How To master Our Time, And Make Tools For Time Accessible For Everyone? - Part 2

We all feel the challenge of managing our time in an effective way. So much content to consume, so many things to learn in order to optimize and grow in our various life aspects. As a founder that needs to manage so many projects at the same time - below are few hacks that you should consider implementing:

1. Time boxing is a very efficient way to manage our calendar. 

We begin with dividing our work into 2 buckets - (1) Deep work, which requires deep concentration (e.g  - prep a board PPT). It requires a higher cognitive intent. The rule of thumb for this kind of work is to block out between 90-120 minutes of uninterrupted time. . (2) Shallow work - a work that doesn’t require too much concentration, like posting on SM. The idea - is to block our calendar in order to avoid a situation where the shallow work is minimizing our deep work time. 

How can we avoid it? By designing the next week at the end of the previous week, and block out time in the morning, between 90-120 minutes, to work on the 1 meaningful task that we have defined. That’s exactly how the Eisenhower Matrix Method is designed. All meetings can take place after lunch time, and that way the mornings are free for creative & deep work time. Make sure to close your email, and spend 20 min, 3 times a day, on your inbox processing. Try to avoid task switching - it takes our mind 16-23 minutes to recover from distractions. If you really need external help - Simplify helps you put constraints on your Gmail and News Feed Eradicator  does the same for FB. The idea is not to delete the services - but to modify them to your own needs.

Remember - being a founder/ employer/ parent/ single - you are the same human being, personally and professionally wise. Hence, your calendars need to be synced, so that you will have a holistic reflection of the way you invest your time.  

2. Matt Mochary, a CEO Coach and the author of The Great CEO Within, speaks about Calender Audit. At the end of the year - you go to your calendar and print 52 weeks of the last year and take a few markers. You mark and circle in green (e.g) the events that boosted your energy. Then, you try to put in buckets all the other events that you didn't circle - as they didn’t raise your energy, according to certain patterns. First of all - you see the % of the events that weren't in a green circle - try to minimize that percentage. Then, you check what kind of substitutes you can offer to those tasks - that won’t take your energy. E.g - commuting doesn't serve you well - so you work remotely >> more time in your calendar for things you love. 

You have to see that you create the right categories that are shown in your calendar: family, network, IR, hirings, inbox processing, health… Each one and what is important to them.

3. Our brain can’t remember it all, and we can’t do everything we want in 24 hours minus sleeping. That's why we need to create an artificial brain - a second brain that documents information and helps us make decisions and save us precious time. Tools like Notion, clay, Roam Research (a note-taking tool for networked thought, easy to use as a document & as powerful as a graph database), mailbrew (create beautiful, automated newsletters with content from the sites and apps you love), readwise (grow wiser and retain books better: Readwise sends you a daily email resurfacing your best highlights from Kindle, Instapaper, iBooks, and more) and others - help in managing and saving our time by capturing, containing, indexing and pulling the right data/info we need for a specific task/decision. It works on the same logic of compound interest - the interest on interest. It is the result of reinvesting interest, rather than paying it out, so that interest in the next period is then earned on the principal sum plus previously accumulated interest. The same goes for the time you save and the knowledge you gain.

Learning and implementing methods like Space Repetition can help boost our productivity and ability to remember. 

Well, there are so many productivity and time management tools, and that is exactly the problem. How can we reduce the noise? Is there a one tool that syncs everything together? How can we create this ONE tool that is bettering our own productivity methods and techniques? 

That was one of the reasons why Tommy founded Supertools - a community that aims to expose its members to various tools with the purpose of extending & optimizing their time. Just like we have superfood - we all need a supertool. That brings another major question - how much technology should we consume? Are we managing the technology, or it manages us? Technology is not good or bad - it’s neutral. It simplifies our life - providing us with measurements (like apple watch), or stress and readiness levels (like Oura Ring) - but that’s not enough. We need the insights, the recommendations, in order to deal with decision fatigue. It’s a question of how we manage the relationship with technology tools.  We need to care about our time.

The problem with calendars is that they are broken. Their purpose is being our RSVP platform - but what we actually need, is a gatekeeper, not a bookkeeper - to minimize our bad time-decisions. The only way to become time billionaires, is to change our mindsets, put systems in place and become our own Chief of Time. In order to create a huge impact - there is a need to create software - and that’s what Tommy is working on now at Magical.