January 10, 2012

For too many of us, feeling anxious and overwhelmed has become the new normal. But 2012 can be the year you finally get a handle on your to-do list and start working—and living—at your best.

“Most of your dread doesn’t come from the work itself—it comes from how you think about the work,” says Jason Womack, a workplace performance expert, executive coach, and author of the new book Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More (Wiley, February 2012, ISBN: 978-1-118-12198-6, $24.95). “The psychological weight of unfinished tasks and unmade decisions is huge. There is a constant feeling of pressure to do more with less. You can’t change that reality … but you can make peace with it.”

Read on to learn more about the essential good habits you can create in 2012, and make it your most productive year yet.

Purge and unsubscribe. When Womack suggests reducing your psychological burden, in some cases that means reducing your literal burden. Start 2012 by deleting and recycling to make room for the “new” of the new year. Too many people let a backlog (paper AND digital information) pile up over the last six weeks of the year.

Block out your time and prioritize. Time blocking and prioritization are two important keys to daily productivity, says Womack. Look at your to-do list, figure out where you have blocks of time to act on those items, and then prioritize. “I keep my defined ‘work’ actions to 15 to 30 minutes each,” he says. “These are the ‘chunks’ of time I can use to stay focused, minimize interruptions, and work effectively.”

You might also designate specific “Interrupt Me” times during the day for the first couple of weeks of the year. This lets people know that you’ll be working “head down” for larger blocks of the day and encourages them to “think-bunch-interrupt” so you get more done at once, instead of getting interrupted multiple times per day.

Change how you manage email. Rather than simply flag e-mails that require action, use the subject lines to catalog and organize them, suggests Womack. For example, you might put “Follow-up Call” in the subject line of an email about a meeting you just had with a client. Also, don’t look at your email unless you have a block of time to devote to prioritizing them and responding to them. When you are going through your email, use subject lines to catalog them and organize them so you’ll easily be able to go back to less urgent emails later on.

Keep your BlackBerry out of bed. Womack writes about a client who listed “Check email on BlackBerry (in bed)” as part of his daily morning routine. Note that he didn’t do anything about those emails while still in bed. He waited until his commute (he had a 40-minute train ride to the office each day) to start taking action. Meanwhile, he said, he rushed through his morning routine worrying about the emails he had read in bed.

“Together, he and I designed a five-day experiment during which period he would leave his mobile device in another room and use an alarm clock to wake up instead of his phone,” says Womack. “He would shower, dress, eat breakfast, and then check email on his train ride to work. Initially, he expressed concern that he might miss the ‘thinking about what I have to think about’ time he had built in to the early part of the day, but he was willing to give the experiment a try.

“When I called him the following week, he had good news,” Womack continues. “The experiment had worked. He was less stressed and was using his morning more productively. This change in his routine gave him a higher quality of life with less stress and increased productivity—one he didn’t know was possible without falling behind in his work.”

Always be prepared for “bonus time.” Bring small chunks of work with you wherever you go. Then, while waiting for a meeting to start or for a delayed flight to depart—Womack calls these unexpected blocks of free time “bonus time”—you’ll be able to reply to an e-mail or make a phone call.

Reduce meeting time lengths. If meetings at your organization are normally given a 60-minute time length, start giving them a 45-minute time length. You’ll find that what you get done in 60 minutes you can also achieve in 45 minutes. You’ll also gain 15 extra minutes for each meeting you have.

Divide your projects into small, manageable pieces. Take one step at a time and don’t worry about reaching the ultimate goal. Make use of small chunks of time. In fact, a great way to approach this is to break the yearly goals down into quarterly goals. If you worked on a goal only two hours each week (perhaps over four 30-minute sessions) you’d have a total of around 100 hours to invest in that goal. Set milestones, decide actions, and make progress faster.

Identify the VERBS that need attention. (And here’s a hint: Smaller is better.) Organize your to-do list by verbs to manage your productivity in terms of action, delegation and progress. Actions such Call, Draft, Review and Invite are things you can do, generally in one sitting, that have the potential to move the project forward one step at a time.

“If your to-do list has ‘big’ verbs—by which I mean verbs that are mentally demanding or longer term in nature, such as plan, discuss, create, or implement—replace them with action steps to just get started,” says Womack. “That is, pick ‘smaller’ verbs, by which I mean verbs describing tasks that are easier to start and faster to finish. This will save you time and reduce the sense of overload you’re feeling.”

Implement a weekly debrief. Take time after every five-day period to stop, look around and assess where you are in relation to where you thought you would be. Look at three key areas: 1. What new ideas have emerged? 2. What decisions need to be made? 3. How do I track this information?

“Not only does the weekly debrief help you hold yourself accountable, it allows you to course-correct if necessary,” notes Womack. “Things usually don’t go the way we expect them to, so these weekly debriefs give us the opportunity to ask ourselves, Does this still make sense? And if not, what does?”

Forecast your future. Open your calendar to 180 days from today. There, write three to four paragraphs describing what you’ll have done, where you’ll have been, and what will have happened to your personal/professional life by then. This kind of “forecasting” is good to do from time to time, and by spending 10 or so minutes at the beginning of the year thinking about the next six months, you’ll put your goals into action.