For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.
~ Benjamin Franklin 📚
If you've never given much thought to organising your workspace, your calendar and Slack may look like this...
https://indify.co/widgets/live/gallery/sOqnkpD94egSBkYKP17W
Doing more meaningful, sustainable work starts with optimising how you organise yourself, so you can deliver this work on a daily basis without overworking. Here are some best practices collected from Jurors across the team that we found helpful in de-cluttering your digital space and getting more done with less effort:
- Make more use of your
time:
- Reduce
distraction from notifications:
- Prioritize your
workload:
🕑 Managing your time
-
Default collaboration to asynchronous-first. Reduce the amount of meetings you organize or are part of. Ask yourself, "can I just record this in Loom and share via Slack?".
- ✅ Use our flowchart to decide whether a meeting should be held. If not, challenge the meeting organizer to make it async. More on 🎯 How to do meaningful meetings.
- ✅ Block calendar time for recording all the looms / updates you want to do in a week.
- ✅ Set the default duration for new meetings to 15min and enable speedy meetings in your calendar settings to cut them by 5/10min each time.
-
Aim for min. 60% uninterrupted deep work. It takes a person ca. 1h to tune into a focused work mode so if your meetings are spread all over the week, it makes it hard for you to find time for focused work. Think of your (half-)days in terms of "focus time" vs all else.
- ✅ Cluster your meetings together as much as possible (e.g. Wed afternoons and Fridays) and reserve blocks in your calendar e.g. the day before to prep for them all.
- ✅ For the remaining time, fill your calendar with larger blocks that aren’t meetings but rather solo work, e.g. coding, cold outreach, candidate sourcing, blog writing etc. Make them minimum 2h for 1 thing only.
- ✅ Make a colour-coding system to get an overview of how much time you spend on what during the week. Meetings will still creep up on you so hygiene is important: your aim is min. 60% focus time. Make a recurring monthly “calendar clean-up” where you go through new stuff and slash/sort it.
🧨 Managing interruptions
-
Reduce notifications you receive. Nothing is worse than being in focus mode and being pulled away from it with a single Slack message or email.
- ✅ Consider removing all work-related (or all) notifications from your phone. No WhatsApp, no Telegram, no Slack, no email. Your screen should almost never light up on its own.
- ✅ Set hours of paused notifications. Nothing should get through to you outside your hours (if it's an emergency, they can call you – you can add your phone number to Slack).
- ✅ Always pause notifications you’re in deep work mode. You can integrate Slack with Google Calendar to automate this. Another option is to set your status to Deep Work mode so people know not to disturb you.
- ✅ Radical idea: Permanently pause all Slack notifications. It depends on how often you have to put out fires; chances are that people will get through to you (e.g. calling you). You can also communicate this to your team and other stakeholders so they’re aware.
-
Reduce notifications you send. The advent of Slack has created an environment where the default way of communicating is unstructured – a quick Slack message can help to solve small problems quickly but it's also disruptive.
- ✅ Before sending a message, ask yourself: "Is this urgent?" If not, it might be better to save it for your next regularly scheduled meeting with this person.
- ✅ Before sending a message, ask yourself: "Is it worth interrupting?" Check their calendar and Slack status to see whether they're in the middle of something or in deep work mode.
- ✅ Before sending a message, ask yourself: "Do I really need them?" We tend to write messages for problems we can answer on our own with a bit of resourcefulness. Make sure this is something that you can solve without pulling them in (#TrustAndDeliver).
🎯 Managing your workload