Structured planning and meta-skills
Life is short. Therefore, I tend to think about the effectiveness of my skills and the efficiency of my time a lot, which often leads me to the topic of finding leverage. Two of the most important levers I use are structured planning and improving my meta-skills.
There are many things in life where these two levers can significantly improve the outcome if you focus on them before starting with the actual task.
Meta Skills are skills that are widely applicable and help you to carry out a multitude of different (relevant) activities. The ability to read is one of the most common and most powerful examples. You need this ability for any knowledge job I can think of and usually need it for many other tasks as well. If you can read faster and comprehend more, this will naturally help you to be more productive. A different example of a meta-skill is the ability to type on a keyboard. If you work on rigorously improving your typing speed, you will be way more efficient in a large variety of productive tasks later on. Let us assume that you spend 2 hours a day typing during an average workday. If you could increase your typing speed by 30% you would be able to save 144 hours a year with a couple of simplifying assumptions.* This adds up to more than 18 days of work, assuming an 8 hour work day. Obviously, not all jobs are that heavy on the typing but depending on the job, there are other ways to save time as well. Another good example of a meta-skill worth improving upon is mastering keyboard shortcuts when you are using the same software program a lot. Using your mouse takes way too long if you spend most of your day in your code editor, your email client or MS Excel.
Another very effective lever is taking time to structure your approach of achieving a goal, also called planning. This comes as a surprise to no one but if you really think about it is underutilized especially in terms of personal productivity. Having a proper workout and diet plan before starting with getting your body in shape for the summer is a very good example. Sometimes it is not only about acquiring the relevant skills but focusing your energy on the right tasks to fulfill your goal. A good workout plan gives you guidance, fills you with confidence that you are taking the right steps and nudges you to pursue the goal. Without a plan, you would need to put more mental energy into figuring out which exercises to perform every time you hit the gym or learning what to eat on the fly which makes it much more difficult. Gathering the relevant knowledge ahead of time can be mission critical.
Before I tackle an important goal of mine, I like to analyze the steps I need to take in order to get there and what I need to learn to be able to fulfill them. Sometimes it means pushing the actual task back and learning some fundamentals and structuring your plan of attack first (workout and diet plan). Other times improving your meta-skills is the best way of achieving your goals (keyboard shortcuts and typing speed).
I kept this post very short by design. Take a couple of minutes to think about your most important goals, what you need to do to achieve them and what levers you can use to get their faster or with higher probability.
*Increasing by thirty percent is actually not that unrealistic depending on the current ability. With proper technique and some time to get used to it, most people achieve significant improvement very fast.
