The Time-Based Productivity Revolution: Stop Counting Tasks, Start Managing Time

”But the fact remains, with all the changes that have happened in our lifetime—whether we’re “boomers,” “Gen Xers,” “Millennials,” “Gen Zers” or whatever comes next—one thing has never changed nor will it ever change, and that is the amount of time we all have.” 

That’s a quote from Hyrum Smith’s book, The 3 Gaps: Are You Making A Difference

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Script | 375

Hello, and welcome to episode 375 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One thing you may have noticed is that there are many things we have to or want to do, yet there never seems to be enough time to do them.

You are not alone. Everyone feels this either all the time or at least some of the time. The reason is that it’s true. There will always be more to do than time available to do it. 

This means we should approach the problem from a different angle. 

Traditionally, people have spent extra hours trying to catch up. Working late or even working the weekend. Yet, is throwing more time at the issue the best solution? 

I don’t think so. 

We live one life. Our work is just one part of that life. If you work an average forty-hour week, your work only accounts for around 25% of your time.

Yet, for many people, their work causes 80% or more of their stress. 

This week, I want to share some ideas and a paradigm shift in how you think about the tasks you have to do and the time you have available. It’s a simple shift, but one that will reframe your relationship with time and ultimately give you more time for the things you want time for. 

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Marcos. Marcos asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to keep up with all the tasks in my task manager. Most days feel like I am adding more tasks than I complete, and my inbox is now full. Todoist won’t allow me to add any more. How do you cope with an ever-growing list of things to do?

Hi Marcos, thank you for your question. 

There could be a number of reasons for this. One of the most common ones is moving any email you need to respond to into your task manager’s inbox. 

You don’t need to do that. Instead, you can create a folder in your email system and call it “Action This Day”. Then, any email you need to act on—reply, read, forward, etc. You place it there. 

Then, add a recurring task in your task manager that tells you to “clear my Action This Day folder”. 

That will remove many tasks from your task manager. It will also begin the process of changing the way you think about things to do and the time you have available to do them. 

It’s no longer about how many emails you must reply to; it’s about when you will work on your emails. 

Other things that can clog up a task manager are articles and newsletters to read, YouTube videos to watch and books to buy. 

All good stuff, but since so many of these are non-urgent, you would be better putting them in a dedicated note in your notes app. 

That way, when you do have time to read or watch these, you can open up your notes app and choose something. 

I covered this recently in one of my YouTube videos. There is information we like to collect—articles, YouTube videos, etc., often the easiest thing to do is to add this information to your task manager’s inbox. After all, reading or watching them is something to do.

Yet, the worst place to collect these items is your task manager. There’s no urgency to read or watch these. We can do it anytime. Perhaps we’re waiting at the doctor’s office, or, in my case, for my wife somewhere. 

In these situations, I can open my notes app and, depending on my mood, choose between reading or watching something—my notes are always on my phone. 

So, Marcos, one of the first things you can do is to remove all these non-urgent informational items from your task manager and move them to your notes app.

I would add that a great place to read articles is something like Instapaper or Read. Both of these apps are designed to collect newsletters and articles. 

Using tools like these gives you a central place to read your saved articles. It’s like having your personalised curated news feed. 

The only addition is finding a regular time to read what you collect. The problem with keeping these in your task manager is that you’re not reading them. Moving them out of your task manager and into a read-later app is just shuffling things around if you are not committing to a daily reading time. 

When I commuted to work each day, I read these articles on bus and train journeys. This prevented me from getting sucked into the negative news cycle and clickbait headlines. 

My news feed was free of junk and algorithmically generated stuff I was no longer interested in. 

And there is another tip for managing the things we have to do. Having a set time each day for doing the things we want to do. 

The challenge we all face today is that everything is so convenient; we can pretty much do anything at any time. You can set up a bank account, apply for a credit card, and even buy a car online today. 

You don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home. 

In the past, if we wanted to open a bank account or buy a new car, we would have to go to a specific place. Going to these places meant we needed to schedule time to go. 

I remember when I was in car sales and couples would come in either in the evening or at weekends. During the weekday, things were relatively quiet for us. Time spent with a customer would typically be around an hour or two. 

