Time-shifting your effort

Time-shifting can be a wonderful thing. I talked last year about how time-shifting is so helpful for entertainment and communication, which is why I suspected Clubhouse might have trouble staying relevant.

There’s another angle to be considered, and that’s time-shifting your effort.

Effort

Part of this is pretty obvious, when you schedule your work around various other priorities and focus when it’s time to focus. If you have an information-oriented job, it’s often pretty easy to slide around your workload to fit your schedule.

However, looking ahead can help a bit more and I’ve seen this come up in two ways.

Weekly

The first is the weekly preview. My routines can vary a little bit, but I haven’t missed a weekly preview in a few years now. Some are more in-depth and some are rushed, but they always get done.

The beauty of these are to identify issues well in advance, because solving them the day they arise can be way more difficult. For example, if my wife and I both have a meeting at 3:00 one afternoon, neither of us can pick up our daughter from school. If we discover the overlap a week early, we can adjust schedules or find a friend to help. If we discover the issue at 2:55 that day, it’s a big problem.