depth here, but the basic premise is as follows:
Work expands to fill the time available.
It doesn’t matter if you have one week or one year, you will get it done. This isn’t to say the quality of work won’t differ, because that depends entirely on your commitment to the work, but it means it will get done. Sometimes, that’s what matters the most.
This worked for a while, but it felt too simple. Too cut-and-dry. I felt that something was missing, like Parkinson’s Law was the water continuing to slip through my fingers no matter how I tried to hold it. I needed a vehicle, a container; a way to hold this strategy and keep it within the confines it needed to work effectively. Then I realised what I was missing: I had a mindset to apply, that I should work best to the time I was given, but I didn’t have a clear target of what those times were.
Find themes
It hit me like a tonne of bricks one morning, something I had heard a few times in podcasts and in the titles of productivity articles: day-theming. When I first heard about this concept, I struggled with imagining how it would work for me. I was dealing with an overwhelming workload to the point where I didn’t think I even had the time to figure out how to theme it all. Funnily enough, that irony isn’t lost on me.
Maybe I was missing a key ingredient to the recipe. It was as though I was given a tool and had no idea how to use it, until now.
Day theming, in essence, is the concept of batching your days based on specific types or areas of work. For example, you can spend Monday planning, Tuesday preparing, and then Wednesday through Friday you spend working on what you planned and prepped (because the rest was already done). It’s almost like looking at your to-do list for a project and assigning specific days to specific aspects instead of just working through everything in one day. This helps because neurological research has shown that multitasking drains more energy than it should, so jumping between different types of work do you more harm than good, and can actually be slower. So if you can do specific types of tasks at specific intervals (instead of jumping between them) you can actually get more done.
Day theming on its own is a rabbit hole better explored in-depth on another day because it comes with its own family members like time-blocking and time-boxing, but the key takeaway is this:
Theme your time so you reduce your cognitive load.
That’s it. Simple enough, right? Well, as it turns out, not on its own.
Take what works and leave the rest
Maybe it’s pessimistic, but not everything works. There are far more strategies out there floating in the ether than there are successful usage cases to prove that they work. What works for you might not work for me, and what works for me might not work for you. And so you’re left with one possible action plan: try it and see what happens.
Parkinson’s Law was great, but it felt incomplete. Day theming also felt like it should work, but I didn’t know what exactly to theme. So I tried something else: I mushed them together. Now I had a container and the water to fill it with. Here’s how it worked:
- I chose my days; and then
- I gave myself ONLY those days
Maybe I was limiting myself, but the irony is that what looked like limiting on the outside was liberating on the inside. I gave myself boundaries to work within that allowed my work to flourish (it felt that way anyway). Because I had given myself limits to work towards, I found ways to maximise those limits. Sure, I likely could have worked on things a bit more, but for what? Would those extra hours have created better work or made me procrastinate more? I don’t know, but I’m happy with what I’ve got now and my stress levels have taken a nosedive. Win-win.
I could spend a month working on four projects and bounce between them based on what I felt like working on in any given day, or I could spend a week flat-out working on one and then moving onto the next. In the former example, I would have faith that at the end of the month they would all come to fruition, but faith only takes you so far; at some point, you have to just get shit done. The latter example, on the other hand, meant two things: I could work on one project (and therefore one way of thinking and executing) and it would then be done before I moved onto the next. Once it was done, it was like a weight had been lifted and I could focus on the next without constantly having unfinished work on the back of my mind. There’s merit to having unfinished work because it keeps your subconscious engaged, but I only think that works to a point.
Using a combination of day theming (specifying exactly what I would work on during specific days — or even weeks — at a time before moving on the next) and Parkinson’s Law (understanding that work will fill the time it is allocated) allowed me to work in reverse and kick my productivity into a new gear: give myself time and then use the hell out of it. End of story.
Not only did this permit me more mental resources to dedicate to specific projects at a time, but it also gave me more time to contemplate their progress contextually while I was working on them, making flow-states much easier to tap into. Not to mention when I finally completed projects it felt hella good. It felt like I was actually making progress; which I cannot stress enough is important to feel, no matter the size of the task.
I’ll keep experimenting, that’s for sure; but for now, I’ve built something that works, however long it took.
