I’m often bored with the monotony of routine. I crave variety and excitement in my day-to-day life, even when it comes to work.
When I discovered day-theming, I got curious to try this productivity technique. I wanted to see if it could make my work weeks more focused and “sane,” while making sure I got to do everything I needed to do.
From MAX Official GIPHY
So I embarked on a month of day-theming my tasks–and here’s what I learned from this practice!
Compartmentalizing on steroids
Day-theming is simply organizing your work week into specific themes per day. This approach is ideal for those whose jobs include a gamut of different tasks or who carry a lot of responsibilities. It also aims to minimize your mental load of task-switching, making you focus better and accomplish your tasks a lot faster.
My work includes writing and editing–two types of tasks that require different headspaces. Fact-checking, proofreading, and making adjustments to articles are (at least to me) vastly different from doing research, creating an outline, and putting words on paper. So, to set the day theme in motion, my work schedule looked something like this:
Screenshot from the author’s Tweek
Since I dedicated three days to editing, I was in turbo editing mode. And boy did my workday whiz by. I was able to laser-focus on doing multiple article edits and adjustments and even accommodate last-minute requests.
Space in your workday
Intrinsically, I’m not much of a planner; but when I do plan, I make sure that my agenda for the day is flexible enough to accommodate a sudden request or an unforeseeable detour. And that’s where the beauty of day-theming comes in. It’s not as rigid as it may seem because it allows you to allot a block of time (say, an hour or two) to anything that doesn’t fit that theme just to get that specific deliverable out of the way.
Did anything last-minute come up in my day-theme trial period? Definitely. Was I able to go back on track after completing the said task? Yes! And the fact that I got more done somehow made me feel a greater sense of accomplishment!
Possible pitfalls
The only downside I encountered when I day-themed was running out of steam early on in the game. I was so fixated on making sure I finished all my editing work right away. Come Thursday, I was exhausted. I craved the momentum I had built earlier in the week and was hoping for the same in my remaining work days.
That’s when it hit me. I barely took breaks in between edits and I finished late at night because of gigil. The next few weeks thereafter, I decided to pace myself, take screen breaks, and consciously avoid the mad rush to finish all of my tasks. I also made sure to relax and not catch up on work during the weekends, so I could recover both physically and mentally (and if you think about it, isn’t that akin to day-theming, but in a non-work context?)
To theme or not to theme
Day-theming changed the way I worked and even relaxed. My little productivity experiment, of course, didn’t come without speed bumps–but everything went a lot smoother after I made adjustments. So, if you’re looking to do something new in your WFH routine, give day-theming a try!
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