In an earlier post I introduced Matt Perman’s list “Four Things You Need to Do Every Day” (Routines, Office tasks, Projects and People related activities). I’ve already written about “Routines.”
Here are Perman’s suggestions for the other three activities:
Office tasks
After doing your routines, take maybe 30 minutes to an hour to clear out non-project actions. These are basically the “next actions” in the GTD system. If you clear some out every day, you can keep up. Again, knock these out in a concentrated batch early in the day, before the phone starts to ring and new email starts to come in.
Projects
After your routines and releases are out of the way, turn to concentrated time on your priority projects for the day. Interruptions are going to start, but that’s OK. If you got your routines and small office tasks out of the way, you’ll be able to handle interruptions better without getting too side-tracked. The amount of time spent concentrating on projects will vary with your job. I’m thinking that it might be best to divide up weekly time in this way:
70% on core projects: Things that execute and improve those things that are right at the heart of your business / ministry / nonprofit model.
20% on progress projects: Things that will generate entirely new growth and approaches that did not exist before.
10% on learning projects: Developing your skills and knowledge. Do this “on the clock,” so to speak. It’s too important to only leave to evenings and free time….
The principle behind designating time to both core projects and progressive projects is: “preserve the core, stimulate progress” (Jim Collins). Be doing both.
People
I don’t have a time recommendation here. This could be the rest of your day, depending on the nature of your job. As long as you got in time to get rid of your routines and some standard action items, along with some concentrated focus on projects, you’re doing well and should be able to focus the way you ought in regard to meetings and interacting over your work.
Free
The core principle behind my above thoughts is to get routine stuff out of the way at the start of the day and then make some progress on your small office tasks. Then you can work in more small office tasks between meetings and project work and be more discretionary in how you use your time. In other words, be disciplined so that you can be spontaneous. If you aren’t keeping up with at least some baseline of progress at the very beginning of each day, the spontaneous time will never feel like it comes. You will always be trying to “keep up.”
If you want to be able to spend 70% of your project time on core projects and 30% of your time on advancement and learning projects, you need to be able to group your work into some type of “categories.” If you don’t, it will be harder to single out your project time from other time.
Simply doing projects, and even next actions, “whenever they work during the day” has never worked for me. In order to have the “whenever it works” time, I need to also have some designated time for them as well.
Here’s link to the complete article.
