Unleash The Benefits Of Unstructured Time
Edition #024
Introduction
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The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done.
The Importance of Unstructured Time
In this article, Alli talks about three concept of unstructured time in your daily routine. We always believe we must have a To-Do list, to Prioritise, Set a Goal regarding what we want to accomplish for the day, etc. But does it make you feel overwhelmed? She encourages the idea of having some unstructured time for ourselves. Here are the benefits:
It can help get your creative juices flowing. It can re-energise and refresh us.
It is a time where there are no expectations to live up to, no task waiting to be done. Most importantly, doing whatever feels right.
Unstructured time reminds us that we need to set realistic expectations of ourselves.
It is a great feeling to see how much we can accomplish when we strip away our expectations.
Look at your calendar and see how many hours of unstructured time have you set aside every week.
Power of Unstructured Time and Spontaneity
Elizabeth Khuri Chandler is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Goodreads, a website that helps people find and share books they love. Goodreads has over 90 million members and was acquired by Amazon in 2013.
In this conversation, Elizabeth talks about:
The role of unstructured time in her life
She uses different calendars, one for her work, one for her family, and one for her children, to focus on various priorities in her life - delicately balancing professional and personal life.
Her approach to prioritisation
Listen to the full episode on
Slow Productivity
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. His books have been published in over 35 languages and featured in many major publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Economist.
In this video, Cal talks about his current thinking on Slow Productivity. Here are some key take-aways:
He paints a beautiful picture of productivity's origins in our ancestors' era.
He talks about the issues of how modern-day productivity and its effects on people - Brain Short-Circuit, Overhead Spiral, and Relentless pace.
He offers some practical solutions - Do fewer things, Work at your Natural Pace and obsess over quality.
Unleash The Benefits Of Unstructured Time
Unstructured time in a day, a week, or even once a month sounds like an anti-thesis in a world where you are driven by back-to-back meetings, unending schedules, and relentless pace setting to achieve or showcase results or outcomes.
In an interesting conversation with the legendary Olympic Gold medalist and swimmer Michael Phelps, he mentions that all his life, he had trained with a diary filled with details of his everyday progress as a swimming professional. He says that for most of his life, he strove to ‘Cut Time’ by a few seconds every time he was in the pool to win the coveted gold medal and become a world champion. Then, post his professional life as a swimmer, when he started to spend time with his children and family, and these were extremely long hours that he had to give to them. He found it difficult and frustrating as he did not know how to manage ‘slow time’!
Similarly, in your work and life, what unstructured time could do is rejuvenate some thoughts or ideas you may have had no time for. It allows you to reflect on some of the work you may be doing and may have reached a dead-end while creating new ways to look at the problem. Unstructured time allows you to slow down your thinking and set a natural pace for your thoughts without the dagger of limited time or an upcoming meeting or a deliverable in your head. Unstructured time allows you to lose yourself in your thoughts, rethink some of the urgent priorities and have a heightened self-awareness of your output and constraints. It will enable you to be at your creative best and in a flow.
Unstructured time can also create a sense of insecurity as you may have nothing to do for the next couple of hours in the day. The constant ‘busy-ness’ that you are used to will get challenged mentally when you have unstructured time. Initially, there could be ‘uneasiness’ with a ‘nothing-to-do’ feeling. But, slowly, it will grow on you as you will get to use this time to think more deeply and solve problems you have either hitherto not given quality time or did not have the mental bandwidth to work on it.
Look at your calendar and block off some slots as unstructured time. It can refresh and rejuvenate you with new ideas and thoughts.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Relook at the To-do, tasks list, and meeting schedules and introduce unstructured time to this list.
An interesting idea is an integrated calendar for work, personal priorities and family.
Slow Productivity enables you to work at a natural pace, do fewer things, focus on quality and do more deep work.