Marie-Claire AssekoThis is a summary of the Season 2 – Episode 5 of The Kaizen Gal podcast titled “Tactics to Organize Work”, the fifth installment of series on Time & Priorities Management.
The goal of the series is to help you effectively prioritize and adopt consistent time management strategies. I will expand on these strategies but they include:
- Learning to reconcile time management with that of your personal or professional environment;
- Identifying your strengths and weaknesses and build a time management strategy adapted to your personality;
- Optimizing time and energy management;
- Maintaining and increase your credibility and control in managing demands and priorities.
How Did This Episode Come to be?
Today’s episode is about organizing work. Indeed, in the days leading to the planned recording of the podcast episode, I did not have a plan for what the episode was actually going to be about.
See, I would typically do some research and scripting for the following episode right after wrapping up an episode recording. All so that when the time to record according to my agenda came, I would only have to hit “Record”.
But that time around, I hadn’t set anything up. Therefore, there was a lot of friction between what I had planned to do and what I was actually able to do in that moment. Which led to me procrastinating.
Had I been more organized, I would have planned for that research and writing time in my agenda. Believe it or not, after close to 8 episodes recorded, that time was still not planned for. As I had been recording more, and had somewhat grown accustomed to what I needed in order to record, I hadn’t adapted how I organized the work required.
Five Tactics to Organize Tasks
- Favor homogeneous work sequences. Meaning that you should group together tasks of the same nature.
- So that your brain does not switch from one workflow or process to another;
- Which avoids the mental friction of having to re-focus;
- And helps to reduce the potential for distraction as you are transitioning activities less.
- Since you’re grouping similar activities together, you also want to alternate these groups of tasks.
- By changing the nature of the work you’re doing, you avoid monotony and getting bored by tasks that become repetitive in the long run.
- Take into account your work rhythm and energy levels.
- Some of us are more energetic and focused in the morning, and others are night owls by choice. If possible, don’t force yourself to stick to a rhythm that is not aligned with your productivity peaks as it will be much harder to stick to it.
- Others’ work might be so complex or energy-consuming that it is difficult or taxing to try and complete it in one session, however focused it can be. Be mindful of not pushing and draining your resilience to its limits too early in your workflow.
- Do only one thing at a time and stick to it.
- Multi-tasking is a myth. Your brain cannot switch from deep work on a topic to deep work on another that easily.
- Just like it needs some time to slip into deep sleep, it needs time to really black out your environment and get into THAT zone.
- Make time for yourself ~ don’t become so obsessed with productivity and efficiency that you end up burned out. If you notice that you’re having an increasing difficulty to focus over time with many things in your environment changing or requiring more of you, take a breath. Give yourself a moment!
- Everybody can start a marathon but not everybody can finish one: a race requires a strategy that combines fast pace, moderate pace and recovery pace. Think of your workflow as that race.
The fastest way to get to where you want to go is to go slowly.
A famous actor whose name I cannot remember
Make Those Tactics Sustainable
The following are areas to explore that will support these principles.
Your relationship with yourself and your relationship with time.
- Basically how do you talk to yourself when things don’t go as you planned?
- Better yet, how gentle are you with yourself?
- How does your productivity and the outcomes you are or aren’t able to deliver impact your self-esteem? Your identity?
- How do you see yourself after failure?
Your organization of time, work and the tools you use.
- The wrong tools can make organizing your work senselessly harder than it needs to be.
- It’s not because a tool worked for someone you know or a Youtuber that it would work for you. Assess your own situation (vision, goals, timeline, etc.) and don’t be afraid to test different tools.
- Don’t go out trying to kill a fly with an elephant gun or to tackle an elephant with a paper fan.
Your relationships with others.
- How important is it for you to please or accommodate people around you?
- Your priorities will clash with that of others, and it’s normal. Not everyone will agree.
- Learn to say NO with potential solution or alternative if you can but most importantly WITHOUT guilt.
The Importance of Rhythm
Like I mentioned earlier, all of us aren’t productive at the same time. Although they can be similar, we all have our own circadian clock. It is our body’s built-in clock of roughly 24-hour periods that regulates and influences our ability or desire to sleep, eat, work, focus and so on.
Our circadian rhythm fluctuates up and down throughout the day. So it is important for each of us to determine our peaks of effectiveness according to our own circadian clock.
2 questions to zero in on these time frames:
- When and why is my energy at its peak? AND
- When and why is my energy at its lowest?
Recognizing these time frames will help you in implementing these tactics to organize work in a sustainable way.
Assessing And Re-assessing Time to Completion
The time it takes to execute a task is divided into 4 phases:
- Reflection
- Preparation
- Gathering everything necessary to execute the work. This include estimating the time needed.
- Execution
- Verification
- That’s when you complete the task and compare its end result with the expected result. The end result (what it looks like) might be different than what you expected.
- In my opinion, what matters is that the outcome/consequence (what it produces) supports your objective.
I suggest that you often compare the time you estimated during the 2nd phase to the time it actually took after you executed. On the one hand, this comparison will help you to plan with better accuracy. On the other hand, you can take it further by analyzing the causes of that gap in order to alleviate them the next time around.
Discipline And Discernment
Successful people and unsuccessful people (≠ failure in my book) have the same goal: to succeed at what they set out to do. For instance, many athletes want to become Olympic champions, but only a few will make it. I believe that the difference between these 2 groups of people is the way they use their time.
- Two people can have the same amount of time, but the one who succeeds gets the most out of his of her time.
- It’s not about the number of hours we have since it’s limited to 24 hours for everyone and there’s nothing we can do about it. What matters is what we do with the hours we have.
Managing time-consuming activities is crucial for increased odds of success.
Among these activities, there are:
- Activities initiated by others: telephone interruptions, unexpected visits from colleagues to the office
- Activities initiated by ourselves: long coffee or lunch breaks, mistakes, lack of objectives or priorities in the execution of work, ambiguous or incomplete instructions.
It is necessary to identify the timewasters in your work rhythm, their causes and effects, and then find ways to counter them.
TL;DR – Tactics to Organize Tasks
- You should revisit regularly how you organize work and adapt it to the type of work or the mental state/capacity you currently have. Maintaining your organization involves evolving it.
- Focus on one activity at a time. Use tools like the Pomodoro technique or apps like the Forest App to help you focus for longer periods of time without distraction.
- Your environment, people and devices alike, play a big role in your ability to maintain your organization habits.
- Last but not least, make it a habit to audit how you are currently spending your time and how your time consumption supports your vision and goals.
Those tactics to organize work have worked wonders in my own ability to reach my goals without stressing myself out. Crazy how a well-thought-out and evolutive plan can free one up!
Onto the sixth post of the series!
