After almost two years, I’m now working on enough projects at once that I needed to bring back a degree of organisation into my work life. I’ll be talking more about this in future blogposts, as I think out loud about what works for me.

The first thing I went back to doing, though, is to put tasks on autopilot. This means that at any point of the day, I already know what I’m supposed to be doing, because I’ve decided on it the previous night.

For this, I’m using Cal Newport’s Time Block Planner, because it makes more sense to me to start with the time I have available and work backwards to what I can get done in that time than to start from what I want to do and then cram too much into each day – but again, more on that later.

The idea of autopilot scheduling is this – rather than getting to your desk first thing in the morning and then deciding what you’re going to be doing and where to start, you set up in advance everything you need to do other than the activity of the task. That is, take all of the thinking out of it except for the doing of the task itself.

For regular activities like, say, invoicing or weekly meetings or whatever your specific work life might involve, you can do this weeks and even months in advance.

For everything else, you sit down at the end of your day with a notebook (or an app – I just like doing this in a notebook), and jot down everything that needs to be done the next day, and assign it a time slot and figure out all the variables involved.

The reason this works for me is that as someone with major attention issues, it’s usually more difficult for me to begin a task than to continue one. While my brain is tackling the variables, it’s much more likely that I’ll procrastinate, alt+tab away, check my phone or whatever.

But if I have everything prepared already, the cognitive load of starting – of warming up – is taken out of the equation.

You might have heard of decision fatigue – it’s the idea that as you make more and more decisions, your ability to continue making good decisions gets worse over the course of the day.

So if your work itself involves making lots of decisions on the fly, as mine does, you want to allot your good decision-making faculties to the work itself. If you mix in all the meta-decisions – the decisions about the work – into the time you should be spending on work, you’re likely to exhaust yourself creatively earlier in the day.

So you move these meta-decisions to the last part of the previous day, when your brain might not be able to make big important decisions anymore, but it’s still able to look at a calendar and see what time works for what, and you can start each day with the important decisions that produce good work.

And then as you go through your day, every time you finish something, you know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing next, and you can just get on with it, without any anxiety about what you’re supposed to do next.