Posts Tagged ‘General Productivity Articles’
The Three Stages of Productivity: Which One Are You?
We all have days that seemingly fly by and at the end, we know that we were busy, but we can’t really articulate exactly what we got accomplished. I’ve come to recognize that as “stage one” productivity. For some of us, many days go by like that. And for still others, it’s a way of life. When you’re at stage one productivity, you are almost exclusively in reactive mode. And being reactive doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t being productive, because it means that you are dealing with the other people in your world, and we all have to do that sometimes: going to meetings, answering emails, returning phone calls, putting out fires, etc. In fact, maybe you are someone whose job it is to be reactive. For example, if you are a manager, and you don’t have any other responsibilities except to be there for your employees, help keep them on track, make sure they are meeting deadlines, dealing with interpersonal issues, etc., then I would say that means your job is to be reactive. However, if you have even one responsibility that isn’t dependent on your staff, at least one thing for which you alone are responsible, and there are parts of it that other people can’t do for you, then you must find some time to be proactive, in order to get that thing done.
Which brings me to the second stage of productivity. Stage two is where you are making time, every single day, to be proactive. You are knocking things off your to-do list, and you finish each work day feeling some sense of accomplishment…some sense that you actually got some stuff done that day. This is a great place to be. If you find yourself having a hard time getting to stage two, my suggestion to you is to break your habit, which I’d bet money that you have, of checking your email first thing in the morning. If the first thing you do when you start your work day every morning is to check your email, that sets the tone of the day for being reactive. It sends you down that rabbit trail of answering emails, responding to people…before you know it you’re reading blogs, checking your Twitter stream, your Facebook notifications…then next thing you know you’re off to a meeting, then to lunch, and when you come back, it’s back on email, and the cycle starts all over again. Break that cycle by going to your to-do list first thing in the morning, instead of checking your email. Work for an hour or ninety minutes checking items off your to-do list, and then check your email. The result will be a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, even if the rest of the time was spent being reactive. You’ll be able to point to some concrete things that you completed that day. (Now, having said that, there are exceptions to every rule. Read more about checking email first thing in the morning here.)
But for many people, there are probably things on your to-do list that need to be done, and may even be important, but completing them may not have a significant impact on your work or your life. Many of them may not bring you closer to the big picture goals you are trying to achieve. So this brings me to the third stage of productivity: not only marking things off your to-do list, but completing things that bring you closer to your goals. Some people call them “big rocks.” If you are unfamiliar with the metaphor of the big rocks, you can watch a video of Stephen Covey illustrating it. He was not the first one to come up with it, but I couldn’t find the originator to give credit.
You are working at stage three of productivity when you accomplish one or more goal-dependent things in your day. Things that are steps toward achieving your major goals or initiatives. It’s similar to the concept Brian Tracy calls, “eat that frog.” My suggestion to reaching stage three productivity is to make sure that you have your “big picture” objectives always visible to you. I do this through my “projects” list. I need to always be able to lift my head out of the “trees” and see the “forest.” Keeping a list called “projects” helps me accomplish this. However, every project must have one thing that you can do next, to keep it moving forward. These concepts are part of my process, the Empowered Productivity System, and some of them are also in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. I learned them long before GTD was written, however, through a company called Time/system International, among others.
It’s helpful to remember that it’s sometimes important to be in stage one and stage two productivity, but you’re really empowered and shaping your life with intention when you are spending time in stage three productivity.
Thanks for reading!
Turning Productivity into Passion
I tend to keep my life pretty busy. Luckily, I’m also pretty good at managing my own productivity . But recently I was blessed to be reminded about a truly valuable benefit of productivity: the opportunity to find something I’m really passionate about.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my work, and I’m excited to be able to help people get in control of the details of their lives. I enjoy empowering people that way. But because my high level of productivity allows me to fit more into my life, I’ve recently stumbled across an amazing non-profit that causes me to wake up every morning trying to figure out new ways to help them. And that’s very exciting for me.
The organization that has me so inspired is Girls Empowerment Network. Their mission is to foster healthy self-esteem in girls by engaging them to explore and define their personal values and to build skills that empower them with confidence and the courage to make wise choices. Having been a teen-aged girl once, I can see how valuable GEN’s services are. One of their programs is ClubGEN, which employs high-school girls to mentor middle school girls through after school programs. I’ve had the chance to hear from some of the middle school girls and the high-school girls, and it’s obvious that the impact on both sets of girls is immeasurable and priceless.
