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Ass-Kicking Email – Don’t try to “balance” your workload

Hey,

In this email I’m going to explain why “balance” can actually make
you more stressed out and less productive.

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Don’t Try to “Balance” Your Workload

Life balance is a common topic thrown around these days. As a whole,
it’s a worthwhile discussion–particularly in academics where it’s
easy to see the learning experience in extremes.

While life balance as a whole is probably good, a mistake many make
is believing that means your workload should be balanced.

I’ll give you a simple example.

Let’s say you have 5 days you want to work next week and you have
5 chapters you need to read. Most people would say this is a simple
math problem: 5 / 5 = 1, therefore you should do one assignment each
day.

Wrong.

This method rarely works, for two reasons:

The first is that nothing in planning goes perfectly in execution.
So you complete the first three chapters no problem, but forget that
Thursday you have a friends birthday to attend, so you skip that.
Suddenly you’re overwhelmed on Friday, racing to the deadline.

Another way of putting it, is that procrastination will always
happen to some extent, so planning for perfection means planning to
fail.

The second reason is a bit deeper, psychologically.

This is that people don’t have a “work 50%” mental switch in their
head. Either you work 100% or you relax. Trying to do both usually
results in doing neither very well.

As a result, by setting an easy, “balanced” schedule your work
switch never flicks on completely, so you never get into that
productive mental flow that actually accomplishes a lot of work.

A better system is to make your workload unbalanced. Place too much
at the beginning so that you’ll have a brief period of intensity
followed by a longer period of relative relaxation.

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The Power of Top-Heaviness

This imbalance I call top-heaviness. By making your time top-heavy,
you get the productive surge early on, account for possible mishaps
and procrastination, and get a chance to relax after your work is
done.

In the Weekly/Daily Goals framework, there are two ways you can make
your time top-heavy:

1. Accomplish most your tasks early in the day.
2. Accomplish most your tasks early in the week.

For myself, I usually try to have 60% of my weekly goals done by
Wednesday. I also strive to get done at least 60% of my daily goals
by noon.

Top-heaviness is more about general principle than specifics, so
don’t hold yourself to a specific quota, just strive to make your
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday lists more intense than your ones
later in the week, and try to schedule your day similarly.

This may need modifications for your particular schedule, but the
key is to stop the balanced “smoothing” method of distributing your
work and try a “piling” approach.