I’ve been a fan of Cal Newport, the epically productive lifehacker and computer science professor, since I read his book Deep Work in 2017 (and promptly deleted my social media). He recently channeled Dave Ramsey’s “Baby Steps” for a responsible financial life in his podcast to create a preliminary list of steps to gain mastery over professional productivity. . Here they are, in my own words:
https://mythinkpond.com/post/2020-12-05-managing-your-time/
Begin daily time block planning (see above). This is the organization of your day into blocks of time so that every minute of your day has a job, even if that job is getting rest or going for a walk. Not coincidentally, Newport has a planner he sells (and which I’ve used) for this very purpose, although a cheap notebook works just as well.
Set up task boards for each of your professional roles. On each task board, keep track of the obligations for those roles and the status of each obligation. He recommends a column for this week’s work, a column for “ambiguous/needs clarified,” a column for each major project you’re working on, a column for “waiting to hear back,” Newport uses Trello for this, a software I’ve never managed to get the hang of, but a physical board would work as well as long as you do most of your work in one location like an office. He also mentions Flow and Asana.
“Full capture” your day. He means that, at the end of the day, every professional obligation for the day is out of your head and recorded in a trusted system so that it won’t be ignored or forgotten moving forward. He says he got this from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which I’ve never read. Newport says that a beginner’s “trusted system” should consist of their email inbox, their calendar, and their task board (see above). He recommends having a box to check at the end of the day that indicates this step has been done. Big on ceremony, that Cal Newport.
Develop a weekly plan, based on your calendar and your task boards. Look at the whole picture, start blocking out time for big projects you know are going to take time, just so people can’t interrupt those time blocks with meeting requests. Come up with a “productivity heuristic” for the week, like devoting 30 minutes each morning to handling questions from clients, come hell or high water. When you time block plan every day, use the weekly plan to guide what you’re spending your time on.
Develop a strategic plan. Part one is the vision for your professional life, where you’d like to be in five years and how you plan to get there. Part two is your vision for the upcoming quarter. Your weekly plan is influenced by the strategic plan in the same way that your time block planning is influenced by your weekly plan.
Automate and eliminate. This is the process of tweaking your work-life by putting in place systems and guidelines to streamline, reduce context switching, and get unnecessary jobs off your plate, like committee assignments you don’t feel are productive. He stresses that the elimination step has to come after you’ve developed professional credibility in other ways. So he recommends saving the automate and eliminate steps for after steps 1-5 have been mastered.
Go for it. This one is a little cheesy, maybe in the tradition of self-helpers. Once you’ve implemented all these philosophies, take advantage of your new powers to take really ambitious swings.