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How to Use Technology to Better Pace Your Work
We work too fast and burn out. Or we procrastinate and get too little done, too late. Or we jump from task to task instead of focusing on one job and doing it well.
Whatever the particular issue, tech can help us find a pace that works best for us. That’s why it’s helpful to choose technologies—and strategies for using them—that let us organize our time more efficiently and prod us when we start to lose our rhythm.
Here are some of the most effective tips I have found, depending on how you’re trying to adjust your pace.
When you need to get more done
If your biggest obstacle is inefficiency—you don’t work quickly enough, or you make poor use of your time—tech can help you set up a plan for your day and plow through small tasks much more effectively. For example:
• Use reminders tied to specific times of day. If I start my day by looking at a long list of tasks, I want to crawl right back into bed. So, I’ve mostly replaced task lists with notices that pop up on all my devices at various points, reminding me to tackle something on my list. These could be big things (“Review data tables for annual report”) or small (“Put AirTag in my carry-on bag”). I use Apple’s Reminders for this; you can get similar features with Microsoft To Do and Google Keep, among others.
: Boosting Productivity: Smart Tactics to Minimize Distractions (Opening Bell (Video))
Since my reminders are now delivered throughout the day, I rarely fall into an extended period of spacing out or procrastinating; if a reminder arrives at a moment when I’m not actually in the middle of something useful, I tackle whatever pops up. And if one arrives at a moment when I’m in the middle of a call or deep in thought, I just use the “snooze” button to defer it.
• Use location-based reminders. Alongside timed reminders, I rely on location-based prompts to give me tasks when I’m in a specific place. Just dictate a command into your phone, along with a business name or address: “Remind me to update my payroll information when I arrive at Citibank Main Street branch,” for instance, or “Remind me to draft a memo about our latest marketing campaign when I arrive at Acme Diagnostic Labs” (a great way to make productive use of the time you expect to spend in the waiting room).
• Gamify your workday. If you’re motivated by points or rewards, turn productivity into a game with specialized task-management apps. Todoist, for instance, has karma points that accumulate as you complete jobs, letting you progress through levels like Novice and Grandmaster as you get more work done. (Think of it as the same kind of motivator as a step counter.) If you really want to go all-in on the videogame experience, Habitica is a web and mobile app that turns your task list into a role-playing game. As you check off jobs, you progress through levels and accumulate virtual rewards.
• Tackle loathsome tasks on a low battery. Some people like to get their most unpleasant jobs out of the way as soon as possible, using Mark Twain’s line of thinking: “If it is your job to eat a frog, it is best to do it first thing in the morning.” I prefer to save my frog until I can see that my battery is down to its last 10% or 20%, at which point my back is up against the virtual wall. Using my laptop’s lifespan as a hard stop gives me a sense of urgency, and lets me know that the pain of doing an unpleasant job—like catching up on invoicing or working through my email backlog—will only last for so long.
• Conquer with calendars. While some productivity pros counsel against filling your calendar up with tasks, I’m one of those who finds it helpful to block certain kinds of work directly into my calendar, so that I know exactly when I’ll tackle an assignment with a hard deadline, and have a game plan for how to make effective use of the windows when my energy tends to flag. I might mark down things like email catch-up from 11 a.m. to noon every day or financial tasks every Friday afternoon.
When you need to focus
If your biggest pacing obstacle is interruption or distraction, tech can help you sustain your attention and focus on a single, challenging task. For example:
• Add focus times to your scheduled work blocks. Choose some periods where you will do more focused work, like reserving your first two hours of the day for writing or data analysis. You can use your focus settings (on a Mac) or create rules under Focus Assist (on Windows) to trigger don’t-disturb mode or other cues that help you zero in (like changing the lighting on your screen or putting on your favorite working music).
• Set email to fetch on a schedule. Even if you turn off email notifications, it can become habitual to check your email throughout the day, so that you’re constantly interrupting your own focus. Instead of leaving your email in “push” mode (where incoming messages arrive in your inbox throughout the day), consider setting your email app to “fetch”—an option you can generally find under your email app or account settings. With fetch, you see new email messages only when you deliberately refresh your inbox, or on a schedule you control. Alternatively, close your email and text-messaging programs for several hours at a stretch, so you can keep your attention on the challenging work that requires intense focus (and make sure to adjust notification settings so that you don’t see incoming message notifications even when your email app is closed).
• Work in bursts with a Pomodoro timer. If you focus better when you have a fixed amount of time rather than a wide-open day, consider using a timer app based on the Pomodoro Technique (named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer first used for this productivity approach). Set the timer for 25 minutes, and when your timer goes off, take a five-minute break. (Pomodoro apps typically time your breaks, too.) After two hours, take a longer break (20 or 30 minutes). You can adjust the length of your work periods and breaks based on what works best for you.
When you need to slow down
Sometimes the biggest challenge in pacing your work is remembering to actually stop working. If you have a hard time gearing down, use technology to put on the brakes. Here’s how:
• Turn off the internet. Treat your inner workaholic like an unruly tween, and set your household Wi-Fi to turn off at a certain time every night. If you want to keep your TV connected to the Internet so that you can still watch your favorite streaming shows after the Wi-Fi turns off, use parental controls on your router to create a separate “adult” profile for any devices that need to stay connected at all times (like your TV, or your smart light switches) and just cut off your laptop and phone.
• Run those system updates. When your computer prompts you to apply the latest update, it is tempting to put them off, because the update process typically requires you to reboot your computer, and may render your computer unusable for 10 or 20 minutes. So take those update prompts as a golden opportunity—no, make that a mandate!—to stop working for the evening, start the updating process, and then walk away so that your computer can update overnight, and you can take a night off.
• Create a weekend alter ego. Another way to turn off work is to create different views on your computer (called desktops on Windows machines and spaces on Macs) for different activities. Essentially, you group your open documents or applications into different views, and switch views based on what you want to do at the moment. You might create one view that has your work email, the slide deck you’re working on, and the draft of your quarterly report; a separate after-hours desktop could have Netflix loaded in the web browser and your novel-in-progress open in a word processor.
• Embrace appointment television. In the olden days before VCRs and PVRs and streaming, people sometimes stopped work at a specific time so they could get home to watch their favorite show. You can re-create those days by participating in an online chat tied to the episode; if you know your fellow fans will be posting to Threads or Facebook while they watch, it will motivate you to watch (and post) at the same time.
• Rethink your autoresponder. Finally ready to take an actual vacation? Give future you the best possible gift by drafting a vacation responder that doesn’t promise to work through the backlog. Instead, set up your autoresponder so that it tells your correspondents when you’ll be back in the office and ask them to get back in touch at that time.
