2. 3 Introduction
Part 1: Useful ideas about designing your day
10 Managing time and energy
16 Lists
20 Workflow
22 Delegating and outsourcing
22 Habits
24 Neuroscience
32 Planning life (not just work)
33 Happiness and purpose
Part 2: How to design your day
38 Design thinking, meet productivity
44 Observation
46 Prioritise first
48 Design the shape of your day
54 Defending your day
60 Conclusion: Taking others with you
62 Further reading
Contents.

4. 3Designing Your Day Introduction
Introduction.
This book is about a powerful idea:
making the choice to design your day
so that you can perform at your best.
People who achieve a great deal have
always spent time thinking about
how they can be more effective.
Some of these great minds have left
us clues - or even clear instructions -
as to how they organised themselves
and their day to get more done, or
more importantly get more of what
they wanted to get done. (We’ll
look at some of those inspiring
individuals throughout the ebook.)
Designing your day involves a
conscious rejection of the idea
that you can just work harder. No
amount of ego-fuelled posturing
can make people work effectively
in the long term just by committing
ever-increasing hours. Indeed, plenty
of research has shown that long
hours radically erode productivity.
Your time, energy and thinking
processes all impose constraints
on what you can do - and when you
know and accept this, you can design
your day much more effectively.
There are many productivity and
time-management models out
there - and we list many of the good
ones in part one of the ebook - but
there is no single model that fits
everyone. Different brain types suit
different working styles and different
productivity systems. We’re not
advocating any particular scheme, just
a framework that makes the most of
them and helps you to choose the
right approach for designing your day.

5. 4Designing Your Day Introduction
The challenge.
Dr David Rock, an expert on applying
neuroscience in the workplace,
compares the scenario knowledge
workers are facing with technology
now to the one the first drivers faced
100 years ago. When cars were first
used on first used on public roads,
it took about ten to fifteen years for
rules of the road to emerge: rights
of way, traffic signs, speed limits and
the like, and until these rules came
into force, accidents were common.
There are no rules of the road for
the connected age yet. Mobile
devices connect us to everyone
we know and work with, put the
sum of human knowledge at
our fingertips, give us limitless
possibilities for entertainment -
and distraction. It’s as if we’re back
in those first days of the road again
- we have access to these powerful
machines, but we don’t really
know how to use them effectively,
safely and considerately yet.
With news, email and social networks
demanding attention on our screens,
it is easy to be distracted by constant
busyness without actually achieving
much. A constant buzz of emails, calls
and meetings can create an illusion
of productivity that convinces you
that you’re working hard, even when
you’re not actually getting much done.
You end up trapped in a responsive
mode of working, riding high on the
dopamine hits of small achievements
- pressing “send” on an email reply,
finishing a meeting having completed
the agenda, crossing the easy items
off your to-do list - but without
really taking control of how you are
spending your time, or prioritising it to
make sure what you are doing has the
most value to you and your employer.
Ironically, this is in effect a form of
laziness - taking the easy route to a
feeling of work satisfaction, without
having the discipline and courage
to test if that feeling is genuine.

6. 5Designing Your Day Introduction
The alternative is relaxed productivity
- a day where you achieve personal
and professional goals (or make
progress on them at least) without
becoming overwhelmed by work or
the incoming information you are
dealing with. You are focused and
effective, without feeling unduly
pressured, because you have a clear
picture of what you are doing when
and why. You respond to incoming
information from colleagues and
others involved in your work at
defined times, and you have the
flexibility to adapt your plans to match
any changes promoted by others.
The scientific evidence is clear:
multitasking is a myth − certainly
in your prefrontal cortex, the part
of your brain that does the active
thinking. We actually work on the
basis of sequential focus, and that
focus can only be applied to a very
limited number of ideas at one time.
Performing complex tasks is actually
a process of addressing a large
number of smaller tasks in sequence.
Focus is all, and it is precious -
because it is so easily broken.
Maintaining focus and flow will be a
core issue we examine in our second
ebook, but for now, remember that
you need to design your day in such
a way that you can protect yourself
from interruptions when you need to
perform detailed or complex tasks.

7. 6Designing Your Day Introduction
Why design your day?
But why design your day yourself? Why not just learn from others,
and copy best practice for productivity?
Even place-based concepts like
“home working” or “mobile working” don’t
really capture the shift that’s going on.
Right now, there isn’t any best
practice. The old rules and structures
of working life have been overturned
by technology. Working tools are
no longer tied to a particular place.
Pervasive connections, cloud storage
and flexible devices mean that we
are no longer
dependent on
a particular
locale to have
access to the
people, information and tools we
need to do our jobs. Our phones
allow us to tap into our documents,
our colleagues, clients and suppliers
wherever we are in the world. For
many, our devices are our new
offices, ones we can throw in a bag
and take with us wherever we go.
Even place-based concepts like
“home working” or “mobile working”
don’t really capture the shift that’s
going on. Place is no longer a vital
component of information work. If
we work anywhere, we work in the
flow: the flow of information, people
and communication. Flow also
describes the way that many aspire
to work - fluidly, adapting to changing
circumstances, but still with a focused
direction. It is fundamentally different
to the industrial-era approach that
has defined so much working theory
until recently.
Shifts like this
cause dissonance,
tension and
confusion. Many people take comfort
in familiar, traditional structures,
because they are tried and tested.
They minimise risk. Other people
are naturally risk-averse, and
for them, this is an uncomfortable
time. The old structures of work are
breaking down, and new ones will take
time to develop. People cling to the
old certainties even as they become
inefficient and damaging. Working
in the old office paradigm, tied to
a desk and a standard daily routine
leaves employees less efficient, less
passionate and, in aggregate, that
leaves companies less competitive.

8. 7Designing Your Day Introduction
Competition in the marketplace will
eventually drive the traditionalists
out of business, and any illusion
of structural comfort with them.
In the meantime, though, some
people will have to take charge of
figuring out how we work in this new
era. They will need to experiment,
to actively challenge their own
preconceptions about work - and
those of the people around them -
while integrating it into their working
day. Risky? Sure. Anything new is risky.
Challenging? Indeed. There are no
clearly marked trails for you to follow,
so you have to define your own path
without the comfort of knowing the
best route - and the likely pitfalls.
The rewards, both in terms of
increased productivity and
competitiveness, are great
though, and the satisfaction
of being a genuine work-style
innovator is immense.
Fundamentally, it’s about being
flexible enough to deal effectively
with the information, projects and
challenges coming at us, but without
letting them dictate every second of
our working days. It’s about having the
mental safeguards in place to allow
you the focus you need - and about
acknowledging those things you
can’t control - then working around
them to control everything else. It’s
about taking personal responsibility
for your time and productivity,
not letting it be completely
dictated by external factors.

