It’s happening again. Monday morning has arrived too quickly, and you’re already feeling behind. You have two meetings before noon, three client deliverables due by the end of the day and a lunch scheduled with a colleague. Your phone voicemail light is blinking, and as you nervously check your email inbox, you see 53 new messages have arrived since you logged off last night. Help! Is there any viable solution to what feels like an ongoing time crunch in the workplace?
Laura Vanderkam thinks there is. Vanderkam — who is author of several books on productivity and time management, including “I Know How She Does It,” “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast” and “168 Hours” — has written extensively on the concept that while we generally think about time in terms of what we can accomplish in 24 hours, we actually have 168 hours in an entire week. When you consider time more broadly like this, it puts less pressure on what you can (or can’t) complete in any single day. As Vanderkam writes in her blog: “If we re-examine our weekly allotment of 168 hours, we’ll find that, with a little reorganization and prioritizing, we can dedicate more time to the things we want to do without having to make sacrifices.”
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U.S. News recently reached out to Vanderkam to ask her if this way of looking at time might be adapted to cover a 40-hour workweek. In other words, can people at work learn to shift their attention to having 40 hours of their standard workweek to complete projects, instead of focusing only on the eight hours they have in a given workday? The answer, according to Vanderkam, is a resounding yes: “Looking at the week as a whole as opposed to any given day is smart, because usually the unit of time that we do work with is the week, and so every day is not going to look the same,” she says. “Often, even our relatively urgent to-dos don’t have to happen today, and if we plan them out over the week, they will get done.”
This means if you’re feeling too pressed for time on a Monday, perhaps there is a different way to think about and manage the time that’s available to you Monday through Friday. Sound too good to be true? It’s all about shifting your perspective. Here are four strategies that Vanderkam recommends to stretch how you view the time you have at work into a weekly sense of expansiveness, rather than succumb to a daily feeling of pressure:
Think through your weeks before you are in them. Being proactive can help you tackle your top priorities while saving bandwidth for those inevitable things that arise unexpectedly. Using Vanderkam’s approach of conceptualizing your hours in weekly increments rather than daily ones, she suggests using Friday afternoons to plan out the entire upcoming workweek.
“Most of us are not exactly killing it on Friday afternoon in terms of productivity, so it’s going to be lost time unless you consciously use it for something else,” she explains. “The good thing about using that time for planning the next week is you don’t have to actually do a project, you’re just planning what future work you should do. Often people find that easier to think about.” What’s more, by mapping out your biggest goals for the week ahead rather than starting each day putting out fires, you’ll have a more productive and enjoyable work experience.
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Front-load your most important projects. As you’re doing your Friday afternoon planning session, how do you know where to slot in your priority projects? Vanderkam strongly recommends front-loading your most important tasks to ensure they get done. “If you’re putting off your important stuff until the end of the week, there’s a good chance it will get bumped when something comes up,” she says. “So as much as possible, tackle your most important professional priorities on Monday morning, because that is a time when the emergencies have yet to start.”
Vanderkam adds that when you’ve knocked out your week’s top priority by 10:30 Monday morning, that sense of progress is often enough to inspire you to do even more than you’d planned. “You already feel like life is good when you’re so productive early on,” she says. “Then the rest of the week can happen as it happens.”
Avoid reactivity with a longer-term view. Remember the stressed out feeling of the overscheduled day described at the start of this article? When you fail to plan for an intense work schedule, it can cause frustration about how you’ll ever dig out of the hole. To avoid this anxiety, Vanderkam suggests shifting your mindset and behavior to favor a long-range perspective, rather than getting sucked into moment-to-moment urgency. “You are not going to complete everything you have to do in one day, but why would you?” asks Vanderkam. “You’re going to show up at work again the next day and probably the day after that as well. So just because something didn’t happen today doesn’t mean it will never get done.”
She adds that the further down the road you can look to see what’s coming up, the more you can start breaking bigger jobs down into actionable steps. For example, figure out the first three things you can do this week for a project that’s due next month to avoid ending up scrambling at the 11th hour. “The more that you do this, the calmer your schedule becomes, as everything finds a space on your calendar in advance instead of just dealing with what is immediately in front of you,” explains Vanderkam.
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Recognize crunch times aren’t forever. The concept of 168 hours can be expanded to think about longer periods of time as well, such as quarters or years. “If you have busy times and not busy times, life isn’t lived in only a day and it’s not lived in only a week either,” says Vanderkam. As an example, she notes that if you’re an accountant, life is not going to look the same in March before taxes are due as it will in July after all of that work is cleared off of your plate. “It would be silly for an accountant to say, ‘I need to have perfect balance in March’ because that’s just not the way life works in that industry,” she says.
With that in mind, Vanderkam recommends recognizing that crunch periods generally come and go — so you can take some steps to protect your sanity until they pass. “If you’re putting in longer hours during a stretch of time, think about how to ensure that whatever it is that makes life feel sustainable still happens,” she says. “It could be sleeping seven hours a night or getting a little bit of exercise every day. Afterward, you can catch up on all that stuff you didn’t do during those few crazy months.”
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You Have More Time Than You Think at Work originally appeared on usnews.com
