4 Actions To Help You Take Control Of Your Day
/We’ve all been there. You turn your cell phone alarm off and before you can say ‘snooze’ you’re hit with an artillery of rings and dings, email and news alerts.
Your day of reacting to work instead of controlling it has begun.
When you sit down at your desk, you valiantly try to ‘get control of your inbox’ in order to ‘create space for focused work’. But alas, your magic unicorn powers just aren’t strong enough. Next thing you know, half the day is behind you.
After eating lunch (at your desk while perusing more messages, of course!), the afternoon lull sets in.
You’re feeling sluggish so you try to pick yourself up before your back-to-back afternoon meetings begin. You deal with a few more emails, messenger pings, and unscheduled interruptions by colleagues who think their work is more important than yours.
You’ve felt busy all day, but haven't accomplished much. You haven't dealt with some really important questions, but wham, just like that the day is over.
You resentfully catch up in the evening and/or on the weekend. You hope that the next day will be different, even though deep down you know that all tomorrow will bring is another assault of emails, phone calls, interruptions and distractions.
Enter Scott Belsky
Belsky is founder and CEO of Behance, and author of the great read, Making Ideas Happen and a contributor to the equally indispensable, Manage Your Day-to-Day.
Our addiction to responding to requests and other stimuli, rather than to tackle important (and most importantly), impactful work, is part of what what Belsky calls our intensifying "reactionary workflow crisis”:
"We have started to live a life pecking away at the many inboxes around us, trying to stay afloat by responding and reacting to the latest thing: email, text messages, tweets and so on … Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us." [1]
So, how do you take back control? Here are four immediate actions you can take starting today.
1. Hit pause
High-performing athletes regularly take stock of their performance. A team forms a scrum before a play or a huddle during a time out. When athletes don’t win, they do everything it takes to identify and fix the problem.
But when was the last time you or your team took a serious step back from the incessant doing to rethink how you’re doing things?
Slow down to go fast by taking pause to have an honest conversation with yourself:
Do you have a hard time distinguishing between work you should absolutely prioritize and work you should delegate, leave to later or let go of completely?
Can you name a high-priority task that is your responsibility and should have been completed last week, but wasn’t?
Are you a bottleneck to those who you manage or say things to yourself like “if only I was organized”?
Are you drowning in sticky notes, little black books and various online organizational tools?
Do you feel hostage to your inbox, calendar and social media feeds?
If you answered NO to all of these, you get a shiny star! You are indeed a highly evolved magic unicorn.
If you answered YES to any of these, you too get a shiny star because you’ve taken the first step and acknowledge that you have a problem.
2. Start your day with a routine
Like many people I work with, you probably have colleagues in various time zones. Getting up to speed on their goings-on in your morning is important and necessary for planning your day. In this case, a quick email check makes sense ... just don’t do this before your feet hit the ground.
If you're just too tempted to check your email in bed, invest in one of these to keep the temptation at bay.
You don’t need to change any of the things you already do to make yourself beautiful and human in the morning. But to begin to control your day, add at least 10 minutes to your routine that will get your brain and body fired up (more coffee doesn’t count!).
Here are some suggestions:
Exercise. The science is pretty conclusive. Moving your body kickstarts the brain and gets your juices flowing. To make life easy, I’m even sharing my own personal super efficient, kick ass circuit training routine. It only takes 10 minutes, but feel free to do it for longer. I don’t have a waiver, so please, workout responsibly :)
Meditate. Even 5 or 10 minutes will have an enormous impact on your life. Seriously, a year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined myself as a lotus flower. Today, doing meditation is as much a part of my morning routine as my cup of coffee. The results have been fabulous. Check out Tara Brach's introductory guided meditation to get started.
Be grateful. Another part of my morning routine incorporates my Happiness Advantage where I write down three new things I’m grateful for that day. Studies show that this simple and quick action significantly increases optimism levels and in turn increases productivity. My ‘workflow planning document’ (more on this below!), which you can start to use right away, incorporates this activity.
Whether it’s yoga, reading the paper, doing a crossword or going for a walk, just add one activity to your morning routine that involves being good to your mind or body, and ideally both.
3. End your day with a routine
Just like a start-of-day routine, an end-of-day one is equally critical in your journey to retake control of your time and productivity.
In the nonprofit world, staff are too often rewarded for working harder not smarter. The idea of ‘work-life balance’ is either loathed or loved at organizations, but even if you hate the idea, it’s hard to deny that burn out in our sector is a real problem.
All organizations have periods or days of craziness when it’s all hands on deck, even at weird hours. But, all too often these spurts become the cultural norm. Signing off for vacation is seen as a cop out, while getting online first and leaving the office last becomes a badge of honor. At this pace even the most magical of unicorns among us will eventually burn out.
To maintain our drive, creativity, motivation and hutzpah to change the world over the long-term, we have to live and take care of ourselves and each other. Ok, enough touchy feely stuff …
Your end-of-date routine should do just that, mark the end of your day. This might involve planning for tomorrow, organizing your desktop or tidying the top of your desk. Whatever it is, when it happens, it means the end of your work day. Short of responding to a work emergency, your evenings and weekends are reserved for living and revitalizing yourself for the day and week ahead.
This requires discipline, but once it becomes a habit, and when your colleagues know (and see) how you roll, it can be life changing and result in more productive days and better quality work.
4. Prioritize tasks and schedule time on your calendar to do them
Whether it’s part of your start or end-of-day routine, it’s helpful to spend 10-15 minutes prioritizing your work for the day and week ahead.
We respond to emails, tweets, chats because it makes us feel like we’re being productive. Belsky points out that there’s a “tension between the urgent operational items with current projects that arise every day and the more important (but less timely) items that are liable to be perpetually postponed.” [2]
Start by distinguishing between the two. Cal Newport, a master of productivity, author of four books, professor at Georgetown and a parent, does this by separating "deep work" from "shallow work".
To make this easy, use my workflow template to get started.
To summarize
I return to Belsky’s words of wisdom: “only by taking charge of your day-to-day can you truly make an impact”.
So remember,
1. Take pause and analyze how you’re doing things.
2. Start your day on the right foot.
3. End your day with a routine to ensure your evenings and weekends are for living.
4. Distinguish and prioritize your work tasks and schedule time to do them.
Knowing what you need to do is not enough. What's required is action and putting Aristotle's wise words into practice – "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
[1] Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind, p.19
[2] Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision & Reality, p.62