Supercharge Your Workday: The Power of 3, Focusing on Outputs and Learning Retrospectively
Busy, busy. You’re busy. I’m busy. We’re all busy.
Your email inbox is overflowing. Your to-do list is trailing behind you, out your office door, across the street, petering out somewhere near your car. Your calendar resembles a poorly-played game of Tetris.
When did this happen? When did the workplace become so chaotic? Is it the internet’s fault? The smartphone? Is our attention so divided that it’s now only available in short, intermittent spurts of rapid-fire intake, like a social media feed scrolling past your zombied, exhausted eyeballs…?
How did the modern office turn into an Interruption Factory? I don’t know. I’ll leave it to others to try and reverse this crazy trend.
But we need to navigate the craziness today, don’t we? So how?
Step 1: Stop task-listing, and start leveraging the Power of 3
One of the common ways that people try to swim up this stream is to get organized. Maybe this is your thing. You make a plan. You create a task list to get all the things you need to do out of your head. You organize your to-dos by project, or by client, or some other logic. You use some fancy app, or a blank word processing document, or even just a yellow legal pad. But now everything’s in one place. One, nice long list. NOW you’re cooking with fire. Now you’re ready to kick ass and take names.
But where do you start? What should you do first? Your task list is long, because you wanted to get all that shit out of your head, where it was squatting, paying no rent. But now you have a dozen things to tackle today, maybe more.
This is where that long to-do list starts working against you. It fucks with your brain, it perverts your incentives. Because you want to whittle this list down, right? You’ll have kicked the most ass today if you pare that list down as much as possible, amirite? So, better to get started with a few quick victories. Bang out the easy ones, the things that’ll take the least amount of time. Do that first, before the day gets away from you, before the phone starts ringing, the email starts flowing, and the fan starts to get shitty.
Hell, after that 10:30 meeting, you might not get *anything* else done. Then tomorrow’s to-do list will look exactly like today’s. So. What can I bang out in five minutes?
STOP. Please stop this madness.
Stop evaluating your output (consciously or not) by how many of those arbitrary checkboxes are checked off before you clock out this afternoon.
At the end of the day, you want to have created value. That’s your job. Your ONLY job. No matter what field you’re in, no matter what role you play in the office, your job is to create value. In some form or fashion.
The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of our outputs are a consequence of only 20% of our inputs. But which inputs? That’s the trick, isn’t it?
That’s why I’m suggesting that you dump the traditional task list. It’s noisy. It’s distracting. It encourages you to take your eyes off the prize. It conflates “busyness” with productivity. It mistakes efficiency for effectiveness.
As Gary Keller and Jay Papasan articulate in their book The ONE Thing, less is more. “You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.” The more you let numerous little things nag at your attention, the more you’ll let emotion and your “gut” dictate your planning. Your gut is stupid (in spite of all the half-assed “trust your gut” bits of advice floating around in the inspirational interwebs).
Yes, get all the little shit out of your head and into a long list, if you have to (or better yet, use project management tools, and plug in the tasks in the appropriate containers). But before you roll up your sleeves for the day, you should ruthlessly cull your “DO TODAY OR ELSE” list down to precisely 3 items.
And not just any 3 things, of course. Far from it — they need to be the highest-value things. You should routinely plan your daily work by thinking about, and then articulating, the 3 *most valuable* things that it’s possible to accomplish today. And put *those* on a list. Use *this* list to determine what to work on, and in what order. Stick *this* list somewhere in front of your face, where you can see it all day, so that it stays on your radar screen, and it slaps you back when you’re tempted to tangent down a rabbit hole.
But wait — how do you quantify how “valuable” each of these work items might be, and which are the *most* valuable? Admittedly, this is the hard part. For most people, day-to-day work outputs don’t readily translate to precise, measurable quantities of “value created.” But if you’re serious about maximizing your overall value proposition at work, you’ve no choice. You have to just do your best to at least crudely assess the value proposition of the various things on your to-do list.
