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7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
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The Digital Entrepreneur
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The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

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Previous Episode:The 7 'Escape Pod' Principles (Help Me Write My Book!) More Episodes Next Episode:The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

Staying Grounded on the Road to Success: A Conversation with JB Glossinger

October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

Finding the Balance Between Pragmatism and Your Ideals

September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

But Facebook Doesn’t Work For … (waily waily)

September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

How to Turn Bad News into Happy Customers

August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

Bringing More Emotion into Your Writing — From the Inside Out

August 11, 2015

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Rainmaker.FM Digital Business Podcast Network

August 4, 2015

My Favorite Tools of the Trade for Writing, Content Planning, and Creative Collaboration

July 28, 2015

How Long Will It Take for My Business to Start Making Money? And Other Impossible Questions

July 21, 2015

5 Things I Learned from Minecraft about Community, Ecosystems, and Business

July 14, 2015

Call to Action: The Awesome Power of Asking for What You Want

July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing (and Other Questions)

May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

What’s one of the biggest constraints that keeps us from doing the things we want to do? We don’t have the time. Here are some thoughts on how to manage that.

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Remember when the internet was going to give us all the free time we could imagine?

Yeah, well. Not so much.

In this 27-minute episode, I talk about:

  • Why multitasking is the worst possible strategy when you’re short of time
  • Where to look for “time scraps” you can use to work on your Cool Thing
  • The activity that’s more restorative than TV, gaming, or getting into arguments on Facebook
  • What to focus on if you’re working on building a business (tiny or otherwise)
  • The most important thing I’ve done when I need to get traction
  • Creating “compartments” of focus
  • What to do when you drift away from the habits you’re working to create

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; CompartmentalizeSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • This episode continues a conversation I started last week about building your Escape Pod
  • My post about creating change via small habits
  • Pamela Wilson’s post on a content plan to create one strong piece of content a week
  • Tony Schwartz’s book The Power of Full Engagement (this link is to an analysis that Josh Kaufman did of the book, I thought it was well done)
  • I always love it when you say hi over on Twitter @soniasimone!

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

If you caught last week’s podcast, I talked about the ideas I’m noodling with for the book I’m writing. The book is really about constructing your “Escape Pod” — the structures and patterns that will get you out of whatever’s not serving you today, and on to your next chapter.

One of the biggest deterrents for any of us is a lack of free time. Very few people have free time in any kind of significant quantity. And when we do, we do dopey things with it like play Nintendo or watch TV we don’t even really like or have fights on Facebook.

Don’t multitask

I’ve talked before about the irony of me talking about productivity, since I am not one of Nature’s Organized People. But that’s maybe part of why I can help you out — if it works for me, it’s very likely to work for you.

When your time is a significant constraint, when you’re at a point in your life when you don’t have a lot of free time — for most of this, this is most of the time — the worst thing you can do is to multitask, because it makes everything take longer.

This is backed up by approximately a trillion studies. We all think we can multitask, but we don’t realize how poor a job we’re doing on everything that’s being done that way. Incidentally, this very much applies to doing anything with your cell phone while you are driving your car. Short of listening to some music or your nav, please don’t do stuff with your phone while you’re driving. It’s dangerous, and even if it feels like you have good control, studies show that you do not.

While obviously you can multitask, since most of us do most of the time, it actually takes you longer to get all of your stuff done, and you don’t do a good job of it.

Find the scraps of time

If you’re not going to multitask and you want to try something different, the first thing to do is find your scraps of time.

In the U.S. by law you have to get breaks every X number of hours you’re working. In some jobs, this is hilariously not a thing. For example if you’re a medical resident, you’re cracking up right now. But for most of us, we get some defined breaks during the day.

Then there’s before we go to work, after we get home from work, etc.

One key marker to look for is: Do you spend any time watching TV, socializing on Facebook or another platform, or playing digital games? If so, think about whether you’re willing to take 30 minutes, or even 10-15 minutes, from those activities for another purpose.

A lot of times we are very unwilling to give up on those because they’re our relaxation time, our unwinding time. If your job is stressful and everything else is stressful, you want that time to relax.

