Tag

Prioritization Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

May 07
0

1150: How to Reclaim Your Schedule and Own Your Time with Laura Vanderkam

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Productivity expert Laura Vanderkam shows you how to take charge of your schedule so that you can make time for what truly matters.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you feel like you don’t have enough time–and how to change it
  2. How setting aside 15 minutes can change your whole workday
  3. How to become the ringmaster of your schedule circus

About Laura

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. 

Her 2016 TED talk, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time,” has been viewed more than 5 million times. She regularly appears in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. 

She is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and four children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Laura Vanderkam Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back!

Laura Vanderkam
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Time. You’ve got a simple path for us for time abundance. And we talked a little bit about this notion of time scarcity versus abundance last time. Tell me, what have you discovered with your new research adventures?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, Big Time is all about moving beyond a sense of time scarcity, and what happens when we truly believe that we have enough time for the things that we want to do in life. I really do think it is possible to fall in love with our schedules, and I’ve got lots of practical tips, talked to lots of people who are making it happen. I think that time can, ultimately, be our friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds enticing. Can you share with us some of the on-the-ground investigative research studying you did to discover these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, one thing I did is looking at how people spend their work hours. And how people feel about work is a very complicated question.

You know, if you ask people, in general, how do they feel about their jobs, most people will say they’re reasonably satisfied. If you look at people’s happiness during the day, like in a 10:00 a.m. staff meeting, they tend to be pretty unhappy. Like, they are watching the clock, hoping that time is moving faster.

So we have this, you know, gap between, like, we’re reasonably happy with our jobs overall, but during the hours we are spending at our jobs, we may not be as happy as we could be. And I really hate to have people wishing time away in their lives because time is so precious.

So one of the things I had people try out is a couple of strategies for making the experience of working hours better. Like, are there things you can do during an average work day to have you watching the clock less? And they’re pretty simple strategies.

I mean, one was spending one more hour per week on your favorite sort of work. We all have things we don’t like about our jobs but, hopefully, there’s something that drew us to the job in the first place. And so spending one more hour a week on that.

Spending just 15 minutes deepening a work friendship. So even if you’re not enamored with your job itself, like you probably have at least one colleague that you could be friendly with, and building a relationship with that person can make the experience of time at work a lot better.

And, finally, taking intentional breaks, taking two short breaks each day that you have decided ahead of time what to do with, turns out can also vastly increase the happy feelings at work. And so taken altogether, when I had a couple hundred people try these out over the course of three weeks, their workday satisfaction rose significantly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, if folks are in a situation where they’re not enjoying their job, the idea of spending more time working, like your first tip there, might seem very unpleasant, like, “Heck, no. I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to.”

Laura Vanderkam
No, not that you need to be clocking 41 hours a week instead of 40. No, I mean, re-purposing some of the time that you are already working. And even when people don’t have a ton of control, a ton of discretion over how they spend their working hours, there are often still things you can do to change it on the margin.

Whether that’s asking your supervisor to assign you to something different than what you’ve been or to spend a little bit more time on one project and try to be a little bit more efficient on something else.

There’s always things you can do just on the margins to increase the number of minutes spent on enjoyable activities versus less enjoyable activities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so the re-purposing, that’s a great distinction. Although, I might suggest, you tell me, that even if you do spend the 41st hour instead of 40 hours, well, I’m thinking of Mary Poppins got that tune in my head, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

Laura Vanderkam
That’s true. That’s true. It might be worth a 41st hour just to change the experience of work. You know, it’s so true. I mean, there was one ridiculous study I read with psychology that had people put their hands in freezing cold water.

And when they made it slightly less cold at the end, people rated the experience as so much better. And so maybe it’s the same thing if you spend the last, you know, 15 minutes of your work day, but maybe even if you work 15 minutes later on something you really enjoy doing, maybe that could make the whole experience different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, and the notion that you’re taking control as opposed to work is happening to you, it’s like, “No, no, no, this is the 41st hour. I am choosing to do this discretionarily.”

And in so doing – and I’m just totally making this up, so give me your hot take – that you can have some transformative impact on your own associations and relationship to the experience of work by going there.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, and I think having that mindset of, “I have some agency over this situation,” is huge. And, again, I know a lot of people don’t have complete control over their work or their working hours. But even if you don’t have complete control, you have some. And using whatever agency you have to make your time better can just change how you feel about life in general.

I mean, we don’t spend the majority of our waking hours working. There’s that adage that, “Oh, you spend the majority of your waking hours working.” Most people do not. But, that said, we do spend a fair number of hours working.

And so if there is something you can do to move those hours out of the wishing-time away category and into even the neutral category, that can be a major life satisfaction boost. And something like deepening a work friendship.

I mean, you think about a friend as somebody that you would spend time with off the clock. So wouldn’t it be exciting to be able to spend more time with somebody that you enjoy on the clock? And, in general, friendships are built through the accumulation of relaxed, pleasant time spent together. So the more you can throw at that pile, the better.

Pete Mockaitis
And with regard to these categories of the experience of work, can you unpack a little bit of the names of the categories, how you kind of think about which vibe is appropriate for a given activity, the tracking, a little bit of the nuts and bolts for these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
I think one way to think about how you’re spending your time at work and how you’re feeling about your time at work is to give yourself, honestly, a mood score or an energy score as you go through your day.

I’m a big fan of time tracking, in general. I’ve found, through other research I’ve done, that when people track their time for a week, they tend to feel better about their time overall because it turns out that many of the catastrophic stories people tell themselves about their time are not true, right? Life isn’t actually all that bad.

We don’t work around the clock. We do get some sleep. We have some time for ourselves, even if it’s not as much as we want. And so as you’re tracking time, you could also keep track of, “How do I feel about my time? Am I happy?” Is it all clouds and rainbows and unicorns? Or is it, “I’m hating the universe?” and sort of somewhere between zero and 10. And probably most of the things we do in life are around a five or a six. But maybe some stuff is better.

And if you are going through your work day and you find that some categories of work are edging up, like you’re feeling like this is maybe a seven or if it’s in certain circumstances, it might be even an eight, well, obviously, if you can come up with a way to spend an extra hour of the week in that seven or eight category, as opposed to maybe a two, three, four kind of category, you’re going to see a big boost in overall satisfaction.

Same thing with energy. Actually, it’s interesting, because one of the problems that creating intentional breaks helps solve is that people’s energy dips a lot through the day. People have been working for a while, and then you feel like you need a break, but if you don’t take an intentional break, you’ll probably take an unintentional one. For many people that looks like scrolling around online, checking email after you just checked it five minutes ago.

And so if you find yourself with your energy dipping, like that’s trending down, maybe 10 as you’re ready to run a marathon and zero as you’re flat on your back, that’s a good sign that it’s time to build in something that would boost your energy, something like taking a quick walk, talking with somebody you like, getting some fresh air.

And as people try that, they’re going to find that the numbers after that break start trending higher.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us just plenty of fun stories in terms of practical, tactical, experiential, individuals who figured out how to make that switch to re-purpose an hour to have more engaging goodness, what they did for their breaks, and how that was transformative?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, sometimes it’s about noticing the work that is already there and savoring it when you’re doing it, because so much of life can just be mindless. Like, you’re going through the day, you’re doing stuff, but your mind is somewhere else, so you’re always thinking about the next thing.

So, for instance, one health care provider who was part of the study would take a minute to look at her schedule coming up and what was going on. And she realized that some of her favorite visits were with babies, right? She loved to have babies come into the office and take care of them and talk to the new parents about how they were doing.

And so when she would see these on her schedule, she would consciously be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to this, right? I’m getting to do this favorite work coming up in one of my patients this afternoon, and would savor it while it was happening and take a moment afterwards to pause and be like, ‘Yes, I love doing that. That’s my favorite kind of work.’”

And, you know, the kids were on the schedule anyway, right? The same patients are coming no matter what, you know, if her mind is somewhere else or if she’s fully absorbed and enjoying this. But her experience of work was so much different by anticipating, experiencing, savoring in the moment and reflecting on it afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super – the anticipating, savoring, and looking back. Boy, that’s powerful. You can do that with just about every day, there’s something worthwhile.

Laura Vanderkam
It could be even that you had a great conversation with a colleague before a meeting.

Like, you can pause and notice that, be like, “Oh, yeah, I like that person. That was a moment in my job that was a wonderful thing.” And it’s the same with you mentioned the breaks, like, stories of people taking breaks. This was almost people had to teach themselves to take good breaks.

I always say people take breaks anyway. People cannot work straight through. Even if it’s just to go to the restroom, there’s some break happening in any sort of work. The problem with a lot of information work is that they are unintentional breaks.

Like, you are going along, doing your work, you get distracted by something, you’re on your phone for a minute. Next thing you know, you’re cycling through headlines, you’re checking your WhatsApp messages. These are breaks, but it doesn’t feel rejuvenating at all.

So I was having people really learn to take real breaks. And some people were very nervous about it at the beginning. Like, I had people, you know, somebody printed out an e-book so it looked like they were working on a document while they were taking a break.

But I’m happy to report that, over the course of trying this out for a while, people realized like the earth does not crash into the sun when you take a 10-minute break. Most of us are just not that important. So you can do it.

And somebody would go outside and sit and look at the sky for 10 minutes and come back in. And it’s pretty hard to tell yourself, “I am starved for time,” when you’ve had 10 minutes to just kind of watch the clouds. And just little things like that can change your entire experience of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really good in that, by physically doing a thing, it’s like your brain gets the memo, “No, actually, you’re not wildly scarce in time because look what just happened.”

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, we could change our story like that all the time. Our time narratives are based all on what we are noticing. So training our brains to notice things that are not just these stressful moments can completely rewrite the story from one of time scarcity to time abundance.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to these breaks, so you say two 10-minute breaks and just build them into the day, is that like one in the afternoon, one in the morning?

Laura Vanderkam
Sure, whatever works. I kind of think of these as in addition to a meal break that people might take in the middle of the day. But, obviously, you could add on a few minutes to take a longer lunch break instead if that works better for your schedule.

Some breaks are formal. Sometimes people are, like, you take it at this specific time. For a lot of people, it’s more you catch it when you can. But looking at your schedule ahead of time and kind of proactively choosing when might work is another very smart way to exert agency over your schedule for the day.

Because that sort of strategy is what can then have you say, like, “Oh, well, look, I actually have a longer break between these two meetings, and I could do something else. I could work on some of my favorite work in addition to taking a break.” And when you start to see those kinds of things, you take more charge of your working day.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share with us some breaks that folks have just been loving in terms of finding them super rejuvenating? Staring at the sky sounds fun. What else do you recommend?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, anything that can get you moving physically is going to be a big win. There’s some pretty solid evidence that people who engage in physical activity will see their energy levels go up quite a bit, even through very short bursts of energy.

So if it is possible to get outside and go for a brisk walk, that is going to be at least two things right there that will boost your mood and energy. If you can take a work friend with you, good. That’s even, like, three. That could be even better.

But so people definitely enjoyed that. Now, obviously, you can’t always get outside. But are you somewhere that you could go up and down the stairs even? That would make people feel much more alert than they had.

You know, I had people take, like, little adventures. If there is, say, a park near your office, you might be able to walk out the door, walk there for 10 minutes and come back and have the boost of seeing something different in the course of your day.

But it could be other things. It could be calling a friend. It could be listening to something inspirational like a soaring movie soundtrack. People might find that a little bit exciting. Meditation works for people. Reading something, especially something upbeat.

Even if you, like, read something fun for 10 minutes twice a day, that’s 20 additional minutes of reading you’ve gotten in your day. And if you do that five days a week, that’s 100 minutes, which is an hour and 40 minutes. Like, this is a lot, you know, it does add up. You could probably read an extra book a month that way if you wanted to.

People looked at art online. Even, you know, watching funny videos, as long as you’re doing it intentionally. I think a lot of people are just sort of, you know, pull up YouTube shorts and see what’s there, which, you know, I get it.

But if you have maybe saved up a clip from a favorite stand-up comedian or a clip from a favorite sitcom that you used to watch back in the day, those can be the kind of things that will make you laugh, and a laugh will boost your energy quite a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, and I’m a believer in breaks. In this office, it’s wild. I’ve got like a little basin of water I will dip my face into. I’ve got a little rebounder trampoline I’ll just jump on. I’ve got an acupressure mat. I’ll lie on it. I’ll stand on it. I joke that it’s the recording studio and wellness spa with all these amenities.

And it’s so true. When I really stop and engage with these things, it creates a great energy boost as opposed to, if you blast straight through, it’s like the body will demand a pause. And so often, yes, it is a scrolling of some sort. I like your phrase – an unintentional break asserts itself.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I refer to that as our electronic hobbies, right, because it fills so much time. And a hobby could be a great thing to do on a break, particularly if you work from home some days. I mean, you know, 10 minutes you could go play a musical instrument.

You could go do some knitting, or needle point, or color in one of those adult coloring books, or even go outside and weed a few things in the garden, if that would be, you know, something you’d find relaxing. But instead, we tend to default to these electronic hobbies of scrolling around, reading social media comments, opening your inbox again, even though you just opened it five minutes prior.

And by naming that as a hobby, I think it gives people pause, because it’s like, “Well, that’s not what I’d choose to do as my hobby.” It’s like, “Okay, well, then we need to re-purpose that time for something that you find more enjoyable.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super. Let’s talk a little bit about the tracking of time. It seems there are many tools that would love to avail themselves in this domain. What have you found works great for you and for others in doing this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, so I’ve been tracking my time for about 11 years now. Nobody else needs to do that, but I have been doing that because I find it very useful and it’s also very easy. And I just check in three to four times a day, write down what I’ve done since the last time I checked in.

Each check-in takes me about a minute. You know, three minutes a day, same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth. So it is not something that I find incredibly onerous. But I just use spreadsheets. It is a basic Excel, standard thing.

It’s got the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, 5:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. So 336 cells representing the 168-hour week, and I just fill it in as I go.

However, that’s not the only way you could do this. There are lots of time tracking apps on the market.

My podcast co-host on “Best of Both Worlds,” Sarah Hart-Unger, was having trouble tracking her time for years, even though I was constantly preaching the benefits of it. And she came across Toggl, T-O-G-G-L, which has a free version that is a more digital version of this.

Like, you just… it’s on your phone, you say what you’re doing, start and stop. You can go back in and correct the record later if you’ve forgotten to hit stop, and so you’ve been commuting for the last six hours. You can go back in and change it later.

But she found that fairly intuitive and something that fit in with her busy life. So that’s something that people could give a whirl. You could also walk around, like, with a little notebook. You want to look all artsy, like, “I look at my journal as I’m going through the day.” That works too.

Like, the tool itself doesn’t really matter. It’s more like, “Can you do it? Will you do it? Will you stick with it for at least a few days?” and, ideally, a week. And if you do, I think you’ll learn a lot about your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, and I’d love to zoom out and get some of your big-picture perspectives. You’ve got a mindset or metaphor of being the ringmaster. Can you expand on this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, this is probably one of my favorite metaphors for time and how we think of our lives. So when people tell you, “My life is a circus,” they tend to mean it is chaotic. But that is such a slander against circuses because circuses are the most organized performance you will ever see.

Nobody is getting shot out of a cannon at the wrong time, right? If there are supposed to be tigers in one ring, they are not in another ring. They’re not coming on at the wrong time. They are there when they are supposed to be there, right? And so I think we should aspire to have our lives be as organized as a circus. A circus is complex, but it is not chaotic at all.

And so I’ve developed this metaphor of, like, I am the ring master in charge of my life. My life has three rings, right? So this is a three ring circus of career, relationships – so meaning friends and family – and self, the things I need to do for my own physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health.

So all the time, you are monitoring all three rings, you are making sure that what is supposed to be happening in each ring is actually happening, that the logistics are thought through, that this all looks like a good time. And one of the additions of this metaphor is that a lot of circus performers, acrobats and stuff, perform over a net. And the net is there for when things go wrong.

And, to my mind, a net is a net, but I have interviewed circus performers and they have informed me that, “Oh, no, no, no, no, the net has to be very well thought through. The net is exactly where it’s supposed to be. The net is inspected frequently. We train ourselves on how we land in that net so that we don’t injure ourselves if we fall or something goes wrong.”

And so I was like, “Wow, that’s a good metaphor for life, too. We all need nets under ourselves. We need backup plans for when things go wrong. We need to actually think of those backup plans. Like, do they work?”

It’s not just, like, “Oh, I think maybe if my kid is sick on a day I have a big presentation, I could avail myself of this backup plan.” It’s like, “Well, no, no, no. Let’s make sure. Let’s test that net. Let’s make sure it’s there.”

But when you do that, the circus can go off with much less stress, with much less worry that when something goes wrong, it turns into a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super and inspiring. Like, we should be so lucky to have it.

Laura Vanderkam
We should all be a circus. We should be a circus. And not just that, you want to manage it for delight, right? Another part of the metaphor is that a circus isn’t cool if it’s all drudgery. Like, if people are just going through with no smiles on their faces as they’re doing their tricks.

You want to make it look like it’s enjoyable. And as we manage the complex but not chaotic three-ring circus of our lives. We want to make it look like a real performance and truly enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your philosophy on embracing your golden hours?

Laura Vanderkam
So the golden hours are the hours after work and before bed. If you think about how people talk about the golden years for retirees after they stop working, they have time for leisure and family, it’s the same that we get a miniature version every weekday evening.

After you’re done working, you get time for leisure and family. However, many people find this time incredibly hard to use well. And that is because we are tired, right? We’ve used up a lot of energy in the course of the day. In many cases, it’s this march toward bedtime. And sometimes people are even counting minutes as they are getting through the evening.

And again, time is precious. I hate to have people wish any time away. So I am all about embracing our golden hours. Partly that’s just a mindset. If you think of that time after work and before bed as your golden hours, you’re going to have a different mindset than if you’re thinking of it as a second shift or just the time that’s left over after work.

I think it’s a good idea to set just small, possibly low energy intentions for the evening so it feels like something happened, right? So it’s not just all this time passed between the end of work and bed. It’s like, “Oh, well, I did a puzzle for 30 minutes,” or, “I went for a walk outside with my family for 30 minutes,” “We had ice cream on the patio because it’s nice outside tonight.”

And if you have something you can point to that you enjoyed that actually happened in the evening, you’ll feel more like this time exists and life isn’t all just these have-to-do’s. There’s some want-to-do’s in there as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Golden hours, golden years. Understood. I guess I’m thinking about, in the universe of time tracking, I find that sometimes our hangups are not so much about having the time available to deploy on something, but finding the will, the audacity, the motivation to push past resistance or avoidance to go make amazing things happen with time.

