114. Working Late AGAIN? 5 Reasons Why You're Still at the Office that Have Nothing to Do With Workload
Episode 114
It's 5 PM, everyone is leaving the office, but you’re staring at your to-do list thinking, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to be here all night.”
When we regularly can’t get our work done within typical office hours, we’re quick to think it’s because we have too much work. And while that might sometimes be the case, usually there’s another reason (or 5) at play.
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I share the top 5 reasons you can never leave the office on time and what to do about it. Believe it or not, none of them have to do with work overload.
What You Learn:
Why staying late usually isn't about workload
The 5 hidden operational mistakes adding hours to your day
How poor task clarification costs you time and sanity
The real reason deep work doesn't happen until 6 PM
How to figure out if you genuinely have too much work
Six strategies to fix your workflow and leave on time
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University: (SchoolHabitsUniversity.com)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (CollegeNoteTakingSystem.com)
⭐Assignment Management Power System (AssignmentManagementSystem.com)
Episode 3 - Admin Block System
Episode 18 - Batching Strategy
Episode 38 - How to Be a Resourceful Person Who Can Figure Things Out
Episode 45 - Are You Doing Too Much?
Never stop learning.
❤️Connect:
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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 choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
Working Late AGAIN? 5 Reasons Why You're Still at the Office that Have Nothing to Do With Workload
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[00:00:00] So it's 5:00 PM and your coworkers are packing up to leave. And as they head out the door, you look at the to-do list in front of you and you think, again, no way, no way I can get outta here on time. And so again, you stay late at the office putting in what seems like way more work than anyone around you, and that is a recipe for resentment.
Am I right? I'll bet to many of you listening that sounds familiar. And you might tell yourself that the reason you're saying work at late is because you have too much to do, too much work. In fact, you have more work than anyone else, and that's not fair. And you know what?
Maybe that is true. Maybe it is, but most of the time. That's not the problem. The too much work piece isn't the problem. The problem is usually something else that happened or didn't happen earlier in the day or earlier in the week, something we didn't even notice. Something that is costing you hours at the end of every [00:01:00] single day.
And not to mention costing you your sanity. Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I am Katie. We are on episode 114, and today we're talking about why you're staying late at work again, and I'm gonna make the case that it's probably not what you think it is. Now, if you are staying late because you genuinely have 40 hours of work to complete and only 20 hours of time to do it, that is one issue.
And we're gonna talk about that. But if you're staying late because your workflow is not exactly flowing, you know what I mean? That's a completely different issue. And that is something that we can address and tweak and improve on. And those are always the things that we wanna put our energy toward, right?
The things that we can control. So here's what we're covering today. I'm gonna walk you through the five common operational reasons that people stay late at work, that have nothing to do with work overload.
And then I'm gonna show you how to do a reality check, or maybe a gut check's a nicer way [00:02:00] to say it, to figure out if it really is too much work, and then what to do about it. And at the end, I'm gonna share some strategies to address each of those five common operational problems. If you know someone who is constantly working late, send them this episode.
You can do that from whatever platform you're listening to or watching just by hitting the universal share button that looks like a little arrow. Remember, links to everything I mentioned today can be found in the show notes at Learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/114. And if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you subscribe to the channel.
Follow me on Instagram at School Habits. All right, that is our housekeeping and let's get into it.
[00:03:00] So, reason number one, why you're staying late could be poor task clarification, so you may or may not know, but I've had a private practice for years. I've been teaching for over 20, but my own private practice for 10 years where I offer private coaching for students and professionals. I think I talk equally about both groups, students and professionals on this show, but this is what I see a lot with professionals that I coach. Okay? They get assigned a task. Their boss says, I don't know. Can you pull together a report on X? Or Can you handle the Y project? Or We need to update the Z process, whatever it is. And they say yes, because, well employment. So they open a document or whatever tool is related to the industry that they're in, and then they start working.
They get to work like a good doobie. And then three hours later, you know, they send it to their boss or the next day, whatever it is, and their boss comes back with like, what is this? Like, this is not what I was looking for. [00:04:00] So then they have to redo the whole thing and or this could happen too. And maybe they get partway through the thing and then they realize that they don't have all the information they need to complete the project.
Or they're not sure if they're supposed to include data from Q3 or Q4, or they don't know if this is supposed to be like a high level project or you know, maybe more micro details. So they basically can't go any further without getting clarifying info from the boss. So they ping their boss, they wait for a response, hours, days pass, they lose their train of thought on the work.
