There are a number of well-known productivity tools and techniques I’ve used over the years. I’ll quickly run through my favourites below. Of course, they won’t all appeal to you, but if one takes your fancy, give it a go!
Pareto's law
Pareto was the Italian economist who once walked around his garden and noticed that 80% of the peas in his garden came from just 20% of the pods. Being a good economist, he didn’t just discard this as an interesting observation; he wondered how he could turn it into a law of world economics. Pareto’s Law is a reminder that not all actions are equal. Some of the things we do create profound and lasting impact. Other things we do are instantly forgotten. Meetings are great examples of this: 80% discussion for 50 minutes, with the 10 minutes at the end set aside for actions, clarifications and the things that will be remembered in two months’ time. The rest will all be forgotten. The rule of 80–20 is worth keeping in mind.
Parkinson's law
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available. Put simply, we rarely work at our optimum speed. Think about when you’re trying to finish a piece of writing such as a report or, thinking back even further, a school or university essay. As you feel the deadline looming large, your hands type the words a little bit quicker. You think that little bit faster too and while you might be prone to mistakes, the sense of urgency produces profound productivity. If you think you have a week to do three essays, the three essays take a week. Yet, they always seem to be written on the last night of your half-term break. So if you’d have just been given one day to do three essays, you’d have produced exactly the same thing. Work expands and contracts depending on the time available. So next time you have a two-hour report to write, consider what might happen if you were only given one hour to do it. Probably the most important 20% of it – the stuff that adds 80% of the impact – could easily be done in an hour. In many ways, the less of a perfectionist you’re able to stomach being, the more you can push your productivity to higher levels than you thought possible.
Hofstadter's law
Perfection is a dangerous disease. So much of what we do has the potential to unravel way beyond what is even necessary (think 80–20) and way beyond what we could find ourselves drawn to do (think Parkinson’s). Hofstadter’s Law states that, ‘Work takes twice as long as you originally anticipated, even when taking into account Hofstadter’s Law’. Wake up and smell the cappuccino. Everything you do has the potential to unravel and require more effort than you think.
So use Hofstadter’s Law as your reminder to commit to less. Use Parkinson’s Law to dare yourself to be different and work to firm boundaries or time constraints. And in all of that use the 80–20 principle to remind yourself what matters. Life’s too short.
Big rocks
In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey tells a story he had heard many years earlier of a teacher in a class- room who pulls out a large jar and several big rocks from underneath a table. He fills the jar with the big rocks, screws the lid back on the jar and asks his students, ‘Is the jar now full?’ ‘Of course,’ say the students, ‘you’ve just filled it with those big rocks.’ The teacher then reaches back underneath the table and pulls out a bag of small pebbles. Unscrewing the lid of the jar, he pours the pebbles around the larger rocks and fills the jar with the big rocks and the small pebbles. ‘How about now?’, asks the teacher, ‘Is the jar full?’ While a number of the students reply yes, a fair few are now suspicious of what else the teacher might have underneath his table. Sure enough, the teacher reaches down and finds a tub of sand, which fills the jar in between the big rocks and the pebbles. Finally, even though the jar is filled with rocks, pebbles and sand, the teacher pours water in and fills the jar to the brim.
The teacher then asks his students what they think the lesson might be here. What might this teach us about managing our time? One of the students raises his hand and suggests it means that, ‘Even though we thought our day was full, there’s always more that we can cram into every day’. The teacher replies by saying that while that may be the case, the real lesson is that if you are going to have any hope of fitting the big rocks into the jar at all, you need to start with them.
So much of our day is taken up with the pebbles, sand and water of our attention. Emails and information inputs are really all just pebbles. The big rocks – those things on our master actions list that require proactive attention, lots of energy, potentially awkward conversations and a whole raft of other things that make them difficult – are the things that need to be scheduled first. Start every day with the question, ‘What are my big rocks today?’ and focus on them ruthlessly, especially during periods of proactive and active attention.
The pomodoro technique
Invented by university student Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, the Pomodoro Technique is named after those stylish kitchen timers you can buy in the shape of a tomato. Essentially a tool for managing attention and focus, Pomodoro has at its heart two extremely simple but powerful observations. Firstly, that short bursts of attention (25 minutes) followed by short breaks (five minutes) are the best way to preserve your proactive attention throughout the day. And secondly, by splitting the day into lots of 25-minute chunks and using a timer, you spend the whole day with the constant buzz of being up against a clock.
Time is counted backwards, counting down from 25 to zero, rather than forwards indefinitely until you take a break. It is a great tool for splitting much larger tasks down into more bite-sized chunks, it can help provide an important sense of focus and can help you resist the temptation to give in to distractions. You can download Pomodoro timer apps for your phone, or download a desktop timer for your computer: they are quieter than using a real kitchen timer. I’ve used both over the years, but I’d advise against using a real one if there are other people in the office!
Pomodoro is also an interesting technique to ensure you don’t focus too much attention on any single area of your work. Used over a day or a week, you can start to view your schedule in terms of Pomodoros spent – and see exactly how little of your time is spent on the stuff you like the least.
