9 hours work and research, 83 sources consulted.
Some people find it easier to organise and do their daily work than others. They work fast and efficient. On top of that, they are often even more productive than their coworkers that work long hours.
So how do these people do it?
I dug into the abyss of the internet and have found hundreds of different answers. (0) Some have entire lists, some only one approach, some tips are great, some are copy-paste from others. Some only sound useful, but are pretty much useless advice: I found one saying 'be happy at work'... well.
A few patterns that are seemingly repeated over and over. Except hiring an assistant. No one ever mentions that I wonder why? Could be a game-changer.
I would like to address some practices that work really well, both if you are on your own or in a leadership position.
Quick Summary
Prioritise and plan according to importance and urgency.
Monotasking beats multitasking
Create Block-Times where you have reduced distractions
Associate goals with due dates
Get enough sleep
Detach from your work every evening
They are pretty much all connected with each other, interestingly. Let's go get us a boost.
Prioritise and plan according to importance and urgency.
A great many productive people do not organise their tasks according to preferences but instead, according to urgency and importance. Not everything is something that you need to do yourself.
While quite a few articles state to use urgency solely as determinator which topic to work on, I find this a tad too simple an approach. Urgent things are not necessarily important. Merely because something has a deadline does not give it the status of being important. (1)
What I advise, is to prioritise and delegate according to a simple Eisenhower matrix.(2) The Eisenhower matrix differs between important and urgent tasks. Which means, some tasks are neither urgent nor important. And some tasks are important and urgent.
Urgent & Important tasks/projects to be completed immediately
Not Urgent & Important tasks/projects to be scheduled on your calendar
Urgent & Unimportant tasks/projects to be delegated to someone else
Not Urgent & Unimportant tasks/projects to be deleted
You want to focus your attention on the important and urgent section. These things are the things that matter, the tasks that have an impact on your personal or professional life.
These things are critical that you do them, and you do them in good quality, not quantity.
Now the urgent but not important things you should delegate so that others fulfil them for you.
The ones that are important but not urgent, you can schedule or delegate.
The ones that are neither important nor urgent - ignore them, put on the backbench or, if you are radical, delete them. To avoid missing things, re-evaluate your list daily.
This goes hand in hand with the advice that you should plan your workday. And, it is usually mixed with mentioning the Pareto principle to maximise that output. Pareto means that 20% of the work generates 80% output. In other words, a workable 80% solution can be done in 20% of the time. To make it perfect, you will need another 80% of the work, in a nutshell. Note, this does not mean to not pay attention to details. Details are what make the difference for your customers.
(3)
If you plan your tasks according to this, you will tackle the most important tasks first each day. Then it descends to what is less important when your brainpower starts to decline over the hours.
Monotasking beats multitasking
The dangers of multitasking are being mentioned almost everywhere and are pretty much the number one most listed advice. (4)
The reason to avoid multitasking is that your brain takes time to focus on a topic. (5)
Multitasking in a more general sense means that you are writing your newsletter, and while doing this, you also respond to that text real quick, check that email that just came in, answer the phone, check out that link on Instagram that was suggested and so on. If you are doing customer-service, then this is part of your job, and you would focus on doing that. What the brain does is to jump between the goals and activities each time. Which is not much time. However, this adds up rapidly over time, making it harder to get into a topic in depth when the brain expects to jump around again real soon.
Our monkey mind has been a mono-tasker ever since. A highly efficient one, yes, and if you want to boost your productivity for output, focus on the one task you are doing. Finish them, one at a time, as qualitatively good as needed in the least amount of time. Then off to the next. This a.) finishes your to-do list faster and b) you can track the progress of tasks that you finished better and see how far you came. Which is also more rewarding in the long run. (6)
Create Block-Times where you have reduced distractions
Following the previously mentioned mind-switch that costs us time, I suggest that you create an atmosphere where you can actually achieve the necessary focus that you need for the task at hand.
An email notification that pops up on the screen, the sound of a new message coming in, your kid screaming in the back... and the concentration can be gone.
However, I can not log out for an entire day to focus on one single task. I have some things that need attention throughout the day.
Therefore, I have been preaching that people should try and set time blocks for certain tasks. A designated, non-discussable timeslot where you are not available except emergencies, thus, no emails, no social media activities, no phone and especially, no meetings. 45 - 60 minutes of such uninterrupted time twice a day can be all the difference you need to make huge leaps in productivity. You might have heard the Pomodoro technique, 25-35 min interval work. If that works for you, perfect. (7)
This has a nice side-effect: it automatically creates breaks for you when these slots end. If you work at home and have a tendency to not leave the chair for four hours straight like I sometimes do, these blocks help as a reminder to get up. Maybe a quick stretch, getting a refill on coffee and water and checking emails or media if that is part of your work.
I further found that the physical movement of getting up helps to mentally detach from the problem at hand. This can be especially practical when you just finished a task and want to tackle the next big one.
Associate goals with due dates
Goals without a completion date are often a dry run. They are pushed out at will because other tasks intervene. Break the goal down into steps and put a due date on them is usually better.
Broken down in this way and provided with a time axis, the goal becomes more tangible. It also becomes more comfortable for me to plan the tasks when I see them. I am a visual person, yes.
