How to Stop Wasting Time - 7 Time Management Hacks That Actually Work
How To Stop Wasting Time-7 Time Management Hacks That Actually Work
with Philip VanDusen
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Philip VanDusen:
So what we're gonna be talking about is how to stop wasting time. Seven time management hacks that actually work.
But essentially these really are more like practices. They're more methods that you can use to increase your level of productivity and focus. So the problem is, is that most people feel busy. And a lot of times they're not actually moving the ball forward or as far forward as they would like.
A while back I did a survey of my email list and I asked everyone in this survey, what are you struggling with the most? And I got back 250 replies to this survey and I was expecting things like finding more clients, getting up to date on ai, improving my design skills, making more money.
But the answers that I end up getting were predominantly time management and organization. That is what my community of creative professionals is struggling with the most. And so I've focused a little bit of my time and energy to try to help my coaching clients and my community to be more efficient and more productive and work through some of this stuff.
It's a challenge. It's just challenge. Even for me. , I'm no guru in this, but I do practice and do try to stay, up to date on different ways of managing this, and today the problem has gotten worse, not better. We have more distractions than ever. We live in a world of constant notifications and pings and banners flying into our screen.
Infinite content coming down the pike, slack messages, dms, emails, meetings stacked on top of each other. Everyone feels busy, but a lot of us feel like we're not moving the ball forward. The thing that you have to remember. Is that apps don't fix productivity. The typical response to trying to improve your productivity of your focus or your efficiency is to download or adopt a new app notion.
Click up Monday, Trello, ToDoist, adopting the methodology of KanBan boards. I mean, the list just goes on and on in terms of tools that you can use to improve your productivity. And they can help to a certain extent, kind of organized your to-do list. But you might, assume if you find the right productivity tool that everything is just suddenly gonna click and be perfect.
But here's the truth. Apps don't make you productive. Practices do. Productivity tools, when it comes down to it, are neutral. They just reorganize behavior you already have. So if your habits are scattered, a new tool is just gonna organize and reinforce your scattered behavior, And so what we're talking about today is really more about self-leadership than it is apps. We're not going to be talking about apps. Okay? So I do mention a couple apps very late in the presentation, but this is really not about apps. There is one app I'm gonna mention though, even though I just said I'm not, it's called Toggle, T-O-G-G-L.
It's just a time tracking app and it can be very helpful if you want to find out where your time is going. So when you're in that analysis phase of like, what am I doing wrong, it can be really helpful to use that app 'cause it helps you track how you're using your time and going back and looking at that can help you deconstruct it.
We're really talking about self-leadership. We're talking about your ability to direct your attention. To control your energy, to prioritize meaningful work and to design your day intentionally. Because the people who perform at a higher level aren't necessarily better at quote unquote time management.
They're just better at managing themselves. They're better at leading themselves. So here are seven time management practices that actually work. Here's hack number one. Your energy is the real calendar. Most time management advice focuses on scheduling, but your calendar really isn't, the constraint.
What you're dealing with is your energy, your focus, and you have to. Manage energy, not just time. And we all know that physical energy changes throughout the day, right? Cognitive energy changes throughout the day. Everyone has a chronotype. A chronotype is your time, energy paradigm, so there are morning people like me. I'm a morning person. There are midday performers, there are night owls who do their best work at night. And the mistake that you might be making if you're struggling with productivity and time management, is you might actually be scheduling your work based on availability instead of energy.
creative work for us creative professionals, they focus on, creative work, And creative work takes. Your best brain power, right? To do design, strategy, writing, thinking, client management, the list goes on. You have to really shape your day around your peak cognitive hours. So here's a best practice for you.
You wanna identify when your brain works best. So think about when you are the most productive. You are the most sharp. Do you know that you're a morning person, an afternoon person, a night owl? Ask yourself, when do I think more clearly? When do I feel the most creative? When do I feel mentally sharp? And then you want to try and map out and protect that window of time because this is where your highest leverage as a creative professional- that's where your greatest leverage lies and where your best work is gonna lie.
Hack number two is designing your default day.
And I think about this in terms of this structure creates freedom, chaos creates distraction, and most people wake up and they react to the day. And email comes in, a message comes in, meetings happen.
You look at your calendar and a bunch of stuff has been added to it, and before you know it, your day is gone. People who perform highly have a tendency to do things differently. They design the structure of their day, not minute by minute, but they do it architecturally and hierarchically.
So here's an example of a default day structure. You wanna think about your time in terms of zones. You may have a deep work zone where you do your creative work, your thinking, your strategy. You may wanna have a communication zone. That's where you handle your email, your slack messages, your calls, your text messages.
You carve out an administrative zone where you're dealing with operations and, finances and logistics. When you design, your default day, decisions disappear, meaning you don't wake up wondering what to do. Your day already has a bit of a shape to it.
Here's hack number three. Hack number three is the one needle mover rule.
And this is something that I like to call. The illusion of productivity, and I am totally guilty of this myself.
I want to get things done fast. I wanna see volume taken care of. That's my mindset, right? I want to check off 12 boxes on my to-do list fast, Because it feels productive. It's a dopamine hit. It makes me feel really good and I focus on doing a whole bunch of little things fast. And I've developed kind of a name for this.
