10. February Q&A: Tips for Better Task Management and Focus
Episode 10
It’s time for another Q&A episode here on the Learn and Work Smarter Podcast! In these monthly Q&A episodes, I answer questions submitted by listeners. That’s you!
Don’t forget – you can submit your questions too! There’s a form on the homepage of LearnAndWorkSmarter.com. All submissions are anonymous.
I answer two questions in this month’s Q&A: one from a working professional asking about a task management system, and one from a student struggling with focus.
Even if you’re not the one who submitted these questions, I encourage you to listen to the insights, as sometimes we hear answers to questions we didn’t even know we had.
FREE RESOURCE
→ Free Daily Time Block Planner Template (pdf download): Download Here
OTHER EPISODES MENTIONED
→ Episode 05: Secrets of a Good Task Management System
→ Episode 08: Motivation vs. Discipline: Which One Matters More
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
Tips for Better Task Management and Focus: Listener Questions February Q&A
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[00:00:00] So what do bookkeeping and dancing have in common?
Nothing other than they are the topics of the two questions that I am going to answer today that were submitted by listeners.
Yes, this is my second monthly Q and A where I answer listener questions that were submitted via the form on learnandworksmarter.com.
I had so much fun doing this last month. And there were some questions I didn't get to.
So I'm planning on answering two questions in this episode.
One is submitted by a working professional and the other is submitted by a student.
If you yourself did not submit these questions then I encourage you absolutely to stick around. Because it's often when other people ask questions that we realize those were the questions that we had ourselves, but we just didn't know to ask them.
So who knows, you might get some answers today to questions that you didn't even know you had.
[00:01:00]
The first listener question that I'm going to answer today was submitted by a working professional. I'm going to read the question and provide a little context.
She asks, does this system work if you're a bookkeeper or an accountant with many customers and many tasks per customer? How can it be modified?
Now, this question was submitted pretty shortly after I released the episode about task management systems.
So I'm assuming that she or you, if you're listening to this are referring to the episode about task management systems. So with that context in mind, when you say, does this system work if you're a bookkeeper, I think you're talking about, do the task management system strategies that I explained in episode five, they work for someone who [00:02:00] has many clients or customers as you call them and many tasks that go with each customer?
Yes, absolutely.
Now the key components to a task management system that I explained in episode five, have to do with first and foremost, creating a system that has not a lot of friction to it.
That is easy to add things to and to edit tasks and definitely a system that is not in your head, that is external. It can be analog, it can be digital, right. That absolutely applies to you.
And then also one that has a weekly or a monthly view. Those were some of the criteria that I shared for what makes a good task management system.
Now I would suggest that if you're a working professional and you have many customers and many tasks that go with each customer, that you're also going to want to have a daily section.
So I have a suggestion for you.
And this is just an idea. Okay. But there is a program- [00:03:00] I personally use it. It's called asana A S A N A. There's a free program and there's a paid one. I use the free one and it is absolutely more than sufficient.
And what it is, it's a digital project management tool, which is a more robust way to manage tasks.
Tasks, I view, are the individual things that you need to do for multiple projects.
The reason why I'm suggesting this might be a good system for you is in my mind I'm viewing each customer kind of as a project. It sounds like your customers are sticking around for a while.
But each customer you're working with them throughout the year. I would, I would assume. And so it's not like a project where there is a clear start and a clear end date to it. It's just sort of open until you stop working with that customer. Asana is a project management system where you create projects, and under each project you can assign tasks.
[00:04:00] I view each customer as potentially being a project. So you would create a new project for customer X. And then in that project, you would have all of the tasks that are related to that customer, to that project.
Now what's cool about Assana is that when you create a task, it kind of creates like a, um, a little like a task card, almost like a visual index card on the screen. And you can give the task a name, you can assign it a deadline. You can add details to the task. It can be a simple task, like email so-and-so back. It could be a more complex task that has sub-tasks in it.
That's all addable you can add it inside the card and you can drag the card across the screen in terms of like, um, this is a task to be completed, a task that I'm currently working on and a task that I have completed. You can sort of like move it down the calendar, so to speak.