Scheduled procrastination
One of the good things about Pomodoro is knowing that after every 25 minutes of work there’s a five-minute comfort and distraction break. This is really useful as it creates a boundary between temptation and virtue by making you consciously aware that a five-minute period to give in to temptation is heading your way. You can take this idea a step further. If you find yourself procrastinating, checking Facebook, doodling and daydreaming, realise that they all have their place. Rather than beating yourself up for doing these things (which adds more drama to what you’re ultimately trying to resist and hence reinforces the resistance to it anyway), simply create the right boundary.
So if you catch yourself procrastinating, your boss-self is allowed to decide, ‘OK, five more minutes of this procrastination and then we’re moving on to this specific thing’. In creating this, what you’ve done is demystify and disempower the procrastination and you’ll often find that such a boundary moves you along at the end of the five minutes and into what’s required of you now that you’ve ‘had your share’.
Power hours
The ‘power hour’ is something I developed for myself a couple of years ago and I use it if avoiding a particular important activity. The idea is simple. Schedule an hour of your most proactive attention to work on what you’re avoiding. After all, it’s just an hour of your day. I’m not asking myself to work on that thing for the whole day.
Adding it to the diary changes it from being a possible option for the day (which I’m likely to ignore in favour of easier, noisier work) to being a commitment, hard-wired into my day. It brings focus and by the end of one power hour I’ve usually delved deeply enough into the activity to know that it’s not quite as scary or difficult after all.
To make choices about what to schedule as a power hour activity, I use a question on my weekly checklist: ‘What are the big rocks that are either difficult or that you might be avoiding?’ If that throws up an answer, I’ll schedule power hours for the following week, right there in my review. It’s such a relief knowing that I have a commitment and a plan to move forward on the things that are stuck.
The other way to use power hours is to think about this question: ‘What’s the one activity that, if you did it consistently for an hour a day every day this year, makes a person in your job successful?’
If you were a sales person, that activity might be cold calling. If you don’t enjoy cold calling, you’ll always find something else to do in its place. Developing a habit, though, that every day between 09:30 and 10:30 you cold call, will, over time, yield results. Of course, this isn’t rocket science. But if you have a clear idea in your mind right now about your one activity, the chances are that you’re not actually practising that for an hour a day or more. The power hour can be a way to find consistency, develop muscle, turn a conscious choice into an effortless, unconscious habit and ultimately meet your goals.
You’ll also find power hours easier if you can tell your colleagues you’re doing it and ask for their cooperation in not interrupting you during that time. This public pronouncement will also firm up the commitment in your mind. Anything else you can do that might subconsciously create a signal that this hour is special and different from all the rest will really help, too. This could be something as simple as changing your desktop background, putting on your favourite music or drinking expensive herbal tea instead of the usual ‘normal’ tea. You could also do something more physical, like work from a different desk or take your work outside to enjoy the view.
Corridor consensus building and MBWA
‘MBWA’, or ‘management by walking about’ is a fantastic tool. By setting aside some time to walk the floors, either once a day or certainly two or three times a week, you make yourself available to your team, and to those outside of your direct line management but with whom you may need to collaborate. I have seen great managers do this without a notebook or any form of capture tool, but if you’re like me and have a memory like a sieve, resist the urge to try to be ultra-smooth – take a notebook and capture any actions or ideas along the way.
More importantly, with time set aside during the week to do this, you can even set up a ‘people’ list of those people and issues you are hoping to meet and make progress on when you’re doing the rounds. This can be a regular part of a master actions list. Done well, this can be good fun, very sociable, and also cover half a dozen or more issues in no more than half an hour.
Daily huddle
This one is cheating slightly, as although it’s very short, it is a meeting! There are various books that talk about the idea of short, daily meetings. I particularly like Verne Harnish’s book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, which talks about how leadership in growing businesses should focus on ‘1% vision and 99% alignment’.
One of the forms of alignment, to keep everyone in the business reminded of what the main goals are that they should be focused on is the idea of the ‘Daily Huddle’. This takes no more than 15 minutes, yet cuts out the need for a lot of other meetings and communications because of its simple and repetitive format.
Gathering around a whiteboard with the main actions or plans on it is a great tip, as well. The huddle asks five questions, which are the same each day:
- What’s your good news?
- What are you working on today?
- What’s our progress towards achieving the key numbers in our business?
- Where are you stuck?
- Are you OK for tomorrow’s huddle?
There aren’t many rules here, but a couple of useful guidelines would be firstly to make sure any issues that crop up that are going to take longer than one minute to resolve are dealt with outside of the huddle meeting, and secondly that the meeting runs at the same time every day, so it creates habit and flow. The final rule is that it never takes longer than 15 minutes.
About the author
Graham Allcott is an author, business speaker and social entrepreneur, who runs a training company Think Productive.
This article comprises a number of tools and techniques taken from his book How to be a productivity Ninja.
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