1.6 – Productivity

Everybody wants to make great things happen. The problem is just that this needs tens of thousands of hours of hard work – a prospect most of us are less enthusiastic about. This chapter of Supermorning discusses ways to not only be productive, but also to want to be productive. With this strategy, productivity becomes part of who you are, giving you the chance to do great things with your life.

Schalk
, , ,
0

Recap: Productive Environment

And so we come to the end of another Supermorning chapter: Productivity. 

Over the past week, we looked at four ways to tie together insights from this chapter into an environment that makes inspirational levels of productivity fully automatic.

Let’s check out the summary. 

The checklist

  1. The perfect working environment.
    • Remove all friction from the process of adding value. Your work space should be perfect. 
    • Line up a wide range of creative relaxation mechanisms to keep your mind fresh and healthy. 
  2. Digital mastery.
    • Install RescueTime to protect yourself against the horde of digital distractions out there. 
    • Intelligently add and remove friction to make good digital actions natural and bad ones tedious. 
  3. Efficient collaboration.
    • Use email sparingly, turn off those distracting notifications, and keep your inbox clean.
    • Block off focused work in your calendar and employ reminders to achieve 100% reliability. 
  4. Proactive workload shaping.
    • Master the “art of no” to maintain a manageable workload of agreeable tasks. 
    • Always be on the hunt for meaningful work containing complexity, autonomy and a link between effort and reward. 

Sustainable productivity is essential for fulfillment and self-esteem in the individual and for progress in society. Mastering this art is a win for you and all those around you. 

Give it a go! I think you’ll like it 🙂

Schalk
, , ,
0

Shaping Your Workload for Sustained Productivity

Our final environmental trigger for a high level of sustainable productivity is created by proactively shaping your responsibilities at work. 

True, you cannot just freely pick and choose all your tasks. But, as you gradually build your capabilities over the years, you’ll undoubtedly win more freedom to shape your responsibilities. 

Shape them well, and you’ll find that sustained productivity comes naturally. 

Learn to say “no”

“No” is one of the most difficult words for productive people to say. But this little syllable is key to protecting you from burnout. 

So, if you often feel overwhelmed, commit to saying no to future responsibilities until you get yourself back to a good balance. 

Ironically, having too many obligations reduces your ability to meet those obligations. On the flip side, controlling your responsibilities through the “art of no” allows you to get a lot more done. 

Although this added productive power can be used to take on greater responsibility, it can also be invested in two other interesting ways: 

  1. Complete your current responsibilities to a higher quality standard. This is especially valuable when applied to strategically important tasks that can open many future doors.
  2. Invest this extra productive capacity in the accumulation of intangible assets. 

Both of these can pay off handsomely in the long run. 

Load up on perfect tasks

A perfect task is something you genuinely want to do and does not have a stressful deadline attached to it. 

Sadly, most tasks are the exact opposite. But perfect tasks are not unicorns. They really exist and you should do your very best to track them down and make them yours. 

If you manage to fill up most of your responsibilities with perfect tasks, sustained productivity is guaranteed.  

What makes a perfect task?

Malcolm Gladwell gives an interesting characterization of meaningful work in his book Outliers:

Meaningful work always involves complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward. All three elements must be present for work to be meaningful. 

This makes a lot of sense. Complexity makes the task stimulating. Autonomy gives you a sense of ownership. And a relationship between effort and reward gives you motivation. 

So, as you gradually gain more power to shape your responsibilities, keep this simple three part formula in mind. Filling your life with meaningful work is one of the smartest moves out there. 

Schalk
, ,
0

Efficient Collaboration

Doing special things in our complex modern world requires plenty of interaction with others. Such collaborative efforts will take plenty of time out of your life and can be quite stressful. 

Building an environment where collaboration automatically happens as cleanly and efficiently as possible is therefore a great investment.

Let’s set this up. 

Email

First thing: turn off email notifications on you computer and your phone.  