So the customer had to go to a showroom intentionally, talk to a human being and in most cases test drive a car. 

Now, if you can do almost anything at any time from anywhere, the challenge becomes, what do you do now? 

If you are task counting, you’re putting yourself into an impossible situation. The number of tasks you have to do is not within your control. 

You do not have control over what your boss or customers will ask you to do today. You don’t have much control over what your partner or family members may ask you to do. You also don’t know when they will ask you to do something. 

By focusing on what you have to do, you’re setting yourself up for overwhelm. 

Instead, you will find focusing on when you will do something a much more realistic approach. Not only do you put yourself back in control, you will also be working within a realistic system. 

This system is called time-based productivity, and it’s been around for a very long time. 

I’ve tracked it back to 1918 with the Ivy Lee Method. That’s where you wrote down the six things you want to get done the next day, and when the day began, you started with the first item and worked your way down the list until the end of your work day. 

Anything you did not get done would be moved to the list for tomorrow. It’s simple and based on a realistic evaluation of how much you could get done in a day. 

From there, it advanced throughout the century to when we began using things like the Franklin Planner. 

Something went wrong in the early 2000s. Somewhere along the line, we stopped calculating how much time we had available to do things and began focusing on the things themselves. 

Well, that’s an impossible situation. You’ll always have stuff to do. If you focus on all that stuff, you’re going to feel anxiety, stress and overwhelm. 

If you want to stop the struggle Marcos, then returning to a time-based system will do that for you. 

The first step is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. You will have admin and communication tasks—we all do. Then there will be tasks related to your specific work. If you work with clients, then there will be client work to do. If you work in management, there will be management duties you will need to perform. 

Once you know what your categories are, you can then allocate specific time for doing those categories of work. 

Let me give you an example of this with email.

Imagine you get 150 emails a day. Of those, around thirty require you to take action. When you process your email, you move those actionable emails into your action this day folder, and either delete or archive the rest. 

This leaves you with thirty emails that require some action from you. 

If you were to allocate an hour each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you will always have time to respond to your email. Sure, some days you may not be able to clear them all. However, if you consistently spend an hour a day on these, you will never develop a significant backlog. 

Most days you will be ahead; other days you might be slightly behind. But you won’t feel it’s out of control. 

You can also apply this to your admin tasks. Admin tasks have a habit of building up over time because they are generally low in urgency and importance. 

If you were to give yourself thirty minutes or so each day for admin tasks, you would find that no backlog is building up, and you are, for the most part, on top of things. 

You can do the same for your client work. If part of your responsibilities is to send out proposals to customers, then allocating some time each day for doing this means all you need to do is refer to a list of proposals to write, and for that allocated time, you do as many as you can. 

That list may be in a CRM system or a simple note in your notes app. Your calendar will tell you that it’s time to write proposals. You then go to your list of proposals to write, and start. 

This way, you won’t need to use your task manager.

I do this with my coaching clients. Every day, I allocate an hour to writing feedback for each client. The list of feedback to write is in Evernote. Some days, there will be six or seven pieces of feedback to write, and other days, perhaps only two or three. 

I know I can write around three pieces of feedback in an hour. This means if I do this every day, nobody is likely to be waiting more than 48 hours for their feedback. 

I’m not focused on how many pieces of feedback I have to write. All I am focused on is writing the feedback in the hour I have to write it. I will write as many as I can. No pressure. Just begin with the oldest and carry on down the list. 

And that, in a nutshell, is what time-based productivity is all about. It’s not about how much you have to do. It’s about how much time you have available to do the work you have to do. 

If you have enormous backlogs now, you may need to increase the time you allocate to specific work periods for a little while. That actually helps because it means you are learning new habits and processes for getting the work done, which ultimately speeds you up over time. 

So there you go, Marcos. I hope that has helped. Take a look at your task manager. Remove individual emails and stuff to read or watch. 

Then in Todoist, use the labels to categorise your work and use those categories to protect time in your calendar to do the work. 

Be consistent with this and you will soon find that the overwhelm and struggle diminish. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.