Survey your entire radar screen, and think about it. What’s the biggest, most valuable project in your queue? What work item will have the highest overall impact? And/or is there something you need to do that could lead the way to opening new doors for new opportunities? And/or are you a bottleneck on a team effort — where your contribution to it could open doors for other team members to do their work, and finalize the project?
This is the kind of thinking that’s required here. Where can you provide the most impact today? The biggest punch? The highest ROI for your time and effort?
This doesn’t mean you won’t ever get anything *else* done. You will. There’s shit in life that you just gotta do. Period. So do it. But stop letting all that little shit dominate your radar screen. Push it toward the edges, so that the big, valuable things *do* dominate that radar screen. If you let the little things take over your day, then you’re saving the big things to fit in the cracks, rather than vice versa. And we all know how well that works out, right?
Why 3? Why not two, or four, etc…?
Well, first of all, settling on 3 forces you to set your sights on large-ish (but not too large) objectives. The kind of thing that satisfies this question: “if this is all I accomplish today, and every workday this week looks like this one, will I be satisfied?” You wouldn’t be satisfied if all you did today was reply to a few emails and sit through a zombie meeting, would you?
But the number 3 is also a powerful, crafty number — one that is more memorable and meaningful than its close peers.
- The number 3 is generally accepted as the smallest number required for the human brain to recognize a pattern.
- In many ancient civilizations and philosophies, the number 3 signified harmony, perfection, or completeness. In Latin: Omne Trium Perfectum.
- It’s been demonstrated that events or patterns of 3 constituent parts are more persuasive to the human brain than one or two, and that past 3, the persuasion effect wanes. See here.
You can read more about the Power of 3 here, here, and here.
It’s possible that, depending on your field and your role, that you could set your sights on ONE SINGLE BIG VALUABLE THING to do today. But I don’t think there’s actually a lot of work like that. And even if you’re one of those anomalies, I think it’s likely that your ONE BIG MONSTROUS thing could actually be divided into 3 smaller chunks of work. Each will be one-third as valuable, perhaps, but each chunk will also yield a sense of accomplishment and offer a mini-break in between deep-dives that can either recharge some brain cells or create a planned opening for a meeting in between, without derailing your plan to accomplish all 3 things.
I’ve created a template to help you plan your daily triad (https://6sf.io/Po3Templates :: Google Docs, Google Sheets, MS Excel, or print-friendly PDF).
Step 2: Focus on outputs, not inputs
Change your whole mindset about being “at work.” You’re not at work to pass time, or “spend” time, or just be present. You’re there (wherever “there” may be, these days) to create value, to Get Shit Done (GSD), to accomplish tangible things.
Inputs are the ingredients used to accomplish things, like time, energy, attention, etc. They’re not valuable by themselves. It takes a smart cookie like you to use these inputs to create outputs, which ARE valuable. People don’t pay you for the ingredients — they pay you for the finished product.
If you tell yourself that you’re going to “work on X,” that’s vague as hell, it’s subject to interpretation, and it gives you as much wiggle room as you might need to put most of it off to another day (but still pretend that it’s something you actually accomplished today).
Outputs, by contrast, are deliverables. You’re not just going to “work on” something — you’re going to “finish” it. That might be a first-draft, a pile of revisions, or a polished final product. But it’s still going to be “finished.” Complete. Something that could very well be a deliverable for someone else’s eyeballs.
In fact, I find that involving another person (your boss, a colleague, a client) in the wording of your planned output is the single best way to get your subconscious to take something seriously. If you’re going to actually SHOW somebody a work output, then you’re FAR more likely to take it seriously, to see it all the way through to something that resembles a deliverable. Something that is, in fact, an output.
This concept of focusing on OUTPUTS applies to everything related to work: your planning, your conversations with colleagues, how you report progress, all your self-talk, your day-to-day outlook.
But its relevance here and now is that all your work-planning — your set of 3 MUST-DO things that you plot out each morning — should be worded as outputs. Deliverables.
