Dividing my days into phases is one of my favourite habits.
The basic idea of phasing is to divide our awake hours into phases and devote each phase to a single project and nothing else. Conversely, the projects will be attended only during their designated phases. Here are the few benefits that I have found.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion - Parkinson’s Law
The first benefit is a sense of urgency. Without the phases, the basic unit of time is a day. By compressing that into phases (often four hours), I begin to constantly ask myself: what needs to be done in the next few hours in this project to call it a day. This pushes me to focus on the activities with the highest leverage. I have found it especially helpful when working from home, because, without that separation between office and home, we begin to fool ourselves that we are working longer, while in fact the work just became more inefficient.
Second, it ensures that each project makes progress. Managing a few projects at the same time can be difficult. Phasing ensures each project gets taken care of. Before I set up the phases, my days were occupied by fire-fighting because tasks came to my attention by their urgency. Now I will work on the project during their phase even if there are no urgent tasks. This has enabled me to work on important but not urgent tasks, which often produce better results overall.
Third, it allows batching and reduces context switching. Every day, I only gather the tools and materials for one project once at the start of the phase. I also create a Kanban board for each project and this is the only to-do list that I will look at during that phase. Because of this, I become more mindful when working on each task and this has brought me higher efficiency and more happiness.
Fourth, it allows breaks between each task. Context switching is not evil. I used to divide my revision days into interleaving humanities and science subject phases so that different parts of my brain can take turns to work hard. This may increase creativity and allows for spaced repetition. Besides, sometimes we will face bottlenecks for one project (e.g. work dependent on others, data processing time) so it is best to change the project while waiting for these things to be processed in the background.
There is also a bonus benefit: between each phase, I give myself some time to process distractions that are generated during the phases. These are often valuable ideas or actions that I realise I should attend to but are quite irrelevant to the phase that I am going through. These blank spaces between phases prevent me from jumping down the rabbit hole to explore these ideas, but also allow me to negotiate a deal with my monkey mind to focus during the phases, and be wild outside the phases.
After all, this is a system that has worked for me, and I encourage you to try out the same principles and let me know which style has worked best for you. I have made templates for different number of phases. Right now, I find a four-phase day fit my current project load the best and here is an example of how I arrange my day:
