It’s not by grinding harder.
It’s not by planning more.
It’s not even by creating your very own time management system.
The quickest, simplest, easiest way to get twice the work done in half the time is to stop thinking about your work and start doing the work.
If you think that’s so obvious it’s not even a point worth making, I disagree.
It's like doing the dishes. It might take you a few minutes to wash up after tea. But if you start thinking about those dishes and reminding yourself you need to wash them, telling yourself how boring it'll be, tallying up who washed them last time, weighing up whether to do them now or leave them to soak, mulling over what you'd rather be doing with your life, pondering whether to use a tea towel or an old T-shirt, and
then summoning every last drop of willpower you can find to work yourself up to doing the dishes…
You could spend over an hour “washing the dishes” instead of five minutes!
So do not underestimate how much faster it is to
DO something vs thinking about doing that thing.
It works the same way with your day job.
The more time you spend thinking about whether now's the right moment to start, whether you've got the full picture yet, how a
senior so-and-so might react, if there's a smarter way to frame it, what it signals if you send your work too quickly, whether it's good enough to put your name to or if you should run it past one more person first...
The less time you have to do that work (and it's not even close).
Of course, I'm not suggesting you ditch the thinking that is the work.
But I am saying that ditching your thinking about the work gives you an almost unfair advantage in the office. Especially when all your colleagues are busy holding hour long committee meetings in
their heads while you've already done your task and moved on to the next one.
As it happens, this is exactly the shift I help professionals make inside my 1:1 coaching program Trust Me, I Work Here.
The
program is like taking the handbrake off your car. At first, you might not even realise the handbrake is on. But once the brake comes off, the car moves faster, smoother and far more freely, even though you're still the one doing the driving.
If you like the sound of performing at a higher level without mentally exhausting yourself in the process,
here’s how the program works:
Trust Me, I Work Here
To fulfilment,
Tom