There are so many YouTube tutorials- that's [00:05:00] how I learned asana. It's a small learning curve. Nothing crazy. But I suggest downloading asana to start and then getting on YouTube and just playing around with it and seeing if that might be something that would work for you.
What's also good about asana is that there is the calendar component because that's another component of a task management system that you're going to need.
I talked about this in episode five with the task management systems, right. That a good task management system has some way for us to track deadlines and due dates.
And of course, with bookkeeping and accounting, either there's, you know, official due dates like taxes and things like that, or due dates that you're assigning to yourself. Cause you know that you promised a customer something would be done by the end of the month.
If the way that I'm describing asana, first of all, I'm not like in asana expert.
So I feel like I'm not even articulating the, um, amazingness of the product. But if the way that I'm describing it, isn't that great, and you've looked at [00:06:00] YouTube and you're like, no, I don't think this is quite for me. And you're really a paper person, then you can absolutely still use paper.
You can use a hybrid system as well.
And I'll explain that in a minute, but if you're a paper person, then I would still separate your tasks by customer.
Think about this. Think about when you were in school, right. You had different classes. History, science, English, whatever. And you had different tasks with your homework that were For each class. In a way that's very similar to you having customers, which is kind of like a class. And then you have your tasks that go with each customer, which is kind of like the homework assignments that your teacher would assign you each day.
I'm assuming, and maybe I'm wrong in assuming this, but I'm assuming that you probably use some kind of paper planner when you were in school.
And if that worked for you, I want you to think back to what you used to keep track of your school assignments. Did you have a paper planner? Did that work? If so, can you create some [00:07:00] system that's reminiscent of that?
If you're like, well, I never really had a planner that worked that well then now, now would be the time to consider creating one in a way that still separates your tasks by customer.
Now one way to do this -if we were to get scrappy- because remember you want to keep the friction as little as possible, so you don't want to have a lot of complexities to your system, you could simply have maybe an eight and a half by 11 planner. I would probably go in the larger size, not the half size.
And you could just start by having one simple page in your planner per customer. And each day as tasks pop up related to this customer, you could add your tasks on that page that says customer X at the top .
And then as your tasks pop up, even if you're not organizing them by deadline, you're just organizing them by, “oh, I got to remember to do this. I gotta remember to do this” -cause you need a place to put these tasks that's not in your, in your mind or you're going to become [00:08:00] so overwhelmed, right, just put them down on the piece of paper as they relate to each customer.
Okay. So "I got to do one this task for Y; I got to do this task for customer X," whatever, put them on their respective, um, lists. And then each day when you go to sit down or maybe each week, if you're doing Sunday planning, look at the tasks that you've assigned yourself for each customer and say, okay, what am I doing today? What am I doing this week?
And then you can tackle those tasks that you're pulling from multiple customers.
Now, this brings me to another point, which is we can't look at task management in isolation. We have to look at it as it relates to time management.
So let's talk about how you're structuring your time. I think that you could probably benefit from something like chunking.
And, and hold on, cause this is related to how you manage your tasks. All right. I don't know how you, you manage your days, but if you're like, okay, I do all customer X activities on Mondays and I do all customer Y activities on Tuesdays and [00:09:00] customer Z activities on Wednesdays.
Right. Okay. So then if that's the way that you operate your days, maybe not like a full day for a customer, but you know what I'm saying? Like take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. Cause I don't understand your exact
business and mode of operation. But if that were the way that you operated, then this sort of paper system that I'm suggesting you try, which is one page of paper per customer, that could work for you, because then you, you know, you peel that piece of paper out of your planner, or you have that, you know, on your desk and you're like, okay, these are all the things that I'm doing today, as they relate to customer x. Alright.
And maybe that takes you half of a Monday and then the second half of the Monday, you're like, okay, now I'm moving on to customer Y and you find a rhythm there. Okay.
