Mark Stedman (0:02)

Just beyond the horizon lurks a faceless terror. It looms, ever patient, ever silent, always watching. For days without number it sleeps, only visible from the corner of your eye, until the day comes and all of a sudden it strikes, coming to a project near you. This is the deadline. Douglas Adams famously said he loved the whooshing sound deadlines made when they went by. If you have to meet any kind of regular publishing schedule, like for example, you have a podcast, you'll know how time can stretch out into infinity until the night before you have to hit publish, when suddenly it feels like you have to cram eight hours of work into 30 minutes. But Benjamin Franklin had a neat little system that helped him keep on top of his commitments. And all it takes is a pen, some paper and a watch. I'm Mark Stedman, and this is Undo. Investigating productivity methods through the ages and the people who discovered them. When you were at school or college, did you ever have an essay that wouldn't be due in for a few weeks? Ah, that first week is bliss. Time seems to stretch out into infinity, and there's just so much fun to be had, so much marrow to be sucked from the world. The second week is similarly sunny, only with just a hint of cloud somewhere off in the horizon. Ah, but that's a problem for next week, you say to yourself. That's months away. And then suddenly that cloud off in the horizon is directly over pissing cold sleet and getting all over your nice shoes. It's the night before the deadline, and time suddenly seems to have compressed. I call this the accordion of time. Copyright trademark tmtm. All rights reserved. It's like a depth perception problem. We only seem to see the deadline when it's right up in our grill. It's a thing in economics too, but there they call it something like dynamic inconsistency. Basically, it boils down to the fact that we're really good chasing short term rewards, but not so good at the long term stuff. That explains why I'm all caught up on severance. But I'm still reading the second Lord of the Rings book and have been for about a decade. So, fine, we're bad at handling deadlines in the distance, or at least some of us are. I mean, probably you if you're listening to this podcast, which you are. So, anyway, let's get to the time machine. Benjamin Franklin was an absolute unit. He's credited with inventing bifocals, swim fins, the catheter, the lightning rod, and even a musical instrument called the harmonica. As in have you seen Gerald? Aye, she's just next door with our moniker. This is what it sounds like. No, it does suck. You're right. But nevertheless, we have a lot to thank Mr. Franklin for. For one thing, without him, there wouldn't be a face on the $100 banknote. Franklin was one of 16 children. His family was so poor that Benjamin was sold to his eldest brother James as an indentured servant, meaning he'd work as a slave until his debt was paid off in 1728. Finally free of his obligations, Franklin followed in his brother's footsteps and moved to Philadelphia to set up his own printing business. He used his business to slander and crush the competition, and as Postmaster General, established his own newspaper monopoly. Yikes. Despite having only a couple of years of basic education, Franklin built up a reputation as a scientist. And many of the inventions he's credited with were actually ideas he nicked from other people. But because no other newspapers could be delivered during his reign as Postmaster General, a lot of this stuff went unchallenged for years. It's worth bringing this up because a lot of what is in his autobiography is likely false or can be taken with a generous pinch of salt. But what we do have from his own pen is his so called daily schedule. Franklin would wake at 5, spend 3 hours getting ready for the day, which meant showering, having breakfast and taking on some personal study. He'd work from 8 until 12, take two hours to have lunch and review his projects, work from 2 till 6, have dinner, chill and tuck himself in around 10. That left seven hours of sleep before the cycle began again. This simple schedule forms the basis of a concept known as timeboxing, which really boils down to figuring out what you want to achieve and putting time on the calendar to achieve it. Now, as we know from Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given for its completion. So timeboxing helps us not only make time for the stuff we need to do, but to stop that stuff spilling over and getting itself all over other stuff. James Martin wrote about this idea in his 1991 book, Rapid Application Development. Since then, it's evolved into a more in depth system which in 2018, Harvard found to be the the most effective method for getting stuff done. So let's go through starts with a brain dump. Julia Cameron calls this your morning pages, and she's quite specific about the number of pages you write and that you do it first thing in the morning. Either way, a brain dump can help you clear out the clutter in your brain and rid yourself of those nagging little thoughts that creep up on you during the night. You then set out the three things you want to accomplish today. These are the three big things you need to get done for you to consider the day of success. Thinking back to our discussion on checklists, this