Weekend Q&A Sessions: Balancing Daily Tasks and Growth
I have a lot to do but also want to grow in my skills
Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.
We are excited to have you in our community.
On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.
Here’s how it works
Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.
(No emails or personal details asked).
We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.
Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.
Past Solutions
Some problems are also recurring. Here are some simple tutorials you can follow to solve your problems:
I can’t focus and am unable to begin a deep work session
I spend too much time on email
I don’t know how to create an action plan
The Productivity Problem
This weekend we look at how we can balance daily work with growth tasks especially when we run multi-venture operations.
A subscriber wrote in:
I have 2 side hustles and a full time job as a performance marketing manager. I live in a different country to the businesses. One is a packaged food business and the other is a SaaS business. It’s really hard for me to switch between these 3 different worlds, especially working on e-commerce remotely (my main role is Growth).
This is a relatable problem because in most circumstances, we find ourselves doing multiple things to reduce financial risks.
You want to work in your daily job during the weekdays and on the weekends, you also want to try side hustles to increase your income.
However, over time, this grows and now, you have 3 different work streams to handle on a daily basis.
There are two main problems we directly see here:
The attention residue cost
The high cost of switching between different streams
How We Could Solve This
A. Embrace compartmentalization or time blocking
You already have a lot on your plate to handle daily:
Full-time job
SaaS business (other country)
Packaged food business (other country)
On a daily basis, you have to first work on your main job then switch to managing the SaaS and later the packaged food business.
The direct cost is attention residue as Sophie Leroy defined it.
“If you’re working on a budget spreadsheet and quickly check your phone to read a text message about a family issue, your brain doesn’t instantly snap back to the spreadsheet when you put the phone down. A portion of your working memory is still processing the text message. Your attentional space is crowded, leaving less room for the complex task at hand.”
How we overcome this is to adopt time blocking or compartmentalization where we work on only one task and complete it before switching to the next one.
The wisdom of Cal Newport in Slow Productivity, “Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.” works well here.
Writers such as Anthony Trollope mastered this. He could write only during his first waking hours (5:30am to 8am) then proceed to work in the post office.
This would work for you if you could fit the management of the SaaS and packaged food business during your non-working hours.
You would know that you only handle the side hustles before and after work, reducing the attention residue that’s making everything too difficult to switch.
B. Make the switch cleaner
Option A will work for you when if you can keep the operations compartmentalized in the different time blocks.
However, more often than not, this is hardly the case.
You may realize that you are still needed during the day to manage the side hustles even when you are working.
In such a case, what you need is the ability to switch between the different streams cleanly so that you can get back to your main work.
Because you don’t want to use company time in your own work activities, the most effective approach would be finishing your daily work that you are paid for and closing that session using a shutdown ritual.
Such a ritual helps you close one task so that you can focus on the other one.
“By creating a concrete plan for when and how you will finish the task later, you close the open loop in your brain, eliminating the attention residue before it can bleed into your personal life or next deep work session.”
If you can finish your daily deliverables on time, you can also create the time to work on your other side hustles without the open loops bleeding into your main work.
How We Could Leverage Tech
How we can leverage free tech such as ClickUp is to separate the tasks related to each of your streams.
Have tasks related to your professional work in one workspace and those linked to personal hustles in another workspace.
Before switching between the different worlds, run your shutdown ritual, which is to simply review the unfinished tasks and set a plan to finish them.
This is how you can do it in only a few minutes.
#Step 1
Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).
Create 3 workspaces and name them accordingly:
Professional (9-5)
SaaS
Packaged business
#Step 2
In each of the workspaces, create a list of tasks you need to do daily.
An example could be:
Professional (9-5) - meetings, reports, deliverables
SaaS - reports, meetings
Packaged business - reports, meetings
For your 9-5 work, these might be some of the tasks to be done.
For your packaged food business, these might be some of the weekly tasks to be done.
(You’d adapt these tasks based on what you need to do).
#Step 3
Use statuses to prioritize tasks you need to focus on and plan the rest.
For example,
Do Now - what must be done now without wasting time
Planning - what you are planning to do
Update required - what needs updates to proceed
Complete - what has been done during the day
This way you can prioritize your tasks for the week as follows
#Step 4
Leverage Super Agents to keep you on track with your different workspaces.
The traditional approach would be to check each workspace daily to know what needs your attention. However, this is ineffective.
Instead, adopt a superagent that updates you every morning about what needs your attention.
What you do is to click the AI menu > Create Agent.
What you want is the digests and updates super agent.
Select daily summaries of your projects.
Follow all prompts until the agent is created.
You can chat it to give you today’s digest and avoid the tax of wondering “what’s the progress on X?” and the results show up.
You will see what moved in the last 24 hrs, what’s overdue, due the next day and stuck.
This way, you can make switching between tasks cleaner.
Try it free in ClickUp.
Coming Up Next Week: Lack of Focus
We look at a case study where a subscriber lacks focus because they are handling too many personal problems.
The Q&A sessions showcase a sample of what we cover in the paid tier - actionable and easy to-do solutions for your productivity problems.
Paid subscribers also access models, frameworks, and playbooks to solve modern productivity problems that no one talks about such as career antifragility, AI brain fog, fear of stepping into new roles etc.
Upgrade for the full experience.
That’s it for now.
Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.
As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!
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Catch you again soon.
Have a great day :)