Or perhaps, maybe you can chunk -chunk is when you group similar activities together and do them all in one sitting. Chunking could also look like: all right, on Mondays,
I do all, I'm trying to think of like bookkeeper and accountant words. I'm doing all reconciliation on Monday for all of my customers, I'm doing [00:10:00] all emails for all of my customers on Tuesday. I am doing tax-related things for all of my customers on Wednesday. So maybe you're organizing your days by activity, and not by customer.
Okay. There's no right way or wrong way.
Just, I would say think about the way that you've been operating, the way that you structure your time over the week, and then see if you can match a task management system that aligns with the way that you like to do your work.
Now, going back to some sort of hybrid system, let's say you were going to try to use Asana or something like that.
Okay. Then Asana becomes the place where you store every little thing that you have to do as it pertains to the customers. Okay. But your daily planner is where you look at just one day at a time where you're pulling tasks from asana.
And then you can pull those and put them on your daily planner and say, okay. Um, anana's telling me that I've got these five tasks to do today [00:11:00] and maybe life happens and you can't get to all five or maybe you get to seven.
That's cool. But if you like to work from a paper planner, you can pull them from Asana, put them on a sheet of paper in front of you, figure what time in the day, use some time-blocking that you would, you know, work on each of those tasks.
But at the end of the day, I think that honestly, I would organize your tasks by customer.
Whether you make that customer a project in asana and add every task related to that customer or if you're going to use a paper system, have just something really simple to start like one sheet of paper per customer and add your tasks as the tasks occur to you. Even if they occur, like after dinner and you're done with work, you're like, oh, I got to do this for so and so. Oh, go to your planner and add it, go to asana and add it as a task.
And then when you sit down in the morning, look at your tasks and say, okay, Which one of these, um, need to happen now? That's why task management is related to time management.
And then my suggestion is that you try this out.
And give it a few [00:12:00] weeks, right? Anytime we try something new, there's some novelty and some excitement in the beginning of like, I'm going to get this thing totally organized. It's going to be great. And then we realize, oh shoot, there's a learning curve.
And then we get frustrated and then we're like, oh, this whole system doesn't work.
The key to ultimately creating a system that works for you is to try something and commit to it for several weeks. Okay. Get through the learning curve. At least to the point where it's not like a daily struggle to even figure out how to, you know, open up asana.
And then after a few weeks, if something isn't working instead of scrapping the entire system and throwing out the window and starting it from scratch, always just make tweaks.
So it doesn't mean the system's not working. It just means that there needs to be some kind of tweak there. I hope that helps.
All right. So I'm going to move on to question number two, which is from a student. And I really, really like this question.
I mean, I don't like the situation that the student is in, but I do like the question. It's one that I have answered in my Q and A's that I do as part of my online course called SchoolHabits University, which [00:13:00] is opening again in March. This is the second enrollment. I'm so excited about it. So part of that course comes with live group coaching calls.
So they're Q and A's where students can submit questions ahead of time. And I answer them on zoom calls. And it was my absolute favorite part of the course when I launched it back in October and the feedback I got from students was that it was their absolute favorite too. Cause they could submit questions.
To be honest, that is why I've started adding these monthly Q and a episodes to the podcast. Because I really like it. I like getting your questions.
And when my course was over, you have lifetime access to the course, but one of the Q and a section was over I missed having this sort of interaction and these real questions submitted by students. Yes. I work with Professionals and, and students all day long, but there was something that I just missed about this Q and a format.
So that is why I'm doing the Q and a monthly episodes for learn and work smarter.
But anyways, keep your eyes and [00:14:00] ears open for more announcements about SchoolHabits University opening again in March.
But anyways, this question,
it says I am a home schooler and a dancer. I'm at my dance studio for over 25 hours every week. I've always been able to manage my schoolwork, but recently I haven't been able to find motivation to get any schoolwork done. I've been feeling really overwhelmed recently. I know that I have enough time in my schedule, I just can't get myself to do it.
How do I find motivation to put down my phone and start doing school?
So, as I said, just a few minutes ago, I like this question because it's a common question that I answer a lot and I think it needs to be addressed.
But I don't like the fact that the student is in a situation where they're feeling unmotivated and down on themselves and like they should be feeling more motivated.
