How to Stay Productive When You Make Your Own Sked

The fol­low­ing arti­cle is the abridged ver­sion of the orig­i­nal. The prob­lem is that I no longer know where the arti­cle came from. I copied and pasted it in my email and I unfor­tu­nately for­got to include the name of the author. So I apol­o­gize for the writer. And if it’s your work, please con­tact me so I can credit you for it:

Study­ing for exams, free­lance con­tracts or work­ing on big­ger projects can mean free­dom with your sched­ule. But it can also mean pro­cras­ti­na­tion, stress from dead­lines and an orga­niz­ing night­mare. Work­ing on your own sched­ule can be eas­ier. How­ever, there are more ways to waste your time if you aren’t being paid by the hour.

Set­ting Up Your Work Sched­ule
When­ever you start a new project, start tak­ing classes again, or sim­ply run into a block of flex­i­ble work time, you will need to set up a sched­ule. A good sched­ule is one that accom­plishes the work you need to do and you actu­ally stick to it. Unfor­tu­nately many peo­ple for­get the sec­ond step and make impos­si­ble sched­ules that would require a machine to follow.

If you need to set up a new work rou­tine, I pre­fer the top-down approach. The top-down approach focuses you on decid­ing what work needs to be done, and by what dead­lines. Once you know the time limit for the work you need to do, this auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates the pres­sure to come up with a pro­duc­tive schedule.

Many peo­ple, how­ever, try to go the bottom-up approach when they need to struc­ture their time. They start by set­ting aside blocks of time, and micro-managing how time will be allo­cated to dif­fer­ent tasks. This method only ensures you spend a lot of time work­ing. It doesn’t ensure you get a lot of work fin­ished. Bottom-up approaches make it easy to waste time, and they can cause stress if your work doesn’t fit neatly into your pre-arranged schedule.

Avoid­ing the Bottom-Up Curse
Stu­dents often take the bottom-up approach with their study habits. They start by defin­ing how many hours a day they need to “study”. This is a recipe for wast­ing hun­dreds of hours re-reading text­books in the library.

Although it’s less obvi­ous, a top-down method would make study­ing more pro­duc­tive. If you started by defin­ing the grades you want, then moved down to what you need to know, then moved down to a list of tasks and activ­i­ties designed to learn that knowl­edge, you wouldn’t need to assign arbi­trary hours for “study­ing” in the library.

Stu­dents aren’t the only peo­ple who get trapped in a bottom-up method. Bottom-up approaches are pop­u­lar when­ever the actual work tasks are vague and fin­ish­ing points are not clear. If your job is to improve the per­for­mance of a web­site, for exam­ple, it seems eas­ier to start with a cer­tain sched­ule of work­ing each day, rather than tasks and projects with spe­cific deadlines.

Sched­ul­ing Free­dom = Pro­duc­tive Lazi­ness
Another trap that is easy to fall into when you con­trol your own sched­ule is to assume that the time spent not work­ing, is unpro­duc­tive. While hours spent not work­ing may be frowned upon by employ­ers who pay by the hour, it isn’t impor­tant when you con­trol your own schedule.

The only thing that mat­ters when you con­trol your sched­ule, is whether the work gets done.

If you aren’t able to meet the dead­lines you set, you aren’t being pro­duc­tive. It doesn’t mat­ter whether you spend ten hours a day work­ing, either the dead­lines are unre­al­is­tic or you aren’t work­ing effec­tively. But the oppo­site is also true. If you’re meet­ing your dead­lines, work­ing fewer hours each day isn’t some­thing to be wor­ried about.

Set­ting Up a Top-Down Sched­ule
Set­ting up a work rou­tine from the top down, means you need to start with your end results. If you’re work­ing for an employer or client, those will prob­a­bly be given to you. The end result is the com­ple­tion of your project or reach­ing a spe­cific tar­get set by your employer.

If you’re a stu­dent on you are work­ing on your own projects, this means you need to fig­ure out what the final out­come should be. If you can clearly define this as a start­ing point, you can work back­wards to fig­ure out the tasks and dead­lines you need to set in order to reach it.

Part of the chal­lenge can be pick­ing an end result. If your job is increas­ing traf­fic for a web­site, you might want a mil­lion vis­i­tors a day. But that might not be real­is­tic if you’re only get­ting a few thou­sand a month. Pick­ing an end result means cut­ting off vague pos­si­bil­i­ties and cre­at­ing one target.

Once you have the end result, you need to work back­wards set­ting mile­stones and tasks designed to reach that tar­get. Except for goals that are com­pletely within your con­trol, this will often mean adjust­ing the plan fre­quently to meet your mile­stones and deadlines.

At the end of the process, you should end up with a list of tasks. For projects com­pletely under your con­trol, like writ­ing a book or fin­ish­ing a design, the tasks to com­plete won’t change much from your ini­tial plans. For goals that have some uncer­tainty, such as get­ting A’s or increas­ing web­site traf­fic, the tasks may vary from the ini­tial plan as you get more feedback.

When you end up with a list of tasks, you have the chance to be far more pro­duc­tive than with a bottom-up set of assigned hours. You can work when­ever you want, with flex­i­bil­ity, but you stay account­able to the end result. Work­ing on your own sched­ule can have chal­lenges, but it also gives you the oppor­tu­nity to do more while work­ing fewer hours.