So it’s, like, sometimes time is the bottleneck resource, and other times it’s more of like an emotional will type vibe. How do you think about these two resources in conjunction with each other?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I think time gets blamed for all sorts of things, that it is not really a time matter. When I have people track their time, often people find that they have a reasonable amount of discretionary time. It’s just that a lot of it happens in chunks that we haven’t thought about, right?

We haven’t thought ahead of time, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to have four hours after work and before bed. Only two of those are going to be spent on childcare,” for instance, “I’ve got two hours after that. What would I like to do with it?”

But, you know, by that time, you’re kind of tired and at the end of your rope and feel like you’re out of energy and out of sorts, and that’s the end of it. And so nothing happens except those electronic hobbies, as we talked about earlier.

I think intention goes a long way. So if you know that this evening you are going to go play a board game with your partner or something, like, you’ve got that on your brain, you’re managing your energy toward it so you’re not surprised by it and feeling sort of resistance to it in the moment, even though it’s something you actively chose to want to do.

So knowing it ahead of time is often helpful for sort of getting ourselves in the mindset for doing something. When my kids were little, I would sometimes even think about that, like coming into the evening, “What could I suggest that we do that I wouldn’t hate so I don’t get, like, ambushed by the request to play Candy Land, which I definitely did not want to do?”

So it’s that kind of thing. Like, can you go into it with an intention? Because the intention will shape how you handle your energy going into it. I think, also, you got to be careful about making sure you’re setting intentions for yourself to do things you truly want to do.

And I think a lot of people just have not thought about this. The things they say they want to do are not things they actually want to do. And so it’s like you get to that time in the evening, you’re like, “I need to learn Spanish.” Do you actually want to learn Spanish? Like, is that something you’re telling yourself you should do?

Or, you know, is it just, you know, the thing that feels responsible and productive to do with your leisure time, like, “I should be on Duolingo”? Well, you know, maybe you don’t want to be. Is there something else that you feel less resistance to?

And if that is the case, maybe you should re-shape your goals to be more in the direction of things you truly do want to do, like things that make you feel more energized when you think about them, as opposed to thinking like, “I don’t want to,” in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a really good distinction. And we might have any number of “shoulds” that, like, “I should learn this language,” “I should build big muscles,” “I should learn AI, apparently.” Do we all need to know AI?

Laura Vanderkam
That’s another one. We’re all going to be behind the game on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So any pro tips on distinguishing between a should and a genuine desire of our heart, our values?

Laura Vanderkam
I think paying attention to that energy that you feel with something. If you think about like, “Ooh, that sounds exciting,” or, like, “I feel a little bit more energized as I think about it.” I’m not saying it’s going to be automatically easy, but like if you saw it on your calendar, like somebody had put “Spend two hours doing X,” like, would you be excited about it?

You know, some things I would, like having dinner with a friend. Absolutely. Like, reading one of my favorite books. Yes, I would. Learning Spanish, not so much. That’s not one of my goals. So I think that can help quite a bit.

In general, in life, I’m always encouraging people to spend less time on the things you are trying to talk yourself into. You might want to spend a little more time on the things that you are trying to talk yourself out of, because it sounds logistically difficult, or it’s outside your comfort zone. Like, those are things you can deal with.

Where that comes up and people are like, “Oh, you know, it would be so cool to sing in a choir again. I really enjoyed that in college, but I’m a busy person. I have a job. I have a family. I can’t make time for that.”

But that’s when you’re talking yourself out of something. Whereas, if you’re talking yourself into it, like, “Well, I should learn Spanish,” “I should be doing this,” those are things that maybe are not the direction to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a master key right there. Wow! It’s so funny because that really does cut to the heart of it. When you’re talking yourself out of something, it means that you have a desire. It’s there and you’re fighting against it, by definition, it’s like, “Oh, that’s not practical. That’s too expensive. It’s like, I’ve got all these other responsibilities.” So that’s really intriguing. And I guess, sometimes, I see a two-by-two matrix in my mind’s eye, Laura.

Laura Vanderkam
Oh, boy.

Pete Mockaitis
You can’t take the consultant out of me. There’s the internal desire and then there’s the argumentation. And sometimes you don’t argue with yourself at all. It’s like, “I should really get a burrito. Yeah, let’s do it.”

Laura Vanderkam
“Let’s do it. We’re on it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s that. And then it goes in every combination of the two-by-two. And so, yeah, I think that you’re right. That really is a zone of opportunity there in terms of you have the desire and yet you’ve been talking yourself out of it. Maybe go ahead and give it a try.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, you know? I mean, logistics can be figured out. You can always try something for a while and see how it goes, too, right? You can go back to life as it was after a trial period or whatever, but you might be surprised at what you can fit in.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, Laura, tell me, any critical insights you want to make sure How to be Awesome at Your Job listeners hear before we hear about your favorite things?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, I’m always preaching the time tracking. So if anyone’s listening to this and thought, “Well, hmm,” I’m going to say, well, that’s maybe a should that we should try at one point in our life.

Because I do think many of us walk around with stories about our lives that just aren’t true, that, “I work around the clock,” or, “I’m working late every night,” or, “I spent my entire weekend working,” “I never see my family,” “I don’t get enough sleep,” or, “I sleep terribly all the time,” “I never have free time,” all these things, “I spend my life doing housework,” various stories that people tell themselves.

And almost universally, time tracking will show that those stories are incomplete, right? Even if you work long hours, you are probably not working around the clock. There are probably some other hours where you are awake and not working. And so you can see where those happen and maybe start thinking about, “Well, what would be the best thing for me to do during that time?”

You may have a bad night or two. Many people do, but often, over the course of the week, we tend to average out toward what our bodies are needing. And when you see that, you might start thinking, “Huh, well, given that I’m not saving any time by sleeping less on Tuesday and crashing on Saturday, maybe I could try to get the same amount of sleep every night and feel better and more energetic overall.”

You might see that there is some discretionary time, but, you know, what you spend that doing is kind of up to you, and that’s the nature of discretionary time. And sometimes we’re spending more of it than we like on our electronic hobbies, but we can do something about that, right?

We can challenge ourselves to do things that sound a little bit more fun, rejuvenating, relaxing, you know, for just a few minutes before going toward that YouTube binge for the rest of the night. So I really do think that time tracking will make time feel more abundant.

And you can believe me or not, but I did have several hundred people try it and they felt better about their time afterwards. So I take comfort from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Now could you share your favorite quotes, something you find inspiring?

Laura Vanderkam
So many years ago, one of the first people I interviewed about how she spent her time told me that “I don’t have time” means it’s not a priority, and that has stuck with me forever.

And there may be consequences to making different choices, but it reminds us that time is a choice. And also it means that I never tell anyone now that I don’t have time to do something.

Pete Mockaitis
You just tell them they’re not a priority?

Laura Vanderkam
It’s not a priority, sorry. I try to be nicer about it, but, you know, that is fundamentally what it comes down to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Laura Vanderkam
I would say that the one I mentioned earlier about people just getting short bursts of activity, like, five, 10 minutes of physical activity, their scores on an energy scale went from, like, a three to an eight or something. It was, really, I’m misquoting it here, but the idea is that it doesn’t take much. And we can’t make more time but we can definitely change our energy levels.

And when you feel more energetic, you can just do more than if you feel less energetic. So even though you can’t make more time, you can sort of have the equivalent of making more time by paying attention to how, you know, where your energy levels are and what you can do to get them back up again.

Pete Mockaitis
And, to be clear, five-ish minutes of activity raises the energy level for hours, or…?

Laura Vanderkam
At least an hour. I remember from that particular study, people took like five minutes to do a burst of activity. And then their levels right afterwards, I think, it was a nine. And then an hour later, it was still north of a six. So if you go from a three to the rest of the hour spent north of a six, like, how could you not be getting more done? That’s the difference between feeling like you’re flat on your back and feeling like, “Hey, I can do stuff with my life.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And a favorite book?

Laura Vanderkam
This is, honestly, what I read in the course of writing Big Time is I read War and Peace, and I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
I just got War and Peace.

Laura Vanderkam
Okay, you should read it. Yeah, I mean people look at it, and it’s like, “That’s a really big book,” and it’s true. But it is very accessible. It has 361 very short chapters. So if you read one chapter a day for a year, it only takes a couple minutes each day and you’ll get through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key habit?

Laura Vanderkam
So I have started listening to, like, all the works of a particular composer over the course of a year for the past three years. So this year, I am listening to Mozart in the car.

And that’s a lot better than other things I could probably be listening to. And so it has definitely upgraded the running around that tends to happen in my life. So that music choice habit has definitely elevated my listening game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Laura Vanderkam
Please come visit me at LauraVanderkam.com. You can learn more on my website about my books and podcasts. You can get time tracking spreadsheet if you want to do that. You can also reach out to me at Laura@LauraVanderkam.com. I love hearing from people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Laura Vanderkam
Maybe today you could think about what your favorite sort of work is and challenge yourself to spend just a few more minutes on that favorite sort of work, and then reflect afterwards on how it went. And I think you’ll change the experience of your work day completely.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, thank you.

Laura Vanderkam
Thanks so much for having me.

Nov 06
0

1108: How to Think, Act, and Achieve Like an “A-Player” with Rob Monson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Rob Monson reveals how professionals can become A-players—and what leaders can do to retain them.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hard truth many leaders don’t want to accept
  2. What A-players do differently from the rest
  3. The simple trick to get a day back every week

About Rob

Rob Monson, founder of Tenfold Advisors, is Utah’s leading business growth coach. A Scaling Up and Metronomics coach, he helps mid-market CEOs install disciplined systems that transform people, strategy, execution, and cash. His clients have driven Utah’s most founder exits at a 7X EBITDA multiple, 10X profit gains, Inc. 5000 honors, and award-winning cultures. Formerly with Golf Channel and 1-800 Contacts, Rob now shares practical scaling insights as Tenfold Biz Coach on TikTok.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Vanguard. Give your clients consistent results year in and year out with vanguard.com/AUDIO
  • Quince. Get free shipping and 365-day returns on your order with Quince.com/Awesome
  • Cashflow Podcasting. Explore launching (or outsourcing) your podcast with a free 10-minute call with Pete.

Rob Monson Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome!

Rob Monson
Hi! Thank you, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to hear your wisdom. You are privy to a lot of deep, high-stakes, personal conversations, coaching executives and business owners. Can you give us a little bit of context for those conversations?

Rob Monson
Yes, so I’ve been a business coach for eight years this month, as a matter of fact, and what I do in my role is I coach CEOs and their leadership teams to help grow and scale their companies. And I do that through helping them install systems and routines and behaviors that help them eliminate drama and focus on the right things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds fantastic. Eliminating drama and focusing on right things are themes and powerful levers, it seems, in terms of accelerating careers and results.

Rob Monson
Yes, absolutely. And one of the big things we focus on is, “Initially, do you have 100% A-player leadership team? And how do you get to what we call an A-player leadership team? And how do you make sure and can identify whether you have non-A-players in your team? And what does that look like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was watching your TikTok and it’s amazing. You have a tremendous number of views for coaching insights on TikTok. Didn’t even know you could find that there, but now I do. And you got them, Rob. I was watching one of your videos, and you talked about, very quickly, eliminating C-players, and that sounds a little bit spooky.

So maybe let’s define what makes an A-player, B-player and C-player, and knowing maybe first of all that some folks feel a little bit perhaps even bristle-y about the language. What about a growth mindset, Rob? Can’t we all flourish and become A-players?

Rob Monson
They do. And this is the difficult part, is in the modern era, we try to avoid labels. However, if we cannot label the behavior and the performance, we will not grapple with it and we will not grow. And so, when we talk about an-A player, it’s someone that lives the core values 90-plus percent of the time, the organization’s core values 90-plus percent of the time, and hits KPI-driven goal 90-plus percent of the time.

So, we have a subject of measurement that’s normed over time by leaders in an organization. We share our scores with each other and we grade out our teams, which we do quarterly. And then we have an objective measurement, which is how often they hit goal. In between those two things, you find whether they have an A-player or not.

And your B-players tend to be people that live the core values consistently, but they aren’t as productive as we need them yet to be. Maybe do not have the habits, routines, behaviors. Sometimes, it’s skillset, but usually it’s embedded in the other area of habit, routine, that really makes them successful. And finally, we have C-players who do not live the core values and are not productive.

And here’s a fascinating statistic. C-players drag down each team by at least 30% productivity every single time.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! So, a single C-player can drag down a whole team by everyone by 30%.

Rob Monson
A single C-player can drag down an entire…yep, A single C-player will drag down a team’s results. It doesn’t matter what the KPI is or growth measurement, by at least 30% every time. And it’s remarkable how often that’s held up over the last eight years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And so, you’re measuring that based upon the attainment of these KPIs?

Rob Monson
Yes, well, attainment of the KPIs, and also, you see some behavioral practices as well that tend to fall off in terms of how they live the core values because they’re making up for this person’s lack of behavior and productivity. So that’s why, when we identify if we have a C-player in our presence, my usual question is, “What time are they leaving today?” And I don’t mean that to be…

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, ooh, Rob, spicy. Right to the quick.

Rob Monson
I learned that from an amazing coach named Dave Baney out of Las Vegas. And Dave had it spot on, which is you’re on the clock. It’s like the NBA shot clock. You are on the clock before your A-players leave. And what you want to do above all, that’s the number one reason you’re a-players will leave is tolerance for C-players.

Number one thing you want to do in an organization is preserve your A-player team and be able to remove the C-players that drag them down. And what happens again, that’s the weight that drags us down. So, most organizations, if you follow the rules that were established about 30 years ago, or the research that was established years ago by a person named Bradford Smart, who wrote a book called Topgrading. By the way, don’t ever read that book. It’s a really rough book, but the concept is great. And in “Topgrading,” the logic and philosophy is that about 25% of your organization will be C-players.

Pete Mockaitis
You say Geoff Smart?

Rob Monson
Brad Smart, his dad. Read Geoff Smart in Who. That’s a great book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I was going to say we had on the show, way back in the day, episode 30 in 2016, Randy Street from ghSmart, because this language of A-player is bringing me back. And he said something kind, I think, if folks are bristling out the labels, and I think it’s true. Everybody is an A-player at something. In the right organization, in the right role, they can flourish as opposed to, “Oh, you’re just dumb and worthless. So, I guess you’re out of luck everywhere.”

Rob Monson
Absolutely. And, you know, in the modern era, because there are just so many ways now for us to make money and so many outlets, today’s C-player usually is an A-player on their own. And one of the one of the big key pieces of advice I give to people who are not flourishing and have a sort of a track record of not flourishing when you dig into their history, it’s, “Hey, you have a great skillset in this particular area and you have great behaviors in this particular area, but you just don’t flourish under someone else’s values. Go start your own thing.”

Today’s entrepreneurs were yesterday’s C-players, and A-player entrepreneurs, too. So, there’s a way to get into a great role and a great fit, even if it’s not with someone else’s organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s define some of these behaviors. It sounds like there is some variability in terms of the organizations and the cultures and the values. But, perhaps, could you zero in on a few universal or near-universal behaviors or things that comprise an A-player?

Rob Monson
Yeah, absolutely. So, we talked about living the core values and hitting KPI-driven goal, and the question is, “How do they do that?” And what we find is they are better at developing habit and routine, meaning that those who set their day in a predictable way, who go out of their way to figure out, to realign themselves to a set of key priorities they’ve established, hopefully for the quarter, “What am I doing relative to those priorities that I’m going to accomplish today?”

“Where am I stuck?” Understanding, “Where am I stuck and need help from others to be able to accomplish those priorities?” And then number three, “If I’m pacing behind on one of my key KPIs, what am I doing to catch up?”

And those are sort of the behavioral traits that the A-player tends to have in addition to some of the things that you talk about with on your podcast on prioritization and time management, those tend to be the hallmark of the A-player is they can prioritize, they can time-manage they can look at that set of priorities and say, “This is important. This is not important.”

What we see, really, really important, in this in this scenario is, one, successful people time-block two weeks out consistently. They block their time. They have their calendar blocked out with time, specifically spent to work on their handful of one, two, or three key priorities they have to accomplish for the quarter.

Number two, their heads are out of email or Slack or Teams. And I remember, like, the Slack tagline 10 years ago was something like, “Be more productive,” and those tools kill our productivity because they encourage us to respond to urgent instead of important. I’m not saying there isn’t any use for those tools, but you have to get into the same habit of Slack or Teams as you do with email, which is if you’re highly productive, you get into a mechanism where you’re responding three times a day.

I do it at 8:00 a.m., 12:00, 4:00, and spend a half hour doing it and economize my responses with AI or other tools, or I get into the trap of being stuck in email. And one of the most painful things we have to do as coaches, is remove leaders who cannot get their heads out of email because that’s not where we need them focused.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are some very specific perspectives. And, it’s funny, I’m imagining, this brings me back to a conversation I’ve had with a couple folks who are in the mortgage game and doing very well. And so, I say, “What’s the trick? How are you able to just really generate so many more loans, deals than the other folks?” And it’s like, “You know what? The thing is, when I’m at work, I’m doing my work.”

And it sounds like, “Well, duh.” But especially, when there are some activities, we feel some reluctance towards like, “Okay, I’ve got to go do prospecting in the sales universe. Like, oh, that’s kind of uncomfortable. That’s kind of unpleasant. I’m going to get some folks who are not pleased to be hearing from me.”

And yet it seems that, from my limited sampling, those who go do that, as opposed to find any other thing they could be doing on email or anything else, tend to flourish in a sales role, for example.

Rob Monson
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there might be some people that are very task-oriented and very relationship-oriented, right? And sometimes we have to make sure we can put them in the right role. They are good at some things. Sometimes you have to have the self-awareness to be able to realize whether you are task- or relationship-oriented.

Like, that’s why I have to minimize task for salespeople, meaning the systems do the tasks for them, whether it’s follow-up or tools they’re using. They have a minimal amount of data entry because they tend to be good at relationship and not tasks. Things that are high relationship and high tasks don’t tend to have a good middle ground unless you have extremely high-level people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, could you maybe walk us through a couple examples of folks you’ve seen see some transformational cool things in their career by following this kind of three-step process?

Rob Monson
Yeah, so what I’ve seen really consistently is, to your point, not everyone’s going to elevate, right? They just don’t have the ability to be able to grasp onto new habit and new routine. And it’s something sort of deep within them. It can be caused by a lot of things. It can be caused by habits growing up, childhood trauma, there are things. ADHD is a big component.

