On the night of my 25th birthday, I was troubled. I was going to face probably the busiest year of my entire life. I had a full-time MA, almost full-time job, large charity projects, and the responsibility to provide for five family members.
Lying awake at night, staring at the dark ceiling of my bedroom for what felt like an eternity, all I could see was this gigantic pile of work as large as Mount Everest effortlessly engulfing me. Every day felt like I had to run a marathon up its treacherous inclines just to keep my head above water. I was without support. In an alien country. All alone.
To endure these unending demands, I had no other choice but to upgrade my productivity. I studied and tried pretty much all the techniques and apps under the sun, and these contributed to gobsmacking results.
Since then, for over a decade, I’ve been refining these principles and have conjured up a pretty simple system—Get Lots Done (GLD)— which we’ll discuss in this article. Actually, it’s the best system I know and will help double, triple, or even quadruple your productivity!
This GLD thing: how’s it done?
We are less productive when we plan and prioritise our day in part. We then operate reactively—“Oh I just got an email, I must respond now!”—versus proactively. In fact, by not giving your day a solid structure, you give others the permission to rob your time and thus dent your productivity.
So what’s needed to double your productivity?
Well, two easy and free tools: A to-do app and a calendar. Both of them should be digital, sync-able, and available on all the primary devices that you use.
RTM is my favourite, and probably the most sophisticated, to-do app. I use it as my personal secretary throughout the day to record any tasks that don’t have definite start and end timings.
For planning my day, I primarily use Google Calendar.
Now onto the steps
1 Prioritise tasks: Instead of jumping straight onto doing the actual work first thing in the morning, review all the outstanding tasks for the day in your to-do app. Next, briefly review your calendar to extrapolate the total amount of time you could devote to those tasks. Finally, assign priorities—for example, high, medium, and low—for each task due today.
2 Plan the day: Estimate time for each of those prioritised tasks and pencil them into your calendar. This exercise of planning your full day based on your priorities will certainly put your productivity on fire. But, is there anything else you can do to intensify this fire? Indeed you can!
Research suggests you pay a kind of ‘cognitive-penalty’ upon switching tasks. In other words, you end up wasting time to get back into the interrupted task. Overcome this issue by bundling up small tasks into a single slot within your calendar.
It’s also worth stressing that for most of us it’s not necessary to attend all the meetings requested by our colleagues. No, really, it isn’t. It’s prudent for a productive person to either reject time-wasting meetings or ruthlessly half those meeting times. Nearly all the meetings that don’t contribute directly to your priorities are potential time-stealers. I wonder if this fits your experience?
So far, then, you’ve prioritised your tasks, and planned the entire day. What’s next?
3 Review week: Based on your priorities, add and remove calendar events for the next six or seven days. That doesn’t mean you plan the whole week (though there’s nothing wrong with that); the real objective is to look ahead and shape the week.
All of the above steps, for me, take 10 to 15 minutes. I then begin (and end) almost all of my tasks based on the calendar alerts. If my plan gets disrupted then I adjust the calendar entries and continue. Simple, isn’t it?
Don’t trust me. Try it!
I’ve since had far better birthdays than my 25th, but that night of lying awake remains one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I’m indebted to that year in its entirety as, despite the stress, despite the anxiety, it gifted me with one of the most useful skills I’ve ever learned.
I invite you to test-drive GLD. Tomorrow, before beginning your work, prioritise and plan your day. Then, continue it for a week. If you experience more work-life balance, more productivity, and above all, more satisfaction, then, extend this trial for a month, a year, or a decade.
Thanks for reading. I wish you luck.