Stack your tasks
Some activities, such as writing, do require sustained focus without interruptions. Many others, however, come with built-in “dead” time. For example, if you’re cooking, you’ll probably have some time where your water is boiling or your food is heating, and there’s nothing else in the current task to do until that step is completed.
This is where task stacking can come in. What else can you do during that time slot, without a huge switch of focus and energy? Maybe the dishwasher needs loading or unloading. Maybe you can put away containers of ingredients you’ve finished with. Maybe you can get the laundry out of the machine and fold it.
Planning for perfection
To function most effectively, task stacking requires some initial planning from you. If you spend 5 minutes thinking about the tasks you need to do, and working out which order to do them in, you can limit the downtime that comes from switching between activities. With an electronic task management system like Asana, you can manually sort your tasks into order. If you prefer paper-based, it’s worth rewriting, or at least numbering, your list.
Planning your task order will help you to complete tasks more efficiently by grouping either similar tasks or tasks happening in the same area. If you need to write three quotes, it probably makes sense to do them one after the other, rather than doing each one at a different point in the day. You won’t need to move from place to place, you’ll use the same software and templates for each task, so you cut out two shut-down and start-up sessions by doing the quotes in succession.
Advance planning will also help you to take advantage of any time-bound activities in your calendar. If you’re going out for lunch, you can plan other outside activities for immediately before or after. If one of those activities is going to the post office, you’re going to want to schedule preparation of your letter or parcel before lunch so you don’t have to make a second trip.
Task splitting
Your tasks may naturally split into activities which happen in different places, in which case it can be easier to group activities rather than completing each task from start to finish. For example, when I’m working through hard-copy paperwork in my upstairs office, I pile up completed papers for recycling on the windowsill. When I next go to another upstairs room, I drop the recycling at the top of the stairs. When I next go downstairs, I take it to the recycling bin. It’s clearly quicker to group the recycling activity from several tasks, rather than recycling each paper as it’s completed.
The Dead Zone
So you’ve planned all the things you need to do in your office to happen one after another, followed by everything to be done downstairs, or outside the home.
Now you can tweak your plan so it makes the best use of “dead” time. For example, if I need to wash a load of laundry and it’ll be in the machine for an hour, it makes sense to start with that task, come back upstairs for an hour’s worth of office work, and then go back downstairs after an hour to hang the laundry and continue with downstairs tasks. If I need to write and edit a blog post, bearing in mind that it’s better to edit after some time away from the text, it makes sense to schedule writing as the first task of office work, editing as the last task, and fit other office tasks in between the two.
Task stacking for health
If you often end up spending all day at your desk, you can also order your tasks to ensure you move every hour or so. When you’re working more efficiently overall, you can afford to take the time to give your eyes, neck and shoulders a break.
Over to you!
How easy do you find this kind of planning? What planning tools do you like to use? Leave a comment and let me know.
Image by Representation Matters