How to better manage your day when working flexibly…

If you want to better manage your day when working flexibly there is really only one very simple thing you need to do…spend less time working!

Not what you were expecting? Well hear me out and I’ll explain why.

Cast your mind back to the beginning of the pandemic when you were asked to work from home? Did you notice your productivity shoot-up overnight, like someone had flicked a switch?

You probably got up at the same time as usual and commuted to your office. However, your office was probably within a few feet of where you woke up so your commute was MUCH shorter and you probably worked the extra time you gained. And the same thing probably happened at the other end of the day too, so it’s hardly surprising that you got more done. 

Did you continue to turn out work at an unprecedented rate or did you start to run out of steam after a few weeks? 

Perhaps you started to miss out on your exercise, then maybe you started finishing work earlier and earlier until eventually you had to take a day of in the middle of the week because you’d simply run out of head-space to work. What was going on?

You were burning out!

Before lockdown, you were out of the house as much but you weren’t getting burned-out then so what was really happening? The only difference between pre and post lockdown was the time you spent commuting, walking to meetings, meeting people for coffee and interruptions. 

Work before lockdown gave you plenty of ‘mental rest’ and that’s what stopped you burning out!

Believe it or not, those differences gave you an opportunity for ‘mental rest’ during your working-day, something that had been removed since lockdown.

Parkinson’s Law states that, ‘Work will expand so as to fill the time available for it’s completion’ and that’s what was happening before lockdown and it’s what had been happening since lockdown. 

‘Reduce the amount of time available for work to expedite its completion’

I decided to turn things on their head and created an alternative to Parkinson’s Law, ‘Reduce the amount of time available for work to expedite its completion’. Now there obviously a limit to this. You can’t expect to allocate 5-minutes to a 1-hour tasks but surely there was a middle ground?

I created the ‘Foundation Week’; a skeleton of tasks including breakfast, morning and afternoon breaks, midday exercise, lunch and a dog walk at the end of the day to signal when it was time to stop. They would reduce the time I had for work. It was an experiment, but I knew I had the flexibility to change it if it didn’t work. 

But it worked! I got as much – if not more – work done in less time. The gaps I gave myself for work were smaller and I remained more focussed. And the one-and-a-half hour break in the middle of the day, containing exercise and lunch, actually gave me more energy for my work in the afternoon. 

So, if you want to get more done and feel better for it, spend less time working. 

If you want to ‘have a life’, simply plan one first.