105 hours: Define work hours

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

For many of us, most of those hours are spent at work.

And the remaining hours ... are kinda spent at work, too.

Time to work

My digital timer goes off; 25 minutes. It's a cheap timer, one I got for $10 somewhere online. I much prefer these standalone timers to those that run on computers or phones.

It's 8:55 am. I save my writing on git, lock my personal computer, and reach out to the cables coming out of the laptop on the right corner of my desk.

I unplug three cables: first, the two cables connecting the laptop to my two monitors, and then the one connecting my keyboard, trackpad, camera, and yubikey. When I plug them into my work computer, the screens go from a red fractal desktop background to green.

It's time to work.

The workday goes as planned. I check my priorities for the day and get to work on my top priority.

Midway through the day, I grab lunch. I usually mark my Slack with an emoji saying I'm at lunch and disconnect until I return. Somedays, I eat lunch while working.

Nothing personal happens during my work hours. I only check something on the Internet if I'm required to by work. I don't check my personal phone or messages. No personal email. No internet news. No internet articles. No social media. Nothing.

Nothing but work.

Most days, when it's 5 pm or 6 pm, depending on the day, it's time to exercise. A few minutes earlier, I wrap up my tasks, get dressed, and head out to the gym; unless I'm doing overtime.

I'm not on call, but after I return and shower, I check my work computer for anything urgent. If necessary that day, I may go to my work computer again once or twice in the evening to check work. If not, I focus entirely on my reading.

I'll catch up tomorrow when I'm back at work.

Everyone's kinda working

I'm not one of those people who are working "all the time." When I'm working, I'm working. When I'm not, I'm not.

I'm never kinda working.

I use several tactics to achieve the above. Here are some examples:

• Using a separate personal computer: I never do personal things on my work computer and barely have access to anything personal in it. Work computer is for work only.
• Blocking Internet: back when I used the Internet, I'd block some of the websites I thought were most distracting on my work computer, forcing me to use a different device to visit them. That's blocking them all the time, not only on "focus time."
• Block calendar for personal things: If there are personal things I need to attend to during work hours, such as personal calls or chores, I block them on my work calendar and attend to them on my personal computer. Again, I never do personal things on my work computer.

These are just tactics, but the goal is to spend work time doing work activities only.

Overtime and Postmortem Actions

I have had demanding roles over the years and expectedly had to do large amounts of overtime. Working at startups in any position can require a lot of hours, and even more so as a leader.

The first thing about overtime is that it happens and must be accepted. Like any complex part of life, work has unpredictable demands, and we need to be flexible.

Importantly, though, if you're doing overtime all the time, it's not overtime; it's just "time". Whatever the root cause for the overtime is, it needs to be fixed in a workable time window so that work can fit its time allocation again.

I've coached many employees and mentees who complained that work was unpredictable, but the same set of unpredictable things kept happening to them.

Of course, if the same unpredictable things keep happening to you, they're not unpredictable – you're just bad at planning. You can't shrug it off as optimism.

At a startup, you need to be constantly doing postmortems and completing your postmortem actions. Completing postmortem actions means creating and implementing systems such as processes, tools, and people roles that address the root cause of the issue.

If things still work the same way as back when something unpredictable happened, I predict something "unpredictable" will happen again.

I only do overtime to work on unpredictable demands. They happen, it's expected, and it's okay.

I also always address the root cause that caused something unpredictable to happen so it doesn't happen again – by actually changing things.

Predictability is created through permanent solutions to unforeseen problems of the past.

Allocating overtime

Because all of my time in the week is allocated, whenever I have to do overtime, I always know exactly what activity I'm not doing and its impact:

• If I'm working extra in the morning, then I'm not writing
• If I'm working extra in the evening, I'm not exercising and taking care of my health
• If I'm working extra over the weekend, I'm not spending time with my family and not recovering for next week

Suppose the cause for the overtime can't be fixed in a workable time window through work adjustments. In that case, work hours need to be reallocated: I can't do work in my originally allocated amount of time and must invest more time to perform the role successfully.

I never re-assign and replan my week based on overtime: didn't exercise today because I had to work late? Too bad, tomorrow is a new day, and I'll follow my routines then.

Moving activities around because of overtime creates decisions, defeating the purpose of routines. Routines are created to avoid decisions.

Work routines

Clear delineation of work and non-work hours is not only fit for laid-back professionals that perform mediocre work. In my view, much to the contrary, it's usually required for one to perform at the highest level for an indefinite amount of time.

I'll mention some examples, starting with the canonical and famous timetable of Benjamin Franklin, who early in life had outlined the following time allocation for himself:

Ben Franklin was a prolific and industrious professional, and I'm convinced that outlining clear areas where he was supposed to do his work enabled his focus and high performance more so than got in his way.

To move to a different US founding father, Abraham Lincoln also had a habit of clearly delineating his boundaries of being at work and not at work by commuting to and from his cottage to the White House every day in order to create a separation from work. Cal Newport, in his book Digital Minimalism, outlines how critical this separation was in him coming to his most important decisions:

“a crush of visitors besieged the White House stairways and corridors, climbed through windows at levees, and camped outside Lincoln’s office door.” These visitors arrived to petition for jobs or other personal favors [..] Against this backdrop of bustle, Lincoln’s decision to spend almost half the year escaping the White House, setting out each night to make the long horseback commute to the quiet cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, makes sense. The cottage provided Lincoln something we now see would have been almost impossible to obtain in the White House: time and space to think. [..]

The cottage also provided the setting where Lincoln wrestled with the Emancipation Proclamation. [..] Lincoln eventually wrote the initial drafts of the proclamation at the cottage. [..]

Lincoln’s time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation. The goal of this chapter is to argue that the benefits Lincoln received from his time alone extend beyond historical figures or those similarly faced with major decisions. Everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude, and, equally important, anyone who avoids this state for an extended period of time will, like Lincoln during his early months in the White House, suffer.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (p. 88). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Making time outside the daily bustle of work is also a way to pursue serious interests outside of work. Not only was Ben Franklin a prolific writer and creative inventor, among several other things, but Teddy Roosevelt is also another example of a high-profile politician with numerous other pursuits, physical and intellectual:

Speaking to the Hamilton Club in Chicago in the spring of 1899, Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.” Roosevelt practiced what he preached. As president, Roosevelt regularly boxed (until a hard blow detached his left retina), practiced jujitsu, skinny-dipped in the Potomac, and read at the rate of one book per day. He was not one to sit back and relax.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (p. 174). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Almost a century apart from each other and from us, the challenges these figures faced as some of the most prominent American politicians of their time were extremely trying and certainly kept asking for more of their time and attention.

Back in their time, however, the onslaught on their attention outside of work hours was far from what is possible today with smartphones and the internet.

This difficulty in drawing boundaries, which shall only increase as more of our work and personal lives becomes digital, means we must be ever more guarded and diligent in protecting time inside and outside work.

And ensuring we know which is which.