Like many of us, Jessica Hische has too much to do and it creeps into her downtime. So she came up with a productivity trick that ensures she gets the rest she needs. She stopped scheduling deadlines on Mondays, and uses it only for administrative work.
Hische is a “procrastiworker” — someone who waits till the last minute to finish a project, but keeps working in bits and pieces until the deadline. In the end, she wasn’t getting the time off she needs every week. Her solution was to eliminate project deadlines on Monday:
If there is a deadline on Monday, and you are prone to procrastinating / procrastiworking like me, you are most definitely working on the weekend. As I said before, I love working on weekends, but I love it a lot less than I used to now that I have fewer work-a-holic freelance friends in my life.
Now that she didn’t have any important deadline on Monday, she turned it into a day to tackle all her administrative work. She catches up on emails, answers interviews, organises files and schedules tasks — all the little stuff that has to get done. By compressing it into one day, she finds it easy to ignore it on other days.
You can find out if you’re a last-minute procrastinator using this flowchart, but Hische’s advice could apply to people who aren’t as well. If you have ever faced a working weekend, it’s probably because of a Monday deadline. So just eliminate those from your schedule entirely.
Productivity Quest: Ultra-Schedule [Jessica Hische]
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