You should only check email when between tasks. That little banner popping up in the corner of your screen distracting you from the task you were doing is costing you and your company dear. 

Emails are not supposed to be answered immediately. If someone needs your immediate attention, they should call or message you. 

Second, completely clean your inbox at least once per week. 

Have well organized archiving folders to which you can move any important emails from your inbox in your weekly cleaning session. Make sure you have answered all important emails and delete the rest. 

Third, don’t overuse email. 

When communicating about anything that will require lots of back and forth, call the other person. Then send a summary of the key insights from your call by email afterwards. 

In general, try your best not to contribute to your own or others’ email overload. 

Calendar

Your calendar is a powerful tool for keeping your collaborations productive and avoiding unnecessary distraction. 

If you have a busy-looking calendar, an important first step is to book regular blocks of focused time. 

Make sure these blocks show that you are busy to discourage people from booking meetings during those times. Of course, this should be done within reason to ensure you remain open to important meetings.  

Make sure you plan your most demanding tasks for your focused time sessions.

Simpler tasks where interruptions are less costly should be done during times when your door is open. 

Reminders

Reminders represent one of the few cases when your phone should call for your attention. 

Make sure you set reminders for all important commitments well in advance of the time you need to be there. 

Never miss an appointment and never be late. Reliability is a critical trait in the professional world. Smart use of your calendar can ensure that this trait becomes yours. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

Digital Mastery

The digital revolution plays a huge part in our lives today. It can greatly increase efficiency, but it can also result in excessive distraction and overwhelm. 

Putting all the systems in place to master your digital world is key to sustained and effortless productivity. 

RescueTime 

This little app is the first step to digital mastery.

It will give you an objective indication of how you spend your digital time. In addition, it has a surprisingly convenient offline time logging solution that gives you a complete picture of where your time goes. 

RescueTime can help you gradually transition from months that look like this:

To ones that look like this:

Dark blue = Online productive time; Light blue = Offline productive time; Grey = Neutral time; Red = Distracting time.

Obviously, a career filled with months like the second example will take you to much more interesting places in life.

A key feature of RescueTime is it’s ability to block distracting websites after a given amount of use time. 

Empty information is just like empty calories: In the moment, it can feel irresistible, but, if you can just get past that moment, the feeling dissipates. RescueTime gets you past that critical moment. 

The amount of productive time that this RescueTime feature has added to my life has already repaid the price of the app a hundred times over. 

Download it, get the premium version, set up alerts to automatically block distractions, customize your offline time logging, and see what happens 🙂

Add and remove friction

Digital mastery revolves around a simple practice: eliminating friction from productive activities and adding friction to distracting activities. 

Here are some examples of ways to remove friction involved in digital productivity:

  • Ensure that you have all the hardware and software you need to create real value. 
  • Dedicate time to master the software you use most often through tutorials or courses. 
  • Build up a strong repertoire of keyboard shortcuts.
  • Use a keystroke launcher.
  • Keep your files nicely organized with automatic cloud backup.

The two most valuable friction additions are RescueTime’s distraction blocker and intelligent reorganization of your phone. 

Carefully think through your digital world to find additional places to add and remove friction. These environmental triggers can add many years of deeply rewarding productive time to your life. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

The Perfect Working Environment

Welcome to the final week of Supermorning Productivity!

As usual, this week will be dedicated to constructing an environment where good stuff happens automatically and bad actions appear increasingly unattractive. 

Let’s start with the space in which you add most of your value. 

Remove all friction

Is there anything annoying about your work space? Maybe your PC is slow, your desk is too small or your chair is not quite right. 

Any small issue with your working environment contributes a bit of resistance to the process of creating value. 

It degrades the experience and hence you get less done, while actually wearing out faster. Each tiny little imperfection will cost you thousands of productive hours across your career. 

Don’t be afraid to invest in the removal of any and all friction from the process of creating value. In the long run, this will pay for itself many times over. 

