Loading the day right & creating balance

2019 and 2020 were maddening for me, professionally. I worked the hardest I had worked ever, in my life. Our team had grown to four geos and we were in a really fast growth phase. Things were moving rapidly and given that I’d been in the team since the beginning, I was being pulled into several different directions.

Beyond this, I was also involved in additional organizational activities, such as recruitment, general strategy, working on some L&D initiatives and in general, managing partnerships & growth with other companies as well. All in all, a really fulfilling period of my career.

This was also the first time in my life that I had to multi-task within my core responsibilities and in cross-functional activities as well. And while I tried to do justice to all my professional responsibilities and was able to juggle most of them quite well, I had let my personal growth take a back seat. Both, physically and mentally (emotionally).

I believe in the philosophy of approaching a task or a day as we would approach life. Small things add up. Given how I was pushing myself to breaking point, and not loading the day correctly, slowly & steadily it started affecting my life too.

I would not eat right, did not focus on my fitness, there would be days when I would have to take a nap in the afternoon because of a bad headache and sometimes I’d have a call early in the morning and another one, late at night. There was no balance. I thought I’d fix it by loading all my calls to one part of the day, and keeping the remaining part of the day for ‘work’. Worked for some time but then I’d fall into a weird routine of trying to play catch up on work that was supposed to be done earlier or postponing calls to just match my timelines.

Over time I figured that the best way to manage my time, stay productive throughout a long 14-hour professional work-day (at times) and be as excited at night as I was when I walked into office in the morning was to focus on loading the day right. Basically, maintaining a balance of sorts. This helped focus on my tasks and also on my varied outward responsibilities.

So here are the five things I did to ensure that I loaded my day right —

#1 — Getting a head-start, in the morning, is important for?me

Ever since school, I’ve been a morning person. I’d always loved waking up early and studying — my peers never got it when I wouldn’t join them for all-nighters and group study sessions. I did not get the point of staying up and studying late into the night. On the contrary, I’d be up early (even 3am at times) and spend the quiet time studying, without any distractions.

This behaviour spilled over to my work-life as well. I loved getting to work early, and on most days, before 8.30am. It just gave me a head-start on my work, and have all my general tasks completed before different teams walked in.

Whenever I started my days late, I’d always be playing catch up and I don’t like that feeling. I like to be on top of my schedule and my work, all the time.

#2 — Spacing out and creating a?balance

On my worst days, I’d have at least 10 calls spaced out over a 9 hour period. I’d practically be jumping from one call to the next with very little (or no) buffer to reset or prepare. I realised that this adversely affected my contribution to the calls too.

If I spaced out my calls, I had time to jot down points, send out an MoM or action plan based on the previous call, and enough buffer to prepare for the next call. This ensured that my calls were mighty effective and I wasn’t left weary by the end of a work-day.

To ensure this was followed, I started to keep a weekly schedule more or less fixed. If any non-urgent calls were to be slotted in, I’d rather do them next week and not disturb the schedule that was already set. I started respecting the white spaces on my calendar a lot more. Even if I’m taking out time to just take a walk and grab some coffee. It was important to create that balance.

#3 — Harder things first or most dependencies first

There are two approaches to our work, in general. We can go for the low hanging fruits first and get done with the simple tasks quickly OR we can choose to tackle the hard stuff early on.

For me, both strategies worked, depending on the day. For example, I would ensure that I got to tasks that had team dependencies first. If my delay on a particular task could end up being a bottleneck for someone else, I’d do that task first. Then the harder individual tasks, and then the easy ones.

This allowed me to get to the harder tasks when I was the ‘freshest’ in the morning and towards the evening get to the simpler things. If I kept a very hard task for later, the stress of getting that task done would always loom on the horizon. I’d always think about that, no matter what I was doing.

Hence, the dependencies > hard tasks > simpler tasks strategy worked well for me.

#4— Noting down tasks, reviewing and always taking stock at the end of the?day

If it’s on my notebook, it’s off my mind. And if it’s off my mind, I have more mind-space. This was the mantra I lived by, and still do. Short-term, medium-term and long-term to-do lists help free up a whole lot of mind-space.

And I was so surprised by how much mind-space is taken up by all the mundane things we might have thought of some time in our lives and forgotten about it. Everything is inside the mind, somewhere or the other — That dream motorbike or the house we always wanted to buy or that trip we wanted to take with our family. Writing things down clears up a LOT of space.

For work to-do lists, while I practiced writing down all my tasks, I was pretty bad at going back to my to-do list and checking how I was progressing through the day. I would probably look at the day’s to-do list next day, in the morning. That did not help with overall efficiency. So I started forcing myself to look at my to-do list four to five times a day and also creating to-do lists for the next few days of the week as I progressed through the day.

This simple practice of following up on a good practice (of creating to-do lists) helps a lot, across functions and activities.

#5 — Finding time for the important things too

This is for all the workaholics in the world. An amazing human being who was interviewing me for a position a few weeks ago, told me that if I was selected, he’d be more interested in my motorbike rides than many others. I was intrigued. His point was that if people working with him did not feel fulfilled and did not feel like they were achieving their personal goals along with their professional ones, they’d not be happy & productive team members.

Hence, he’d rather we gave our all at work but also made it a point to achieve our personal goals too. There were no two ways about it.

This actually makes a whole lot of sense, doesn’t it? If we don’t achieve the goals we set for ourselves, at a personal level, no matter how successful a professional we are, we will always feel a bit incomplete inside. Over time this adds up and creates a sense of dissatisfaction inside us.

It’s always a good idea to plan for our personal goals, take out time for a course, for a trip or for family events. These are the things that we work for, earn for. If we lose out on the truly important things in our personal life, we will never be able to give our all, professionally. We can create a win-win and rock our entire LIFE.

So there you have it, these five mantras helped me implement the larger concept of ‘loading the day right’. This, in turn, helped me become a much more effective & meaningful person.

Cheers!