Time Management by the Hour Chapter 4 - Tactics

You can't win a battle without a good overall strategy. But you need effective tactics as well. Every day is a continual battle to keep focused on achieving your goals, and you face continual skirmishes that a capable of derailing you. You are fighting a war on multiple fronts and at any time you can succumb to the ignominy of a small defeat or the triumph of a minor victory. The tactics you adopt will determine how well you do.

We are looking here at the very stuff of life. You might have enjoyed a successful, even a triumphant career to date. You can still throw away a day with little if anything to show for it.Or your previous achievements might well place you amongst humanity's laggards and stragglers. No matter, you still have the chance to turn today into one of solid achievement. The key is not changing yourself into somebody new. The key is adopting the tactics that work for the day you want to live.

So what kinds of tactics work?

The best starting point is looking at what doesn't work. My biggest problem is frittering away time in the morning. For example there is breakfast. This can easily turn into an extended period of eating and reading the news which can burn a large hole in the morning. It doekIsn't feel like procrastination because, well you have to eat and a good citizen should keep abreast of current events.

This is all very well, and indeed when I am having a rest day this is exactly how I start it and I thoroughly enjoy it. But it isn't the way to get anything done. I aim to get on with something productive within 10 minutes of my alarm going off. If this seems like a tough goal, the emperor Vespasian boasted that he was at work within a minute. He probably had a slave to make him a cup of tea though.

I also eat something as soon as I can. You need some source of energy that doesn't need much in the way of preparation. I find fruit meets the bill, preferably a banana or if needs be an apple. It is important to get your blood sugar levels up quickly.

Getting started really is the key. I am after momentum initially rather than achievement, so I schedule interesting and enjoyable things first. This works better than tackling something tough. I enjoy writing and thanks to modem technology I can do so without the extra trauma of having to find the willpower to get out of bed. But once I am up new distractions appear.

One really difficult problem for me as someone who works from home is avoiding housework. It is so easy to find some task that seems to require one's attention and to get sucked into it. Having a tidy home is a great thing, but unless that is your biggest goal in life it shouldn't be on your agenda in preference to all the other things that need doing. I include a category in my schedule called life which includes things like ironing. I treat it as a project like any other. The goal is to turn my house into a machine for living. That is a quote from Swiss architect Le Corbusier, though I am not using it I in the way he intended.

In fact that is one special case of a general problem of low importance jobs squeezing out the ones you really should be working on. The whole point of planning is to make sure you get on with those things that really matter, but it is so easy to lose sight of that when you are in the middle of a pile of jobs and there is one that you can just get out of the way that is sitting right in front of you.

It makes a lot of sense to try to keep what you are doing in front of you and what you are going to do behind you. I have my physical inbox behind my back. I schedule clearing my inbox like any other task. I keep only programmes I am actually working on open on my computer. I use a web based email client that I can close down when I am not working on it. I don't want continual notifications of how many unopened e-mails I have waiting for me.

Unopened email and important looking bits of paper are my biggest distractions - I think they are probably most people's. But distractions in general are a bad thing and are not always as obvious. It is often said that listening to music is helpful to getting work done. If this is true I have to say I haven't noticed. I listen to music sometimes, but only for the most tedious and repetitive of jobs.

Social media is designed to distract you and you need iron willpower to resist it. You have to disable all notification systems. Most tempting of course is looking at reactions to things you have posted yourself. If you have to post to social media so do early in the evening after you have finished your work. Following the responses is going to wreck your attention to anything else so beware.

(Incidentally I worked at one place where the senior management were highly adept at destroying the productivity of the people doing the actual work. The one thing they ever did to try and counter it was to block Twitter and Facebook on the company server. This was mildly helpful to me as an individual offset by the fact that people who couldn't socialise online would now find someone nearby to socialise with instead.)

Not all distractions are controllable of course. Family members, friends, co-workers and clients all place demands on your time of varying degrees of welcomeness. Do what you can to control access to your time.  Distractions might be unpredictable but they do follow patterns. Try to avoid scheduling work that needs concentration when you might get interrupted.

But the fact remains that interruptions are a fact of life. There is a widely quoted bit of research that says that the average time it takes to recover from an interruption is 25 minutes. That is usually put forward as a surprisingly long time. As I have no better data with which to counter it I'll have to accept it, but it sounds quite short to me. But it does at least give us a target to beat. I will confess that there are times when an interruption has thrown me off course for the duration of the rest of the day. But knowing that if I can get back to where I was before 24 minutes had elapsed puts me above average is quite motivating.

The ability to bounce back after an interruption is rare and is well worth cultivating. Oliver Cromwell was renown for his ability to pull his cavalry together after a charge. It marked him out as a remarkable cavalry commander. Put yourself in the same class by rapidly bringing your forces under control when things don't run smoothly.

Not all interruptions are completely unavoidable. Running out of paper or not having the information you need can disturb your flow just as much. It is said that armchair generals study tactics while professional ones study logistics. Make sure you have everything you need on hand. This includes things like snacks if you are planning a long see session. Fruit is a good choice for this purpose.

Having a list to work to is almost always a good idea. It is good from all sorts of points of view, but it is a good way of making sure you are prepared for what is coming next. If you are planning a phone call make sure you have the number and a pencil and paper for example. Many people like the psychological boost they get from ticking things off of a list as well.  Lots of things can be most easily coped with by splitting the task down into small chunks. This is a good thing to reflect in your list. Being able to keep track of your progress is encouraging and energising.

Don't live in your inbox. Clear your emails regularly. Add the ones that require some action to a task list. This is easily done in Gmail. I haven't used Outlook for some time, but it used to have a splendid feature which enabled you to simply drag an email onto your calendar. This is great because it automatically schedules some time to deal with it.

An early start is always good, but does come with an inbuilt danger. You are you and at the jobs and you are making progress. This makes it very tempting to take a break early on. Reward yourself with too much of a break and you can easily negate all the benefits of an early start. This is something to be avoided at all costs. If you start early you are going too run out of energy earlier.

It is certainly the case that regular short breaks help your productivity, but this is something it is easy to overdo. The Pomodoro technique suggests 5 minutes. I think this is about right. Time your breaks as well as your work sessions.