While five minutes may not feel like much, that time allows me to decompress and readjust. Once infrequent, breaks now feature prominently in my schedule. Less urgent tasks, emails in particular, receive their own time slots later in the day, when I feel the least productive. With this new technique, I feel better equipped to prioritize my time. After thirty minutes had passed, I would notice that I had written more words in my emails than I had transcribed in my notes. That kind of awareness empowers me.īefore, my work time resembled a meandering path: a dozen or so minutes spent transcribing a nineteenth-century text in Zotero, another dozen flipping back and forth between the text and a recent news article, a few following an unexpected lead from my source, and a couple here and there replying to emails. If nothing else, I know what I’ve accomplished in one block and what I need to do in the next. On the few occasions when I’ve finished a task early, I simply move on to whichever task requires the least time to complete. Rarely do I complete one task in exactly twenty-five minutes-I can only aspire to that level of precision.
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