Allocating Time Is Better Than To Do Lists

Carl Pullein’s Time-Based Productivity tip is something I’ve incorporated into my daily practice. I recommend you give it a try.

What I read: “What is Time-Based Productivity?” by Carl Pullein.

I've written about productivity and personal development practices before. In “The Self-Improvement Strategy That Works For Me,” I explain how over the years I’ve tested many self-improvement and goal attainment strategies and how only one approach seems to consistently work for me. I also link to a bunch of my past writings on the topic in that post.

My process is to continually capture things and rearrange and prioritize them as I go. Plus, every morning and night I sit quietly with myself and think about my life and what I want to move toward at the time.

I think our obsession with hyper productivity is one of things wrong with our culture, especially American culture. Life is not a contest with the person checking off the most to do list tasks being the winner. That's not how life works.

Lately, I’ve added to my process exactly what Carl Pullein explains in his post. Apart from my own personal life organization system (I don't like the term productivity system because it still has that word productivity in it), the thing I’ve added is to undertake efforts of the time-based variety.

This is the essence of time-based productivity: not trying to control the uncontrollable but controlling what you have control over—how you allocate your time each day.

Transitioning from an unsustainable task-based system to a time-based one is tricky. It’s likely you have become conditioned to believe everything has to be done now, and if not now, it must be done before the end of the day. In reality, 90% of those items can wait until tomorrow or even next week.

To know which 10% should be done today takes practice. It also involves consistency; becoming consistent at something requires a little self-discipline. That’s not going to be easy.

But it’s not impossible. Not if you want to escape the daily grind of urgent, low-value tasks and a never-ending stream of messages, emails and requests from others.

Blocking off time versus remaining focused on individual tasks ends up being quite liberating. During my nighttime self-reflection periods, I decide how much time I want to spend on various areas of my life. I use four words – body, mind, people, and stuff – to help me focus on those areas that encompass the totality of life for me, and to make sure I’m moving forward in some tangible manner. I write about this specifically in “My Daily Practice.”

Timed activity doesn’t need to be onerous either. Some nights I do nothing more than write down that the next day I will dedicate 15 minutes each to exercise (body), reading or writing (mind), connecting with others (people), and organizing or purging (stuff).

Interestingly, what most often happens is that I reach the 15- minute mark and keep going. It’s not unusual for me to sit down to write for 15 minutes only to look up and realize I’ve been writing for an hour. The jumpstart of the shorter 15-minute guideline often provides me with all the nudge I need to spend more time on that area.

But, and this is really important because most of us are really good at beating ourselves up for “not doing enough,” if you make the low-bar deal with yourself to spend that hour (15 minutes in each of the four areas), or however much time you decide, and you do it, the sense of calm and serenity that manifests because you did what you said you were going to do is palpable. At least it has been for me.

Keep your expectations low. There’s nothing worse than setting a high bar of spending three hours on something only to end up spending two hours on it and somehow feel like you’ve failed. The phrase “under promise and over deliver” comes to mind.

Pullein concludes with this.

With Time-Based Productivity, it doesn’t matter how many emails, messages or tasks you have to do. If you allocate one hour to respond to your emails and messages each day and begin with the oldest first, you won’t be far off being on top of your emails each day.

You have a choice. You can continue to look for new ways to control the uncontrollable stuff that comes at you, or you can take control and move towards a more sustainable time-based system. A system where you allocate time for the critical work you do, and, if you have time left, you can spend time on the trivial, low-value stuff that disguises itself as urgent and important (it rarely is).

This is how I choose to proceed. I use my two-step personal process with the now added hack of creating time-bound activity sessions that help me focus without the unnecessary nagging feeling that I’m not completing an often arbitrary to do list that almost never contains tasks of equal importance or that are ideally prioritized.

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