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Resources on Productivity

Get in the Zone Through Time Blocking

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Another Fast Company column by Gina Trapani. Here are the first two paragraphs:

In an interruption-driven culture, it’s too easy to let everyone else decide where your attention goes and how to spend your next 10 minutes. If you jump every time your phone rings, a new email arrives, your Blackberry buzzes, or someone stops by your desk, you’re undermining your most important work and costing your company money. A recent study shows that unnecessary interruptions costs the U.S. economy $650 billion dollars in lost productivity per year.

Being available to your boss and co-workers is part of your job. But the most creative and important work you do requires total focus and attention for an extended period of time. Your brain needs at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted time to dive in, concentrate on one thing, and get into the zone where you’re truly focused and doing your best work. Time blocking is a technique that sets the stage for that to happen.

The More You Multitask, the Worse You Get at It

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From an article I’ve been reading on leadership and solitude:

That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

Don't Fill Up Your Calendar

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Some good advice from The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success:

When you think about it, absolutely everything anyone does starts with a thought. Becasue the quality of the thought has a large influence on the quality of the outcome, it makes sense to do what you can to think clearly. In a world in which technology provides the capacity to reach out and be reached anytime, anywhere, finding space to think clearly is more and more of a challenge. A lack of white space on one’s calendar correlates with a lack of white space in one’s brain.

The author then recounts a story from his former boss to illustrate this:

I can remember one time talking to another executive who said he was in meetings from morning until night and I asked, “How can you do your job?” and this guy just looked at me. I said, “I see part of my job as leaving enough space to think about what the next issue or problem is that lands on my desk.” He just looked at me like I was nuts. It is very counterintuitive, but I think if you leave some white space on your calendar you tend to get more done.

A full calendar may give the appearance of getting things done, but being able to see that next competitive thing coming down the line or being able to see that we’ve got two groups that are fighting here and we really need to invest in getting them to work together — those are the critical things that executives need to do.

It is about having the capacity to see further out or to deal with that big threat to your bottom line. The easier issues will get managed below, if you are doing your job right. The higher you are in the organization, the tougher the issues are that come to you. You have to have the space and perspective to deal with those tougher issues.

I think a lot of people measure their worth in a corporation by how many meetings they attend. It depends on the culture of the organization you are in, but often it is a huge mistake to fill up your schedule with meetings.

Don't Miss It

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“To every person there comes in their lifetime that special moment when you are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to you and your talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds you unprepared or unqualified for work which could have been your finest hour.” — Winston Churchill

The Six Major Factors that Determine Knowledge Worker Productivity

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From Peter Drucker’s Management Challenges for the 21st Century:

  1. Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
  2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
  3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of the knowledge workers.
  4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
  5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not — at least not primarily — a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
  6. Finally, knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

Using Jott and Evernote Together

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Lifehacker has a good post on how you can use Jott and Evernote together.

Jott is a transcription service. So using the iPhone app, you can use your voice to leave yourself a note, and Jott automatically transcribes it.

These notes need to be processed just like your in box — they are really another in box, in fact. When processing them, the less than two-minute actions should be done right away. Longer than two-minute actions should be put on a list.

But what about the non-actionable stuff you just want to remember? For example, there are a few key things after a meeting that you want to write down for reference, but they aren’t necessarily actionable. That’s where Evernote can be useful. Evernote is basically an electronic notebook, which allows you to group your notes into notebooks, tag them, and sort them by title, date, etc.

The way to use Jott and Evernote together is to email those “reference”-type jotts to your Evernote account. Jott will have already transcribed it, so it saves you that work. Then, once in Evernote, you can title the note, tag it, and put it into the notebook you want. The article shows you how to do this.

Do Smart Phones Hurt Productivity?

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Someone recently argued that they do, and then Derek Johnson responded in the Atlantic that they do not.

It’s an interesting article. I just want to say one thing. The “yes the increase productivity” person notes at a couple points:

I suppose I don’t see how spending more time on email is necessarily unproductive, or even sub-optimally productive. Again, if I’m on the subway listening to Coldplay and staring at the floor, I’m accomplishing nothing of particular use for my company.

I would disagree that staring at the floor, listening to Coldplay (or doing nothing at all) is unproductive. I think that it is the crowding out of this type of time that is the biggest problem.

I wouldn’t say that’s a reason to never check email or Twitter during those in-between-times. But we do take a productivity hit from the lack of in-between thinking time and the mental change of gears it involves.