isn't a list of everything it'd be really cool if you could accomplish today. But the three things that mean once done, you can think. Yep, that was a good day's work. Then you set about planning your day. You can do this in pomodoro units if you like. So your work day is cut up into little half hour slices. If you use a digital calendar. This works best if you actually put these blocks in. Not in half hour increments, but on a goal by goal basis. So let's say you have three goals for the day. Write the week's company newsletter, prep for tomorrow's meeting, and book the dog in for her yearly checkup. Writing the newsletter might take you two hours because you've got to gather all the links and resources from various departments, write them up, and present them in some kind of order. Then put the thing up on slack for everyone to ignore except for the funny little hobbit guy who run the Internet, who will inevitably find a semicolon where there should have been a colon. On second thoughts, best make it three hours. You can call the vet while you're at lunch, but you might be on hold for a bit and you've gotta fish out their number and then submit a time off request to the boss. So call it half an hour. Then the rest of the day is blocked out for working on your notes for tomorrow's presentation, putting the slides together, circulating the agenda, and whatever else you'd have to do to do a meeting. Look, I've been a freelancer for ages, so I have absolutely no idea what happens anymore, but you get it. And you can use this trick in your personal life too. I mean, probably best not to use it if you live with another person because they'll just think you're insane. Or maybe do it and don't tell them. Either way, I won't judge. But having predefined time boundaries, even if you're not militant about maintaining them to the second, can help the day feel like it's in hand. Have you ever had the sense of just not being able to leave the house? You know, there's always some tiny little job you have to do before you leave or you've spotted an object out of place and it'll Only take you a few seconds to put it right. Those sorts of things get a lot easier when you've predetermined how your day is going to go. But as with all these systems, they can only help us so far. And then life steps in and gets it all mucky, stupid life. I wish it wouldn't take its boots off before coming in. So after this brief diversion, we'll figure out how well this can stand up to reality. We'll get back to the show in 30 seconds. I just wanted to let you know that Undo plus is now open for business. When you become an Undo plus member, you get access to your own private podcast feed where you can pick my brains, join a Discord community with other listeners, and show your support for the show. Your money goes directly into making the show better. So if you enjoy Undo and you'd like a little bit more of it, you can head to undo FM plus. That's undo FM plus. Oh, bang on. 30 seconds. So timeboxing can help us figure out the shape of our day so we can actually get done the things we say we're going to do. So when should you do this? And should you box that time off too? And if so, how do you timebox timeboxing if you haven't yet started timeboxing? Oh, God, that's giving me a nosebleed. Hang on. So, yes, the night before is the best time to do this. I think. I know that some proponents say you should start with your morning pages, and you can still do that. But setting up the next day, the night before is a great way of putting today to bed. That was a bit confusing. So I'll try it another way. If it's Monday night and you've had the morning mother of all Mondays to deal with, and you know there's a bunch of stuff that needs doing tomorrow that's currently living rent free in your brain. A few minutes just before you clock off for the evening is a great time to write down what you plan to get done the next day and to reserve that time on your calendar. And when I say clock off, I mean that time of day in which you say, that's it. No more obligations for today. I've cooked and cleaned up and everything's ready for tomorrow. So the rest of the evening I'm spending with a glass of wine and the new Mick Heron book or whatever floats your boat. Your last task before cracking the spine of that book should be to block out your next day. Now, as Cal Newport covers in his book Slow Productivity you might not have total control over your calendar, and other people might want to shove a team's call right in the middle of your newsletter time. Or a vital piece of the website might just fall off and you and the hobbit from it will have to gaffer tape it back on. If that's the case, just look at the time that's been hijacked and set aside an equal amount of time the following day to get your work done. If you only schedule yourself a day ahead, bar meetings that have been in the calendar for weeks, you give people enough flexibility to book around you. And if the shit does hit the fan and something needs doing same day, that doesn't mean everything gets thrown out. You just take that block of time that was stolen from you and move it to the next day. But isn't this daily planning just a tad like incredibly rigid and restrictive? Why would you voluntarily strap yourself into a straitjacket every day? Well, firstly, whatever