productivity

Power Hour for Nagging Tasks

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When I read Better than Before book by Gretchen Rubin, I learned so many helpful tips and tricks, one of them is Power Hour for nagging tasks and this is how she defines them:

With this hour, I’d tackle only tasks where I had no deadline, no accountability, no pressure—because these were the tasks that weren’t getting addressed. That’s another Secret of Adulthood: Something that can be done at any time is often done at no time.
-Gretchen Rubin

According to Getting Things Done book, if a task takes less than 2 minutes do it now. If it takes more, write it down to free up mental space and have the list accessible to you to use whenever you have some time free time or for your weekly power hour. Gretchen downsized this rule in her one-minute rule in her book The Happiness Project.

Sometimes I have no idea how long a nagging task would take, so I use a stopwatch to time it and find out and most probably laugh at myself afterwards for all the times I felt burdened by it.

A recent example is when I wanted to add a subscription option to my blog but didn’t know how, so I set the stopwatch. It only took me 10 minutes to make it happen and I felt lighter after.

Another tip is that you can set a timer and decide beforehand that if the time is up and the task is not complete yet it is perfectly ok to stop the task too, or, if you get some momentum going, keep at it until it is complete.

Celebrate the progress either way.

Power Hour for Nagging Tasks

Apps I love: Readwise

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An application I’m adoring these days is readwise. After using it for a month I’ll recommend it to anyone who uses Kindle for reading.

Readwise brings back all those books I read years ago on my Kindle through a digest of my own highlights sent by a daily email and their super app. It can also save twitter threads for you, how cool is that?

What I like about Readwise is that I don’t only remember what I read, I remember who I was when I read those books and feel proud of all the long hours I put into reading. It gives so much joy to use it and I can save and share favorite highlights in social media-friendly formats.

Click my link to get a free one-month trial and see for yourself.

HT to @AliAbdaal for pointing me towards Readwise.

Apps I love: Readwise

For The Love Of Timers

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My podcast short format artwork, featuring Time Timer

I use timers all day long, they are one of my favorite tools to keep me conscious of time passing and to motivate me to do daily tasks.

My first timer was a digital kitchen timer that I used to track my morning routine and and to get myself started on house chores like washing dishes.

Then I got this big, gorgeous timer for my kids called Time Timer that I am featuring in my photo above to help them visualize what I mean when I say they need to do just 5 minutes of clean-up for example and to manage their screen-time, so when the timer goes off the TV gets turned off.

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For The Love Of Timers

Leave Bread Crumbs

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I learned this concept from the book Start Finishing. The author noticed how it takes us so long to jump back in a project when we leave it for a while, for example for the weekend or when we need to pause it for some reason. Instead, he recommends writing the exact steps you need to follow next time you start working on this project:

Here are some ways to leave yourself bread crumbs:

  • At the end of a work session — which may be the end of one focus block or the end of the last of back-to-back focus blocks — leave a quick note to yourself about where to pick up.
  • If you were truly in flow and lost track of time, your fallback time to leave yourself bread crumbs is at the end of the day. While it’s not as optimal as at the end of the working session, it’s better than starting cold the next morning or at your first focus block of the day.
  • Consider using author Ernest Hemingway’s trick of stopping before you’re empty and leaving something easy to start with. You want it to be easy enough that it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower but difficult enough that you have to engage with it.

I try to write bread crumbs every time I quit working on an excel sheet, either for a break, or due to some kind of interruption, and definitely as part of my workday shutdown ritual.

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Leave Bread Crumbs

Anticipate

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Anticipate is one of my favorite words. If we think about it in terms of work and projects, it is really helpful.

Anticipation helps us plan better if we:

  • Anticipate changes.
  • Anticipate obstacles.
  • Anticipate questions.
  • Anticipate expenses.

Anticipate is another term for risk management in projects or how we might do a SWOT analysis. It is, in this case, a guiding direction.

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Anticipate

Keep Your Goals Visible

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Today I wrote my work goals for the year on a white cardboard paper to keep them on my desk visible to me all the time like |I did last year.

I spent the first 6 weeks of the year analyzing and reporting last year’s performance and preparing for a kick off meeting presenting all my findings. Now that this task is done I’m back to working on my objectives for the year. Seeing them written in front of me reminds me of my priorities and keeps me focused.

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Keep Your Goals Visible

Productivity Technique: Time Blocking

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Time blocking at work has been an indispensable productivity and focus technique for me in the past months. I learned it from Cal Newport and Charlie Gilkey.

At the start of each workday I write what I plan to do on a time schedule. I use my weekly passion planner to do that and I use erasable pens as I edit it when needed.

