Episode 40: Optimize Your Day of Work

Transcript

When I was getting started with my career, there was a certain point of time, I initially
came in to the organization as part of a small team.
We worked on website stuff and web applications and internal portals and, you know, that kind
of stuff, web developer work.
So when I first came in, I was part of a team, you know, getting my bearings at the place
and being handed projects to work on and all that kind of stuff.
Fast forward a little bit and I essentially ended up becoming a team of one through a
series of a combination of things.
There was, there were some layoffs, there was some restructuring, there were some retirements
and within my little pod, people who could do web development work, I essentially became
a team of, of one.
If you've never been a team of one, like, you know, really no one else to hand.
Work to or to share in those responsibilities.
It has its pros and cons.
There are some pros to it.
You really get to take ownership and control.
And, you know, at least for me, I was able to kind of guide my priorities in a way that
someone at my level generally wouldn't have been able to do because I was really the only
person doing the work.
So it was relatively easy to keep my own funnel of projects and priorities and all that kind
of stuff.
It also really gives you a opportunity to kind of develop and spread your wings, so to speak,
and work on a number of different sorts of things.
Cons are probably pretty obvious, too.
It's all on your shoulders, right?
And there's no one else to, and you really, usually your list is much longer than the time
you have in a day.
And, you know, not necessarily the way people should work.
At the time, at this organization, we were still doing quite a bit of internal web development.
I say at the time because longer, in the longer run, in the long term, eventually the organization
kind of moved away from internal development and moved over into mostly purchasing products
and purchasing services as opposed to building themselves internally.
So it's kind of a different time.
So in this work, there were many times that there were other departments, other teams,
whatever, within the organization who needed some sort of application built or redesigned
or reworked or, you know, ground up created or bugs to look at or, you know, whatever.
That was sort of the job.
So in the cases where you had, you were staring down, you know, large revamps or ground up
new efforts, you know, there were a lot of times you would need to sit down with those
people.
You know, this is all way pre-COVID, so everything was in person.
You would want to call a meeting and do a pretty in-depth requirements gathering session,
right?
Figure out what it is they were trying to accomplish, whether or not there was something that would
already fit the bill.
If you were going to build something, what was that going to look like?
Maybe do some wireframing, maybe do some storyboarding, like all that kind of stuff.
What I came to find really draining.
So I would schedule one of these meetings.
I'd schedule all these requirement sessions.
Be a great session.
I'd lead the session.
I'd get out of there.
Maybe it was an hour.
Maybe it was two hours.
Feel pretty energized.
Feel pretty ready to, you know, take things on, get back to my office, sit down, and then
realize that now I had to build all the things that I just gathered requirements around.
And due to a one, two, maybe more hours session of running this and whiteboarding and all this
kind of stuff, now I was tired.
Now I was like, whoo, and I couldn't just pick up that batch of requirements that we had
just done and just dive right into it.
And there was a good chance that probably there was some other project that was already floating
around that I was in the middle of working on.
And I found I was pretty exhausted for this too.
So it would take, you know, whatever, half an hour or an hour to kind of, maybe I'd answer
some emails, do whatever.
Or just try to get my energy level back up, maybe have some lunch, recharge, and then
try to get going.
I found this to be a pretty consistent pattern.
And it wasn't just requirements gathering sessions I eventually learned.
It was other things too.
It was, you know, you'd have that, that a few meetings in the morning, you'd sit down for
the afternoon and you'd be kind of just, or I'd be kind of just drained.
And it would take me longer to ramp up to a place where I can actually get the work done
that I'm trying to get done.
I've mentioned on this show before that there are times, there have been times in my life
where I've kind of dived in a very nerdy way into productivity.
I find productivity to be a really just generally interesting and an interesting rabbit hole.
You can really go down the rabbit hole.
It's like many other things where you can way over-optimize and way over-engineer.
And it's like some kind of weird circle where it loops back on itself.
You've become so productive that you become unproductive.
But I do enjoy those types of, you know, trying to make small changes that make sort of a big
impact on what you can get done through a day.
So based on some of this stuff that was repeatedly occurring to me, again, to be fair, on a team
of one person really.
But what I eventually came around to the conclusion of, and it's sort of the productivity thing
that I wanted to, it's like a tip that I, you know, if you have any agency over your day
and how you work through your day, this is something if you haven't tried it, I think it's
worth considering because once I made this switch, it really made a big difference in how much
I was able to get done through the course of the day.
So working under the assumption that you, your approximate work hours are something like
nine to five or eight to four, adjust that.
So adjust all of these timeframes based on when your actual work hours are.
But let's just say you start working around 830.
The hypothesis here is a 10 a.m. meeting is where productivity goes to die.
This is sort of the approach that I started taking with things.
It's so commonplace, I find, for people to schedule a 10 o'clock meeting.
You know, call it 10, 1030, whatever.
The reason I think that gets scheduled so often is that, you know, 8 or 9 seems a bit early.
They probably want to have a cup of coffee.
