3. Finding your style
The ArtP4T will give you a user-friendly tool to help you in realizing what you are really doing during your working time, that is called the Everyday Sheet. But before to delve into this topic, we need to revise our beliefs towards time. That’s why I collected the most frequent assertions related to working time problems and have created a role play game you can play with your teammates.
The Time-Work-People Game
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The Everyday Sheet
Some people are surprised that I suggest to do one thing after another, and they are proud to be able of their own performances in multitasking. Well, I am afraid to tell them that multitasking is an illusion. According to recent studies in cognitive sciences, what such are doing is a constant task switching, which is enormously energy consuming. According to 30 years of scientific research by Sandra Bond Chapman, director of the Center for Brain Health (U of Dallas) they should immediately switch to single-tasking. In an influential newspaper article published in Next Avenue, she explains how it works:
For example, when you are driving while talking on the phone, your brain can either use its resources to drive or to talk on the phone, but never both. Scans show that when you talk on the phone, there is limited activation of your visual brain – suggesting you are driving without really watching. This explains how we can sometimes end up places without knowing exactly how we got there. Frequently switching between tasks overloads the brain and makes you less efficient. It’s a formula for failure in which your thoughts remain on the surface level and errors occur more frequently.
Task switching is our enemy, because it is energy waste and source of frustration. The Everyday Sheet is build upon the single-tasking principle: do one thing after another. In order to do so, you should describe tasks in a strict, operational way. In other words, a clear fixed endpoint should be stated in advance. A crystal clear description of the task in one phrase is essential. For example, a student will write ‘study chap 4’ or ‘write intro essay max 2 000 words’. It is of the maximum importance that when the time slot will be over, a question will be raised: “did I finished my task or not?” The answer should be Boolean: yes or no. There is no 99% here: either it is finished or not. No third way. If the tasks written before were ‘study story’ or ‘start writing essay’ a clear answer is simply not possible. Of course you have studied your story book, but how much did you planned to study during a time slot? Of course you started writing your essay, but how can you evaluate?
Let us have a closer look to the Everyday Sheet. It is a A4 sheet of paper, 2 pages long: the first page is for the morning, the second one for the afternoon. In the first column, there is the indication for working time, divided into slots (Arabic numbers), and pauses (Roman numbers). There are 8 time slots for work in the morning, and 7 time slots for the afternoon, plus a special slot, the 16th, called “spective”. We will deal with this special slot afterwards. Each time slot is approximately 20 minutes long. Why exactly 20 minutes and not 25, as in other approaches?
First, my decennial experience tells that 25+25 is more than 50 minutes, usually 53-58 minutes of work. In order to keep tracking of our working time, we want to have 2 slots per hour, no more. So, what happens usually? People cut off pauses! And this is literally a disaster: all the purposes of the technique are vanished. On the other hand, if you keep it 20 min long, you can go beyond 1-3 min and nothing serious happens.
Second, studies on effective lecturers have shown that students’ attention is at its peak in the first 5 min, while in the next 15 min it goes down until a reasonable level; after 20 min, attention goes drastically down if nothing happens — a change of the general setting, a question and answer moment, or others.
And exactly a change is what you need, or, better said, a pause. In this way, the next slot you will be fresher and your attention curve will be at the higher parts most time. In other words, you will be more efficient and more relaxed at the same time.
A common question now is: “my duties are far longer than 20 min; how can I divide my tasks in such small slots?!?” Well, it is not