www.asianefficiency.com: Every Tuesday at 4 PM, I review upcoming tasks. 1.5 hours. If something doesn’t align with my top goals, I eliminate it.
I keep this ritual because low-impact work still costs payroll. My time. My energy. Skip a week of it and it’s easy to spend the rest of the week on work that never should have made the list.
6 comments:
Life as a college student and theater professional can get very hectic very quickly, and optimizing your life, workflow, and workload is incredibly important. The point this article brings up about not optimizing a task until you have done it at least twice is incredibly interesting, and while I had never thought of that before, I can see so much value in it. The first time or two you do a task, you’re still trying to figure it out, and it's important to do the task well, not quickly. There have been so many times when I’ve tried to make a task I’ve only done once quicker, and I almost always end up forgetting something or messing it up in some way. I also really appreciated the point about not being able to do something until you can teach/explain it. Especially with my drafting assignments, I've found that explaining things to my classmates has given me a much deeper understanding of the content we have covered so far in the course. All of that goes to say that I found this article to be a very interesting look at how people actually get things done and how we can get better at organizing our work.
I really like the direction first then speed approach that this article talks about. Not only does it literally come up while calculating the velocity on various problem sets, but the idea that you need to go slowly at the beginning to make sure your doing what you actually mean to be doing is a powerful idea. I feel like the rest of this article seems to focus more on management styles, but as of right now in my life is not a huge concern for me, I’m the one who has to know how to do my homework, I don't find myself communicating my process to others very often, and there are very few things in my life I try to automate because most things are just one offs. However, thinking about how to explain a task to someone else I do think helps in finding the potholes in the plan, it also helps to find redundancies.
I am actually a big fan of this article and what it speaks on. Maxing out your efficiency is a very useful skill especially at Carnegie Mellon University where we all are under extreme pressure and being fast and efficient is everything. The idea of doing something two times then building a system on the third time makes a lot of sense to me and although I do like to jump ahead of step 3 I do see the value of step 1 and step 2. To take the time to process a task and understand the best way to do it I think really helps with generating a schedule and a step to step list on how to do something. I have heard a lot that you can better understand a concept or something by teaching someone else how to do it or explain it to them. Which I think really aligns with the idea of “if you can’t teach it, you don’t know it.”
I found this article very applicable to the work we do at Carnegie Mellon and in the School of Drama. We are constantly working on multiple projects and assignments, and trying to manage them without a plan can feel very overwhelming. This article made me think of the saying "Work smarter, not harder" because hard work can feel like a waste if you are expending energy on the wrong thing. I also like the point that the article made about making sure to document your process. I can't count how many times I've had a good idea and it went to waste because I didn't write it down. Part of being efficient is being able to comprehend and replicate what is working, and to easily determine what is not. By writing your process down, you make it easier to streamline your workflow and make sure you are always working smarter.
I am someone who is always trying to budget and optimize my time. I still have a paper planner because I like the ability to have a concrete written plan for my schoolwork, while my hangouts with friends or other appointments stay separate on my phone’s digital calendar. However, I find myself constantly readjusting what is written in my planner to the point that its pages are covered in white-out and sticky notes to keep up with myself. I really like the idea of having a “backlog” appointment, where I block out a time at the start of each week to clean and update my planner to the best of my ability. If I know I have more time for a certain project but less time on the other, I’ll write down which specific days I plan to work on each project. If I know I have some smaller tasks to do, I will try completing them during this time if possible. If there are certain tasks that are just cluttering my schedule without actually giving me benefit, I will cross them out from my planner or find an alternative solution that can accomplish these tasks.
I like the line “never optimize a task you haven’t done at least twice” because I feel like a lot of people (myself included) feel like we are failing when we do not do something efficiently/effectively the first time. I try to remind myself that when I am doing something for the first time that I might not do it perfectly, in fact it is more likely that I will fail than do it perfectly, but that does not mean that I a) can’t do it or b) am incapable of learning how to do it. When you are doing something for the first time, there is a lot of learning that comes with it and you have to learn to give yourself grace for it because oftentimes others will not. I also liked the author's differentiation between efficiency and effectiveness. We tend to strive for efficiency, but now I will think more about striving for effectiveness.
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