“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”
— William Shakespeare
I’ve just finished listening to an audiobook by Michael Hyatt called “Free to focus“. Reading personal productivity guides has become a bit of a hobby for me, so they often seem like a blur. After all, there are only so many ways one can spin the same idea. I began listening to this book expecting as much, but was pleasantly surprised by the fresh take on the day-to-day tactics of grappling with the (not really new) underlying concept of prioritization and execution of multiple tasks that compete for ones attention. I particularly liked the framework of viewing your life as consisting of separate roles (e.g., professional, family, etc.) Hyatt side-steps perhaps the most challenging issue of prioritizing these roles (perhaps, the Shakespeare’s quote above gives an approach that is not so bad – your primary role is related to your age, i.e. your stage in life). Within a given role, however, he suggests classifying your activities into three categories: on-stage (the primary activities defining your role), backstage (development of skills and setting up the conditions for performing the on-stage work) and off-stage (activities that are deliberately not related to your primary role, but that are necessary for recharging and avoiding burnout). He then suggests to plan on the weekly time scale, allocating about two days for the “on-stage” activities, two days for unplugging from work (being “off-stage”) and the rest – for “backstage” development work. The key advice is to be mindful about not slipping into backstage work during your primarily on-stage days.
For me personally, this model is a bit too rigid, because the academic work is notoriously unstructured, with all the benefits and disadvantages that it entails. Still, it is comforting to have this theatrical framework as a conceptual guide as I roll through the weeks of a typical academic term. To throw in another quote, this one by Dwight Eisenhower, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