In the meantime, they get lost in their email management, whatever, and by the time they get the answer, they've completely lost momentum. Don't even remember what step they were on, and now they have to spend X amount of time ramping up to get themselves mentally back where they left off, which means they've wasted a lot of time and have to stay late at the office again. Now something very simple could have prevented this situation. And here's what I mean. So your boss says, can you create a [00:05:00] presentation for the team meeting?
Okay. You say, sure, but like, do you even know what that means? Right? Like how many slides? What's the goal? How long should it be? Who's the audience? What level of detail are they looking for? Is this a quick update? Is this some full, you know, strategic overview? And if you don't have the answers to these questions or you don't ask these questions, and you just start making slides, and you're gonna end up in the first scenario we just went through, which is a lot of wasted time.
Now we want to avoid guessing here because guessing and guessing wrong. Takes way longer than clarifying the dang thing upfront. The solution is honestly quite simple, but not all of us do it because sometimes we think like it makes us look like we don't know what we're doing if we ask the boss, but like doing the presentation wrong, is literally evidence that we don't know what we're doing.
Right? So pick your poison. So before starting a task that's new to you, I'm gonna suggest three questions. You need to have [00:06:00] answers to these questions for you to proceed with clarity. Number one, what does success look like for this task? Like what is the goal? Number two, what is the scope of this project?
How detailed should this be? How much time should I be spending on this? And then number three, what format do you want? So what is the final deliverable? Those three questions take, I don't know, 30 seconds, a minute upfront, but they save you hours of redoing the work or maybe sheepishly by yourself, you know, at 7:00 PM trying to figure out what it is that you're supposed to be doing.
And I'm not saying we need to ask our boss to micromanage every single task like nobody wants that. But if something is vague, clarify it before you start. Because spending three hours on the wrong thing is worse than spending 30 seconds asking a question, even if you think it makes you look bad.
Now, reason number two that some of us are spending too long at work, we're managing interruptions wrong. Okay? So let's say that you have clarified your task. [00:07:00] You know what you're doing because you asked those three questions. You sit down to work and then somebody pings you on slack or your phone rings or someone stops by your desk with just a quick question.
Oh my God, this happens to everyone. Like interruptions are just part of work. I get that, and that's partially why I work for myself. He, he, he. But we can't let that interruption completely blow up our systems all day long, because you might be in the middle of something, right? And someone asks you a question and it takes two seconds for you to answer it, and then you come back to your work.
But now just that brief interruption means you have no idea what you were working on and what step you were on. So you either spend five minutes trying to remember the thing, or you just start over from the beginning. All for what? To check your phone or to answer someone's question about when the meeting is when, oh my goodness.
They could have just checked. Their own calendar for the information, but that is neither here nor there. These micro interruptions add up and we don't always notice that they're there or [00:08:00] that they're happening until it's 5:00 PM and our to-do list is still massive, but we still feel like we've been working all day.
The interruption itself might be like two minutes, but by the time it takes to get back into what you were doing, that could be another five or 10 minutes. And then you do that five times a day and we've lost almost an hour just trying to remember what you were working on. So you go home and someone's like, what did you do today?
And you're like, well, I spent most of my day trying to remember what I was working on. Right? Like essentially that's what's happening. And this is something I we see with students too. They are studying, right? And they get a text and they respond to it. But when they come back to their notes or their study session, they're like, wait, hold on.
Like, what was it, what was it even doing? Now the obvious solution is not to never get interrupted because that's not realistic, but you know what we can do? Leave yourself a status note so you can pick back up where you left off without any drama of like, where was I? How do we do this easy? I've talked about status notes a lot on [00:09:00] this show. Before we step away from work, even just for a short meeting, maybe for a phone call, even like for lunch, right, write down where you are and the next step where we should pick back up on not just working on report. That's too vague, like your future self will come back from lunch and look at that note and be like, well, like thanks, like. I don't even what that means. So something like finished intro, need to add data for section two and write conclusion.
I dunno, I'm making this stuff up on the spot, but it takes 10 seconds and it is so worth it. Again, I call these status notes. It's not rocket science or some complicated task management strategy that's only for the geeky pros. This is basic stuff. But most people try to rely on their memories, which does not work because our brains are not great for storing this kind of, I'm gonna use air quotes here when I say useless 'cause like according to our brains and our survival mechanisms, it is useless information.
