Productivity Bridges: Do More Work with Less Time and Effort
Adapted from editions 37 & 38 of my Weekend Upgrade Newsletter.
Productivity isn’t “getting more work done”
You can work until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been productive.
For one thing, you might be doing the wrong work. Ten hours of toil toward no particular goal is catastrophically unproductive.
Plus, there’s more than one way to improve your Productivity Return on Investment (ROI). Sure, you can “get more done,” but you can also “use less time and effort.” Both have an equal effect on your Productivity ROI.
And if you do use less time and effort, imagine what you could do with the time and effort you save! You could spend it with loved ones. You could travel more. Or, sure, you could reinvest it in getting more work done.
The point is, you have options. When you use less time and effort to get work done, you stop drowning in work.
But how do we actually do less?
We do less by capturing recurring work and using it to build what I call Productivity Bridges.
Bridging is an action taken Now to increase the speed, accuracy, or quality of future work. The result is a Productivity Bridge.
A bridge might be a template built from reusable work. Or it might be an automation that streamlines a recurring process. It might be as simple as learning a keyboard shortcut, or as detailed as a multi-pronged strategy for achieving a goal. A Productivity Bridge is an investment: spend a little time now building it, and you’ll save a lot of time later when you can skip the work that’s already done and get straight into action.
Opportunities to build Bridges can be difficult to see at first, but recognizing those opportunities is a skill you can develop. Cohorts of my Applied APP course are largely devoted to improving that skill and implementing Bridges in your productivity workflows. (If you catch it at the right time, cohorts are 15% off for Early Bird registrations.)
The concept of Bridging applies universally — every aspect of productivity can benefit from well-built bridges. But the type of Bridge you build depends on what you’re Bridging. Just as you wouldn’t use steel I-beams for an ornamental bridge over a garden stream, or wooden planks to bridge the New River Gorge in my home state of West Virginia, the techniques for building Bridges will vary depending on the circumstances.
Bridge-Building Techniques
As you work through the list below, consider ways you could build similar Bridges in your own system. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it will introduce four core types and the tools and materials you need to build them.
Documentation Bridges: Notes to Future You
The most fundamental form of Bridging is sending a message from Today You to Future You in the form of documentation. We always believe that we’ll remember tomorrow what we learned today — but how often is that actually the case?
When you complete a task or project, document how you did that. When you encounter similar work in the future, you can cross the Bridge you built with that documentation and greatly reduce the time and effort to get started. (The question of how to ensure that documentation surfaces when you need it is one we discuss in our Applied APP cohorts.)
Automation Bridges: Shortcuts, Text Expanders, Macros
Automated Bridges can speed work and help you get it done more accurately. Even the lowly keyboard shortcut can be shockingly valuable. If I use ⌘-z (Ctrl-z on Windows) to Undo errors instead of mousing my cursor to the Edit menu and clicking a couple of times, I can save around two seconds every time I Undo something.
Given that I Undo a hundred or more things every day, that’s two hundred seconds — three minutes. That’s fifteen minutes a work week — and twelve and a half hours every year. Imagine what you could do with five commonly-used keyboard shortcuts!
Let’s expand into expansion — text expansion, that is. I have an email I send to a few people every week. Using Typinator (or Text Expander), I can trigger the entire text of that email, with placeholders and prompts for information unique to each instance of the email. If I were to do this work from scratch each time, it would cost me five minutes per email. Instead, I send it in about ten seconds. Imagine how much time and effort you save every week if your three most-sent emails could be templates in a text expander. For that matter, imagine the money you’ll make using that time and effort for more valuable work. (Or stop imagining and join us in the next Applied APP cohort where we can build those templates together!)
Automation can get even more elaborate with tools like Keyboard Maestro. I send an email to my clients after a coaching session that includes the video and transcript (via Fathom), as well as an AI Summary. This takes me less than ten seconds, using Paste to grab the link and the AI Summary and Keyboard Maestro to assemble the email. Forget time saved — without this Automation Bridge, I probably wouldn’t be sending that email at all.
Strategy Bridges: Proven Ideas
Efficiency doesn’t matter if we are executing poor strategies. Well-designed strategies are themselves Bridges from our goals and vision into effective project and task execution.
The Strategy Bridge is almost always missing in the productivity discussion. Some gurus teach us to set big audacious goals, and others (like me) give us tools to execute and take action. Rarely is the Strategy Bridge mentioned, but it’s how our big goals convert to action.
When you set a goal, build a Strategy Bridge. Look at how someone else has accomplished what you’re aiming to do and model your strategy on that. Or, better, look at how several someone elses have done it and choose what you think will work best for you.
This is the Strategy Bridge of “Proven Ideas” — and you don’t even need other people for that anymore. You can start with AI! Ask ChatGPT how it would go about reaching the goal you’ve set. Continue the conversation to dig deeper into its suggestions. Are you required to use the answers ChatGPT suggests? No, of course not, but you’ve overcome the “blank screen problem” and you have a strategy you can use as a jumping off point.
Template Bridges: Capturing Reusable Work
Wouldn’t it be nice for your work to be 85% complete when you start it? With templates, that can happen regularly. For example, I save 45 minutes a week making the worship aid for my church (I’m the director of liturgical music), simply because I have templates for the various seasons of the church year. What would take an hour takes me 15 minutes instead.
Templates have three components: Pre-Done Work, Modular Variants, and Placeholders. If you can master these, you’ll almost never start work from scratch again.
Pre-Done Work is everything before the Last Predictable Step. It’s Reusable Work that is 100% predictable — it’s the same every single time you use the template. Templates with a lot of Pre-Done Work, like my email automation mentioned earlier, take seconds to execute and save minutes to hours of time.
Modular Variants are Pre-Done Work that can be swapped in or out of the template as needed. Attorneys may find particular value here for contracts. If you have one main template for a certain type of contract, but with several clauses that can be added or removed depending on the circumstances, that saves loads of time. Modular Variants are where most people stop trying to create templates — “Oh, it’s different every time, so what’s the point?” The point is that it’s often different in predictable ways, so capture those variants too!
Placeholders capture the type of information required, but not the actual information itself. By holding the space for information, it greatly speeds up your use of the template. My worship aid templates in Adobe InDesign have placeholders for the week (e.g., 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time), the date, all the hymns, and the readings. Because these places are held, instead of reformatting the worship aid every week, I’m just tweaking some spacing.
Building Bridges Together
If you think you could save time implementing Bridges like those listed above, join the next cohort of Applied APP.
Bridges are the unifying principle in Action-Powered Productivity, and I hope you’ve seen in this article that they’re applicable in many specific ways. What we explore in Applied APP cohorts is how you can implement them in your system. The cohort format is invaluable in sharing ideas and implementations.
Plus, it’s affordable, at only $350 ($297.50 if you catch it during the 15% Early Bird period) for six weeks of lessons and live sessions.
Join the hundreds who have attended past Applied APP cohorts and dive into the next cohort today!
The links in this article will always lead to the latest upcoming cohort of Applied APP. Learn more about productivity coach R.J. Nestor at rjn.st/links
