You arrive at your desk at 8.45am. You open your emails. Your phone vibrates. You check Twitter. Your phone rings. You go back to the email you were drafting. Your boss emails – you drop what you’re doing to reply to that one first. Your phone vibrates again. Your head swims. Where was I? Suddenly, you realise it’s almost lunchtime, and you’ve spent the morning rushing from one thing to the next – but have achieved a sum total of near zero in the process, and are feeling completely frazzled.
How many times a day do you check email? Check your phone? Facebook? Twitter? We are bombarded by pings and buzzes that command our attention – and they are utterly addictive. Every time we check on our likes and comments on our social media, we get a little dose of dopamine, our happy hormone, causing the reward functions of our brains to go absolutely bananas. Party over here. Someone noticed me! Someone cares about me! Someone is validating me!
The satisfying ping of a notification speaks to one of the most primal human needs – the need to belong to a tribe. But a constant stream of notifications is the ultimate distraction and what’s called self-interruption. It is no surprise that we find it hard to get stuck into our work or a good book – it is impossible to get into a state of flow when you are being constantly poked and prodded by these little electronic nudges.
We have more tips, tricks, calendars, and checklist apps than ever before to help us manage our time; and yet we find ourselves in a constant state of distraction. Our problem is how to use our time in a valuable way, and protect ourselves from the constant demand put on our time from hundreds of distracting pings and bings throughout our day.
But there are some simple things can do to help take control over your time. Be warned: it involves some work and some self-discipline around your best friend: The Phone.
1. Actively stop wasting time by becoming mindful about your work and life practices.
One simple way of managing your time better is to become conscious of how you spend it. So many of us spend our days mindlessly jumping from task to Twitter to task. To bring some mindfulness into your life, I recommend the Headspace app – take ten minutes a day to just breathe and create some space for yourself. Being mindful of how you use your time is the first step to managing it in a more effective and productive way.
2. Make time for deep work and reflective thinking.
The biggest enemy of creativity and reflective thinking is information overload, including the zeitgeisty malaise of infomania: the compulsive desire to check or accumulate news and information. WNYC’s Note to Self podcast ran a series called Infomagical which encouraged people to be mindful about their digital consumption and manage information overload. They tackled mastering the “Tricky Art Of Single-Tasking” in order to see problems clearly and think creatively. It’s well worth a listen if you struggle to make room for creative thinking in your day.
In his wonderful book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown shows us how the world’s leading thinkers regularly carve out this quiet time for reflection and what he calls ‘slow thinking’.
McKeown also says we must cast the net wide when thinking about new ideas, and that ‘Essentialists’ as he calls them – people who are focused and reflective – explore far more options than Nonessentialists. “Because they will commit and ‘go big’ on one or two ideas or activities,” McKeown explains, “they deliberately explore more options at first to ensure that they pick the right one later.”
3. The End of Perfectionism
Winner of the award for “Biggest Over-Promising -Under-Delivering Book Title of All Time” The Four Hour Work Week was a mad book. The majority of it was a lot of get-rich0by-doing-very-little – BUT it had a simple but brilliant take-away for me – to delegate and say no as much as possible.
Many people find it hard to delegate – especially if they have perfectionist, only-I-can-do-it tendencies (guilty as charged…). Saying no to tasks which you can easily delegate to a co-worker or family member or which are merely a distraction from your true focus can really free you up, but if you have a team working with you, that’s often easier than if you work solo.
Another great time-saver is automation. Creating processes (like auto-replies on emails you rarely check, online bill pay, switching off voicemail, and so on) will really help limit these time-wasting activities. I switched off my voicemail function after reading this as I hated checking it, and it was surprisingly liberating – is there a person alive who actually enjoys checking their voicemail?
4. Learn to beat procrastination.
Tim Urban from acclaimed blog Wait But Why is a master procrastinator, and knows we all are guilty of it too. Here’s his brilliant blog and TED talk where he hilariously and helpfully tackles the subject of procrastination. We often forget that procrastination is a symptom of stress, overwhelm, and anxiety. Understanding the root causes of procrastination will help you overcome it – and stop avoiding the important work by wasting time on lesser tasks, or worse, down another YouTube rabbit hole. A simple technique is to do the task you are dreading first thing in the morning, as per Brian Tracey’s great book about procrastination, Eat that Frog. As Mark Twain said “if it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
5. Finally, consciously remember that life is short.
There’s a Buddhist practice of imagining and meditating on the idea of you and everyone you know of already having left this world. Its not something I’m able to do myself, but I recognise the need to take myself off my grasping and distracting treadmill and really reflect on how short a time we all really have here.
The late, great Professor Randy Pausch, who you may have seen speaking to his students about his pancreatic cancer and his childhood dreams, also gave this incredible talk about time. If anyone knows and understands the value of time, it’s someone who has just been given a terminal diagnosis. His talk about owning your time is utterly humbling and inspiring – and one simple line stuck with me:
“…doing the right things adequately is much more important than doing the wrong things beautifully. It doesn’t matter how well you polish the underside of the banister”.
Your time is precious. And we all must consciously commit ourselves every day not to waste it.
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