Roles: Mindful and frictionless productivity
There is a fundamental basis to my understanding of personal productivity: Roles. All of us have a healthy degree of multiple personalities in our work and personal life. Let’s face it: The “you” who is hugging a loved one, and the person who you become during the Monday morning company meeting are two very different people. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s something to be mindful of. Why? Because either role likely requires different resources from you, too. I need much more social energy in company meetings than I do playing games with friends. And I need more creative juices to write engaging e-mails or one-pagers than I do for adding numbers to spreadsheets. And if you didn’t already know: What drains people faster than the big button on a toilet cistern is not (necessarily) the amount of time they work on something, but how often they switch between tasks – and I would add: Roles! Switching from filling out spreadsheets, to a meeting, to making strategic decisions within half an hour will drain you more than 2 hours of only chill writing, numbers-juggling, or brainstorming. That’s why being mindful of my roles is so crucial to my mental sanity. It allows me to look at my tasks, and bunch them together into bundles of role-based themes: “This morning I will turn off notifications and hide in my spreadsheets, so I can save my social energy for the afternoon when I have my meetings (maybe I also use a scheduling tool and let people only book meetings with me at certain times in a day), and tomorrow I will sit together with my favorite colleague so they can help me with all the strategic decisions I need to make in one swoop.”Minimal friction! And then there is one more beautiful side effect of being mindful of my roles: I am significantly more mindful of where most of my time goes, if I thrive in these roles, and if that aligns with my larger professional trajectory. If I spend 70% of my time juggling budgets, but I am more interested in becoming a good business developer, maybe there is a need for change. So not only do I get more done by reducing friction between tasks, I also continuously improve my personal mission and quality of life by strengthening the roles that fit me. Here’s how I found out my roles: – Method A (for immediate insight): Make a task dump. Write down all the tasks you think you will have to do in the next two weeks. Then, go through the list and mark every task with the role (e.g. “Administrator”, “Business Developer”, “Meeting facilitator”, “Bookkeeper”,…) this corresponds with. Finally, go through the task list one more time and try and estimate how much time each task could take. Reflect on your findings: Does one role eat up most of your time right now? Will this change throughout the year? Which tasks do you dread the most? Does it correlate with a certain role? – Method B (for immediate time management improvements): Get a time tracking app (I have used Blinkist in the past). Now start tracking what you do throughout the day. Every time you switch activities (you answer emails, then get up to make lunch for example), end the previous timer and start a new one. Label them with the activities. Over time you will notice that you actually have to answer emails or cook food on a recurring basis, so you can give these types of activities just the label “Business developer” or “Cook”. After a week or two, your categories of what you are doing will have formed. And so will your awareness of where your time is going. Very likely, you will also already have become more efficient in your time management, just because you engage in tasks more mindfully already.