You shouldn’t prioritize more than three things at a time, says Laura Mae Martin, Google’s executive productivity advisor.
“Your time is only finite,” so choosing just three items to focus on forces you to make clear to yourself what you really care about, she said on an episode of LinkedIn’s “SPARKED” podcast earlier this month.
Martin is the author of the 2024 book “Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing” and advises Google executives on how to optimize their time.
Every three months is a good time to reassess your three key priorities in life, but being selective about those areas requires a tradeoff mentality, she said. For example, if you’re preparing to move across the country with your family or if you’ve taken on a big new project at work, expect to focus on those aspects of your life while putting other parts on the back burner.
Here are three techniques she suggests to improve your workflow.
1. Highlight your calendar
First, it’s important to define your priorities and evaluate whether your actions reflect those intentions.
One “eye-opening exercise” Martin uses to help people recognize how they spend their time is to print out their calendars from the last three weeks and take a highlighter to paper: “[I] say, ‘Hey, you said these were your three priorities. Let’s put it to the test because your calendar doesn’t lie. What have you been spending your time on?'”
The exercise, Martin said, confronts you with instances in which you might be spending too much time on less important objectives and prompts you to shape your calendar to reflect your needs. It gives you more conviction to say no to commitments that you don’t have enough time for.
2. Imagine a day free of any plans
To help people establish a routine that supports their goals, Martin walks advisees through a hypothetical scenario: “If you had a full day of absolutely no interruptions or commitments tomorrow and you had to do these three types of tasks, when would you naturally slot them?”
You may immediately think of the times of day when you’re most productive, but a “launch-and-iterate approach is by far the best way” to answer this question, Martin said. Spend a week doing certain activities at a specific time and then the following week change that up to see what works best for you.
“Sticking with [a routine] because it’s what you’ve always done or what you’ve heard people do is never the way to really find the sweet spot,” she said.
Martin also recommends keeping a journal to note when you’re feeling “in the zone.” Over time, you can use your journal to observe patterns that reveal the conditions that allow you to work optimally.
3. Get preparations out of the way
When you find yourself procrastinating on a task, it might be because you selected the wrong time to do it. But it is also possible that you simply don’t have the will to get started, Martin acknowledged.
In those cases, try another mental exercise from Martin: Pretend you have an assistant and ask yourself what you’d have them set up for you to be able to get started.
The “hack” separates the “doing of something” from the “preparing of it,” she said, adding, “Our brains really like a prepared environment.”
At work, for example, to kick off the creation of a presentation, you could begin by opening up a file and naming it.
“Then when I sit down at my desk with a fully named presentation already open, I’m way more likely to kick it into gear,” she said.
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