I’m a morning person. After a good night’s sleep, I wake up with a cheeky grin on my face and accost my partner with what we refer to as “sparkle”. He’s an evening person, and responds to my energetic greeting with what’s known in our house as “not sparkle”.
With regard to time management, I always hear people recommending that the best thing to do is to start the day with some exercise, get the blood flowing, and then settle in to your work day. In my experience with this method, I’ve found that by mid-afternoon I am just tired and ready for a nap. And this makes sense when I think about time management, not in terms of some objective, one-size-fits-all approach, but in a way that honours my body’s natural rhythms. The time of day when my mind and body are most active, lucid and productive was being wasted on some mindless physical activity.
In contrast, after a productive morning, I’ve found myself really lagging and ready for a nap mid-afternoon and chosen that time to do some physical activity. After this, I’ve noticed another “bonus burst” of productivity emerge, allowing me to complete those niggly little tasks that needed doing before the end of my work day.
So you can imagine how relieved I was to read about the idea that managing your time is not just about setting a fixed schedule and sticking to it, but also about listening to your body, your mind, and responding in a way that maximises the times when you’re naturally inclined to be focused, creative and productive. With that in mind, here is my plan for how I intend to structure my days during the EDA Foundations course:
- Coffee / Morning pages / Shower / Breakfast
- 4 x Pomodoros (1h 40m)
- Morning tea
- 4 x Pomodoros (1h 40m)
- Lunch
- 4 x Pomodoros (1h 40m)
- Afternoon tea
- 4 x Pomodoros (1h 40m)
- Exercise
- 3 x Pomodoros (1h 40m)
- Dinner
- Chill
Test Results!
My partner and I have been on holiday for quite a while and as we’re both working from home it’s been quite tricky establishing a routine that allows us to “get shit done”. So we decided to make yesterday a “productivity day” and I chose this day to run a wee experiment with Pomodoro and see how it worked out. Actual results:
- 2 x Pomodoros
- Lunch
- 3 x Pomodoros
- Run
- 3 x Pomodoros
- Dinner
- Chill
By the last Pomodoro it was around 5:30/6pm and I had hit a wall — I ended up on the couch napping, despite intending to do at least one more. I realised two things. One, I need to start much earlier in the day! So if I want to get morning pages and breakfast in, I’ll need to wake up at 7:30 to be ready for a 9am start. Two, my exercise break needs to be later in the day, around 5:30/6 where I hit that wall and can’t formulate coherent sentences. So it was great to give it a go and reflect on the results. My partner also found the Pomodoro method worked really well for him, and when we both do it together it is incredibly motivating! I am super stoked that I’ve figured out a plan for my days and so grateful to EDA for incorporating this into their prep curriculum.
Reflection
What have I learned?
I’ve learned that there are many, many strategies that you can use to help maximise your own productivity and build time management skills.
Why is this important?
This is incredibly valuable, because I think there is a real common tendency to feel hopeless about our natural propensity, or lack thereof, towards being able to focus and get things done. We can be so disparaging towards ourselves about our seeming inability to “get shit done”, when in reality, it’s a just a matter of trial and error: figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t. It gave me great hope to know that I’m not alone in this struggle and that others have found ways to overcome seemingly insurmountable levels of procrastination and “time wasting”. I particularly loved this piece: Seven Counterintuitive Ways to Be Insanely Productive. It was a really good reminder that we are not robots, able to be programmed to perform a specified task flawlessly. We are human beings: living organisms born of nature and its cycles and rhythms. And we must work with that, not against it.
