What's Best Next

You are here: Home / Archives for 1 - Productivity / i Productivity Obstacles

The Core Productivity Decision in an Age of Infinite Input

by

Namely: input versus output. Godin makes a great point on this today:

[Input versus output] is one of the most important decisions you’ll make today.

How much time and effort should be spent on intake, on inbound messages, on absorbing data…

and how much time and effort should be invested in output, in creating something new.

There used to be a significant limit on available intake. Once you read all the books in the college library on your topic, it was time to start writing.

Now that the availability of opinions, expertise and email is infinite, I think the last part of that sentence is the most important:

Time to start writing.

Or whatever it is you’re not doing, merely planning on doing.

3 Strategies for Recovering from Information Overload

by

An article from the McKinsey Quarterly. Here’s the first paragraph:

For all the benefits of the information technology and communications revolution, it has a well-known dark side: information overload and its close cousin, attention fragmentation. These scourges hit CEOs and their colleagues in the C-suite particularly hard because senior executives so badly need uninterrupted time to synthesize information from many different sources, reflect on its implications for the organization, apply judgment, make trade-offs, and arrive at good decisions.

What Causes Burnout?

by

It’s not working long hours. It’s working on the wrong things — whether for long hour or, over time, normal hours. Here’s what Marcus Buckingham writes in Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

Burnout doesn’t happen when you are working long hours on invigorating activities. Long hours may tire you out, but they rarely burn you out. But fill your weeks with the wrong kinds of activities, activities that weaken you, and even regular activities will start to burn.

This means that burnout doesn’t even necessarily mean that you are in the wrong job. You can be in the right job, doing the wrong things.

So, what’s the solution? Work within your strengths, and cut out the activities that call upon your weaknesses — that is, the activities that weaken you:

Pick a week; capture, clarify, and confirm which activities strengthen and which weaken; then start the week-by-week process of pushing your time toward the former and away from the latter.

Don't Internalize Failure

by

From the book It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It [note: I’m not necessarily recommending the book in this case — haven’t looked through it enough –, but this was a helpful quote I took a picture of when I was thumbing through it in a bookstore]:

Don’t internalize failure. Remember that failure is an event, not a person. When you do fail, allow yourself to feel the disappointment. That’s reality, and an important part of it. But don’t internalize disapproval. Just because you failed at something doesn’t mean your a failure. Shake it off. And try something again.

Your Brain at Work

by

Here’s another book I’ve recently dipped in to: Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s an enjoyable discussion of why your brain works the way it does in relation to various issues of productivity (for example, why you can’t multi-task).

Here’s an interesting paragraph:

While you can hold several chunks of information in mind at once, you can’t perform more than one conscious process at a time with these chunks without impacting performance. We now have three limitations: the stage takes a lot of energy to run, it can hold only a handful of actors at a time, and these actors can play only one scene at a time.

And here’s another very interesting point on the consequences of being “always on”:

“Always on” may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on “alert” far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear has an impact. As Stone says, “This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?”

… [Also], the surprise result of being always on is that not only do you get a negative effect on mental performance, but it also tends to increase the total number of emails you get. People notice you respond to issues quickly, so they send you more issues to respond to.