If you know the amount of people in society who suffer from ADHD, it’s about 6%. And then the number of people that suffer from slowish cognitive tempo is about 15%. That lines up perfectly with what I see among executives, which is about one out of five suffers from something that looks like ADHD, making it harder to form habits and routines.

Pete Mockaitis
Fifteen percent slow cognitive tempo.

Rob Monson
Sluggish cognitive tempo, yeah. Dr. Russell Barkley, I believe, has talked about that. That’s someone that’s a very interesting ADHD expert. I’m someone who suffered from ADHD myself. I have very good medication at this point, and that’s helped me develop habit and routine successfully, whereas without the medication, I could not do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s define a sluggish cognitive tempo. Does that just mean I’m thinking slow?

Rob Monson
It usually just means that, you know, between the ADHD receptors, right, we’re not getting quite as much of a chemical reaction that we need to. I think it’s dopamine and norepinephrine, right, or something in those neighborhoods, the same neighborhood. You’re not getting enough that you need out of those two to be able to be as effective as you need to.

So, it becomes an executive function issue, meaning we’re not able to consistently make decisions and listen appropriately in such a way where it translates into us being able to either absorb new habit or routine, or be able to prioritize and manage our work effectively so we get through things, we accomplish things we need to, and we excel, learn new patterns as we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And so then, it sounds like, sometimes you find yourself in that boat, it may just be a biological matter, something in the realm of medication, in the realm of nutrition, exercise, or kind of outside of what happens inside the office.

Rob Monson
Yes. So, to your point, those situations are very difficult to deal with. Those who are successful can, basically, with a little bit of coaching, even though they might not have had in the past, to say, “Hey, let’s really focus on blocking your time out now more effectively so you have time to be able to spend focused on your priorities. Let’s make sure that you are spending way less time in email on a daily basis, that you’re only checking it three times a day, over Slack,” for instance, right?

“Let’s take those distractions that maybe you’d walk down the hall to be able to go talk to someone and let’s get those knocked out of the way in a daily huddle.” We haven’t talked about that yet, but in a daily huddle, we usually put our executives and all of our teams in a daily huddle where they can knock out things that don’t distract them later in the day.

And if you can do those things successfully, what we find is, and about 30% of leaders will be able to do that, so probably low for a lot of people, but that’s the reality is you can get about 30% will be able to develop new habits and routines, they will be able to be successful in their role.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about a few of the particular habits with regard to time blocking, and the process by which you identify, “Hey, what is the high-value thing? And how do I think about where the best place is to block that time?” Maybe just walk us through a couple examples of folks putting this into action specifically in their roles.

Rob Monson
Sure. So, the most successful way that it starts, by the way, is at a higher level than maybe all of us start with as even leaders or even doers in an organization. It starts with the leadership team coming up with a set of priorities. And once those set of company priorities are known, then we can actually tie our priorities back to the company priorities.

And can they always tie back? No. But in most cases, everyone can usually tie their priorities back to something that’s a key priority for the organization. That’s step number one, “Is what I’m working on tied into the most important things the organization has deemed worthy or important to work on?” That’s number one, “And do I have a handful of things tied to that?”

Then, usually, the KPIs or the measurements that I own are also tied to those priorities as well. Not always, but most of the time. So, it’s, “Am I devoting a portion of my week to making sure that I accomplish those priorities and the tasks related to them, rather than getting distracted by something that comes up like an emergency?”

Because the job isn’t to do the job, by the way. The job is to do the job better. And that’s where most people fall off into non-A-player land.

Pete Mockaitis
Expand on this notion the job is not to do the job?

Rob Monson
In a scaling company, we want A-players. And what I mean by that is we want to grow the A-player percentage inside the organization. And the percent of A-players is something that each leader is measured on. And again, that’s the person that lives core values, that’s KPI-driven goal. And what we want, and we pay for this as well, we’d rather have one great person than three average people. We’ll pay that one great person two times their average salary and still win.

And when we do that, what we expect out of that role is they will not just come in and sit in the seat and do the job. It’s they will actually excel with the job. They will be better than the role. They will wipe out portions of the role that are inefficient and ineffective. And these are things that are very clearly set as expectations up in the hiring process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, could you walk us through a story of an individual who wasn’t doing the things, then turned around and started doing exactly that?

Rob Monson
Yes, so I had a member of a leadership team, and this is someone who, you know, had struggled previously before I became the coach of the organization, had struggled by getting distracted by the wrong things. With her, it was, “Hey, we’re going to be focused on things that are emergencies or things that are popping up throughout the day.” And this person was not doing what they needed to do to actually systematically work through, “How do I make sure this emergency never happens again?”

And what that meant was they, and because they weren’t accomplishing their priorities, which were directly tied to being able to eliminate those emergencies that popped up consistently, they just kept running into the same issue again and again. Once this person adopted a time-blocking routine, and by the way, was she immediately better at all aspects of time blocking? No, she gradually worked up to it. She blocked out a day, a week, you know, a week and a half and up to two weeks as she did that.

And as she got, she was coached by myself and by the CEO to be able to let go of things that were not the most critical priorities and be able to stay focused on certain times of day to respond to her email, she became one of the most productive members of leadership team and is still in her role to this day excelling.

And she’s learning not only is she able to excel and sort of think past the role, which is where we need our A-players to be, she is becoming an expert at recognizing patterns. And that skill of pattern-recognition is something that is built up over time by focusing on the most critical things.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, so let’s get into some detail associated with the priority and the time-blocking, how it is done better. So, we already talked about getting the alignment associated with the organization’s priorities and getting your priorities and the key performance indicators that we’re responsible for and what are the activities that will move those forward. Are there any magical questions that you find are super handy to cut through the lesser important things and really highlight the magical things?

Rob Monson
So, what we see is that most people who are successful with prioritization, they learn to do something that we teach them, which is a priority, usually, it’s a longer-term project. It takes several weeks to accomplish.

We teach them a practice of breaking down that priority by week and putting in place one major milestone they have to accomplish related to that priority in a given week, by the Friday of every week, to be able to successfully complete a priority in the time that they’ve allotted themselves.

Now again, they’ve gone through a process of sort of aligning, “Hey, is this something that’s critical and tied into one of the company priorities? Is it tied into the department priorities that I’m a part of?” And then we go through a process again of laying it out and being able to say, “Hey, how do I get into measurable steps that I can go through and be able to be more effective at hitting on a consistent basis?”

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that. And it’s funny, I imagine, as you do that, then the emergencies become even more irksome to you, such that you’re like, “No, the mission of this week is this, and instead I’m dealing with that.” And that question you asked, “How could I make this never appear again?” feels all the more weight-y, substantial, and critical that, “No, no, I’ve entertained this little interruption, annoyance, urgent thing, dozens of times. And before, whatever, I was cool, I was patient, and friendly, and no more. No more. That comes to an end now.”

Rob Monson
Yes, they get out of what we call firefighter mode, which is, and we love real firefighters that respond to real fires, but the rest of us in our work cannot be firefighters. Those jobs are all going away. So, if you believe your job is to show up and put out the fire, or to respond to the same problem again and again and again, that job will one day be erased.

What I want to get into is a role of being able to say, “How do I make the job better? How do I get rid of things that are constant pains to me and the organization? How do I do that with my priorities? How do I make sure that I’m changing the outcome in my role?”

Pete Mockaitis
And can we hear some cool examples in practice how a particular recurring emergency fire kept showing up and how a person figured out how to prevent that from ever emerging again?

Rob Monson
So, a good example of someone being able to systematically sort of see past daily emergencies and be able to sort of put out the fire is someone who works at a manufacturing organization that I coached. And we hired, we do not have a history of hiring A-players in this organization. We did manage to hire A-players in the roles in our back shop, and we had a pretty high defect rate. The defect rate was something like 6%.

And what, literally, within the first couple of months, a couple of key A-players said, “Wait a minute, why are we making the same mistake again and again and again with how we are pulling product off the line? Why don’t we, in fact, change the process of how we’re doing that so that…” in this particular case, it’s a facade that we manufacture for buildings, “…so that it occurs in a different spot than it did previously?”

And this is something that no one had ever thought of. They just kept doing what they were doing, meaning they just sort of kept wallowing in it, “Hey, it was really painful. We have a defect rate,” and rework costs companies so much money we don’t even realize it. And this was creating a very unprofitable entity, by the way.

And once they realized that, and we had all the other A-players in that role, number one, those people were thrilled and happy because they didn’t feel like they were failing every day. Number two, that organization’s profit went up by 8,000% the following year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, 8,000. Okay, there you go.

Rob Monson
It literally went up 8,000%. That’s the craziest thing. Yep, that might be one of the crazier stories of all time, but you get your defect rate low enough, and it can just be, that’s the stuff that’s shooting ourselves in the foot. Everyone thinks they’re going to grow because of demand or competition. It’s all just stopping you from shooting yourself in the foot.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is bringing me back memories. I had a consulting project at one of the world’s largest cookie-manufacturing plants, and it’s wild, yes. Especially in a manufacturing world in which, if margins are slim and competition is fierce, and it often is, then, yes, a meaningful change of the defect rate is huge.

And it’s funny, now I’m thinking about there’s so many things that we just kind of accept or put up with as normal, how it is, and it takes sort of an extra level of acuity, awareness to say, “No, no, time out. That’s not acceptable.”

And so how do you develop a little bit of that wise sensibility to recognize, “Hmm, this is a reality of which, you know, humanity must deal with,” as opposed to, “No, that’s jacked up and we got to fix that pronto”?

Rob Monson
Right. So, you touched on something that’s very, very critical. By the way, there’s a great website called The Systems Thinker, which is very useful, and it talks about people that are more predisposed to linear thinking versus systems thinking. And systems-thinking people tend to be able to see patterns in things.

So, one of the key things that I will ask, when I start coaching an organization is, “What are some basic things that you’ve seen over the last several weeks or months that aren’t good that you would like to change?” It sounds really, really basic, but sometimes no one, and again, a lot of organizations are poorly managed, most are, and nobody asks sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, last time, nothing happened. I was ignored. They bit my head off. I’m just going to keep quiet here.”

Rob Monson
Yeah, the number one thing we deal with are dysfunctional leadership teams, right? And that creates that lack of psychological safety. Or, you know, you might have a manager that’s below leadership team who still creates that lack of psychological safety, and people don’t feel comfortable doing that.

But, “Hey, it’s just, what would you change? If you could, what would you get rid of that wastes your time, right, that would actually help you have a more high-level job to be able to get you promoted in the future if you could spend more time on this?” Those are the basic things that help people realize annoying tasks that waste their time.

I ask every one of my leadership teams to say, “Tell me the top five things that waste your time.” And they write them down. And then I say, “Okay, how much of that could you automate, eliminate, delegate, or simplify?” Most will come back with half a day to a full day of time savings that they can re-deploy.

Pete Mockaitis
Per week? Per month?

Rob Monson
Per week.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Rob Monson
It is a per week savings in time when they go through that process. Because again, we just don’t proactively, in a lot of cases, or the organization hasn’t created psychological safety enough, to make it a practice to routinely think about, “How do you economize time spent on low level tasks?”

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. Could you give us a couple examples of, “Here’s a time waster we identified and how we busted it”?

Rob Monson
A couple of critical things. So, I have an example of a COO, for instance, who was struggling with time management, and I asked him to write down “What are the top five things that waste your time?” He did. And one of the most compelling things that came out of it was that none of the lists were very compelling at all. And I said, “How many of those could be delegated?” And guess what his response was?

Pete Mockaitis
All of them.

Rob Monson
All of them. Yep, every single one of them. And that’s usually kind of what you find out of that process is, you know, there are a lot of low-level tasks. It can be the time you spend polling reports where you can’t get to transactional data fast enough. It can be the time spent chasing the problems caused by your B & C players that are creating in the business, right?

People, because they have a fear of letting go, are holding onto the very low-level tasks, sometimes in very high leadership positions. So those are the kind of things that tend to hold people back in how do they use their time more effectively.

What I find in organizations, I’ll come in, and most people, I’ll tell you right off the bat, most people are at about 30% of what their true capacity is. And people say, “How is that possible? How is that humanly possible given how much I’m working?” One, we’re not focused on the right things. Two, we’re not focused on the process of automate, eliminate, delegate, simplify in how we look at work.

And, three, we’re not doing the time management things I was talking about earlier. So, when you get all those things going in an organization, you see that people have a completely different level of output and behavior, not just with themselves, but with each other if they’re an A-player.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, Rob, I’m curious, can you tell us any other key tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts that we haven’t covered yet?

Rob Monson
So, there are a couple of things that when we talk about habit and routine, and what we find is that, consistently, if people are not doing something daily or, at the minimum, weekly, it will not form into a consistent habit.

And so, what we want to do is, with one-on-one coaching, we try to get that into a weekly behavior, meaning you are in a one-on-one coaching session with your supervisor all the time, as much as possible. By the way, some of the worst times I’ve had in my career is when I did not have a consistent one-on-one with my supervisor.

And there’s a huge difference between organizations that will do consistent one-on-one coaching and those that will not. So, one of the things I encourage people to do is, if you’re not having a one-on-one with your supervisor weekly, I would ask for it, first and foremost. And I would get feedback on what I’m working on for two reasons. One, stay focused on the most critical things. Get aligned around that.

Two, “Behaviorally, are we both seeing the same thing? How are you growing? Where do you need help and support?” There’s a massive difference when people get both quality and quantity in coaching. And the organizations that do not do consistent one-on-one coaching, they’re always in my bottom three in terms of year-over-year results if they do not one-on-one coach on a weekly basis.

So, it’s like, “Hey, if you’re an organization that won’t coach you, that your boss keeps giving it up, you’ve probably got the wrong boss,” they’re saying, “Hey, I can’t get to your one-on-one this week because something else is distracting me,” I’d find another job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, that has been my experience, that I have experienced way more learning growth development when I did have that regular recurring thing in conversation happening. And I like what you had to say about a habit. I’m reminded of, I’ve got fond memories in consulting with a teammate named Blair.

And whenever we were returning from the client trip, it was understood that he and I would be taking a cab together from the Chicago airport, Midway or O’Hare, back to the office. And folks would be like, “Oh, well, we can all get on the same cab.” And Blair would say, “No, Pete and I,” he’s from New Zealand, “Pete and I will be on this cab. We’re going to be chatting.” And so, I loved it because I felt like I was a priority for him, so I felt tremendous loyalty.

As well as it was a nice, we talk about habitual, it was a nice groove. It’s like, “Okay, this is a sensible time. We did a bunch of work at the client site. We’re now about to have more of a chill Friday with, whatever, filing expenses or whatever. And so now, while it’s fresh, we’ll talk about what we observed during the course of working at the client site week after week after week,” and it was gold.

Rob Monson
Yeah, absolutely. And what you find is that most people will say, “Well, I have no time,” or, “I have no time to coach.” And the real answer is you have no time because you will not coach. So, what we try to do is get people’s mindset around that.

And if anyone listening to this, if they’re in a coaching position, and if you’re in a manager role, that’s the job, unfortunately to some people. I mean, fortunately, for people that want to do it, that’s the job. But a lot of people will go, “Well, I don’t have time to manage my team.” Well, that’s the job.

Now you do get into these really unfortunate things like ratios when they’re managing more than, I mean, eight people is kind the maximum anyone can really coach effectively. Like, eight is a burn line. People get to 10. Weird things like insomnia and anxiety go through the roof in the leader. So those are the things you have to look out for.

You can appoint team leads or do other things to solve for that situation without, by the way, having to pay more in a lot of situations. It’s just, hey, give someone a coaching assignment. Remove the 10% of their week that was focused on those tasks that could be automated, eliminated, delegated, and simplified, and give somebody an assignment to coach their team member. That’s a great way for people to build their skills and capabilities over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so that’s one critical key, weekly, behavioral, habit thing is these recurring one-on-one coaching bits. Any others that you would elevate to similar criticality?

Rob Monson
So, you heard me talk about a daily huddle. And this is something so you might have heard of Vern Harnish who wrote the book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up. I was part of an organization that had a daily huddle several years ago, and we grew and scale like wildfire. And a couple of things I never heard because of that daily huddle were, “Hey, no one’s ever told me about that,” or, “Hey, we don’t know where someone is on this particular project or priority.” We were always on top of those critical things.

So, we get everyone into a daily huddle where they’re there for five minutes a day with their team members. There’s usually a minute per person on the team. It might go a little bit longer than five minutes if it’s a bigger team, right, 10-people team, 10 minutes. But, “Hey, what are we focused on the next 24 hours? Where are we stuck? Where am I with my KPIs? And what do I need to do to get them back to green if they’re not?” And that’s basically it.

Pete Mockaitis
And one thing I love about that is just the basic accountability. There’s no hiding out when that is occurring. It’s like, “Oh, Rob, it seems like you’re not doing much. Well, lucky us, we have some resource available to give you some stuff.”

Rob Monson
Yeah, and you get the non-A player responses at first in organizations which are, “Well, that might be like micromanagement.” No, we’re just going to manage the company. Most people don’t even run their companies effectively. We’re just going to have basic alignment every day. It’s going to take a couple minutes. It’s going to free you up throughout the rest of your day.

And the one thing that really changes you, and this is what’s really silly when people fight putting in place a daily huddle. At the end of the day, the five minutes of prep that you take for that particular meeting is what changes you. And again, it’s part of that habit routine we talked about earlier. It’s, “I know what I’m supposed to focus on today. I know where I’m ahead and where I’m behind. I know where I need help.”

That little thing, fundamentally, allows us to put all the other systems and tools we put in place to grow organizations. And people will fight it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Yeah, you’ve got that perspective. It’s like, “Oh, I said yesterday I was working on this thing, but I’m about to end my work day with very little progress on that thing. And so, I’m going to have to fess up to that tomorrow. That sounds very unpleasant. Maybe I’m going to kick it into gear here.”

Rob Monson
It’s a little bit uncomfortable. And I remember back in the day, I worked at a company called Compass in Florida, and we help big universities take degree programs online, and Dan Devine was our CEO, and it was a little bit uncomfortable. And Dan was a super nice human being, by the way. But it was professional. You walked into the meeting and you were ready to go. And, by the way, being ready to go and being professional are not bad traits to be able to grow your behaviors, capabilities, how you treat other people on a daily basis.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, Rob, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Rob Monson
One of the things I’d like to say about pattern recognition, just very, very quickly, is that that is a skill that not everyone has.

Our A-players tend to have it, meaning 25% of the population will tend to have it. It can be developed over time and you have to be able to ask yourself some really key questions, which are, “Hey, what are the effects on the ecosystem around me? Have I seen this before? Have I seen anything remotely like it in my past that I can compare what I’m looking at right now to?”