So our brain isn't good at storing it. That's what external storage is for [00:10:00] in the form of a status note. Alright, so here is another thing. This is number three that might be keeping you lead at work. You're not protecting your deep. Work. Now, let's say that you're spending the entire day in meetings and answering emails and responding to Slack messages and putting out fires and answering questions like, when's the meeting?
When they could have just checked their calendar. It seems like I'm irked by that particular scenario. Perhaps I am. And then finally, when five o'clock rolls around and everyone else is logging off and maybe going home, that's when you can finally sit down to do your actual work. I'm talking about the actual work, like the work that requires deep concentration and focus, the work that moves the needle, and most likely the work that we were supposed to be doing all day long, but you couldn't because you were so busy reacting to all of those other things like meetings and emails and messages and all that noise.
But that can honestly be a reason why you're feeling overworked and staying later at the office. 'cause if we don't block off time [00:11:00] for this deep, cognitively demanding work, and honestly that work, like what that is, looks different for everybody depending on what your industry is.
For me, it's writing and making content, for somebody else, it could be working on a blueprint of a building. If you're a teacher, it could be designing a lesson plan, right? I'm not saying that everybody's deep work is like sitting in a computer and you know, typing things up. So whatever it is for you, you know what your concentrated focus work is, but everybody in every job has some kind of challenging work that requires concentration,
and if we don't dedicate time in our schedules to do this kind of work, then all of the other kinds of things are just gonna creep into our schedule, and we're gonna find that we never have time to do our actual job.
So we have to schedule the good, thick, juicy, sticky work into our calendar. We can't just assume that we're gonna get it done at some point during the day because you know, as well as I do that the day is gonna get away from us. Heck, I can lose myself for like 90 minutes trying to manage email on a Friday, and [00:12:00] then I'm like, oh my gosh, there was this other thing that I should have been working on today, and then I stay late at the office.
And I know that meetings are really hard to work around because if someone higher up calls a meeting like you have to go to the meeting. But then we put those meetings on the calendar and we find the open blocks of time between the meetings and we block off those open chunks of time to work on the good stuff.
And in that time, we are so locked in and focused.
Now, as I said, deep work is that stuff that requires your full attention. It can be writing, analyzing, strategizing, problem solving, creating. It's that work that is like the core of your job. And if you don't get it done, then basically like you're buzzing around that, you know, office in circles.
We can't assume that this deep work can just happen in the margins of our day. The other stuff should happen in the margins of our day. It can only happen when we have uninterrupted time that we are intentional about and that we protect. [00:13:00] Because if we don't do that, then we don't get to this work until everybody around us is gone at the end of the day.
Because if you think about it, like most of the time it's everybody else who's the interruption, right? And people are gone at the end of the day, and that's what results in us feeling like, oh, phew, everybody's gone. It's five o'clock and now I can work. But that's not the goal here. Like I want you to go home.
The goal is to do your job within your job hours and then go home. Am I right? So here's what I'm suggesting. I say schedule the deep work first. So look at your week. Figure out when you have your best focus time and when you actually have those open chunks of time on your calendar. This, um, best optimal focus time, that's a real thing.
Maybe it's in the morning for you, maybe it's afternoons, maybe it's on Tuesdays and Thursdays after lunch when you get, you know, like a jolt of energy from your lunch. Or maybe you're one of those people who feels like sluggish after eating. Okay. You know, just my point is. Work with your natural rhythms and your calendar, [00:14:00] like the intersection there, right?
So you're starting with the concrete blocks of things that are on your calendar. You can't really move like meetings, you can't move those. And then you're working with your natural rhythms and you're saying, okay, this is when I'm gonna do this hard thing.
And you block off that time on the calendar. You treat it like it's a meeting with your most important client and yes, that is you. And then we fit everything else in around that. And honestly, you might think, well I can't do that 'cause like my colleagues might need, nobody cares.
Like, nobody cares that you've chosen to do your focus work from two to four. And if someone's like, Hey, can, can I like, you know, pick your brain for a sec. You know what? Like, catch me at four 30. I'm working on something. They're gonna be like, okay, Charlie, sounds good. And walk away. Like we've, we create this story about, well, I have to be available at all times.
No, we don't. 'cause everybody it like they're doing their own thing too. You know what I mean?
