Hacking My Work Day

This morning as I was enjoying my quiet cup of coffee I got to thinking... "there has to to be a way to be productive and enjoy my day more!" (and yes I had the thought with that exclamation point). Perusing my Twitter feed and reading some on LinkedIn when I came across the 'Pomodoro Technique' and did some digging. 

This technique is a "time management method" that breaks down the day into intervals. This seemed interesting... I like intervals in my workouts so why not in my workday?

My work day flounders when I get caught up in something (like e-mail) and then poof - hours of my day are just GONE!  And the worst part is I have so little to show for all that time and in the end I'm more annoyed than anything else. So I was looking for a work-day-hack and this one seemed it could fit the bill. 

So I set out with my to do list and turned it into a schedule of sorts - 25 minute intervals with breaks worked in. The cool part is that I was in control of my to do list rather than the other way around. 

Another thing I had read about in several different articles was e-mail management (you know, don't let it manage you).  Many people claim that you should not start your day by checking your e-mail because then your to do list is created by someone else (outside of your control), and in that spirit I've been waiting until I'm in the office before I look at my work e-mail, that way I get my morning coffee hour to myself and am not sharing it with my job. Since today was a new work-day-hack I thought I might take this one a step farther and not schedule my e-mail time until late morning. 

All that said, today was awesome!  I feel like I got stuff done which is SO not how I typically feel on a Monday afternoon. One observation from today was that I'm more naturally drawn to a 30 minute interval.. But I think I will keep pushing myself towards 25 minutes just because I like the flexibility it creates... plus it's less intimidating when I need to tackle a task I'm not overly interested in. 

I totally want to do this every day this week, and next, and the next!  In reality I want to keep myself honest here and see if I can make this my new working style. That's how much I liked it!  It will be interesting to see how I can work this around my meeting schedules (and maybe in time change my approach to meetings).

#WorkDayHack #TimeManagement #BringingTheAwesome