How to get stuff done
3 things I do to stay organized and productive
Productivity has always puzzled me. Despite the fact that I’ve held many different jobs, I’ve spent very little time actually working in an office. (I’ve been a freelancer/remote employee for almost all of my work life.) I think that’s the reason I have no concept of how much people are supposed to be able to accomplish in one day and why I set such unrealistic expectations for myself. But I’m learning and that’s a topic for another day.
Now that I’ve returned to independent consulting, I get to choose the systems that work best for me (rather than being stuck with what HR and IT dictate). So here’s how I stay organized and productive.
1. I work for about an hour before anybody else in my house is awake.
This means getting up at 5:00 am to feed the pets, take the dog outside, and make a cup of coffee before settling into the sofa with my laptop. This idea may sound awful to you, but it’s the best part of my day.
There are, of course, the obvious advantages: My husband and kids are asleep so the house is quiet and no one asks me for anything or tries to make conversation with me. There are no meetings or Slack messages competing for my attention. But there’s something else at work here, too. I’ve always thought my focus was so sharp in the early morning hours because my mind is not fully awake (read: distracted).
But there may be more to it than that. According to Robert Carter, PhD, MPH, and co-author of Morning Mind, less than 1% of the population is genetically programmed to be night owls. And — get ready for this — our brains are actually bigger when we first wake up. Why? In the horizontal sleep position, your brain receives and retains more fluid. This insight comes from studies of patients with Parkinson’s Disease. As the day progressed and the brain lost fluid, the patients’ cognitive performance declined. Who knew?
Here’s how my early morning works: I commit to what I’ll work on the night before. And once I’m on the couch the next morning, I focus on that project or task until 6:45 am (when an alarm goes off, reminding me to make sure my youngest is up and getting ready for school).
In those 75 minutes, I am a machine. I accomplish more than I’m capable of doing in twice that amount of time later in the day. That’s why I reserve that hour for the hardest and/or most important thing I need to accomplish each day.
Getting a lot done in a short amount of time also makes the rest of my day more flexible, too. It allows me to go for a run when the sun comes out or to do a personal errand in the middle of the workday. And it breaks up my workday so I’m not sitting at my desk for too many hours in a row.
2. I use an analog notebook.
There are plenty of apps and fancy diaries you can use to track your to-do list and take notes, but I prefer a simple spiral notebook. Research shows that taking notes with pen and paper is associated with more robust brain activation and better recall. And that’s certainly been my experience. Here’s how I do it:
I turn to a new page every day and write the date at the top.
I fold the page vertically, aligning the outer edge of the page with the red margin on the left side of the notebook. This creates two columns.
I use the left-hand column for meeting notes, to organize my thoughts, and to record ideas I don’t want to forget.
I use the right column for tasks (my to-do list). I even draw a little empty check box next to each item and put a tick in there when I’ve done the thing.
To the left of the red margin, I write the names of each of my current clients. Since I bill by the hour for some projects, I use this space to record my time. Again, there are fancy apps and plug-ins that can do this for you, but I hate context switching, so I keep track in my old-school notebook.
Some people strongly believe in the separation of church and state. But since I live where I work and work where I live, I mingle the personal and the professional in the same notebook.
I wish I had bought identical notebooks in bulk years ago so they looked pretty in a photo like Austin Kleon’s do, but the truth is I usually use those fake Moleskin notebooks you get in swag bags or a spiral-bound notebook leftover from a school supply splurge. I do prefer the A4 size (roughly 8.5” x 11”) over the A5 even though the bigger size is a little more cumbersome to carry (yes, the notebook travels with me). The last time I was in New York I bought a three-pack of simple spiral notebooks from Muji that I love. If you’re overwhelmed by all the options, this notebook primer is worth a read.
3. I let my Google Calendar do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Here’s how:
In addition to my oh dark thirty work block, I try to carve out two additional hours for focus later in the day. If I didn’t do this, I’d end up with 30 minutes of “free time” here and there and I’d never be able to actually deliver the deliverables. Treat this focus time as sacred and people will learn to respect it. (In rare cases, I let people schedule over this, but everyone I work with knows that should be their last resort.)
I also create blocks for specific tasks as necessary (sometimes within my focus time). If I need to create a deck, write a website page, or offer feedback on some other document, I block the time to do it on my calendar. I even do this for errands I need to run and when I need to take 30 minutes of my day to get dinner in the crockpot. If you don’t want people to be able to see personal blocks, you can make them private so they’ll know you’re busy without knowing the details.
I create recurring blocks for tasks like logging my hours for clients at the end of each week (taking those numbers from the notebook and entering them into the digital time trackers each client uses) and billing clients at the end of the month.
Most of my communication with clients and collaborators happens in Slack, so connecting my Google Calendar to Slack helps set expectations. When people can see that I’m in a meeting or OOTO, they know not to expect an immediate response.
I also connect my calendar to Calendly to make it easier for people who don’t have access to my calendar to grab time with me. This eliminates the long email chains often required to find a mutually convenient time to talk. When someone needs 30, 60, or 90 minutes of my time, I can send them a link that allows them to choose the time that works best for them. The tool only offers times that are good for me as dictated by my Google Calendar and any other configurations I set on the back end. For instance, I only do discovery calls (chats with potential clients) on Thursday and Friday afternoons. So simple.
And while I use Google Calendar for work, I use an app called Cozi for the family stuff. I should probably move all that to a second Google Calendar instead, but the Cooper household is a large enterprise that resists change. Still, it’s easy to integrate the two. So all the family stuff — the PSAT, Mr. Man’s work travel, etc. — shows up on my work calendar so I’m aware of it, but I still appear “free.” It’s there for awareness unless I choose to have the family thing affect my work schedule. This week, for instance, I noticed my son’s home football game on the calendar, so I created an OOTO block to protect my time so I could attend the game.
In this piece, self-described minimalist Katie Lawrence talks about a few other Google Calendar blocks she swears by. And this piece, which is more of a how-to, gets really specific.
If you’ve got a tried-and-true productivity hack, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
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