How to reclaim your day, without managing time

01·Where you are now

The day is over, and you can’t say what you did in it. You worked from the morning on: you answered, you ran, you put out fires, you circled back. And the list you wrote this morning looks exactly the way it did when you wrote it.

Could the problem be not how much time you have, but what is eating it? Most fixes are about the calendar: plan better, block hours, prioritize. They treat how much time you have, not what is eating it.

And it costs you. What knocks you off course is items that were handled wrong. “The volume is not at fault.” And meanwhile, from the outside, you look frantically busy.

And every item you set aside gets read twice and decided twice. Little pieces of paper “can turn into a blizzard and blow one right off post.”

02·Who’s talking to you: Axel Jedlitschka

My body gets set, focused times

My day starts with a morning routine and the gym, goes on with the commute to the office and work, and on the way home I work too.

I give my body controlled work times: set periods, fairly short and focused. My livelihood takes the whole day. That is why I am against “I have too much work” as an explanation: the volume is not at fault.

Axel Jedlitschka

04·There is a way

Treat the source, not the time

“Do it Now. One of the best ways to cut your work in half is not to do it twice.” An item put aside to do later gets read again, and only then handled. “This of course doubles your traffic just like that.”

1. 01The recurring type.Log everything that got in your way for a week, and mark each line with a type. The type that recurs the most is the one worth disconnecting, not the one that annoyed you the most.
2. 02Three baskets.Set up three places: in, pending, out. Physical or digital. Twenty minutes, once, and it stays.
3. 03A day of closing.Once a week, a day when everything you open, you close. Even with an imperfect decision.
4. 04A quarter hour on “pending.”Go through the basket item by item and ask what it is waiting on, and what the date is. An item with no date isn’t pending. It’s abandoned.

“‘Developed’ traffic does not mean usual and necessary traffic. It means unusual and unnecessary traffic.” The question isn’t how much, but whether it needed to happen at all.

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