Productivity: Smarter. Not Harder.
2020: 👎👎
All of us have been impacted by the dumpster fire of 2020. Some people dealt with significantly more pain, frustration, and hardship than others, but all of us were impacted in some way. Having to process and deal with all the heavy events of the year left many of us drained: emotionally, physically, and mentally. So, it is no wonder that burnout at work is becoming even more common. We are entering into our work with hardly any gas left in the tank.
Throughout the year, I had to become even more intentional about managing my time well so that it didn’t manage me. I refined some of the productivity hacks that I had already been using at work and wanted to take some time to share the system I currently use. Before I get into the details of the productivity system, let me be clear on one thing:
Productivity is a journey, it is not a destination.
In other words, being productive is not some permanent state of existence one can achieve. It is an iterative process of intentional continuous improvement. It’s a journey of discovering productivity tricks that work well for us today and then adjusting and refining when they no longer work for us. What I do to keep myself organized today is a little different than what I did a year ago, and very different than what I did five years ago. That makes sense because I am different today than I was five years ago. I am also working in a different role in a company that looks different than it did five years ago.
Productivity Pillars
The way I keep myself organized and productive will continue to evolve (the journey), but there are a few foundational pieces for me that I don’t think will change anytime soon. These foundational pieces are self-care, removing waste, and flexible planning. I refer to these as my “productivity pillars.”
Pillar 1: Self Care 💆♀️
In my opinion, this is the starting place for all of us. If we aren’t taking care of ourselves, it doesn’t matter how many cool productivity hacks we try to implement, we will still burnout. We often buy into this lie where we tell ourselves, ”things are crazy right now, but once I do _________, things will slow down and that’s when I will take a break and recharge.”
The reality is that things around us never really slow down. Life continues to move fast and there is always something else begging for our attention. Instead of working to get to the place where life around us can slow down, we need to acknowledge the reality that it probably isn’t going to happen and take care of ourselves now.
Work from your rest and health. Do not work for your rest and health.
We need to stop working and striving to get to that place where we can rest and recharge and instead enter into our work rested and recharged. To do this, we need to practice basic self-care activities, like getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising. We also need to ensure that we are regularly engaging in activities that give us energy and joy, and minimize the activities that drain our energy and joy. Notice I didn’t suggest we eliminate activities that drain us, because that just isn’t reality. We sometimes need to do the things we need to do so that we can do the things we want to do. Please don’t tell your manager that you don’t want to do some necessary part of your job anymore, ”because it doesn’t spark joy.”
Pillar 2: Remove Waste 🗑
Once we are approaching our work from a rested and healthy place, we need to eliminate waste from our day. I’ve discovered four of the most common forms of waste I tend to run up against.
1. Ineffective Meetings
If the purpose or agenda for the meeting is unclear, I have a really hard time engaging in the meeting. I have to spend all of my cognitive load just trying to understand what it is we are even talking about. What’s even worse is while I know ineffective meetings are a productivity killer, I am sometimes guilty of creating and holding ineffective meetings myself. I may be 100% clear on the purpose and the agenda of the meeting in my mind, but if I don’t communicate that to the meeting attendees, I’m not doing any favors to myself or the people in the meeting.
2. Clutter
In a 2011 report, published by the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers discovered that clutter can limit the brain’s ability to process information correctly. In my current work-from-home reality, this means I have to keep my home working space free of clutter. I’m not going to be as productive if my desk is covered in bills, home projects, and a dirty lunch plate. At the end of every workday, I try to make sure my office and desk are free of clutter. Additionally, every few weeks I try to free my computer of clutter such as downloads, emails, and Slack channels. I can keep my physical workspace free of clutter, but if my digital workspace is a mess, I’m not going to be as productive.
3. Multitasking
Studies show that only about 2% of the population is actually capable of multitasking. I can confidently say that I am NOT in that 2% of the population. When I try to bounce from task to task, I lie to myself that I am being productive. The truth is that I am not, because I am forcing my brain to constantly shift gears. Metaphorically, it’s kind of like when I tried to drive a stick shift when I was 14. Sure, the car moved forward a bit, but it never left the parking lot and I’m pretty sure I got whiplash. Instead of trying to multitask, I’ve embraced the concept of mono-tasking. I try to devote parts of my day to closely related tasks. When I do get distracted by something, it is easy to pick my work back up again because I have a consistent theme throughout the day. As an example, I block out a few hours once per month to just focus on everything related to quarterly planning, roadmaps, and vision.
4. Not Having a Plan
The single biggest form of waste for me personally is when I don’t have a plan for how I manage my time. It has such a large impact on me that I’ve dedicated my third productivity pillar to this form of waste.
