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Four com­po­nents of a good structure

Emil con­tact­ed me and asked me to share how to nav­i­gate a day when things don’t go as planned until you can close your com­put­er for the day.

As I see it, you (and I) need four com­po­nents in our struc­tured work­ing method on an abstract and over­ar­ch­ing level:

1. A place or tool where you keep track of every­thing you need to do (the few­er places, the bet­ter); for exam­ple, a to-do list and your calendar
2. A max­i­mum inter­val for how often you check if there’s some­thing new in the chan­nels of infor­ma­tion you use, mean­ing an idea of how long it’s accept­able for you to wait between each check-in
3. A clear cri­te­ri­on for why a task is impor­tant, mean­ing what makes one task more impor­tant than another
4. A rhythm for when you take breaks, how long they are, and how you take them

Keep track of every­thing, easily

Your plan for the day is expressed in your to-do list (or rather, the tasks from the list that you intend to do today, regard­less of time) and in your cal­en­dar (where you have sched­uled time-depen­dent tasks — meet­ings, for exam­ple. A meet­ing is a task that has the char­ac­ter­is­tic of being done with oth­ers at the same time. From this task, new to-do tasks may arise (just like with any task). Unless you do them imme­di­ate­ly, you need to add them to your to-do list eas­i­ly and efficiently.

You start work­ing on your plan.

Some­thing new happens!

When some­thing unex­pect­ed comes up in your email or chat, or when a col­league phys­i­cal­ly stops by, on the phone, or in any oth­er chan­nel, you’ll find your­self in one of two every­day pri­or­i­ti­za­tion sit­u­a­tions. You’ll be faced with the ques­tion: should you fin­ish what you were doing or drop it and do this new thing that came up instead?

Pri­or­i­tize correctly

Because, of course, you want to do what’s right in every moment — the right task to spend time on. What deter­mines your pri­or­i­ti­za­tion is the com­bi­na­tion of how impor­tant and urgent a task is. What you want to achieve is what decides what’s impor­tant. Often, you have con­crete goals that you want to achieve. In that case, it’s your respon­si­bil­i­ty to pri­or­i­tize based on those goals, and con­se­quent­ly, the tasks that con­tribute to get­ting you clos­er to those goals are important.

As long as you choose the most impor­tant task (and often the most urgent one) in every pri­or­i­ti­za­tion sit­u­a­tion, you’ll make the most of your day and your resources — even if you don’t fol­low your orig­i­nal plan.

Inter­rup­tions at the right frequency

To eas­i­ly do the right thing, you want to be inter­rupt­ed infre­quent­ly enough that you have time to com­plete many tasks but also fre­quent­ly enough to be alert­ed to any high­er-pri­or­i­ty tasks that may have arisen. You want to have as few inter­rup­tions as pos­si­ble but also be inter­rupt­ed by things that can draw your atten­tion to some­thing of high­er pri­or­i­ty that you may not have seen (because it did­n’t exist) when you chose to start the task you were work­ing on. You active­ly look for what’s new and has come up as often as need­ed to achieve your goals with the least effort possible.

When some­thing is completed

When you fin­ish a task, you are faced with the next com­mon pri­or­i­ti­za­tion sit­u­a­tion: choos­ing the next task to work on. The ques­tion then becomes: What is the right thing to do next out of every­thing I am keep­ing track of that I haven’t done yet?

The cal­en­dar shows you when to start a spe­cif­ic task (often a meet­ing) because the time has come.

Tak­ing a break from work

You take breaks fre­quent­ly through­out the day so that you have the ener­gy to com­plete the workday.

This is how it goes dur­ing the day

In my opin­ion, the basic work­flow looks like this:

1. You work on a task
2. You see that some­thing new has come in that requires you to do something
3. You choose between con­tin­u­ing with the task at hand or switch­ing to the new­ly arrived task
4. You make your deci­sion based on your cri­te­ria for what deter­mines a task’s importance
5. When you fin­ish a task, you choose the right next task to work on
6. When it’s time for some­thing in your cal­en­dar, you drop what you’re doing and do what’s sched­uled in the cal­en­dar — for exam­ple, hav­ing a meet­ing with someone
7. Occa­sion­al­ly, you take a full break and then con­tin­ue working

Round and round

As you can see, there are plen­ty of details to struc­ture in this — the details that all of my struc­ture tips and lec­tures are about, prac­ti­cal­ly speaking.

Do this

1. Check with your­self that you have orga­nized the four com­po­nents I men­tioned ear­li­er to suit you and your work.
2. If some­thing needs to be fine-tuned, do it imme­di­ate­ly or add it to your to-do list.
3. If you haven’t already, decide how long it’s okay to wait before check­ing for any­thing new in each infor­ma­tion chan­nel you use.
4. If you don’t already do it, be sure to choose tasks based on the cri­te­ria you have set for what is impor­tant instead of what feels best, seems most urgent, is nagged about the most, is the most fun, you feel the most guilty about, etc.
5. If you, like me, eas­i­ly for­get to take breaks, decide on an inter­val to try for the remain­der of this week. Set alarms on your phone to remind you when it’s time to take a break.

Less affect­ed by the unexpected

Because if you work sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, you won’t be as affect­ed when your plan does­n’t hold up. You can’t pre­dict every­thing that hap­pens in your plan, but at any giv­en moment, you choose to do what is the prop­er task accord­ing to your cri­te­ria. Togeth­er, the day’s com­plet­ed tasks result from a series of cor­rect deci­sions. If you ask me, you can’t ask for more from your­self oth­er than to fine-tune your work process so that the unex­pect­ed events are as few as possible.

How do you do it?

Do you have a dif­fer­ent abstract image of your struc­tured work process? Show it to me or tell me! I would be hap­py to hear your thoughts.

(Look­ing for more tips on how to man­age a busy day? Check out my post on how to pri­or­i­tize what sim­ply ​“must” be done!)