Free Work Clean by Dan Charnas Page B

we’ve made one at all. We forget to consult our calendars for impending and future events. We make ourselves vulnerable to chaos. We get buffeted about by a timeline that is not of our own making. When we arrive at appointments, we’re not prepared. When we’re not in meetings, we forget what we should be doing. We neglect to handle the expected and thus have little bandwidth for the unexpected. We are
underplanners.
    Still others spend
a lot
of time planning, perhaps too much time. Our lists are sophisticated and endless, our expectations for our days excessive. We pack our daily schedules with back-to-back appointments with others and tasks for ourselves. We do too much and fight to fit in even more. We’re disappointed with ourselves every day. We’ve created for ourselves a different kind of chaos, self-imposed. We, too, have no bandwidth for the unexpected. We are
overplanners.
    Underplanners surrender to time. Overplanners fight and curse time. What we need is the chef’s mature sense of honesty about what we can and cannot do with time, and of the consequences of surrendering or fighting something that should just be met squarely. What we need is to
work clean
with time, where working clean with time means two things.
    1.Determining our daily actions
    2.Ordering those actions in sequence
    The pages that follow contain some exercises and habits to help us do just that.
    EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN
MAKE AN HONESTY LOG
    Kitchen folk have an easier time determining and ordering tasks because kitchen work is defined by physical processes. It’s easier to know how long it takes a steak to get to medium-well than it is to know how long it takes to create a spreadsheet, write an article, or make a sale. Knowing how long our actions take is harder for us to determine, but that information is valuable. Creating an honesty log will help you understand how much time your regular, recurring tasks actually require.
    Let’s use a specific example to illustrate how a creative professional might do this exercise. Let’s say you’re a graphic designer. How long does it usually take you to come up with a logo concept? Sometimes you allow yourself 30 hours spread out over 3 weeks. At other times you can come up with a bunch of ideas in one intense, 4-hour session. You won’t develop knowledge about this without
gathering data.
So for your most important categories of tasks, log your times for a month on a piece of paper, a spreadsheet, or a time-tracking app, and see if they average out in a meaningful way. Some more examples: For a teacher, how long does it take you to prep a class? For students, how many hours does it take you to read 50 textbook pages? For executives, how many small tasks, like returning e-mails, can you complete in an hour, on average? For insurance agents, how long does it usually take you to fill out paperwork on a new client?
    Perhaps you will always have certain tasks that are particularly hard to nail down. But what you
can
do, even in those cases, is determine what the length of a “minimum session” might be. Maybe it’s not worth working on a logo concept if you can’t set aside at least an hour. Great. An hour becomes your baseline for that particular task. And knowing that a logo design might take up to 30 hours, it’s your job to gauge and moderate other projects you accept so that you can deliver the one on hand. I know, for example, that for certain types of writing, I can usually get 500 words down in 2 hours. That’s helpful information for scheduling purposes, but that information would never have been possible if I hadn’t purposefully tracked it.
FIND YOUR MEEZE POINT
    Here’s an exercise for habitual overplanners. We’re going to find your Meeze Point: the optimal number of Actions you can put on your daily list before you begin to overload yourself, an Action being either an appointment or a task. This will become your