Mastering the routine before it dominates you

Is quarantine causing problems for you to organize? How to improve the routine before it swallows you completely and you change the day for the night? I don’t have all the answers, but I hope to be able to share my experience working completely remotely.

I love helping other people to fulfill their professional goals, I try to do more than help in setting their goals and encourage them on their path to success, to stay on track and achieve our goals, we need good habits.

Having a weekly planning method can make a difference and save a few hours of procrastination and indecision during the week. These habits keep me productive and consistent, with less effort and in less time than would normally be necessary, with the results I want.

Let’s go?

Plan your week in advance

On Sunday night or Monday morning, spend some time on your calendar and decide how you will organize about your most important goals. Focusing on a weekly timeline provides good results: long enough to provide perspective and a sense of progress, but short enough to keep you there and with your head on the job.

By scheduling time to perform tasks weekly in advance, you will also notice a positive side effect: after writing down everything needed to achieve your goals in a weekly calendar template, you will find that you still have plenty of time available for other things.

In short, plan your week in advance.

Understand your tasks and workflow

Real life forces us to reconcile our plans with meetings, calls (hello quarantine), homework, emails, children and much more. Prioritizing includes deciding how to handle non-priority work.

Deserved time to focus

Are you offering yourself enough time for focused work throughout the week? With high effort, you generate high impact. You need long periods of time that allow you to dive deeply into complex or highly focused tasks; as a developer, the reasoning break can be awful , whether by a person at home or an office person. This means that there are no emails, calls or interruptions.

The easy wins

If focused work is important, so are easy wins (or quick wins), which are low effort and high impact tasks. They allow you to feel good and productive, in no time and give you that mood in the middle of the week. That simple bug fix or 4 lines of badly needed documentation.

Only for some reason, we keep putting it off because we are unable to give a feeling of flow, of completeness of the whole, because we find lack of focus. One solution may be to group all of this work at intervals of three consecutive hours once or twice a week. I usually do this in between larger activities that demand more attention, it is a way for me to rest from focused work.

The gap fillers

After all, not every result has a giant impact. The gap filling are activities that require low effort and generate low impact. Need to answer multiple emails? View an order log? Check if your PR has been approved? Approve friends' PRs? This is the time, tasks from 15 min to 30 min, in which you will not be able to deal with more meaningful work.

The productivity killers

Finally, the productivity killers whose main characteristic is low impact with high effort. These tasks drain your energy and result in minimal impact. They usually appear as urgent requests from other people (the famous expedites, right PO?).

Can you delegate to someone more suitable to resolve? Can you somehow automate with scripts? Or maybe outsource them (I’m looking at you, software factories)? How much time are you taking out of the things that really matter to core business, spending time on them? If you think in terms of cost per hour, paying someone to do that can be a much cheaper solution

Make time for the things that will take you towards your goals

Using the calendar can be a great strategy for removing distractions and staying focused on what needs to happen before the end of the week. Don’t know how to prioritize? Many “important” and “urgent” things to do? Ask yourself, “How am I aligning my time, energy and focus with the high-impact activities that will drive my goals?”

Make sure you get, over the course of your week, an hour and a half without distractions, to execute your main goals
Every morning, plan your next day to be able to execute the tasks that will bring you a sense of completeness immediately
Then, block the schedule for anything secondary you need to do next week, be sure to write down your lunch break and personal appointments.
Observe leftover time slots or rest between major commitments, for productivity killers, like writing long email, getting documentation, watching that important video or studying a long article .
If you quickly run out of agenda, maybe it's time to say no . And if you agree to give your time to everyone who asks, your time will no longer be yours, but theirs

Give yourself a gift, gamify the process to solidify habits and take a deliberate break to avoid burnout

It is possible to pursue your dreams and still hate the tasks that involve reaching them. Trello, Jira, Asana, it doesn’t matter. No system will replace your efforts and sacrifices. At various times, the search for success can become stressful and even dull.

Reward yourself

If many of these tasks are boring, how do you always stay motivated? Having a tangible reward is a powerful source of motivational momentum, and it all works when it comes to keeping us alert. I would like to encourage you to find ways to link pleasure and duty within a manageable and motivating timeframe (weekly, it would be my choice).

Have fun tracking your progress

Many apps track recurring activities or habits. They work because they hold themselves accountable when we start to transform behavior, providing a form of play that demonstrates progress and creates momentum.

Some applications can solve this problem, and Habitica is a great example. This app will allow you to make your goals public to a support community (creating an external commitment), check in when you accomplish the desired behavior (creating a reward) and interact with thousands of like-minded individuals who will support you throughout the process.

Use the app every day to mark my productive habits: wake up early, meditate, write in your diary or reach the box zero input until the end of the day. The fact that you have these items to cross your list can have a powerful effect on your determination to achieve your daily goals.

Police yourself to rest properly

We are not machines, and overwork will lead to inefficiency. In professional sports, rest is not just as important as training: it is part of the training program. A good way to implement this? I also set up times to block time on my calendar to spend time free from technology and work.

Focus on reaching your daily and weekly goals and worry less about your bigger goals

The best habits are those you can maintain; success is not a point of arrival at perfection, but a return to practice every week. If you follow these small practices, you will focus less on worrying about your long-term aspiration and more on doing your immediate tasks.

The fact is, we cannot be creative or productive when we question ourselves regularly and try to define the perfect workflow. Reject perfection in advance, focus on what makes progress for you, and maintain a system that works!