How to Work Smarter: Do Less and Get More Done
It feels like we’re always busy.
Some days are a blur: before our feet hit the ground, our minds are racing. From there on in, every moment is filled with heavy traffic, goals set the day before are hijacked by some or other urgent priority.
But at the end of the day, what do we have to show for the busyness?
Many times, this is the nature of modern professional life. It’s as if the yearning we have to do something meaningful is at odds with the experience of work in the 21st century.
We want to spend our days engaged in work that sets our souls on fire. We want to become masters of our craft.This is what we all want. And I believe this type of fulfillment is available to us.
Three surprisingly simple strategies for smart work
There’s a moment when you realise you are not valuable in the economy, writes Cal Newport Deep Work.
For me, that lesson came at the start of my freelance writing career. I was always frazzled, working from early morning to late evening.
When the day was done, I sank into myself, hollowed out. The problem was that I thought this was the right way — the only way — to achieve anything worthwhile at all.
And in truth, I knew my writing wasn’t good enough to compete in the global economy. This stung but was too obvious to ignore. I worked with writers who were much better than me.
They were willing to teach me, but I knew if I was going to learn from them, I needed to make the time.
Soon, I realised:
I was useless when I didn’t get enough sleep. Late nights would need to go.
I wanted to be more present with my two young children. Being a mother didn’t mean I should pause my professional ambitions, but I needed to find ways to work that made sense for me.
That is still where I stand today. In my search, I found some strategies that shape the way I work.
“Juggling is an illusion”
To make the most impact in our work, we need to focus on one thing at a time.
That’s the key message in The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
“Juggling is an illusion…In reality, the balls are being independently caught and thrown in rapid succession. … It is actually task switching.”
In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwarz, counts the costs of the juggling act:
“Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.”
For me, juggling was my attempt to do too much. I battled to stick to one niche. I was trying to write about the blockchain, resume development, the green economy, and general news. It was a tiring and useless exercise.
Once I stuck to a single topic and learned everything I could about it, my writing — and my state of mind — improved instantly.
From then, my singular focus was to write the best online content for small business owners.
Keller and Papasan suggest the focusing question to direct your attention:
What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything will be easier or unnecessary?
By answering this question, you can begin to answer other important questions:
- Big picture questions: Where am I going? What target should I aim for?
- Small picture questions: What must I do right now to be on the path to getting the big picture?
When you’re this specific, you reframe your priorities, write Keller and Papasan:
“Going small is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most.
“It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realising that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.”
I struggle with this. (A peak at my Udemy dashboard will confirm.) But a good way to steer yourself is to keep your bigger goals in mind. The small picture is connecting your daily actions with that vision.
Even as you work to achieve your goals, rest remains key. Use the focussing question to determine your One Thing at home, too, writes Keller and Papasan.
“When you’re supposed to be working, work, and when you’re supposed to be playing, play. It’s a weird tightrope you’re walking, but it’s only when you get your priorities mixed up that things fall apart.”
Sticking to the One Thing is a powerful way to focus your energy in a noisy world. Once you commit to your One Thing, you are saying that everything else is a distraction.
Protect your peak
One summer evening in 1729, French researcher and astronomer, Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan, made a curious observation.
The plant perched on the windowsill would spread its leaves during the day and close at night.
Even when de Mairan moved the plant to a sunless cabinet, the plant, a Mimosa Pudica, followed the same dance; opening and closing its leaves, as if acting on an internal clock.
Just like the Mimosa Pudica, human beings “open” and “close” throughout the day, writes Daniel Pink in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
Our energy levels rise and fall, and when we understand these “hidden patterns” we’re able to better plan our days.
“We’re smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others,” writes Pink.
Throughout the day, we go through the following phases:
- Peak: we start the day off in a good mood
- Trough: in early afternoon our mood begins to dip
- Recovery: our mood picks up again in early evening
Our energy levels depend on our natural rhythms.
“Human beings don’t experience a day in precisely the same way. Each of us has a “chronotype” — a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology.”
Pink refers to research that uncovered these chronotypes:
- Early birds
- Night owls
- Third birds (somewhere in between early birds and night owls)
Larks and third birds experience their peak early in the day. This is the best time for them to do analytic work. The research shows larks do better at creative, insight tasks during midmorning. Third birds excel at creative tasks in the late afternoon and early evening.
On the other hand, owls started the day in recovery and ended in peak, writes Pink.
To find your time, answer the following questions about your behaviour on a free day, i.e., you don’t need to wake up at a specific time
- What time do you go to sleep?
- What time do you wake up?
- What’s the midpoint between that time?
Use your midpoint time to find your chronotype:
- Lark: 12am to 3am
- Third bird: 3am to 5am
- Owl: 6am to 12pm
One you find your “daily when” you can plan your schedule. For instance, I realise that I do better when I write first drafts later in the afternoon. Mornings, however, are best for revising articles.
Bury your head in the sand
Let’s face it: we’re surrounded by distractions.
Many of us need to go online as part of our work. Once we get there, it’s hard not to get sucked down a random internet rabbit hole.
Study after study shows online distractions will undo our attempts to focus. One piece of research showed even just having our phones in the same room can distract us.
When I was freelancing, I often worked with the Whatsapp Web browser tab open on my computer. I’d respond to emails and instant messages as they arrived. I took a long time to finish an article, and I enjoyed it less than I do now.
These days, I’m grateful that I can manage my work schedule to allow for uninterrupted, deep work. Most days, I block off peak productive time for writing and thinking. It means I have moments each day when I am engrossed in some part of the writing process. It’s deeply satisfying and my writing is better for it.
During this time, I pause my Slack notifications and make sure my email tab is closed. My cellphone is on silent and in a different room.
This is part of extending the idea of One Thing to give a single task our undivided attention.
What if you need to switch to a new task? You might experience attention residue.
Every time we switch from one task to another, we leave some of our attention on the previous unfinished task, found Sophie Leroy, Associate Professor at the University of Washington’s School of Business.
“It’s like Windows staying open in our brains, and it makes it hard to focus on the intervening work. As I am still thinking about Task A while trying to do Task B, I don’t have the cognitive capacity to process those two tasks at the same time and do a perfect job on both tasks,” said Leroy.
In a follow-up research paper, Leroy and co-author Theresa Glomb suggest writing a short “ready to resume plan” that covers:
- Where to resume
- What challenges are left
- What actions you need to postpone and will resume later
If I’m writing and need to work on something else, I’ll just write my ready to resume plan in a comment, e.g. needs links and screenshots
The life-changing power of doing less
Somehow busyness became a badge of honour. What are we getting in exchange for our time? Time should be our ally. We should be growing and learning, not reacting. Work should be an opportunity to achieve mastery of a skill or domain.
This means we need to pick productivity over pointless busyness. We need to choose focus over distraction.
