CHART OF THE DAY: How we spend our time

Today's Chart of the Day comes from our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics from their recent American Time Use Survey, which collects information about the activities people do during the day and how much time they spend doing them.

So what do most of us (employed people ages 25 - 54 who have kids under 18 at home) do all day, or at least all 'work' day? Here is the chart and some FREE comments (lamentations) from me after the data:

A few things stand out really quickly from this data of the average 24-hour work day:

1. While the average person sleeps just a shade under 8 hours a day, I don't know anyone that is likely to report that much sleep. It seems like most folks I know are maybe getting 6.5 or 7 hours a night. So the 7.7 seems really high, what do you think?

2. The single largest slice of the average day, unsurprisingly, is work (and related activities including commuting from/to work), with 8.7 hours per day spent. That kind of seems in line to me although I bet if you ask around your circle of friends and colleagues most people will say they work more than that. I kind of think there could be some fudging in both the survey numbers and what folks talk about privately as well. We like to think we work more than we do, but come on, are you really grinding away 10 or 12 hours a day like you would like (certain) people to believe?

3. The most interesting thing about the chart, and for many of us, also the most interesting thing about how we spend our time, is what we say we are doing when we are not at work or asleep. Taking out the 'responsible' stuff from the chart (taking care of others, household activities), and that still leaves something like 5 - 6 hours a day (remember, these are working days), of more or less 'free' time. No one I know will admit that they feel like they have that much free or leisure time each day. 

I don't have any really prescient or even pithy conclusions to draw from this data except for just thinking about (and similar to what I blogged about earlier in the week), how I am spending my time and whether or not I am getting closer to the various goals I have.

What do you think? How does your day stack up against this data?

Have a great day.

The best productivity app...

...is not some new system or process or technology or yet the umpteenth re-imagining of the 'To-do list' - ('This time it is better! We have gamified, mobile-enabled, and socially powered the 'To-do' beyond a simple list and into a cloud-based 'List-as-a-service' platform!)

I think the best hack or approach to understanding why you are not getting enough (or anything) done (this can be at work, with personal stuff like fitness, or even hobbies), is to first understand just how you are spending your time and attention in the first place. And more importantly, whether that 'thing' you are doing RIGHT NOW is getting you closer to your goals for the day/week/lifetime or farther away.

So despite all of the more sophisticated ways to try and monitor and track productivity, like apps that can sit in your browser and monitor which sites you visit and how long you spend on them and for keeping track of offline activities you can keep some kind of activity log or journal (Note: you will give up on this in about 2.3 days), and finally for fitness/exercise there are a slew of apps and gadgets that can help you keep track of the time spent exercising, we still (most of us anyway), hit the end of the day/week/month not having made enough progress on the really important items we need to get accomplished.

We have the ability to monitor/track/analyze everything, yet we still feel like we are coming up short. And that is kind of a crap feeling at the end of the day or week or year. (Admittedly, I started thinking about this when I saw the date today was December 1, and time is growing really short to get completed some '2014' goals I had).

So let's circle back to the title of this post, 'The best productivity app'. I imagine it will get at least a few clicks from people that see that headline and think 'Yes, I need that! What is the name of that App?'

The terrible news is that I have no idea what the best productivity App might be, there is an entire cottage industry of productivity 'experts' to offer their thoughts on that question. Google them, I guess.

But since I baited and switched you with that title, I will offer my take on what the best Productivity app would do.

It will have one input box that asks you 'What is the most important thing you need to get done?' 

It will also have a checkbox indicator type setting, (minutes, hours, days, etc.), where you would set up periodic 'push' notifications that will ask you the following question:

Is what you are doing RIGHT NOW getting you closer to completing XYZ, (the 'important thing' you need to get done), and you would close the notification by saying 'Yes' or 'No'.

And that is it. That is the entire app.

No integration with Evernote or Slack or Trello.

No fancy dashboards or social sharing capability.

No API so you can share the data from the 'Stop doing stupid things' app, (that may or may not be the name, but it doesn't matter), with your favorite fitness watch.

