9
Productivity Tips from People Who Write About Productivity
In recent years, work has become infinitely
more complex.
Technological innovations have led to
round-the-clock work schedules and mounting expectations. Our assignments have
grown more collaborative, requiring more coordination, conference calls, and
meetings. We now face an endless barrage of distractions, from the vibrations
and alerts on our smartphones to the breaking news stories and viral videos
awaiting us at our desks.
Now, more than ever, we need strategies for
being productive. But where do we start?
Earlier this year, as part of an
online summit taking place in January 2016, I invited 26
bestselling science and productivity writers to share their insights for
achieving top performance. Here are nine overarching themes that encapsulate
their advice for navigating a rapidly accelerating informational landscape and
achieving peak performance at work.
1. Own your time. Our
most satisfying work comes about when we’re playing offense, working on
projects that we ourselves initiate. Many of us know this intuitively yet
continue allowing ourselves to spend the vast majority of our days playing
defense, responding to other people’s requests.
Many of the experts I interviewed believe that
top performers take steps to ensure a favorable offense-to-defense ratio. Tom
Rath, author of Are You Fully
Charged?, recommends blocking out time to work away from email,
programming your phone to only ring for select colleagues, and resisting emails
first thing in the morning until you’ve achieved at least one important task.
2.
Recognize busyness as a lack of focus. There’s a
satisfying rush we experience when there’s too much on our plate: we feel
needed, challenged, even productive. And yet that pleasurable experience is an
illusion. It robs us of our focus and prevents us from making progress on the
work that matters most.
Sociologist Christine Carter, Ph.D., an
expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, put it this way: “Busyness
is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme,
it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.”
Instead of viewing busyness as a sign of significance, top performers interpret
busyness as an indication of wasted energy.
3. Challenge the myth of
the “ideal worker.” Far too many of us continue to believe that an “ideal
worker” is one who works constantly, often at great expense to their personal
life, but there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Being productive
requires recognizing that you can’t work for extended periods of time and
maintain a high level of performance. As humans, we have a limited capacity for
focused attention. And yet, as Brigid Schulte, journalist and author of the New
York Timesbestseller Overwhelmed, points out, we have been
seduced into thinking that if only we try harder and work longer, we can
achieve anything.
Top performers take a different approach. They
recognize and honor their physical limitations by getting plenty of exercise
and sleep, cycling between 90-minute bursts of focused work and
short restorative breaks, and taking time to disconnect from email for some
portion of their off-hours.
4. Intentionally leave
important tasks incomplete. We often race to finish assignments
quickly so that we can move on to the next item on our list. But Wharton
professor and psychologist
Adam Grant believes resisting this urge can actually make us
more productive.
“I used to sit down to write and not want to
get up until I was done with a chapter or an argument,” Grant told me. “Now I
will deliberately leave sentences just hanging in the middle and get up and go
do something else. What I find when I come back is that I don’t have to do a
lot of work to finish the sentence, and now I also have a bunch of new ideas
for where the writing should go next.” (Note: Hemingway followed the same strategy.)
What both Grant and Hemingway are leveraging
is the human tendency to ruminate over unfinished tasks, otherwise known as the Zeigarnick
Effect. If you start a project and leave it unfinished, you’re bound
to think about it more frequently than after it’s done.
Instead of aiming to complete important tasks
in one sitting, try leaving them incomplete. Doing so will encourage you to
continue thinking about your work in different settings and, in the process,
position you to uncover creative solutions.
5. Make a habit of
stepping back. In a knowledge economy, productivity requires more than
perseverance — it requires insight and problem-solving. Research indicatesquite clearly that we are
more likely to find breakthrough ideas when we temporarily remove ourselves
from the daily grind. This is why the best solutions reveal themselves when we
step into the shower, go for a run, or take a vacation. Top performers view
time off not as stalled productivity but as an investment in their future
performance.
6. Help others
strategically. High achievers, Grant argues in his 2013 book Give and Take, tend to be Givers —
those who enjoy helping others without strings attached. While giving can
certainly help your succeed, Grant’s data also reveals that helping everyone
with everything is a recipe for failure.
So how do you do it right? Top performers,
Grant argues, avoid saying yes to every helping opportunity. Instead, they
specialize in one or two forms of helping that they genuinely enjoy and excel
at uniquely.
7. Have a plan for saying
no. The more commitments we agree to take on, the more likely
we are to experience what author and consultant Rory Vaden calls
“priority dilution.” This is when the sheer number of obligations we’ve
committed to prevent us from doing the work that matters most.
One method of counteracting priority dilution
involves having a strategy in place for saying no in
advance, so that you don’t have to stop and think about how to phrase your
response each time you need to turn someone down. Create an email template, or
write out a script that you can use when doing it in person.
When dealing with a manager who is asking you
to take on more than is reasonable, think outside the yes/no paradigm.
Consultant and writer Greg McKeownrecommends having a conversation
with your manager and listing all the projects you’re currently working on.
Indicate which items you think are priorities and invite your supervisor to
share his or her opinion. It’s a way of illuminating the constraints you’re
under without ever saying the word “no.”
8. Make important
behaviors measurable. To make progress toward any goal, it helps to track our
behaviors. Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin, an expert on happiness and
habits, sees monitoring as one of the keys to behavior changes, saying, “If you
want to eat more healthily, keep a food journal. If you want to get more
exercise, use a step counter. If you want to stick to a budget, track your
spending.”
Marshall Goldsmith, the well-known CEO coach,
agrees. Every evening, he reviews a 40-item spreadsheet consisting of every
important behavior he hopes to achieve. Among the items: the number of words he
wrote, the distance he walked, and the number of nice things he said to his
wife, daughter, and grandchildren.
9. Do things today that
make more time tomorrow. A final theme to emerge is that top
performers look for ways to automate or delegate activities that are not a good
use of their time. Vaden suggests asking yourself, “How can I use my time today
in ways that create more time tomorrow?” Evaluating your to-do list through
this lens makes it easier to commit to activities that are not immediately
enjoyable, like automating bill paying or creating a “how to” guide for other
team members to help you delegate repetitive tasks more easily.
All of these suggestions are useful
individually, but they also highlight an important trend.
In the 1990s, being productive mainly required
good time management. Ten years later, the advent of email led to an expanded
workday and productivity requiring you to manage your energy, not just your time.
Over the last few years, we have entered a new
age in which managing your energy and time is not enough. Today, the magnitude
of information rushing toward us from every direction has surpassed our
capacity for consumption. No matter how much time and energy you have at your
disposal, you can’t be productive without mastering the art of attention
management.
Resisting the lure of busyness, having a plan
for saying no, maintaining a relentless focus on self-directed goals that only
you can achieve — these are the skills we need to cultivate in ourselves to
succeed, both at work and in life.
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