I call it procrast to working, and this is where you're answering emails, striving for email box zero. You're checking all your slack messages, you're making sure you don't have comments on any of the five social media platforms that You're on. You do quick tasks, but then the problem is it's lunchtime or the day ends, and you feel like you haven't moved anything forward.
So here's the one needle mover rule. Every day you want to ask yourself one question, what is the one thing that could make this day successful? What is the one thing that could move this needle? One meaningful piece of work, not 10, not 15 little check boxes, but one. So here are some examples of what I would consider to be a needle mover.
finishing a client project, finishing a proposal. Recording a video, writing a podcast outline or script outlining a strategy, If that one thing gets done for me, the day counts, it matters. Everything else is secondary. This focuses and resets your brain to think about your day in terms of impact.
Rather than activity. That's why I call it procrast working because basically it makes you feel like you're working. But essentially what you are doing is you're procrastinating about addressing the one big needle mover that's gonna make that day successful.
Think about it in terms of the one needle mover rule.
Hack number four is killing reactivity at the source.
This is how I think about this. You want to eliminate reactive work. and increased proactive work, so it's reactive versus proactive One of the biggest productivity killers is reactive work. Reactive work means other people are controlling your time. You are reacting to things rather than driving the process yourself.
You're reacting to emails, you're reacting to Slack or WhatsApp or Discord messages. You're reacting to banners and notifications, phone calls, text messages. Client emergencies, social media posts, and comments. When your day becomes reactive to things that are coming in, you lose ownership of your attention, and you want to think about it in terms of owning your own attention.
That's that idea of self-leadership that I mentioned at the beginning, because when you allow yourself to be reactive all the time. You become a professional responder, you're not a creator, you're not a driver of movement and change. You are a professional responder. so here's a best practice. You want to become a proactive worker.
You want to create communication windows. This is a great hack, and that is to say you're only gonna answer email three times a day, morning, midday, late afternoon. This is something that I try to do, and it really, really helps because I have a tendency to really strive for inbox zero like all the time.
And because having, 500 unread messages really stresses me out. And so I'm constantly kind of nipping away at it, but what it does is it's sucking my attention and I'm becoming that professional responder. I started to institute this thing where I look at an answer email three times a day.
I do it first thing in the morning at lunchtime and at the end of the day. And I also train my clients to understand that's the case. And so they don't look for answers super quickly and I don't become that professional responder. when you do that, something really powerful happens. You move from reaction to intention.
You start directing your own work instead of responding an example I try to use when I'm talking about this is that protecting your time is, you know, when you have a CEO or like a head of industry, and they may have, a gatekeeper, an admin, that person that you have to get to in order to schedule a meeting or get time because this person is Super busy, right? That person is a gatekeeper to a certain extent. You want to become your own admin. You wanna become your own gatekeeper of time.
Moving on to hack number five. hack number five is artificial deadlines.
Have you ever noticed that work expands to fill time? There's this thing called Parkinson's Law.
You might have heard of it. Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time allotted to it, If you give yourself eight hours to do a logo design, that logo design's gonna take eight hours. If you give yourself three hours to do a logo design. That logo design's gotta get done in three hours.
If you block the time or create an expectation of time and artificial deadlines to an extent, you are forcing yourself to work within them. A best practice methodology for this is to think of it in terms of constraint instead of endless time and endless boundaries, you want to try to create constraint around what it is that you do.
Here are some examples. 90 minute work, sprints, time, creative sessions. Refined stopping points, super defined rest breaks. Because by using constraint, what it does is it forces decision making. It forces you to get it done, and you have to decide, it increases momentum and it removes perfectionism.
The more time you give something, the easier it is to slip into perfectionism. Perfectionism is one of those things that I struggle with a lot, and unlimited time is disguised as quality control essentially. So you're thinking of it in terms of, constraint eliminates analysis, paralysis in a way it forces decision making.
I, I always say this, if perfectionism and fear of failure had a baby. It would be called analysis paralysis because constraint, that idea of constraint and giving yourself time blocks, artificial deadlines, it forces decision making because you have to make that decision to hit that end point that you have set for yourself.
So constraint eliminates analysis, paralysis, and it's a really great way to start to practice artificial deadlines.
Hack number six. Hack number six is that focus is a trainable skill.
In other words, kill the squirrels, because multitasking is a total myth.
Clinical studies have shown that the brain does not multitask. What it does is it switches attention very quickly, and every switch drains cognitive energy. So here are some examples of squirrels, notifications, popups, alerts, messages, emails, texts, tabs, social media, quote unquote news. I'm just gonna check Instagram for a second.
I'm just gonna check Facebook. I'm gonna see what's happening on LinkedIn. Procrast working, right? You're responding. You're becoming that professional responder to the squirrels, and every time you switch your attention like that, you are draining cognitive energy. And those sorts of things will run across your mental field of view every few seconds.
That's the sort of business world that we live in. And so what you wanna try to do is you want to create a distraction free work environment. This is what this looks like. Turn off notifications, close extra browser tabs, mute your phone. Use headphones to eliminate outside sound. Close your office door if you have an office door to eliminate people walking through pets, walking across your desk, right?
