Double the Productive Hours In Your Working Week Using the Prep System

I had the good fortune of going to boarding school and the discipline I learned there helped to instill some lifelong habits vis a vis time management.

At boarding school, your evening would be punctuated with periods of time where you would be continually at work. Tutors would allocate 45 minutes of time three times in an evening where you would do nothing but sit quietly in a room and focus on your homework assignments. Of course, there was time for other leisurely pursuits, such as playing a round of backgammon in the school living area, but these activities were doled out in appropriately small quantities as befitted our young and otherwise waywardly impressionable lifestyles.

I would like to say that this habit set me up for success in life, but the truth is that as soon as I left boarding school I abandoned the habit wholesale. My life went slightly off the rails, I was suborned into procrastination and general miscreantism, and consequently my grades and general life results dropped.

It took me many years to rediscover this simple ethos. As soon as I rediscovered it, I decided to not only reincorporate it into my lifestyle, but to turn it up to 11, in a way that would allow me to apply it to just about every waking hour of my life.

So I created the Prep System.

The Prep System, in a nutshell, divides the day into 42 minute blocks devoted to productive work. Spacing each of these blocks is an 18 minute rest break where one may undertake certain pre-defined rest activities (such as making a cup of coffee, a burst of short exercise, a brief set of stretches (try not to visualise me doing stretches), or some meditation. One starts at every hour at ten minutes to the hour (a conveniently specific and memorable start time), and then works through until to one’s rest break (at 32 minutes past the hour). Take an 18 minute break, your alarm sounds for the next hour, restart the timer, rinse and repeat.

To follow this routine, all you need is a timer and an alarm clock, both of which can conveniently be downloaded as apps on a phone.

You then just need to get a pen and paper and spend some time planning the typical structure of your week. Do you work 5 days, 6 days or 7? How many hours do you work, starting when and ending when? Jot it down on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet. Now it’s time to get out your phone.

It will take you about 15 minutes to create a series of alarms starting at 10 minutes to the hour, beginning on the hour where you want to start work, and then ending on the final work start hour of the day. When each of these alarms sound, you trigger a timer to run for 42 minutes, then stop work when your timer buzzes out. (You can, alternatively, set up two sets of alarms on your phone, one for prep start, and one for prep finish, eliminating the need altogether to download a timekeeper app – but I prefer to have some inbuilt flexibility in my system.)

The amount of hours you work is really up to you. It depends on a number of factors, such as your energy levels, the best time of day for you to work, the days you are prepared to work, your travel times, your family obligations, etc. Only you will know what’s right for you. I would recommend, however, to allow more time than you think you need to complete your weekly activities, at least at first, then scale back as necessary.

Congratulations! Your alarm will now sound every hour at 10 minutes to the hour. This will happen regardless of where you are, what you are doing, whether you are next to your phone, whether you are in a social setting, having an important discussion about your relationship, whatever. When this happens, all I need you to do is get out your phone and start your timer ticking.

The most enjoyable thing about the Prep system is its hidden benefits. If you decide to begin your day at 6.50am, for example, even if you are typically a late sleeper and don’t get up until 7.30am, your body will, over time, adjust to this new schedule and automatically start waking up even earlier to squeeze in some additional leisure hours before you start work.

My chunky black day planner is never more than a few feet away from my person, so it bodes well for not only myself but also those of a similar time management bent to be using a system that very naturally interweaves itself with our high falluting time managerial tendencies. Having a Prep System and a day planner is like magic plus magic. It enables you not only to add a dose of habitual consistency to the day’s workflow, but also to actively plan out and even account for one’s usage of time.

It also forces you to rationalise how you spend time. You know that one thing on your to-do lists that lingers up the top, but somehow never manages to get done? It lingers and lingers because you haven’t chunked it down yet. What looks on the surface like a simple objective to be ticked off, is in all likelihood as many as six different steps whose parameters haven’t been clearly defined. In other words, you basically don’t know how to do that thing you haven’t yet done. (Was that the excuse you were looking for?) Once you understand this, and notice the feeling that accompanies it, it becomes possible to approach the problem in a different way, usually by chunking it down into smaller steps, and then allocating the proper amount of time to each step. (Sounds obvious now but it took literally years for me to figure this out.)

I’ve worked in businesses where to ‘make one sale’ could be a 9 month process. For anyone who works in a highly variable industry, such as sales, your only option is to focus on the areas of your life that you can control. Managing your time this way helps you see clearly how to manage your time for better effect.

