1 Project / Day 🏗️ 📅
Hi friends!
I’m a firm believer that scheduling your time is incredibly important. Every Sunday night, I’ll open my calendar app and look through how my next week will look like so I can get organized.
I’m generally quite selfish with my time, so I’ll always schedule things to my convenience as much as possible. I’ll decline irrelevant meetings I don’t have to attend, batch meetings and email time, so that I have more working time for myself. This is the time I get to work on the more strategic stuff, and can deep dive into whatever I am doing.
But I wanted to take this one step further, and implement more concepts from Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work’ (which I wrote about here in a previous edition of my newsletter) by designating a specific project for each day.
For example:
Mondays and Fridays should strictly be no meeting days so that I can fully focus on planning and strategy work.
Wednesdays and Thursdays should be used strictly for working on action items on emails, as well as taking meetings.
Tuesdays will be left mostly for whatever needs my attention the most, but should still be geared more towards planning and strategy.
However for the projects I’m working on, I’ll focus my time on 1 project a day: Monday - Project A, Tuesday - Project B etc. The intent is to make sure that my head is literally in the right space, and to avoid having attention residue at all costs.
When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance - Deep Work, Cal Newport
Of course, there still needs to be some sort of flexibility based on other people’s schedules.
However, I’ve learnt to be extremely selfish with my time - because if you don’t prioritize your own time, no one will. Make sure you take charge of that aspect of your life, because only you can control it!
Curious to know, how do you all schedule your week and time? Do share with me, as I’m interested to know different styles I could potentially learn from :)
Till next week!
Jamie
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