10. Part 1:
Designing
your day.
Useful ideas about designing your day.
There is no right way to design your
day. While it can be useful to compare
and contrast designs with others,
or take inspiration from the work
routines of high achievers like artists
and historical figures, your perfect
day, or even just a good, effective
day, is something you need to take
responsibility for creating. It takes
a plan and it takes discipline and
determination to execute in the face
of everything life might throw at you.
We are going to start with a look
at useful ideas that help you
design and manage your day.

11. Managing time
and energy.
Designers talk a lot about
“constraints” when they are
approaching a brief. For this
brief to design your day, the two
fundamental constraints are time
and energy: how many hours you
are awake, and how much energy
you have to get things done.
Time is relatively easy to plan,
but as anyone who has planned a
series of back-to-back meetings
and then tried to write a strategy
plan or something that requires
some creative thought can tell you,
even without interruptions, not all
hours are equally productive.
A calendar showing the available
hours in the day does not tell the
whole story of what energy you have
to draw on and what you will be able
to achieve. When you think about
designing your day, you need to
work on two axis - time and energy.
10Designing Your Day Managing time and energy

12. 11Designing Your Day Managing time and energy
Time.
Diaries are many people’s primary tool
for planning their day. They may be
electronic now, but this is a tradition
that dates back hundreds of years.
Diaries that you could use to plan
your day were first popularised in
1800s Britain by Thomas Letts, a
bookbinder. They were intended
for merchants to use to record
transactions in, but were also a
useful way to schedule appointments
and tasks throughout the day.
Combined with the spread of more
affordable and smaller clocks and
timepieces, the industrial age gave
rise to an obsession with time in the
workplace, that continues to this day.
In the late 19th century, the
assembly-line and mass production
was accompanied by Frederick Taylor’s
famous “time and motion” concept.
Taylorism, as it became known, made
people think about themselves and
their workers like machines, focusing
on measurable outputs from words
typed to numbers crunched, to
items on a to do list checked off.
Organisational cultures have often
supported this perspective. Time is
easier and less complex to measure
than the seemingly intangible
concepts of energy and ability to
focus on creative and strategic
thinking, for instance. We plan
projects with hours and outputs
tightly correlated, though the best
project managers build in margins and
flex for - among other things - the
unpredictable performance
of individuals.

13. 12Designing Your Day
Energy.
Like time, energy is a finite resource.
If you simply block out the days with
meetings and demanding activity like
analysis, writing or creative thinking,
you are making an impossible promise
to yourself. Allocating blocks of time
to activities and work with others is
useful - and often non-negotiable -
but the question you need to ask
as you chart out the hours is: what
will be happening to your energy
levels while you are doing this?
When sports coach Jim Loehr starting
working with business people he was
shocked by the difference between
their expectations and their actual
ability to perform at their peak.
When he was working with athletes
a key indicator of their performance
had been “return to resting heart
rate” - how quickly they could begin
recovering from bursts of exertion.
The key to an athlete’s
performance is often recovery.
If you were to train for a marathon,
as well as putting in the miles, you
would need to schedule rest days
and even easier weeks. And if you ran
a marathon, you wouldn’t expect to
run one the next week - not without
your performance diminishing and
incurring a significant risk of injury.
Rest is key to getting fitter
and to performing at your full
potential - it lets your energy levels
recover and your body mend.
Working with your mind is no different.
You need times during the year, as
well as each week and each day where
you can recover your energy levels in
order to perform at a high - or even
sufficient - level. Sometimes this
means actual rest and relaxation -
taking a walk, having lunch, a chat
with colleagues - but you can also
recover by doing a different type of
work that uses your mind differently
- reading for instance, tidying up or
doing some undemanding admin.
That’s right, the good/bad news is
that mundane tasks might actually
make you more productive.
On a day-to-day level, mental
activity can be physically tiring too.
The brain uses 20% of our body’s
energy, by some estimates. When
you think hard you use up some of
your supply blood glucose, which
is finite and needs to be restored.
Managing time and energy

14. 13 Managing time and energy
The consensus from experts in
energy management and brain
science suggests you include the
following elements when you
design your day to make the most
of limited stores of energy:
More breaks.
Short breaks from intense work
can help you focus for longer. The
trick is to find an optimal rhythm
for different types of work.
Exercise and moving around.
People who have an exercise regime
will have more energy. Getting up and
moving around your office or going
outside for a quick walk can help keep
your energy up.
Sleep and naps.
A good night’s sleep is essential
for good energy levels, so plan
to get to bed at a decent time. If
you are low on sleep, naps - even
short ones - are hugely effective.
Snacks and meals.
Eating well and having regular
healthy snacks can help maintain
your energy levels. Unhealthy foods,
especially sugar, will cause spikes
and crashes in your blood sugar.
More holidays.
Taking holidays is an important part of
managing your energy. Some experts
suggest that more long weekends and
one-week holidays are better than
taking a couple of longer breaks.
Focused bursts.
A more efficient way of using your
energy is to focus on one task or
a series of similar tasks in a burst.
Some people use timers to help trick
themselves with a mini-deadline.

15. 14Designing Your Day Managing time and energy
Knowledge workers.
In 1959, management thinker Peter
Drucker famously coined the term
“knowledge worker” to describe
people who were paid to think rather
than perform physical labour.
Working with your mind was not a
new thing, of course, it was just -
with the advance of automation
and the growing communications
revolution, becoming something
a lot more people were doing.
As Drucker noted in the opening of
his seminal article Managing Oneself
in Harvard Business Review in 1999:
“History’s great achievers - Napoleon,
da Vinci, Mozart - have always
managed themselves. That, in
large measure, is what makes
them great achievers. But they
are rare exceptions, so unusual
both in their talents and their
accomplishments as to be
considered outside the boundaries
of ordinary human existence. Now,
most of us, even those of us with
modest endowments, will have
to learn to manage ourselves.”

16. 15Designing Your Day Managing time and energy

17. Lists.
Besides diaries, calendars and time-
planners, the other perennial tool
for managing your day is the list.
Task lists can probably tell you as
much about a person’s personality
and working day as a glance at their
office or the contents of their bag.
Lists are by turns compulsive,
reassuring and sometimes
overwhelming; used as
organisational life-rafts and
abandoned as impossible burdens.
People organise their to-do lists
on paper, in apps, spreadsheets.
From a neurological point of view
they relieve the mental burden of
trying to hold several tasks in your
working memory and allow you
to concentrate on prioritising.
Even if you have a task list on the
go, starting again can be helpful: a
new list can be like casting fresh eyes
on the problem of what to do next
and how to get everything you need
to do completed. Sometimes this
sense of a new perspective can be
boosted by trying a different method
of list-making - using a white board or
index cards and Post-its to visualise
and reorder what needs to be done.
16Designing Your Day Lists

