In the previous post, we covered the Pomodoro Technique – a method for bucketing your workday into focused 25-minute sprints separated by refreshing breaks. But that’s just one approach to mastering productivity. Let’s explore a few more powerful techniques to try.
Developed by productivity guru David Allen, GTD is a comprehensive, stress-free productivity and focus system. The core idea is to get all your tasks, ideas, and commitments out of your head and into a system for organization, review, and engagement.
The 5 Steps of GTD boil down to this:
- Capture EVERYTHING: Capture anything and everything that crosses your mind. Nothing is too big or too small; just write it down. (By the way, you can use electronic means or just good ol’ fashioned pen and paper.
- Clarify: Take the time to process everything captured into concrete action steps.
- Organize: Everything must be put into place. As in, there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. Add dates to the calendar, update contacts, delegate projects to others, and sort your tasks.
- Review: Review your lists frequently. In fact, schedule a review appointment on your calendar at least monthly. At this point, you will revise and update your lists.
- Engage: Get to work on the important stuff.
GTD emphasizes capturing everything that has your attention, clarifying each item’s following action, and regularly reviewing and processing your lists. This upfront organization lets your mind be clear and present rather than consumed by that mental “stuff.”
GTD can seem deceptively simple, but it creates a huge amount of mental clarity and work momentum when appropriately implemented. Your mind is like a computer—if too many programs are running, everything grinds to a halt.
Mark Twain famously advised: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” It’s a crude analogy but brilliant productivity advice.
The “Eat That Frog” technique, upon which Brian Tracey has written a great book, encourages you to start each day by tackling your biggest, most challenging task before anything else—the “ugly frog” you’ve been dreading and procrastinating on. This front-loads and conquers your most significant resistance.
By eating your biggest frog first thing, you eliminate procrastinating on that project. And you go through the rest of the day with a significant win under your belt and renewed energy from overcoming procrastination. You will walk around feeling pretty damn good about it.
Task Batching
There is no such thing as “multitasking.” You must think of it as “switch-tasking,” where you go from one project to another repeatedly in the day. Instead of hopping back and forth between different types of actions and working all day, batch similar tasks together into dedicated blocks of time. Reserve certain hours for meetings, creative work, admin, email replies, Rainmaking activities, etc.
Task batching minimizes the friction of switching between different contexts and getting re-started on new types of work. It lets you enter a flow state and crank through multiple related tasks before switching modes.
One of the major complaints I receive from attorneys is that they don’t have a choice but to go back and forth—that a project will fall into their laps and need to be done immediately. First, when you must switch tasks from one to another or are distracted (not a planned break if using Pomodoro or just taking a break), it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus on a task you want to continue or start, according to a study from the University of California, Irvine.
Second, you are an adult! Start taking control of your life. You can choose any program that gets the job done, and if it can be done more proficiently and effectively, you should try to implement it. You can talk to your assigned partner to discuss how you want to become more efficient in your work.
I have a client who liked the idea of task batching – so on Monday mornings, she did all of her administrative work; on Monday afternoons, she worked on her cases (one case at a time), making calls to clients and opposing counsel, etc. She worked on calls and more cases on Tuesday morning, and Tuesday afternoon, she would schedule her appointments. She would also schedule them for Wednesday morning. Are you getting the idea?
In addition to that, my client has also carved out 15 minutes for Rainmaking Activities on her calendar. You can take 15 minutes most days to complete your Rainmaking tasks. She scheduled other rainmaking activities that needed more time on different days. And she used the two-minute rule.
The Two-Minute Rule
While task batching is highly effective, the two-minute rule is an exception to just doing that work at each batch. If a task will take less than two minutes, knock it out immediately rather than putting it into your task manager.
For quick actions like firing off an email reply, adding an event to the calendar, or jotting a note – just handle it right then and there. The two-minute rule avoids procrastination on tiny items and keeps your to-do lists focused on substantive actions.
But do not let yourself be distracted by emails. There are studies out there that say that about 1/3 of your day is consumed by emails.
Experiment and Optimize
Collectively, techniques like Pomodoro, GTD, Eat That Frog, Task Batching, and the Two-Minute Rule provide a robust suite of productivity methods to explore. But you’ll need to experiment to find which combined approach works best for your particular working style and life demands.
On December 4, 2013, I wrote a post entitled The Mathematics of Time for Rainmaking. It still holds up. You have approximately 7 hours a day, after working 8 hours and sleeping 8 hours, to do whatever you want (that includes gym time).
Yes, there will be days where work seems like all you are doing, but you can do everything you want if you get your job done. How do I know? Because if I came up to you with free front-row seats to your most favorite person, you would find a way to do the work to enable yourself to be there.
The key is optimizing how you invest your 24 daily hours – being intentional about where you direct your time, energy, and focus. Done consistently, these techniques will allow you to be a rockstar at work while still reserving quality time for family, friends, hobbies and personal passions.
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