3 Crucial Habits To Keep You Out Of The Deadly Rabbit Hole
“Why not? It’ll only take a second.”
Those are the famous last words for any one of us who’s seen the little red notification dot pop up on our screen...“Lemme just check this real quick.”
Before you know it, you’re down a rabbit hole of gossip articles, email replies, or YouTube clip of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Adele. It’s fantastic, by the way!
And even if you only took 5 actual minutes to goof off, that rabbit hole cost you 25 minutes of productivity.
Why?
Because studies show that when interrupted or distracted, “...it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task.”
Let’s run some numbers. If you fall prey to ten teeny interruptions a day, that’s 250 minutes you’ve set yourself back. More than four hours a day. Which is twenty hours in a workweek.
That’s nearly 3 work days you might as well have spent on the beach!
So how do we begin to fix this?
Instead of the road (or hole) most traveled, focus on implementing the following 3 critical habits...
HOLD UP: You may read these and think, “Wait, these aren’t surprising/new.” You’re right. You’ve seen all these before. What’s new is in how well they work when you actually practice them and use them together. (And that’s the only way they work, by the way.)
Ok. On with it…
Prioritize & Prep It
Ever wake up in the morning wondering, “What do I need to get done today?”
If you do, you haven’t properly prepped the night before. Take 15 minutes every evening to review your tasks, projects, and calendar. Identify 2-3 priority tasks you must get done [tomorrow].
The next day, write them on a post-it note and refer to it throughout the day. Meanwhile block out “focus” time to knock them out one by one. More on this later.
Plot & Book it
Time management expert Julie Morgenstern states, “A to-do not connected to a when...doesn’t get done." In other words, schedule tasks/to-dos onto your calendar.
Plot out all of your unmovable, recurring tasks, and appointments (i.e. weekly status meetings, deadlines, meeting placeholders) on a time map.
Use the time map as a guide from which to book “focus time” (FT) appointments on your calendar to work on your top 2-3 priorities.
Uncomfortable booking “focus time” appointments? Test it out. Try doing it once a week for 1-2 hours. Once you start leaving work at 6:30 p.m. instead of 10:30 p.m., you’ll implement this habit.
Above all, protect your time or someone else will (or rather not) do it for you. This leads us to the third and final habit.
Time It
Do you have one of these two problems?
You have trouble keeping your attention on the task in front of you, and can’t get into that “zone.”
When you do manage to lock into a zone, where you’re totally in flow and your creativity’s on point, you lose track of time and miss your next appointment. Oops!
If you’re putting off sitting down with something you must write, or crunching numbers in an excel spreadsheet, tell yourself, “I’ll just work on this for an hour.” Set a timer with an alarm, and work till that alarm goes off -- it’s like a carrot hanging in front of you. (You can even promise yourself a little reward. I book spa days in advance and work hard to earn it.)
And if you have trouble keeping track of time, set an alarm or an alert for every little call, appointment, or meeting you have during your day.
It’s much easier to settle into a productive, creative trance when your mind's at ease knowing your device/alarm will rouse you out of it at just the right time.
Alarms and timers, if used effectively, will change your life for the better.
A “real-life” scenario:
I wake up at 6am, shower, have breakfast, drive to work, sit in meetings all day, work for 3 hours, come home at 8pm, warm and eat dinner without hearing about my kids’ day, shower, pop open the laptop and work until 2am, sleep for 4 hours, wake up, and do it all over again. I’m beyond burnt out. MAKE IT STOP!
Can you relate? Nodding your head?
Put these 3 crucial habits into play today so you can have…
A “better-life” scenario:
Wake up at 5am, work for 2 hours from home, shower, have breakfast the my kids, head in to work, sit in meetings all day (because they’re not going away), work for 3 hours, come home at 7pm, have dinner with your family, do homework, play and read stories, and go to sleep by 10pm, wake up and look forward to a new day!
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