And you would not be able to shut off the notifications (short of deleting the app), until you mark that 'Important thing' done, (and you could set up a new one from there).

Maybe there is an App out there already that does this, but failing that, anyone (me too), can set it up pretty easily with recurring calendar events/notifications. The technology doesn't really matter. What matters is the question and the answer.

Is what you are doing RIGHT NOW getting you closer to completing XYZ, (the 'important thing' you need to get done?)

Have a great week!

On Nobel Prizes and Email Responsiveness

I have a 'hate-hate' relationship with email.

No matter how much time I try to spend on email the 'task' is never completed, there is always another message that needs a response, (or the person who sent the message at least thinks it needs a response), and most responses just spawn even more messages, the digital version of the old myth of the Hydra, when cutting off one of the monster's many heads simply resulted in two more appearing in its place.

Plus, I am bad at email. Bad in the sense that I actively try and manage the time I spend reading/sending emails so that I don't reach the end of the day with nothing really to show for it, except an endless, meandering trail of email threads. If sending/responding to email is all you do in a day, then you can never be really happy I don't think - you can never complete anything. Which is the reason, even when I am really, really busy, that I try to blog every weekday. No matter how insipid, irrelevant, and lacking in insight any given post might be, it is always done. And there is some satisfaction in that.

Also, if you are someone reading this post that has been (persistently) trying to get my attention via email lately, you probably are nodding with understanding and also probably cursing me out under your breath. I will get back to you, I promise. I mean it. Really.

It is from this place, that this piece caught my attention the other day. Titled, Richard Feynman Didn't Win a Nobel by Responding Promptly to E-mails, it shares some insight into how a great and successful scientist manages to stay productive and focused. One way, certainly, was by not getting bogged down or distracted by non-essential tasks, (like 90% of emails). Feynman also says 'No' a lot - basically to any request for his time and attention that takes away from his main goals - doing great science.

From the piece:

Feynman got away with this behavior because in research-oriented academia there’s a clear metric for judging merit: important publications. Feynman had a Nobel, so he didn’t have to be accessible.

There’s a lot that’s scary about having success and failure in your professional life reduce down to a small number of unambiguous metrics (this is something that academics share, improbably enough, with professional athletes).

But as Feynman’s example reminds us, there’s also something freeing about the clarity. If your professional value was objectively measured and clear, then you could more confidently sidestep actives that actively degrade your ability to do what you do well (think: constant connectivity, endless meetings, Power Point decks).

That is a really interesting take, I think. Tying most jobs and workplaces inability to measure success unambiguously and objectively with the perceived need to spend time on those activities that 'degrade your ability to do what you do well.'

You spend countless hours doing email and sitting in status meetings because that seems to be what you should be doing, but I bet that often it is because no one knows what it is you really should be doing.

So the lesson from Feynman? Figure out what you do really well, and then focus on that as exclusively as you can. If you get good enough at it, and it is valuable enough to the organization, then you get to decide what other nonsense you can ignore.

Until then, better get back to your email. Me too.

Ask this question first

Winding down to the end of a long, and extremely snowy week here (Thanks Vulcan!), with a quick shot and sort of a companion to the first post of the week, 'The trouble with deadlines.'

In the 'Deadlines' post, I submitted that when attempting to negotiate the completion of some task, the key information wasn't (just) how long the given task would take to complete, but rather how motivated your co-worker, colleague, supplier - whichever was about even starting, much less completing said task.

So today I'm giving you the opposite side of the equation - most of us, no matter what kind of role we are in, are facing a barrage of 'asks'.

Can you do this?

Would you review this?

I emailed you last week about this, have not heard back, so I am passive-aggressively forwarding the same email I already sent so you can see how serious I am in my desire to get an answer.

What's the status of that?

Did you speak to Molly about that?

And on and on.

Once your job starts to get a little complex, requires just a touch of individual judgment or discretion in not just how but in what order you attack the large list of 'asks' that keep coming, it can get really, really tough for some people, (Note: I am sometimes one of these people), to make those very critical to your success decisions about prioritizing and time management.