Convenient creative relaxation

Last week’s final post was about the importance of creative relaxation, and how it can help you find your perfect work rhythm. 

The key to achieving this huge benefit is to build a wide variety of convenient creative relaxation mechanisms into your environment.

Ideally, you should have close to 10 different options for creatively relaxing your mind for 10-30 minutes downtime between work sessions. 

Variety is the key to perpetual productivity without any boredom or burnout.

Having too few options will quickly make the work-relaxation pattern feel repetitive and boring. And when that happens, we become prone to procrastination of the unhealthy kind.  

Smart investments in creative relaxation promise similarly enormous returns to the optimization of your work environment described above. 

Nothing less than perfection

Your productive environment should be perfect. Perfect for you. 

Especially if you’re still reasonably young, the payout of creating such an environment over the course of your career is truly massive. 

So, what’s the first thing you should change?

Schalk
, , ,
0

Recap: Time Management

Time…

Our one truly non-renewable resource. 

The way we apply this precious commodity shapes our entire experience of life. Squander it, and life quickly becomes empty and meaningless. Invest it, and life can blossom beautifully. 

This week studied the investment of time into four categories of productive and creative endeavors. 

The checklist

  1. Planning time.
  2. Execution time.
    • Make sure you have the five E’s well covered: Effectiveness, Engagement, Environment, Efficiency and Energy. 
    • High efficiency needs sharp focus, the right tools and expertise, an ordered workplan, and great information organization. 
  3. Communication time.
    • Here, we switch from E’s to P’s: Purpose, Preparation, Presentation, Positivity and Participation.
    • Patiently practicing these P’s is pertinent to proper communication of a professional persuasion. 
  4. Recharge time.
    • Never push beyond breaking point to a highly unproductive (and unhealthy) crash. 
    • Find your ideal recharge rhythm. It may well be something different from the societal norm. 

Any awesome creation needs a healthy mix of these four ingredients. Is there one or two you tend to neglect? 

Your time is precious. Spend it well. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

Time Management: Recharging

For better or for worse, humans are not robots. There are limits to our productivity. 

But neither are we hopeless heaps of hormones acting exclusively on emotional whim. We can learn to deploy our minds to purpose and make consistent progress in an inspiring direction.

The key to unleashing the power of this complicated emotional machine lies in a regular recharge. 

Cruising speed

We’ve all been there… A brief and desperate excursion beyond our breaking point, followed by a spectacular crash.

In this scenario, the best case is a couple of ultra unhealthy days of binge-watching and binge-eating. Worse cases involve trips to the hospital or psychiatrist.

Aside from being deeply unpleasant and unhealthy, such episodes are actually counter-productive. We’d have been able to get a whole lot more done staying safely within our limits.  

Each one of us needs to find their own perfect productive pace: fast enough to be stimulating, but not so fast that we start falling apart. 

Sleep

This is the most natural form of recharge our bodies demand every day. It should be fully embraced by anyone who wants a long and interesting life. 

I’m currently about half way through Matthew Walker’s eye-opening book on the science of sleep. 

The main (scientifically backed) message is that sleep is just as important to our general health and happiness as healthy eating, regular exercise and low stress. 

Thus, if you’re thinking of sleeping less to increase productivity… Don’t.  

Regular recharge

Aside from sufficient daily sleep, our complex emotional machine needs regular additional recharge sessions.

And by regular, I mean by the hour. 

These charges can be anything reasonably healthy that relaxes the mind or stimulates it in a completely different way.

Here are some of my favorites:

  • Playing piano or guitar
  • Enjoying a session in my massage chair
  • A Headspace meditation
  • Taking a walk around the lake close to my flat
  • Healthy and delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner
  • A free fruit break at the office
  • An interesting random conversation
  • A ski or rollerblade trip
  • Reading a silly comic book for Norwegian practice

I’ve found that I can continue indefinitely on one-hour sessions with such 10-30 minute recharge sessions in-between. In RescueTime, it looks something like this:

Dark blue: Online productive time like MS Office, simulation software and blogs. Light blue: Offline productive time like meetings, exercise, music and reading. Grey: Neutral time like eating and socializing. Red: Distracting time like YouTube and Facebook.

