Snippet 12: How To Organise Your Week - Productivity Hacks from Dr Grace Lordan
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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Any other tactics that you use to, I mean, especially when writing a book, I imagine that's like a real exercise in procrastination.

So I use this for my workload. So kind of in the morning, if I'm planning on doing something like writing where there's a particular output, I'll define what a low output looks like, define what a medium output looks like and define what a high output looks like.

And regardless of which one I'll hit, I'll mark it off on my to-do list. So I give myself that kind of satisfaction. And most of the time, and I always say this, maybe I'm just an average person, most of the time I hit medium. And I've tried it on some friends now and they hit this medium output as well. So I think if you're somebody who has this mama task, and this really aligns with chunking, right? Think about what the outputs would look like beyond I need to do X, right?

dividing X down and giving yourself a treat at the end of it. So whatever it is for you, whether it's Netflix, having a massage, going for a walk, going out for dinner with friends,

bundling it with something that's really attractive is another way to actually get you to get you to the desk again. So really what our decision making is determined by costs and benefits in the present moment. You want to lower the costs in the present moment and you want to make the benefits as nice as possible. And bundling with good activities helps as well. Nice. How do you manage your to-do list? Like,

It's a great question. I mean, again, I make it off my own back by talking about this, but it's my struggles that has made me write about actually writing to-do lists. So every day I have a period of time in the morning where I do deep work, where I do writing, where I do kind of tasks that really, really need to be done. So this morning I was actually preparing something for the skills committee that you mentioned in the beginning. And then I go about my day

having engagements with people like you, you know, kind of having kind of enjoyable engagements. So I really do the horrible part first and then I have the nicer part of my day that actually comes later. So it's hard for me, it's hard to get an appointment with me before 10 and that's because my mornings is for my deep work. At the end of the evening, I do, I look back on how I spent my day. I think about what went right because I'm really bad for seeing kind of small wins during the day.

And I'll reflect on each activity and think about actually did this activity, did I enjoy it in the moment? And was it something that would pay off in the future? And if it's something that's neither, I try to avoid it or call it all together. And I write about meetings in my institution that I don't go to a lot of them now for that exact reason. So I find myself showing up, people would talk in circles about issues,

Nothing would be resolved. We would waste maybe two hours that could be used on something that's giving me purpose or someone else purpose or giving me fun in the day. That's interesting. Do you do any sort of weekly review type stuff? Yes. Every Sunday evening, I look back at how I actually spent my time during the week.

and days where things went well and days where things did not necessarily go well and then I think about the week ahead and how I can make it better for myself so if I've had a particularly draining week and the activities are things that I need to show up for that can include scheduling more free time in the week going forward so it doesn't actually always mean about getting more work done the next week if I felt quite exhausted and I didn't feel that I was able to show up it

It also can mean that I think about what are the activities that I might want to pull out of my calendar, given my experiences in the last week that might not actually be adding value for anybody. And it also allows me to think about what are the big things that I want to check off my list in the week going forward. So I first came across weekly review stuff like five years ago when I first read Getting Things Done by David Allen. And in that time, I've done about four weekly reviews. How?

Any tips for sticking to this practice? You need to make it easy. So I'm not a journaler. So I do all of this on my phone. So I basically have my diary is set up and I have kind of two columns that say this was pleasurable, this was purposeful, that I just fill in. So my entire journaling on a Sunday evening is 15 to 20 minutes. Okay.

And I think that the reason that we fall off the wagon with journaling is if we're carrying around notebooks, we're carrying around pens, it's not really how we kind of are set up as a society anymore. And we're thinking that it's going to take one hour and two hours. So it's really about making it simple and doing it at a time. So I do it Sunday night. People who have read Think Big, who've reported back, are using it on commutes and using it on times that otherwise would not necessarily be used for anything useful.

Oh, okay. That's interesting. I spend a lot of time on the toilet scrolling Twitter. So maybe like a Sunday toilet time equals weekly review on my phone. Keep it simple. That will go viral.