What I would just suggest as a thing you could let ping around in your thinking is: Spending regular time every day working toward something larger, a goal that you care about a lot, is genuinely restorative in a way that TV, Facebook, and gaming are not.

This isn’t about being one of those people who fills every moment with something “worthy.” I’m not that person and I think you’re not either, otherwise I would annoy you and you’d be spending your time with other people who are good at being perfect.

It’s just about cultivating a small habit of working on something meaningful.

This is easier, by the way, if you use my values hack — one that I’ve talked about, certainly not one that I invented — to charge your battery. I’ll give you a link to that in the show notes.

Identify microtasks ahead of time

The other thing to know is that if you wait until your “little habit time” to figure out what you’re going to do with it, the time will evaporate. Deciding what to work on is work.

So let’s say you’re going to skip 15 minutes of TV every day and work on your thing instead. The first set of tasks you do in your 15 minutes is: Figure out what tasks you’re going to do in your 15 minutes.

Make a nice list you can find easily. Could be pen and a paper notebook, could be an Evernote item, could be a Google doc or just the to-do app on your phone. Just have a list of things to spend 15 minutes on.

Some possibilities are:

  • Writing blog posts
  • Figuring out how to get your site active
  • Outlining and recording podcasts — these will be separate days
  • Figuring out something complex like getting a payment method set up
  • Outreach to people you’d like to know better in your topic

9 times out of 10 for most of us, it’s either planning content or creating content. One of my favorite resources for this was a post Pamela Wilson wrote for Copyblogger that set out a content plan to produce one excellent piece of content per week.

Link

Cultivate itty bitty habits

The reason we start with these itsy bitsy habit processes is that once you have even a small amount of movement, you’ve opened up the possibility of momentum.

If you work on, let’s say it’s a side business, 15 minutes a day, it will take a long time to get traction. But you’ll get traction faster than working on it zero hours a day, and you’ll also make much more progress than you would working on it an hour a week.

But one thing that happens is that it’s fun to make progress. It feels good, it’s empowering, it’s energizing. So those 15 minutes start to turn into 30. And then you realize there’s some other chunk of time you spend on a “relaxation” that you would rather put to your project.

Changing behavior is fundamentally psychologically scary. It shakes up our attachment to who we think we are. These little habits are a way to sneak up on the change, make progress, even if it’s very slow at first, and start to open up space for new possibilities.

Compartmentalizing your time

So half of my statement is “don’t multitask,” the other side of the same coin is that you compartmentalize your time and your focus.

That means, when you’re at your day job, you’re really there. You’re looking for ways to bring meaning to it, you’re looking for ways to do it as excellently as you can, or you’re looking for another job where you can do those things.

You’re fully present.

And you’re fully present when you come home, whether you have other people there or not. You’re fully present for your project. You’re fully present with your family, if you have family.

Each moment is like a compartment, and you try to focus fully on that compartment while you’re in it.

This is really not easy at all to do, but if you remind yourself all day every day to strive toward it, you get better at it.

This all by itself is very energizing, even if it’s imperfect. Because thinking about work when you’re with your family, and family when you’re at work, and your side project all of the time, is exhausting. It’s draining.

Link in the show notes — Power of Full Engagement

You really can do this

Finally, I want to let you know that you can actually do this.

Even if you’ve tried some of these before and petered out with it. That’s so normal. We’re talking about behavioral change, and that almost always takes a few tries.

But it rewards multiple tries. If you try some of these out, do well for two weeks, then drift off for a couple of weeks, that’s completely fine. Just come back to your little habits and start fresh. You can always start fresh.

This isn’t about being perfect and it’s not about superheroic levels of will power or energy. It’s about building and growing and taking small steps toward the things you want to create in your life.

Let me know about your journey! And thank you all!

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Comments

  1. Ola Rybacka says

    May 23, 2016 at 2:01 AM

    Hello,
    Happy to announce that this article got featured on TimeCamp’s 10 Most Inspiring Productivity Articles of Last Week List!

    Please find the entire list here: https://www.timecamp.com/blog/index.php/2016/05/productivity-articles-3/.
    Ola Rybacka, Social Media Manager at TimeCamp

    Reply
    • Sonia Simone says

      May 23, 2016 at 8:59 AM

      Nifty, Ola, thanks for letting me know!

      Reply

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