Humans only have twenty-four hours in a day.

Which means, if someone wants to get to the bottom of their Herculean to-do list, they’ll probably need a day with one hundred hours. But unless they have special favors in store with a genie, extending the length of a day is impossible. Therefore, for ordinary folks like you and me, doing everything we want to becomes virtually impossible.

Except, it isn’t. There is a workaround; a way to make things happen faster in the same twenty-four hours. We can find it in…

The Blessing of Economics:

As humans, we have unlimited wants but limited resources. How can we create an equilibrium? Well, that question is the very reason Economics exists as a field of study.

For centuries, economists have tried to balance the equation, and these are the two (imperfect) ways we’ve come up with:

• Reduce the wants to match the resources.
• Improve the efficiency and use of resources to match the wants.

Either way, there is a tradeoff. And because our time is a limited resource, we have to make a tradeoff too:

• Settle for less and just accept that we can only do X amount of things in a day.
• Improve our efficiency (how we use our time) and create leverage (less effort for more results).

The choice is entirely up to you. But if you want to be an achiever, your only choice is option two. Achievers don’t settle for less.

If you’re still reading, then I know your choice is clear.

How Efficiency Works:

There are two ways we measure how well we use our time. 

The first is to look at the number of things we get done (the quantity). The second is to measure how well we focus and deliver on the expectations (the quality).

If we just focus on quantity, we might get 100 things done but the quality of our work will suffer and we’ll burn out. After all, it doesn’t feel good to hear your shabby work get criticized while you eat a half-baked pizza that cooked for less than five minutes.

Remember…

A task well done is a task full-done.

Which brings us to the second measure: quality. If you focus on your focus, and improve the way you work, the quantity will take care of itself without burning you out.

And that’s what economists look for, too. They don’t want a solution that achieves a 100 percent efficiency only to run out quickly. They’re looking for sustainable solutions that work in the long-term. You should do the same.

The best way to find sustainable solutions? Remove the things that don’t work. Let’s begin with the secret killer of your productivity…

The Curse of Switching Cost:

Imagine for a second that you’re the president of your country. You have a hundred billion dollars to spend on either building highways or funding new schools.

What happens if you choose to build the highways, but a few days later, you realize the schools were more important? Well, you’re the president. You can withdraw the money and put it towards education.

But it’s not as simple as just drawing a cheque from the bank. There are many layers of officials involved. Some of the money gets spent. The approvals take long. And at the end of it, a portion of the hundred billion goes into making this ‘switch’ happen. Anytime you choose to switch the way a resource is used, you pay a switching cost.

When the resource is your attention and the switch happens between the tasks you do, the price you pay is your time. If doing calculations in a certain type of spreadsheet usually takes you 30 minutes, it might take you 35, or even 40 if you were writing a project report right before jumping into Excel. 

Your brain uses different areas to reason and write creatively. When it’s focused on just one type of task, almost all your mental resources concentrate on that area. After you jump from creative writing to reasoning, your brain needs time to adjust and activate the areas associated with reasoning. 

Without those areas, you can’t calculate efficiently or accurately. You slow down and time is lost as your brain tries to reallocate its resources.

That’s why the most effective productivity hack is not another app in your arsenal but reducing switching cost as much as possible.

If we try to fit in a hundred different things in a single day’s schedule, none of them will get the attention or focus they deserve. Therefore, daily planning feels exhausting. A better approach is to plan overarching priorities for the whole week and club similar ones on each day. You’re no longer overwhelmed and switching cost goes down.

When you start working on those priorities, create uninterrupted focus sessions where your mind has nothing else to think about except the task at hand. Put your phone away when you’re in this zone. Here, your switching cost goes to zero and you unlock the wonders of deep work.

This might feel hard because we’re used to distracting ourselves. But that constant distraction is our biggest productivity killer.

Tame it, and you’ll be unstoppable.