18. 17Designing Your Day
GTD - the ultimate
to-do list?
A time management classic that
spawned something close to a
movement of devotees as well as
hundreds of apps organised around
its principles, Getting Things Done
(GTD to its fans) by David Allen
took the idea of the to-do list to
its logical conclusion: a watertight
system for managing everything.
Everything you think of as a task
or project goes into an inbox to be
processed into different buckets
to be attended to, or simply
filed for future consideration.
The system takes some setting up -
Allen recommends a weekend, at least,
to get things in order - and requires
discipline to make it work. As with
many time management systems
though, many who have tried it take
away a few key, valuable lessons and
principles that help them greatly.
It’s recommended reading, but
here are a few key learnings:
• Two-minute rule.
If you are putting something on your
list that would only take a couple of
minutes, you should do it right now.
• Next action.
The emphasis should always be on
asking “what next”? Adding a whole
project to your to-do list is sometimes
unrealistic and can become a mental
block, because it’s too big to tackle
you avoid it. Rather than noting
down “write presentation” we should
have “plan presentation process” or
“begin research for presentation”.
• Weekly reviews.
Allen advocates taking time out during
the week to clear clutter from inboxes
and lists and review how things
are going. This “appointment with
yourself” approach, scheduled in your
diary is a great way to keep any week
on track.
Lists

19. If you want to see a really big,
ambitious to-do list, take a look at
Thomas Edison’s from one day in
1888. It is scrawled over five pages,
is titled “Things doing and to be
done” and includes projects such
as “deaf apparatus”, “artificial cable”,
“electrical piano” and “ink for blind”.
The ultimate to-do
list: Thomas Edison.
Lists

21. Workflow.
Workflow will be familiar to web developers and users of some enterprise
software platforms, but on an individual level, it means finding the most
efficient personal process for completing a task - a kind of personal
production line.
You can develop and optimise your
personal workflows for the simplest
of tasks - what’s the quickest way to
clear an email inbox, for instance?
Probably not email by email, in date
order. You could triage, deleting
non-urgent mails to make space,
replying to high priority individuals
and requests, adding to-do lists
and scheduling time for tasks where
required, then scanning for other
important/time-sensitive mails, and
finally scanning and filing or deleting
the “FYIs” and round robins.
For a more complex task, say writing a
presentation, a defined workflow with
phases that allow you to do a good job
with the right tools can be beneficial.
20Designing Your Day Workflow

22. For instance:
• Research.
Gather new knowledge and pertinent
data, using online research, contacts
and resources like social bookmarking.
• Decide on insight.
Review what you’ve learned
and list your key insights and
points you want to get across.
• Craft your story.
Outline how you want the
presentation to run.
• Pull together visuals.
Develop slides and/or other
supporting materials for
your presentation.
• Refine.
Proof and sense-check - this
should include having someone
else give feedback.
• Deliver.
Give the presentation.
• Share.
Post materials online if
appropriate and/or send links/
documents to attendees.
Review feedback and process. Take
time to look at any feedback and
think about what could be done
better next time, both in terms of
content/delivery and your workflow.

23. 22Designing Your Day
Delegating and
outsourcing.
Obviously, one way to clear your to-do list is to
get other people to do things for you.
No matter how experienced
someone is, delegation takes
discipline and planning - and it is
the up-front investment in these
aspects that too often deters
us from delegating to others.
We have all been told the how and why
of delegating at some point. Making
a habit of it, developing systems for
deciding what and how to delegate
and who to are the challenges.
For a useful reminder of the essentials
of delegating, read Harvard Business
Review contributing editor and
business consultant Amy Gallo’s blog
post: “Why aren’t you delegating?”
Delegating and outsourcing

24. 23Designing Your Day
Outsourcing
your work.
Just a logical step further than delegating tasks
is the idea of personal outsourcing.
Delegating and outsourcing
Organisations routinely outsource
things that are not a core
competency, but it is completely
feasible for individuals to
outsource tasks to others - it
just takes some organisation.
Personal outsourcing and virtual PA
services are common now, but the
concept was popularised by Tim Ferris
in a book called The Four Hour Work
Week. Ferris advocates “lifestyle
design”, developing career plans
with “mini-retirements” and - of
most relevance to designing your
day - “elimination” of tasks and work
which someone else can do more
cheaply than your time is worth.
While few people may have
successfully followed all of the
recommendations of The Four
Hour Work Week, its focus on what
you want your life to look like and
ruthless attitude to minimising
low-value tasks is something
many of us could learn from.
Going too far.
Famously, one over-zealous personal
out-sourcing effort came to light
in early 2013, when a US security
software developer was discovered
to have hired someone in China to
his work for him. The difference
between his salary and the cost
of this made it worthwhile.
The deception didn’t exactly liberate
the US developer however, he still
spent a lot of time in the office, albeit
surfing the web idly, rather than
doing anything useful with his time.

25. 24Designing Your Day Habits
Habits.
Habits are why you can do something
like listen to a podcast or audiobook
while driving without putting yourself
in danger - the mechanism of driving
is locked into the basal ganglia, leaving
spare cognitive capacity to listen.
It’s this outsourcing of repetitive tasks
to a more energy-efficient part of the
brain that makes habits an incredibly
powerful tool to apply to your working
life. Identify things which you need
to do repeatedly in a constrained
but automatic way, and make them
habits. Research suggests that habit
formation can take a long time -
months in most cases - but building
the right patterns into your day allows
you to do so without committing
much effort into the process.
A habit is a process which has been repeated often enough to
root itself in the brain (the basal ganglia, to be precise) meaning
it can be performed without much conscious effort.

26. Designing Your Day
Outgrowing bad habits.
Habits
Many of us have already established
a habit of opening our e-mail app
whenever we look at or use our
phones, and that means we’re
committing time to that activity
without making a choice to do so. That
might be OK - if dipping in and out
of e-mail is important in maintaining
your flow - but if it’s a distraction, it
needs challenging and breaking. That’s
why the review stage of designing
your day is so important. Without that
you can’t identify and break habits
that are stealing time away from you.
When you’ve identified them, you
can work out what the structure
of the habit is and, in particular,
what triggers the behaviour.
Once you know that, you can
grow a new habit to replace it.
One bad habit many people have is
checking emails the moment that they
wake up. Without giving themselves
a chance to wake up properly and
make plans for the day they can find
themselves in a minor state of crisis
or problem-solving. At one of the
designing your day workshops we held,
someone suggested that a better
habit to grow would be spending
a little time reading some articles
they had saved on their tablet.
Conversely, designing your day gives you the
structure you need to break bad habits.

27. The original habits
of a highly effective
person: Aristotle.
We might call Aristotle the original
over-achiever. He studied almost
every subject of his day - including
physics, anatomy, geology and
astronomy - and made his mark on
all of them. Philosopher, polymath
and teacher of Alexander the Great,
Aristotle noted that “excellence is
not an act, but a habit” - a clue to
his personal management, perhaps.
26Designing Your Day Habits
Habits.