Got rhythm? 

Such machine-like consistency tends to make people uncomfortable.

Come on! We’re supposed to be unproductive in the evenings and weekends (even if it sometimes gets quite unhealthy and brings us surprisingly little joy). 

Yes, the world expects you to slog it out for five days and recuperate for two. But that doesn’t mean this is the best rhythm for achieving inspirational levels of productivity. 

In the end, it boils down to this:

  1. The mind and body need regular recharge and replenishment.
  2. Recharging activities don’t need to be passive or self-destructive. 
  3. Your ideal recharge rhythm may well differ from the societal norm.

I really recommend experimenting with this and finding your perfect rhythm. Personally, I wish I’d found mine many years ago…

Schalk
, , ,
0

Time Management: Communication

Life is a team effort. Any meaningful creation will inevitably involve close collaboration with other people. 

Hence, we’ll dedicate today’s post to the practical aspects of professional communication via meetings and email. 

So, without further ado, I proudly present the five P’s: 

Purpose

I’ve sat through far too many meetings where most people in the room had no purpose being there. This is a huge waste of resources and motivation. Irrelevant emails are almost just as bad. 

Please … pretty please even … always make sure that your communication serves a clear purpose to every one of the recipients.

This sounds blatantly obvious, but the amount of useless communication in the professional arena is just astounding. No need to add to this communal time-wasting effort. 

Preparation

When you call for a meeting or write an email, you’re taking other people’s time. Make sure they will see this is time well spent. 

Repeated useless or irritating communications will quickly give people a negative connotation to working with you. And this is very dangerous in today’s interconnected world. 

Thus…

  1. Be sure to put in the necessary preparations to run meetings smoothly and effectively. 
  2. Put some time into your emails to ensure they’re highly relevant, informative and easy to read (without a bunch of typos). 

Presentation

You can have the best idea or the most valid point, but if you don’t present it well, it simply won’t be heard. 

Communication of an idea can almost always be improved by using fewer words and more pictures.

In meetings, be sure to use visual aids and whiteboards to better communicate your points. Sending a visual aid to enhance an email message is also a good idea. It takes a bit longer, but is well worth it. 

Also be sure to formulate properly before speaking or writing. You don’t want to drown your message in an ocean of vague and whishy-whashy superfluousness.

Positivity

Positivity is contagious. So is negativity.

So, if you want get your point across effectively in a meeting and help others do the same, be sure to send out those good vibrations.

Standing meetings are very helpful in this respect. If there is some reason to move around (like writing on a whiteboard), all the better. 

The occasional well-timed joke can also work wonders 🙂

Participation

Lastly, we want to make sure that everyone in the meeting contributes to the information exchange.

Our first P (purpose) is a prerequisite here. If you have that covered, there’s no better way to engage others than asking them to share specific expertise they possess. 

People love sharing information in subject areas they’re passionate about. Ask and you shall receive…

Practice

As a bonus sixth P, I encourage you to slowly build habits out of these effective communication tips (I must admit, I’m still working on some of them myself). 

We don’t want to think too much about the way we communicate. This quickly makes our communication seem forced and awkward. 

Thus, it pays to make small changes and cement those as habits before moving on to the next.

This requires plenty of … wow, these P’s are everywhere! … patience 🙂

Schalk
, , ,
0

Time Management: Execution

Once the planning phase is done, it’s execution time. This is where we spend most of our productive time. 

To make the most of this large chunk of our lives, I’d like to introduce you to the five E’s:

Effectiveness

Effectiveness (doing the right things) is the main reason for planning.

If you spend your time doing the wrong tasks (or just surrender to randomness), our next four E’s are powerless to help you.  

Engagement

Engagement is another vital reason for planning, particularly for the long term. 

If you manage to arrange your life so that your work is genuinely engaging, you’ll soon find that productivity becomes second nature. 

“Engagifying” your work takes time. You’ll need to be patient. But luckily, life is long 🙂 

Environment

Working should be as comfortable, convenient and natural as possible. 

For example, those doing most of their work on a PC should do everything in their power to optimize their workspace.  

Efficiency

Effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency is doing things right. 

There are five key elements to efficiency:

  1. Focus. Constant task switching is terrible for efficiency, particularly distractions from your phone or social media. 
  2. Tools. The right tool for the job can easily boost progress 10x. 
  3. Expertise. If you don’t have it, get it. And if you don’t have time to get it, collaborate with someone who already has it. 
  4. Order. Patiently build projects from the foundation up, resisting the urge to randomly start somewhere in the middle. 
  5. Organization. Make sure you can easily find the right information whenever you need it. 

Energy

Our last E is rather enigmatic, perhaps even a bit esoteric. 

Learning to manage your energy is one of the most important objectives for anyone with some ambition in life.

Success in this area will allow you to not only make rapid progress, but sustain that rate of progress indefinitely. Such sustained productivity is a prerequisite for pursuing any worthwhile purpose in life. 

Respecting your limits and learning how to effectively recharge your batteries are two essential productivity hacks.

They’re so important, in fact, that they’ll get Thursday’s post all to themselves. 

Take stock

So, how do you fare with respect to the five E’s? Do they explain any difficulties you may have with getting things done?

Be sure to make the necessary adjustments. Having all five E’s firmly in place is genuinely awesome 🙂

Schalk
, ,
0

Time Management: Planning

This week, we’ll talk about our most precious resource: time.

Excellent time management is essential for getting the best out of life without burning out or losing motivation. 

We’ll break it down into four chunks: planning, execution, communication, and recharging. Today’s post starts us off with planning. 

Prioritize planning

Humans are great at just winging it. Our short-term instincts are well suited to dealing with random problems as they pop up. Indeed, such problems can extract heroic levels of effort from us. 

But in today’s world, working smart is substantially more important than working hard.

Those who do not invest the planning time needed for smart work run the risk of getting little or nothing out of their efforts. And that’s no fun whatsoever. 

In my experience, dedicating 10-20% of your productive time to planning is the sweet spot.  

In other words, for a standard 40 hour workweek, 4-8 hours should be spent deciding what to do instead of actually doing stuff. It sounds like a lot, but this investment will pay for itself many times over. 

Schedule planning time 

The three key planning events discussed last week should be regulars in any productive schedule:

  1. Daily plan. Integrated tightly in a good morning routine and updated throughout the day. 
  2. Monthly plan. An hour or two at the end of each month.
  3. Life plan. Whenever you receive some divine inspiration regarding your purpose. 

Planning complex tasks

The scheduled planning sessions mentioned above are vital, but they actually take up quite little time – maybe 1-2 hours per week. 

Most planning time will actually happen before starting a new and reasonably complex task. 

Any task that requires a bit of brainpower and needs more than a day to complete can benefit from planning. The greater the complexity and time commitment, the greater the value of planning. 

Here are a few general guidelines:

  • Always plan on (digital) paper. If a smart idea pops into your head while you’re away from your PC, note it down on your phone checklist and transfer it to paper later. 
  • Be lazy and do proper research in the planning phase (it will save you a lot of work). Learn from the experience of others and make sure you have access to the best tools.
  • Have a written record for any team planning. (Well organized) email works nicely for this, but you can also have a shared planning space in various cloud-based solutions. 

A great investment

Planning is an awesome investment. You don’t make any progress while planning, but it will greatly accelerate your progress and enhance you work satisfaction in the execution phase. 

Which is where we’ll pick this up tomorrow…

1 2