Those are things that we don’t do that often in business, but those are kind of some of the key questions we have to ask ourselves to try to get more into systems thinking or pattern-recognition mode over time. And so, people can get better at those areas, but it can be a struggle if we’re more of, “Hey, this straight line gets me from point A to point B and it’s hard to think outside of that.”

There can be some great linear A-players though, to be very, very clear. I’ve worked with people like that in the past and they were amazing at keeping someone like me in the right spot when I needed it. And so, you can get some very, very highly effective A-players that are linear thinkers. They might not be as abstract as everybody else and they’re not dumb. They just think differently than the rest of us. They’re very precise in how they think about their day, their week, their month. And they don’t deviate from that too much. That’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rob Monson
“Plan your work and work your plan.” And I believe my boss, Suzanne, back in the day at Compass, heard that from Johnson & Johnson. That’s one of my favorite quotes of all time because, really, that’s the essence of how to do successful work is, “I plan what I’m going to do and I fight toward it, and I get better at prediction.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rob Monson
So one of my favorite studies is the research that Bradford Smart did, Brad Smart did, back when he created the hiring process for GE, back when GE was GE, and that’s what we refer to as “Topgrading.” There’s probably a better name for that in the modern era, but that’s the same process that Geoff Smart, basically, shows us in the book Who.

But the research behind that was very accurate. And what it says is that 25% of the organization will be A-players, meaning, again, those people that live the core values, hit KPI-driven goal, 50% will be Bs and 25% will be Cs. And the crazy thing about that, when you actually tie in everything else that we talked about today, is that you could have 25% of your organization walk out the door tomorrow that were C-players and your happiness and productivity would actually go up.

I have a client that I’ve worked with recently, actually started them several months ago, and they’ve done a great job. This is going to be a very well-known nationwide brand in the very near future. And they realized very quickly, the CEO realized they had people that were not living the core values and were not productive in their midst, and they quickly changed that outcome. They did try to coach up, that didn’t work, so they quickly removed those who would not elevate.

And guess what? Everyone’s happiness has gone up dramatically, the organization is now going towards its goal tiers. Here’s the number one thing. The A-players have not left. And that’s what we want more of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rob Monson
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Pat Lencioni. And I have every leadership team member read that, and I wish I would have read it even sooner than I did. I read it several years ago, but wish I’d read it even earlier than that. It would have really helped me understand what my role is on a leadership team.

And that is you are on the leadership team first. You’re not the head of marketing. You’re not the head of sales. You’re not the head of operations first. That’s where we get into the most trouble as leaders is you think you’re the head of the other team first and you come to the table as their advocate and not coach them through obstacles. That’s where you get into the biggest challenges.

Pete Mockaitis
Pat was on the show. He was awesome. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Rob Monson
There’s a great toolset that I’ve used consistently lately, which is an assessment of ironclad emotional control in leaders. And one of the key behavioral characteristics we find in Sam Walker’s book, The Captain’s Class, is that leaders on sort of dynasty, very successful sports teams had some very similar characteristics. And one of them was ironclad emotional control.

And what we do is I give them a really quick 12-question assessment to see where they are with their own Iron cloud emotional control. And that’s created, not only in myself, but in my team, some of the greatest improvements in self-awareness that you’ll see as leaders. So, that’s definitely been a favorite. Multipliers assessment is also a favorite tool, by the way, if we’re talking about team members. And if anyone’s talked about it in the past, Liz Wiseman Multipliers is a great tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, she was on the show.

Rob Monson
Liz Wiseman, the multiplier assessment, there are some quirks with it. There are some questions that I would word completely differently, but it is the fastest dose of self-awareness that you’ll put a leader through. And it’s pretty cool when they realize that, “How much did a previous leader multiply out of me? And how much did one that was diminishing get out of me?”

And if they realize they want to be like the one that multiplied more out of them, it’s a pretty fast change for those that are willing to do it

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Rob Monson
My favorite habit is I get up. I look at everything I have to do that day and I say, “What is the one thing I’m doing tied into my top three priorities for this quarter?” And make sure that I have time, energy and effort focused on those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they’re retweeting and commenting up a storm on TikTok, etc.?

Rob Monson
Yeah. So, yes, there are. Yes, there are some things that resonate. And sometimes, again, it’s that things resonate because they defy conventional wisdom. And one of the things that defies conventional wisdom is to be able to remove your C-players immediately. So, for eight years, in dealing with 35-plus, almost 40 CEOs, I have not, in eight years, ever heard the phrase, “I should have held onto that C-player longer.”

And what that means is, we usually, so mid-market CEO problem is way different, by the way. I mostly deal with mid-market CEOs, way different than the big bad CEO problem that a lot of us, we might have our impression of in our mind. We have a lot of really, really, well-intended mid-market CEOs that are members of EO, YPO.

By the way, great tip for your audience, if you want to find organizations that want to find A-players, look for organizations that are in your local EO or YPO chapter, the CEOs are in that. Those who are in peer learning groups are usually way more self-aware and open to A-player hiring, paying more for the right person in the right role than others that will not.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Rob Monson
One, they can follow me on TikTok, @robmonson12. Two, they can find me on TenfoldAdvisors.com. That’s my website as well. So, if they’re interested in learning anything more about what I do, that’s where they would go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Rob Monson
The one challenge I would leave everybody with is the email challenge, which is find a way to get yourself out of email or Slack. Really try to set a habit and routine. That’s the fastest and easiest one. It’s, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to respond. I’m going to get in here three times a day rather than have the dopamine hit of doing it all day long,” so that you can spend more time focusing on more critical things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rob, thank you.

Rob Monson
Thank you. I appreciate the time and getting to know you, and hope that was helpful.

Jun 30
0

1071: Boosting Productivity and Slashing Overwhelm through Timeboxing with Marc Zao-Sanders

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Marc Zao-Sanders reveals the key to breaking the cycle of overwhelm with a power tool that makes a huge difference.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to prune your to-do list effectively
  2. How to use timeboxing to plan your day with intention
  3. The art of choosing breaks

About Marc

Marc Zao-Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of filtered.com, a learning tech company. He regularly writes about algorithms, learning and productivity in Scientific American, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He has followed the practice of timeboxing for over ten years. He lives in London.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Strawberry.me. Claim your $50 credit and build momentum in your career with Strawberry.me/Awesome
  • Quince. Get free shipping and 365-day returns on your order with Quince.com/Awesome
  • Plaud.Ai. Use the code AWESOME for a discount on your order
  • Rula. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at Rula.com/Awesome

Marc Zao-Sanders Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marc, welcome!

Marc Zao-Sanders
Pete, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to chat and let’s kick it off. I know you have studied productivity, done many experiments, worked it, iterated it. Could you share with us your most surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans and being productive so far?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Most surprising? I mean, maybe it’s just the simple fact that managing your time is so very important and yet it doesn’t get much attention from the public in general, from people at work. If you think about managing time, because time governs everything else, you can adopt a new habit and it might be really good for you. Let’s say it’s exercise or it’s breathing or it’s meditation or whatever, but if you can adopt an exercise, a practice, which is using a time better, then that’s all of the above and many thousands of other things.

So, I find it surprising that, although time management is a thing, if you ask people on the street, what are their systems for managing time, they haven’t thought about it all that much. And yet, that is the entirety of our existence, of our conscious experience of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Starting off light, our existence and conscious experience of life.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Straight into philosophy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, yeah, I think that does ring true. We had Demir Bentley on the show who wrote a book called Winning the Week. And he said that this is, indeed, a theme he has observed amongst many of his high-performing clients, is that they all agree, “Oh, yes, planning the week is one of the most important things I could possibly do,” but they don’t do it. And so, almost universally, is the observation there.

So, share with us, what are we missing? Like, why aren’t we doing it? Are we just oblivious to the true benefit? Do we think it’s kind of a nice to have? We haven’t really seen the light, experienced it firsthand? Why are we dragging our feet here?

Marc Zao-Sanders
I think, probably, the main reason is just that life gets in the way. There are so many emails in your inbox, there are tasks to do in a task management system, or communications in Slack or Teams, or whatever it is, our mobile phones now as well. So, there are just so many reasons to not carve out some time for yourself and think about how to spend it well. We’re just hugely, hugely distracted.

So, I’d say that was a big thing with it. And I think, also, with any habit, you need to persevere with it a little bit to feel the benefits. And I think people need to get past that first day or two days to see the benefits of timeboxing or, indeed, another time management technique. Yeah, I think that’s it. And it’s a shame because I think we could, if we all lived more intentional lives, we would be happier. We would be more productive. We would get on better with each other. We’d be better human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you maybe paint a picture for us in terms of an inspiring story of somebody who did just that? They weren’t bothering with the timeboxing approach, and then they adopted it, and what happened for them?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, one such person is me. It has worked for me as an individual. And that’s the key thing, I think, for anyone listening to this. You need to think, “Does it work for you as an individual?” There are studies, there’s all sorts of science that says that this works. But the key thing, really, is not whether it works for a bunch of other people, it’s whether it works for you.

So, I mean, my personal story is that I’m 45 years old, about to be 46. And when I started my career 20 something years ago, life was hard. I started in strategy consulting and the pressure was pretty intense.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ve been there.

Marc Zao-Sanders
I was suffering, frankly. I was a disorganized mess, yeah, the performance issues. I was, but more importantly, I wasn’t feeling very good about the work that I was doing. So, I established a little bit of control by setting up what I called a daily work plan. So, that was just an Excel file. I’d write in the Excel file. These are the things I really need to do today.

This is roughly how long they would take. And I’d check them off. They would sum up then to the productive hours that I’d had that day. That was good. That was much better. And it made me feel better about work, more confident with what I was doing. But it didn’t tell me, at any given moment, what I should be doing. It wasn’t linked to other meetings to my calendar.

So, then, yeah, I saw this article in Harvard Business Review. It’s called why “To-Do Lists Don’t Work.” And it immediately resonated. I changed what I was doing as an individual, overnight. And then, over the next five years, I sort of honed the technique. I made it my own. I wrote my own Harvard Business Review article that became very popular.

And that led to the book, and talking to many, many people over the years about timeboxing and how it can help not just with your, I mean, it’s really not just about your productivity. It’s really mostly about how you feel, the control that you feel as you go through the day, as you’re going through the maelstrom of a knowledge worker’s day. It can be unpleasant a lot of the time, but if you focus on one thing at a time and you’ve planned that out, it feels a lot better.

So, yeah, the case study I would give most of all, first and foremost, that I know and have lived is mine, but, obviously, I’ve heard that story, that kind of story from many, many people, from, I mean, literally, from around the world. That’s, I mean, just one other thing to say about that, that the book’s been, and I’m an unknown author.

I was an unknown author before I started this, and yet the rights were bought up in 33 languages because the story, because this idea of making your life more intentional through, basically, through your digital calendar resonated across cultures, across languages. And there’s also a bunch of case studies at the end of the book as well, stories from individuals that have made timeboxing work for them in their specific situations too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s cool. Works for you, works for them. I actually am curious to hear about the studies. And, in fact, in your Harvard Business Review article, at the very top, it says a recent survey of 100 productivity hacks, timeboxing was ranked the number one most useful. Tell us a bit about that and any other, I guess, researcher evidence saying, “This isn’t just a cool thing Marc likes doing. It’s pretty proven for lots of folks.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
So, that study was done a long, long time ago. I did a lot of the research for it, but this is well before I’d written the book or even had an idea about writing the book. I had no, literally, no affiliation with timeboxing. I mean, I happen to do it myself, but actually a lot of the other techniques on the list, I also happen to do.

So, the way that we conducted that study was to look at lots and lots of thought leadership pieces online and categorized them according to which time management technique, which productivity hack or tip they were, and then just see how common they were. And that gave rise to an ordering, a top 100, and, yeah, like you say, timeboxing came top.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that came about by votes or by most frequently cited amongst industries?

Marc Zao-Sanders
No, exactly, most frequently cited, so how many times they were coming up. And it’s not only that. If you look at a lot of the other entries on that list, and like you say, it’s linked to in the in the book and probably on some articles on my site, you can see that many of the other techniques on the list are very, very similar to timeboxing or, actually, they form a subset of timeboxing.

I’ll give you an example. Just saying no, so just saying no is a thing in business. It’s been encouraged a lot over the last five, ten years. By the way, I think this is more of a nuanced thing. Sometimes people should say yes more than they do. It depends on the person and the context. But sometimes they should say no.

Well, saying no is partly dependent on how busy you are and what you’ve got on. If you timebox, you’re not just saying no or just saying yes, you’re doing so on the basis of what you’ve got on your plate. It’s something that you can point to, point your boss to, or point colleagues to. So, just saying no is, it goes very, very nicely hand in hand with timeboxing, just like so many of the other items on the list.

I’ll give you just one other example as well. “Eat That Frog,” the Brian Tracy idea of, you know, do the most difficult thing at the start of the day. Well, again, it’s not like timeboxing is saying you should do the most difficult thing, but if it suits you as a person, then here’s a system where you can put the most difficult thing at the start of the day, again, just completely, consistently, and to support that system that Brian Tracy came up with or popularized.

But also, if you’re the opposite, if you’re someone who needs to slowly, slowly build momentum through the day and start with some smaller tasks, which suits certain people better than it does the Brian Tracy method, that’s also consistent with timeboxing because here’s a system where you can build up slowly with some easier, smaller tasks at the start.

So, my point is that, yeah, timeboxing is very flexible with, it was number one itself, but it’s also works, so nicely with virtually every other time management technique.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then we say there were timeboxing a lot. Can you lay it on us? What exactly are we talking about here?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, I’ve got a definition, but maybe it’s better to describe it in terms of what I do at the start of the day. I’ll come back to a definition after that. So, I wake up, I get dressed, I brush my teeth. And then the very first thing that I do is spend 15 minutes thinking about my day and how I should spend my time. So, those 15 minutes are definitely the most productive of my entire day.

I couldn’t really, now, I can’t really imagine not using them like that. I don’t need more than 15 minutes. I do normally need 15 minutes because sometimes your emails have come in overnight, an idea has occurred to you overnight, and you need to take that into account along with other entries in your calendar. So, it’s a little bit of work, but just 15 minutes.

And then those 15 minutes lead you to have a day where it’s full of what you really wanted to do, what really mattered, what you intended to do. This is what I mean by intentions, giving yourself the space to become aware of what your intentions are, what’s important to you, and then having a system for making sure that they happen. So, that’s what it is, you know, that’s sort of my experience of it. I do that each and every day. I do it in the morning. Some people do it the night before.

But in terms of a definition, which, it’s probably slightly less useful, but I’ll give one anyway. So, I described in terms of what, when, one, enough. What I mean by what is deciding, giving yourself the space to think through what is most important. And then when is deciding when it should start and when it should finish, not being too ambitious, but being ambitious enough with those timings.

One means doing, is single tasking. Just do that one thing in that slot, nothing else. And then enough is doing it to a good-enough level. You’re not aiming for perfection here. Perfection doesn’t really exist for any of us. Do it so that it’s good enough that you can share with others and move things on in your workflow or in your life, whatever the context happens to be. So, yeah, that’s kind of how, that’s the lived experience of it as well as the definition.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that seems pretty simple, and yet, in your experience and that of luminaries throughout history – Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, etc., – it’s revolutionary, you say.

Marc Zao-Sanders
It’s revolutionary in that anyone who wants to achieve a lot and feel good about doing that needs to really use their time well. And I think there’s just something very fundamental about timeboxing. It is working out what’s important, setting a time to do it, not being distracted by anything else, and doing it to a good-enough level.

I mean, it’s very hard, I think, to launch an argument against that. I’m going to invite you to do that, Pete. And, actually, I wanted to ask you if you timebox.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, challenge accepted.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay, so go ahead. I mean, which of those elements, which of those four elements of the definition would you say, “Eh, that’s actually not that important”?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no. I suppose, I don’t think that it’s not important. I just think we can come up with lots of excuses for why, “Oh, that’s a nice view, Mark, but I don’t think that’ll quite work for me,” or, “Yeah, that sounds cool, but…” so I think there’s a lot of buts that it might be worth our time digging into to a few of those.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Of course. I mean, some people will see that and then not act on it. I mean, of course that happens. It does require a little bit of discipline, and anything that requires even a modicum of discipline can be ignored, and some people will take the path of lesser immediate term resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
“No, Marc, instead, I’m just going to get this cool app. That’s going to fix my time management problems. This fun little app instead.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
So, yeah, I mean, there are some apps that will do some of this for me and for a lot of people. It’s connecting with your intentions and making sure that you’re doing the things that you want to do at the right time, requires a little bit more of yourself. So, yeah, sure, you can have AI just arrange things for you, but then are you going to be happy with the order of them?

And even in the processing of you’re putting these tasks into your calendar, your brain starts to think about, you know, starts to problem-solve. So, you’re making a little bit of progress with each of them, even in the act of doing it. So, yeah, there are apps and there’s AI, and that’s fine for some people. It’s not for me. It’s not the method that I advocate.

I’m a little bit more old school. So, while I advocate having a digital calendar and making that sync with your various devices, rather than a sort of paper-based system, AI is not something that you need for timeboxing. Not in my view.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, certainly. Well, so then I suppose, with regard to discipline, for folks who think, “Oh, that sounds cool, Marc, but I just couldn’t even do that because I’m a creative, flexible, fluid kind of a personality. I don’t really do well when I’m tied down,” what do you think of that?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay, so I hear this, obviously, sometimes, “They just wouldn’t work for me. Well, it wouldn’t work for me.” Okay, so, I mean, a few things to say. But the first one that occurs to me is like, even if you’re a creative, you’re already timeboxing to some extent because you’ve got meetings in your calendar, right? That’s unavoidable. And however creative or uncreative those meetings are, you’ve got those meetings.

And you have to have some sort of timekeeping system to make sure that you attend those meetings more or less on time. I mean, even if you’re five, 10 minutes late for most of your meetings, as some creatives might be, the meeting is there and it is important and you’re probably annoying some people by being a little bit late.

So, it’s not like this is a brand-new system that I’m suggesting you sort of foist-force into your life. We’re all creative or non-creatives, and also, we’re all creative in some respect. But all of us are using our calendar to spend time specifically, at the very least, with meetings. What I’m saying with timeboxing is let’s extend that a little bit further so that we also do it with some of the work that we do on our own so that we can achieve more and actually, with creativity, specifically, achieve more creatively.