29. 28Designing Your Day Neuroscience
Neuroscience.
We are in the middle of a revolution
in the understanding of how our
brains work.
As neuroscience - a field which
combines several disciplines, including
psychology, chemistry and philosophy
- expands what we know about our
brains, the lessons are beginning
to be applied in the workplace.
We have gathered some insights
that will be helpful in designing
your day. To find out more about
this fascinating subject, take a
look at Your Brain at Work, by
Dr David Rock and Thinking Fast
and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Thinking is expensive
As discussed in the section on
managing time and energy, the brain
uses about 20% of our blood glucose
each day, most being consumed by
the prefrontal cortex, a small section
at the front of your brain responsible
for conscious thought. When you
think hard about something you use
up glucose and deplete your ability to
think about other things. The more
decisions you make, the harder it gets
to make them.
We need to complete things
One of the reasons that finishing
tasks - or reading books, or articles
- is so satisfying is that it closes a
loop. Leave something undone and
your mind will return to it again and
again, burning more precious energy.
This applies as much to an unfinished
expense report as to an email that
needs a reply, or a bulb that needs
replacing at home. This is the reason
why so many of us love lists, or more
precisely, ticking items off on lists.
Toward and away modes
The brain has two basic mental states
- “toward” and “away”. The former is
positive, open and engaged, while
“away” is negative, defensive and
withdrawn. If you feel threatened or
too stressed, your ability to think well
is limited. Asking yourself which state
you are in during different times of
the day can help you control this. If
you are in an “away” state and need to
think clearly or creatively, you should
do anything you can to change your
mood to a “toward” state.

30. 29Designing Your Day
The Goldilocks brain
Dr David Rock talks about the
“Goldilocks brain” where things have
to be “just right” to achieve peak
performance. In order to operate
at your best, you need to be in a
positive state, but you also need
to be stimulated by a potential
reward or threat. So while stress
and the “away” mode can limit
your thinking, you sometimes need
a little bit in order to motivate
yourself to get on with things.
Our subconscious supercomputers
The conscious mind uses a very small
fraction of the brain. If you let it, your
subconscious can do a lot of problem-
solving and thinking for you. The trick
is to relax - as Don Draper advises
his protégé in Mad Men, in order to
come up with a creative solution “Just
think about it deeply, then forget it…
then an idea will jump up in your face.”
When you are designing your day, you
can think of breaks and mundane
tasks not just as an opportunity to
allow your brain’s energy levels to
recover, but also for high quality
thinking to go on in the background.
No multitasking
Many of us have heard that
multitasking isn’t such a good idea,
but we still do it anyway. The problem
is two-fold: it makes us look very
busy and we literally get slightly
high on the hormone (dopamine)
our brain gives us as a reward for
answering email or using our social
networks. The problem is, it is an
illusion - we are getting less done
and we are doing it less well than
if we did one thing at a time.
Our brains operate best sequentially-
tackling one task after another.
Multitasking is best described as what
coach and McKinsey adviser Caroline
Webb called “procrastination in
disguise”.
Neuroscience

31. 30Designing Your Day Neuroscience
Thinking on the move:
Charles Darwin.
Darwin’s prodigious output as
a scientist relied on lab work he
performed in the morning. In
the afternoon he would walk
circuits of his garden’s “Thinking
Path”, while he reflected on his
work and thought deeply.
The evidence from neuroscience
suggests that this is an extremely
effective strategy for helping get
the most from your brain. In his
book, Brain Rules, Dr John Medina
says that we evolved to walk many
miles a day and think best when we
get lots of this kind of mild exercise.
Neuroscience.

33. Planning life (not
just work).
Designing Your Day is obviously a book with the business of work
at its core. When you look at a design for your day - a timeline or a
diary page, for instance - work will be at its core, but the other things
that fill up the rest of your day should be considered as well.
The idea of “work/life balance” is
troubling to some, because it seems
to set the two things in opposition,
when they are part of the same
day, the same person. Work and
life outside of work support one
another in so many ways. When you
arrive at work alert, engaged and
healthy, ready to perform, to be the
best you can be, it is because you
are a whole person - supported by
home, a social network of family
and friends, your own interests and
passions, and a healthy lifestyle.
Your non-work life supports your
work and also makes demands on
you - you need to make sure you
have allocated time and energy to
everything that is important to you.
The idea of “balance” is also a tricky
one. Sometimes you need to throw
yourself into your work completely,
at an unsustainable level, in order
to make the most of an opportunity
or to respond to a crisis. This is
normal and necessary, but when you
are designing days where work has
squeezed out family time, social life,
exercise, you have to be aware that
this can only go on for a short while.
Dr David Rock and Dr Daniel Siegel
have a model for how this works from
a neuroscience point of view, called
The Healthy Mind Platter. In the same
way as you would make food choices
to ensure different types of nutrition
are represented in your diet, Rock
and Siegel suggest you need to have
different types of thinking - including
socialising, play, exercise and focus
- in order to reach your potential.
32Designing Your Day Planning life (not just work)

34. Happiness and
purpose.
Knowing yourself starts with having a clear idea of who you
are - your past, the skills you have built, the experiences
you bring to bear - and where you are going.
Like any well put together
organisational strategy, making the
right decisions about where to put
your focus and where to allocate
resources is far easier if you have a
clear idea of what your purpose is.
Having purpose is not just sound
advice for life, it has a bearing on
your practical effectiveness each
day. Knowing why you come to work
and how that fits in with your idea of
who you are lowers anxiety, making a
“toward” state easier to achieve, which
in turn makes you more effective.
Over the past decade or so a body
of thinking has emerged about
the importance of happiness
at work. Some individuals and
organisations - famously Zappos -
put the happiness of their people
right at the heart of their strategy.
Some Scandinavian countries have
a word “arbeijdsglaede” to describe
happiness at work, it’s a shame that
word doesn’t exist in more languages.
The evidence is that happiness
makes you more productive, more
creative and more resilient.
Happiness shouldn’t be a bonus,
it should be the foundation of a
productive day. It begins with
a personal sense of purpose.
Happiness and purpose33Designing Your Day

35. 34Designing Your Day

36. Part 2:
How to
design
your day.
Useful ideas about designing your day.
The critical idea in this approach
is not about making grand, life-
changing commitments, but rather
making small changes one day at a
time and learning from your
ordsuccesses and failures.
Design one day. Review it.
Design another.

37. 36Designing Your Day
How to design
your day.
The days quickly turn into weeks and months until you find
yourself in a radically different place than when you started, but
without setting yourself up for the sense of failure - and likely
project abandonment - that a sweeping resolution brings.
36Designing Your Day How to design your day

38. 37Designing Your Day
The key principle is stepping back:
taking time out of the process of
work to prioritise, plan and finally
review effectiveness day-by-day.
This structure gives you the freedom
to concentrate on those things that
are most important. Successful
people don’t have more time, energy,
or freedom than the rest of us - they
just use what they do have better.
Begin each day with a set of
questions:
What do I want to achieve today?
What do I need to achieve today?
How much time do I have available?
Where do I need to be?
Once you know what matters, you
can plan your day to make it likely
that it happens. You won’t always
succeed in implementing the things
you design into your day exactly as
you wanted, but that’s OK. Learn
from that failure, and begin again
tomorrow. Each day is, in effect, a
prototype - but it’s a prototype of a
product that will never be finished.
How to design your day
As you get better at reviewing your
day, every day, it becomes easier
to see what activities are making
low-value contributions to your
life - and consciously try to plan
them out of existence. You trade
low-value activities for high-value
ones, and make your working day
substantially more effective within
the same time constraints.
However, nothing can liberate
you from those constraints.
As we explored in part one, we all have
time, energy and personal limits on
what we can achieve in a working day.
The aim is to take those constraints
and use them as a structure to
build the rest of your day around.
Instead of being limitations you
push against, they become a
constructive and accepted part of
your working day. Knowing your
limits is a critical factor in design.
Design always has an aim. Your
aim for designing your day is
sustainable productivity.