you do in your own time and with your own collection of whips and chains is entirely up to you. There's more of that humour mom from Ohio finds upsetting, but I get the point. It can feel restrictive to have your day so tightly controlled, but the thing is, you are the one in control here. Your schedule is only set for the next day. If a day later you find something doesn't work or it takes longer than you expected or shorter than expected, you can make adjustments. You could add in some buffer time in between blocks so you've still got time to decompress or to let your brain switch gears. Mostly this is about the you from now taking care of the you from tomorrow. But knowing what to do is one thing, doing it is entirely another. A system like this does require a measure of self discipline. If you're someone who finds structure restrictive, then this probably isn't going to work for you. That said, though, you might find the structure oddly freeing because you're not having to think about what to do next. You just follow the plan you made the night before. The human brain only has capacity to make a certain number of decisions. Then it kind of shuts down. If you've ever had an interminable discussion over what takeaway to get or what film to watch on Netflix, you're in a situation where one or more of you is suffering from decision fatigue. This is a real thing, by the way. Barack Obama and Steve Jobs are both said to have worn the same clothes to work each day because it limits the number of decisions they have to make. I mean, not the actual same clothes that would be stinky, but you get the idea. By making a bigger decision about what tomorrow looks like, you'll find yourself having to make fewer tiny decisions throughout the day. Another point worth making is that we're really bad at estimating how long a task will take. In my old marketing jobs, we used to talk about the process for deciding how long a job will take. Double it and add a bit was always the rule, and it holds true now. The nice thing about timeboxing on a daily basis is that it gives you that flexibility. So if something took longer than expected on a Monday, you can make adjustments for Tuesday. And if something took less time than you expected, take the win, my friend. You'll feel happier and healthier if you give yourself a bit of space around the work so you're not completely knackered by the end of the week. If you sense your boss might want to give you some busy work to fill the gaps, find your own. Ideally something that looks visibly productive but doesn't take a lot of energy. Sure, it's performative, but sadly this podcast isn't about changing company culture, so I can't help you there. And on the personal front, don't be too restrictive about the tasks you assign yourself. As author Nir Eyal puts it in his YouTube channel, if getting some exercise is a priority for you, just label that time block with the word exercise. What you choose to do on the day will be up to you. Just don't skip leg day or something. I don't know. Have you ever seen photos of me? I've never not skipped leg day unless it's leg of lamb day. Am I right? Okay, so what do you think? Does this time boxing thing work for you? I'd suggest giving it a trial run for a week to see if it helps you get a better handle on time. It might not revolutionize things for you, but you might just find that a little structure here and there can help stop things from getting off the rails. And the next time you're presented with a looming deadline, cut the thing off at the knees and block it in your calendar. That way it'll have no power over you. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. You'll find links, videos and other timeboxing related gubbins over at Undo fm. And if you want to get Undo in your inbox every Monday, you can sign up at the bottom of the page. Stick around after this next brief missive and I'll tell you all about why I'm getting up at half five in the morning. Otherwise, I know you have a wide range of podcasts, so thank you for making Undo your most recent listening choice. Catch up with you again next Monday. Just before we move on, I got this review for the show recently by Mum from Ohio. It reads, the content can be interesting, but his political comments are distracting and insulting. I am sure he thinks he is witty, but we would all be better off without snide comments on unrelated topics. I am not listening for political hot takes now. I find this really disappointing because it reads much more like a one star review, but she actually gave the podcast two. If you were as bothered by this show as Mum from Ohio, do please leave a one star review. I put up all my favorite reviews on the website, this included, and right now it's looking embarrassingly positive. Anyway, your reviews are always welcome, so thank you and now let's you and I get in the shed. So I'm here in the shed and I said I would talk about why I'm getting up at half five in the morning. I'm doing this for a limited amount of time at the moment. While I sort of spin up a few things, I'm trying to get the whole sort of work situation in order. I've got lots of things that I, I want to achieve in 2025, and I find personally that working early mornings does a lot better for me than working late evenings. I couldn't tell you why, but there's