You’re much more likely to achieve the state of flow and get to what Cal Newport and others call deep work, scale the heights of our capability if you remove all of your distractions, if you get to a period of time where you’re just working on one thing. So, I would say that it actually, I mean, genuinely, I think that it supports creativity. It doesn’t stifle it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when it comes to discipline, if folks think, “Boy, Marc, I just don’t think I have that level of discipline. That sounds really hardcore. That sounds Navy SEAL-esque to go from thing to next thing, to next thing, to next thing with perfect rigid execution. That sounds beyond my meager willpower capabilities”?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. If someone said that, if you said that, for example, I would say, I mean, first of all, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be rigid. It also doesn’t need to be productive thing to productive thing. One of the productive things might well be having a break, might be lying down, might be having a cold shower, might be taking your dog for a walk. It’s just positive, intentional activities that you know, by the end of the day and even actually during the day, are going to be really, really good for you.

The other thing I’d say to such a person or, you, potentially, Pete, is, well, like I said, you’re already doing it to some extent. And then also, well, why don’t you just try it? For tomorrow, you could put into your calendar right now, I mean, actually, if you’re listening to this, or watching this right now, anything you could do to get started is put a 15-minute time box, just an event, into your calendar for tomorrow morning at a time that suits you.

I mean, obviously, you need to be awake. You need to be awake enough to get it done. And in those 15 minutes, plan out some of the rest of your day. I will plan out a lot of the rest of my day because I’ve been doing it for 20 years now. But do it for a couple of hours or three hours or four hours.

And once you’ve tried that for a few days, and I imagine you will achieve some success and you’ll get into a snowball effect, a virtuous circle, you’ll be doing it some more. And if it really doesn’t work for you, well, then stop, but give it a try.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well said. So, we don’t need to start with the entirety of the day that, indeed, could feel intimidating. Understood.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, don’t let perfection or completion be the enemy of the good here. Get something done. And I’m a big believer in 80-20 and pretty good and doing a decent job of things rather than sort of Navy SEALs perfection, anything like that. I don’t come from that background. I don’t have that in my locker. I’m just a regular guy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so let’s talk about, it sounds like the hardest part of all is we’ve got dozens, hundreds of options, things that have landed in our to-do list with varying levels of seriousness, urgency, importance. How do you begin to decide, “Ah, yes, this is, in fact, the thing that goes on today’s calendar”?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. So, first of all, what you’ve just described is exactly the reason that timeboxing is important. Most of us knowledge workers, at any given moment, could be working on 20, 30, 40, maybe 100 things. They would all be somewhat legitimate. And the existence of so many different things that we could do is stressful in itself. So, you’re doing one thing, and two or three or five or 20 of the other things occur to you. That is so stressful. And that stresses me out every single day.

So, that’s the reason that, the main reason I would say, that timeboxing is important, it kind of pushes all of those other things away and focuses you on a single thing. So, that’s why it’s important. If you have 100 items, though, and how are you going to decide, I’ve got a trick which is very concrete, very tangible, very easy.

So, let’s say you’ve got a to-do list, Pete. You’ve got 100 items on it and you don’t know where to start. Some of those things are going to be very important. Some of them less so. It’s probably accumulated over weeks, months, maybe even years. I would say grab it, put it into a spreadsheet, go down the list, and just score them very roughly on a of an approximation of both urgency and importance. Just sort of, you know, merge the two together, give them a score between zero and 10 every single one.

Now, look, even if you’ve got 100, it’s going to take a little while to do it, but it’s not going to take you more than 10 minutes. This is not a huge, huge task. So, you score them all, zero to 10, and then you sort it on the score that you’ve given it. So, most the highest numbers will go to the top. And then as soon as you’ve done that sort, you will see immediately there’s a group of tasks at the bottom that you really could just delete.

And that is hugely reassuring, gratifying. It’s such a relief to see the list look like that. And then there are tasks at the top that really will be super important because you’ve given them an eight or a nine or a 10. You might want to do some further ordering of those. And that’s also a huge relief because those big important items that you knew were lurking in your to-do list are being surfaced properly. So, they will get your attention.

So those, you know, three, four, five, 10, whatever it is, items that you really had to do are going to make their way into your calendar and get done. And that is so, I mean, it really is about control, like taking control of your life by having a system to understand what is most important, and get it done. This is a specific tactic for dealing with a long to-do list.

And then you can do that even every so often when you’ve only got 20 items, it also works. It sounds, I don’t know, maybe for some people it sounds a little bit much to put into a spreadsheet, but much better that than just leaving it there to gather dust and bother you every so often.

And, occasionally, you’re going to be getting fines because you haven’t dealt with some tax issue or responded to some letter. So, I mean, it’s literally costly, financially costly, to not address it and not address it in some kind of systemic positive, repeatable way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I love that so much. And you mentioned 80-20 and so much of what you said there, I’m vibing with a ton. And the phrase “somewhat legitimate,” I think is, oh, so perfect for the items that hang out in our to do this.

Marc Zao-Sanders
At the top that we’ve got.

Pete Mockaitis
They are somewhat legitimate and, yet, Vilfredo Pareto would say they are not the vital few of the 80-20 rule.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, find the vital few. Find the vital few and do those.

Pete Mockaitis
And it is such relief, you’re right, to see a huge list and to see many of them drop off. It’s like the fastest way to get something off of your to-do list is to decide thoughtfully, thoroughly, not to do it, “Hey, that’s off my to-do list and legitimately so.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
Exactly. Yes, it’s basically pruning. And there is no more efficient way of pruning a list than via a spreadsheet. So, the spreadsheet is not officially part of timeboxing. It is a very effective method for, yeah, for getting to the vital few, as you put it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I would like to hear a little bit about some of those questions by which we might use to determine what is calendar-worthy. And so, vital few, 80-20 type things suggest that vital few activities produce 16 times the output per unit input than trivial many items. So, there’s that. I also love the ONE Thing question. We had Jay Papasan on the show earlier.

What’s the one thing such that, by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary? So, that’s a huge win in terms of a prioritizer. We had Greg McKeown talking essentialism, in terms of like raising your standard, like cleaning out your closet, not from, “Might this someday be useful?” “No, no, low standard,” to, “Does this spark joy?” Marie Kondo style, high standard.

So, any other sort of uber powerful questions that are super handy in the universe of prioritizing?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, well, the main one for me is actually the emotional response you have to a specific item. So, as you’re going through the list, you will feel stressed or you have some sort of emotional response to some, and to some you just will have the absolute opposite.

What I’m suggesting is that, where you have a stronger emotional response, in general, you’re going to want to action those. So, I think that’s a proxy for importance for what matters to you that comes from your soul, actually. You don’t really need to ask any other questions. It’s just what is your response to this particular item.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say strong emotional response, is it either positive or negative? Is a go signal for action?

Marc Zao-Sanders
No, definitely. It might well be negative. I mean, look, for example, let’s say a tax return. A tax return, for most people, is not going to be hugely positive, but that doesn’t mean that you leave that and let’s find the good stuff. No. What I’m saying is that any kind of strong response probably means that either, you know, because you really want to want to do it because you’re enthusiastic about it.

In general, we don’t need help with those sorts of tasks. So, it’s actually more the ones where you have some sort of negative response. And to just dwell on that particular example, because that’s something that a lot of people feel when it comes to that time of year, getting something like a tax return back to whoever needs to see it.

The problem with not addressing it is that you just die a thousand deaths instead. You will need to do it in the end, and maybe you incur a fee as well if you go beyond whatever the deadline is. But even if you hit the deadline, if you worry about it 17 times before you submit it, well, why have you done that? Much better to confront it, be front-footed, and get the thing done on your terms proactively.

I use the term. I use the word agency a lot with timeboxing. It’s taking back your agency. You be in control. Don’t let the world happen to you. You decide what needs to happen and when it’s going to happen and get it done.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, ooh, die a thousand deaths, or sigh a thousand “Ugh.” Like, “Ugh, maybe tomorrow.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
Or, timebox instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so we got some thoughts on how to choose what goes in on this day’s calendar. Do you have some pro tips on how do I think about how long should that thing take? How long should I work in a bout of work, rest, breaks? What are some of the pro tips to designing a day to be a masterpiece?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. Well, exactly, it is like that. It’s sort of like you’re an architect, you’re designing, you’re like an alchemist of the experience that you’re going to have that day, and the ordering matters. I mean, if you think, let’s say you’ve got to write, I don’t know, a summary of a podcast, right? That’s one of your tasks. And you also want to go to the gym.

Now for some people, it will make a lot of sense to go to the gym first and then do the write-up. And for others, it will be the other way around. It really depends on how your brain works, how your mood is, what energy you have, maybe some of the logistical, the contextual elements of your day, but, really, the order really matters.

So, yeah, build in breaks. Consider that the order matters. I mean, for me, for example, when I’ve got difficult things to think about, I like to have some exercise built in to give me a chance to think about them in a diffusive way. So, I can just be a little bit more relaxed and have sort of answers come to me while I’m doing some hard or semi-hard exercise.

So, yeah, build in some breaks, build in also some slack. If you don’t have any slack and you go, like you were saying earlier, Pete, from thing to thing to thing, if anything breaks or anything takes a tiny bit longer, and you haven’t responded to it, then you can have a cascading, a negative cascading effect. So, build in some slack, build in some breaks.

I mean, to be a little bit more specific, okay, it varies from person to person, but for me, every couple of hours, I will need 10, 15 minutes, normally 15 minutes of a break. And that could be anything. Just get a drink, take the dog for a walk, have a shower, meditate, close my eyes. There are a lot of ways of having a break that aren’t just to default to the canteen or the kitchen and eat something that’s not that healthy for you.

So, with breaks, there’s a bit of an art to it as well. And think a little bit more about what’s going to refresh you and give you energy. But I would say that there’s no hard and fast rules about how much time or how many breaks you should take. It’s really, just coming back to that word intention, what works for you. Think hard about what works for you.

You can take as a guideline, you know, how I spend my day. And in the book, I’ve got some screenshots of how that is, but that won’t necessarily be that way, done that way, it won’t be for everyone. The point is to have a system, like timeboxing, which is super flexible and can accommodate different attitudes to different needs for taking breaks and having slack and what you do in those times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. And then when we’re actually doing the calendaring, do you have any pro tips in terms of 15-minute increments, or color coding, or anything that makes this go better?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Both of those, for sure. So, I mean, 15 minutes, so I have three sizes of timebox. And, again, other people can take a different view, and it is flexible to having different denominations. But my denominations are 15 minutes, 30 and 60. It’s nice and easy, there’s only three sizes so I don’t have to spend long thinking, “Is this a 48-minute task or a 17-minute task or whatever?” It’s just, like, a small, medium, large. And I know what small, medium, large are.

They also stack nicely up to an hour. There’s obviously 15s, you know, go into 60, so does 30. And then you asked about color coding. Well, I do color code my calendar, and this is to get a handle on, I mean, quite literally, get a view, a literal view of the balance of my life. So, I have five different areas of my life at the moment. So, there’s one business that I advise, another business that I advise, things that are for me to do with my soul and my wellbeing. And then there’s speculative activities as well.

So, I’ve got a few different categories of my life that I’ve deemed to be important for me right now. Okay, so if I color code the items as they go into the calendar, I can see at a glance at the end of a week, how much time I’ve spent on each of these areas. And, actually, the way that both Google and Microsoft do calendars now, they’ll toss it up for you.

So, they’re telling you, “Well, you’re spending 30% of your time on your…” as I put it, “…soul. Well, is that good or not good?” But if you have the data, then you can make a decision about adjusting it up or down. So, color coding sounds a little bit trivial, I mean, almost absurd, but there’s actually a very good reason for doing it.

I also, Pete, use emojis in my timeboxes. Why do I do that? I mean, probably not for a very good reason. It just gives me, I see timeboxing as sending your future self a message, a little bit of guidance, so that when that future self is distracted and stressed by the inevitable difficulties of a working day, you have that line back to, when you were in a calmer moment, when you were a bit wiser, when things were more still, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing that I should do.”

How’s that relevant to emojis? Well, it’s a little bit tongue in cheek. It’s a little bit, like, I don’t know, like a wink or a hug. It’s an affectionate message from my former less-stressed self to my later more-stressed self. And so, I put them in. That it definitely is an optional feature of timeboxing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And what’s cool about emojis is they can be right in the line of the text as opposed to a separate image thing, which is all weird and complicated and hard to shove into a calendar software.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, definitely. And it is for me. It’s right before the text that I put it. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also a fan of the Unicode symbol for a checkbox in the calendar. That feels nice. I just have that copy-pasted like, “Oh, and then that happened. Mission accomplished,” because that’s one of the most satisfying things about a to-do list is the checking them off. I can still have that in my calendar too.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, exactly. So, it sounds, Pete, like you timebox and you are using some of the higher arts of timeboxing, as we speak, as you live.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, higher arts. Well, Marc, tell me, any final things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Sure. I mean, well, okay, a couple of things that occurred to me. One is just the word time itself. So, this is a not very well-known fact, but time is the most commonly used noun in the whole of the English language, but not just the English language. If you look at Spanish, if you look at German, if you look at Chinese, I think, as well, and many others.

So, it’s super, super common. And it’s not like I was saying at the top, at the start of our conversation. It is surprising that people don’t give it even more time and attention than they do. So, that is just a factor I’ll sort of park with people. The other one I want to say is there’s a, yeah, sometimes you’ve got a plan with someone, like a dinner, and then the dinner gets cancelled.

And there’s nothing nicer than that feeling when you suddenly have some time in your calendar, but it’s very easy to waste, especially with your social media and our phones and what have you. There’s a mnemonic which has really gone down. Well, actually since the book came out. This isn’t even in the book, but it’s Mr. Elf.

So, the M is for meditation, R is for reading, E for exercise, L for learning, F for friends and family. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a very, very useful list to just run through. If I’ve got a bit of time and I want to use it well, here’s a reminder of some of the things that are probably going to be important, could well be important to me. And why not do that with your time rather than Netflix or Instagram or Snap or whatever it is? So, yeah, I want to get Mr. Elf into the ears of the people that are listening and watching.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marc Zao-Sanders
There’s one from Lady Gaga that I really like and speaks to, I think, what’s the most important about, one of the most important things about life and about this system.

So, the quote is, “I am my own sanctuary and can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.” To me, it’s about agency and hope and truth. And while it’s nice to be quoting Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche in the book, too, it’s also nice to give Lady Gaga some extra attention, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Marc Zao-Sanders
There was a study into what’s called implementation intentions. If you just Google implementation intentions, you’ll see. What these basically said was that if you decide when you’re going to do something, what you’re going to do, and when you do it, you’re two and half times more likely to get something done. You’re something like 90% likely to get it done versus 30-something percent.

It’s been replicated more recently in studies. And, of course, that kind of encapsulates exactly what I’m trying to get at with timeboxing. And, actually, when you were asking me earlier, “Well, what about the people that are just aren’t going to do it?” Well, the studies say that you really are two and a half times more likely. So, I probably should have said that back then. It basically says that timeboxing works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marc Zao-Sanders
I mean, the book I’ve read the most frequently is Lord of the Rings because it’s just enjoyable. A book that moved me more recently was The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand. I enjoyed that very much. That felt a lot about freedom and, again, agency. So, that resonated and was enjoyable as well, and it’s quite a different style to Tolkien’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, I mean, in making decisions in business, or in life, actually, the two-by-two matrix is one that I default to pretty frequently. You’ve got an issue, you don’t know how you’re going to resolve it, think about two of the factors involved that are distinct, and then you look at high, low, or yes, no for each of them. You put that onto a two-by-two and, just almost immediately, almost every time, things clarify somewhat. So, yeah, the two-by-two matrix is a really useful one for me. I love the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks, a Marc-original soundbite?

Marc Zao-Sanders
So, this is about, timeboxing is mostly an in-day activity to help you make the most of that day. But the point is if you keep doing it, that adds up to a whole life of intention and purpose and meaning and what have you.

So, the quote is, “The practice of daily intentional activity will eventually yield what almost every human being wants most – a chosen cherished life.” I think that’s very nice and just touches on, like I said, meaning, something that’s sort of deep. Deep and important.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Marc Zao-Sanders
I’m on LinkedIn. You can just put my name in. I accept requests, generally, there. I also have a website, MarcZaoSanders.com, from which there’s a monthly newsletter, and you can email me and get in touch by just answering, that it’s a Substack.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for someone looking to be awesome at their job?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, don’t just let life and your job just happen to you. Rediscover what you want to do, what your intentions are, and find a way to bring them into being, into your work, into your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Marc, thank you.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Pete, thank you.

Mar 10
0

1039: How to Stop Wasting Time on Email with Randall Dean

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Randall Dean shares practical tips for taming an overwhelming inbox.

You’ll Learn

  1. The best time-saving investment you can make
  2. How to keep unread emails from flooding your inbox
  3. The inbox shortcuts that’ll save you hours

About Randy

Randy Dean, The E-mail Sanity Expert®, author of Amazon bestseller Taming the E-mail Beast, is an expert on time & e-mail management and the related use of technology. For 25+ years his humorous and engaging programs have given attendees key strategies on better managing their time, e-mail, apps & technology.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Randall Dean Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Randy, welcome!

Randall Dean
It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited. We’re talking email. You are the Email Sanity Expert, registered trademark. So, I’d love to start by hearing a little bit in working with so many people and their email, is there anything that’s particularly surprising to you that you’ve learned about us professionals and doing email?

Randall Dean
Well, you know what’s interesting, I’ve been leading programs on this topic for 20 years now, started my company all the way back in 2004, and what I’ve learned over all this time is that not only are people spending, I think, the average that I saw in a published study was a little bit more than two hours per day, but at a lot of the conference events, conventions, places that I speak, I’m getting people answering anywhere from three to six hours a day just on their inbox.

The interesting contrarian fact and statistic that I’ve discovered, I ask people at these programs, I go, “How many of you have had prior training?” And if it’s an audience that I haven’t spoken with before, it’s less than 5%. Less than 5%, not just here in the United States, Canada, Mexico. I’ve spoken in Europe several times on this. And in all of those places almost no one has had strategic or technical training on how to be more efficient with their email on a tool that’s taking 25% to 50% or more of their workday. It’s crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what’s funny is I think we have a sense, or I have a sense, and I think I’m getting the vibe from other professionals, that we’re spending “too much time” on meetings and emails. Well, first, I just want to check that assertion for validity, because I guess it’s conceivably possible that even if you are spending six hours on email a day, if most of these messages are thoughtful works of written craftsmanship in which you are casting a vision and offering clear guidance, and wisdom, and leadership, and insight, and clarification, and coordination that that might be okay.

