What is it?
A method of dividing each day into specific blocks of time, each dedicated to accomplishing a specific task or activity.

What is it good for?
Clearly structuring your day and allocating realistic amounts of time to accomplish your tasks. It also prevents you from getting too stuck into a task and spending the whole day on it – or from procrastinating on work that you’ve been trying to avoid.

How to use it
Identify your most important tasks for the day and block out chunks of time in your calendar to focus solely on each task. For example, Christine Nguyen – senior producer at weareseventeen – likes to categorise her days into focus time, meetings, less intense tasks, and breaks.

Don’t overestimate how much you can achieve, though! Bond & Coyne producer Mollie Lawrence advises that you should “always buy yourself a little time, especially with deadlines. That way you have some buffer room if things don’t go the way you planned – and if you do manage to complete things earlier, you earn yourself some brownie points.”

What is it?
A method of identifying the single most important task of your day and doing it first.

What is it good for?
Achieving your most important – and often most difficult – work when your energy and motivation are high. It also helps you build momentum: as Moving Brands project manager Max Pelzner shares, “tackling the toughest task first thing in the morning gets the hard stuff out of the way and sets a positive tone for the rest of my day, boosting my productivity”.

How to use it
Decide on your ‘frog’ – that is, your most important task – and ‘eat’ it at the start of your workday before moving on to other less critical ones. For example, Thabita Luzitu from Creative Lives in Progress makes any analytical numbers-based tasks her ‘frogs’ and gets them done at the beginning of the day because she’s more energised between the hours of 10am to 12pm.

What is it?
A technique of alternating regular intervals of work with short breaks in between, with the work intervals usually being 25 minutes.

What is it good for?
Maintaining focus over extended periods and avoiding mental fatigue. For Nehanda Roberts, a creative producer at weareseventeen, these “regular short breaks are crucial to preventing burnout – even taking a five minute walk around the studio is good to give your eyes a rest from the screen and get some headspace.”

How to use it
Set a timer for 25 minutes and work on a single task with full concentration. When the timer goes off, take a short 5-minute break to rest and recharge. Repeat this process for four cycles, then take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes.

While you might gravitate towards using a digital timer for this, consider using an analogue one instead – as Indi Davies from Creative Lives in Progress points out, it provides a physical touchstone that helps you stay engaged and prevents you from getting distracted by your devices.

What is it?
A written record that retrospectively tracks how you actually spent your time throughout the week.

What is it good for?
Accurately accounting for how your time is being used and how your energy is being spent so that you can optimise your schedule accordingly.

How to use it
Write down all the activities you completed in a day, along with its start time, end time, total duration and your energy level while doing it. Once you’ve tracked your activities for a week, go through the log and evaluate how you might tweak your schedule accordingly. For instance, Thabita Luzitu from Creative Lives in Progress rearranged her tasks after doing her activity log, prioritising those that she felt least energised by at her most productive times so that she could maximise her productivity.

What is it?
A practice of eliminating distractions and working with full concentration on cognitively demanding tasks.

What is it good for?
Achieving a state of complete focus. It’s changed the game for project manager Max Pelzner: “Deep work is where I thrive. By shutting out distractions and fully immersing myself into the task at hand, I can tap into that state of flow and accomplish more in less time.”

How to use it
Find a quiet environment where you can work without interruptions and eliminate all distractions – whether it’s by turning off notifications, closing unnecessary tabs, or setting boundaries with colleagues. Then, get into the zone and dedicate at least 90 minutes to each deep work session. Ambient noise on platforms such as earth.fm, Noisli and tree.fm can help you get into a flow state.

What is it?
A system of breaking down your to-do list by their level of urgency. Having adopted this system herself, Bond & Coyne producer Eadaoin Barrett explains that “green tasks are easy quick wins, yellow tasks are bigger with a longer deadline and red tasks are chunky ones that need to be prioritised”.

What is it good for?
Visually representing your priorities so that you can quickly scan through and figure out what needs to be done first. As Bond & Coyne producer Lily Mackley points out, “sometimes a long list of things to do can feel overwhelming – so organising tasks into what needs to be done today, what needs to be done this week, and so on, can be useful.”

How to use it
Write down all your pending tasks and assign each a colour based on their level of priority. If it’s a high-priority task that needs immediate attention, assign it red; if it’s moderately urgent, make it yellow; if it can be completed at its own pace, let it be green. Now that you have all those tasks visually organised in front of you, get the red items done first before moving on to the yellow and green ones.

What is it?
A project management system that originated in Japan and visually depicts different stages of your work process from start to finish.

What is it good for?
Having oversight over complex projects and breaking them down into manageable tasks. Yumna Matar from Nice and Serious shares that it’s been particularly useful for her work as a project manager: “I work on several projects at the same time with different team members and tasks with varying lengths. Visualising where each task is on a wider timeline is helpful because it allows you to see the progress of each project.”

However, it might not always be ideal when it comes to collaborative work. For Christine Nguyen, it was “counter-effective at times, especially when team members are busy and unable to spend time manually updating the status of their tasks.” So, try it out and see whether it fits your project and team.

How to use it
Set up a physical whiteboard, or use a digital one on platforms like Notion, Trello and Asana. Create columns representing different stages of your workflow, such as ‘to-do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’. Write each task on a separate card and move them across the board as you progress.

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Special thanks to our Company Partners Bond and Coyne, Moving Brands, Nice and Serious, and weareseventeen for their teams' input. If you know of any other techniques that you think should be added, feel free to get in touch and let us know at

If you know of any other techniques that you think should be added, feel free to get in touch and let us know at [email protected]!