3 Productivity Hacks Every Manager Needs To Know

Do you feel that you’re constantly distracted by notifications, people around you, or the urge to multitask?

You’re not alone.

We live in an age of ever-increasing demands for our attention. In fact, a study by Udemy shows that 3 out of 4 workers admit they feel distracted at work, with 16 percent asserting that they’re almost always distracted.

Think about that for a second.

If you can teach your team to be indistractable (and become indistractable yourself), you’ll be performing at a higher level than most people.

So, how can you and your team learn to manage distractions — and become more productive as a result?

I had the honour of interviewing Nir Eyal, who is the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable. Here are three things I learned during our conversation:

👉 [Read the full article (including other 3 practical tips and videos) here]

1. Surf the urge with the 10-minute rule ⏰

One of the techniques that Nir recommends is called the 10-minute rule, a practice that he learned when studying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Basically, the 10-minute rule says that you should wait 10 minutes before giving into an urge. Why is this so powerful? Nir Eyal explains that just telling yourself “no” can actually backfire and make the feeling of discomfort worse.

“We don’t say no, we say not yet,” said Nir Eyal. “And for those 10 minutes, what you do is you do what’s called surfing the urge. Because these urges, these sensations, these uncomfortable feelings, they feel like they’re gonna last forever in the moment, but of course they never do. They’re like waves, they crest and then they subside.”

Next time you get an urge to check your phone… or eat that chocolate cake… make sure to acknowledge what you’re feeling and surf the urge for 10 minutes. According to Nir’s experience, the urge to get distracted will probably disappear after that.

2. Sync your schedule with your manager (or direct report) 📅

Here’s a life-changing practice I learned from Nir Eyal: If you’re a manager, you should spend some time coaching your direct reports on how they’re using their time. This technique is called schedule syncing — and it will help you ensure that everyone on your team is working on their most important priorities.

From the direct report’s perspective, this is a great way to manage-up:

“This is managing your manager,” says Nir Eyal. “What you do is you show them this calendar of what you plan to do, or what you weren’t able to fill in for the week ahead, and you let them reprioritize for you. That process of having this check-in with your manager and saying ‘here’s how I intend to spend my time. Can we do a quick schedule sync?’ It takes 15 minutes a week, and it will completely change your work life.”

Pro tip: Use your one-on-one meetings to ask your manager for guidance on your priorities!

3. Label your emails based on when you need to reply 🏷

How many hours a day would you say you spend checking your email?

Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review have concluded that the average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails.

For the average full-time worker, that adds up to 2.6 hours per day. 🤯

Luckily, Nir Eyal shared a very practical tip with us: schedule specific times to check your email, and label each individual email based on when you need to reply. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Schedule 15 minutes every morning to label your emails.
• If an email is urgent, you’re going to label it with “today”.
• Tag all other emails with the label “this week”.
• Check only the urgent emails that day (during a specific time in your calendar).
• Schedule some time block later in the week (e.g. on Fridays) to reply to all the unurgent emails.

“If you want to receive fewer emails, you have to send fewer emails,” says Nir Eyal. “By just replying to the ones that are easy to reply to, we’re actually hurting ourselves because we’re going to keep playing this ping-pong game of hitting reply. We want to slow that down. And the way we do that is by only responding to the urgent emails today.”

I hope that these strategies inspire you to work on your time management skills and encourage your team to build an indistractable culture.

I cover 3 other tips (make time for traction, schedule time for reflective work, and let people know when you’re doing deep work) here.

You can learn more about Nir Eyal’s book, Indistractable here.

Finally, if you need more leadership, productivity, or meeting insights, you can check out other articles in the Fellow Blog 👋