In the UK, the average employee spends two hours and 11 minutes procrastinating daily.

US office workers get interrupted up to 11 times an hour.

For those who work in offices, this includes talkative co-workers 80%, office noise 70%, feeling overwhelmed by work challenges 61%, meetings 60% and social media 56%.

For those remote working, the challenges are completely different. 39% of people are distracted by responding to household demands. 31% are distracted by browsing social media or other content. 16% are distracted by household chores.

It feels like we're more busy than ever and we're more distracted than ever.

We're finding ourselves overthinking, procrastinating, constantly trying to figure out how to be more productive and more effective.

Today, I'm going to share two steps with you that will change the way you manage your time.

Step one is understanding the difference between efficient and effective days.

So many of us are doing just different tasks every single day without any sort of organization, focus or prioritization.

When I discovered this tool, it changed my life.

I started looking at days as either being efficient or effective.

Efficient days were days where you got lots of things done.

You ticked off things off your to-do list.

The checklist was complete.

You felt really accomplished because you got lots of little tasks done.

Now, effective days were completely different.

Maybe you only got one thing done, but it was so big.

It was so huge.

It was such a priority that that felt like a huge accomplishment.

I'm sure you've had experiences of days where you do so many things, but you don't feel accomplished because you didn't do the one big thing.

Or you've had other days in your life where you do one thing, but you don't feel accomplished because you feel you should have done more.

When you start to look at your days, weeks, months, and quarters as divided by is this an efficient day or is this an effective one, you'll start to make better decisions.

For example, if I'm working on my book and I'm writing my next book proposal, that's a big task.

If I try and fill that day up with lots of other to-do lists and lots of other tasks, I'll probably fail at all of it.

So I know that I'm going to have to free up a considerable amount of time to make sure that I can focus on that one big task.

Now, at the same time, I've got to reply to emails.

I've got to take phone calls.

I've got meetings.

Those are all things that I can put into one day so that when my head hits the pillow at night, I can feel accomplished because I've checked off a number of items.

Start looking at your days and weeks as effective or efficient.

The next step is to understand the difference between creative and logical work.

A few years ago, I read a study that said you can't be creative and logical at the same time.

It's like trying to drive from one side of New York to the other side in the middle of the day.

And a lot of us find our days stacked with both creative and logical tasks.

Maybe you're starting your day with a creative brainstorm meeting.

You're running into a data meeting.

Then you're going back into an artistic meeting and then flipping back into doing an analytics meeting.

And we're literally going back and forth.

This puts stress on our brain.

It puts strain on our ability to be flexible and be adaptable no matter how smart or thoughtful you might be.

Since I learned this, I changed the way I work.

So now I look at days as either creative or logical.

And I'm going to show you how some of my tasks break down using this system.

You can start off by using this table as well when you're starting to understand the difference and make sense of it.

Here we have a list of tasks that I may have on any given day.

We then have a checklist to check whether it's creative or logical.

We have a time estimate, which I'll explain in a second.

And finally, the day that we're going to schedule it on.

So let's look at emails.

It's a task that needs to be done.

It's a task that needs to be completed.

It's definitely not creative.

So it sits in the logical bar.

Now, the time estimate for emails, depending on your own email hygiene and how quick you are, for me, I'm going to sort 30 minutes for that.

And then the day I'm going to put it down for is Monday, which is now going to become my logical day for the week.

Now, I may end up having more than one logical day in a week, but I'm going to start off with the first day.

Now, if I look at something like writing chapter one of my new book, which could take so many hours, so I'm making it more simple for this exercise.

But this time, of course, it's a creative task.

I don't want to be doing it on the same day as when I'm checking emails.

I'm not going to be able to get into that creative space, that deep work, that deep mode that I need to be in to discover new ideas to place into the book.

Now, chapter one of my new book will take a hell of a lot of time, but if I'm only going to focus on the first thousand words, that may take me half a day.

So I'm going to put down four hours to do that work.

And now I realize I'm going to put down Tuesday as my creative day.

I've now mapped that out.

Moving on to the third one, preparing for a podcast.

Maybe I've got an exciting guest coming on.

I really want to prepare for the podcast.

I may need to read their book.

I may need to select questions.

I may need to prepare with my producer.

This is mostly a logical task.

It's a task that we've repeated, we've done often.

It requires presence and diligence.

And that prep time, as we've developed and gotten smarter and better at it, probably takes around two hours of my time.

If there's a book involved, it would probably take up to 10 hours of my time.

And there again, I'll put that down as a logical task.

It can also happen on a Monday.

So that's a simplified version of what it may look like as you walk through the tasks that you have for the upcoming week and trying to break it down.

Now, what gets really incredible about this is sometimes I'll do a whole week of being creative and a whole week of being logical.

What it allows me to do is get better at my craft, focus more on my ability to deliver in that moment.

And best of all, it takes the stress off my brain and stress off my mind.

I hope those two steps help you think differently about your work.

And I really hope that you lock into that deep work mode that will allow you to enhance your creativity and launch your productivity to another level.

Hey, it's Jay.

Thank you so much for finding my YouTube channel.

If you enjoyed this video and want more of these, subscribe below and leave a comment to let me know what themes, topics, subjects you'd like to hear me on.