What is your Productivity Grid?
How much more productive can you be in a day?
Is it possible to make more out of your 24-hour day?
Is there some science or art behind constructing your day to be as efficient as possible?
These questions are important as remote work, freelancing and online schooling are becoming more acceptable structures in our daily lives.
Before we dive in, let us consider some concepts.
We’ll all agree that our 24-hour day can be broadly divided into sleep time and wake time right? Okay.
And we can also agree that if you ‘squander’ your waking hours, you might have to pull an all-nighter to compensate. If you do this, it could further affect your waking hours and the vicious cycle continues till your body packs up on you.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But let us break it down a little more
If we break up your waking time further, we’ll see that 2 metrics are necessary for productivity to happen.
- Energy Coefficient(EC)- This is a measure of how alert you are. For this to be high, you are rested, wide-eyed and revving on all your engines. For this to be low, you’ve been active for a while and you now need either food ,rest or both.
2. Focus Coefficient(FC)- This is a measure of how you can concentrate on a specific task without unavoidable distractions or interruptions.
From the grid above it would appear, those metrics are only high during the morning hours . What this could mean is if you have a family and you work a 9 -5 job, then you cannot have time for anything else.
Actually, a very alarming percentage of people have this belief and conduct their daily business resigned to this fate.
But we need to break it down a little further because, in reality our day is made up of a number of time zones. Our productivity in these time zones is a result of the EC & FC mix.
This is what I have termed your Productivity Grid.
The highlighted green zones are areas we can extract more from our 24 hours. It would surely differ from person to person based on age, responsibilities, the city you live in etc. but there are similarities.
It’s clear the grid above that you can gain extra time by structuring your high impact activities around your green zones. We can do a safe estimate by retrieving 2 hours from your early morning green zone, and 1 hour from your night green zone to see how much this amounts to. A quick calculation shows you can save 21 hours per week!
Imagine what you could do with that….
· Finish a book
· Prep for an exam
· Learn a new skill
· Learn a new Language
· Learn an instrument? The possibilities are endless…
And you still have time for Netflix, social media, dates and whatever else creates your butterflies.
So the next action is yours. If you could draw up your own grid, what pockets of your day can you salvage extra time?