Nothing in the Prep System stops you from taking two preps to go to the beach, provided you have completed your mission critical activities. The Prep System merely forces you to account for the time you spend on leisure activities versus other activities. In essence, it provides the trellis against which the creeper plant of time management can shape its successful tendrils and even bear the lush fruit of goal accomplishment.

The simple brilliance of the Prep System is that it creates a time structure to which your body quickly adapts, and even naturally remembers once you have been using it for a while. Many times even when I have left my phone in another room, or forgotten it altogether, have I felt my body notify me of the ticking past ten minutes to the hour as if there were some phantom drummer tapping on my cerebellum.

The Prep System gives you an important level of clarity that many work days, I think, lack. After a few weeks of using this system, and once you’ve got a handle on it, you will know more or less exactly which step of which project you are meant to be working on at this date and time, and which steps preceded and followed. In this way, it eliminates confusion about what you really need to be doing.

Don’t get me wrong, you still get those feelings of ‘unchill’ when you’re having a panic attack over a bad customer interaction or a due deadline, but 15 minutes lost to those feelings is very little when viewed in the context of an entire day.

If you are a believer in spending each moment living in the present moment, then there is no reason why the Prep System would be incompatible with that. Rather than creating urgency, it creates space, in a way that actually sometimes makes people feel initially uncomfortable (the biggest challenge is with slowing down, as we will see below).

If you are a believer in restructuring your lifestyle so that you can automate your income streams and minimise your activity as far as possible, then there is no reason why you can’t have the Prep System running in the background. Simply devote the additional time that you allocate to other activities, such as sport, education, video games, or whatever life goals you have.

Some drawbacks to the Prep System

This is one of those things that, while it presents many benefits, you need to follow it for a period of time to figure out if it is really right for you. I have a sneaking suspicion that, while most people will give it a shot, not a lot of people will see it through to the end of the year. This is for a few reasons.

It is incredibly annoying for your phone to sound while you are in a conversation. Particularly if you are in a service industry, where you have to meet clients, it can be a bad look. If these things keep happening to you, I have a solution – turn off your phone before you go into an important conversation. Another good habit to cultivate.

The biggest challenge I have is on the commute front, and in particular, being behind the wheel when the prep alarm sounds. There’s no real solution to this, as you instinctively know, as it is not a system designed to work in 100% of circumstances. If you’re really devoted to this, you will push on through, or perhaps plan your day better in order to find workarounds that make it fit the more complex or unmanageable aspects of lifestyle.

I will be the first to admit that this time management style is ideally suited to entrepreneurs. If you work in an office place, your boss may have cause to question your regular work stoppages to undertake yoga routines and breathing exercises. But the best way to implement it is to show this article to your boss, explain “look, I want to try this thing, let’s go based on results” (as you may do in your own circumstances anyway) “and see what happens”. No doubt your boss will say “fine, but I want it to be a 5 minute break, not 18 minutes, and don’t let me catch you faffing around on Facebook” or something along those lines. But if you can demonstrate an actual increase in productivity, minus the short run adjustment speed bumps, then no reasonable employer ought to say no. (And your employer may even commend you for taking the initiative.)

Yes, before you ask, I am currently not a parent. If I were, I may have cause to be far less gung ho on time management, instead focused on wiping the liquid sleep out of the bags that used to be my eyes.

There’s no telling how a system like this would work if I were a parent. With all the late night variables involved it would be quite likely that it wouldn’t. If anyone does have children and does attempt this system, I’d be very keen to hear your feedback. Until then, I will reserve judgement.

And before you comment, “Gor, I wish I was single so that I could sit around writing blogs and coming up with over-the-top time management strategies all day,” please note that I am not a totally lazy jack-bastard, I actually run several businesses and have a part time job.

The biggest problem for most people is that it creates a surplus of time to plan, reflect, and just do whatever. While this may sound like a great thing on the surface, it is a huge stressor for some people. They become eager and overly anxious to recommence work, and feel like they are falling behind.

This is all part of the adjustment period, and will be difficult in your first month. You can still use ‘down time’ effectively by planning your next prep, clearing your desk, getting a coffee, taking a walk, etc. I have my four regular habits that I repeat every day (meditation, yoga, exercise, affirmations) and I just knock them off in each scheduled down time. The important thing is, once that alarm sounds, you start the prep clock again.

You will occasionally get so involved in a project that you passionately skip a chunk of your down time in order to see it through to completion (this blog is a good example – as I write this, my prep ended five minutes ago). If this happens to you, I say follow the impulse; working through a scheduled rest break is not a bad thing. If anything it’s a great thing – work has become intrinsically more attractive to you than rest.

