Sure, a request from a coworker may take you around 30 minutes to complete, but when will you have that dedicated half hour to devote to the request? The best way to give an honest estimate of how long a task will take is by seeing when you can realistically fit it in to your schedule. However, to be able to check your calendar and task list, you…well…must have an updated task list and a calendar.
Easier said than done, but nothing is more essential to your productivity. So, the coworker comes up to you with a request for a minute task. You open your calendar and your task list I really like Outlook Tasks because it can show them both in the same screen , and say….
This does not have to involve a stopwatch or a scientific research study. For two to three weeks, track the requests you receive and how long it took you to complete them. This can be done in a spreadsheet or paper notebook. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Know your numbers. If you are plagued by interruptions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to track your turnaround times, you need to attend my free webinar: The Anatomy of an Interruption…and how to resume work when they happen.
At the end of the self-paced webinar, you can receive some free templates to help track your interruptions and reduce the time suck they often cause.
It is also a good way to get to know your typical turnaround times. For example, if you learn that it typically takes one pomodoro to produce Report X, or two pomodoros to finish Task Y, then you can better estimate your turnaround times. It may sound ridiculous, but some programmers and engineers can attest to the validity of the approach.
Exaggeration may work for a while, but eventually, your boss and coworkers will catch on to the game. Cushions are great. For the mathematical people in the world, yes, there is an equation to help you estimate turnaround times. It comes from the world of project management. While my instincts are to tell my clients the most likely estimate, the weighted average technique reminds me to allow a little extra time. The weighted average technique is also a good one for the chronically tardy.
All four techniques above necessitate diligence and the ability to manage your tasks well. If you are struggling with time or task management, contact me for an initial assessment at my expense to see if productivity coaching can help. Notify the requester that, despite your best efforts, you will need more time. Most people understand because they experience it themselves. Learn from the experience and estimate better next time. Well that was pretty cool! My friend Hazel is going to love this one: I love a little math and how it can help us think through things.
Estimating time is always difficult. Time seems to have slowed down! LOL, I do love it, Seana! In the source data, each record has the task date, worker name, minutes spent on the task, and the task name. To calculate the tasks per hour, you would divide the number of tasks, by the TaskTime multiplied by If you wanted to calculate the tasks per hour on the worksheet, outside of the pivot table, the formula in cell D5 would be:.
In a pivot table, you can summarize data by Sum, Count, Average, and several other functions. However, when you create a calculated field, the SUM of the fields are used in the calculation, even if another summary function, like COUNT, is used in the pivot table. In this pivot table, the Sum of Tasks will always be zero, because Tasks is a text field, and the numeric value of a text entry is zero. You can read more about calculated fields and calculated items , and their limitations, on my Contextures website.
Instead of using a text field to count the tasks, you can add a numeric field to the pivot table source data. In the screen shot below, you can see the new field — TaskCount — and a 1 has been added in each record. To see the pivot table and formulas, you can download the Pivot Table Calculated Field sample file. It is in Excel format, and zipped.
Focus on finding your sweet spot and trying to hit that consistently. Remember productivity is more than hours logged and your current productivity level does not have to stay this way forever.
If you track your time and are setting time goals for yourself, I recommend sticking to the hours max per day rule for a mix of regular task activities.
If you can consistently hit that number via actual time tracked on tasks, you are among the most productive in the world. For those types of tasks, a good upper limit seems to be hours a day. And working hours on those tasks per day means you had a very productive day. The key concept to remember that mental energy is the limiting factor here.
And the more mental effort your work requires, the fewer hours you can work each day. Each person has a sweet spot of hours that they can work each day without getting burnt out over time. Curious how much work you get done? Try time tracking for a while you can use the Amazing Marvin 30 day trial. Also published on Medium. Your articles are amazing. I read a lot of different blogs and your style is just plain clear and helpful. Thank you so much. But this seems like really bad news for anyone who has a knowledge work job but is trying to do a serious creative project in their off hours.
Any tips or insight or research about how to make that possible, when both the job and the personal project are mentally strenuous? That is a great question and something highly relevant to a lot of people nowadays.
Probably something I will make a post about. I know some who work on the creative project first thing in the morning and get up hours earlier to make this happen. In general, there are three factors that you can manipulate to get more overall energy in the day, and that is what you need if you are doing a serious project besides a job: — optimize your physical health a healthier brain can perform longer — reduce energy inefficiencies, stressing and worrying while doing a job is wasting energy that could go towards work.
Working on mental patterns helps with this. Great article! This is really making ne reflect on the high expectations we put on students to do mental work not only during school hours, but while studying and doing homework outside of it. So true! Really good point. It is intense to do to school and then do homework and study… No wonder so many students get burnt out sometime during college. I work as a consultant and my hourly rate is set by my experience. Being a little OCD I track my time with a stopwatch.