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Productivity Technique: Time Blocking

My New Digital Rules

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As I’m preparing to end my digital declutter challenge I would like to share my social media  mission statement and digital rules below:

My social media mission statement (draft #1):

I am on social media to teach what I learn from books I read and self-development experiments I apply in my personal life. I want to inspire people and women in particular to love themselves and take care of themselves first through goal setting and building and tracking positive daily habits in order to be able to take care of the people in their lives and meet their responsibilities with energy and love.

Here are my new digital engagement rules after I finish my digital declutter challenge on Feb 15th. I will do maintenance for these rules by reviewing and tweaking them every month to better manage my time and attention.

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My New Digital Rules

My Evening Ritual is how I prepare for easy mornings

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Commitment to my evening routine is still a bit new for me as I have always overestimated my energy level and planned stuff to be done in evenings but didn’t do. Good evening routines are the secret to easy mornings and I always encourage my podcast listeners and the early risers groups I lead to fix their bedtime and evening routine first before they commit to earlier morning wakeup time.

With my digital declutter month I managed to commit to my evening routine more and discovered how much my phone was getting in the way of enjoying it. My habit of blocking Whatsapp between 6pm and 9pm worked like magic in January and I plan to keep doing it daily as long as I don’t have outings with friends.

I will post here my ideal evening routine:

  1. Be home at 5:30pm.
  2. If I did not walk in the morning: walk outside with the kids or with an audiobook (for a minimum of 15 minutes).
  3. Have my early dinner/snack with my favorite comedy show (10 minutes).
  4. Play with kids or do homework or give the kids baths (60-90 minutes)
  5. Prepare fruits and vegetables lunchboxes for all the family for next day with an audiobook while kids have their dinner (15 minutes)
  6. Prepare my coffee machine for next day (5 minutes)
  7. Kids in PJs, story time and bedtime (30 minutes)
  8. Pick my outfit for next workday (10 minutes)
  9. End the day with removing my makeup and a good shower (10 minutes).
  10. Open and post on my social media which is going to be my new social media rule based on the insights I have had in my digital declutter month (30-60 minutes)
  11. Spend time with hubby.
  12. Write in my gratitude and daily stoic journals. (5 minutes)
  13. Read until I sleep by 11pm max.

My mornings are superb when I only need to press the ON button of my coffee machine, take my lunchbox from the fridge and put-on my laid-out outfit for the day. I encourage you to prepare for your mornings like this. How we start and end our days matter so much. Take care of the ordinary parts of your day to make room for the extraordinary to happen.

My Evening Ritual is how I prepare for easy mornings

My Workday Shutdown Ritual is how I set boundaries between work life and family life

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For my workday shutdown routine I follow the 15-minute checkout steps as exactly mentioned in the book Start Finishing:

“The checkout is critical because we usually have a better perspective at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day. We know what we did and didn’t do, and we have a good idea of the next steps we need to take to keep the ball rolling. So while our level of overwhelm might be higher, we don’t suffer the mental cobwebs that cloud the beginning of the day.”

Charlie Gilkey-Start Finishing

 The 15-minute checkout has three questions:    

  1. What did you accomplish? (Celebrate!) Acknowledge what you did rather than just focusing on what you didn’t do. Always, always, always celebrate what you accomplished. Life is but a series of small steps, and if you don’t celebrate the small wins, it’s harder to build up the momentum for the bigger ones.
  2. Is there anything that you need to do right now to be able to disengage? This question answers that nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten to do something. Check your inbox and your to-do list for those things that have to happen today. Ask yourself what would really happen if you didn’t do whatever you’re considering — you would be surprised how many things can wait until the next day.    
  3. When do you need to do the things that you didn’t get done today? There might be a lot of things that came up during the day that need to get done sometime soon, but they don’t have to happen today. If something needs to happen tomorrow or some specific day in the future, put it in whatever app, tool, planner, or calendar you use so that you’ll see it tomorrow. That way your mind can let it go and you can get some peace.

I added a 4th question inspired by my Full Focus Planner:

  • Write your daily big 3 tasks for tomorrow.  These are the tasks that will move my key projects and goals forward. Writing them will help me start next day with clarity.

I also love what Cal Newport says when he is done with workday shutdown ritual:

Finally — and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this — I close down my computer and say the magic phrase: “schedule shutdown, complete.”

Cal Newport

What about you, did any of these steps appeal to you? I highly recommend you consider some ritual to announce you’re done with work and not take its worries with you back home.

Listen to the podcast episode about this in Arabic:

My Workday Shutdown Ritual is how I set boundaries between work life and family life