Like, you’re doing work. You’re doing knowledge work at a high level. You’re spending six hours on email but those six hours are well-spent in these communications. Tell, Randy, how often is that the case? Or, is, in fact, our assertion correct, that that’s too darn much?

Randall Dean
I would actually say for the vast majority of people, they’re not doing what you just described.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Randall Dean
They’re dealing with 200 emails a day, and they’re trying, in a mass flurry, to get through them as fast as they possibly can, and they’re not writing terribly high-quality and high-level communications. They’re just trying to get through the flood of information that’s coming in at them. It’s funny because I actually talk about email etiquette sometimes and I’m actually of the point, like, make the subject line sort of say what is in the email.

If there’s tasks inside the email, make sure people, right up front, know who’s got what tasks. And if you can’t get down to bullet points, it’s almost the exact opposite of what you just said in terms of crafting really nicely crafted communications. And I actually even mentioned that, if you are going to write something that’s sort of wordy and requires extra time and effort to go through it, you should probably turn that into an actual document, like a Word doc or a PDF so that you attach it to the email, so people slow down and read it more carefully.

Because one of the problems that they have is if it’s sort of a long email in terms of message length and density, a lot of people are just scanning over the top of them and not getting into them because they’ve got too many coming in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Randy, you’re bringing back a fun memory of my first kind of grown-up internship was at Eaton Corporation in Pittsburgh, and I was part of this program, and the one coordinating the program, her name was Amber. And it was funny, her email signature had “Thank you for your attention to this communication,” like in all of her emails.

And it was so funny, I don’t know if this is what she was going for, but it caused me, an insecure 19-, 20- year-old intern to say, “Oh, shucks, I didn’t actually spend much attention on your communication. I better read it again.”

Randall Dean
Yeah, and the thing is, I always tell people, “If somebody’s getting 150-200 emails a day, and you’re barraging them with a 14-paragraph soliloquy, and they miss something, is that really their fault for missing something? Maybe it’s your fault for not getting to the point, you know? So, yeah. Now that doesn’t mean you throw out all rules for appropriate grammar and etiquette.

But I also am a believer that email is best used when communications are simple, obvious, and straightforward. And the minute they start getting complex or confusing, it might be time to pick up the phone or go find the person.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or, I guess, we’ll talk alternatives and tools. I personally love the Loom video, if we’re remote and asynchronous, in terms of, “Hey, these are my thoughts on this matter and some detail. So, you can see my face, hear my voice, see the document, or whatever we’re talking about at the same time.” So, okay, understood.

It sounds like it’s quite rare that email time is time brilliantly spent, and we may, even if we do need to craft a beautiful something, it might be better off in a document. And so, the Tim Cook’s up early in the morning, emailing the day’s leadership wisdom for each of his key team members, it sounds like that’s not what most of emailing is.

Randall Dean
That’s really funny because, I mean, if you’re at Tim Cook’s level and his senior leadership team’s level, then maybe what you described at the start of this conversation might work. Most of the people that are coming into my audiences are administrative professionals, mid-level to low-senior level managers and directors, and they’re just dealing with a barrage of messages, and they’re trying to figure out what they need to get done within these messages, who they need to follow up with from these messages, and how to then turn that into a work day.

And so, a big part of what I’m doing is like, “Okay, here’s how you go through this stuff to figure out what’s important, what’s urgent and what’s not.” So, I think that that’s been a big part of the struggle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I hear you. So, that’s kind of the email vibe we’re talking about here is tons of incoming things, kind of unprocessed, unsorted, that need to be gotten through. And I’m thinking we had Cal Newport, we talked about A World Without Email on the show, and he used the phrase, just haunting, “In some corporate environments, we are human network routers.”

Randall Dean
That’s a good way to put it. I like that a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of, “Okay, here’s a message that’s coming to me. Okay, I can do this thing. I can forward it. No, it doesn’t belong to me, it belongs over here, forward there.” So, for many of us, it’s about processing large volumes, and having help is awesome. Shout out to my producers. I just forward all my pitches to them and they know what to do. It’s like, “Read all of these thoughtfully and tell me which ones are fantastic finalists.” And so, I don’t read 90% of the pitches in my email, and that’s awesome that they do that for me. I greatly appreciate them.

Randall Dean
And that’s a perfect delegation right there, that not enough people, I think, are doing. And so, I always tell people, “If you’re more of a senior level in your management chain and you feel like you’re spending way too much time, especially on low-level emails, that’s a mismatch because you’re getting paid to do higher-level work than low-level emails.”

So, you got to find a way to sort of fix that a little bit. And it’s probably going to require a reallocation of some of the messaging so that you’ve got somebody else helping you with screening a bit. I think that’s a really good way to put it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I am tempted to jump into tips and tactics, but, first, maybe, can you orient us to, you mentioned, okay, almost none of us get training in this. Can you give us a glimmer of hope or inspiration? What’s on the other side of this? Let’s say we do get some training from this insightful conversation with Randy or more, what’s possible? In terms of when we’ve got our email game optimized, what’s the before-after transformation look like?

Randall Dean
I think email is what you could call a necessary nuisance. It’s something you have to deal with and we’re not going to get rid of it. I don’t see anywhere on the horizon where email is going to completely go away. But when you think about what it is, the vast majority of what’s coming in are what I basically say are a whole bunch of hungry squirrels with the occasional big angry dog, right?

And so, basically, you’re trying to figure out, “Which one of these is the big angry dog that’s barking? And how do I reduce the distraction of all these hungry little squirrels?” And so, when you say “What’s on the other side?” I think having a logical triage mentality with processing your emails that requires some new habits.

But if you get into the habits, and you do it well, you will look at your emails less times per email, you might look at your inbox less times per day in total, you will be able to better identify what’s really important or urgent, and you’ll end up without such a big cluttered mess so that it’s not a distraction in and of itself.

You know, I would bet almost every program I’m into, maybe 15-20% of the audience has more than a thousand emails in their inbox that haven’t even been filed or deleted. And I mean that’s common. So, if you’re in that boat, you’ve got a lot of company. But I can also tell you, I know that when you’ve got just got pages and pages and pages of email streaming in your inbox, some marked unread, some flagged, some starred, most of them not, and you don’t know what is most important, that’s stress. I mean, I just think that’s the definition of stress, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. As you described that scene, I could actually feel my heart rate ticking up a bit. So, okay, less stress, fewer times, fewer total minutes there. Could you ballpark it for us? I mean, I’m sure it varies a lot based on roles and responsibilities and email volume. But in terms of untrained to email Jedi Master, what kind of email time savings might we realize?

Randall Dean
Well, it’s interesting. I had one of my university clients at one time, they had to sort of justify the expense of bringing me in to do the program. They did an ROI justification. And what they did was really cool. They actually asked people about a week or two after the program how much time they thought they were saving from the tips they learned in the program, and how confident they were, they were saving that much time.

And, now, the average person was basically saying they were saving more than two hours a week with a good number of them as much as four to six hours per week. Now, I know that may not sound like a lot, but if you could get a half day to three quarters of a day of additional productivity time every week, I think you’d be pretty happy with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And my mind just leaps to running the spreadsheet. So, two hours a week times 50 work weeks a year, 100 hours. What’s that annual rate for those employees? And now that time spent more valuably. So, Randall, unless your workshops cost a quarter million dollars, I’m pretty sure they got their money’s worth.

Randall Dean
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s easy, low-hanging fruit return on investment. I believe that we figured out that if you extrapolate those findings across all users in the room, that the first year ROI in and of itself was over 2,000%.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s what I like to hear.

Randall Dean
Because, like I said, it would be a different math if half the people or more already had this training, but if it’s literally 5% or less, it’s almost impossible not to see a significant productivity improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’re fired up, Randy. Lay it on us, what do we do to realize these gains?

Randall Dean
Well, when I teach my programs, I’m mostly speaking to professionals using tools like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, and one of the first things you have to do is just understand how software works. Most people don’t know what the software can actually do. And one of my first tips to anybody is, if you’re using a piece of software frequently, daily, multiple hours per day, there may be no better use of your time if you want to be more efficient to spend a little bit of time at least every week learning another new tip.

Because, by learning that extra tip or two over time, you’re just going to get so much more efficient and so much more time back just by understanding how the software works.

And the one example, really interesting thing, because most people are self-taught, I’m going to play a scenario out for you that happens super frequently for a lot of people. They get an email, they open it, they read it far enough to go, “I don’t have time for this right now,” and then they mark it unread or they flag it or they star it. Okay, now right there, let me share with you the statistic that I believe comes from that behavior right there.

The average professional email user tends to look at each and every email they receive, on average, three to seven times before they finally take a smart action with that item. And I think a big part of the reason that’s happening is because they read it, they go, “I don’t have time,” they mark it unread, they flag it, they star it. It stays in the inbox. This is where your inbox mess is coming from too. And then what happens is you’ve just guaranteed you’ve got to go back and look at it again later.

And so, you’re not doing anything. I mean, you’re really not doing anything with that input, but you are giving it time that is basically worthless time that you’re throwing away. And so, one of the things that I share with the people is a little triage method, sort of based a little bit on the work of David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done. I took training from him all the way back in the early ‘90s. And one of the things that I learned from him is, if something is quick, you do it right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Two-minute rule.

Randall Dean
Yeah. If it’s quick, you do it right now, and don’t you dare keep it for later. I love this. Somebody said, “Let’s go to Ohio. OHIO, only handle it once,” right? So, that should be your philosophy when you run into something quick. And I always challenge people in my programs, “If you’re looking at an email, you figure out what you need to do, and it’s only going to take you a couple minutes, and you don’t have time to do that? Why are you looking at your email? Shouldn’t you just keep working on what’s on fire? Why are you looking at your messages if you don’t have time to handle a quick little thing?” So, keep your focus.

But then, when I talked about what’s inside the software, both Outlook, classic Outlook, new Outlook, as well as Gmail have internal capabilities to take an email and quickly convert it into a related task or calendar item.

And so, I say take a few more seconds to get to the point where you know what you need to do next and then turn that item into a task or calendar item. And then once you’ve done that, if you haven’t got it done, but you got it on your task list or calendar, get it out of your inbox. Because, I mean, you’re done for now. It’s time to either file it for later reference or delete it if you don’t need it. And if you don’t have a good place to put it, make one and put it there. Not really rocket science.

I, sometimes, am surprised I get away with this as a living because, really, it’s sort of advanced common sense, but people just don’t think it all the way through, and they’re very inconsistent with how they’re triaging these messages.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s interesting is, I think the reason you are getting away with it is because there’s some psychological things at play here.

Randall Dean

Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Because whenever you go to the email, it’s like, “Ooh, here’s new interesting things. Oh, and some of it’s really important and urgent. I better handle it right away.” So, we’re almost never in the mind space like, “Okay, fire up Outlook, fire up Gmail. Hey, you know what? I wonder what all this software is capable of?” Like, we’re not in that headspace to do that.

And those functions, I guess, we’re not as accustomed to them, as well as thinking about the GTD, Getting Things Done, David Allen kind of philosophies of the inbox is merely a temporary repository by which it means, “Hey, you haven’t looked at me yet. Process me out of here in one way or another.” As opposed to, “Let me be the long-term storage facility for messaging.”

Randall Dean

Far too many people are using their inbox for three things. One is to receive and process new items. Two, is their de facto, but very dirty and highly disorganized task list. And, three, is their Uber storage for all things that haven’t left that inbox. And my strong belief, especially with my background understanding some of the GTD-type philosophies is the only one of those three that’s valid is processing new items. That’s what your inbox should be for is processing new items.

If you can deal with it quickly, you get it done. If you can’t deal with it quickly, it then becomes part of your task list or calendar because there, in your task list and calendar, once you understand those tools, you’ll be able to say, “What is the best use of my time right now? Where should I be putting my focus?” And you can’t really do that easily in a big messy cluttered inbox with 200 things marked unread and flagged. It’s just not going to work well.

And then, of course, once you’ve either got it done, got it on your task list, got it on your calendar, get it out of there. You don’t need it in there anymore.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. So, help us out, if we’re worried, like, “Okay, I read a message and I realize, hmm, this is going to take some more thought and attention, and it is not to be dealt with now. I’m not leaving it in my inbox. So, what am I doing with it? And how do I make sure I don’t forget about it and lose it if it’s not in my inbox?”

Randall Dean

Now, simultaneously, when I teach the tip about putting it especially into your task list, I also show in both programs how you can turn on reminders. And then, so what will happen is that task will pop back up on your screen at a time when it’s better for you to see it. Not the email, the task, although the email text is typically inside the task that’s been created.

And so, that way you can say, “Okay, I’ve identified what needs to be done. It’s going to come back and find me when I need to see it. I don’t need to leave it where I have it right now. I can put this thing away if I need to keep it for later, or get rid of it if I don’t need it.” And, I think, by utilizing the reminders that are available in both task and calendar, you can relieve some of that stress.

Of course, now I’m going to say this, I regularly get my inbox down to close to zero every day, which makes a lot of sense because I’m teaching people how to work their inbox. But because of that, what I’m trying to teach people is, once you get that inbox down to close to zero, that’s when you shift your focus to your task list and your calendar by habit.”

“If there’s nothing on my calendar right now, no meetings or blocked time for anything, then I work my task list until it’s time to go back and check my email again, or go to my next meeting.” And so, you just sort of get into this habit of where you’re surfing across those three tools throughout the day, balancing your needs to get your critical focused work done with your needs to periodically get back to people.

And I think if you can get yourself into that habit, that flow, you can both reduce the distraction of your email, reduce the time spent on your email, and potentially increase the time you’re spending on your more important stuff, which is the goal of all this anyway.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, let’s say we’ve scheduled a time, we’re going to spend 30 minutes or so processing this email, and just rocking through it. How do you recommend we execute this step by step? You mentioned triage.

Randall Dean

Yeah. Well, like I said, I think if you’re going to open an email, you look at it once. If you look at it, what do I need to do with it? If it’s quick, deal with it now. OHIO, only handle it once. If it’s not quick, it goes on to your task list or calendar, and then you either file it for later reference or you delete it. And if you don’t have a good place to file it, make one and put it there.

And I will say this, nobody’s perfect at this. I’m not perfect at this. But the closer I get to following that triage mentality when it comes to processing new inputs, especially at the start of the day, but maybe a few more times throughout the day, the more efficient I feel myself getting at dealing with this, once again, necessary nuisance, and keeping the squirrels under control.

So, that’s sort of the goal is, “I want to keep these squirrels from taking over. I want to be in control of this input stream.” And the way to be in control of that is by having a good consistent strategy, habit, routine on how you deal with them and try to stick as close to it as you possibly can.

How much time would you save over a year if you went from looking at the typical email three to seven times, down to once maybe twice max? How much time would that give you in a year?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it sounds like perhaps 100 plus hours.

Randall Dean

I would think so.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so you mentioned, learn the software. And I remember there was a day, and I was. I was just goofing around in Gmail, and I think in the settings, I saw enable shortcut keys.

Randall Dean

Yeah, yeah, I show that in my Gmail sessions. I actually go in the settings and I click on the link that says keyboard shortcuts. And, I mean, like that’s a classic example. It’s right there in your settings. You click on it, it opens up. It says shortcuts for computer, for Android, for iPad, right? And I’m like, “My gosh.” And then it’s got like 14 categories of ways you can use the shortcuts; each one is its own drop menu with a whole list of potential shortcuts.

And I tell people, I go in there and I show it, and I say, “Now look at this. This is a classic example. Print that. Print it onto a sheet of paper, set it right next to your computer, highlight two, three, four of these things that you want to get really good at, and then practice them for the next week or so. And then once you feel like you got those ones down, cross those out, highlight two, three, four more.

Once you get those done, then go back to the next drop panel and print that one and do the same thing. And if you just did that, picked up two, three of these keyboard shortcuts a week over the next year, you’d be like a maestro. I mean, you would be fantastic and so much more efficient at just doing the normal little stuff on your computer because now you don’t have to move your mouse to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. When I made the discovery, I was astonished at so many levels. One, I thought, “How is it that these have been here the whole time and I was not aware?” Two, “Why were these not just automatically turned on as the default setting?” because I guess it was not at the time. Maybe it still is not. And, three, “How come none of my friends, who know I love productivity, ever felt the need to share this with me,” probably because they assumed I already knew it, and it would be insulting to bring it up to me.

Randall Dean

I’m going to give you a different assumption.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Randall Dean

They don’t know about them either, because nobody has the time to go take a look. That’s why I said, especially if you’re using Gmail, just in the last week, I saw two things that have changed. They’re constantly working on things behind the scenes. One of them was really minor. They moved it from the little three dots at the top of the screen to the little three dots over to the side of the screen.

And so, I was doing a live program, and I go where it’s always been, and I’m like, “Uh-oh, it’s not there anymore.” And then, just out of nature, I went over to the one, “Oh, there it is. They moved it.” And they’re doing that kind of stuff constantly. And so, I think when you’re using a tool like Gmail, as well as maybe the new and Web Outlook because those are sort of Cloud-based, real-time being updated type tools, you want to go in and look into your toolkit quite frequently because there’s new stuff showing up all the time.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s telling. And you’re right, and doesn’t take a lot of shortcut knowledge. The ones I use all the time is J for next message and E for archive message.  And you can do a lot of damage if you just say, that’s how I like to triage, I go, “What are the emails I can archive without even really reading? Like, I can just know these can disappear in under three seconds.”

And I go J-E, J-E, J-J-E, E, J-J-J. And it’s just like, boom, flying through it. And it does feel like you’re a maestro. It’s cool. Can you share with us, what are some other software discoveries that are eye-opening and game-changing for people?

Randall Dean

Well, I think one of the biggest ones that most people don’t realize, both Outlook and Gmail, you can actually utilize the Signatures tool as an automated response template manager. So, basically, like let’s say there are certain messages you’re sending all the time, and the same question keeps coming up over and over again. You go into your Sent folder to find the last time you sent it so you can forward it again until the next time you need to send it again.

And every time you’re doing that, you’re spending, I don’t know, a minute, two, three looking for this thing in your sent folder. You could just copy and paste the text of that message. Go into your Signatures tool in both Outlook and Gmail, create a new signature, give it a name, paste that text into the copy field with your signature at the bottom and hit OK. And now from this point forward, that message reply is push button.

So, as soon as somebody sends you the message, you just copy their email address, you go up to your signature, you pop that into the message, put their name in the Send field, personalize the “Hi, Joe” and then, boom, in like five seconds, you’re sending that message. Not two minutes. Five seconds. And so, that’s like a great example of a way that once you learn the way the software works and what it can do. I always tell people get the word signatures out of your head, replace it with automated email sender, and use that three to five times a day, that you just got half an hour right there.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, boy, there is so much we could cover. So, Randy, I’ll just leave it to you to curate. Could you give us maybe the top three transformational tips or practices in terms of this takes very few minutes but it will yield you very many hours?

