Do less, achieve more

During her final term at the University of Oxford, Grace Beverley wrote 40,000 words, sat five exams, launched one business, rebranded another, and took on her first fulltime employees. “I felt like I was hustling, but I was volatile and stressed out,” she says. Beverley realised that she was “the least productive when I was working the most”.

It’s a common dilemma – feeling like you have to choose between bossing working life and having a happy actual life. The world can seem divided in two: the girl-boss brigade and the self-care camp. Beverley, a former fitness influencer and now the founder of two successful businesses (TALA, an activewear brand, and fitness app Shreddy) with a million Instagram followers to boot, saw this divide and became frustrated that the nuanced need for both wasn’t being discussed. “I’d share my thoughts on productivity and get comments saying I needed to relax and chill out, but when I’d post a picture of myself chilling out, the other side would pop up saying, ‘If you don’t come out of the pandemic having learned a new skill, it’s proof that you didn’t lack time, just discipline.’ I couldn’t win.” Believing working hard and hardly working to be two sides of the same productivity coin, Beverley created a new productivity blueprint that forms the basis of her new book, Working Hard, Hardly Working. Here, she shares her advice on how to balance work and time out in a way that works for you.

Reality dictates that we need to make money. We also want careers that challenge us. I love business books, but they can be dry, so I’ve taken what I’ve learnt from them about working smarter, and added my own learnings. Et voilà… PLAN YOUR TIME

Time management is the first step to doing everything you want. The Eisenhower Method is a prioritisation plan that helps me work out what is urgent and what is important, and therefore what order things should be done in, and whether I should be doing some things at all.

Divide a page of your notebook into four. Name each quarter: 1 Urgent 2 Important 3 Delegate 4 Don’t do

Then put each task in the most relevant box. This helps you to work out the content of your tasks (1 and 2), and which you can skip altogether (3 and 4). It may seem like adding an extra layer of “list admin”, but by figuring out what actually needs doing, it’ll make your daily to-do “list” (see the next step) much shorter and more organised.

SWAP YOUR TO-DO LIST FOR A TO-DO TABLE

Why does your to-do list look like the Top 40? All your tasks are not the same: they are not of equal priority. Once I’ve done the Eisenhower Method and know which tasks actually need doing, I feed each into a to-do table at the start of every day. It also includes items that won’t get done that day but that I need to keep an eye on.

Divide your table into three columns:

“Quick ticks” (things that will take five minutes or less)

“Tasks” (that take up to 30 minutes) “Projects” (the big boys you need to be conscious of). Break these down into smaller steps because you’ll never do something in one day that’s going to take 12 hours overall.

BLOCK YOUR DIARY

Then I put each thing from my to-do table into my calendar as a block of time, a technique called “time blocking”. They can be half an hour or four hours, whatever works for you. I plan these around my meetings and do specific tasks in each. This approach helps me concentrate on longer tasks while avoiding being sucked under by the admin demon. Admin can be a form of procrastination, so if you do it within pre-assigned blocks of time rather than sprinkling it throughout your day, you’ll be more productive.

GET INTO “DEEP WORK”

This concept was developed by Professor Cal Newport. Deep work is about reclaiming concentration and committing to work that avoids the constant ping of notifications. It’s basically the zone you’d get into if you had an exam at school, where you’re so “in” the task that you do it intensively for a period of time. Get into deep work by doing a “related task” first – if you’re writing an article on renewable energy, for example, you could trigger deep work by reading an article or watching a YouTube video on the subject for inspiration. Then, eliminate distractions. I like using focus-enhancing apps – my favourite is Forest, where you grow a virtual tree for a set amount of time and can’t go on your phone during that period or your tree will die. Deep work’s superior cousin is “flow” – the state we reach when we’re concentrated on a task we’re skilled at.

None of us want to be stereotyped as a snowflake who doesn’t work hard, so we’ve internalised the idea that we have to be working the whole time. Self-care isn’t seen as something we’re meant to do unless we’re burnt out, but we shouldn’t wait until we get there – integrating time spent hardly working into our lives is essential. DO NOTHING

There are two types of “doing nothing” – “planned nothing” and “fuck-it nothing”. Doing nothing has become a solution for burnout, but in order not to get there in the first place, it should be a planned exercise within our lives. Maybe you keep two weeknights free, or take a whole day at the weekend just for you and your partner. That’s “planned nothing”. “Fuck-it nothing” is the understanding that you’ll never get it totally right, so you give yourself permission to ditch the evening of work you’d anticipated or say “fuck it” to that exercise class you thought you might do but really don’t want to. Allowing for “failure” within your structure is the only way to make it realistic.

FIGURE OUT WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD

I used to get to the end of the working day, realise I had a dinner planned and cancel it. I thought that made me feel good. Don’t get me wrong – occasionally it was the right thing to do because I would have been terrible company. But the majority of the time, I’d go along and feel much better afterwards. Learning what activities recharge you – what makes you feel good – is an active process. On top of that, know what gives you instant versus delayed gratification.

How to do it: find a double page in a notebook, and label one page:

“Things that make me feel good”, and on the other side:

“Things that make me feel bad”. Then create a right-aligned side heading next to each called:

“Limits and exceptions”. Right now, going on walks at the end of the working day is in my “feel good” column, as are Friday nights in front of the TV – the “exception” is when I genuinely have too much work on and feel overwhelmed. Write yours down and fill your time spent doing nothing with things that make you feel good.

PUT BOUNDARIES IN PLACE

Once you know what makes you feel good and bad, you need the discipline to make sure you do them – which means boundaries. Boundaries are personal, but they’re probably time-related, space-related or taskrelated. They may involve having a different working area from where you sleep, or not working on weekends. You’ll know better than I do what you need – the key is being strict when it comes to enforcing those boundaries.

COMBAT SELF-SABOTAGE

I’d say that 90% of the time, we know we’re self-sabotaging as we’re doing it. We recognise that we would feel better if we went for a walk, but we don’t. But are you self-sabotaging, or is it what you really need? Force yourself to do it, and if it doesn’t make you feel good, then you were right. The more work we do on establishing what self-care means for us, the better we understand when we are self-sabotaging and when, actually, our instincts were right. If you get it wrong, don’t self-criticise – move on, and learn from it. Working Hard, Hardly Working: How To Achieve More, Stress Less And Feel Fulfilled by Grace Beverley is out on 15th April