The blog post isn’t meant for most people. Within few paragraphs you will know if it is for you or not. Feel free to close this window if it’s not for you.

To my perception, this post is for you if you’re SUPER interested in raising your work related productivity, you wish to do more-more-more, and sometimes you think other areas of your life come in the way of your Work (yes, Work with a capital ‘W’). You don’t need to be a workaholic by any means. I, for instance, value my personal life, my friends and family, more than my office responsibilities. But I also know that personal life, family and friends don’t require 1000-tasks to be done. But my office job does require that. And hence I need to organize myself better.

I will assume you are a normal person and have some desire to live a balanced life with a healthy body. Even if you aren’t, I have news for you. The best way you can optimize work productivity is to provide time for a balanced life and a healthy body. Consider it a means to an end or consider it to be one of your top values – either way it is important.

So the punchline is – you have to account for the time spent on all areas of your life and bring some level of organization to it. My claim is – I will have the bandwidth to deal with Work challenges to the extent to which I’m able to manage rest of my life well.

The standard week is a great measure of time. It’s not too long and not too short. Unless you’re in a unique profession, you most likely work on weekdays and have an off on weekends. Or something of that sort.

There are three distinctions that I wish to introduce. Constants, Good-Life Must-Have’s, Work time and Interstices.

Note: Read the descriptions below and understand the concept of the distinctions well. After that you can name them whatever you like; for example Constants can be called Daily Rituals/Routines.

Constants

Quite simply, it’s those activities that you perform Daily, Always, Without fail, regardless of whether you’re at home/at someone else’s place, traveling, someone in family is sick, there’s a Tsunami etc. No matter what you do this activity.

You have to decide your own list of Constants but my recommendation would be keep the list short, include activities related to Health, schedule them ideally at times you don’t have other distractions (like early morning/late evening etc.).

My Constants are: 8 hour sleep from 11pm to 7am, 1 hour exercise preferably in the morning and preferably includes a run, and 10 minutes meditation immediately after waking up.

That’s it. Simple. If I’m doing it I never have to worry about keeping my health in check. Sure there’s the element of diet and stress/relaxation also but I won’t include that in this post because both Diet and Relaxation are something that you do within the flow of your day or week and can do in conjunction with other activities. It’s not something you have to schedule separate time for. Hence they are not relevant for this post.

Good-Life Must-Have’s

It’s simple. Work does fill most of our time but in order to live a good life (by our own standards) there is a list of things we like to do and experience periodically. If we’re doing those things, we say to ourselves “my life is in balance”. If we don’t do them, we feel a gnawing emptiness or restlessness that something is wrong.

This list will be dramatically different for each person on the planet. It totally depends on what you value and what is your view of a good-life lived.

So without academic explanations I’ll lay out my list and let you make the mental connections with your own life. In the end, you must come up with your own list.

For me, it’s:

• Family responsibilities (catering to my parents’ health/house chores etc.),
• Entertainment (watching movies/documentaries/web series),
• Going out and socializing (this can include my close friends and other networks),
• Checking in with loved ones (just staying in touch and telling them about what’s up with me); and
• MOST IMPORTANT – Alone Time (I journal, I walk aimlessly, I sip coffee and think; but whatever the form I need loads of alone time)

So these are all those things that I wish to spend my time on routinely. If any one of these things is not happening, I start getting the feeling that my life is not in control. If I sacrifice any of these things in favor of work or any other random time-slippage (i.e. social media) I pay the price in the currency of my sanity.

So the recommendation with Good-Life Must-Have’s is that let them build up, then do them all together. It’s called Batching. You don’t wash your laundry every time there is a handkerchief and one pair of socks in the basket, right? You wait till there is a big lump there and then you put it all together in the machine. You let it build up to a critical mass and then do it all together. It’s called Batching. Do the same thing with your Must-Have’s.

Even if it’s something like spending quality time with your children. Sure you want to do it daily but it’ll be much better to spend 2 fully unadulterated hours with them at night (with phones off and no distraction; Full Presence Mode) than to spend 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there, half-attentive and half-lost in other priorities.

Some Must-Have’s will be piled up daily and some weekly. But make sure to give yourself a specific day or time when you’ll do them and put it in your calendar (mental one or actual one, like Google Calendar).

Work time and Interstices

Now comes the protagonist. The thing we wanted to be optimized. The big idea here is if you’re taking care of your Health through constants and are catering to all other needs of your Good-Life image in your head through batching Must-Have’s – then during whatever time is left, you can GO HARD on your Work and your Goals. You can literally give it all and let it consume you. Because whatever else you could have been doing is already done. There is nothing stealing your attention from the task at hand. There is no thought of ‘Oh I have to do that and I have to cater to this’. Your mind should be clear.

Now, let me introduce the biggest winning advantage of highly productive people. Interstices. The cracks of Time. It means whatever little time is available between tasks, between one meeting and another, during your commute, when you’re walking to the water cooler to your desk, when you sit down to eat, when you’re waiting for a friend to arrive etc. Any point of time when your full attention is not required and neither your problem-solving mind. These time cracks are together called Interstices.

What does a regular person do in their Interstices? Scroll through Instagram? Post a story? Browse Amazon for nice watches or cool pair of sneakers? Google random stuff? Go up and down in Email inbox? Do small-talk or chit chat with anyone around? Or just mentally wander and ruminate? Maybe a little of all these things.

Highly effective people use their Interstices for ‘thinking about’ or ‘taking a small action toward’ their Work or Goals. And when I say ‘thinking about’, I don’t mean ruminating or fantasizing, I mean thinking hard about some work-related aspect and sorting it out, maybe even making the next day’s to-do-list or the next meeting’s talking-points or agenda. They are getting actual work done.

Now, interstices are plenty and Social media is a time-suck. You literally are letting your life slip away through your IG feed. (no hate to IG, insert: whatever favorite social media platform of the day). Some things like mindless social media consumption or aimless mental wandering (also known as ruminating) are big NO-NOs. Same is the case for random small-talk (unless you really enjoy it and that’s your method of staying alive).

But other things can be batched. Most of the aspects related to your Good-Life are already taken care of by your Must-Have’s list and are in your calendar. Do the same for Emails. Batch them and deal with them at specific times of the day, say 11am and 4pm.

The big idea is GO HARD on your work goals and use your Interstices for the same purpose. Let them act as propellers for your airship to your dreams, not the drag of a broken wing slowing you down.

That’s it folks. Break down your time between Constants, Good-Life Must-Have’s, Work time and Interstices. That’s how you can mentally conceptualize your weekly time for achieving high levels of work-productivity.

If you wish to learn more about Productivity, read the article https://www.teamgantt.com/blog/the-busy-humans-guide-to-the-best-productivity-systems-in-the-world

Cheers and have a good week!