Randall Dean

One of the things, and this is a little bit of a technical tip, so I’ll describe it, but it always gets the oohs and aahs when I’m doing my program. Did you know that you can just highlight a piece of text in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs? You can highlight it, release the click, then pick it up and move it to a different place.

And here’s the thing, it’s like almost like a shortcut to copy and paste, cut and paste. And the thing is that it works on all of these tools – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, Google Slides, even on a lot of web forms it works. And if you can get really good at this, it’s like this quick little thing that you can do to allow you to take a piece of information that’s in the wrong place in your document or file, and quickly move it to the right place in your document or file.

And little tips like that, I think, can, you know, I will say, you know, when I show that to people and they’re all going like, “I didn’t know that I could do that.” I go, “Ah, I just gave you three days this year. There’s your three days.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I guess we’re saving the Command X and the Command V steps in doing that. Okay.

Randall Dean

And, I mean, it’s literally going to save you a second or two every time, but that second or two, multiplied by 40,000 times a year, it’s going to add up. The other one that I love is that a lot of people don’t realize this. When you’re creating folders, that you can use a special character, like an exclamation point, or even a number, and that will allow your folders to supersede alphabetization. So, what you can do is identify the folders you use the most or that are most important, and move them to the top of your folders list.

And that’s another one that is just like a no-brainer, super time saver, because now, instead of having to go all the way through the alphabet, you’re truncating that, and you can get to the folders you use most frequently right there at the top of your list. And that works not just in your email. It works in both Outlook and Gmail, but it also works in tools like OneDrive and Google Drive with your folders for your documents and files. You can actually move up your most used folders to the top and save a ton of time there, too.

Pete Mockaitis

Nifty. Okay. What else have you got?

Randall Dean

The other one that I really love is to get into the settings, you might need to go into rules in Outlook. You can also do this in New Outlook. You might have to go into Settings, Mail, Notifications. So, they’ve sort of moved it just a little bit. And in Gmail, you might have to go in and set up a filter to do this to make it all work.

But the basic tip is this, identify who your most important senders are. You know how I talked about the big angry dog? You want to identify, “Who sends me emails that are my big angry dogs?” Because what you can do in these tools is you can then go in and tell Outlook and Gmail, “These are my most important people. So, when they send me a message, I would like a pop-up or I would like a unique sound.”

And that means that you don’t necessarily have to get distracted by every squirrel, but when it’s one of those most important people, you certainly can. You can be, “Okay, boom! You know what? I’ll make a different sound, ‘Dun-da-dun-dun’ instead of ‘Doo-doo-doo-doon,’” you’ve been here for years and years, you’ll hear the “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” “Oh, I got to stop for a second, I got to see what this one is.”

And so, that way you don’t feel like you have to look at everything coming in right now because you know that the really important things are going to probably jump up and get you, which means that actually, you might feel a little bit more comfortable keeping your focus on things, knowing that it’s going to tell you when the big angry dogs bark.

And I’ll even add one little micro thing about this. That same capability of setting up those rules can also allow you to set rules to auto-delete things that you don’t want to see at all. So, not only can it help you know when your most important people are trying to get a hold of you. It can also get rid of a bunch of the junk and spam automatically so it’s not even taking two seconds of your time.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Randall Dean

So, it’s both sides. It helps on both sides of this. One last thing I’ll say is Outlook, specifically, will even allow you to set a priority level. So, like, I want to know when I get an email from my boss that is marked important. See, and it will only make the special sound when it’s from my boss marked important.

In that way if you’ve got an enlightened boss, who’s also taken my program, they’re going to learn that they should only mark emails important when they want faster action. Everything else can just be processed in normal strategy. And I always make the joke, “If every email you send is marked urgent or important, none of your emails are truly urgent or important.”

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Well, tell me, Randy, any final things you want to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Randall Dean

Once you get this efficiency regained, then you can actually take advantage of some of the other tools in in the suite – calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, maybe tools like OneNote or Google Keep, Teams, Drive, Planner – to get significantly more prioritized and strategic with that extra time you’ve now created.

And if you can get to where, you know, you get that email under control, it’s not taking quite as much of your day, you’re getting some of these efficiencies in time, then maybe you can actually step your game up to be a little bit more prioritized, more strategic, more effective, because now you’ve got this new necessary nuisance under control a bit.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Randall Dean

Well, it’s funny. I put it in my book. The quote is from Gandhi. It’s, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” But I then put right under it, “Be the change you wish to see in your inbox.” 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Randall Dean

It’s more than 20 years old now, it was by the group called Basics. And they actually did a study where they got permission to go into a whole bunch of different organizations, have their researchers stand around just waiting and watching for people getting unexpectedly interrupted, and they tracked what happened.

And they found an interesting thing, that people that get unexpectedly interrupted in the workplace, after that interruption has been handled, they answered the question, they had the conversation, they get off the phone call. The interruption is now over. If they’re not ready for that interruption when it first occurred, they will then spend an additional four to 15 minutes each and every time before they get back to what they were working on, because they lost their place and they forgot what they were doing.

And so, the little micro tip that I share is, if somebody interrupts you, you can just go, “One second, please,” grab a sticky note and write down exactly what it is you need to do next on whatever you’re working on, put that right on your computer screen. And the goal of that is so that you’re basically leaving yourself bookmarks throughout the day, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was doing.”

So, the interruptions can still happen, and I even say, I think it will help your communication quality because if you don’t do that, what are you very often doing the whole time you’re talking to that person?

Pete Mockaitis

To remember you’re still doing the thing, yeah.

Randall Dean

Trying to remember where you’re at, which means what are you not doing, listening? And that is where mistakes and errors of omission creep in, too. So, I think that’s just a classic little study that can then morph into it. And I always conflate that, you know, four to fifteen minutes per, and then I will ask my audience, I’ll go, “What do you think, 10 to 25 a day, 10 to 25 unexpected phone calls, stop-bys, interruptions, text messages?” And people give me the head nod.

I go, “If I’m right on this, that means you’re losing 45 minutes to as much as two hours a day just because you’re getting distracted that many times per day. And if you can get it down to where you have a strategy for that, that could create another hour or two, daily.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. And a favorite book?

Randall Dean

It’s called Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Randall Dean

Don’t start your day in your inbox. Start your day in your calendar for a few minutes. Not just looking at today, but looking forward to see if there’s anything coming you need to get ready for. Are there any blocks of time that you could block for more strategic use on your key projects or activities? And then build a short, focused task list for today that matches your key projects and responsibilities, but also your available time.

If you’re doing that right, that should only take you three to five minutes at the start of the day. But you want to do that before you even dare open your inbox. Because if you open your inbox first, it’s basically like going over the door of the office, opening the door, and saying, “Come on in, squirrels! Take over,” right?

So, I want you to get into your time, your projects, and your tasks for a few minutes before opening your email so that you put that email into perspective. And then if the email fully takes over, it probably should. It probably is the most important thing. But if you’re not looking at your calendar and your projects and tasks first, how do you know? You’re just guessing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Randall Dean

I would just say go out and check out my website, RandallDean.com, pretty easy. That’s Randall, R-A-N-D-A-L-L. And if you go out to RandallDean.com, I’m also on LinkedIn. I would say search “Randy Dean” to find me. And I have a popular and growing YouTube channel too, and I think you could just type in Randy Dean, email, and it’ll probably, something of mine’s going to pop up right near the top of the list, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Randall Dean

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Pick two, three, four pieces of low-hanging fruit, do those first, baby steps. You don’t have to become an expert overnight, but find those really good nuggets wherever you find them and try to integrate those right away, and then build your system from there.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Randy, this is fun. Thank you.

Randall Dean

Yeah, I had a good time.

Jan 16
0

1024: Crafting your Own Ideal Time Management System with Anna Dearmon Kornick

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Anna Dearmon Kornick shares essential tools and tricks for managing your time and energy well.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most forget when planning out their day
  2. How to keep little tasks from distracting you 
  3. How to arrange your week to maximize energy 

About Anna 

Anna Dearmon Kornick is a highly sought after time management coach and keynote speaker, top 1% globally ranked podcast host of It’s About Time, and founder of the It’s About Time Academy. A true Louisiana firecracker who has become known for making time management fun, Anna helps busy professionals and business owners struggling with overwhelm manage their time using her personality-driven HEART Method.

Building on more than a decade of experience in the fast-moving, high-stakes world of political and crisis communications, it’s no surprise that Anna thrives on creating order out of chaos. Early in her career, she wrangled media for a Lt. Governor and managed the hectic schedule of a U.S. Congressman. Her rapid response background and relentless approach to problem-solving position her as the go-to expert for purpose-driven time management for busy professionals.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Anna Dearmon Kornick Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anna, welcome!

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Hey, Pete, how you doing?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m lovely. How are you doing?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I’m doing great. Thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear some of your time management wisdom. You have had some cool experiences from wrangling some hectic schedules in your professional world, so, I’d love to hear any really surprising insights about time management that you know and we don’t, but we should know?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Well, I’ll tell you an insight that I learned very early in my, I guess you could call it time management career. My first job straight out of college was as a scheduler to a United States Congressman.

And my very first week on the job, I was so excited to dive in and create the most perfect schedule anyone had ever seen. And on day one, mid-morning on Monday, our chief of staff Clayton walks up to me, and he says, “Anna, we have a problem.” And my heart absolutely sank, I had no idea what I could have done wrong. And he points out that I’d forgotten something very important, and it’s something that a lot of us actually tend to forget.

And he shared with me that the boss was not a robot, and that he needed bathroom breaks built into his schedule. And I was absolutely mortified. And it was such an important reminder very early in my career that we are all human, and that taking breaks is just as important as making sure that there’s time allotted to get things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, we are all human, and time needs to be allotted. As we’re having this conversation, this is the day that, well, President Jimmy Carter’s funeral is occurring in the Washington Cathedral. And I caught some of the news showing that live broadcast. And it was sort of a unique moment watching all these presidents.

Just sitting and waiting. Just like the rest of us, like there are times, it was like, “No, a funeral is about to start. We are sitting and we are waiting for things to occur because even though we are super powerful, wealthy, important, that’s just kind of a reality. Like, they, too, need bathroom breaks and need to eat and sleep and do all the things, though that’s not put on the news stations.” So I think that’s a great point right there, is that whether or not you’ve scheduled it, these things must happen.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re in a highly scheduled environment, it sounds like that was your duty to literally put a line item in the calendar, which says, “Restroom.” Or, how is that operationally executed, if I may ask, Anna?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
You know, that’s a great question. It really looked like making sure that there was 15 minutes of buffer. Between every two meetings, there needed to be 15 minutes of buffer just in case, so often, when we think about time management, we tend to think about getting as much accomplished as possible and squeezing in as many things as possible into our day. But if that is the only lens through which we look at time management, we’re setting ourselves up for failure because the perfect day, maybe on paper, where you maximize every single minute of your day, it just doesn’t work in real life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, I’m so fascinated by the notion of scheduling every minute of another person’s life and what that experience is like for you when you’re fresh into your first kind of professional role there.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I know it’s a crazy concept to think about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so I guess help me out, literally, in that calendar, you’re having sleeping, waking up, and showering. Like, you have this written in there for every piece?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yes, that was all completely time blocked. So, I know your audience is no stranger to time blocking. It’s creating a block in your calendar that represents how you’ll spend that time, and we essentially knew that in order. So, as a congressman, as anyone in a high-powered, high-responsibility position, you have to divide your time in a lot of different ways. 

And so, without having a minute-by-minute itinerary for the day, it’s nearly impossible to divide your time between all of these different pieces that have to be tended to.

And, of course, it took a really important upfront conversation of, “What do you want your day to look like? What type of breaks do you need?”

But it really had to look at, “Okay, so you want to work out, in the mornings. How long do you need to work out? What does that transition time look like from the gym back to the office? How much time do I need to block out?” I got really acquainted with using Google Maps and traffic projections in order to understand transition time from point A to point B because that was so key in making sure that buffer time was included.

Really, every single thing had to be thought of and accounted for to ensure that the day went smoothly and that we were able to have him show up everywhere that he needed to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I find intriguing about this notion is, I guess maybe I’m just sort of like a creative, free thinking, I like to get into my flow. Like, that’s my favorite is like, “Oh, there’s nothing this afternoon. Let’s just dream up some things.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Well, you should not be a congressman then. I would not recommend that path for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I think for several reasons, but I guess what’s funny though is if you are proactively taking into account every minute and the travel time, then it doesn’t necessarily follow that having a schedule that looks visually jam packed actually feels emotionally stressed, rushed, hurried, exhausting. It’s like, “What’s on my calendar? Oh, 45 minutes for strolling to the gym, exercising, and strolling back. All right then, I’ll just enjoy doing that now. Cool.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, I mean, what’s so interesting is that. A lot of my work as a time management coach now incorporates your personality and the way that you think, the way you make decisions, the way you approach structure, closure, open-endedness, all of those things, it deeply impacts the way that you spend your time and manage your time.

And for many people, a minute-by-minute planned-out schedule feels freeing because everything has been accounted for, and they’re not having to make minute-by-minute decisions as their day goes on because everything’s been planned. All they have to do is adapt as they need to. But for other people, having a minute-by-minute planned-out schedule is just an opportunity to rebel and do the opposite of what is on the schedule.

Like, “No, nobody is going to tell me what to do, not even me and my calendar.” And so, it’s really important to understand. I mean, you mentioned, “Hey, if I’m a creative type, I want to have time to think.” Having that minute-by-minute schedule probably wouldn’t be the best route for you to take. I would recommend something else for you. But if you have that type of personality where the structure feels like freedom, then time-blocking the heck out of your day or your week is going to feel right for you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. Well, I’d love it you could perhaps share with us a cool story of someone who saw a transformation with regard to their relationship to time management, where they were, what they did, and where they landed.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
So, it really makes me think back to a client that I worked with a few years ago. I’m going to call her Amanda. And when Amanda and I started working together, she was completely overwhelmed to the point where she felt hopeless. She was working in a job that honestly had her working 24/7. She was never putting her laptop away. She was missing out on spending time with her family and friends. She felt like life was completely passing her by and that she was completely just drowning in work, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

She reached out, and she said, “I feel like this is my last hope. Let’s work together, let’s figure this out.” And so, working with Amanda, we started, step by step, sorting out what it is she actually wanted her life to look like. And the thing is that, for so long, she had just been kind of swept up in this wave of everyone else’s expectations, of what her parents wanted for her, of what she thought that she was supposed to be doing.

And she realized that she wasn’t really doing anything that she truly wanted to do. And so, for the first time in her life, she actually started to create a vision for her life and what she wanted. And she started getting really clear about what she wanted for her future. And a lot of times you might think, “Wait, what does this even have to do with time management?” But without a vision for your future, you have no direction, you have no decision points about how to spend your time.

And so, I encouraged Amanda to write a letter to herself from a future version of herself. So, we worked together in 2020, and she wrote a letter to herself from 2025 Amanda. And in this letter, she poured into all of the things that she was currently doing, that she owned a home, that she was in a job that she loved, that she worked in an office with exposed brick and huge windows, that she had time to spend with her family and friends, and that, more than anything, she was happy and proud of herself.

Now, staying in touch with Amanda over the last five years, because it’s 2025 now, I’ve had the opportunity to watch her set boundaries in how much time she spends working. I’ve had the opportunity to watch her take care of herself by leaving work in order to actually go to the gym and work out. I’ve watched her invest in her health. I’ve even seen her, she called me the day that she bought a new car, the car that she had always wanted.

And it was such a huge step for her because she was finally doing something for herself that she wanted. And she reached out to me a couple months ago, and she said, “I’m about to step into 2025 Amanda, and almost every single thing that I wrote in my letter five years ago has come true. And it’s come true because of the vision that I created and the way that I shaped my time to match that vision.”

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. All right. Well, I think we’d all love a little more of that going on in our lives. That’s delightful. So, tell us, I think we’ve all heard some tips or tricks, some listicles, maybe we’ve got an app or some tools that we dig, can you share with us perhaps, fundamentally.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
So, a lot of times when we want to make a change to the way that we’re spending our time, we want to go straight to our calendars or our to-do lists and start rearranging things. We want to download an app or try a habit tracker. But the thing is that, whenever you go straight to trying to rearrange things or add a new hack or an app, you’re starting in the wrong place. The biggest mistake that most of us make when it comes to improving our time management is that we skip the most important first step.

And it’s exactly what I shared about Amanda. It’s creating that vision for your future. And the thing is that, when you have that vision, you have a direction to move in. You know where you’re going because every single decision you make about how you spend your time either gets you closer to or further away from that vision. But let’s say you have that vision, you know what it is that you want, then what? How do you actually make that happen?

So, that’s where I like to share basically my time management Swiss army knife. I really think that there are three core tools that really serve as the foundation for time management once you have that vision in place. And that’s time blocking, task batching, and theme days. Time blocking, task batching and theme days. When you are able to pull one of these tools from that time management Swiss army knife, you’re able to do a couple things.

So, there are two productivity pitfalls that all of us are constantly fighting, whether we realize it or not. One of those is Parkinson’s Law. So, Parkinson’s law tells us that work expands to fill the time available. And you might be like, “No, Anna, I would stop working at some point. Work’s not going to expand all over the place.” But the thing is that it does.

When we don’t have a clear understanding of what done or complete or enough or success looks like, there’s always something else that we can tweak or adjust or edit in order to get ever so much closer to impossible to reach perfection. And so, we just kind of keep going without a limit. But when you use time blocking, you’re able to beat Parkinson’s law because a time block gives you a set start time and a set end time. And it helps you contain that work within a specific timeframe.

Anybody who has ever said, “I am so good at working under pressure. You give me a last-minute deadline and I can crank it out.” That’s Parkinson’s law making that happen. Because when you have that set deadline, you find a way to make it work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, when it comes to the time blocking, I totally hear you that the work will expand to fill the time allotted for it. Although, I don’t think that the reverse quite works, in the sense of, if I say, “I’m going to accomplish this thing in 12 minutes,” but, like, it’s actually impossible. How do you think about setting an appropriate amount of time for a thing?

