“Many of the opportunities you have in your life are generated by the energy you create around you.” —Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica
1: It’s Tuesday. Time to take on the day.
There is, however, a hidden enemy working against us.
“Every time we switch tasks,” Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time, our “brains have to switch focus.”
The technical term for this is “context switching,” and “according to a joint research project by Qatalog and Cornell University,” Dan shares, “every time a worker switches between software applications, it takes them almost ten minutes to get back to a high level of productivity.”
Ten minutes x 20 interruptions a day = more than three and a half hours of wasted time in a given day.
“Context switching costs a few minutes here and a few minutes there,” Dan observes. “That’s the immediate price. But throughout an entire day, if we’re switching too often, we’re never able to get into that deep state of thinking where our minds are focused, and ideas flow freely.
“Different theories exist about how long it takes to get into a ‘flow’ state—some think it takes fifteen minutes, while others suggest it’s closer to thirty. Regardless of the time, switching between tasks interrupts that flow.”
2: There’s another invisible productivity killer that we often overlook.
Take a look at the following list of activities performed by a business leader:
8:15–8:45 a.m.: Coaching call with Sarah, a direct report
Fifteen-minute gap
9:00–9:30: In-person meeting with potential high-value customer
Thirty-minute gap
10:00–11:00: Plan next quarter’s ad campaign with head of marketing
Thirty-minute gap
11:30–12:45 p.m.: Coaching calls with other employees
Fifteen-minute gap
1:00–1:30: Zoom call to onboard new client
“See all the gaps in there?” Dan writes. “There’s a total of ninety minutes unaccounted for, and is anyone really getting anything productive done in fifteen-to-thirty-minute time slots?”
Dan calls these gaps “buffer time,” and it drains us because they prevent us from being as effective as we want to be.
We also face the challenge of “bleed time” when we allow meetings or activities to run over. All of a sudden, our day is out of whack as we have to scramble to make up the lost time.
“Also, think about the energy lost. Coaching calls with [team members] demand one kind of headspace. In these meetings, we may need to be empathetic, soft-spoken, and leader-oriented,” he suggests.
“On the other hand, sales calls require an entirely different mentality—we may need to ‘turn it on,’ or we may need to bring certain presentations or statistics. Randomly rotating between the two throws you totally out of whack, ensuring you can never get ‘in the flow.'”
3: How do we fight back against “context switching” and “buffer time”? We take back complete control of our day by planning our upcoming week.
“Marcell is a serial entrepreneur,” Dan writes. “He’s one of those go-getters who’s willing to put in the work. From his early twenties, he’s been a tough, hardworking entrepreneur. His hard work paid off, and his company grew. . .
“All the while, he had a wonderful fiancée, and he was also a CrossFit coach. Balancing a growing business with relationships and CrossFit was starting to take its toll on him.”
So, Marcel took action.
“He created a templatized weekly plan,” Dan notes, “that allowed him to utilize every minute of his day effectively—a ‘Perfect Week’ that allowed him to go from task to task in an order that accounted for his energy and times.”
A “Perfect Week” accomplishes four things:
Benefit #1: Eliminates buffer time: “No more time in between tasks,” Dan observes. “Instead of having a thirty-minute gap in between meetings, with the Perfect Week, we stack those meetings on top of each other.”
Benefit #2: Eliminates bleed time: By planning our week in advance, we make a commitment to end meetings and activities on time. There’s no more “Whoops, we went over on that interview.”
“Truthfully, there can’t be bleed time,” Dan recommends. “With a tightly stacked day without any buffer time, if we go over on one task, we’re cutting into the time allotted for the next one.
Benefit #3: Optimizes for energy: “When we create a good working calendar for our week, we’re able to see when our energy dips and when it rises, and at what times of the day we’re most attuned to execute on certain tasks,” he writes.
Some of us are morning people. Others are not. “When we take control of our own calendar and start putting tasks in around our energy, we’ll find we get “in the flow” much easier.”
Benefit #4: Allows us to spot N.E.T. time: A concept Tony Robbins recommends is “No Extra Time,” by which he means we can double up on certain tasks and “use time spent commuting, running errands, exercising or cleaning the house to feed your mind.”
“So while we’re commuting or vacuuming, we can be listening to a podcast,” Dan writes. “While we’re on an airplane, we can be reading. These moments allow us to grow personally and professionally while costing us no extra time. When we plan out our week, we can typically spot all those moments where N.E.T time is available.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where in my week am I losing time to context switching or unproductive gaps, and how could a “Perfect Week” help me reclaim that energy?
Action: Map out my upcoming week, stacking similar tasks together and scheduling them around my natural energy peaks to minimize context switching and maximize focus.