How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

BATCH YOUR TASKS, ZONE YOUR DAY
So let’s understand what an ideal day looks like for our singletasking brains. The
first implication of the research is that you can work fewer hours, and work less
hard during those hours, by batching your tasks more effectively. By batching, I
mean grouping together similar tasks, so you spend less time and energy
switching between different types of activity. In the “a1b2c3…” exercise I
mentioned earlier, it’s like handling all the letters first, in one batch, then
handling the numbers together, in a second batch. Applied to your tasks, that

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means spending time on email. 
Then
on deep thinking. And not mixing the two.
Anthony has successfully lightened his workload by applying this batching
technique to his daily tasks as much as possible. For example, part of his work
involves finding and sharing interesting articles with his clients. “You think it’s
one to-do, but it actually involves several different types of activity,” he says.
“There’s the task of 
gathering
information, which means my mind needs to be
wide open and in scanning mode. Then there’s 
digesting
, which means I have to
stop and think. Then there’s 
sharing
, where I have to make some decisions:
what’s worth passing on, to whom? And gathering, digesting, and sharing
require different mental states.” Anthony used to mix them together, but, as he
says: “I used to get distracted as I went back and forth, because I was using
different apps to gather and to share. I always had lots of windows open on my
laptop, and each one was an invitation to go off at a tangent. So I found it’s
much better to chunk the different types of activity and tell myself, ‘Now I’m
gathering
and I’m entirely focused on that’; ‘Okay, now I’m 
digesting
and I’m
focused on that.’ It takes a lot less time overall, and what I do is better-quality.”
Anthony also decided to create some standard “zones” in his schedule each
day: at least one chunk of time to think about the trickiest tasks of the day, and a
couple of “email zones” when he handles as many incoming messages as
possible. Sometimes he has to be opportunistic in deciding where to fit them, by
looking at the slices of open space in his calendar. But knowing that he has
dedicated time to tackle his inbox twice a day makes it far easier for him to focus
on his other tasks in between, Anthony says, allowing him to reap the cognitive
and emotional benefits of singletasking throughout his day.
Here are some suggestions on how to try this yourself: