Productivity is a loose word as it may mean a lot of different things for different people. As per the Oxford dictionary, productivity is the state or quality of being productive, that is to be able to achieve a significant amount or result. If I need to deliver 10 actions in the course of the day, I want to deliver as fast as possible with the required quality. Therefore, productivity is generally linked to a form of time management (method) and to tools we use.
Make your own productivity methods
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Unfortunately for any human being, there are plentiful time management, goal setting, project management methods, just to name a few « buzzword ». The most important method is the one that works for you. I’ve seen many failed attempts to fit a square peg in a round hole. The only way to make any method work is to adapt it to our own existence and adapt our own existence to the method. This means making a conscious effort, but not a too steep one. It needs to make sense for you. If the method does not make any sense, change it!
Make your productivity tool work for you (not the opposite)
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As a professional, I keep track of my goals and what I need to do in Microsoft Outlook, because it replicates to all my devices and is easy to capture any new task. But I’m not a classical user of Outlook, I’m a deep user of Tasks and Calendar, on my own terms. However, Outlook may not work in every situation, particularly for team work, for which I am using my own version of Scrum in simple Excel spreadsheet. Because my motto in productivity tool is: Keep It Simple, Stupid! If any tool requires more that one hour to master, I throw it away.
Recently Inc.com published a post entitled The Productivity Secret Behind Bill Gates’s Incredible Success. The title entices you with the idea that Bill’s success is a matter of just a productivity secret, which is, of course, not really true. However, it puts the finger on something that has now been demonstrated numerous times: intensity of focus is a game-changing behavior and increases performance.
Monotask
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For peak performance, the first to get rid of is distraction. Second, you need to concentrate on the one task you have to do. If you’ve ever been totally absorbed in what you do, like coding or painting, or any pleasurable activity, you should have been amazed at how time flies fast and how much you have done. This is the power of dedicating all your energy to one activity and one activity only. Of course our brain and body are multitasking: we breathe without thinking about it, we digest, we do all sorts of things without being conscious about them. However, dedicating our conscious energy to one thing only is what I’m calling monotasking here.
Concentrate
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When you are about to do something difficult, you often need to concentrate. This moment of deep thinking allows to focus our mind and energy on what we are about to do. Unfortunately, with all distractions, many people have lost the ability to concentrate and dedicate oneself to deep work. If you are prone to distraction, you may need to start with short period of concentration, like 10 minutes, and increase slowly to be able to sustain an hour or more of deep concentration. Concentration will bring you to the next performance level.
Meditation can help you reach your concentration goal. By bringing back focused monotasking in your daily work, you will soon be amazed at your results!
Day 706 This idea is not mine but Andy Groove’s former CEO of Intel. In his book High Output Management, written in the 80’s, he describes how to create a successful organization and goes through all aspects of management and leadership. For a long time, it has been a model and still is in many aspects, whether you are in manufacturing or not. On all the concepts he describes, the decision-making one is so elegant and simple, it’s the best I came to see. It is described through three steps:
Free discussion. This is probably the most important step. All parties that need to come to a decision need to speak up. They need to provide their concerns and ideas. Free speech is essential and everyone needs to go as deep as possible. Nothing should be left on the table. If the ideas exchange is too shallow, the decision risks to be not that well accepted.
Clear decision. Because the discussion has been to the right depth, consensus is reached with the right balance, having heard all parties.
Full support. Once again, because a consensus has been found and a decision made, all parties need to support the action following the decision. If something has not been said, or things have been left on the table because somebody did not spoke up, it may be necessary to go back to the free discussion step. Pay attention though to not end into an analysis-paralysis infinite loop. Trade-offs have to be made sometimes.
The interesting piece about this process is the first step. Free speech is essential, therefore the leader of the discussion has to ensure all parties are heard and has to establish a trust environment. If trust is not present, some persons may not feel right to speak up, they may fear retaliation if they disagree. The leader does not have to impose his/her idea but let all parties to talk. It may end up by a decision that is at the opposite to what the leader of the discussion thought at the beginning. So be it, if it’s the best consensus found.
I am not sure though all companies or group of leaders are ready for this kind of decision-making process. However, to evolve into a growth mindset, this kind of behavior is essential and will contribute to better decision and a more pleasant work environment. Once again, simple, not easy!
Day 657 If multitasking is bad for productivity, it happens that some things can be done simultaneously, here are a few I could think of :
Running and listening to music
Driving and listening to an audio book
Cooking and learning a foreign language
Walking and looking around with deep attention
Talking while talking (walking meeting are awesome)
Working out and watching you favorite series
Hiking and thinking
Painting and singing
Reading your emails while having a coffee…
Actually all that you can do on autopilot, without deeply thinking about it, can form the base of another task that will require more attention. This is not multitasking, this is real parallel processing.
Day 655. A friend of mine asked me over the week-end how I was doing all that I am doing: blogging, working out, travelling, doing my CTO job, etc. I told him there was no extravaganza here, just simple and powerful discipline. I revealed him that I was actually defining how much time an activity was to take me and therefore was finding ways to go fast, as fast as I can, without taking any shortcuts or compromising on quality. Having thought about it over the week-end, here are the early thinking of my « no-shortcut theory of ultimate productivity », or « how to do all you have to do, without compromising on quality »
First and foremost, let me qualify what do I mean by not compromising on quality. It’s actually meaning two clear things:
Content quality. If I ever have to product something, it has to be of top quality. Cheap is low quality, cheap is crap, and cheap has to be avoided!
Time quality. We all have 24 hours every day and we all have/want to do a sum of things every day. Ask yourself how you want those to be done and to consume the allocated time. Then do them in the allocated time.
Time quality also means that I need to take time to take care about myself (health, physical quality) and my relationships with others (people who matter, friends and family). None of my professional or personal activities should put my health or my relationship at risk. And this means, that I had to learn to say « no » to some activities. Superman does not exist and No is the most powerful word when it comes to keeping your commitments.
With this baseline, the no-shortcut theory of ultimate productivity comes to my six simple and proven axioms:
What’s not planned does not get done. Every morning, take 5 to 15 minutes to plan your day and ensure all your activities are aligned on your short, mid and long term goals.
Every activity has to have a time limit. If you do not put a stop sign, you will eat into the next activity and your schedule will get sidetracked.
What’s not finished needs to be planned again. If you reach the stop sign and your activity is not finished, reschedule it for the next day or for the next available slot. Some activities are shorter than expected, others are longer.
Never, ever plan back-to-back activities. You will need bio breaks, unexpected events will happen or you will just need to breathe and go for a walk.
Plan no more than 80% of the day. A little bit like axiom number 4, you should always keep buffers between activities or sometimes free slots. This will allow some mundane tasks to happen or unexpected phone calls/emails to answer. Eventually, if everything works flawlessly, you’ll have free time to do more things or to go for a walk.
Do not tolerate interruptions. Multi-tasking has been proven counterproductive time and time again. When you do something, do it with 100% focus. Unplug the internet, silence the phone and close the door.
Now, this is working for me and has been working for many years now. It goes down to being disciplined to follow them every day, starting the day with your planning activities. Now, do you have to read your email first thing in the morning, wake up at 5 or practice meditation? The choice is yours. I know the same activity may mean different things for different people, and each needs to define his or her own routine. But, with these axioms at play, I can deliver 100%, sometimes more, of what I planned to deliver, day in, day out. As you can see, it’s not rocket science, it’s pretty basic, actually, very basic, but efficient, actually, very efficient!