And so first and foremost, I'm sorry, you're in this situation that stinks. Everything is temporary. Right, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, [00:15:00] everything is temporary. So I am hoping for your sake that this lull, this dip in your motivation passes.
Now, I'm recording this episode before another episode releases. It's all about motivation. So you would not have heard that episode before you submitted this question. So at this point, by the time this episode is out, I do want you to go back and listen to that episode about motivation and discipline.
It doesn't sound like you're necessarily coming from a place of not having discipline here. You were able to be disciplined into your schoolwork. It says I've always been able to manage my schoolwork. So this sounds like a recent thing.
So my first question to you, to you, it says you have enough time in your schedule to get it all is I just want to make, sure, let's just get the basics down. Do you actually really have enough time?
You are at the dance studio for 25 hours a week. That is a part-time job. Plus you're commuting. Plus you have meals, and you have relationships to [00:16:00] maintain and you need to sleep. Okay.
There's a lot of things. 25 hours of dancing is a lot. On top of being a student.
So my suggestion to you is to take a blank weekly calendar. You can go online and find a blank weekly calendar, or make one on piece of paper where you're just like, Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
And I want you to block block out on that calendar exactly what you are doing each day and how much time you're spent doing it.
You don't have to get super micro, but like I am at dance from one to six or one to seven every day and then, okay. It takes you 20 minutes to get home from the studio and then you shower and then you eat.
I want you to add in all those things so that you can see how much time you really do or don't have. You might be right. And you might have enough time to do your schoolwork, but I want you to make time visible first, so you can see how much time you have in your day.
Because if the story you're telling [00:17:00] yourself is I have a ton of time, I should be getting all this stuff done. What if. What, if you don't have that much time, it just feels that you do. And so you're shaming yourself into thinking I have all this time when reality mathematically, you don't. And then that's good information, right?
We don't want to run away from that feedback that would give you the information to say, okay, well maybe, um, I need to cut back on this thing. I mean, maybe need to cut back on that thing. Okay, let's start by making time visible.
Now let's talk about motivation for a second. Motivation is tricky. I do talk about this and that motivation episode, but it's something that I believe we overly rely on.
It's my view that, you know, excluding any sort of depression and anxiety and outside factors that might be going on. I'm not a doctor. So if you feel that any of those factors are relevant to you, then please consult a physician.
Okay. But motivation we often rely [00:18:00] on it when we shouldn't. We often expect motivation to show up. And that's our cue that, oh, I'm feeling motivated. It's time to do the thing. When in reality, if we do the thing, then the motivation might show up as we're doing it. It doesn't always right.
Motivations kind of a luxury. I explained in the other episode that I view it as kind of like a, um, a sunny day, a sunny day is awesome. It makes everything better. But we don't not do things when it's a rainy day. Right. We still get up. We go to work, we go to school, we do the things. And if the sun comes out, we're like, oh, that's cool.
That's awesome. That just makes me feel better about what I'm doing. But it's not required for what you're doing.
So I think if we depended less on motivation, and just saw it for like this neat sort of emotional type thing that sometimes it's there. And sometimes isn't then we would have less feelings about, you know, wanting to do the thing or not wanting to do the thing. We'd be able to do the thing while still not wanting to.
But with that said, there are [00:19:00] two primary ingredients to motivation that we can kind of like play with a little bit and that's novelty and that's urgency. So novelty is the sense of newness. So anytime you can add an element of newness, anything that's different to what you're doing that can increase motivation at least temporarily.
So here's an idea and I don't know your exact situation, but you know, you're going to a dance studio.
Okay. So. Is there a location that's near your dance studio? That you can maybe two or three times a week go to before or after your dance.
Is there a cafe, a coffee shop, a library, that's near your dance studio. So we're not adding in a lot of commute time, but it's just something different, right? So instead of doing your homeschooling at home and then going to dance or going to dance and then doing your homeschooling at home, because you know, you can do it on your own time.
Can you go to someplace near your dance studio, do your [00:20:00] homeschooling work and then go to dance or flip it around. If, if that fits your schedule better.
