Your most precious asset is your time, and this chapter exists to save you time. You can start adopting the following set of habits right now to give yourself hours of your life back. Equally importantly, these habits will substantially increase your productivity by reducing stress, increasing focus, and ultimately improving the quality of the things you build with your hands.
Some of these practices pay immediate time-saving dividends. Some require small, consistent investment over time to achieve the desired effect. All require discipline. Some feel destructive. Many require working counter to the intent of the apps and services you use every day, because the collective goals of those apps and services often diverge from your goals.
You will have a strong negative and opinionated reaction to at least one of the bullets in the following sections. Your strong negative and opinionated reactions are a clear sign that you care about how you spend your time, so keep reading even if you’re mad.
Brace yourself. Some of these will hurt:
Make a copy of your bookmarks and store it somewhere safe. Now delete all your current bookmarks. Wiggle uncomfortably in your chair a bit. Breathe deeply.
Start rebuilding your bookmarks from memory a bit at a time, over multiple days. No hurry. Links to your web-based tools and critical documents belong in your browser bar. News, blogs, and other daily consumables belong in your feed reader because a browser is designed to browse, not read.
No feed reader? Configure and pay for Feedly. Learn the keystrokes.1
Install an ad blocker. Be generous about unblocking the sites you regularly visit because while it’s not a fair trade yet, it’s the best we’ve got right now.
Pin your must-have browser tools (candidates include email, calendar, and feed reader) to your favorite browser. This will keep them handily anchored in a familiar, accessible place. Pin no more than five. Unpin a tool if you haven’t used it in a week. I’ve held steady at four for over a year: internal email, calendar, external email, and Feedly.
Use tabs in your favorite browser. Learn the keystrokes to create new tabs, navigate through them, and close them.
Strive to have a single browser window open at a time. Strive to have 10 or fewer browser tabs open at any given moment. Fail at both of these objectives frequently. Don’t beat yourself up, but understand that each window and tab you have open creates additive distracting undetectable stress.
Put your bookmarks in the cloud so that they are the same on your phone’s browser. Your goal is that a majority of your preferences are shared with all of your devices and desktops.
A win condition: The ability to “scrub” all your consumables in fewer than 10 minutes, and the absence of a long tail of cluttered bookmarks whose compounding/increasing stresses force you to declare bookmark bankruptcy every month and a half.
Okay. It’s sitting right there. Let’s work on your phone:
If your phone allows it, flag VIPs in your contact list. If there are more than seven, you’re not identifying VIPs, you’re identifying another set of essential humans.
Turn on any episode of season 2 of The Office, sit somewhere comfortable, and turn off all noncritical notifications on your phone. Critical notifications are calls from people you know and VIP notifications. Continue to ignore the voice that tells you that you need these noncritical notifications.
Purchase and install a spam-blocking utility, and configure it to block all spam calls and SMSs to your phone.
Return to your comfortable place, turn on any episode of season 2 of Parks and Recreation, and delete any app you haven’t recently used on your phone. Ignore the voice in your head that says, “I’m going to need this at some point!” Remind that voice, “Deleting the app from my phone doesn’t delete this app from the universe.” Repeat this phrase over and over.
A win condition: When you have three free minutes, you don’t instinctively reach for your phone.
Read your inbox with the following scrubbing protocol:
If it’s a mail you want to read, read it. Enjoy.
If the mail is from an external (nonwork) source and you don’t want to read it, do one of the following without fail:
If the option exists, unsubscribe from the mail. This works about as well as you would expect.
If an unsubscribe option does not exist and you’re sure you’ve already attempted to unsubscribe, or you are just fed up with this mail, mark it as spam. Tell yourself this is fun.
If the mail is from a work source and it’s generated by a robot (calendar notifications, code check-ins, system notifications, etc.), spend a morning learning how to filter these notifications automatically out of your inbox into a useful place.
If you haven’t already, learn the keystrokes for your favorite email application.
A win condition: Using this protocol I’ve managed to get my work and personal inboxes to inbox zero and keep them there, every day. It took months of filter tweaking and unapologetic religious spam flagging, but for the first time in years, what I have in my inbox is mostly high-signal mails that I need, with little filtering fuss. Yes, I spend a lot of time in Slack and my inbox has much less work email than your average work inbox, but I continue to get hundreds of emails per day.
I am often asked how I prioritize my time, because there is a perception that I do a lot of work.2 First and obviously, I have precisely the same number of minutes of the day that you have. Second, I am ruthless about spending my time appropriately. One of the individual practices mentioned here might only save me 10 seconds, but that’s 10 seconds multiplied by completing that action a thousand times in the next month. That’s around 160 minutes, or just under 3 hours of my life.
In 3 hours, I can ride 40 miles and climb 3,000 feet. I can read a sizable chunk of my current book.3 In three hours, I can write the first draft of this piece. It will take another two hours to finish. I don’t know when that time will arrive, but I know—because I care about each minute—that it will be here shortly.
1 What’s with the incessant “learn the keyboard commands”? The math is simple. The faster you perform each individual action, the less time it will take you to get work done. If you are touching your mouse during common work, I guarantee you could be moving faster and saving time.
2 Productivity types: notice there’s no discussion of productivity apps here. I’ve never met a typeface, editor, or productivity system I wouldn’t try, but for the past year, the work I might have done in a productivity tool has been absorbed by the system described here, plus Slack practices. I have a 1:1 channel with everyone I meet with regularly, and we use that shared space as a mutual to-do list—and it turns out that this captures a majority of the tasks I’d normally house in a productivity app. When you combine this habit with the fact that I can use my email inbox as a lightweight to-do list because it’s usually empty, I don’t need a productivity app.
3 Bonus: Remove anything with a screen next to your bed. Put one book there.