The 3 C’s: Productivity Schedule Planning
Returning to work after a long absence is an interesting experience. In discussing it with friends, I’ve often heard stories of women returning to work after having a baby feeling much less confident before, and in my own sabbatical period, I certainly noticed my own confidence ebb away in the absence of the daily drip-feed of tiny wins.
Having seen that my company not only survives but actually grows when I’m not there, my need to return isn’t necessarily a financial one (although “more money” and growth are on my priority list!) and having spent a lot of time in recent years working from home and not part of a team in an office, my return was perhaps unusual in that I had significant control over my own destiny in terms of daily and weekly routines. So it’s been a kind of blank canvas. Most of us have some degree of control or autonomy over how we set up our working lives, but the power within us to actually use it often gets lost in the day-to-day. On day one of my return, I had no day-to-day, so I thought I’d start with schedule design.
What I’m going to share with you is a mix of old and new. I’m returning to a few things here that I know have worked for me over the years, but accentuating them and going ‘all in’ on what I know works for me. It’s also taking into account two really important ‘problems’ I needed to solve:
The smartphone problem. I noticed in my sabbatical time that I’d become morbidly fascinated with Trump and Brexit, leaving me regularly sat at home with a vague sense of doom. It’s just not healthy for me. Twitter has become a cess pit, and it gets me down. Yet phones offer the easiest route to ‘looking busy’ when your brain feels idle and these days for most people, they fill in pretty much every gap in their attention. I need to occasionally dream, think or just be silent and bored to be creative and useful in my work. I had to solve this addiction problem (and it IS an addiction, by the way. If you’re reading this on your phone, do you really need me to make that clear?).
The child problem. Well, it’s not a problem as such, but I realised on my sabbatical that, for various reasons, I needed to put Roscoe first. Like, actually first. Before anything else. I’ve always found parents who say “my kids come first” vaguely annoying. I think it’s a bit pious but also that it lacks a bit of imagination (“I used to dream of professional successes or visiting all the football league stadiums, but now my biggest priority is buying Lego for a child’s birthday party”). Can I plead special circumstances? I’m a 50-50 single dad, with a special needs kid who requires A LOT of admin and is at a critical stage of his learning and development. I can’t spend time unfocussed or wishing these years away. He comes to me on Wednesday evenings and he’s either here until Saturday lunchtime or Sunday evening, depending on whether it’s mum or dad on the weekend shift. So being useful at work and showing up for him means maximising the first half of my week.
I’m also aware of the law of diminishing returns of attention. Most studies point to something like a 40 hour threshold as being the sustainability point for peak performance in more manual roles, hence Henry Ford’s designing of what we now refer to as the ‘typical 9-5’. Yet studies of knowledge work jobs tend to point to diminishing returns after around 30 hours a week. Personally I also work with an awareness what psychologist Roy Baumeister called ‘ego depletion’ – the idea that every act, every decision, every little effort to focus your attention or emotion onto something useful helps chip away at your ‘ego’ or self, until the well runs dry and you need refilling. It’s why you can sit at your desk at 4pm and just stare blankly at a screen when you’ve a list of useful stuff you should be doing. This operates for me on a daily and a weekly level, so broadly speaking I need to be doing the hardest or most skilled work earlier in the day and earlier in the week. It’s basically the ‘proactive to inactive attention’ concept from ‘Productivity Ninja’.
So you can probably see where this is going. Here’s my ‘business as usual’ week:
The timings here are largely irrelevant, but the 3 distinct ‘modes’ are useful:
Create
This for me is my ‘big rock’ time. My time to get down and work solidly on something where I can really add value. I tend to focus on one thing for each ‘period’. Think of it like school! It’s total focus, total solitude (I’m a natural introvert so luckily this doesn’t bother me or scare me, as it seems to other people – it feeds me).
Collaborate
This is where I open the doors, (metaphorically speaking, as I’m usually still in my shed). This is where my job switches to being about supporting other people in the work they do. It could be via emails, skype calls, meetings, coffees, or something else.
Chill
Chill is the one I find the hardest. I noticed during my sabbatical how guilty I would feel just curling up on the sofa to read a book and enjoy a moment. It’s something I struggle to do when the temptations are nearby. Baumeister’s work makes clear not only how important it is to ‘fill the well’, but also that self-control is a muscle, so developing my ability to chill, actually builds increased self-control in my brain, so that ‘ego depletion’ happens at a slower pace in future. The mindset that ‘chill’ is as important a priority as ‘work’ might seem strange – since it’s usually the thing we promise ourselves in that mystical never-land of ‘later’ - but it was one of the hardest and most profound lessons the sabbatical time taught me.
In part two of this post, I’ll look at the 3 C’s in more detail, and offer some reflections on the first few weeks of implementation.