Now that might add just enough, um, newness or novelty to inject you with a little boost of motivation where you're like, oh, it's Tuesday. I get to go to the coffee shop today before dance. Oh, it's Wednesday.
I get to go to the public library, where I've reserved this little study room. Because it's Wednesday. And that's what I do on Wednesday. Now that might buy you a couple of weeks, a couple months of motivation because you know, everything gets old after a while. And then maybe after six to eight weeks, you, you mix it up and you change locations.
But I want you to think about the the power of our environment to impact our emotions. And adding novelty in your environment can have an amazing impact.
Now urgency. That's the other factor for motivation. Urgency has to do with, okay. This needs to get done now.
That's why so many times, if something's due in a week, we don't touch it until like the night before. Cause like, [00:21:00] oh my God, it's due now. Well, think about that. That's because that urgency there's like a fire under our butt. Right?
Now with homeschooling, a lot of those deadlines are sort of self-imposed yes. You have to get through a certain amount of curriculum by a certain amount of time, but it's, it's different than if you were part of like a public school system.
So, what are you doing to add deadlines and urgency on yourself?
Sounds like you're already busy, so I don't want to like add things to your schedule. But sometimes when we book an appointment or a phone call with a friend or something that involves being accountable to somebody else, if we schedule that for a certain time, Like let's say one o'clock you've told your friend that you're going to call your friend at one o'clock right. Then you wake up and you're going to start your schoolwork at 10. You're like, oh my gosh, between 10 11, 12, 1. I gotta get my stuff done by one, because I told my friend I would call them at one.
Or you deliberately book a dentist appointment or some [00:22:00] place to be, that's kind of an inconvenient time where it gives you the short amount of time
like in the morning sometimes like, oh, I got to be someplace at 1230, so I need to get my stuff done before then. When we have this wide open, expansive time
it's really hard to sit ourselves down and work because this little voice in the back of our mind is like, oh, you have time when reality, like you got, you have time now, but that's gonna disappear before you know, it.
Okay. Another strategy that I might suggest is to create a routine for yourself. This is kind of related to the strategy of like, can you change up your environment? But if you create a routine for yourself where you're like, okay, Every Monday, I'm going to the library. Every Tuesday, I'm working from home every Wednesday
I'm going to this coffee shop. Okay. And I want you to map it out on a piece of paper.
I want you to make yourself a visual schedule that you hold your self accountable to, but I want your schedule to excite you a little bit.[00:23:00]
A routine where like every Tuesday I'm doing this every Wednesday, I'm doing this and stick to that for a couple of weeks. But make it visible.
If you make it on paper, put it up on your wall. If you make it digital, well, print it out and put it up on your wall. Make multiple copies, carry it with you in your planner. Um, have one in your car. Make it something that you do. Define yourself as a person who does this thing, who follows this routine.
And if it's not working for you after a couple of weeks, you can make an adjustment.
Now I can't wrap up this answer without addressing the real question you had at the end of your question.
Which was, how do I find the motivation to put my phone down and start doing school?
That's a tough one. Um, because phones are incredibly addictive. Technology is changing faster than we can chemically and biologically and anatomically evolve. Our phones provide so much stimulation and [00:24:00] so much input that our little cave people brains were not designed to handle.
Um, maybe one day they will, but like evolution and, and, and changing and brain adaptations don't happen at the same pace that technological inventions happen. So I think, and, and I don't mean to ruffle any feathers here, maybe I will, but like, I'm doing it unapologetically.
I think we're in a crisis with these phones.
I have a 12-and-a-half-year-old daughter who just got her first phone. According to her, she was the last person in her entire school to get her phone. You know what she probably was. But like, I didn't care.
That argument meant nothing to me. And I'm already seeing, like she doesn't have social media or anything, but I'm already seeing that, you know, in her little moments of where she would used to just sit there and be like, Hey mommy, whatever. And like, bring something up or like go over and play with the cat or something.
She's reaching for her phone. And I'm [00:25:00] already regretting the decision to give her a phone I needed to for safety, for after-school things and stuff. But I already see how it's changing her default behavior.
