3 hacks to better manage your time
Avoid falling into blackholes and make the most out of your precious time
Almost two years ago, on a Saturday, I had just spent a night, like many others, where I came back home late, after too many drinks.
I didn’t sleep well, and woke up the next day somehow dizzy at 11 am.
Getting up only to cook myself the traditional post-hangover breakfast. In these moments, one needs consolation. Enters Netflix, your best friend in such troubled times.
That’s when I fell into a space-time rift. 6 hours later, the end of a series : it’s 7pm.
At this very moment, I have been hit with despair.
I just wasted the most precious, I wasted my time.
I call those days black hole days, absorbing time, desire, motivation and meaning. You have probably experienced similar days yourself.
Conquering time
These experiences are frightening because you can immediately measure the loss caused.
Imagine what you could have done during all those hours?
Was it your best contribution?
If you are reading this article you might be an avid reader of books and articles sharing stories about people making tremendous impact.
Saving lives or contributing to the great causes of today’s world (climate, education, …)
When you put your 6 hours of binge-watching into perspective that way … the truth is, it hurts a little.
My purpose is not to go into self-flagellation, because we know that resting is important. Resting is essential.
What we are talking about here is to make sure you avoid getting distracted and sucked into a blackhole you will regret.
The reason behind blackholes
One of the reasons you are attracted into these black holes is simply that you haven’t decided rigorously what to do with your time.
You certainly have a vision of yourself and your goals.
You’ve probably taken time to think about your future, and designed a roadmap to achieve those goals.
If so, congrats! You’ve managed the most difficult. The rest is going to be a piece of cake to you!
There are 3 hacks you can use to make the best use of your time and to help achieve your goals.
- Create habits
- Centralise your effort
- Master the tools of daily life
Create habits
Our brain has a bias, that of laziness.
The simpler a choice is, the more likely you are to take it, because by default your brain will favour the path with the least amount of effort.
We can relate to Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking fast and slow, which develops precisely this point (among other biases).
So, if you create habits, you reduce the friction of decision making.
If you make it a habit to take a cold shower every morning for 2 minutes, you don’t have to motivate yourself to do it. You just do it.
As an example, my habits or routines have evolved over the years, but respect a logic that is constant :
- Get up
- Physical awakening (yoga, stretching or training)
- Shower
- tea / coffee
Building these habits prevent you from second guessing what your alarm clock is trying to tell you: “Get up!”
Centralise your effort
Centralising your effort allows you to limit the dispersion of your attention and maximises the concentration that you invest on a subject.
There is a well-known statistic that measures the impact of distraction.
It takes an average of 23 minutes to resume a task for which you were interrupted.
23 minutes to get back into the swing of things and get to the point you were at before you were distracted.
This is a significant loss from a personal point of view, but if you bring it to the scale of a company you can arrive at gigantic losses of time.
So your challenge is to preserve your attention, to limit dispersion in order to make the most out of your time.
No need to fall into a too extremist vision of time management because the unexpected always happens, but you can still plan for it.
And if unexpected happens too much, it means that there is another underlying problem to solve. You might then use root cause analysis or problem solving in order to tackle it.
Master your focus
You can go through these three steps
Delete as many notifications as possible that encourage defocusing and that rarely need urgent attention
→ I don’t get any Slack notifications, no emails, no WhatsApp. Nothing.
→ Exceptions done for personal phone calls/messages, because real emergencies, if they happen, will be notified there.
Compartmentalise your days and preserve time for yourself
→ Block mornings for yourself
Set aside mornings during which you won’t accept any meeting. You can then devote time to your projects, actions, and reflections. It is your “me-time”.
Moreover it is an easy KPI to keep your time management in check
→ Be available on afternoons
On the other hand, stay entirely available and dedicated to all kinds of interactions: project updates, informal exchanges, … this is your “team-time”.
Thematise your days
You can push even further, and thematise your days in order to keep a specific topic or business unit focus for each day of the week
For example:
→ Mondays for operations
→ Tuesdays are product oriented
→ Wednesdays for finances
→ Thursdays for customer service
→ Fridays around management and HR
The main goal here is to maximise your attention span regarding specific topics while limiting external disruptions
Mastering the tools of daily life
Everyday we are using tools for our work, and for our personal life. There are desktop tools, mobile tools, paper tools and so many others.
However, most of the time we do not take the time to customise the experience we have with those tools.
And yet, tools are made to be used and fit your own system. Not to stay with the default settings.
Often, we believe that tools are the solution, when really it is the process, and the system that matter most.
The basis of my system relies on three main tools
- a mail management app
- a note taking app
- a calendar app
That’s it. Build your system, choose your tools and make them fit your needs!
Gmail
Did you you know that you can process 100 emails in 30 minutes without using your mouse or trackpad on Gmail ?
And when I say “process” it means : answered and/or archived and/or planned for later actions.
You only need to invest 1 hour in the shortcuts description of Gmail to create your personalised mail management system to achieve that.
Settings you might want to set up
- Customise your inbox in 3 categories:
- Starred emails when you need more than 2 minutes to deal with it
- Waiting for labelled emails, if you delegate action or expect an answer from s.o. else
- Unread emails, new inbound mails
- Set up your inbox to “auto-advance”, so you’ll show the next conversation instead of your inbox after any action on the conversation you’re on
- Enable keyboard shortcuts:
e → archive
j → next email
k → previous email
b → snooze email
⬆️ + # → delete email
A gadget you may say?
Maybe. However, have you ever checked how much time you spend every day interacting by email?
I am convinced that good email management is a huge time saver.
Note: I’ve discovered those parameters after trying Superhuman Mail App. Configuring your Gmail works just fine, no need to pay extra $ for that.
Google Calendar
There’s no point of talking about time if you have no where to log and plan for your time.
Google calendar, as basic as it is, will be enough for you to manage your schedule.
- Use colors to categorise and better visualise your time slots (blue for operations, green for product, pink for hr, red for sport, yellow for personal tasks, …)
- Set meetings with yourself in your calendar. Personally, there is a morning time slot called (reserved) for my “me-time”
Evernote
Most importantly, taking everything in note is essential especially when there is a variety of meetings, interactions, and thinking that is to be done.
- Use tags in order to associate notes with ideas or context.
tags are more efficient then notebooks for example - Use your note taking app as a bucket to centralise all your thinking and your production. Based on the GTD (Getting Things Done) method
- Use Evernote’s research (Cmd + j) as much as possible, it’s probably one of the best research feature I’ve tested compared to other tools such as: Obsidian, Notion, Slite, Bear, …
Wrapping up
- Create habits to reduce decision making friction
- Centralise your effort and master your focus
- Master 3 tools: email, calendar, and note taking
Remember to start by building a system that fits you. Then, and only then, get away from the default settings.
With these three hacks you have the opportunity to create a system that will help you move forward with your goals and use your time without risking (too often) being swallowed by a black hole.