So while it is so easy (and sometimes compelling) to turn towards the endless 'To-do list' each day, I think it makes more sense, or at least helps to offer some clarity and context, to ask yourself this one question each day, (or at least at the beginning of each week), before you take on anything, apply any 'productivity' system, or otherwise start the process of meeting other people's demands.

Here's the question:

What is the most important way to spend my time and effort?

Asking this question, and taking just a half-step back from the 'list', where you'd be asking yourself a question like 'What task should I attack first?' is a way to remind yourself just what is it you are meant to be doing, what overarching goals are you working towards, and how your active decisions about time and task management will or will not contribute to those goals.

And if a big part of what you are working towards are personal goals, then re-setting with that one question will naturally or at least usually force a re-alignment of the To-do list away from prioritizing the tasks that are mostly about other people's goals and guide you to keep your eye (and time and energy), on the things that matter to what you are trying to get done.

I am not saying that you or me or anyone else should not be a team player, far from it, working on the team and contributing in a team setting might be extremely important to you and thus the 'asks' that come from this team context should fit the model of focusing your time in the most important manner.

But it is also really easy to have these kinds 'Other people's most important things' asks to show up in your Inbox masquerading as 'Team' asks.

And I think it is important to recognize that, and understand what the difference means to you, your career, and your success, and your happiness.

Have a great weekend!

Making the most of the time you have

This is probably an 'Off-topic' kind of post except for that it falls squarely into the category of 'Things that are interesting to me' and therefore at least in the broad definition for this blog is actually 'On-topic.'

Check out the Tikker - a watch that not only tells you the time, but tells you the time you have left.

And the folks at Tikker mean that quite literally, the watch displays, based on information you provide on your current age, habits, BMI, etc., how much time in years, months, days you have left to live.

Why would anyone want to glance down at your wrist in hopes of determining (variously) if and by how much you are going to be late for work, how much longer this interminable opera/play/ballet your significant other dragged you to is likely to drone on, or to make the mental calculations that start with 'If I go to bed now, then I will still have 5.5 hours of sleep before the big meeting tomorrow, that should be enough', and instead be reminded that you only have precisely 41 years, 8 months, 12 days and some hours left upright?

Well according to the folks behind the Tikker project, the stark display and countdown of your time left will make you appreciate that time more, help you to make better decisions about how you use that limited and diminishing time, and even make you happier. 

From the Tikker project's Kickstarter page:

As a group we first started working on the idea of Tikker 2 years ago (although we have dwelled on the concepts of time and happiness for well over 10), and we've come a long way since those first development meetings. What started as an idea slowly took form in sketches, models and concept prototypes. It wasn't long until the project took on a rather morbid name – Tikker has come to be called "the death watch" by the people in and around the development group. But despite it's nick name we really doesn't see it as one.

"Forget all about "smart watches" that will keep you connected to your work email 24/7. How about a watch that is designed to actually make you happier, and help you get a better life? A happiness watch. That's what Tikker is designed to do."

It is an interesting concept for sure, that being forced to contemplate more directly the limited time you have left would lead you to be more thoughtful and even could change at least some of your decisions about how you use parts of that time.

Would it make you 'happier', to see every day the countdown clock winding down, winding down?

Hard to say. 

But it is pretty likely that just about all of us spent potentially large parts of this time we have doing things we really would prefer to not be doing. Of course many of these are from necessity - we have to work, sometimes at jobs we don't enjoy to provide for ourselves and our families, we have to rake the leaves, have to take the odd colonoscopy and so on.

However, it's also likely that we spend a fair chunk of our time on silly things that we choose to do, and rationalize this by convincing ourselves that we have to do to them, and don't really have a choice. Which is also silly, because of course we do.

Anyway, I found the Tikker kind of interesting. I am not sure I would want to wear one though. I am not totally convinced it would make me happier.

But then again maybe it would lead to some better decisions. 

And I just spent 31 minutes I will never get back writing this post.