Because I’ve heard studies show that we humans are not the best at estimating how long something actually takes. But at the same time, I see there is value in having a number there that keeps us from spinning our wheels and going to unnecessary layers of iteration that are really not that helpful. So, I think you can assign too much time, you can assign too little time, and we’re not that good at it. How do you go about blocking an appropriate amount of time?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Okay, I love that because you actually stepped right into the next productivity pitfall, which is the planning fallacy. So, that thing, that study show, it has a name. The planning fallacy states that humans are terrible at estimating how much time things take. And when you know that that exists, then you can do something about it, right? Because it’s kind of like the first step is acknowledging that there’s a problem. Our first step to getting better at estimating how long things take is acknowledging that we’re all naturally pretty terrible at it.

So, I really encourage my clients to kind of create their own formula. My rule of thumb is if you think something is going to take an hour, add an additional 30 minutes. If you think something is going to take 12 minutes, give yourself an additional 12 to 30 minutes, just in case. Because most of the time we are going to underestimate. So, anytime you think, “Hey, I think it’s to take me about this long,” add more time. You’re probably going to need it.

And if you want to take it even a step further, so let’s say that it’s something that you do on a regular basis, maybe it’s submitting invoices, or doing some type of report, or just something that you’re doing on a regular basis, time yourself. Next time you do it, time yourself. See how long it takes because that’s going to give you a much better example to refer to in the future is when you have some actual data to work with.

Me, personally, I am not a huge fan of time tracking for the sake of time tracking. But sometimes one of the most valuable exercises that we can do is a time study where you spend time tracking how you are spending your time for the course of a week in 15-minute increments because it is so telling and it exposes all of those places where we waste time, that we don’t even realize that we’re doing things that we don’t even realize that we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is handy, yes. And I also like the notion of when you put more time than you estimate is necessary, I think that creates just really nice psychological feedback things going on because sometimes I get frustrated with like, “Ugh, this thing is taking way longer than it ‘should.’” And that makes it more aggravating as opposed to, “Oh, wow, I allocated an hour and a half for this thing. And by good fortune, it only took 52 minutes.” Well, then, one, I feel like a winner, like, yay me. And, two, it feels like there’s a little bit of a present, like, “Ah, well, here we have this extra time right here.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Bonus time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, “What shall I do with this surplus?”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I love that. I love that. You know, that actually reminds me of something that I shared with a client yesterday called the shiny things list. So, we can have the most pristine organized environment to work in, we can turn off all of our notifications, put our phone in airplane mode, but we still have ourselves and we can sometimes be the most distracting thing in the room. We’ll start working on something, like you said, “I gave myself an hour and a half to work on this and it only took 52 minutes.”

And in that 52 minutes, we remember that we need to order toilet paper and have it shipped, and that we need to get a birthday card for our mom, and that we need to follow up with Tony about the Jones report. And so, what we tend to do naturally is we stop what we’re working on to order the toilet paper to have it shipped from Amazon, and we stop what we’re working on to order a birthday card, or to make a note, or to stop what we’re doing and we check in with Tony about that report.

And we end up ping-ponging around to all of these different things, which ends up slowing us down, causing us to make more mistakes on the thing that we’re trying to focus on and just making it take a lot longer. And so, what I encourage people to do is to have a notepad right next to your desk so that, as you are working, let’s say that you have an hour and a half to get something done, so at the top of our notepad, we’re going to write down, “One o’clock to 2:30 because, boom, that’s the time that I’m committing to work.”

And then below that, we’re going to make a list of the three things we’re going to accomplish in that timeframe. Now, you might only set out to do one thing, but what if you finish it in 52 minutes? Then you have this bonus time. And what do most of us do with bonus time, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Social media. News.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
You got it. We just kind of flop into default mode when we could transition that focus time into something else useful. So, I love to recommend, “Okay, what are the one, two or three things that you’re going to accomplish during that focus time so that you’re able to go straight into the next thing without having that waffly decision mode?” And then once you have those three things decided, you draw a line underneath it, that’s your line in the sand, and then you write, “Shiny things.” The more scribbly you can write shiny things, the better because it really emphasizes, like, the frivolity of them. And then you get to work.

And every time something pops into your head, instead of acting on it immediately, you write it on your shiny things list. You contain your shiny things instead of chasing them. And so, after you finish this work block, and you have this list of shiny things, now you have some decisions to make. You can decide, “Do I need to do these now? Do I want to defer them to later? Do I want to delegate them to someone or delete them altogether?” But the point is that you didn’t go off on a million different rabbit holes. You stayed focused because you didn’t chase your shiny things.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it’s a good feeling, too, because there’s a little bit, again, psychologically, when I have the idea, it’s like, “Ooh, there’s a thing that I should do,” and it comes into mind, we do tend to do them right away, because there’s a little bit of a tension. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to forget. This is in my mind, and that’s the way to relieve that pressure of it being in my mind.” But you could also just write it down, and then it’s like, “Oh, and here they are all captured here. How handy.” Super. Okay, so we got time blocking, task blocking. And then theme days?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Theme days, yes. So, I love theme days, and theme days are especially a good fit for people who want flexible structure. So, if you’re the kind of person who, having a minute-by-minute time blocked schedule, makes you feel itchy, then a theme day is probably going to be the best bet for you. So, it’s basically choosing a different theme for each day of your week.

So, let’s say you’re in a marketing role. And maybe Mondays, you want to make that social media Mondays. And that’s the day that you focus on creating social media content. It doesn’t matter if you write captions in the morning or in the afternoon, as long as it gets done on social media Monday. Maybe on Tuesdays, you call it, “Tell them all about it Tuesdays.” And that’s the day that you put together PR pitches and do media outreach and write your newsletter. Again, it doesn’t matter when it happens during the day, as long as it happens.

Go a step further. Wednesday could be website Wednesday. You can come up with a different theme for each day of the week. And what this does is that it creates some mental consistency for you. It puts you in a consistent mindset all throughout the day so that, even though you’re working on a collection of tasks that are related, you’re not jumping from one moment writing a social media post, to then sending an invoice, to then updating a website. Those are all three very different mental processes and ways of thinking.

And so, it enables you to really streamline your energy, your creativity, and your focus and to basically shape your day around each of these themes. It’s also really cool because it helps you create consistency and set expectations for yourself about when you can accomplish certain things. And it helps you set expectations with your team if you’re collaborating with others. Because if your team knows that, “Hey, every Wednesday is Anna’s website Wednesday,” they know that they’ve got to get any updates to you by Tuesday afternoon so that you can incorporate them on Wednesday, you know?

And so, theme days can be a really great way to introduce some flexible structure that helps you be more efficient with your time, your creativity, and, plus, it’s just fun to use alliteration and come up with fun names for theme days. I mean, to me, that’s like half the fun.

Pete Mockaitis
I was asking if alliteration was required.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I mean, personally, I think it should be, but you do whatever you want.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s nifty about themes is the organizing principle of the theme can be any number of things. Like, when you say website Wednesday, it’s sort of like, “Okay, on website Wednesday, there are a number of,” let’s say, “environmental context things in play.”

Like, “Okay, I’m going to be in an office at a computer with some quiet. I’m going to have a few pages or tools open and at my disposal.” And so, in so doing, there’s time savings that just shows up because I’m not logging into a new thing, and they got the two-factor authentication, you know, blah blah blah blah. It’s like, “I’m doing that once, and then, all right, and then I’m in the thing, and then away we go. Cool.” And, likewise, you are well equipped. It’s like you’ve got all your stuff for doing the thing at hand.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Your mise en place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and you’re in the mental groove, and you have like a bit of expectation and understanding of, like, in a way, you’re almost warmed up. So, I see a lot of value in the themes. And in my experience, sometimes you can even just have like a theme half day in terms of, “Well, hey, before lunch is this theme, and after lunch is that theme.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
One hundred percent.

Pete Mockaitis
And in the startup communities, they talk a lot about the maker schedule versus the manager schedule, which I think is fantastic because those feel wildly different. Like, “I’m creating some stuff thinking deeply and I’m not available to anyone, go away,” versus, “I am super responsive. I am your most accessible, friendly, quick manager and collaborator you could dream of because I’ve got the slack. I’ve got the email. I got all the text, window. I got all the things to message and communicate up a storm quickly,” and they do feel totally different.

So, I would love some of your pro tips from your clients in terms of like themes, categories, contexts, mind states. What are some buckets that you find pretty handy for holding a variety of things together in a theme?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Oh, I love this. I love this question so much. And if you have not had a chance to read the book, Mind Management Over Time Management, I think is the name of it. It’s by Dan Kadavy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, David Kadavy. That sounds like David Kadavy.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
David, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, he’s been on the show a couple times. He’s a buddy.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, I thought so. I loved that book so much, and I’ve actually taken a lot of what he shared and incorporated that into some of the way that I teach theme days because it’s just so good. But when we think about different ways to approach theme days, we have to think about the way that our mind works. And that Monday morning time block is when we are freshest, typically when we are most energized.

And so, any opportunity that you have to give yourself heads down work on Monday morning is going to be huge. So, that could look like thinking about what is your most important project right now, what is the most important thing that you need to do in order to move your goals forward, and stick that Monday morning, if that’s when you’re going to be at your best.

I’ve had people make that their book writing time. So, Monday is for content. Monday is for marketing. Monday is for really just that heads-down thought work because that’s when we’re at our freshest. And we decline during the course of the day. Our energy gradually drops. We have a little bit of a second wind in the early evening, but, typically, we start fresh. And so, like you mentioned, using the half day theme concept.

It’s also great to think about your day in terms of two parts, “What is your before-lunch theme? What is your after-lunch theme?” I have some clients who arrange their days based on the different industries that they support. So, I have a handful of consultants or PR advertising agency folks, and rather than, in one day working on an industrial client and a health care client and a food and beverage client, instead, they align their days with, “Okay, Monday is my healthcare day. Tuesday is my hospitality and hotel day. Wednesday is my education and nonprofit day.”

And this, again, allows them to align their thinking in a streamlined way. They get into that groove, that flow state, even though they’re performing different tasks, it’s all under that same umbrella. I have different clients who have created research theme days, if part of their work involves research or academic writing so that they’re able to identify when during their week are they at their best for that type of work, and they arrange their theme days accordingly.

I’ll say that the most consistent theme day on Friday is admin and, like, financial catchup because a lot of the time, by the time we reach the end of the week, we’re kind of spent. We need to kind of take it easy. And so, a lot of times my clients choose to make Fridays either a no-meeting day or a light meeting day, and they use it to catch up on tracking metrics or completing reports or updating databases because it’s a light lift before they do an afternoon planning session heading into the weekend.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I also like the notion of when it is, is that groove. Like, sometimes I enjoy, I don’t know what I would call it. I call it in my brain, like, task slaying in that there are many little things.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Pebbles.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go. Pebbles. That’s fun. And, I’m just going to obliterate them. And it feels so good because a lot of them, it’s sort of like they’ve been lingering for a while. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got some laundry there. I should probably handle that.” So, it’s sort of like, it’s surfaced in my consciousness numerous times. And there are things like tidying, replenishing supplies, email. I like the OmniFocus Task Manager. There’s some time management dork-ness for you.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, old voicemail clutter. It’s like there’s lots of little things and they’re kind of weighing on me a little bit, and have been weighing on me a little bit repeatedly, and to decide, “This is the afternoon in which I’m going to annihilate many of these things in quick succession,” feels just phenomenal.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Oh, yes, it does. Pete, you would love a pebble power hour.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
You would love them. So, when I’m working with my clients, we like to break down the things on their to-do list, the things in their life as boulders, big rocks, and pebbles. Boulders being those things that are important and not urgent that help you show up as your best self. Big rocks being your project-oriented tasks, the things that really move the needle in your life and work. But then there are pebbles, and pebbles are everything else. Those are those little tasks and to-dos that weigh on you.

My favorite example of a pebble is filling out a reimbursement form because I can think of a few things that are less mundane than filling out a reimbursement form, and like tidying up your email, and all of those things. And so, I really encourage people, over the course of the week, to put all of those little tiny tasks in a different place. Don’t let them swim alongside your most important tasks.

We want to separate out your pebbles because, let’s say Friday afternoon, you schedule a pebble power hour for yourself. You’ve got just set a timer for an hour and knock out as many of those little bitty insignificant tasks as you can. You’re going to feel amazing heading into the weekend because you’ve just done this total dopamine burst of accomplishing so many little things.

And you’re clearing your plate and you’re lightening your load because individually each one of those tasks is small, but they add up to weigh on you, and they pull you down and they hold you back from really giving your all to what’s most important. So, hey, maybe you need a Pete’s pebble power hour on Friday afternoon to knock out all those little things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, even more alliteration. Okay. And Anna, I’d love your take on what is some common advice that is just wrong or bad or ill-advised and you recommend we disavow entirely?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I’d say that the worst advice that’s out there, really, can be applied to any, so any time management system, okay? If you do not follow it 100 % and correctly and by the book, the way that it is written, then you are failing. And let me make sure that I’m super clear about that. There are so many different ideas and books and thoughts and methods around time management and organization. And what is so disheartening to me is to talk with someone who has tried to follow a system, but it doesn’t work for them. And they think that they are the problem.

But what’s really happening here is that the system as written is not a match for the way that they think. It’s not a match for their lifestyle. It’s not a match for who they are. And I hate to see people think that there’s something wrong or broken about them because a system that worked perfectly for someone else didn’t work for them. And so, the flip side of that advice is, adapt. Take what’s out there and use what works for you.

If you find an amazing book on time management and you try some things, but maybe part of it doesn’t work for you, it’s not a you-problem. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. Just adapt it, treat it like an experiment, keep trying. The more self-awareness that you have and the better you’re able to understand yourself and how you think.

I mean, this is exactly why I have my clients take the Myers-Briggs as soon as we start working together because it’s so incredibly revealing, and it’s such a boost to their self-awareness, which helps them take what they need and leave what they don’t to create a system that works for them instead of trying to copy and paste something else that’s out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Anna, I love that a lot. It reminds me, we had a conversation with BJ Fogg from Stanford, who’s fantastic, and he wrote the book Tiny Habits, in terms of he likes to think about it as, I believe he calls it behavior design, which is just fun because design conjures images of whiteboards and Post-it notes and Sharpies. And it’s, like, we’re trying to design something that works. And if what we have done hasn’t worked, it doesn’t mean it’s a moral failure, “Oh, I’m lazy. I’m insufficiently committed. I have an addiction to social media,” or whatever, and, hey, maybe we do.

But it’s not like, “Through my fault, my own grievous fault, I’m bad and evil.” It’s just that, “No, this design isn’t quite fitting. It’s not quite working.” And I like to think about it sort of like when you’re organizing a space, if an item does not fit on a shelf, it’s not because the item is bad or the shelf is bad. It’s just that these shapes and sizes of these things are not compatible with each other. There’s no value judgment. It just means that shelf is not the ideal place for this item and we have to figure out where is a better fitting place.

And, likewise, with some of this tiny habit stuff or these systems, I likewise feel that satisfaction just as it is, at least I find it, and I’m not that organized of a person, it is delightful when you have an item that fits perfectly into a place. 

So, too, I think about that when you’ve got a real great lock for an activity and a schedule. It’s, like, “Oh, this matches my groove and my mode and my flow and my energy and the time available. Like, this activity matches this space in my calendar, oh, so just right and it feels delightful.” But the flip side, I’m thinking also about David Allen, Getting Things Done, and he’s been on the show, and I think he’s phenomenal.

But he will mention, and I think it’s kind of a tough reality that the mind-like-water mental clarity amazing space is primarily achieved when, in fact, you have completely absolved your brain from the task of remembering things. And so, if you do not have a system that you sufficiently trust and have sufficiently downloaded all of the stuff from your brain into that system, then you will not experience the peace and freedom that comes from exercising the Getting Things Done, GTD system.

So, it’s a little bit tricky because it’s almost like, “If you’re not doing it perfectly, you’re not reaping the benefits.” And yet, I think it’s semi-true that there are tremendous diminishing returns from being able to completely trust your system and having all contents downloaded out of your brain than being able to 92% trust your system and have 92% of the contents downloaded out of your brain.

But at the same time, it’s not like a shame-on-me value judgment thing. The answer is more of a, “Okay, how could I tweak my system to get that lingering 8% out of there and experience all the wonders that can be enjoyed?” What’s your hot take on all this distinguishing, Anna?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Well, I’ll never forget, I was listening to an episode of Beyond the To-Do List podcast. Love that one. And David Allen himself said that he does not follow GTD 100% all the time. And hearing him say that felt like such a wave of relief washed over me because, to that point, I was struggling because I’d implemented a lot of what was in GTD, and it was before I’d become fully confident in taking what worked and leaving what didn’t.

And it almost felt like permission to customize it to the way that it worked for my life. And I’ve had so many clients come to me feeling like failures because they were unable to use another system 100% copy and pasted. And so, I aim, instead of for, “Hey, let’s go all in on whatever this is.” Let’s not focus on all or nothing behavior, or all or nothing implementation. Let’s look at all or something. What’s the good, better, best?

You know, like you said, the 92%. What if I trusted 92%, and I have 92% of my things downloaded? Sure, there’s still that 8% there, but, like, is it even worth it to struggle and push to get that remaining 8% out of your head when 92% is really freaking good? That’s nice. That’s awesome. And so, like, let’s celebrate getting really far, and let’s celebrate the progress, and let’s be really happy with how far we’ve come instead of how we’re not doing it perfectly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, sounds good. Well, Anna, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Oh, my favorite quote of all time is “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” by Albert Einstein.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
So, actually, I think that instead of jumping straight to something that a scientist has done, I just want to give a shout out to Laura Vanderkam and the work that she has done with collecting time studies and what she has learned about the way that women, professionals, people actually spend their time during the course of a week.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
The One Thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. And a favorite tool?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I can’t live without Asana.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Every Sunday evening, I like to refill all of my supplements while doing a face mask. And I like to pair those, like do some habit stacking, habit pairing, and it’s such a really nice way to take care of myself heading into the week. You should try it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
It’s that time management doesn’t start on the pages of our planners. It starts by getting to the heart of what matters most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, so I would love for you to head over to check out my podcast. It’s called It’s About Time. It’s a podcast about work, life, and balance, with new episodes that go live every single Monday. You can find it in your favorite podcast app. So, that’s where I would love to keep in touch with you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah. So, if you’re looking to be awesome at your job, my challenge to you is to think about what do you want your life to look like five years from now? What’s that vision that you have for your life, and not just at the job description level? What do you want your house to look like, your relationships, your family, your fitness, your wellbeing, what’s going on inside of your head? All of that is what adds up to create your vision. And when you’re clear on your vision, every single decision you make about how to manage your time becomes so much easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anna, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many beautiful days.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Thank you, Pete. This has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you having me.