You don't want to get to 11 or 12 because you're starting to chew into lunchtime.
And you want to get it done in the early part of the day because you figure, well, that leaves the afternoon open to do other things or whatever.
So you land around 10.
Here's some of the problems with this.
The first is how the morning ends up unfolding then because you end up spending your first hour, hour and a half, basically just sitting around waiting for the meeting, right?
In some capacity.
Maybe you're answering some emails.
Maybe you're doing a thing or two.
But you can't get too deep into anything because if it takes more than an hour, hour and a half, you're going to get interrupted.
And you know you've got the meeting coming up.
So maybe there's a little bit of prep work you do for the meeting.
That's the other thing that could happen.
So now you're prepping for the meeting.
But maybe the prep doesn't take the full hour, hour and a half from when your day started until 10 o'clock rolls around.
So you're still wasting time.
In some capacity, the first hour, hour and a half of your day is kind of a waste.
Then you do the meeting.
Let's say it runs from 10 to 11.
Now you've only got an hour, hour and a half, maybe two before lunch.
So now what are you going to do?
Now you're kind of hungry.
Your coffee might be starting to wear off.
You know, it's like 11, 11.30.
You're not really sure what to get into.
So now you're wasting more time.
And then you get around to the afternoon after you have your lunch and stuff.
And now you're tired.
Now you've got your afternoon dip and you're not nearly as awake or alert as you were back during the 10 o'clock meeting.
And this 10 o'clock meeting, if you do it enough time, I'm saying this happens every time, right?
Like obviously, if everyone just had one 10 o'clock meeting and that was all they did for the rest of, for their entire work week every day, that'd be pretty unproductive society.
I'm just saying it always felt less optimal to me.
I always felt a little more tired at the wrong times and a little more awake at the wrong times.
And it just never, it never seemed to jive.
The research is also pretty clear that for most people, your highest productivity window is generally that 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. ish time frame.
For most people, that's when you're most alert and most ready to get into things in a very cognitively active way.
So here's my suggestion instead.
And again, I started doing this and it did make a huge difference.
Ultimately, I fell out of it.
And I fell out of it eventually mostly because my volume of meetings got so high, there was just nowhere left to put them.
But anyway, if you are able to do so, try a schedule where you never book a morning meeting.
All of your meetings should be 1 p.m. or later.
This gives you your morning to always focus in on what you're going to be doing, what you need to do for that day while you're at your most alert.
Now, you might think to yourself, okay, but then I'm going to have to slog through these afternoon meetings while I'm tired.
And that is probably true at first for the first few minutes of the meeting.
But research also shows very clearly that for most people, if you are engaged in a productive and useful conversation with other people vis-a-vis a actually well-run good meeting, it will help you become more alert.
You will become engaged.
You will kind of wake up.
It's a way of almost system-shocking yourself out of that afternoon slump.
I made this change for a good couple of years, I think, and it really made a huge difference.
It gave me this 9 a.m. until, let's call it 12 or 1 o'clock, depending on when I decided to grab some lunch, a good three to four hours of clear-minded, get-right-into-it,
block the world out, block the world out, and get my work done.
And then in the afternoons, when I was going to be kind of run down anyway, I would go to the meetings or I would book all my meetings I needed to book for any given day.
And I found that once I was in the meeting, I might drag for the first 5-10 minutes, but then I'm awake.
Then I'm engaged.
Then I'm interacting with other people.
And it all kind of flowed very nicely.
It also then provided a great way to kind of help set the to-do list for the next day.
Because you have all of your meetings and whatnot in the afternoon.
You end your day in that way.
And then you're thinking to yourself, okay, so for tomorrow's morning session, morning work session, here's what I've got to do next.
And you're all teed up and ready to go.
As an added bonus, research also shows, and I, again, from personal experience, kind of find this to be true.
So there's often another kind of smaller productivity alertness boost in the mid to late afternoon, like the 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. time slot somewhere.
So hypothetically, if you worked from, I mean, sort of an ideal work day, if you can swing it, is something like start work at 8.39 o'clock, do heads down work on whatever it is you're doing from about 8.39 until noon or 1.
Grab your lunch, whatever.
Have your meetings booked, say 1 p.m., 2 p.m., 3 p.m., that time slot or that general window.
So get done that last meeting, let's call it 3, 3.30 with any luck.
And then you've got an hour, hour and a half to knock out a little bit more of whatever it is you need to be doing, or maybe that's your email time or whatever.
But that late afternoon time slot is where you can also get a little bit, like, you know, squeeze a little more blood from the stone, I suppose, if you're in a role where that's, you know, something you need to be doing every day.
So anyway, just thought I'd share the tip, found this to be really useful while I could swing it.
Maybe you're in a role, you can do this, maybe you're not.
But if you are, give it a whirl.
If you're finding that you're struggling with productivity and you're struggling with meetings and you're finding that you're exhausted coming out of them and whatever, give it a shot.
But I really found it to be a huge benefit when I was doing that.