Of course I know, and I tell people often, that better managing their lives gives them more time to do things that feed their soul. But sometimes it’s easy to take things for granted, or get stuck in a rut with the things we do. If you feel like your life is already jammed full, and you can’t possibly take on one more thing, I would say you have two choices: be careful that you are still passionate and excited about the things you spend your time on, and take the opportunity to rotate older things out and newer things in. It will keep you fresh and motivated and valuable. Your second option is to evaluate what you have going on in your life, and see if you are really making the most of your time. If you often feel like you are spinning your wheels, and the days pass with you feeling like you haven’t accomplished much, then perhaps it’s time to get some help with your productivity. Not only will it lower your stress levels, and put you back in control, but it can also free up some time for you to do something that has a real and lasting impact, and inspires your passion and motivation in a way you’ve forgotten was possible. Even if you don’t know what that thing is, you will never find it if you don’t create the space in your life for the opportunity.
Good luck, and thanks for reading!
Incorporate Change in 3 Easy Steps (Part 2)
Yesterday’s post discussed how hard it is to incorporate change in your life and the first step that might make it easier: awareness.
Educating yourself is the second step in changing your behavior. It’s hard to change habits when you don’t know how or what to change them to. Let’s say you’ve become aware that you spend too much time in your email, and you know it’s having a detrimental affect on how much you get done every day. But what choice do you have? It seems like you get an endless amount of email and if you aren’t checking it all the time, it will just pile up on you, right? Well, regardless of what you are contemplating, there are typically many people who have done it successfully before you. That’s one of the positive things about the internet: the abundance of information available for you to learn from. Find a book, or an article, or a blog (like this one! =), or an entire website, about someone who has learned how to successfully stay on top of email, while continuing to get things done and be productive. (Incidentally, besides this blog, another great place for advice and more resources about email management is Merlin Mann’s work at 43 Folders: Inbox Zero). Maybe you need more help than just reading, but those resources are available to choose and learn from as well. Another idea that works really well for me is to ask people. I typically get a wealth of information when I simply say to my friends and acquaintances during conversation, “you know, I’m trying to get better at XXX. Do you know of any resources to help me do that?” People LOVE to be helpful and look smart. If you don’t often do this, I think you’ll be surprised at the results.
So, if you’re trying to incorporate change in your life, the first step is to become aware of the habits you have that aren’t serving you. Next, educate yourself about NEW habits that might help, learning from people who have mastered the skill you are trying to acquire. Tomorrow I’ll post the third and final step: dealing with your own psychology.
Thanks for reading!
Incorporate Change in 3 Easy Steps (Part 1)
We all know that changing our behaviors is hard. Knowing we should exercise isn’t enough to get us into the gym or out on the Trail every day. It’s why most New Year’s Resolutions don’t last beyond January. But there are three components to changing behaviors, and considering these might make it much easier for you to incorporate those new things into your life.
Whether it’s “going green,” improved productivity, or incorporating a new initiative, like volunteering, into your life, if you consider the following three steps, you can do these, or most anything else, much easier.
The first component is awareness. Most of our habits are so ingrained in our lives and behavior that we don’t even recognize them anymore. Becoming aware of the behaviors that aren’t serving you is the first step in changing them. For example, if you want to incorporate more environmentally friendly habits into your lifestyle, it’s important to understand what you’re doing that doesn’t serve that desire. Do you leave the water running when you brush your teeth? Do you participate in your city’s recycling program? Do you buy recycled products? Try to think about areas where you could improve, perhaps even make a list. Then the next time an opportunity presents itself, you’ll be more likely to remember that you want to change the behavior instead of just being on “autopilot” as you move through your day.
Do you pay attention to how you work every day? Do you know how often you check your email in a day? The answer might surprise you. Do you have a process for managing your workload, or do you just respond to whatever calls your attention all day? Give some thought to your existing behaviors. Once you are aware of what you want to change, to the extent that you can articulate them to someone else, you’ll then become aware of opportunities to change them. What you measure is what gets improved. So what are YOU measuring?
Tomorrow I’ll post step 2, Education . Thanks for reading!