Another thing you will encounter is that even while you rest, you will end up thinking about your work, and end up returning to it early when you have a burst of inspiration. But apart from this, avoid working on your down time as much as possible.

This is perhaps the oddest outcome of all. After a few months of using the Prep System, you will no longer need the Prep System, because your body will know internally what it is meant to be doing at each stage of the day. When you reach this level, you can switch off your alarms and simply bask in the glow of automatic productivity.

I will be the first to admit that this time management style is ideally suited to entrepreneurs. If you work in an office place, your boss may have cause to question your regular work stoppages to undertake yoga routines and breathing exercises. But if it works, hey, go for it.

The Prep System is, ultimately, a great way to harness your own inbuilt need to procrastinate and seek variety in your daily activities.

Your thirst for time management hasn’t taken you far enough? Here’s how to take it to the next level. You know how lawyers write time sheets for billable hours? That’s what you’re going to do!

Create an excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets document and next to it write the prep start time. At the end of each prep, return to this document and write what the time was used for.

At the end of the day/week/month/year/eternity you’ll have a comprehensive record of how your time was accounted for that you can then share with your friends/loved ones/accountant in order to discuss how you could obtain further dividends from your investment if time. The sky is the limit!

While a standard work week might contain between 35 and 40 productive hours (and yet be considered full time) using the Prep System 6 days a week from 6.50am until 7.32pm (like I do) creates up to 78 preps, which are generally the equivalent of full productive hours.

Sure, you may laugh now, but will you be laughing a year from now when your accountant gives you a high five for reaching all of your goals?

The interesting thing about the Prep System is that once you have run it for a few months your body becomes automatically adjusted to it, creating a number of side effects. The most interesting side effect is probably the effect that it has on your sleeping pattern.

I used to be a heavy sleeper, requiring roughly 7.5 to 8 hours sleep per night in order to function. After several months of operating on the Prep System, I noticed my need for sleep dropped significantly, and I now regularly take only 5 and three quarter hours of sleep.

It’s as if your body naturally adjusts to the new pattern, only filling up on sleep so much as necessary to complete the tasks at hand.

I do take the odd 15 minute power nap during the day, which is fine because my alarm will sound and wake me up for the next prep anyway.

Mind you, once in a while I will find myself just so exhausted that I end up sleeping in and missing a prep or two. But I find this is fairly rare, now that I’ve adjusted to it – perhaps one day in ten.

In such a situation I just allow my body to rest. The main goal of this system, after all, is to improve your focus and results, and if that’s the price your body demands to do that, who are you to argue?

My body has now adjusted to prep to such an extent that it can function almost perfectly even if I disable my alarm clock.

The Prep System has become so ingrained in my daily routine that my body now expects to work at certain times without thinking.

I no longer need to force myself to muster up the creativity or resolve to begin or resume work projects. Getting started in work, particularly creative projects, used to be the hardest thing for me.

Almost nothing feels better than having reached the end of the day and having accomplished literally everything you thought to accomplish, with no exceptions.

For this reason, at the end of the day (and I wrap up at 7.32pm each day), I just allow myself to relax and do whatever I want with my time, with no pressure or expectation. Often, it’s something lively and social.

While I have only been running this system for less than a year, over that time I have achieved quite a considerable amount.

I set multiple goals for myself each three months (screw the New Year’s Resolution thing) and ever since I started using the Prep System, I have simply achieved all of the goals that I set.

As mentioned above, I work 6 consecutive days a week with 13 hours of consecutive prep blocks. This gives me a total of 78 total preps per week.

On the one totally prep free day per week I take, I consciously allow myself to just do nothing. Nonetheless, on that day off, I reach the 10-minute-to-the-hour start time and suddenly feel myself feeling motivated to work.

Although my down day is designed to allow myself just to veg, I often find I end up doing productive activities on these off days anyway.

So there you have it: an effective time management system that just about anyone can start, provided that they are not parents, can manage their daily commute effectively (ie no traffic), and have an alarm clock and timer installed on their phone.

It takes 5 minutes to set this routine up, and provided you see it through with the right level of commitment, can totally transform your life and at the very least, give you much more perspicacity on the preps that are wasted.

What’s the reason why I’m including this time management system on a blog about inflation? It’s simple.

What’s the number one excuse I get every time I talk to someone about setting up a worm farm, or growing their own veggies using a square foot garden?

“I don’t have time.”

As a result of this system, when I refer to time measurements on this blog or in future articles, I will refer to preps. Just a reminder – a prep is a 42 minute burst of productive activity, which precedes 18 minutes or down time or ‘rest’.