According to Acorns, the schedules of celebrities and CEOs have always been a topic of much fascination. Apple CEO Tim Cook wakes up at 3:45 AM every day to read comments while Kris Jenner does her routines before starting her day at 7 AM.
“CEOs have more demands on their time than they can accommodate,” says Raquel Benbunan-Fich, a professor of information systems at Baruch College who specializes in user behaviour and multitasking. For them, tight scheduling serves an essential purpose. Scheduling imposes protective barriers to ensure that others do not misuse their time, address problems promptly, and make critical decisions on time.
However, that kind of schedule could backfire for the average person.
So if you start feeling that your schedule is controlling your day instead of helping you make the most of it, you might consider making some changes. Let’s start doing these below pointers from Acorns for a better multitasking time.
1. Trust the clock
If you tend to have small chunks of time between meetings, don’t let them waste because what matters is to focus on the time on the clock and not your sense of time.
Even if you only have 30 minutes before a meeting, remind yourself that you can complete many kinds of tasks within that time frame.
2. Clump your meetings
Instead of having a spare 30 minutes here and there between meetings, scheduling back-to-back meetings for one half of the day and keeping the other half completely free would optimize your day better.
3. Have ‘meeting days’
Schedule one or two meeting-heavy days during the week, and then keep the rest of the week open to follow up the meetings and do your work.
4. Be flexible
Just because you wrote something on your agenda to happen at a particular moment doesn’t mean you will need to complete it all at that time.
While conducting research, Benbunan-Fich discovered that ancient Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos refers to chronological, scheduled, quantitative time. Kairos refers to the perfect time to do something. If you stick too closely to Chronos time, you might miss opportunities to complete a task because you are so concerned with adhering to a schedule.
These quick tricks will hopefully make your schedule work for you this time around.