The Relationship Between Happiness & Productivity, Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about making progress toward your goals as it relates to both happiness and productivity. Today I want to share with you one other interesting result from the Real Simple magazine happiness survey. They reported it as “3 things that the happiest women do.” Although I bet it’s true for men as well.
The three things the happiest women do are:
- they cancel appointments to get more time alone
- they don’t always answer the phone
- they know how to say no.
These are all excellent points and they support my earlier post about taking control as a key to productivity. It seems to make sense that productivity and happiness would be related, as no one would likely associate “stressed out and unproductive” with happiness. When the minutes and hours of your life pass with you always doing things for, with, or because of other people, this is a signal that you are not in control of your time. And if other people are controlling your time, in a very real way, they are controlling your life.
So it’s important to get back in control, which will make you not only more productive, but happier. Taking the first point about canceling appointments: It’s important to recognize when you are over-committed, and sometimes just begging out of a few appointments or plans you’ve made is a great way to catch your breath and get back in control.
The second one is something I say to my clients and in my classes all the time: “just because the phone is ringing, doesn’t mean you have to answer it.” And it’s not just the phone. You can take the same attitude for email, instant messages, text messages, Twitter, faxes, snail mail, and all of the other communication methods we are subjected to.
Knowing how to say no is important but I think there’s more to it. Sometimes it’s not as easy to “just say no,” especially if the person asking is your boss. However, this is where having your to-do list out of your head, where you can see it, comes in especially handy. You can only truly manage things when you can see them, and you can only see them when they are out of your head. When your boss comes in to drop yet another assignment on your desk, having your task list available gives you ammunition for a conversation. You can discuss your workload with them, and your priorities, and have a useful dialogue about your workload. This really helps to put you back in control of your time, rather than being helpless to just accept the work that’s always being “dumped on” you.
Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment.
Three Secrets to Personal Productivity
Productivity is such a big subject and there is a lot to learn, with more every day. One of the things I am working on personally, and answering a lot of questions about, is how to incorporate social media into my life. One of the biggest fears I hear, about Twitter especially, is “How do I make the time? How do I incorporate yet ANOTHER communication tool into my life?” It’s a great question. What I’m learning is that the answer is the same for Twitter and other social media as it was for email before that (which most everyone is still struggling with) as it was for the internet before that, and for the fax machine before that, and for the telephone before that. Many productivity experts have their own “big picture” points about managing the details of their lives. Here are mine…
The first is the most important, although they are all related. The secret to productivity is control. That’s why I call my process the Empowered Productivity System. There are three components to control and if you can master them, managing the details of your life will become much easier and less stressful. You need to learn to master control over information, control over the technology that information comes in on, and control over your own behavior and focus. A couple of brief points about each…
If you, like most people I meet, spend your day in reactive mode, instead of in proactive mode, then information is controlling you, rather than the opposite. If you have your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and your TweetDeck or other Twitter stream, open all the time on your desktop, along with your email client open and messages automatically downloading, plus your notification sounds on your iPhone or Blackberry, then you are not controlling your technology, it is controlling you. Maybe you don’t leave these things open, but you can’t control your urge to check one or all of them every few minutes or less, or you find yourself almost never looking at your to-do list, or maybe you don’t even have your to-do list out of your head (more on this below). Then you are not controlling your own behavior and focus. Control is the key. It might not be easy, but it is simple.
Next tip: you hear money “gurus” saying this all the time: pay yourself first. It applies to your time as much as it does to your money. Spending your time in reactive mode all day means you are prioritizing everyone else’s questions, requests, information, etc., over your own stuff. Presumably you have put things on your to-do list, or they are floating around in your brain, because they have some significance, some importance to you. If you spend little or no time being proactive, checking things off your list…if your list gets longer more often than it gets shorter, then you are not paying yourself first. Here’s the easiest way to implement this: when you start work in the morning, resist the urge to go straight to your email. Go to your to-do list, be proactive and productive for an hour or more, and only then switch to your email messages. Anything you were going to read at 8am can probably keep until 9:30am.
