Bulletproof Busyness — New Year’s Resolutions, part 1 of 2
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It’s almost the new year… finally! Like many of you, I can’t wait for a fresh start in 2021. I usually start the year feeling hopeful and setting a few New Year’s Resolutions. As the year goes on, I see great progress on some resolutions and limited progress on others.
I’m not alone. According to Inc., only 8% of people achieve the resolutions that they set. When I reflected on why a type-A person like me was only driving mixed results, I found two root causes. First, I recognized a pattern where things get busy. The resolution feels less important and falls to the wayside. Second, many of the resolutions are set as empty promises without an action plan.
To address these root causes, I will be transforming my New Year’s Resolutions into a two-part ritual this year, which I’ll cover in this post and the next post. This post will focus on how you can create more time in your day to bulletproof yourself against times when things get busy, so that you don’t have to sacrifice your resolution. (If you’re thinking this sounds similar to my post last week about becoming indistractable, it is definitely related!) The next post will focus on how you can set better resolutions that lead to action.
Let’s get started on the 3 steps to create more time in your day and bulletproof yourself against busyness.
1. Understand how you’re currently spending your time
I kicked off the process by doing a time audit. For a few days, I kept track of everything that I was doing. You can track your time for a week or two if your schedule tends to be spiky and you want your sample to be more representative.
Tracking was a lot of work, but enlightening. I looked for patterns in the log and honed in whenever I saw busyness, which Dictionary.com defines as “lively but meaningless activity.” I boiled down my busyness to five repetitive actions and am calling those my time sucks.
2. Think critically about your time sucks
My top time sucks:
- Re-reading the same emails
- Re-drafting the same emails
- Writing stories
- Posting about stories
- Wormholing on the internet
Once I identified my time sucks, then I asked myself about each one:
How can I make this repetitive action more efficient?
In some cases, there were changes to be made and in others, I made a conscious decision not to make changes. I’ll detail the thought process of each one in step 3 so you have plenty of concrete examples to inspire you.
3. Automate or delegate what you can
I analyzed each time suck and decided whether I wanted to continue to spend time on it, or if it required behavior change, automation, or delegation. The last step is to take the actions necessary to execute on those plans.
Re-reading the same emails
I often re-read the same email in my inbox several times. Here’s how it goes:
- I get a notification that I have an unread message, so I check my inbox as soon as possible.
- Maybe there’s an email I want to reply to, but it’s too long to type out on my phone and I’d rather do it when I’m back on my computer at home, so I leave it in the inbox but forget about it.
- Later, I see that my inbox is growing so I re-read all the emails again. When I read all the emails together, I have to make a lot of small decisions on what to do with each one. That’s a lot of cognitive load for one moment so I end up taking action on some of them but leaving others there.
- And on and on… An email could be read four or five times in my inbox or even stay there indefinitely, which adds up to a huge waste of time.
Because I’ve laid out each step in my user journey, I can see that there are multiple ways to solve this problem. The cycle triggers because I get a notification that I have an unread message. I can make a few easy changes that will reduce the volume of email that I get, so I am triggered less. I unsubscribed from marketing emails and set filters for unimportant emails.
But to truly break this cycle, I have to reprogram my habits to take action on an email the first time I read it, rather than leaving it in the inbox to do later. I have to consciously ignore the unread email counter going up and do email at a scheduled time when I have the capacity to take action on them the first time that I read them. This behavior change will be harder to make stick, but I’ll try.
Re-drafting the same emails
I get a lot of emails that require essentially the same response from me — for example, finding a time to meet. Each time, I spend five minutes typing out a three sentence response that ends up being pretty similar to every other message about setting up meeting times. Even worse, my perfectionist instinct kicks in and I re-read the email several times before sending it to make sure it’s perfect.
I can easily shave off a few minutes by creating email templates. Whenever I write a reply that I anticipate will be useful again in the future, I can copy it and save it as a canned response to use as a starting point for a future email. Next time, all I have to do is customize it with any specific info or times.
Writing stories
I’m not a seasoned writer, so I can’t crank out stories at the speed of a pro. I experimented with using Fiverr to shortcut some of the research and pre-writing, but I didn’t find the deliverable to be very valuable. It could be that I didn’t connect with the right freelancer, but ultimately, I realized that penning my thoughts is high value work that I don’t want to outsource. To me, writing isn’t a busy work activity that I should eliminate or minimize.
Instead, I challenge myself to write more efficiently. Like my emails, I tend to re-read a lot while I drafting stories, whereas many writers swear by getting all your thoughts out first and editing later. I have to coach myself to separate the drafting and editing process, and not to over-edit when it doesn’t matter.
Posting about stories
Writing takes time. Posting does too, because of the overhead of logging into each platform and copying, pasting, and tweaking content to fit the platform.
To increase my efficiency, I’m experimenting with Woop, a social scheduler, which lets me draft a bunch of posts at once and schedule them to automatically post later. This allows me to better batch my work so I don’t waste time context switching between platforms and to be more strategic in planning out when posts are published rather than defaulting to when I have time.
Wormholing on the internet
During COVID, I’ve developed an addiction to mindlessly looking at my phone. If only scrolling through social media was a workout, I’d be in amazing shape! There’s a daily circuit — from Instagram to Feedly to Twitter to CNN to TMZ, and sometimes some TikTok or Pinterest thrown in the mix. It’s a good escape from reality, but I never feel fulfilled, even after spending hours on the circuit. At the same time, I realized that without a daily commute, I was doing a lot less reading. I can more productively use my time by timeboxing the mindless Internet surfing and replacing the time saved with reading an actual book.
The key for me to read books is availability. If I always have a good book in queue, then I will choose to read it. I alternate between mystery/thrillers and non-fiction — I just finished Catherine Steadman’s “Something in the Water” and am in the middle of reading Ben Horowitz’s “The Hard Thing about Hard Things.”
In this post, we covered the first part of setting your New Year’s Resolutions. I identified five of my biggest time sucks, analyzed how to make each more efficient, but chose not to make changes in all of them. It’s perfectly fine to make a conscious decision to spend time on something that is high value or brings you joy.
Also I chose to focus on my digital activities here, but you could choose to widen the aperture and do this process with anything in your life. For example, I spend a decent amount of time cooking everyday and could think about how to do it differently to be more efficient.
By working through this process, you can find ways to reclaim your time — even if it’s just 15 minutes a day — and then apply those 15 minutes towards achieving your resolutions, which we’ll talk about in my next post. Bulletproofing busyness allows you to work on your goals without adding more to your day and increases your chances of successfully achieving your New Year’s Resolutions in 2021!
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