something about once I've cooked a meal and washed up and done all that stuff, I kind of just at the same time want to do nothing but veg out, but also kind of feel guilty about it, like it's wasted time. But I also sort of tell myself that I do want to work on a side project, but also really don't want to. Like, I don't want to get back into the office or back into the studio, my home studio here where I record or you know, or back in the back in the shed if you, if you like. So what, what does one do? And so for me I find that actually getting the side project stuff done early doors works a lot better for me. And so I'm working up a bit of a schedule at the moment and I thought in true, sort of Benjamin Franklin style, I might run you through it and you know, you can see is this insane or is there something here? Not necessarily the, the times themselves, but the idea of saying, well this, this is the shape of my days and these are the things that are allowed to fit into the different boxes. Right. So half I've wake up, sort of give myself about half, half an hour to sort of, you know, let, let the day, let the sunlight filter through. And then from 6 to 8 I'm working on my, my particular little side project at the moment which mostly involves building a website and writing copy. And then from 8 till 8:45ish, I'm getting ready to go out to my act. I go and work. I have a co working space and so that's a sort of 35 to 40 minute walk. So I'm walking there from quarter to eight, quarter to nine till about half nine. Half nine till half five is actually when I'm working and most of the time I carve up my day into Pomodori. So if you caught the Pomodoro episode from a few weeks back, that is 25 minutes of pure unadulterated singular focus on a particular task. 5 minute break and on and on. So you typically do that for a couple of hours, take a longer break and then get back into it, that kind of thing. And so there's a lunch somewhere in the, in the middle there. Usually one one till half one is sort of lunch time. And then half one onwards we're back into Pomodoro time until half five when I'm getting ready to go home and so I'm hopefully I've walked home by about quarter past six. From quarter past six till half seven I'm cooking and eating dinner and sometimes I'll sit and watch a wee bit of telly but then I'll sort of get myself back up again by about half seven. So half seven till half eight is sort of household jobs setting up the next day, maybe having a bit of cat time, that kind of thing. And then half eight till half nine is winding down for bed. So especially that sort of, that Last kind of 45 minutes ish, get myself a bit of TV in and then the idea is ideally I'd like to be kind of in bed by 9ish and then drifting off and, and trying to get as much sort of proper good REM sleep as possible. That is always the, that's always the hope anyway. And so that's, that's kind of the shape that I'm taking the moment for my weekdays and then the weekends. I let them be a lot more fluid because you know I've, I've packed my days really tightly before and I've sort of worked six and a half hour or six and a half day week sometimes and, and it can all get a bit much and sort of, it's very easy to blow a circuit doing that. And I've experienced that before. So, you know, this is, I think, a lot of this stuff, especially if you're going to do something like timeboxing, which does have a degree of rigidity in it, although you can be flexible each day. The idea really is that, yes, your time is actually quite accounted for. And I think too much of that time, if you're not kind of checking in on yourself regularly, can be a little bit tricky. So that's the sort of main thing I kind of want to bring at the end here is I think with a lot of this stuff you've got to keep monitoring yourself. It's, you know, it's like taking medication and seeing what that does to other bits of your, of your body. You know, if I'm taking blood pressure medication, for example, I want to be constantly monitoring my blood pressure just so that I know are things heading in the right direction and that kind of stuff. And so I think whenever you make any kind of change, it's really worth just checking in on yourself every now and again, every few days and just going, are we cool? Are we, are we all right? Are we doing, you know, are we doing okay? Are we feeling a bit burnt out? Are we feeling, you know, is there some kind of change that we want to make? Rather than steamrollering in and saying, no, this is the system, this is what I can, you know, I, I agreed to do this, I've got to commit, like that kind of drill sergeanting is not necessarily going to do yourself very good. So I think having that rigor, having that, that self discipline to begin with, but always checking in on yourself to just make sure, are we good? Is everything okay? Taking your sort of mental blood pressure, if you like, or your actual blood pressure and just making sure that everything's okay. So there you go. If there was a, if there were a takeaway from the shed, that is mine, Listen, we'll chat with you again next week. Other than that, of course. Hellodo fm, if you ever want to have a chat about any of these kinds of things. And I will look forward to doing this all again next Monday. Until then, take very good care of yourself.