Last thought, and if you know me, you’ve probably heard me say it many times: you can only truly manage things when you can see them, and you can only see them when they are out of your head. Human beings are only capable of holding one conscious, coherent thought in our heads at a time. Everything else is swirling around in that haze that causes stress. Our brains our not designed to manage the banal details of our lives. Our brains are much better at problem solving, big picture, creative-type thinking. If they worked in such a way that we could reach into our mind, and pluck out the exact piece of information, exactly when we needed it, then perhaps we wouldn’t need calendars, planners, to-do lists, contact managers, etc. But we DO need these things. So you should use them, and learn how to use them well. You need a good set of tools, that work well together, and support you in a logical, meaningful way (check out this post and this post for more on this). Having these will allow you to free your mind of the details, allowing you to do the things your brain is good at, and this, in turn, will lower your stress levels.
Just raising your awareness of these three points will put you on the path to improving your personal productivity. As always, I’m happy to hear your comments. And if you’re one of those early adopters who have found a way to work Twitter into your life, please consider following me @mnthomas. For more on why I think Twitter is useful, read this.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Conclusion
One last thing I want to address is something I get asked about a lot, which is how to file your email messages that you don’t want to delete. It’s actually an easy answer.
The way that I suggest you file is categorically, breaking things down into the major areas of your life. For me it’s business-related emails and personal emails. Realize that the search features in email clients are very good. You should rely on these rather than spending lots of time creating folders and sub-folders. The more folders you have, the harder it can be to find things! If you have just a few folders, and a search feature, you should be able to find what you need in a matter of seconds. One final note, if you responded to the message, delete the one that’s in your inbox, and file the one from your “sent” folder.
Here’s one final tip on how to get started implementing everything I’ve outlined over the last several days. If you want to start with a with zero inbox today, right now, first you need to shut off that automatic download in your email client if you haven’t already. Then, create a subfolder called “old emails to process,” move everything before yesterday into that folder. Process all of your emails from today and yesterday using the process I’ve outlined here, until you have zero messages in your inbox. Go back and process the others when you have some time, or wait until something comes up (someone says, “did you get the email I sent you last week?”) It’s not as drastic as deleting everything and starting over, but achieves the same result. When you’ve gotten to zero, RESIST the urge to click that send/receive button again! Go do something else! Work off your to-do list for a while, go out and experience “Twitter 3D,” aka the real world! =)
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 3
Ok, so I outlined steps one and two to managing email and Twitter, and I left you with a question about multi-tasking. If you leave your email client open, Twitter feed, Facebook & LinkedIn pages constantly open on your desktop, you are forcing yourself to multi-task all the time. The question posed yesterday was, “is multi-tasking good or bad?” To answer that, we have to take a look at what multi-tasking really is: It’s a myth. In reality, human beings can only hold a very small number (maybe one!) of thoughts in our head at the same time. So we’re not actually doing things simultaneously, we’re actually switching back and forth rapidly between those things. It’s called cognitive switching, and the ability to do it peaks around age 20. When switching between two tasks, you are probably giving at most 40% of your attention to each of those tasks, and the other 20% at least, is required for the switching. Study after study has shown that switching both lengthens the time it takes to complete a task, and decreases the quality or accuracy of the output. I read a study recently that determined that driver inattention is the cause of 80 percent of all car crashes, and the most common distraction is use of cell phones. And guess what? The numbers are the same whether the person was dialing, talking, or listening!
So we covered controlling the information and controlling the technology. Let’s talk about controlling your habits and your behavior, because that’s the hardest part. What’s the difference between Lance Armstrong & other cyclists or Michael Phelps & other swimmers? They probably have more natural ability than others, but not all others. The difference is the ability to focus. Athletes winning competitions, surgeons performing successful surgeries, scientists making breakthroughs….None of these happen without being “in the zone.” What’s “the zone?” It’s focus. So the question becomes, “how can you learn to focus better, so that you are better at the things you do?”
When you are working on important tasks, you will perform better if they are receiving 100% of your attention. Which means having the willpower to close your email, Twitter feeds, Facebook, etc. And the only way you will be convinced to do this, is if you value the benefits of focus.
Remember that cognitive switching means that you are only giving at most 40% of your attention to the task at hand. Some tasks only need 40% of your attention, or less. I often catch up with friends over the phone while I do household chores like empty the dishwasher. Chores require much less than 40% of my attention, so my friends are getting the bulk of my attention (which might be more than they are giving me! =)
But does the work you perform for your clients deserve more than 40% of your attention? Does driving deserve more than 40% of your attention, when it could mean the difference in life or death, for you or someone else? Does your family deserve more than 40% of your attention?
