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

Batch your tasks into different types of work.
What types of tasks do you
have to do today? Which to-dos fit into which category? Here are some
groupings you might try:
• In-depth thinking or creative work
• Responding to emails and messages
• Reading and researching
• Meetings (virtual or in-person)
• Personal projects
• Administrative tasks
On the last category, Anthony says he borrows Benjamin Franklin’s approach

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On the last category, Anthony says he borrows Benjamin Franklin’s approach
of describing the benighted “admin” category as “putting things in their
places,” or PTITP. “Everybody’s heart sinks when they think of admin. But
‘putting things in their places’ sounds like the sort of thing any sensible
person would want to do. Someone else I know calls it ‘consolidation time,’
for similar reasons.”
Then, identify your uninterrupted blocks of time.
Look at your schedule
for the day, and work out where you can identify blocks of uninterrupted time
to devote to different types of tasks. Try to ringfence blocks of at least twenty
to thirty minutes, as well as some longer ones of sixty to ninety minutes. If
your schedule is highly fragmented, with meetings and calls scattered
throughout the day, try to batch those interactions more closely together by
asking someone to meet/talk a little later or earlier in the day. It’s often
possible to move appointments in this way, but typically we don’t dare or
bother to ask—and it’s worth shooting someone the question if it means you
can create a stretch of uninterrupted time somewhere in the day.
Next, decide which batch of tasks fits into each block of time.
The aim is
to do less zigzagging across different tasks, with less jumping from writing a
document to answering an email to picking up the phone. If you do nothing
else, create one zone for more in-depth thinking/creating, and one or two
zones to crank through your messages. Give your biggest and best chunk of
time to a task that needs deeper thinking, something that you know will take
time to get into.
You’ll also want to experiment with what times of day work best for different
“zones” of work. Don’t be too swayed by people who assert that there’s only one
time of day to do certain types of tasks. For example, some say you should
always
do creative tasks very early in the morning. This advice comes from the
fact that there is indeed something special about the fluid kind of thinking that
you have when you first wake up, and it’s good to have a pad by your bed or
shower to capture those thoughts. But you have to know yourself, and tune your
schedule accordingly. If you’re a night owl, your ideal routine is simply not
going to be the same as that of the lark who loves to get up before 6:00 a.m.
Whatever your “chronotype,” late or early, recognize which time of day sees you
at your best, and use it to work on your most complex tasks.
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