Scott over at Lifehack recently wrote about the rituals and how they help maximize time. There are two rituals that I think are especially important: waking up and working.

• The Wake Up Ritual

Few things make as much of an impact on the day as when and how you wake up. Fighting with the alarm clock, not drinking caffeine, and not eating breakfast are a sure way to hamper the productivity for the day.

Whatever your full ritual is, get up when the alarm clock first goes off, drink some caffeine (if you’re one of those souls that have mastered existence without caffeine, I admire you), and eat breakfast. Do this everyday and you will program your body and mind to follow-up the routine with high-yield work periods.

• The Work Ritual

The single most effective way to set yourself up for success during working is to define at the end of the work day what you’ll do the next day. This serves three purposes:

First, it serves to give you some perspective on what you’ve accomplished during the work day. It may have seemed that you didn’t get anything done, but when you review what you’ve done, you’ll often see that that’s not the case. If you truly didn’t get anything done, then take a minute and try to figure out why. What contributing agents were there that kept you from being productive?

Second, it makes you plan your work into actionable steps for the next day. It also gives a psychological “stake in the ground” to return to that may do some motivational work in the morning.

Third, you don’t have to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing first thing in the morning when your energy and motivation is usually the lowest. It’s hard to get to work in the morning when you both don’t want to and don’t really have a clear idea of what you need to be doing. With a plan in place, you can just follow the steps you’ve set up for yourself until (a) you get motivated to work or (b) you’ve done all the work you needed to do for the day.

Combining these two rituals is a powerful way to boost yourself into a productive mode. There’s a takeaway point to remember here: you’re creating habits and rituals even if you don’t intend to. Doing the same thing day in and day out programs your body and mind to continue to do those same things; you can either harness this fact and create rituals and habits that help you flourish, or you can leave it to chance.

Chris over at Lifehack has a brief article on his morning routine. I’ve found a similar technique to be especially helpful for the day. I try to get up two hours (yep, two hours) before I absolutely have to be anywhere. Half of the time is spent on either exercise or stretching, and the other half on writing out the major goals I have at the different levels followed by the three-five things that I want to get done for the day. Writing it down (in paper at this point, though I’m considering electronic options) helps the sub-conscious reiterate what’s important, and when things pop up, I can ask those important questions:

• Is this something that is consistent with my goals? (if no, think about how to get out of it; if yes move to the next question)
• Is this something I need to do now? (if no, then schedule for later; if yes, move to the next question)
• What on the list has to be rescheduled, and how comfortable am I with that? (unfortunately, this one is not a yes or no–it’s more of a “go-with-the-gut-affair)

Starting the day this way has helped me feel much more in control of the day and my projects; on those days in which I’m too lazy to get up, I feel really disoriented and rushed, regardless of whether I actually have all that much going on for that day. If you can’t come up with two hours, then at least give 30 minutes a try. It’s worth it.

I’m sure I don’t need to cite statistics to assert that email has become the primary method for work communications. Unfortunately, too many of us have yet to really understand how to work with email yet and the management of email correspondence has become a major source of work in and of itself.

As with most serious components of our work, there is tension from both ends: if we don’t spend enough time filtering email, we miss deadlines and important information that is now being distributed solely through email. However, if we spend too much time messing with email, we end up with too little time to actually get any of the work we need to get done completed. As Aristotle keenly observed, the balance is in the middle.

Enter the R.A.F.T. method. R.A.F.T. is a handy acronym for Read, Act, File, or Trash. Here’s how it works:

• Read

This one’s self-explanatory. Briefly skim through the email and determine whether it’s something that actually requires your attention. You’d be surprised how much doesn’t. If it doesn’t require your attention, Trash it immediately. If it does, move on.

• Act

Does the email require you to do something? If it’s a quick reply, do it, and file the message. If it is something that requires you to do something for the future, but not now, place it on your calendar, or whatever system you use to track suspenses, and file it.

• File

If the message does not require action but needs to be referenced or filed, then File it. I still file messages in one of many different folders, but that’s partially because I manage not only academic stuff but other careers as well. Many productivity gurus are advocating dumping all messages in one big archive and relying on the mature search capabilities now available in most mail apps, but I have yet to make that transition. Do some experimentation to see which is right for you, but, above all, get the stuff out of your inbox.

• Trash

Be merciless on unactionable, unimportant messages and get rid of them immediately.

The goal here is to get your Inbox either empty or so that it contains messages that require some response of you. I’ve experimented with having @Action, @Response, and @Waiting mail folders and noticed that either I spent too much time shifting through them or that I forgot to check them regularly enough. I transitioned to letting actionable items sit in my Inbox, but to get the psychological release, all the stuff in there had to be stuff that required some sort of prolonged action. Despite it being somewhat of a task parking lot, the goal is still to get it to zero.

Of course, the R.A.F.T. method isn’t anything special, and the elements of it are covered in GTD’s processing system. However, “R.A.F.T.” is a nice little mantra to help you through your Inbox. Here are some other quick tips:

• Don’t check email first thing in the morning

Doing so starts your day off responding to external projects and actions rather than advancing internal projects. Do your work first and make other people wait their turn.