In project management, I learned, that it is more rewarding for a team if they see lists being checked and cleared on time. Thus, if you have a huge task that takes 2 months, divide that to-do list into several shorter or thematic to-do lists that each take about 2 weeks. (Sprint thinking here, yes). On a visual level, the team has accomplished a lot more because one entire to-do list was finished after two weeks already. And it builds trust in you as a leader that it is going in the right direction. (8)
Planning your tasks with a time association also means that you actually took the time to think about the tasks at hand. Maybe you can group some if you have the liberty?
Get enough sleep
I stumbled upon this as a productivity tip quite a few times, and it is not about protecting your mental health. Getting enough sleep is an essential requirement for a productive day at work.
If you don't get enough sleep, your brain does perform measurably worse after so much as even one night without sufficient sleep.
Over time, continuous lack of sleep decreases your memory and cognitive performance. (9)
There is a hustle culture among us that preaches to work 16 -20 hours a day. Which I find bananas. Working longer hours does not equal getting more things done. (10)
After a certain amount of time, your output's quality decreases so drastically, that it becomes more or less pointless to keep working. I rather work 8 hours focused and productive so that I make up what others do in 16.
This falls in line with me proposing to do the most important tasks first. You will make more mistakes to the end, and your thinking gets slower, so better have your focus and energy at max for the things that matter.
Detach from your work every evening
This I heard many entrepreneurs and CEOs say in interviews over the past years, yet it was mentioned only a few times in articles I read. Many high pressure CEOs have rituals to detach themselves at night, and they try to keep these habits up in some way every day. Forbes teaches this, and I have been doing this for years myself - although I learnt this in the military from my then mentor. (11)
Whether you take a bubble bath like Arianna Huffington, read half an hour like Obama did or meditate like Oprah Winfrey - letting go gives peace of mind and helps you sleep better. (12) I am not talking about the extreme days of high-intensity stress and extraordinary efforts. I mean during your regular workdays. I probably would suggest that you take the time to do some exercising, whatever your jam is. It helps the body to get rid of built-up stress hormones such as cortisol, and it helps to release tension that manifests itself physically, like grinding teeth, neck tension or nervous ticks. (13)
What helps me mentally, is to take 10 minutes in the evening to write down all the things I did not finish that day and the goal I think I have for the next day. This then basically becomes the to-do list for the next day. Because I write it down, I can let go, not having a fear of forgetting 'that one important thing.'
I write down everything that comes to mind, not assessing, not prioritising.
The next morning I can then reattach with what I was doing the day before. Seeing the board makes it easier to create my schedule for the day and assessing whether my goal was set as a realistic one or not.
If I don't write the things down, I found myself to sleep a lot worse, up to the point of waking up more often, thinking I forgot something.
TL:DR
A lot of these techniques may seem blatantly obvious. Plan a bit ahead, reserve time for important things, sleep enough...
If they do, excellent, then you just got a reminder that this stuff works. I will not tell you to use productivity apps or that there is a secret method. There are great tools out there, yes. Yet, you have all the tools at hand that you need. Maybe cleaning up your office and blocking out 2 hours every morning for your most important tasks is already enough to unlock your super powers. Give it a shot.
Thanks for being here.
If I may help you, don't hesitate to contact me.
Shoot me an email if I can help you with something if you have input or literally anything else.
Except for death threats maybe, please send them by post?
cheers
Notes
0/ Thinking only about what David Allen said in his speeches about the ‘Getting things done’ movement would create an entire list. (https://gettingthingsdone.com)
1/ I am not advising to miss deadlines, which can affect your business and the team. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3560243?seq=1
2/ zapier has a nice and more indepth read on this. https://zapier.com/blog/prioritize-task-list-methods/
3/ https://www.businessinsider.com/productivity-tips-japan-kaizen-tidying-up-2019-1?r=US&IR=T
4/ https://www.inc.com/john-rampton/15-ways-to-increase-productivity-at-work.html
5/ To be picky, I disagree on the term multitasking, because technically, humans can not multitask two processes that require both high-level brainpower. We can switch between such tasks rapidly and learn to combine them, yes, but we cannot do two entirely different things. Most true multitasking things we do are things we use muscle memory and automatisation to achieve. For instance, you can juggle on a bike while having a conversation about physics. But you can not write a physics article while simultaneously talking someone through what you did last summer in reverse order. You get my point.
I kid you not, this is a weird thing we use in our daily language and no one bats an eye. See Burgess: https://doi.org/10.1007/s004269900006 or Brainfacts: https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/thinking-and-awareness/2013/the-multitasking-mind . Certain types of multitasking can be improved, as suggested by Garner and Dux you divide the tasks into single tasks and become able to switch really fast. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26466456.
6/ NY times wrote on this once. https://www.nytimes.com/guides/business/how-to-improve-your-productivity-at-work
7/ Todoist has a whole bunch of killer articles on this, worth checking out. https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique)
8/ I searched for asian appriaches towards productivity to break from our western centric thinking, japan times has some interesting thoughts. Not the best read. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/11/19/commentary/japan-commentary/want-increase-workplace-productivity/
9/ https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-deprivation/lack-of-sleep-and-cognitive-impairment
10/ There is too much literature on this, I propose to just read the Book REwork by Friedmann.
11/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhall/2020/06/26/maximize-your-productivity-with-these-4-methods/?sh=cb5dfea6be4a
12/ According to https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/6-habits-highly-successful-people-before-bedtime.html, Obama stated this in an interview (bottom of the interview) https://www.newsweek.com/qa-obama-dick-cheney-war-and-star-trek-79715
13/ https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/exercising-to-relax
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