Today, I want to share five of my favourite little tricks to help you squeeze more out of your week. These tips come from the first episode of my brand-new Engineering and Leadership Podcast. If you'd rather listen to it than read the tips, you can go to the blog, iTunes, or listen using the player below.
If you’re a typical engineer, you’re not exactly sitting around twiddling your thumbs all day. You’re busy, you’re over-worked and there are never enough hours in a day to get done what you need done. If you can chose even just one of the tips I share below to implement at work this week, I’m promising you that you’ll be able to carve out extra space in your week to do things that you wouldn’t normally get to do, like reading a book or washing that coffee mug that’s been on your desk for months….
Whatever you chose to do, be sure to tell me about it by leaving a comment in the comments section below.
Tip #1 – Eliminate distractions, especially e-mail
Tip #1 is to eliminate distractions. Everyone can agree that distractions are, well, distracting, but most people don’t know just how seriously they can derail your day.
A study conducted at the University of California Irvine found that, on average, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after you’ve been distracted.
Small interruptions, then, can really add up and become a major problem in the run of the day. The trick, then, is to avoid or eliminate distractions wherever you can.
For me, the number one distraction used to be email. I felt compelled to check my inbox every single time a new message came in. With over 100 new messages a day, that’s a lot of interruption.
One thing I did was turn off the automatic email notifications so I didn’t have that nagging pop up enticing me to go to my inbox. Now, I check my email on a schedule, three times a day, and I’m in control of how that time gets spent.
What I suggest you do is this: over the next week, keep a pen and paper handy on your desk and take note of the distractions that occur. You’ll likely find that the same few happen over and over again.
Once you’ve determined those key interruptions, work out a plan to eliminate or mitigate them.
Tip #2 – Take breaks
Have you ever struggled with a problem for hours, and just had to walk away from it you were so frustrated? Have you ever come back to that same problem little while later, devastated to realize how simple the solution was all along?
Every so often, its important to step away from your work and just take a breather. It gives your mind a chance to reset, and lets you attack your work more effectively in the long run.
Everybody is different, but I find that taking about 5 minutes for every 45-60 minutes works best for me. What I’ll do is chose something on my to-do list that I want to work on and set a timer on my phone for 45 minutes. When the alarm goes off, I drop my pencil, and back away from the keyboard. No exceptions. I’ll get up from my desk, stretch my legs, grab a fresh coffee, and often step outside for a minute to get some fresh air.
Once the 5 minutes are up, go back to work, refreshed and ready to go.
Tip #3 – Pareto’s principle
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote a paper in 1896 explaining that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. His inspiration for the paper game from his own garden, where he noticed that 80% of the peas came from 20% of the pea pods.
Later, management consultant and engineer Joseph M. Juran suggested that the “80-20 rule”, the idea that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes be credited to Pareto.
Thus was born the Pareto Principle.
The principle can be applied, generally, to almost anything. In this case, we’ll apply it to work. The idea is that 80% of the work that you produce while working on a given task comes from 20% of the time you invested in that task. What that means is that you’re nearly done an hour long task by the time you’ve spent 12 minutes on it.
The trick here is to ask yourself for each task "Do I need to take this to 100%, or is 80% good enough?" In other words, does everything need to be A+, or will B do the trick?
Because, often, we assume that everything needs to be done to 100% perfection, when it would actually be better to hammer something out, get it done quickly, and move on to the next thing. Perfection can often get in the way of getting things done. Apply Pareto’s principle to your work whenever you can, and you’ll free up hours of your time.
Tip #4 – Batch, don’t multitask
I’d like to dispel a myth here. Are you ready for this? You may want to sit down for this one.
There is no such thing as multitasking.
There, I said it. It’s countercultural, I know, but it’s true. You can literally only use your brain for one thing at a time. What happens instead is single-tasking with frequent switching. When you do this, it’s like the distractions we talked about in the first tip. The distraction is just the next task.
Remember, it can take a long time to refocus your brain once you start something new, so "multitasking" is a bad strategy.
So, while I used to pride myself on multi-tasking, I’ve started batching as an alternative.
For example, I don’t try and respond to emails one at a time as they come in. I’ll let my inbox build until about 10AM, and take 45 minutes to an hour and deal with all of them. This is much more efficient and saves me a lot of time throughout the day. It pairs nicely with the break-taking technique mentioned above.
Batch, don’t multi-task.
Tip #5 – Eat that Frog!
Mark Twain once said that if you could start each day by eating a live frog, you could go through the rest of the day with the satisfaction that the worst thing that is going to happen to you has already happened.
Brian Tracy wrote an excellent book of productivity tips based on this idea called, as you might suspect, Eat That Frog!
Your “frog” is the biggest, baddest, ugliest task on your to-so list. Eating your frog is just tackling that big, bad task first thing.
Don’t check your email. Don’t clean up your desk. Just eat that frog. Everything else can wait.
If you can get into the habit of eating your frog first thing every day, you’ll eliminate a lot of stress and get through your to-do lists that much faster, because you’re not getting hung up on those ugly things you’d rather not do.
What will you apply?
I'd love to know what you think of these strategies and how implementing them works out for you. Head down to the comments section and tell me all about it.
About Pat Sweet
Pat Sweet, P.Eng., helps engineers and engineering firms go from good to great. His Engineering and Leadership blog and podcast are top-notch resources for strategies and information on leadership, management, and productivity for engineers. Go to Pat’s blog now to sign up for his 12-week Engineering Leadership course for free.
Twitter: @engileader