Defragment your day

Life seem random? Endless barrage of emails, phone calls, meetings breaking up your day and eating away at your billable hours? Recently we’ve come up with a way to deal with these insurgencies on your time and how to get your day back.

Everyday we are bombarded with a ton of information. It is nonstop, up-to-the-minute, and just about everything is classified an emergency. You need to organize your time into segments that increase the productivity of every activity. Group your billable hours, communications, meetings, and personal time into separate segments. By doing this, it will allow you to completely focus on each activity. Everything else can only be dealt with during its specific segment.

The diagram contains illustrated segments of time.

Administrative or Meetings
Work or Billable Hours
Communication
Personal Time

The example on the left displays an average workday for us before optimization. A meeting or phone call in the morning, billable hours mixed with emails, lunch, another meeting, some more billable hours, etc. Emails were distracting us from completing our projects and even worse, they were keeping us from making money. To combat this, we instituted a new way of segmenting our day.

For the first part of every day we put in 3 straight billable hours based on requests we previously received. These requests might have come in just hours or even weeks before, it really doesn’t matter. However, not a single request from today will be fulfilled during this initial period.

Now, get some food. Don’t worry about today yet; just have a nice happy lunch.

We’ve provided a 1 hour, email-only segment. Read all of your new messages and respond to each one meaningfully. Deliver any files or completed to-do lists to your customers.

The rest of the day is for administration, estimates, invoices, internal projects, personal stuff, phone calls or meetings. If you need to have a meeting or phone call, it can only be scheduled between 2pm and 6pm every day. People often have a number of miscellaneous items they need to take care of during working hours. This could range from paying a parking ticket to depositing a check. These things are also handled during the 2pm-6pm segment.

That’s it. Go home at 6pm. Don’t check your email. Don’t work. Hang out with your family, watch TV, eat, shop, whatever. This is your personal time. Spend it wisely.

At 10PM everyone logs back on and puts in another 2.5-3.0 consecutive billable hours. This period has zero distractions and people tend to be ultra-creative at night. This period is optional, but if you want to stay on top of the game, we recommend the evening period.

At the end of the final segment, check your email to make sure you have an idea of how tomorrow night will work and prioritize for your next morning session.

We’ve found that this process not only helps to increase our day-to-day productivity, but also our revenue generated per period. If you deviate from time to time it is okay, just try to get back on the plan. It isn’t always easy to stick to the regimen, but if you do you’ll make more money, complete your projects, and be less distracted by all of the things that can and will happen.

This work is licensed through Creative Commons.

Posted on Mar 19, 2009 by Kevin Milden

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