How To Simplify Your Work
3 suggestions to recover your attention and time
Introduction
Over Thanksgiving week, I had some time to reflect on my current responsibilities at work. I listed every task I have encountered myself doing during a regular week of work and assigned it a time value. It looked a little bit like this:
Email (3-4 hours per week)
Meetings (4-5 hours per week)
Transportation (3-4 hours per week)
Social Media Team Management (2 hours)
Etc…
After calculating all the time values in each of my responsibilities, I came around to an average of 38-41 hours on a “light week” and up to 52-60 hours on a “heavy” week. It was a shocker, to be honest. I try to have a good relationship with my work-life balance, but I realized that I have been giving more time to work than anything else in my life. Sleep, food, and time with family are nowhere close to the amount of time that works takes during any given week. Moreover, I am sure I am not alone. As humans, we dedicate most of our time to our “livelihoods” and to putting bread on the table. It is what drives our lives and it shouldn’t be so. Thus, I will give you 3 actionable suggestions that you can do this week to simplify your life.
Ask for clarity
After listing all of my responsibilities, I contacted my supervisors and asked them to take a look at them. I wanted to see if there was any responsibility that was outside of my scope or if there was any task that they would like me to outsource to someone else. Sure enough, I found that one task that usually takes me 1-2 hours each week should be offloaded to a volunteer team specifically selected to handle it. I, then, decided to ask them to make any comments on the short document I prepared, and what they shared has helped me orient my week from now on. They saw the value I have been bringing to our non-profit and wanted me to do more specialized work and spend less time on repetitive tasks.
After gaining clarity from my supervisors, I decided to trim down my list to the most essential tasks. By essential tasks, I mean those that must be completed each week or otherwise, we would fail at our mission. This short exercise allowed me to see that while email is relevant to keep in contact with our outsourced projects and general communication, there is nothing that usually comes to my inbox that would make or break my week. I felt relieved at this finding because I despise email and already have been wanting to reduce my time in it. Therefore, my actionable step this week is to check my inbox less than I already do and see if something breaks. If nothing does, I can move forward to the next item.
Create Intentional Breaks
Work is important. I understand this is the place where we derive our lifestyle, budgets, travel, food, etc. However, it is not the most important (at least it shouldn’t be). We ought to make time for ourselves and our families in such a way that enhances our quality of life. Let it be by reducing the number of hours you work or by inserting breaks during the day where you can step aside, creating time for you and your loved ones is another step towards simplifying life. If removing tasks can lead to a better state of productivity, breaks can help with your burnout and the one experienced by your loved ones. By taking a stroll at the nearby park or just stepping aside from your home office to enjoy a cup of tea, you are making space for longevity in your life.
After seeing the amount of time that evening meetings occupy during my week, my wife reminded me that I am not essential at all of them. Sure I have to be there for our staff and finance meetings, but I do not need to be there for our safety checks and lower management division meetings. Thus, the second lesson arrives: we are not as important as we’d like to think. We can create breaks throughout our days or remove ourselves from non-essential meetings. Either way, it creates space and time to spend with hobbies, friends, or that date you’ve been avoiding to plan with your significant other.
Priority (Singular)
By now you may be aware that the word priority is derived from the Latin prioritas, meaning “first in rank, order, or dignity.” It was meant to be a singular item, not a plural one. Before 1900, the word priorities rarely appeared in print. However, starting around the 1940s, time management experts accomplished the impossible—they turned the singular priority into multiple priorities. Check this graph from GoogleBooks that showcases this terrible trend. Instead of focusing on a single item, we now had “priorities” in all different areas of our lives. Priorities at work, health, family life, travel, etc. Instead of orienting ourselves toward a single task and accomplishing it, we made everything “important.” Once everything became important, nothing was crucial anymore. It has all been jumbled up.
Thus, my last suggestion for you this week is to enumerate the one thing you must accomplish. Do not be fooled into thinking that you can do it all, focus instead on the one thing that will make you better this week. With the advent of “automation,” we are seduced into thinking about multitasking and addition. We offload work to the machines and think that these are making our lives easier. We are not! By automating, we are asking for more work, more “priorities,” and more load. We think that we are smart by adding the tasks we accomplish through the different apps or services. Yet, we do not realize that instead of pursuing automation, we should simplify our work.
We must find one thing, one task, one priority for the week, and not move until we accomplish it. After we are done, let’s select the next priority and work with an unrelenting focus on it. This is one of the most difficult things for me to accomplish, but I am on the path like you to retrain my brain to be selective in my priority and nothing else.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading as always. I hope you have a great week by asking for clarity, making intentional breaks, and focusing on your priority. Remember, simplify by subtracting, not “automating.”
Great read. Thanks, Jose. Timely!