Clear the decks later

There will be enough time for everything, if you go in the right oder

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is that there will be time to clear the
decks later. Don't try to finish all the little things
before starting in on a big project. You can trust

(00:26):
that you will have time to get to everything if
you go in the right order. Last week I shared
a tip about mapping out your focused work time on
a recent week. Knowing I had carved out eight fifteen
am to two forty five pm on Thursday for a
big project made this time seem real and made me

(00:47):
more motivated to protect it. It also kept me from
feeling too unhappy about seeing my afternoon chopped up to
do some required driving for the camp schedule. I think
seeing the actual deep work time that is available can
help lots of people. It may not be six and
a half hours, but it is probably something. Of course,

(01:10):
when I talk about this, people ask, well, when are
you supposed to do all the other things you need
to do on a day like that? And when do
you deal with the things that come up during the day.
Good questions, but here's what I promise. If you do
the big stuff first, there will be time to clear
the decks later if you start with all the other
stuff though during your open time. That is, if you

(01:33):
try to clear the decks first, it's quite possible that
you won't get to the big things, or at least
won't have as much time for the big things, And
given how hard it is to come by open time,
that would be a shame. In my case on that
particular Thursday, what I did is that I knew the
emails and tasks were going to be stacking up. But
when I came back from camp driving at three thirty PM,

(01:55):
I was able to spend about ninety minutes dealing with
all those things amid the various interruptions that kept happening.
That was okay, those tasks didn't require intense focus. By
using that chopped up time, I didn't need to sacrifice
my deep work time, thinking that was more responsible. If
I had used ninety minutes of my deep work time

(02:16):
for the little stuff, though, I would have had ninety
minutes less of deep work time, and I probably would
still have had a lot of small to dos to
deal with later. Because my general sense is that administrative
tasks expand to fill the available space I was still
going to have to answer emails, whether I had done
that before or hadn't. I think it's still wise to

(02:40):
wait to clear the decks, even if you generally do
need to be quite responsible in your job. You might
be able to quickly scan email or other messages for
emergencies once every hour or so, but tell yourself you
won't deal with anything that isn't an emergency until after
your big projects and focused work time is over. I

(03:02):
bet if you take thirty to forty five minutes before
lunch and an hour at the end of the day,
you will be able to get through most of your list,
and you will have had the benefit of giving yourself
any available thinking space. Now for some tough talk. Why
do we sometimes think we need to clear the decks
first before we get to our focused work. People might

(03:25):
think they are being responsible by doing everything else first,
but to be honest, I think it's often that the
lure of easy wins is so strong. If you've got
five things on your to do list and one is large,
and we'll take several hours and four are short, it

(03:46):
is so tempting to do those four easy things first.
And who knows, I mean, maybe those wins will be motivational.
But sometimes those tasks turned out to be longer than
we thought, or they lead to other things and we
get distracted, or we feel like we've done something and
so we don't do the big thing because hey, haven't
we done enough already today? If you clear the decks later, though,

(04:10):
I promise there will be time and then you truly
will get through everything. Often the little things can be
done in crevices of time or in interrupted time. Big
things not so much. So it's important to keep this
in mind in the meantime. This is Laura. Thanks for listening,

(04:33):
and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks
for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Meatia.

(05:00):
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