In the age of Covid where online learning, working from home, and socializing over zoom is the new normal, screen time = work time = down time = friend time.

The days seem to all blur together and we find ourselves repeating the unfulfilling routine of opening our laptop at the start of the day and staying glued to the screen until bedtime week in and week out.

How do we create more time for the things we love and end every day feeling fulfilled and accomplished?

Create structure in an unpredictable world

To almost anyone, having an empty calendar feels like a dream-come-true. No responsibilities. Just time for school, work, the people you care about - “the world is your oyster!”

However, for me, the reality of having a blank calendar sets in when I catch myself having watched an entire season of Gossip Girl in one day. (Yes, Gossip Girl is my guilty pleasure too, and this may or may not have happened more than once during quarantine - but that’s a secret I’ll never tell).

Bottom line… I get nothing done.

In the current work-from-home environment, where we can’t schedule in “dinner with the girls” or where our longest “commute” is switching over to a new zoom room, our calendars may look almost blank.

The unfortunate truth about a blank calendar is that we’re faced with the burden of choice. In her famous “jam study,” Sheena Iyengar shows that when people are faced with more than 6 choices - like having a blank calendar where we have 24 slots to fill with activities - we feel completely overwhelmed and are unable to make any decisions whatsoever. In practice, it means we choose not to make any choices and default to binging the entire season of Gossip Girl.

So how do we manage our time and to stay productive while working from home?

1. Schedule in your values

We all know the importance of spending quality time with family, friends, leaving time for our health, yet when it comes to following through on these commitments, something urgent always comes up. We end up hoping that we will make time towards the end of the week, or that time will magically appear. The result is that we never end up living up to our values.

It’s especially hard to be deliberate in the current work-from-home environment. We are most likely surrounded by our family or our roommates 24/7 and it could feel like we’re already spending time with them (sometimes even more than we would like). But unfortunately it’s rarely quality time.

Treat your values like the true priority that they are. Schedule them in… first.

The power of timeboxing

In a survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review, timeboxing was found to be the number one productivity hack. However, timeboxing can also prove to be extremely useful in other domains of your life.

In the words of Nir Eyal, “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you planned to do it.” Timeboxing is just that - allocating a fixed period of time to work for one particular activity. A few of its benefits?

Enables a visual of when to complete a task
Provides hard deadlines and accountability
Makes you feel in control of your schedule
Gives you frequent feelings of accomplishment

I like to think of my life as having four domains: health, work, fun, and growth. To me, a great week is one where I was able to make time for each of these four areas. Every Sunday when I sit down to plan out the rest of my week, I deliberately timebox an activity for each of these areas first. For me it looks something like this:

Health: 4:30~6:00pm Mon~Fri is my workout time

Work: 8:30am ~12:30pm are my main work focus hours

Fun: Sunday morning (time does very depending on when I wake up 😅), I FaceTime my best friend

Growth: 2:00~4:00pm Monday and Thursday are set aside for Chinese lessons

Then everything else that needs to get done will fill the gaps in the rest of my calendar - surprisingly there’s a lot of time left!

Of course everyone’s values and priorities are different, but timeboxing the main pillars of your life can help you create structure, stay accountable and follow through to make time for the things you value.

2. Make the most of your downtime

Many of us may have found that working from home and no longer needing to commute to work or school, we actually freed up a lot of time in the day to pursue a hobby that we otherwise would not have. Or, maybe we found we need some extra down time to take our eyes off the screen.

In her book, 168 Hours, Laura Vanderkam shares that a time-use study found that on average, Americans have at least 30 hours per week of leisure time. If we now add in the time we are saving ourselves from the commuting we no longer do, we might realize that there’s actually more time that we think.

Vanderkam says that we often end up wasting our leisure time because we don’t recognize when leisure time is appearing. The result is that we spend it in the most frictionless way possible: watching TV.

What’s the solution?

First, it’s important to figure out what we would like to do with our free time.

Ask yourself: “What leisure pursuits would I like to build into my life?”

This can be taking up photography, starting a blog, training for a triathlon (if you’re really ambitious). I love learning languages, so I decided to invest time in my week to learn Chinese during this pandemic. These leisure pursuits can also fall into any of the four domains of your life too!

