How to get a ‘one-day refund’ each week

When you leave a 15 per cent buffer in your day, you’re setting yourself up for success by reserving adaptive capacity for anything urgent and unexpected which may pop up (and on many days, it will). If you’re always operating at 100 per cent capacity, then you’ll be caught off-guard by unexpected situations, leaving you to have to play catch up later with the tasks you set aside.

In the context of an eight-hour workday, operating at 85 per cent capacity would mean we plan on doing around seven hours of solid work per day, leaving at least one hour of adaptive capacity. This hour can also be used to think ahead, plan our to-do lists and review our upcoming schedule, ensuring that we feel organised and well-prepared for the following day.

Purple patches

When was the last time you had “free time” in your diary? Sometimes we end up with a bit of free space by accident when an appointment is cancelled. And how good does that feel?

One of my clients identified these rare moments as “purple patches”. I encouraged him to block out these patches so he could take advantage of them any time he liked! He colour-coded the time – in purple – in his calendar.

Blocking time out doesn’t mean you do nothing; it means you decide what you want to do, and you can use that time to your best advantage. You shift from reacting to what must be done right now, urgently, to being proactive and planning ahead. This is the magic that creates the appearance of being cool, calm and collected.

Create more ‘thinking space’

The irony is that if we are to be more productive, come up with good ideas and reach smart decisions, we need to slow down and do less. One way to achieve this is through the three Ds related to thinking space: decelerate, decompress, and decide.

Decelerating is about slowing down or stopping, taking time out just to pause and be. You are off duty and beholden to no one.

Decompressing is about letting off the pressure. First thing in the morning, try writing down a “brain dump” list of everything you need to do that day, including work-related and personal admin tasks. This relieves pressure by removing the need to hold everything at front of mind.

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Deciding can only happen once we have stopped and taken stock. It’s a bit like spring cleaning, we generally get better results if we take everything out and put back only what needs to be there. Because there’s always a bit of chaos before the feeling of control, it’s important first to decelerate and decompress.

In the short-term, we may have the stamina to stay up late, pack our schedules with back-to-back meetings and push ourselves to the limit trying to outwork the demands we face, but in the long term this approach will lead to us running out of steam. Time is our most precious commodity, and by freeing up capacity and getting our one-day per week refund, we can start to change our lives for the better.

Donna McGeorge is a productivity coach, speaker, and best-selling author. Her latest book, The 1 Day Refund, is available now.

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