062: Stop Nickel-and-diming Your Time Away In 3 Easy Steps

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Head on over to daretoprioritize.com to join the waiting list.
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“Studies show that it can take 15 minutes of uninterrupted work on a certain task to reach a flow state.” ~ Elise.

If you’ve been following the podcast for a while, you will have heard of my GYST productivity coaching program, where I help people build what I call a bonus brain; essentially a dashboard for their life so they can make more intentional choices about how they're spending their time and energy, and they can quit trying to hold stuff in their head which just leads to so much overwhelm.

Anyway, one of the things I teach about is the two minutes or less rule. The intention of the rule is that if, as you are processing a bunch of stuff, eg. cleaning out your email inbox, something is going to take two minutes or less, you would do it there and then because it usually takes longer to put something into a system than it does to just do the damn thing.

This simple rule can get tricky when people think that it is about doing anything that needs to be done that is two minutes or less...regardless of when it comes in.

This is how you can nickel-and-dime your time away two minutes at a time because it's not just the two minutes for the task that you're taking. It's the time that it takes you to read the email, then go do the task that's only two minutes, and then get back into what it was you were working on before — context-switching, essentially.

Studies show that it can take 15 minutes of uninterrupted work on a certain task to reach a flow state, so in reality, that context-switching is going to cost you way more than the two minutes it takes to do that “quick task”.

In this episode, I give you three (3) simple things to do to make sure you are not nickel-and-diming your time away with two minutes or less tasks all the time;

• Accept that you are doing it. Just notice when you're doing it - without judgment.
• Stop doing the 2 minutes or less task. Just stop.
• Ask yourself, "is this the most important thing I could be doing right now?"

I want to know your takeaway from this episode by answering the question of the week…

What are you going to do to minimize your context-switching starting this week?

Let me know over on Instagram or Facebook at @productivitybreakthrough