39. 38Designing Your Day
Design thinking,
meet productivity.
The devices we use, the chairs and
desks we sit at, the vehicles that
transport us, the buildings and public
spaces we move through - all of
them have been shaped by designers
and the method of design thinking.
Why not apply the same processes
to how you work - to creating
more effective habits and routines
and what we talk about at Nokia
as a “smarter everyday”?
Brilliant minds and thousands of hours of their thinking have
been invested in designing the world in which we work.
38Designing Your Day Design thinking, meet productivity

40. 39Designing Your Day Design thinking, meet productivity
The Wikipedia entry at the
time of writing this ebook
describes design thinking as:
“the methods and processes for
investigating ill-defined problems,
acquiring information, analysing
knowledge, and positing solutions
in the design and planning fields.”
That lays out a good case for why
you should take a design approach
to how you shape your day, optimise
the way you use your time and energy
to get things done. The problem of
how to stay focused amidst the roar
of distracting demands and make the
right calls about where to spend your
attention through your working day is
“ill-defined”, but through a process of
analysis and trying out solutions, you
can find better ways to work (and live).
Tim Brown is one of the founders of
IDEO, a leading design consultancy.
He and his firm have played a large
role in popularising the idea of design
thinking and applying it to business
problems. In late 2012, on his blog,
Tim suggested applying design
thinking in our lives, concluding his
post with the tantalising provocation:
“Think of today as a prototype.
What would you change?”
What is design thinking?
You may be aware of the concept of design thinking, or at least have
heard it mentioned, but let’s pause for a moment and understand
exactly what it is and why we can use it in our everyday lives.

41. 40Designing Your Day Design thinking, meet productivity
Five-step design
thinking process.
Let’s take a look at a simple model of how the design process works and then
some key ideas designers use that you can apply to designing your day.
The design process might be mapped out in the following stages once a
brief or challenge has been set:
Discovery.
Observe and try to understand what
is happening in the current situation.
Use empathy to understand why
people behave in the ways that
they do. Develop insights about the
challenge.
Define the challenge.
Based on what you understand
about the challenge, the people
and the behaviours involved, work
out the best way to describe it.
Asking the right questions, using
the right language to frame or re-
frame the challenge is crucial to
developing an effective solution.
Ideas.
Develop ideas - as many as possible,
without restrictions - about possible
solutions to the challenge. Think
about what the best possible
solutions might look like.
Prototype.
Select an idea and try to make it real
as quickly as possible. For product
designers this means building a model,
no matter how rough, so that they
can see how it works. Website and
software designers will create bare-
bones versions of the product. Service
designers may start storyboarding
what the customer experience will be
like or mocking up physical locations.
Test and Iterate.
Create and test working prototypes.
Each new version - called an iteration
- is an improvement on the last. If you
were designing a product or a piece
of software you would say at the end
of this process that it was time to ship
the product or put it on the market.
For the purposes of designing your
day, you can probably say that you
will always be iterating, adjusting to
some extent how you design each day.

42. Discover
Define
Ideas
Prototype
Test and iterate

43. Create the right conditions.
Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s head of
design, talks about “creating the
right conditions for innovation”
as being essential to his design
process. In practical terms this
means having the right people in
the room, the right atmosphere
and the right tools to hand.
Three
more
useful
concepts
from
design
thinking.
42Designing Your Day Design thinking, meet productivity

44. 43Designing Your Day
Learn from failure.
Designers expect to fail during the
process of finding a solution. In
fact failure is vital to the process
of finding the best solution. When
days don’t work out, when plans go
awry, you should look for what you
can learn from the experience and
what you can improve next time
around, rather than feeling bad.
Constraints are liberating.
We might think that creative minds
like designers can’t stand being
limited by process. In fact they
crave that structure, seeing the
process and acknowledgement
of constraints as essential to
creativity. Designing your day around
the constraints of your work and
personal life can still leave room
for creative and strategic thinking.

45. 44Designing Your Day
Observation.
To design your own day, first you have to understand how you work.
This may be more difficult than you think. Somehow we can have the ability
to both be incredibly critical of ourselves (“I am terrible at staying focused!”)
and overly flattering (“If there’s a deadline, I’ll hit it, no matter what.”).
Observing how you work requires a
little rigour. Here we have gathered
some approaches which might help:
• Keep a work diary for a few days:
Note down the things you have
done in each hour. You might also
make a note of your energy level,
and how happy and motivated you
feel. Use a scale like marks out of
ten to give some consistency.
• Write a timeline.
Sketch out the 24 hours of the
day and note what you do in
each. When you sleep, travel,
read, the types of work you do,
when you take breaks, etc.
• Bad day/good day.
Based on your notes or from memory,
create a timeline or free-form
visualisation of what a bad day looks
like. What’s not working? What’s
getting in the way? Then try showing
what an ideal day looks like: when you
are really getting great work done,
have enough time for family and
friends, and get a good night’s sleep.
• Be dispassionate.
Be as dispassionate as possible, as
if you were analysing the actions of
someone you had never met before.
Try to be relatively non-judgemental
and simply curious: “I wonder why I
leave all of those windows open on
my computer all of the time?” “Why
do I add something I have just done to
my to-do list and then cross it out?”
• List your insights.
Based on your observations, list some
insights you have about yourself. What
do you do well? When do you do it?
What are the things you need in order
to be able to work well? Where do
things go wrong? What are habits that
work well and which get in the way?
• Get feedback.
Talk to a trusted colleague or friend
and ask for their impressions of you
at work. Do they think you are well
organised, happy, effective? Where
do they think you could improve? If
you have listed some insights about
yourself, ask them if they agree.
44Designing Your Day Observation

