How eating Blue Apron Meals made me 10x more productive at work
To get control of my calendar and get more productive I have been blocking 2 hours a day to actually “work” for the past 6 months. This is time scheduled with myself on the calendar where I do not take meetings, but do the actual work of helping solve a challenge facing a Community member, of learning more about a market or a product, of handling follow-ups from meetings I had that day, but NOT the task of responding to email.
At first this was very liberating — hours in the day without talking to people is heaven to an introvert — and I felt like I was doing a lot more during the work day instead of having to push everything to the evening hours. But when I looked at these hours, they were mostly wasted. Here is how it went:
:00 — Nice! An hour to do work! Deep breath.
:05 — Check eMail for urgent items (hope there are none)
:15 — Check Twitter, Techmeme, Hacker News etc, etc.
:20 — Make sure there are really no urgent eMails (find a way to make at least one feel urgent and reply)
:25 — Remember that I am supposed to be doing real work — try to decide what to work on
:30 — Choose the item on my list that needs the most attention
:31 — Figure out where to start
:35 — realize that I only had 25 minutes left before my next meeting — check what that meeting is and see if there is extra preparation I should do.
:40 — realize I only have 20 minutes and that I can’t get the work item done — go back to checking eMail
:59 — realize that another hour just went by and I was not productive and should have taken another meeting instead.
This hour was like cooking without Blue Apron.
Without Blue Apron, the effort required to decide what I want to make, to make sure I know how to make it, to figure out where to get the ingredients and then to make the time to shop, prep, cook and clean up make cooking feel over scheduled and underproductive — like my “work time.”
So, I changed my approach to the calendar and modeled it after the experience of cooking with Blue Apron.
With Blue Apron, I never think about what to make, how to make it, where to get the ingredients or when we have time to shop. Cook, eat, clean-up. That’s it. And it actually happens 3x a week (or more).
Now, each night as I look at my calendar for the next day, I also look at my task list and my goals for the quarter. I pre-plan each hour of “work time” with specific things that I believe I can accomplish in the hour and make sure I know the first step in the project/the first thing I will do to make progress against the task or goal. This way, there is no friction for me as I start the work — I do not need to think about what to do or where to start — I just go.
It looks like this:
:00 — Nice! An hour to do work! Deep breath.
:01 — Check eMail for urgent items (hope there are none)
:05 — Check calendar for the recipe and instructions for that hour and start working
:20 — Work
:25 — Work
:30 — Work
:31 — Still focused and working
:35 — Work
:40 — Realize I am actually getting things done
:59 — Feel good about chewing through high calorie, high quality, important items of hard work
This hour of work is like cooking with Blue Apron.
You should try it and let me know if it works for you too.