Pillar 3: Flexible Planning 🗓
I call this pillar “flexible planning,” and the key to it is to find a healthy balance between planning out every finite detail of a day and just freestyle working. This is something I discovered by visiting one of my favorite places in the world: Disneyland. After my first two trips as an adult, I discovered there are two types of people who have an awful time at Disneyland: people who walk in without a plan and think they’ll just be able to ride any ride and eat any meal they want, and people who try to plan every single detail of their visit.
When people visit a Disney Park without a plan, they’ll spend most of their day waiting in line for rides and trying to figure out where to eat. They’ll leave the parks sad and disappointed that they just paid a small fortune to stand around.
When people visit Disney Parks with every detail planned out, they’ll become paralyzed when things don’t go as planned. The ride they wanted to go on will be down for maintenance. The unexpected rainstorm will roll in. The kitchen of the restaurant they wanted to eat dinner at will catch on fire (this actually happened to us). They’ll leave the parks sad and disappointed that they spent a small fortune and didn’t get to do everything they planned.
Before my third trip to a Disney Park, I came across Shannon Albert, creator of WDW Prep School. Shannon encourages people to use flexible planning when visiting Disney Parks. I’ve now adopted this model when I visit Disney or go on any vacation for that matter. I make a trip plan that includes the basic scaffolding of the things we want to do each day and then we fill in the rest of our time with whatever we are feeling. At Disney, having a flexible plan allows us to enjoy the rides and meals that are most important to us, while leaving us space for the magical moments, like Pluto asking my wife to dance.
This moment happened because we were flexible with our time. We accomplished what we wanted to in the parks and allowed ourselves enough space in our schedule to come back to the hotel lobby early to relax by the roaring fire with a glass of bourbon.
At work, having a flexible plan allows us to make sure we complete the most important items we need to while allowing space in our schedules to address emergent items that may come up. Free-styling our work leads to spinning our wheels on items that aren’t actually important. Likewise, planning every detail of our day just isn’t realistic and we will be constantly disappointed when we can’t fulfill our plans. Flexible planning allows for a healthy balance. Here are some tips for flexible planning:
1. Group Meetings Together
Take control of your calendar and try to group meetings back-to-back instead of leaving small breaks between meetings. This helps to avoid multitasking and leads to space in your calendar for emergent items and/or flow states.
2. Flow States
Flow states are periods of time when you are hyper-focused and very efficient. After you’ve removed the waste of unnecessary meetings, and grouped necessary meetings together, you’ll have space on your calendar for flow states. Block out 60–90 minutes for yourself and pick one important task or area of focus. You’ll crush that project you’ve been wanting to accomplish and time will fly by.
3. Group Small Tasks Together
Even after you’ve cleaned up your meetings, there will still be small gaps of time (30 minutes or less) that you will have on your calendar. 30 minutes isn’t enough time to get deep, meaningful work done, but it is enough time to get something done. When small, non-value-added, but required tasks come up throughout the day, try to group them together. When you have a 30-minute chunk of time available, try to knock out all those small tasks: requesting that time off, answering that slack question, replying to that email.
4. Plan Ahead
At the end of the day on Friday, take 30 minutes and prepare for your upcoming week. If you have something due next Wednesday, you can make sure you schedule a flow state to get it done on Monday. To bring it full circle, this is typically when I discover if I have an upcoming meeting with an unclear agenda or purpose. Additionally, at the end of every workday, try to take 10 minutes to prepare for the next day. Planning the week in advance is great, but plans change throughout the week. Take time to recalibrate each day. The tool I use to help me plan ahead is Trello.
Trello Boards
After trying just about every productivity system I could find over the years, I finally settled on Trello. I use it for everything: vacation planning, home improvement projects, personal and professional goal tracking, and of course daily work.
The first iteration of my weekly work board was based upon kanban. I have columns for “to do,” “ready,” and “done.” I also have columns for each day of the workweek. After an item moves into the “ready” column, that is a signal to me that it’s ready to be pulled into a day of the week. This is when that Friday planning session comes into play! All the “ready” tasks will be spread evenly throughout my week. This system served me well for years, and hundreds of others have copied the board and found it valuable.
The second iteration of my work planning board came about after my role changed at work. My day-to-day became less task-oriented and more vision-oriented. I found myself needing to keep track of topics that I needed to learn about/research, decisions I needed to make, and projects I needed to maintain. This updated version still includes the days of the week and the “done” column, and the Friday planning session still applies to this board.
Final Thoughts
It bears repeating that productivity is a journey, it is not a destination. While I have shared things that work well for me, know that I still find myself in ruts. I still have days where I feel utterly worthless as an employee. Those are the days when I come back to my three pillars: self-care, removing waste, and flexible planning.
I hope you’ve been able to find something in this post to help you be more productive without just putting in more work hours. Please share your productivity tips in the comments so that we can all learn from each other! Now, off to plan my next week on my Trello board.
To use my Trello boards, click the links below, and then click “Create Board from Template.”
- Version 1: https://trello.com/b/WGEP2zIq
- Version 2: https://trello.com/b/eHYteE3Z
