Scheduling – Come one step closer to full productivity

The unicorn of office days: Having a productive day, each day, every day. It’s an admirable goal. It’s a goal we all strive to achieve. A step in that direction is having an efficient schedule. I’m here to help. Let get cracking!

Get the data

Step one in solving any problem is defining it. Try to keep a list of the tasks that need to be done within a given period. I usually find a week to work best. Use whatever you want to get a list of tasks. Forward warning, this might take some time and some trial and error to get used to. Some apps that I find useful when collecting tasks are:

• Todoist – I use this to keep track of small tasks, repetitive tasks and reminders. I also use this as an idea bank to keep track of ideas before I get back to them and turn them into something more useful.
• Trello – I use this to keep track of bigger projects. I find Trello boars offer a nice way to keep on top of multiple ongoing projects. If you’re anything like me, you have your work and then a couple of ongoing personal projects you need to deal with.

Disclaimer: There are the tools I’m using, and they seem to work fine for me. However, I must warn you, finding the right tool is a process. You will most likely need to try a couple of alternatives to find the one that works best for you.

A couple of alternatives might be: google tasks, google keep, your favorite calendar app.

Arrange the data

Do not underestimate the power of a well thought schedule. In computer science there is a concept called context switching. It’s the list of operations that the CPU needs to do to move from one task to another. They’re not processing the task, they’re the overhead needed to move from one task to another. Doing that to often can be a problem. You can spend more time switching between tasks than doing actual work. Our brains are not that different. To switch between tasks you need a long time. More so, you have to spend a lot of mental effort to do so. Why not try to minimize that?! Group similar tasks together! You have  a bunch of meetings you need to schedule ? Bundle them all together, so they don’t interrupt your other work! Need to do some paperwork for the week? Do all the paperwork in one day. It will be a boring day probably, but once you get that out of the way, you can focus on your other tasks. More so, you have the bonus that you don’t have to think about paperwork.

Remember, it’s your schedule and it should be custom tailored to you. You know yourself best. I find that certain times of the day work best for certain types of task. For me, morning works best for intense, focused work, so I try to reserve big blocks of time to code early. In the afternoon, I don’t seem to have that much energy left, so I try to do my more mundane tasks: reports, meetings, planning etc. Try out different things to find out what works best for you!

Give yourself some wiggle room

Things happen. More often than not, those things cause delays in your schedule. This is normal. Unknowns cause delays. Keep this in mind when designing your schedule. Meetings run late. Tasks take longer than expected. So many things can go wrong. Part of the purpose of the schedule is to isolate those issues so that they don’t affect other tasks. Some takeaway here could be: don’t put meetings that can run late just before meetings that cannot start late. Find out what the important tasks are and deal with them early (so that you have a bit of time for the tasks to run late)

Tinker with the schedule

A schedule is not a one-time job. It’s living creature, it grows, it evolves. It’s aliveee! Every one in a  while, review your schedule. Who knows, maybe there is something you can improve. Try out some different ways of scheduling, see which one works best for you. It’s your little world. You can do anything with it.

Do you have any more tips on how to build a nice schedule ?