46. 45Designing Your Day Observation
Your body
doesn’t stand
a chance on a
caffeine and
sugar hit.
Use your
Mornings wisely,
its when you
have the most
energy.
Email and
meetings can
rule your day -
if you let
them.
Exhausted and
demoralised, you need
a drink! But alcohol
may disrupt precious
sleep and lead to poor
food choices, making it
less likely you’ll be on
your A game
tomorrow...
Sleep is the most
important factor in
having good
cognitive function -
it should be the
priority
GET UP
BREAKFAST ON THE MOVE
GET UP
EAT BREAKFAST AND READ
TRAVEL / CHECK EMAIL
MEETING
07:00
13:00
PRIORITISE AND PLAN THE DAY
LUNCH AND GO FOR A WALK
EMAIL
TRAVEL / EMAIL / SOCIAL MEDIA
LUNCH / EMAIL / SOCIAL MEDIA
Instead of
defaulting to
email, default
to looking at
priorities.
Exercise may
seem like a
burden, but the
rewards speak for
themselves.
Time well spent.
Relax or
reflect on
the day
ahead.
Switch off -
relax and
re-charge.
14:00
18:00
MEETING
DRINK
PROJECT WORKRECHECK PRIORITIES
MEETINGS
REVIEW THE DAY
CHECK EMAIL & SOCIAL MEDIA
TRAVEL/SOCIAL MEDIA
Being able to
spot what is
really urgent is a
skill. Most things
will wait.
EMAIL
19:00
24:00
EAT
TV/EMAIL
BED
EAT DINNER
EXERCISE
BED
PHONE IN DOCK, SCREENS OFF
TRAVEL/EMAIL/SOCIAL MEDIA
EMAIL AND ADMIN
Nooooo!
Email is not the
best place to
start the day.
EMAIL

47. 46Designing Your Day
Prioritise first.
The more habitually you return
to setting priorities, the more
effective you can be. When things
get a little crazy and you aren’t
sure what comes next, it should
be your cue to take time out and
set or reset your priorities.
One of the things that neuroscience
teaches is that the brain has evolved
to be lazy, or more kindly put, to
avoid activities that consume a lot of
resources. Planning and prioritising
- or re-prioritising - seems like hard
work and so we will try to avoid it,
muttering “I’ll just get on with it” and
diving head-first into the first task
in front of us, or that old fall-back of
the mindlessly busy person: email.
Knowing what your priorities are
takes an effort of will. It takes
discipline to focus on the task and
then to complete it, but it is essential.
Lists are the obvious place to start
with setting priorities, but often
to get a fresh perspective you
need to try something new. If you
have a massive list of things to do,
marking them A, B and C will only
get you so far. Try writing a fresh
list, allowing yourself only a handful
of priorities. Some prefer to use a
visualisation approach, rearranging
index cards, or getting things up
on a whiteboard before sitting back
to consider which things should
receive the most attention.
Whatever methods you use, really
effective prioritising means being
ruthless and realistic with yourself
about how much you can achieve.
“Prioritise prioritising”- Dr David Rock.
If you take just one piece of advice from this book, from
all of the works on managing yourself and your time, it is
that you should put prioritising first on your list.
46Designing Your Day Prioritise first

48. 47Designing Your Day Prioritise first
In their book, Willpower, Roy
Baumeister and John Tierney tell the
story of a psychologist asked to speak
at the Pentagon to a group of elite
generals about time management.
They asked the audience to define
their personal approach to being
effective in 25 words or less. The
only useful response came from the
only female general in attendance:
“First I make a list of priorities: one,
two, three, and so on. Then I cross
out everything from three down.”
Now that’s focused prioritising.

49. 48Designing Your Day
Design the shape
of your day.
Lists tell you what to do, calendars when to do it and priorities tell you
which things really matter. To help all of these things work best together,
you need to use two approaches: chunking and shaping.
48Designing Your Day Design the shape of your day

50. 49Designing Your Day
Chunking and shaping.
Chunking
Chunking means grouping together
similar tasks - say, making phone
calls, filling out expense claims, and
even more cognitively demanding
tasks like writing, research and
analysis. It is a very efficient way
of working, because using your
brain in a certain way on a series of
similar tasks allows you to stay in
the same mode, as it were, rather
than having to shift into a new one.
The term chunking is also used
in the psychology of learning and
project management, to describe
the breaking down of complex tasks
into smaller ones. It is much easier to
take on a simple task than a slightly
unknown larger project, so it’s better
to plan your task lists in chunks
where the next action is what you
focus on. Larger projects belong in
your planning and prioritising time.
In designing our day, you should
look to exploit the benefits
of both kinds of chunking.
Shaping
Following the logic of chunking
your time and tasks, a method for
designing the “shape” of your day
should emerge too. Remembering
the insights you developed from
observing your day, as well as
your ideas about what a “good
day” looks like, you can plot out
what kinds of things you need
to do and when in order for the
day to run as well as possible.
Thinking about when your energy
levels are highest, whether you are
a morning person or a night owl, you
can plot out what types of activity
belong where in the day. If you are
at your most creative and focused
first thing in the morning, you
should shape your day to get you
to your desk and writing, planning
or whatever as soon as possible.
You also need to block out time for
breaks - short ones and longer ones
for meals - as well as factoring in
time for exercise, socialising and
spending time with your family.
Sounds challenging, doesn’t it?
Well no design problem is without
challenges, but by devoting time and
energy to those challenges you can
develop better ways of doing things.
Design the shape of your day

51. 50Designing Your Day The Challenge
Day designer:
Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790)
Franklin might be regarded
as the godfather of designing your
day. He structured his ideal day in a
thoughtful, measured way as you
can see from the table opposite.
You will note that his day was
untroubled by email, childcare,
commuting or other concerns of
the modern knowledge worker.
(Although he did fret about
interruptions nonetheless.)
Design the shape OF Your day.
As well as being a founding father of the United States, a President,
a distinguished diplomat, a scientist and an inventor (of bifocal glasses
and the lightning rod, among other things).
Despite this there are real insights
to be gained from the close reading
of his routine. Creating “zones”
for types of work when you are at
your most productive, “chunking”
similar tasks together, taking
breaks and planning time for the
rest of your life are all things that
make for a well-designed day.

52. 51Designing Your Day The Challenge
The morning question,
What good shall
I do this day?
Rise, wash, and address Powerful
Goodness; contrive day’s business
and take the resolution of the
day; prosecute the present
study; and breakfast.
Work.
Work.
Sleep.
Put things in their places, supper,
music, or diversion, or conversation;
examination of the day.
Read or overlook my
accounts, and dine.
Evening question,
What good have
I done today?
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
1
2
3
4

53. 52Designing Your Day Design the shape of your day
Trying this
for yourself.
There are a number of ways you can design the shape of your day.
It’s up to you whether you use a white board, an electronic diary or just
a blank sheet of paper. In the spirit of innovation, maybe try different
ways of planning on different days to find what’s best for you.
If you are using an electronic diary,
you can set up a new calendar just
for this activity. This will allow you
to block times for types of activity
in a different colour to your actual
calendar appointments, and to
switch views between your schedule
and your design for the day.
On paper or a whiteboard, start
by sketching out a timeline for all
twenty-four hours of the day. Then
plot out things that need to happen
all the way along it. Don’t be afraid to
cross or rub things out and try again.
Another method would be to
use index cards or sticky notes
representing time blocks and
moving them around along a time-
line to see how you can develop
different shapes of the day.
Try some radical ideas to see what
they look like. What if you worked
in the evenings and early mornings
and exercised and socialised in the
middle of the day? What if office
hours started at 1pm? You may not
end up working like this, but the
thought experiment may be useful in
shaking you out of a rut and thinking
about what different approaches
you might take to your day.