Now this might sound obvious, like you might be hearing this strategy right now and thinking, well, like obviously like I do the most important work [00:15:00] first, but do you really do this? Most people don't. They're scheduling their meetings first and then try and like thinking like, well, when am I gonna do my email?
And when am I gonna make this phone call? And I'm gonna do the paperwork? And then they're trying to squeeze the real work into whatever time is left over, which is honestly like table scraps. And then they're wondering whether working so late. And then, let me make this point too. If you go to your calendar and you do this strategy and you realize that it genuinely is full.
Of meetings like all day long and you don't have time to block off for this kind of deep work, you're gonna have to have a conversation either with yourself or with someone else about what's realistic, because you can't do 40 hours of work and also attend 30 hours of meeting, right? Like there's a 70 hour week like that.
Math doesn't math, something has to give. But you would never arrive at that revelation unless you had a calendar where you made time visible.
And if you don't go listen to episode 76 where I share, I think it's called like 10 [00:16:00] pro calendar moves or something like that. It's basically about a digital calendar, right?
Because managing a digital calendar or a calendar is the core of this strategy, for sure. Okay.
Reason number four, you're staying late at the office again, is that admin tasks are eating up your day. We have to talk about administration work. I talk about this a lot. I'm talking email expense reports, updating spreadsheets, maybe scheduling meetings, responding to people filling in, uh, filing paperwork.
All the little tasks that don't feel like work, but they do eat up massive amounts of time over a day and over a week. And it's normal to tell ourselves that these tasks don't take that long. We're like, oh, it's, it's just a quick email. Like, I can do that in a minute. Or This thing here is just like a five minute project, but before we know it, we've responded to one email, we've updated a single spreadsheet and replied to some Slack messages.
And then we find ourselves, man, I don't know, filling out some expense report and then, oh shoot, I need to schedule that meeting. And then in isolation, none of these things take that [00:17:00] long on their own. And that's why we justify them, right? That's why we justify, oh, I'll just do it now. It's not a big deal.
It's like a five minute thing. And often too, they're scattered throughout our day, so we don't feel the cumulative impact of all those minutes together. So it doesn't even seem like a problem until it is. And then that becomes a problem and it becomes obvious at five o'clock when everyone else is leaving, but you're not.
And I already talked about this, but every single time we pull ourselves away from our deep work to do one of these administration tasks, we're disrupting our flow and we're putting ourselves further back than when we started because of that transition time that it takes to get back into the focus mode.
Right. We call that context switching. I'm actually gonna talk about this, um, a little bit later in the episode. If, if I remember it's important here and the cognitive cost of context switching, which is that switching back and forth between this thing and that thing and this thing. It is huge. So let's say that you're working on a project.
You are in the zone, you're in the flow. You're locked in [00:18:00] as the kids these days say, and then you get an email and you take, I don't know, two minutes to respond, like big deals, two minutes, and then you go back to your project. But in that time you don't realize that it took you about five minutes to get back into that zone that you were in .
So that two minute email reply has actually just cost you seven minutes total. Big deal. Right? But hold up. We're doing that sometimes like we, something like that, like 10 times a day, and that's adding up to over an hour and we don't even notice it because every individual interruption, it feels like small and almost unnoticeable.
And that's why batching admin work is a key strategy here. So instead of doing admin tasks one by one randomly as they pop up, whenever we get a second to do them, I'm suggesting that we batch them together. I have a whole episode about the batching strategy, which is episode 18, and I have a whole episode about creating an admin block that is episode.
Three, that's like an og, but essentially it's when you're setting specific times during the day to cluster these admin tasks together, bang them all out in [00:19:00] one sitting. You know, again, these are the tasks that don't require a lot of concentration, but they still consume our minutes. And when we batch the admin work together, we're doing it all at once.
So we're already in in email mode, right? So knocking out 10 emails back to back, that's gonna take less mental energy and transition time than responding to one email at 10 different times throughout the day. In my coaching session, sometimes adults will push back on this 'cause they think that they need to be responsive all the time.
Like, what if I planned an admin block in the morning and someone emails me late afternoon? Like, don't I have to reply back to them? I'm like, I don't know. Do you like, who said that? Where did you get that memo? And even if you do live in a high urgency job, like most emails can wait an hour or two.
Alright? So maybe you plan a, a larger admin block in the middle of your day to catch you know, all of the things. And if you have a super high urgency job, maybe you plan a small admin block in the morning to catch the stuff that came from overnight, and then [00:20:00] you plan a larger one at the end of the day to take care of those emails that really do need a reply.