Let me be clear: I’m not telling you never to multi-task. I’m just suggesting that you be more selective, and more thoughtful, about when you do it, rather than having that be your default method of operating. If your email (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) is always open and always downloading, then nothing ever gets 100% of your attention. Make sure there are times that you can devote to doing nothing but tackling the things on your to-do list, and when those important things come up, give them all of your attention. This is not news to you. I’m sure you do it when you have something really, really important to do, right? Well, does that happen often? And if not, does that mean that the bulk of the things you spend your life doing, aren’t really that important? Or is just that you never get to the important stuff because you’re too busy splitting your time between unimportant things, because it feels more productive?
We’ve talked about 3 steps so far, control over information, control over technology, and control over your behavior. Come back tomorrow and we’ll discuss the 4th step.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 2
Yesterday was step 1: mastering control over the information. Next, you need to learn to master control over the technology it comes in on. Having your email client always open, with messages automatically downloading and giving you an indicator, means that your email is controlling YOU. Same is true for your Twitter client, and your browser windows with Facebook & LinkedIn pages up. Here are a few steps that integrate a process for controlling information and for controlling technology:
- For email, turn OFF the automatic download, so that messages only come in when YOU click send/receive (puts the control back in your hands, rather than keeping you at the mercy of constantly flowing email messages).
- Set aside time to click that send/receive button only 2-3 times per day, allowing yourself at least one full minute (or until you’re done, whichever comes first) for each message.
- Be sure that in that minute, you have moved the message out of your inbox (delete it, file it, or move it to your to-do list). Your email tool should allow you to easily convert emails to tasks. If you don’t have a good system for your to-do list, consider reading my earlier post Are Your Productivity Tools Complicating Your Life.
- Take the same approach with your Twitter feeds and your other social media tools. Yes, Twitter is like a constant “great” party, but sometimes you have to be ok with missing the party to stay home, if you catch my drift. Put another way (from @cjromb): think of Twitter like a river, jump into the flow every now and then, but accept that you can’t touch every drop of water.
I know that you are thinking, “I can’t possibly do that!” It’s a common response, so let’s talk about what’s going on when you aren’t doing this…
If you are constantly checking your emails, (not to mention your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Feeds), what you are forcing yourself to do, is to constantly multi-task. Tomorrow I’ll continue the post where we’ll address whether multi-tasking good or bad, and later I’ll discuss the other two steps for mastering control over email and Twitter.
Mastering Control Over Email & Twitter, Step 1
The secret to personal productivity is mastering control. You need control over the information you receive on a daily basis, control over the tools that bring you that information, and control over your own behavior. If you can master control over these three things, you will be the most productive, and the most relaxed, all the time.
The biggest thing I hear people struggling with lately is communication. There are so many ways to receive information now that it’s having a real impact on how people think about their personal productivity. So to learn how to control communication, you need a good process. And by process I mean a real, step-by-step, I-could-explain-it-to-you-if-you-asked, methodology. Taking email, for example: most people’s “process” for managing email is “skim, then skip to the next one.” Does that sound familiar? You need to figure out why it is you are skipping over messages: it’s probably either that:
- you don’t know the answer
- you don’t feel like dealing with it now
- you think it will take too long
- you are looking for “just the important ones.”
So I suggest that the first component in your process be that you set aside time, every single day, to actually “process” your email messages. All of your messages, not just the important ones. During processing, start by allowing yourself at least one whole minute for each message. If you can read it in 10 seconds, and then would normally skip to the next one, allow yourself those extra 50 seconds and I’ll bet you’ll figure out what to do with it (and don’t leave it in your inbox!) The “stopping to think” is the biggest barrier to get over. You won’t actually need a whole minute for each of them, and you may need more than a minute for others. This can help to protect you from the urge to check your email when you don’t really have time. The same is true for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Set aside time each day (how often and for how long is up to you, but I suggest that it should be LESS than you originally think, and you should decide how long you’re going to spend before you log in. Set a timer if necessary.)
So those are just a few things to think about to get you on the road to an actual process for dealing with information, so that you can master control over it. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about step 2: mastering control over the technology. If you have comments or ideas you’d like to share, I welcome them.