If you look over your week, how many of the tasks you currently do take you more than an hour?

For that reason, I suggest you start thinking when you plan your week (if you don’t plan, you may want to consider doing it) to break down your tasks and projects into minutes.

It sounds a bit challenging, so let’s simplify this.

In a week, you have 10,080 minutes. As an example, you know from your previous experience that you spend about two hours a day dealing with emails.

I would suggest putting three-time slots per day to deal with those emails as an example

From 08:00 – 08:40           

From 12:00 – 12:40

From 16:20 – 17:00

As you can imagine, you will have some days that you might need to change those times due to other meetings or unexpected tasks, but pinging those time slots in your diary will help you add important tasks that you won’t be able to do otherwise.

Another example of a project that you might have:

Let’s say that this project has four steps:

Step 1 – 5 hours = 300 minutes

Step 2 – 10 hours = 600 minutes

Step 3 -5 hours = 300 minutes

Step 4- -6.6 hours = 400 minutes

Overall time: 1,600 minutes

Deadline: 2 months = 8 weeks

1,600 minutes/8 weeks = 200 minutes a week

You work 5 days a week: 200 minutes / 5 days = 40 minutes per day for this project

In a nutshell:

• It is essential to be aware of your tasks that potentially can “eat” most of your day (emails as an example) and block specific times in your weekly planner while trying to avoid overdoing them.
• Starting to look at your day in minutes will give you more flexibility in your capacity and productivity.
• If you work 8 hours per day and 5 days a week, you have 2,400 minutes per day – think how much can be done!