But honestly, if something is truly urgent. People will find you. They're gonna call you, they're gonna walk over to your desk, they're gonna hunt you down. They're gonna get what they need from you if they really need it. So my homework to you is to maybe track your admin time for just one day. I'd like to say like, do it for a week.
But if you're like, I won't do that. Okay, one day this might be annoying, but the ROI or the, the data that you get from this, and then what you can do with that data is gonna be essential. So, to track your admin time for one day, you are just writing down. Every time you answer an email, respond to a message, fill out a form, take a call, schedule a meeting.
Print something out, walk to the printer. I want you to keep a tally of these things and I'm willing to bet it is way more time than you think and I am willing to bet that it is chopping up all of your deep work time into these little, tiny, useless fragments that never allow you to get any traction that aren't substantial enough for you to move the [00:21:00] needle on your actual job.
All right. Reason you're spreading way too long at the office. Number five. Is your context switching too much? See, I said I was gonna come back to this one and I remembered. So this one ties into what I just said about admin tasks, and even what I said in an earlier tip when I was talking about the benefit of leaving ourselves a status note, but this one's a little bit bigger than that. So I wanna dive more thoroughly into what I'm talking about. So I already mentioned this, but it's worth repeating.
Context switching is when we bounce back and forth between different types of work without giving ourselves enough time to really settle into any one thing. So we might work on a report. For say 15 minutes and then we have to go to a meeting and then after the meeting we're answering some emails. And then we think like, oh, I'll just work on this other project that I need to make progress on.
'cause many of us have like multiple, you know, irons in the fire and then you quickly check your phone messages and then you go back to that first report. So like, that's a lot of stuff. And other than checking messages and email, like those projects, that's deep work time. That time that you're putting into those projects, that's your actual job.
That requires concentration. [00:22:00] But when we ping pong around like this, we destroy our focus and every single time we switch from one type of work to a different type of work, we do need time to set up and give ourselves the mental context for what it is that we're doing next. We might need even to get literal materials for our next project, we might need to change locations.
That's all the logistical stuff, but also those things need to figuratively happen in our brains too. We can't just flip a switch and instantly be productive because we want to be on some entirely different project. We need some time to remember where we left off last time that we worked on this, and to get ourselves back into the head space and to load all of that context back into basically our, our working memory so we can work with it.
And if we're switching tasks every 15 minutes, then we're essentially spending our entire day just like ramping up for the thing and never working on it or working on it for like this teeny, tiny bit, but never getting into the flow of anything. And as I was saying earlier, that's [00:23:00] why batching works so well.
When we're grouping similar tasks together, we're staying in that same mental mode, that same framework, the same context. We often have all of the materials and resources for that kind of work at our disposal in that moment. So like for example, if you're batching your emails together while you're sitting at your computer, with your email client open and your hands are on the keyboard, there's no contact switching.
Like you're just like booming the inbox doing all the emails and then you get out of the inbox. So my advice is this. If you're working on three different projects this week, don't touch all three of them every single day. Maybe work on project a Monday morning, project B, Tuesday afternoon, maybe project C Wednesday morning.
I dunno, you can shake that around to fit your schedule, but give yourself solid chunks of time to stay in one mode, on one project, in one context, instead of this ping ponging back and forth, which honestly increases anxiety as well. 'cause we're like, wait, I have this thing and I have this thing. And you never feel like you've made any progress because you're only making incremental progress on all of the projects.
That's [00:24:00] like this false idea of multitasking. Just don't do it. Pick one thing and do it for as long as you can before you switch the other thing. Okay? Same thing with different types of work. If you need to do creative work and then analytical work, and then admin work. Don't mix 'em all together in the same hour, and if possible, maybe don't even mix them all together in the same day.
If you can get away with it, it's not always possible. So do creative work in one block, your analytical work in another block, your admin work maybe in another block. And at the very least, if you have to like do multiple things in the same day, maybe.
One is all of your hours before lunch and then lunch is your break. And then the other type of work is what you do from lunch until the end of the day. So there's still a division there and still chunks of time dedicated to each one. And I know this isn't always possible, some days are gonna be bananas and you just have to deal with whatever whack-a-mole nonsense that your job through at you.
And I get that. But on the days where you do have some control over your schedule, try to protect yourself from this context switching that we have [00:25:00] told ourselves isn't a big deal. But it is. It is this mental whiplash basically, and it take, makes everything take so much longer than it needs to, which of course leads you to staying later at the office than you want to again.