My sweet spot seems to be around four hours per day billable but my colleagues are recording eight hours a day. I can guarantee I do as much work in a day as my colleagues. I think that is a common issue with billable hours. What an individual can actually get done in an hour can vary so widely, and the more experience or focus someone has the less time they need for the same task. Of course experience also factors into the hourly rate… but ultimately I like to think of services as value based.
You get a certain service and you need to decide if that is worth it the money you pay for it. How long it really took the service provider to do it, is in some ways not relevant to you. They tend to get much more value from it, so pricing goes up accordingly. There is just no perfect way to do this. This is the article I have been looking for all my life!
I am the type that worries about not doing enough work each day. But what is enough? I have asked other people around me and they come up with incredible numbers that make me think I have been wasting my time all day, though I actually manage to do 3 hours of mentally demanding revision with active recall a day. Thank you so much! I am so glad I could help you find an answer to this important question.
I have worked in the same woodworking shop for 19yrs, and the previous one 8 years. Our office staff spend much of their day chatting, and doing every thing but their job, then when their part of a job is not done they cry foul as being too pressured. The wood shop is an open plan and most everyone is focused on their task.
Yesm they may have ear buds in, and yes the younger ones often look at their phone, but only for quick looks. Part of the reason there is little talk has to do with the machinery both making noise and for the person who is using a machine not to be distracted. Some new hires do not understand shop etiquette and are abrupt in their movements, talk too much or spend too much time on their phone, which is not productive and does not equate in them learning the tasks they are there to learn.
We, in the shop like to pressure them to find other employment. This does not mean that there is a negative vibe or hostile atmosphere. People take breaks, have something to eat, etc, but mostly they are on task. From what I have seen this is the norm for shop work environment. Shame so little gets done in the average office esp since they often get higher pay, and are more highly regarded by the business world. Very interesting! Perhaps there is a more natural flow to working with your hands as well, seeing direct progress as you work can be very motivating as well.
Maybe it is easier to get into the flow versus most of the office tasks that are perhaps a bit less natural to us humans. I can do a lot more productive hours than described here. In the same way I went to the gym and became stronger, I pushed also my limits in demanding problem solving tasks. As you can correct your training form over time and get better at training and actually get more results from less training, I noticed my problem solving capacity has tremendously augmented over the year or training my brain.
I can recall a phenomenal amount of details. I surpassed all my colleagues and I try to share with them how I do it. All that comes to mind is to use gym training as an analogy as to explain how I augmented my problem solving capacity. Instead of breaking down muscle fibers, I am creating new neural pathways. One more minute is like one more rep. You can do much bigger bursts over time. There is definitely a cost to create all those neural pathways, it uses something as an energy source and you run out of it at some point.
If you overdo it, you might cumulate some debt yes. You should only push your limits a little…. Consider this factor as well: programming is like playing for me, imagine yourself as a kid playing games all day long. Now I admit, you will be lucky if you ever get that dream job.
That you are so much into it and feeling so good that people will lock the office and set the alarm without even noticing you are there… Yep that happened to me.
That drive, I think it part of the energy source I mentioned. So many things are as mentioned in this article and I agree with them. Getting better and having the motivation to want it and to respect your limits, while always pushing them a little so that you recover faster, or last longer, or having more efficient neural pathways over time or etc…. Thanks so much for your amazing comment! Completely agree. There is much that affects how much you can work in a day.
And I only brushed on a few of them. If you do something a lot and build strong neural connections around it, you will be able to do this longer. It is mentioned briefly in the point about the more mental energy something takes, the less you can do it. Similarly, when you enjoy doing something there is less energy wasting on negative emotions and fighting against our amygdala who tries to keep us from doing something takes extra energy.
So if that factor is gone because we fully enjoy it and derive primitive pleasure from it, our brain can do it longer. I want to write a follow up post about how you can increase that limit, whatever limit you have right now. And a big part of that is optimizing brain function. I think the key point is that no matter how optimized things are, there is a natural limit.
At some point you have to sleep and efficiency decreases. And I wanted to show that many people have way too high expectations for themselves and feel like everyone else but them is productive.
And that is very destructive. I have 18 hours of class every week and honestly they all feel like they require pretty intense mental focus. Sometimes, after I have my class, I feel like I have little focus left to keep doing homework or studying. But I have to do them sometime, so I guess my question is:. Great questions! Couple of thoughts. First off, I would think about how much you get out of the lectures. Because it is an intense time and energy commitment.
I am a poor auditory learner and at university I realized my time is totally wasted in class. Everyone learns best in different ways.
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