Figure out the big chunks

Ever realize on a Sunday night that the weekend just happened to slip away and you can’t even remember what you’ve done? Weekends are really great for scheduling in your leisure pursuits or even valuable time with your friends and family.

One of my favorite activities on weekends has been spending the entire afternoon and evening with my family. Either on Saturday or Sunday we all set aside time to spend it with each other and do our best to turn off our devices. We aren’t really creative and usually end up going on long walks, but spending this quality time together and catching up on our weeks has been so great.

Loosely schedule leisure activities into your weekend. This will also give you something to look forward to during the week!

Figure out the small chunks

We often have 10, 20, 30 minute awkward gaps during our days where we are waiting to join a zoom call, or waiting for a family member to finish getting ready before going on a walk. Unfortunately these small chunks of time are like quicksand. I’m guilty of turning to social media to fill in that gap of time. I say to myself, let me see what’s been on Instagram really quick and then I’ll get to work. Before I know it, the 10 minutes I promised myself turned into 30 minutes, or worse, an hour.

Laura Vanderkam suggests creating two lists:

“in 30 minutes or less I can…”
“in 10 minutes I can…”

See if any of your leisure pursuits can be broken down into 10 or 30 minutes chunks.

One of my favorite stories was from Riana, a mother of an 11-month old, who started taking photography classes during her daughter’s naptime. She told me that she had always loved photography and wanted to improve her skills. Being a full time mom, she not only felt like she had no time but also felt mom-guilt for even thinking about picking up a hobby. Riana said that after she started tracking her time with Mana, she realized she could carve out time during her daughter’s daily 30 minute nap. In May, she signed up for online photography classes and has been loving pursuing her passion ever since!

So whenever you find yourself in between tasks or with some extra downtime, look through your list of activities you want to pursue and see if there’s one you can check off.

3. Sync your schedules

To make sure there are no surprises or distractions that will keep you away from what you intended to do, it’s important to make sure that everyone involved is in sync.

Family

At the start of quarantine it was near impossible to find quiet focus hours at home. Whether it was my mom calling to help me set up her zoom call, or my brother coming into my room for the tenth time to annoy me, it felt like every time I finally sat down to get some work done someone needed something. This was, of course, not one-sided and I was also very much guilty of interrupting my siblings and parents without knowing it. After a bit of an adjustment period, however, I found these two tips to be really helpful:

Have a conversation with family members. This might feel a little awkward and forced, after-all if your family needs your help you shouldn’t turn a blind eye, but talking through what times of the day you don’t want to be interrupted can actually benefit everyone.
Create signals. Asking to remember your family’s or roommate’s schedule on top of your own is most likely unrealistic. However, one solution I found helpful was to create signals to show when I’m “in the zone” and don’t want to be interrupted. For example, my door fully closed means I’m focusing. When my door is cracked open, I’m no longer in my focus hours.

Of course you have to also do your part of respecting your family members’ times and signals.

Work

If you are working remotely, make sure to also sync your schedule with your co-workers.

Working from home, your co-workers may be juggling childcare, or have found that they work best during non-traditional work hours. Maybe that coworker is you.

Take a few minutes to have this conversation with them. Knowing when you can expect your colleagues to be online and having them know when they can expect to hear back from you can make everyone less stressed and more productive.

Firstly, this alleviates the pressure of being “on-call”. When you’re not working, you can focus on everything else that’s important to you - like time with family and friends - and you won’t be worrying about your colleagues trying to reach you because they know you won’t be responding.

Secondly, I’m sure we’ve all experienced anxiously waiting for a reply on Slack or email without which we can’t go on to the next step. Knowing when you can expect a reply from your co-workers, can also help you plan your work time better.

This is especially helpful, if you are now working across different time zones. At Mana, we are truly a global team - working across 6 time zones. We created a little cheat sheet of when each of us are online and when it’s realistic to schedule meetings or hear back from each other. Maybe you and your co-workers can create one too!

Make time for the things you love

In this new normal where work and life are completely intertwined we can still make time fo the things that matter with three simple time management techniques:

Schedule time for your values
Take advantage of your downtime
Sync your schedule with those involved

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