What do you start with – hamburger or chips?

Mar 29 / Loren Phillips
I like to think that the Torque team is quite open to trying new ways of working and operating, especially when it’s something that could change the way we handle our workloads and plan our days. One of the most effective (and strangely named) ways of working that we have adopted is our Hamburger and Chips time (I know you’re thinking that I’m talking about lunch time, but I’m not – unfortunately).

Something often said in my house when I was younger was that, when given a McDonalds meal, we should start with the burger because that had the most important nutrients and then once that was finished, we could move on to the chips. Therefore, we get the most important and nutritious parts of the meal done first, and then move on to the less important parts.

At Torque we tend to operate with the same mentality. We acknowledge that everyone has their own schedules of working optimally and try to cater to that. We also realise that some work should belong at a different priority level than other work – purely because it’s more important in terms of deadlines, or it requires more mental capacity. So that’s where the Hamburger and Chips time comes in.

If you’re like some, who work best at 4am, then that’s when you should tackle your biggest and most important tasks (Hamburger time), and once 4pm rolls around and your brain is mush, you deal with your less important tasks like emails and research (Chips time). On the flip side, if you’re a zombie until 11am at the earliest, then you handle your Chips tasks until your brain is awake enough to conquer Hamburger time. This system enables you to separate what’s important and mentality intense, and what can be done between meetings or while you’re waiting to clock out for the day. And while it sounds kind of weird, it’s helped leaps in bounds in making sure we use our time effectively, exerting energy on the right tasks. It also means deadlines are met, and that clients are happy – which is probably the biggest victory in all of this, isn’t it?

So while it isn’t as great as lunch time may be, Hamburger and Chips time has become a methodology among the Torque team that truly makes a difference in how we interact with our work, our energy levels, and our days as a whole. Maybe it’s something you should try and integrate into your day?