54. 53Designing Your Day
Reviewing
and redesigning.
Just as you need to build time into your day to prioritise, you also need to
set aside a few moments to review, reflect and revise your prototype.
If you find that you frequently fail
to meet all of your goals for the day,
then perhaps the larger problem lies
with you taking on too much work,
so the issue will be prioritisation. If
your plans are often scuppered by
an unexpected development, then
work will be required to make your
system more agile and easy to adapt.
As you perpetually improve your
prototype of ‘the perfect day’ you
will assemble the parts one by one.
Through the process of working you
test it, break it, and rebuild it again
in an improved form, discarding what
doesn’t prove itself to be valuable.
With each new configuration, the
framework will grow stronger, and
your confidence in what can be
achieved will grow exponentially.
Sometimes reflection, redesign
and prioritisation are all part of
the same “meeting with yourself”.
Don’t be afraid to rip things up and
begin afresh. You’ll be surprised by
what you discover when you do.
No system will ever be immune to
improvement, and the challenge is
in forcing yourself to step back and
examine your work objectively.
What worked well for you today?
Did you achieve everything you
set out to do? Could you have
done more? How do you feel
now that the day is over?
The process of asking these questions
at the end of each day should
become a habit, the mirror of the
prioritising and planning session at
the start. Through repeated analysis
you will quickly notice patterns
emerge. If the same problems
surface time after time despite
your best efforts, then a process
of elimination will soon allow you to
identify the real cause for concern.
Design the shape of your day

55. 54Designing Your Day
Defending your day.
Having invested time and concentration in designing your day, it is
now necessary to protect yourself from the temptation of reverting
back to bad habits. Time gained by cutting away unnecessary
tasks can just as easily be squandered elsewhere, and the chaos
of the wider world can frequently be too great to ignore.
Nobody works in a vacuum. Situations
evolve, and your day needs to be
robust enough to evolve with them.
As your daily processes are refined
and improved upon you will need to
remain agile and adapt often. Roll with
the punches, but stand firm on what
you know to be most important. Don’t
allow your priorities to be hijacked.
With the best of intentions, you
can only defend your day so far.
Ultimately you are working towards
an ideal that will fail in small ways
many times, running up against
problems. However, there will also
be small victories that mount up
over time and can bring powerful
changes to you, your team and your
organisation as a whole. Pushing
back in a positive way and asserting
control can become a powerful habit.
Let’s look at some of the main
things that can get in the way
of your day going to plan.
54Designing Your Day Defending your day.

56. 55Designing Your Day
Distractions.
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman tells
us that the best way to not allow us to be distracted by habits like
checking email is to stop the chain of events as early as possible.
hour or two while you work. A pair
of headphones, even if you aren’t
listening to music, can help as a signal.
If someone does wave or interrupt,
let them know you are focused and
can talk in however many minutes. If
colleagues are used to interrupting
you, then adapting to a new work-
style can be as much a habit-setting
exercise for them as for you.
Ultimately, if it is impossible to remain
uninterrupted at your desk, it may be
a sensible idea to retreat to another
space for focused work: a café, a
meeting room or break-out area.
Developing distraction-resistant
working isn’t a case of a quick-
fix, it is something to work at. Like
the whole project of designing a
better working day, you need to
persist, try out different tactics
and develop effective habits.
The moment you open Facebook,
Twitter or your email inbox it is
very hard indeed not to notice
seemingly fascinating or urgent
messages that require your
attention, then open them, then
reply, then move onto the next one.
The best solution for avoiding
common distractions is to create
the right conditions and habits
for focused work, or to put it
simply: remove temptation and
work on a routine for deflecting
distractions. Turn off alerts and apps
or programmes that aren’t essential
to the task in hand. Get notes and
files from any emails that you need
before starting your task. Unless you
are expecting an urgent call or text,
turn off communications devices
and set phones to flight mode.
If you are in an office environment
where people may interrupt you, give
signals that you are focusing on work,
perhaps even tell neighbours that
you will have your head down for an
Defending your day

57. 56Designing Your Day Defending your day
Meetings.
Meetings are obviously a vital tool for any team to stay in touch,
compare thoughts, and plan for the future. However, when mismanaged
it is all too easy for meetings to become overlong, disorganised
distractions from the business they are intended to support.
So how can you make meetings
work for you? As with so much
in the process of designing your
day, it can often be a case of
asking the right questions, both
of yourself and colleagues.
For instance, is your attendance
essential for this particular meeting’s
success? If the answer is no, then
perhaps a phone conversation or even
an email could achieve the desired
result in a fraction of the time. Is
your attendance required for the
whole of a meeting? If not when can
you join and leave? A well-planned
and chaired longer meeting should
be able to give you a time slot.
Is the meeting itself necessary?
How long should it be to achieve
the objectives? People default to an
hour or round up to hours because
that is how diaries are laid out, but
a ten minute huddle to reach a
decision, or a twenty minute update
on news might work just as well.
Once meetings begin, there are some
simple questions that we all know
but sometimes forget to ask, and
their going unanswered can result in
a baggy, less effective session. Who
is chairing the meeting, keeping it
to time and its objective? Who will
share actions? What are the key
objectives? If no formal agenda has
been set, take a couple of minutes to
do that. Conversation that is off topic
or deserving of more time should be
politely deferred to a future meeting.
Aside from these traditional rules
and structures for meetings to help
them run well, the age of always-on
connectedness brings new challenges.
Colleagues can drift off from the
discussion, looking at email and other
work behind laptops or on phones.
One useful tip to avoid this pitfall
and retain the focus of your team is
to promote the practice of declaring
technology in use at the table. If
somebody is using a laptop to take

58. 57Designing Your Day
This can encourage people to arrive
on time and prepared, and give
them time for a break if they have
back-to-back meetings all day.
Lastly, don’t get stuck in a rut. If
regular Monday morning roundtables
are proving unproductive, try
scheduling in a midweek lunchtime, or
even last thing on a Friday. Stepping
out of established habits will provoke
thought and engagement from
those involved, and lead to shorter,
more valuable meetings for all.
Weekly meetings can become a bad
habit if they outlive their usefulness.
Adding an agenda point every few
weeks to briefly discuss if the
meeting is still useful or could be
shorter is a useful discipline to keep.
notes, have them say so at the
beginning of the session, so that
others know they have their full
attention. If someone needs to check
email for an urgent client message
during the meeting, they should say
so up front, and reassure colleagues
that they aren’t just responding to
anything that pops up in their inbox.
This eliminates confusion as to
who might not be fully focused on
the discussion, and discourages
distraction. Why not switch off
your mobile phone and encourage
others to do the same? More focus
on getting the business of the
meeting finished efficiently may
mean that it can end sooner, and
then everyone can give their other
work full attention. (As we saw in the
neuroscience section, multitasking
is extremely counter-productive.)
Another useful strategy is to make a
point of booking your meetings at odd
times, for instance ten past the hour.
Defending your day

