One Week of An Experiment in Making Time, and Moving Big Rocks Before Sunrise

Published on Tuesday 13th of June, 2006

Well, one week has passed since beginning the Experiment in Making Time. I've learnt a few lessons and this week I will be tweaking a few things to try and squeeze more (effective) time.

Recap

Last week I decided to do two things:

1. Optimize my sleep
2. Change the way I communicate with co-workers and friends to try and gain more time to focus on the work at hand that I face every day.

Things worked out fairly well for the second point, however the first part is going to take a little work.

Sleep

Optimizing one's sleep can be a difficult task to do; it takes time to implement, just like other habits and skills, but when things go wrong, you get tired and cranky.

Fortunately I didn't have any trouble with crankiness nor did I lose much sleep. What I did find, however, was that I didn't know enough about how to properly hack my sleep. So as a result, I will have a post later this week on the topic after having done some research.

I can say one thing: Getting up at 5am is a brilliant way to start the day (disclaimer: I'm a morning person, and don't mind getting up early). That extra window of 1-2 hours over a "normal" wake up time is pure gravy and when used properly a secret weapon when it comes to getting things done.

Move big rocks before sunrise

Note: This part of the article refers to the term big rocks as introduced by Stephen Covey. Read about it here.

This won't come as any surprise to early risers: the time between 5am and 7am or even 8am is a great window to move big rocks. For example:

1. Wake up, grab food and a coffee.
2. Spark up the computer, throw back chow and water.
3. Sit down, and work through 2-3 "Big Rocks" that you planned out from the night before.

I have most of these bigger tasks printed out on a piece of paper that I prepare during the previous day. These are the tasks that I have to get done during the day, and there is nothing like crossing off 2-3 of these tasks before I crack open my e-mail at 7 or 8 in the morning.

That is an important part of the trick, where constraining communication and resisting the urge to check my e-mail right away has opened up big gaps of time for me, first thing in the day.

This is all possible because I work from home, but certainly there must be a way to fit this into a more conventional working setup. In any case, there is something very satisfying about having some bigger tasks knocked off before the morning workout.

This is exactly the type of habit that will be useful for training for Ironman distance events when a family is around. Discipline is key here; get up early, get to work and don't get distracted.

Communication

This is where huge time gains were made. Chatrooms were closed and only used when needed, and Basecamp, where I manage all of my projects and client communications, was only dealt with on regularly scheduled intervals (sometimes it was a big rock).

As a result, communication became a task during my day, something dealt with in a block of time, sort of like eating lunch, rather than a pesky person tapping me on the shoulder every so often.

This turned out to be a good example of using constraints to increase productivity.

Tags: constraints, life-hacks, making-time, napping, personal-development, productivity, sleep

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