Phones are addictive. Period. They become our default. We reach for them. We reach for them. When in another life, we would have looked up and talk to the person next to us.
We would have, um, thought we would've been okay with having, you know, a few seconds of boredom because boredom doesn't kill us. Right. It's it's actually just an opportunity to think.
All right, so now I'll get off my soap box, but here we go.
I would put your phone in another room. Not turning it on silent, not turning it upside down, not putting it on, you know, the table behind you. Put it in an absolutely different room out of sight, out of mind.
It's not fair to you to expect yourself to be stronger than the [00:26:00] primal urge to reach for your phone because the phone has become the thing that we connect with survival.
It's not. But our brain thinks it is because all of the information from our universe. Uh, right now, it comes from our phones. Right. Yes. If we suddenly had a fire alarm, we'd be like, oh my gosh, there's a fire. That's coming from something other than our phone. But mostly like we live in a pleasant little world where things are generally fine.
And the stimulus that we get comes from our phone. Not from the lion roaring from the cave, not from, you know, Lightning about to strike us cause we don't have shelter. Okay. But it's coming from our phones. It's, it's not really stimulation that's related to our survival, but again, our little prehistoric brains don't know that. It's nearly impossible for us to ignore cues from our environment that our brains believe are central to [00:27:00] our survival. Okay. So it's not fair to you if you have your phone in front of you. It's not fair to you. to just try to resist it. It's too powerful.
The phones are stronger than willpower. What you do have control over is before you sit down to do your work to literally put your phone in another room, and remove the source of the simulation.
Now in the beginning, when you sit down to do your work you might get the urge to just reach for your phone and you realize it's not there. That might happen to you, I don't know, like, you know, 20 times in a five-minute span, I don't know how accustomed you, are to just grabbing your phone. And that's okay.
Right. That's okay. Be gentle with yourself as you get into the strategy of like, Not having your phone with you. You go to reach for it and you realize, oh, it's not there. Okay. I'll get back to work. Then two minutes later, you go to reach here. Nope. It's not there. You're going to tap your phone to see if you have notifications. And it's not there. Okay.
That's okay. Pretty soon. You'll train yourself into like, okay. Well, in the back of my mind, I know my phone's not [00:28:00] there. I'm not even going to reach over to tap on it.
That doesn't happen overnight. That happens over weeks. Right change doesn't happen overnight, especially when we're talking about like primal instincts.
So put your phone in another room. So there is no temptation.
And to anyone listening to this podcast who has the same experience where they're like my phone, like, I know I'm on it all the time, but I just can't stop being on it. You can, if you remove it from your space. If it is in your space, correct, you will be unable to resist the phone. You've got to get it out of your vision.
Okay. Another strategy you could try. I don't know how practical this is with homeschooling. But could you try body doubling? Do you have a friend a peer, a neighbor? Someone in a homeschooling group that you belong to, who you could body double with. Maybe even just once a week, not every day now body doubling is this idea [00:29:00] of you're doing work with somebody else.
Well, next to somebody else, but they're doing their own work. You're doing your own work but you're doing it next to each other.
So you're both assuming the position of a student. You're both, exuding the body language of work and focus and productivity, but they're working on their thing. You're working on your thing.
But any time that you get this temptation to just be like, oh, maybe. maybe. I'll stop. Maybe I'll get a snack. Maybe you look over and the other person is head down, focused, doing their thing. And that encourages you to just be like, oh, okay. I guess I'll do it too. Subconsciously we mirror those who are around us. And that's why body doubling can be really effective. It's a wonderful strategy for people who have ADHD. But more and more I'm recommending it for people who don't even have ADHD, who would just benefit from having a boost of motivation by like absorbing the physical cues from somebody around us. Okay.
I hope that's helpful. Don't forget guys: you can submit your own questions at [00:30:00] learnandworksmarter.com. I love these questions. If I didn't get to your question today, I'm sorry, this episode's already going really long. I knew it only get to two, but don't worry. They're in my queue for future episodes.
Absolutely. And don't forget. Never stop learning.