Outputs are how you GSD, and reflect an approach to work embraced by those who reliably create value, and whose value proposition is almost never questioned. Inputs are embraced by those who think about “work” as punching a time-clock, and as an exercise in sitting conspicuously in a chair at the office for certain hours of every weekday.
Step 3: Create a recurring, retrospective feedback loop
The post-mortem aspect of this approach is the most critical, the hardest to do, and the most commonly ignored. Software teams use the concept of a “Retrospective” (a term I’ll adopt from here on out), which describes some degree of effort invested in looking back at the most recent quantity of work they produced, and in assessing what went wrong, what went right, and any lessons learned or opportunity to improve, before moving forward with the next cycle.
This is probably the most effective way for the average employee to up their productivity game. Personally, I’ve worked long enough to recognize that we as human beings wildly overestimate how much we might be able to accomplish in any given timeframe. It happens almost every day, to the vast majority of modern workplace inhabitants. They hit their desk in the morning with gusto (or maybe the gusto kicks in a couple hours later), they think about (maybe even list out) all the big things they’re gonna do today (Look out, world!), and they hit the ground running. Then, life happens. Or the office happens. They get interrupted. The phone rings, or somebody stops by their cubicle for a “quick question.” Then the necessary re-orientation to a high-focus task. Then another interruption. Then lunch happens. Then post-lunch sugar crash. Then a meeting. And then the post-meeting re-entry (into real work) is rocky. Wait, where was I? Then 4:00 hits. Too late to crack open a complex project now, right? Gotta pick up the kids after work.
This is the modern workplace, is it not? We’re all constantly battling a steady flow of interruptions, trying to fit in some productivity during the lulls.
But here’s the key: those that continuously flail while enduring this do so precisely because they almost never look back. They never actively, intentionally, critically think about what they had set out to accomplish yesterday, and so they fail to recognize how little of it they ACTUALLY got done, and what they could have done differently to achieve better results. They just start over the next day. If there’s a task list from yesterday, they tweak it very slightly, and they’re off and running again today (Look out again, world!). With no sense of irony over how little ass-kicking actually happened in this very cubicle the day before, and no realization that their to-do list remains largely static from one day to the next.
So the Retrospective is precisely the missing piece. What went wrong? Assess those interruptions. Was that phone call or that “quick question” MORE valuable than what you had otherwise planned for yesterday morning? Yes, the interruption *may* have opened a door for a colleague to create *more* value on *her* project than what you might have created on yours. If so, that’s a win, too. But carefully consider how often this happens, and whether you’ve been using that type of interruption as a procrastination excuse.
What about that meeting? Did it coincide with (and therefore interrupt) your peak-mental energy flow? Could you have skipped it? Or could you influence the scheduling of meetings in the future so that they don’t cost you so much productivity? Did you leave your most complex work for the part of the day within which you normally have the least mental energy? Or for the part of the day that is normally interruption-heavy in your organization?
Sometimes the learning is complex and nuanced, forcing you to mentally hop backwards through a series of upstream decisions. Did you fail to get ALL the intel you needed from a key stakeholder before unwrapping a complex task, forcing you to completely back out of it while you await a response by email (which you might not get for another business day or three)…?
Did you encounter an obstacle that you *could* have predicted sooner, such that you could have consulted with colleagues during last week’s team meeting, instead of interrupting them with your own “quick question” yesterday, compromising output for both them AND you in the middle of an otherwise juicy productivity window?
I can’t teach you to be more productive, more effective, or more efficient. But *you* can. You just have to take the time and invest the effort in a Retrospective feedback loop, one that *will* teach you these things.
The Retrospective aspect of this cycle is accommodated in the work planning templates I’m sharing for free. Check them out here: https://6sf.io/Po3Templates
Even if you’re working from home in this pandemic era, interruptions are lurking around every corner, ready to strike whenever it looks like you might be buckling down for a deep-focus task. Are you, like so many others, still pretending that you can muddle your way through, without a deeper, more intentional method of cutting through the noise?
What are *your* techniques for dialing down your ambition, in order to dial up your focus and SERIOUSLY GSD? Let me know in the comments.