Eliminate those distractions. But we all know that distractions do happen, Some of you who are in the audience might know that I practice meditation, and there are a lot of things about meditation that come in really, really handy when you're running your own business or your own creative practice.
one of the techniques that meditators use when you're meditating, your brain wants to work. Your brain is always working. And so when you're meditating, you're trying to quiet your thoughts, right? But thoughts have a tendency to rush in when you're not expecting it, or as soon as your mind is resting you're thinking about snow tires or something just comes into your head, and so.
Meditation. Practitioners and trainers talk about it this way. You wanna realize that your thoughts are gonna happen. There's no way that you're ever gonna eliminate them. But when those thoughts happen, you wanna recognize them. You recognize them, and notice it as if it's a leaf floating down a stream, okay?
And then you just consciously let it pass. You don't beat yourself up, you just return to the work because practicing this, that sort of focus improves with practice. So the more you do it, the better you get at it, the faster you get. And that's the same thing that happens with distractions is that the more you architect your space, so it's a distraction less environment or as reduced as possible, when those distractions do come in, they're less frequent.
So it's less constant static and movement, and you will train yourself to be able to react to those distractions quicker and easier to be able to recover from that distraction and to maintain your cognitive energy as much as you can.
Hack number seven. Hack number seven is you want to build your own personal production system.
And the idea behind that is that you never want to solve the same problem twice. High performing people have a tendency to build systems. They don't reinvent the wheel every day. so here's some examples from my own systems. One of the systems that I use across a bunch of different things from my hard drive to how I respond to communications are as I use templates a lot.
every time I write an email, the second time I find myself writing a similar email. I realize that this is an email that I have to make a template out of. So I will genericize that communication email and I'll put it in a Google doc. And over time I have saved probably 40 different email templates, responding to sponsorship opportunities, responding to new client opportunities,
I have tons and tons of email templates, and all I have to do is copy, paste, fill in the personalized information and send it. It's an incredible time saver proposal templates. When I create a proposal, I have a very specific kind of, organizational structure to the proposals that I put together.
And so sometimes I have proposals for naming, sometimes I have proposals for design, sometimes for web services, sometimes for strategy projects through design, through packaging. Brand guidelines, and I've saved a whole number of templates that have the moving parts, and even in many cases, the description of the phases that I use over and over and over again.
I have a creative brief template. I have a client folder structure template. So when you get a new client this is one of the things that I noticed early on in my career is that you get a new client and then over time you end up having 15 or 20 folders in every client folder, right? There's video and there's emails, and there's, team links and there's, production and presentations.
And so what I've done is I've created a folder. This says, new client. Inside that folder are 20 different folders that have. Names and every time I get a new client, I just duplicate that master folder. I put the client name at the top, and then my folder structure is similar across all of my client projects and I know exactly where to put things and exactly where to find things.
This is also super helpful if you're working in-house in an agency or a corporation to establish that kind of structure with a team. So everyone is using the exact same structure because we know what it's like when they don't. Essentially, every repetitive task should have a template. Every repeatable process should have a system.
Now, this is the one place where I am gonna mention a couple apps. But this is really more around automation. There are apps like Zapier and Active Pieces, and if this, then that, which is I-F-T-T-T. And these are systems and SaaS products that help. You create automations across different platforms.
across email, across social, it will interconnect aspects of your business and you can create automations around that if you haven't those sorts of applications, Zapier active pieces, if this, and then that. I would suggest that you do because it was one of those things that I didn't really get involved in until a good three or four years into starting my own business.
And AI is making this even easier, than ever, and it's getting easier and easier to create your own agents and AI agents are things that can go out and do stuff for you suffice it to say that essentially the landscape of being able to create repeatable automated processes for your business is rapidly, rapidly expanding and growing. And so if you haven't gotten into starting to do this for your own business, now is the time to do it,
all right, so what systems do is they reduce your having to think, which is what we want them for. It. They reduce having to expend cognitive energy and decision making because decision making also takes cognitive energy. Every time you remove a decision, you free up additional mental energy for more meaningful work
So just to circle back, what we're talking about here is we're talking about productivity being self leadership.
These seven principles, these seven hacks, are not really about time management. When you get down to it, they're really about self-leadership. It's about your ability to direct your attention, to protect your energy, to recognize when you have the most energy and to structure your day around that, how you can focus or recover from distraction to focus on meaningful work. Designing how you are spending your time. Time management's not about squeezing more tasks into the day, it's about making sure that the right work gets your best attention.
It's so, so easy to talk about time management in terms of apps. And apps as I said, don't solve the problem. What really solves the problem is looking at your energy, your focus, eliminating distractions and architecting your day in a really meaningful way, and also trying to become more proactive rather than reactive, to not be a professional responder.
I hope you have really enjoyed how to stop wasting time and seven hacks that can really move the ball forward in terms of changing how productive you can be and how efficient you can be. Because when it comes down to it it's about self-management, self-leadership, and behavior changes.
So with that, until next time, I'll see you later.