Okay, so those were the five most common reasons that you're working too much, that actually have nothing to do with work overload. But before we get into some of the strategies, I do wanna do a quick gut check or a reality check here.
I feel like reality check sounds like condescending, and I don't mean it to be that way. But before we try to optimize our workflows or implement any strategies at all, we have to figure out if the problem is how you're working or if the problem is that we genuinely have too much work to do, because sometimes the issue isn't that you're bad at managing your time.
In fact, I would never say that anybody is bad at managing time, like it's too vague. We say that too much. We tell our kids that too much with, they don't even know what it means. And even if all five of the scenarios that I just walked you through applied to you, that doesn't mean you're bad at managing time.
It just means that you haven't optimized your strategies yet. [00:26:00] Okay? But sometimes the issue is that you're expected to complete 40 hours of work that you have evidence that you did. In, let's say only 20 hours of time to do it because you're spending the rest of the time in meetings or going off site or whatever it may be, and no productivity hack is gonna fix that.
No batching strategy or admin block or status note is even gonna make a dent if that's the issue you're dealing with. So here's what I'm suggesting. I want you to do a time and task inventory for one week. I've talked about this time and task inventory method several times on this show, but essentially I want you to track what you're spending time on, not what you think you're spending time on, but what you're actually truly doing, where you're spending the minutes of your day. You can categorize it. Say something like, okay, I'm spending X amount of minutes on deep work.
I'm spending X amount of time on, you know, this type of work. I'm spending X amount of time in meetings and X amount of time on admin work. And then maybe 90 minutes of your day just disappeared into a black hole And you don't even know where [00:27:00] it went. That happens. But you have to account for that.
Like we don't deny the data. Right. And then we do the math. How many hours of focus work do your current projects require? Let's say that you have three projects that you generally work on at a time and each of them needs 10 hours of deep work this week. Alright, well that's 30 hours right there. But how much deep work time do you have available after you account for meetings and admin work and impromptu stop bys by the chatty coworker?
well, let's say that after all that you only have 20 hours in your day. Well, that math does not work, does it? You can't do 30 hours of work in 20 hours of time. That's just a reality constraint. And when the math doesn't work. It's not about workflow.
It's not about, I just need to get better at strategies. That's actually a capacity and an expectation issue. That's a conversation that you're gonna have to have with the boss, and depending on your relationship with the boss, that conversation could look like, Hey, here's what's on my plate right now.
Remember, you're [00:28:00] bringing them the data. You're not bringing them feelings. You're bringing them data. Here's what's on my plate right now, project A, B, and C. Here's how long each of these things take when I do them with integrity. And here's my available capacity after our team meetings and the admin work that's required for my role.
So what should we deprioritize? Which timelines can we extend? What here can I delegate to someone else? And many people don't have this conversation 'cause they think it makes them look weak or maybe incompetent or like they can't handle their job. But your boss doesn't know how long these things take unless you tell her.
She doesn't know that project A requires 15 hours of focus work, unless you explain that to her. And if you don't explain it, she's just gonna keep piling the work on because like, why the heck not? And you're probably gonna keep staying late at the office trying to do something that's mathematically impossible.
So do the inventory, do the math. And if the math doesn't work, have the conversation. Because if [00:29:00] you really do truly, honestly have too much work to do, tweaking and optimizing your workflow just means that you're gonna, you're gonna burn out like more efficiently. That's not the goal. No. I have an episode on this, it's episode 45 called are you doing too much? And in the episode I walk you through the signs that you are genuinely over committed and exactly what to do about it. I talk about the task and time management inventory, like in more detail there. I'm gonna link that in the show notes. But the main point is this.
Sometimes you need to do less or give less to certain commitments, and sometimes you just need to be ruthless with time management, but you won't know which one applies to you until you do the math and see what's real.
Okay, so let's say that you have done the time and task inventory and the math shakes out. Like you do actually genuinely have time in your day and in your week to complete your work, and you're learning that maybe you're just not using your time well. Here's what we do. Don't worry. You are normal. If it happens, we're all here to learn, right?
Never stop learning. So first things first, clarify things before you [00:30:00] start. Before you start any task, ask yourself those three questions we talked about earlier. What does success look like? What is the scope of this project and what is the deliverable? And if you don't know, ask. I don't want you guessing.
