THE SECRET: Measure By Time, Not Output.

Author Jeffrey Archer flies out to Portugal each December to begin a seven-week writing marathon. Over the following few weeks, he will start writing at 6:00 am and will write throughout the day every day. At the end of those few weeks, he will have the first draft of his next book written.

Jeffrey Archer is not measuring the number of words he writes each day. He focuses on being at his desk and writing by 6:00 am. He knows that if he follows that routine for the following weeks, he will have a finished manuscript by around mid-February.

It’s a simple formula based on just turning up daily.

It is the “secret” to getting anything done consistently. Whether that is your work or getting yourself fit. You need to turn up each day and do the work to achieve anything. There is no other way.

If you measure your productivity by what you produce each day, you will set yourself up for disappointment. You are going to have good and bad days. You will also have “meh” days — days where you get stuff done, but it feels like you’re constantly pushing a large stone up a hill. The trouble is, you never know when you will have a good or bad day. You may have slept badly or fought with your partner at breakfast and are distracted all day.

Some days, Jeffrey Archer may only write three hundred words; others, he writes over two thousand. On a daily basis, it doesn’t matter. He knows if he turns up each day to write, after a few weeks, he will have achieved his objective.

Most people’s struggles with managing email are a result of inconsistency. If you dedicate an hour a day to clearing your actionable email, while some days you may not clear them all, most days you will, and you will never have a build-up of backlog. The alternative is a gradual build-up of emails demanding replies that sit around for days, sometimes weeks, and soon you have hundreds of emails that require replies and no time to do it. To clear all that would require at least a day of nothing but responding to email. Who has time for that?

Let’s imagine you dedicate an hour to deal with your communications at 4 pm every day. If you begin with the oldest email and work your way down your list, most days, you will clear them all; some days, you won’t. However, because you always begin with the oldest email, no one will wait more than twenty-four hours for a response.

If you were to say you will clear thirty emails today, and after an hour, you have only cleared fifteen, you will be disappointed with yourself. You’ll hate it and soon give up that system. Instead, if you were to say for the next hour, you will focus on responding to your actionable mail, it won’t matter how many you clear; at 5 pm, you will have achieved your objective.

You can apply the same principle to your important work each day. If you are a graphic designer, you could block two to three hours each morning (or whenever you are most focused) to work on your design work. Doing that, you would get more work done each week than if you were allowing interruptions all day.

You would still be available for meetings and discussions in the afternoon, but you would protect your design time so the work gets done. You also free yourself from the anxiety of not knowing if you have sufficient time to complete projects. You know you have the time — you have three hours each day for focused design work.

Warren Buffett successfully does what he does because he dedicates five hours daily to reading financial papers. He’s not a prodigy; he turns up each day and does the research.

You will find the same pattern if you investigate any successful person in any field. They are not measuring their days on how much work they get done. They measure based on turning up each day to do the work. Some days, they will get a phenomenal amount done; others, very little. But they turn up even when they don’t feel like doing it.

Having worked with hundreds of people, I have learned that most work-related stress comes from the anxiety of not knowing if you have sufficient time to meet deadlines or client expectations. We promise too much because we don’t want to disappoint anyone. Yet, simultaneously, we convince ourselves to be available for our boss or clients at a moment’s notice. This is not true. That only happens if you allow it to happen.

You will not be remembered positively if you are great at responding to requests but fail to deliver on those requests. People are not fired because they are slow to answer an instant message or do not answer their phones for a couple of hours each morning. People get fired because they don’t deliver on their work.

If you prioritise answering messages and calls over doing your work, you’ve got your priorities wrong.

If you want to get on top of your work and live in a stress-free environment, here’s what to do. Block two to three hours each day for doing your most important work (call this your focused time). Then, block an additional two hours. One is for managing your communications (email and messages), and the other is for working on administrative tasks. Committing to those four or five hours daily will ensure sufficient time to finish your work and still leave you with enough time for meetings and other interruptions.

Alternatively, you could do nothing and live in a world of stress, backlogs and disappointment. It will always be your choice.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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