Find something you'd rather be doing

You’ll power through your tasks if you’ve got a skating race later. (Dutch National Archives)

I do my best work when traveling.

I actually operate pretty well in transit, whether hot-spotting from a moving vehicle, taking advantage of free wifi on a bus, or outlining a project from the relative peace and quiet of an airplane seat.

But the real magic is in the moments where I do routine tasks like replying to email prior to going on an adventure in some part of the world in which I’d rather be doing something other than routine tasks like replying to email.

In such circumstances, I can see the necessary decisions with perfect clarity and execute them quickly. I easily find just the right words to compose an email. I do what must be done without deliberation or procrastination.

And two hours later, I’m out into the sunlight, playing with my nieces and nephews or exploring a trail along the sea, having accomplished a day’s work in a fraction of the usual time.

Tim Ferriss, in his bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, offers lots of excellent advice on how to accomplish this feat of doing your work in less time. For me, the most important factor is simply having something else to do. Otherwise, I might accidentally mistake answering email and doing routine tasks for my actual job, spending ten to twelve hours a day just doing that. In fact, that used to be my life.

These days, I have other work, like meetings and writing, that is my “real work” and takes me away from spending too much time on low-level tasks. Even better, I have hobbies and pursuits outside of my career-related activities. Why would I keep working when it’s a beautiful day for tennis or rowing or a sweater sleeve is ready to be knit?

If the promise of something fun awaits you on the other side of a challenging task, you’ve got a compelling reason to focus and get it done. My students come to realize that if they do all their stuff earlier in the day, they get to enjoy their afternoon and evening without anything hanging over their head. For so many of them, schoolwork has always seemed an insurmountable obstacle, but when they can see that it is actually finite, they are much more motivated to get to the other side.

Sometimes, we get bogged down in our routine and can’t see a way out. One alternative, used by many young people, is to abandon the work completely and focus only on the things they’d rather be doing. The other is to accept that our day will always be full of stuff we don’t want to do and frame our busy-ness as virtuous. Neither extreme is very satisfying.

Instead, let’s do the work without allowing it to take up our whole day (or our whole life). Let’s make space for the experiences that bring us the most joy and satisfaction. Gradually, we can allow those experiences to take up more and more space in our lives without compromising the effectiveness of our work.

What decisions have you made that have brought you more joy and fulfillment in your life? Under what circumstances do you find that you have the most clarity? I’d love to hear in the comments.