Are you caught in the trap of being constantly busy, yet feeling unproductive? Many of us rush through our days, reacting to urgent requests and flitting between tasks, only to end up exhausted, without having made meaningful progress on what truly matters.
We often mistake busyness for productivity; but productivity, by definition, is about achieving significant results.
The reason busyness feels so unsatisfying is that it’s often rooted in constant reactivity, while productivity comes from being thoughtfully proactive. Our brains are constantly bombarded by distractions, from emails and chat notifications to interruptions from colleagues. This results in constant task switching that undermines our performance, leaving us feeling scattered and overwhelmed.
Attention Management: The Key to Productivity
The key to moving from being merely busy to truly productive isn’t better time management – after all, we can’t actually control time. The more relevant path for the 21st century is attention management: controlling distractions, maximizing focus, and engaging our flow state.
Attention management is a collection of behaviors that allows us to recognize our current brain state and consciously shift it to achieve the best results, or have the most meaningful experience.
Constant distraction causes us to mostly be reactive. But we can only be productive (achieve our significant results) when we can be PROactive. And we can only be proactive when we aren’t being REactive. In fact, research shows that the single most important factor in boosting motivation and emotions during the workday is making progress on meaningful work, which researchers call the Progress Principle.
Practicing attention management empowers us to both reclaim parts of our days from the grip of reactivity, and to build up “brainpower momentum”— the thoughtful, undistracted way of applying ourselves that this meaningful work often requires.
Scheduling Tasks vs. Time
A core strategy within the Empowered Productivity System, detailed in my first book, Personal Productivity Secrets, is to be intentional about how you structure your week to protect time for crucial proactive work—whether that work is the work you get paid for or the “work” you have to do as a grownup, like reviewing insurance or personal bookkeeping.
Your calendar is best used for managing tasks that have a strong relationship to time, such as meetings and appointments. However, these scheduled commitments should only fill a portion of your week.
The bulk of your work likely involves tasks that have a weak relationship to time – meaning exactly when they get done doesn’t matter that much. It’s things you need to do “soon,” or things that have a due date sometime in the future, but exactly when you do it doesn’t matter.
To ensure you have ample time for this focused, proactive work, I recommend aiming for a roughly 60/40 split weekly between time you have committed to others, and uncommitted time.
This means consciously limiting the time you commit to meetings, appointments, and other scheduled events. In my experience, a 60/40 split is a good place to start. This means limiting committed time to about 60% of your productive time, leaving approximately 40% uncommitted, so you can do the work that is more mentally challenging.
What is productive time?
To implement this, you first need to understand what I consider to be productive time. This isn’t just your “workday” hours; it’s the total time during the week when you are awake and taking personal or professional action.
For example, let’s imagine you wake up and start checking emails at 7:00am. After work, you take appointments, go to an exercise class, make and eat dinner, and do other family activities, until you hit the couch around 8pm. That’s 13 productive hours in a day. Multiply this by five work days in a week, and that’s your total weekly productive time.
Once you know your total productive hours, calculate 60% of that figure. This is the maximum number of hours you should ideally schedule for commitments like meetings, events, or other commitments that involve other people.
The remaining 40% is your dedicated time for getting work done. It may need to involve some reactive time, like staying on top of your incoming communication. But it also needs to include proactive, ideally high-attention tasks – the work that requires you to “unleash your genius”, where your highest and best self emerges. This is time for things like:
- analyzing
- planning
- strategic thinking, or
- tackling those important items on your to-do list that drive results that are significant to you—personally or professionally.
Why is this split so vital?
In my example above, you’d have 65 total productive hours per week. That’s 39 hours per work week for planned activities (meetings, appointments, lunch dates, errands, exercise classes) and 26 hours per week for proactive time, where you can actually get work done. Protecting that 40% unscheduled time helps to create the environment necessary for deep work, focus, planning, and other progress on your most significant results.
You cannot fully focus or remain in a flow state if you are distracted. You cannot access your full capabilities or muster the full range of your knowledge, wisdom, and skills when you’re constantly switching tasks every few minutes, or even seconds.
Implementing the 60/40 split helps you be less reactive and more intentional. It allows you to better absorb unexpected situations or changes in priorities because you haven’t already scheduled every minute.
If you lead a team, recognize that wall-to-wall meetings are detrimental to your team’s overall productivity. Instead, encourage each team member to block out 40% of their time for concentrated proactive work.
Prioritize attention management
By prioritizing attention management and structuring your week to protect time for proactive work through strategies like the 60/40 split, you can move beyond just being busy, and experience the satisfaction and effectiveness that come from being truly productive.
