Disclaimer: If you have read any books on productivity then you are not going to learn anything new here!…or maybe you might. Just read on.
Now that that’s out of the way…
I hate meetings. I usually find them to be the most unproductive part of my day. People show up late (me included), lots of people unprepared, nothing goes according to schedule, before long people start zoning out and as a result the meeting rarely has any concrete deliverables. Sigh!
How many times have you seen this:
Meeting is scheduled to begin at 10am.
At the start of the meeting you hear “Hey, this will only take 15 minutes.” Then one and a half hours later, “Let’s finish this before noon”. In my mind am thinking, “Someone please shoot me right now..PLEASE!! Just get me out of my misery.” But then meetings are part of the typical office life so what to do?
I gave up on my Tuesdays because meetings start at 10am and go on till around 3pm (if I am lucky). A big part of that is because I try to schedule all my meetings to be on one day if at all possible. (You should try it. It makes every other day of the week so much more focused when you don’t have to worry about meetings).
If you are having meetings everyday and spending more time in meetings than actually getting work done, then that is exactly why you are not getting stuff done and spending more time in meetings discussing why that is the case. It’s a cycle.
About a month ago I was reading some books and articles about productivity and decided to run an experiment — with yours truly as the subject. Now, this is not to say that I was unproductive. I just wanted to see how much more productive I could be if I tried a new regimen.
First things first — get rid of all distractions
Twitter, Facebook, Chat, Email — I switched them all off.
As much as we like to convince ourselves, the human brain just wasn’t wired to multitask.
It’s amazing just how much useful time we waste not just in processing these “minor distractions” but in the whole process of context switching between productive work and the distraction. Think of it this way, each time you see that notification and open the browser tab or chat client to read and/or respond to some message, 5 things happen. You:
- unload the “work” context,
- load the new “notification” context
- process “notification” context i.e. read/reply to an email, a Twitter update, a chat message etc
- unload “notification” context
- reload “work” context
Now, depending on the kind of task that you were working on before the notification came in, each time you reload the “work” context you have to remember whatever other relevant information that was necessary to complete that task, before you can continue. Really unproductive if you ask me. Two steps forward, 1 step backwards.
Let me not even get started on the context switching that takes place before and after meetings.
No more crazy hours
Many people work crazy hours yet they cannot see what they’ve accomplished. That’s the processor activity at 100% while output is at 1%. (+/-0.5).
Previously, I would either leave the office really late or get home early and continue working. I’d get exhausted and feel burned out way too often because I felt like I hadn’t accomplished all that I needed to. If only I could finish that one last task…
So I set out a new schedule for myself:
- 9am — 12pm: Work Hours (WH1) — Nothing but productive work
- 12pm — 1pm: Social Hour (SH1) — Turn on the distractions. Read and reply to any chat messages, emails, 1-on-1's incase someone needed a quick meeting, some light reading, social media (in that order)
- 1pm — 2pm: Lunch — Get away from the desk! It’s good for you. Really! Stop eating at your desk.
- 2pm — 4pm: Work Hours (WH2) — Nothing but productive work
- 4pm — 5pm Social Hour (SH2) — Turn on the distractions again.
No office work after 5pm. That is when I read up on any interesting articles that I couldn’t finish reading and had to bookmark during SH1 and SH2; watch funny YouTube videos; updates on the startup world; learn new hacks and programming languages and other stuff like that.
Initially, I was quite concerned that I might miss out on what’s happening in the news, or an urgent email or chat message that needed to be replied to ASAP. The truth is — it’s seldom that urgent. You’ll quickly realize that the world doesn’t end when you don’t immediately reply to yet another one of those “urgent” emails. More often than not, it’s only urgent because of the lack of planning on the part of the sender.
I know this can’t work for everyone but the truth is that if you get rid of all that noise you have going on around you, you will be pleasantly surprised by just how much more productive you can become.
The interesting thing is that I find that I am accomplishing more now even though it feels like I spend less time on it.
So what are you doing to become more productive? Or what’s holding you back? Let me know in the comments?
