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Cal Newport's Secret To Finishing Tasks On Time


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0:0 Cal's intro

Transcript

So a few more questions. I'm going to give quick answers, Jesse, because I know we're running a little late. So I'm going to be pithy. Sounds good. Next question is from Shibuzo, a health administrator in Nigeria. I find that I'm always excited to start things, but struggle with finishing them.

I'm constantly having competing overdue tasks on my assant. Where do I begin to stop this habit? Ah, typo. I think that's a sauna. They got typoed in there. Okay. So he must be using a sauna for, for his tasks. All right. If you're not completing things on time, there's two issues.

Either your plans are unrealistic. So you're giving yourself too much to do or your execution is too unfocused. So you have a reasonable load of things to do. You're just not doing it. Two different types of solutions, unrealistic plans. You want to do multi-scale planning. Here's what I'm working on this quarter of those things.

Here's what I'm working on this week of those things. Here's what I'm working on today. So you can see the whole ball game. You're not just bouncing around randomly. You also should use doubling heuristics, whatever lists you think is reasonable for you to do today, cut it in half.

However much time you think you should give yourself to complete a project, double it. So if you use those doubling heuristics, because people are bad at estimating how long things take place and you use multi-scale planning, you'll get a better grip over what are we working on? What's the reasonable load?

If your issue is unfocused execution, you need the time block plan. Otherwise, you're just bouncing through the day emails here, they're hoping that your energy carries you through execution. That's not sustainable. That's not scalable. Give every minute of your workday a job, make a reasonable plan for the time you have available, force yourself to actually make decisions about given this time, what do I actually want to do?

And when's the best time to do it? That's how things get done. Not just going randomly through a day with seven inboxes and WhatsApp open and just continually asking yourself, what do I feel like doing next? All right, let's roll.