59. 58Designing Your Day Defending your day
Email.
In discussions about productivity and managing time email is often
cast as the most villainous of all distractions. This is of course very
unfair. There’s a reason that email is everywhere: it is incredibly useful.
Blaming email for your misfortunes
is the modern equivalent of the
proverbial poor craftsman blaming his
tools. Tools need to be used skilfully
and methodically to achieve the best
results, and email is no different.
So here are a few headlines and tips
from the many experts and advice
we have come across on how to
achieve mastery of email, rather than
letting your inbox dictate your day.
Find a new default setting
(for yourself)
Email is the default activity for many
people. They reach for their phone
to check it when they wake up, while
waiting for their train, walking
between meetings. It’s a habit, and
perhaps not a useful one as it can
raise stress levels (psychologists
says constant checking of email or
social networks can create a sense
of false urgency or anxiety) and stop
you from taking a rest or reflecting
on things that have just happened
in a meeting. Habits that might
be useful could include reading, a
relaxation exercise or reviewing your
plan for the day and priorities.

60. 59Designing Your Day
Schedule time for email.
Many people recommend scheduling
times to check email and sticking to
them as an effective counter to the
temptation to check your inbox every
few minutes. Everyone needs to find
what works for them, but a quick
triage for urgent messages at the
start of the working day - resisting
the urge to respond to non-urgent
ones - followed by a focused burst
of clearing messages and replying to
messages at the end of the morning
is a recommended approach.
Email bankruptcy.
Ask people how many unread emails
they have in their inbox and it’s not
unusual to get answers of 10,000 or
even 20,000. The concept of “inbox”
becomes fairly meaningless at this
point and it is fair to say that if you
have this many unread you may
have lost control of your email.
A solution that some resort to is
“email bankruptcy”: tacitly admitting
that none of these will now be replied
to and deleting the lot to start
over. With caveats about deleting
urgent client messages or emails
from your boss, it can be incredibly
liberating to start over, free from
the psychological burden that that
ridiculously high inbox number brings.
Inbox Zero.
Suggested as an approach by David
Allen in Getting Things Done and
expanded upon by Merlin Mann, the
idea is simple. Email inboxes are not
surrogate task lists or file storage
systems - every time you focus
on your inbox it should be cleared
to zero. Emails need to be replied
to, added to proper filing systems,
forwarded, delegated, ignored or
filed for later reading. Inbox Zero is
a highly effective way of ensuring
that mails are not forgotten and
cutting back on procrastination,
because emails that demand
action and are dealt with quickly.
Defending your day

61. 60Designing Your Day Conclusion
Conclusion: Taking
others with you.
Thank you for reading Designing Your Day, we hope it has been useful to you.
There is so much to explore on the topic of how to design a more effective
day. As we have discovered, you could spend all your time thinking about how
to get things done, but you would neglect actually getting on with your work.
Taking the decision to design your
day, to make each day a little better
than the one before, is a project
in the first instance. It requires an
initial investment of time: to read,
reflect, plan and to implement
changes in your everyday life.
As we have tried to make clear, the
real power of thinking about how
to design your day is about turning
these good intentions, insights
and ideas into habits, a routine
that slips into the background
and becomes less effortful.
Every now and again we simply
need to check ourselves against the
fundamentals of how to design your
day. In all of the things we looked
at, three principles stood out:
• Purpose.
You need to check your day’s design
against what your purpose is - what
you want to achieve with your work,
where you are headed in your life.
• Prototyping.
If every day is a prototype, you
learn and improve with set-
backs and failures, rather
than being disheartened.
• Prioritisation.
The most important task in your day
is setting priorities. When things
change or you aren’t sure what comes
next,your return to prioritising.

62. 61Designing Your Day
Beyond this approach, there is one
further dimension to the idea of
designing your day: other people.
Few of us work in isolation - we have
colleagues, wider organisations,
industries and communities that
we are part of in our working lives.
Sharing your approach and including
colleagues in discussions is the logical
next step from taking responsibility
for the design of your own day.
Imagine the potential of sharing
good habits, of building designs
for the ideal day for a whole team,
of building a movement within
your company of people who think
deeply about how everyone can
get the most from their days.
Best of luck to you in designing your
day. Let us know how you get on.
We hope you have enjoyed this
book. For more about this and other
topics in the Nokia Smarter Everyday
programme, please find us at:
@NokiaAtWork
www.linkedin.com/company/nokia
www.nokia.com/global/
business/nokia-for-business
www.nokia.com
Conclusion

63. 62Designing Your Day Further Reading
Further Reading.
Design Thinking.
Tim Brown,
http://designthinking.ideo.com
Flex: Do Something Different.
Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine,
University of Hertfordshire
Press, 2012
The Four Hour Work Week:
Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere,
and Join the New Rich.
Tim Ferris, Vermillion, 2011.
Getting Thing Done: How to
Achieve Stress-free Productivity.
David Allen, Piatkus, 2002.
The Healthy Mind Platter, Dr
David Rock and Dr Daniel Siegel.
http://www.mindplatter.com/
Brainpickings.
Maria Popova,
http://www.brainpickings.org/
Brain Rules: 12 Principles
for Surviving and Thriving at
Work, Home and School.
John Medina, Pear Press, 2009.
Change by Design: How Design
Thinking Creates New Alternatives
for Business and Society.
Tim Brown, Collins Business, 2009.
The Chimp Paradox: The Mind
Management Programme to
Help You Achieve Success,
Confidence and Happiness.
Dr Steve Peters, Vermillion, 2012.

64. 63Designing Your Day Further Reading
The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People: Powerful
Lessons in Personal Change.
Stephen Covey, Simon
and Schuster, 2012.
Thinking Fast and Slow.
Daniel Kahneman, Penguin, 2012.
Why aren’t you delegating?
Amy Gallo,
http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2012/07/
why-arent-you-delegating.html
Your Brain at Work: Strategies
for Overcoming Distraction,
Regaining Focus and Working
Smarter, All Day Long.
Dr David Rock, Collins Business, 2009.
Willpower: Rediscovering
Our Greatest Strength.
Roy Baumeister and John
Tierney, Penguin, 2011
Inbox Zero.
Merlin Mann,
http://inboxzero.com/
Managing Oneself,
Peter Drucker,
http://hbr.org/2005/01/
managing-oneself/ar/1
The Power of Full Engagement:
Managing Energy, Not Time, Is
the Key to High Performance
and Personal Renewal.
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz,
The Free Press, 2003.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do
What We Do, and How to Change.
Charles Duhigg, William
Heinemann, 2012.

65. #smartereveryday
@nokiaatwork