Do you ever feel like having to schedule a quick call for tomorrow is a huge effort?
You know that it’s just a quick call but you have to find time in the calendar, remember to actually make the call, and now it’s just one more thing on tomorrow’s massive to-do list.
The strange thing is, picking up the phone and making the call really isn`t that difficult. REMEMBERING to make the call and REMEMBERING everything that you need to say and how you want to say it are the hard parts.
Momentum as productivity can be a strange thing to wrap your head around. For a long time, productivity, to me, was powering through tasks as quickly as possible. It was a bit like jumping in a bulldozer, heading straight for the nearest bit of ground, then getting distracted and moving to something I saw in my peripheral vision. Sure, I moved around a lot and I felt like I was always rushing to the next task, but I definitely wasn`t taking the optimal approach to work.
What I’ve started to discover is the power of keeping momentum. If I’m finishing a meeting and there is a quick action to follow-up with, I try to do it right there and then, while the action is still fresh in my mind. The bonus: the context of the action is fresh in my mind, too. If I’m on a phone call and the next action is to call somebody else, I try to make the call immediately after or, if it makes sense, I`ll start a three-way discussion with a conference call. This saves me SO much time in a day, a week, a month.
Imagine this: your expense receipts have been piling up and you know you’re way overdue in claiming them. You log in to the expense claim tool and find it takes you a second to orientate yourself – it’s been a month since you last logged in. The first few expenses are a bit of a hassle, you try to find the right categories for each expense and upload a receipt. Then things start to speed up. You get in to a rhythm. You know where all the common categories are and start building up muscle memory. You get a system going for scanning receipts. Your momentum is much faster than when you first started.
Now imagine if you just did three expenses at a time. You’re effectively operating at your slowest speed for the whole task because you’re not building momentum. By batching common tasks you give yourself a chance to build momentum and reduce the total amount of time that you spend on that task.
Batching tasks is easy to implement and can save you a lot of time. Have a think about things you do every week or month that can be batched together. Have a think about how you can re-arrange tasks to keep building momentum and get more done, with less effort.
Happy Productivity!