Add 13 Weeks to Your Life Every Year
Eric Partaker shows how constant task switching wastes 28% of your workday, or about 13 weeks a year. He cut his own task switches from 77 to 10 per day using time blocking and picking three priorities each night. A paper timesheet to track switches is the key to breaking the habit.
Have you ever felt there's not enough hours in your day or your day is just full of busy work and not enough work on what matters most? Maybe just pulling your hair out because you're just not getting the things done that you want to get done.
I'm Eric, and today I want to talk to you about productivity and how I've had many struggles in this exact same area. As a matter of fact, ten years ago, I considered myself the world's number one procrastinator. I still had success, but all that success constantly came with just way too much pain. It was way too difficult, and I struggled. I had a real hard time maintaining focus, minimizing distractions, and really getting any work done. And it was just the same story going over and over and over again. I'd be sitting there with a project and thinking about all the things that I needed to do related to that project. And sure enough, days would pass and I'd get closer and closer to the delivery date, and I still wasn't getting the work done that I needed to get done. And suddenly it's the day before. And now I'm getting frantic and overwhelmed. And now I'm up till 2am and the project is finally finished. But I go the next day feeling completely exhausted, handing it in or delivering it, you know, whatever the situation was at the time and just not feeling my best. And maybe you can relate to this. You know, maybe you felt like this with certain things in life. Maybe you felt like it's just all too hard, like it's pushing water up a hill. It doesn't have to be that way. And 10 years ago, I started a search. I started a search for determining how can I transition from being this ultimate procrastinator in my mind to a super producer who I am today. And that search process led me through hundreds of books and interviews and listening to various experts talk about procrastination and what you need to do to overcome procrastination. But I'm not going to go through all of that today because.
Well, frankly, we don't have time to do all of that today. So I'm just going to take you through just one simple golden nugget on this topic that really transformed my life. And it was. It came through in a book that I read called the One Thing. And in that book they had this small quote which said that the Average worker loses 28% of their workday to multitasking ineffectiveness. Now, what is multitasking ineffectiveness? This is the simple fact that very Often we're doing more than one thing at a time or switching from task to task, and we think we're being effective, but we're actually taking longer to do things than we even realize. Multitasking ineffectiveness is essentially jumping around from one job to the next. And that's what's accounting for a 28% loss in a workday. And if you extrapolate that up into the work weeks in a year, it's 13 weeks being lost every single year. So if the average person is losing what amounts to an entire quarter every year, what does that mean? That means. That means that the average person who's worried about their productivity and doesn't feel like they have enough time in their day is only playing with 3/4 in the year instead of 4. So then the question is, well, what could you do if you had an extra quarter in your life, if you had an extra 13 weeks? And today I want to tell you about my solution. How I came up with a way to add back 13 weeks to my life every single year, feel a lot more productive because I had a lot more time. And who doesn't want 13 weeks, right added back to back to their life if you can get it? And by the way, if you extrapolate that out even a little bit further, if we take 13 weeks a year, and if you take that out over an entire professional career of 40 years, you're talking about an extra decade that you can capture here. What could you do with an extra decade? What hobbies might you pick up? What more work might you do? What more time might you spend with your family? That's what's on the table here, and that's what I want to help you capture. How do we capture all of this? By mastering the art of single tasking. Single tasking is the antidote to multitasking ineffectiveness. How do we go about single tasking? Well, first of all, we need to start our day knowing what it is we want to be doing. And the best time to do that is by choosing your top three things that you'd like to be working on the night before. Then, when we start our day, we need to work with time blocks throughout our day. Have a specific thing that you're working on, like an appointment that you scheduled with yourself, where you're only going to work on that one thing. But here's the real game changer. The real game changer comes in you becoming more self aware about how many times you switch tasks throughout the day. So going back to the book, the One thing. Do you know the average number of times that someone task switch in an hour? 37 times. Now you might think right now, well, there's no way I switched 37 times in an hour. But the majority of those task switches are happening unconsciously. So our goal is to make you far more conscious of all the task switching that you're doing, which is leading to a 28% loss of your day, which extrapolated to a year is a loss of an entire quarter and which over a career is a loss of an entire decade. And we do that by once again mastering the art of single tasking. How do we do that? We use an old school timesheet. What do I mean by a timesheet? I literally mean you take a sheet of paper, you have a series of columns on it. First column is an activity, what you're working on in that moment. It might be, you know, working on a presentation. So you write presentation. Then you have next column start time 9am, next column end time, let's say 9:13am and then you get your total column 13 minutes and then your next activity. Let's say in this example that the next activity was I switched to check email. So now I write email start time 9:13, end time 9:17. Total minutes, four minutes. You get, you get what I mean here? So you're literally counting and recording every single switch that you make throughout the day, simply because the first step is to shine a spotlight of awareness on where your time is going. And once you do this, you're going to start to see just how many task switches you make throughout the day. Now, when I first did this, my timesheet had 77 entries on it. It was so long that it couldn't even fill. It went past a full sheet of paper. I actually had to use the backside of the page 77 times. Now I was capturing everything, you know, walking up to reheat my tea, sit back down, work on the presentation, pick up a phone call, go back to the presentation. Every single switch was recorded. And I could clearly see that because I wasn't working on something for a long enough period of time, because I wasn't single tasking that. This is what was leading to my ineffectiveness. This was hampering my productivity. Now here's the magical thing that happened day after day. As I started to become more conscious of where my time was going by recording every single thing that I worked on the task switch, the number of entries on my timesheet started to decline. And soon 77 entries on a typical day and a timesheet only became 50, and then only 26. And then these days, often I'll have a timesheet and I'll look at it and I'll only have maybe seven or 10 times seven or, you know, 10 activities that I've switched to throughout the day. So I've gone from 77 task switches in a day to down to 7 or 10. What has that done for me? Well, it's added that missing quarter back to my life. Do I think I'm achieving a lot more with the extra 13 weeks a year? What do you think? Of course I do. And those same 13 weeks are on the table for you. So I really, really encourage you. Number one, if you'd like to go, you know, more deeply into the subject time blocking and single tasking and the negative effect of multitasking, grab that book. The one thing. You'll love it. I loved it and it was a real game changer for me. Number two, make sure that you're choosing your top three items the day before so you know what you're going to be working on the next day. And then, number three, really focus on single tasking by using the power of a timesheet to measure the amount of time or the number of instances that you're constantly switching from one task to the other. Do all of that and I'm sure you're going to feel much more productive.