Guessing is always gonna cost you way more in time than asking ever will, and if for some reason you have some kind of mental roadblock against asking, or you're convinced that you just wanna do it yourself, I get that. I have a podcast episode number 38 called How to Be Resourceful Person Who Can Figure Things Out.
That was one of my favorite episodes to record. Go listen to that. In that episode, I give you very practical, concrete strategies to figure things out. When you're less inclined to ask a boss, or maybe when you're in a position where asking wouldn't actually look that good? Alright, second, this is easier said than done as a lot of things are.
I know that, but to try to build interruption recovery into your daily operating system. So what does this look like? Well, before you step away from your work or your project, even just for a short meeting or a [00:31:00] phone call, or to grab lunch, leave yourself a simple status note about where you are and what the next step is.
We have to stop relying on our memory. It just doesn't work. So write it down.
Third, schedule Deep work first, and I already said this, this involves looking at your calendar, blocking off time for your focused work, knowing what your focus work is in the first place.
Like that's probably like ultra step one. And then fitting everything else around it, because if we don't protect our deep work time, it is just not, it's not gonna happen. We're gonna try to do it in the margins. We're gonna try to do it at 6:00 PM finally, when everyone else goes home. But you are cooked.
Fourth, batching your admin work. So doing random admin tasks one by one as they pop up throughout the day is not a good approach, categorically.
the idea is that you're grouping similar tasks together so that you can get through them faster and it won't fragment your deep work time. And then remember too, I have that whole episode on admin work and batching. That's episode 18. That's the, um, batching one in admin work is episode three, linked [00:32:00] below.
And then the fifth strategy. Protect yourself from context switching. So if you're working on three different projects this week, don't touch 'em all every single day.
And if you're giving yourself uninterrupted chunks of time to stay in one mode, in one context, instead of ping ponging back and forth, you can go home at five, right? You can't do this all the time, but on the days where you do have some control over your schedule, make this a priority. And then finally.
Set a hard stop time and work backwards. So if you need to leave at five, or if that's the goal here, that is the goal here, like to leave on time, put that leave time on your calendar, and then use reverse engineering to schedule your day backwards from that time. So what needs to happen before 5:00 PM?
What can wait until tomorrow? What can you delegate? What do you, can you like delete entirely? And if you are planning to shut down by five and you're gonna spend the late afternoon working on some project for X amount of hours, okay, well, reverse engineering tells you what time you need to start that project so that you can work on it for the amount of time
then you said you're gonna work on it. [00:33:00] And not everyone does this. We kind of just work until the thing is done, regardless of the clock. But in reality, the work is never done. Work expands to fill the time available. That's Parkinson's law, that's a thing.
But if you set a hard stop time, we force ourselves to prioritize and to reverse engineer and say no to the things that are gonna steal your focus. And yeah, some days you're still gonna stay late, but that's just life. But that should be the exception and not the rule. Okay. So as we near the end of this episode, I do wanna kind of tie all these things together with this overarching concept or theme that staying late is not a badge of honor.
And honestly, most of the time it's not even because we have too much work to do, it doesn't mean that we're like ultra important. And, and you know, I know sometimes it is true that as I just said, like spent like 10 minutes saying like, sometimes we do have too much work. But usually that's not the case.
Usually it's because of our daily and weekly operations are just a little off. And over time, these non-optimized routines i'm trying to say this like nicely because I [00:34:00] said, I won't tell you you're bad at time management, non-optimized time strategies, whatever, and ways that we approach our day they add up and they kind of just take us out at the knees.
The theme here is that if we fix the stuff on the back end, the front end things are kind of just gonna take care of themselves. Now, if you're a student dealing with these exact same issues around assignments and deadlines, I have a program that can help with that.
It is so simple. You can do it in a weekend and implement it by Monday. It's called the Assignment Management Power System, and it teaches you how to track everything you need to do to clarify your tasks before you start to manage your workloads so that you're not going bananas at the end of every single day, feeling overworked and overwhelmed, and it's literally just $47.
You can find it@assignmentmanagementsystem.com. Also linked below. I'm not gonna lie. It's pretty sweet.
And if you want more help with the strategies that we covered today, I do have episodes that dive deep into some of the topics, the admin block Systems, episode three, how to be a Resourceful Person is 38, the batching strategy that is 18.
[00:35:00] All of the, I feel like there's one that I'm missing, whatever. They're all linked below in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. Keep showing up, keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.