• Turn off the auto-checker in your mail application if you use a computer-based email application.


The threat of a notification alone is enough of a psychological distraction and the reaction is much like waiting for a punch that you know is coming. Again, rather than letting other people’s issues distract you, check email only when you’re ready and prepared to karate-chop your way through it. This also allows you to reference your email without having to deal with the inclination to check and read new messages when you should be completing your more important projects.

• Check email twice a day.

Tim’s insight on this is dead-on. I check it about 30 minutes before lunch and about 30 minutes before the end of whatever time I determine I’m done working. Generally, this gives me enough time to respond to short messages, schedule a time to do longer messages and actions, and file messages in their appropriate folder with time left-over.

• (For Mac users) Use Mail Act-On to decrease drag and drop filing time.

When a student writes me, I respond or act, and with this nifty program press “~S” (my tag for “this semester’s student email”) and I’m done. Since I have all of my reference folders short-cutted through Mail Act-On, I don’t have to leave my Inbox to get things filed in their assigned folder. This one program alone probably saves me 10-20 minutes a day.


• If you get one of those nervous-I-need-an-answer-right-now emails that would give you peace of mind to answer, quickly respond with “Hey, I’ve got your message and am working on an answer. I will get back to you on X day with the information/answer you’ve requested.”

This response is generally sufficient to get the offender off of you until the time you’ve indicated. Complete the tasks and projects you’ve decided you’d work on while you’re at your peak. Figure out the answer to those types of emails during some less-productive time prior to the time you said you’d respond and respond then and only then.

The goal is to get email back to the way we accomplish our work rather than email being the work that we do.

Glen has recently posted an article on LifeDev that resounds quite true. My original peak-time was in the morning from about 7:30 to 11:30, but I stopped getting up earlier and have actually managed to collapse onto the time of 8:30 to 12:30. Sometimes I catch another sprint from 1:30 to 5pm, but that’s highly dependent on how much iced tea I drink and how distracted I got at lunch. One the best, and hardest, things for me to do was to stop checking my email first thing in the morning, as that’ll send me on a task goose-chase across the day, when, in reality, most of it can wait until I get into an off-peak time.

Hint: To be really productive, I’ve had to turn the auto-checker off on Mail.app. Despite the frequency of auto-checking for incoming email, I found myself anticipating the new mail and checking it anyways. By turning it completely off, I freed up the psychic energy being taken by that anticipation. I now check it either twice a day or in-between tasks if I’m waiting on an urgent email.

Take Glen’s post to heart and try working at different times of the day. If you notice a change, make it a habit with Steve’s 30 Day Trial Plan.
Good luck, and I’ll see you bright in the morning.

Some days you wake up knowing that you’re not going to get much done (today was one of those days for me). Popular wisdom would tell you to drink your joe, open up your work, and get to it. In this case, I think popular wisdom is wrong.

Let’s suppose that you’ve got a 20-page project that you’ve got to do. On a strikeout day, you’ll work all day and maybe get 2-3 pages done. Why? Because, dammit, there’s interesting news on Yahoo, you forgot to check your bank account online, a few friends wrote you, it was time to do the weekly vacuuming…in short, Procrastination has worked it’s voodoo on you.

Okay, so you’ve worked the full day, feel happy at the end of it, wake up the next day and look at what you’ve done. The words carry with them the malaise of yesterday, and the process of editing, deleting, and, in general, overhauling what you worked on yesterday saps most of the better part of your Flow time. At the end of day two, you’re all of a page or two further along than you would have been had you just not worked the day prior.

“Charlie, that’s total nonsense! If I were to do that everyday, I’d never get anything done.”

Okay, realistically, odds are you’re not going to do that. Also, realistically, you’ve been denying yourself some down time for quite some time. We all have to refresh our batteries, lest we burnout. Let’s talk about Pareto’s principle in our context.

Pareto’s principle, sometimes called the 80/20 rule, advances (among other things) that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. How is this relevant to your slacking for the day? Consider the inverse of the principle: 80% of our efforts advance 20% of our results. We can probably surmise that your days worth of procrastination and funk-fighting would fall within the latter 80% rather than the former 20%. In short, it’s a lot of squeezing for such little juice.

I’ll give two options for how to spend your strike-out days: (1) do something fun or enjoyable (you remember what that feels like, right), or (2) work away at some routine task that doesn’t require so much brainpower. (1) is good because you recharge your batteries and actually may be better able to work when it’s time, or, even better, you may catch some insight from not thinking about whatever you need to be doing (the “finding-the-remote-when-you’re-not-looking-for-it” syndrome). (2) accepts that not a lot will be accomplished on Project A, but Tasks B, C, and D, if completed, will allow you to more clearly focus on Project A, when you come back to it…and, without the psychic RAM being taken up by those inane tasks, you’re more likely to wind up in the Flow.

“Why do today what you can put off ’til tomorrow?”

Because, either way, you won’t be really doing it today. But what you don’t do today may help you do what you need to tomorrow.