Productivity++
Bob spends his time in and out of meetings and jumping between tasks. At the end of most days, he feels exhausted and frazzled, despite hardly accomplishing anything.
Sally has hours each day of uninterrupted time focused on her most important tasks. She goes home relaxed and happy with her progress.
This is the difference between managing your time efficiently and being constantly interrupted by meetings, Slack, or Twitter. An hour of flow is vastly more productive than an hour peppered with distractions, which is why Sally is so much more effective than Bob. Here are some techniques you can use to be more like Sally.
Identify the Problem
Before you can improve your productivity, you have to track where your time is going. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Use an app that records the applications, web pages, and documents you use throughout the day. A great, free option is RescueTime. After a few days, you’ll have a baseline for how you spend your time and what detracts from work on important tasks.
Meetings
The first step to increase your productive time is to reduce the number of meetings you attend. Look back at your calendar and rate how valuable each one was, then cut out any that weren’t a good use of your time.
Now that you’ve eliminated extra meetings, you can make the necessary ones more efficient.
Pack your meetings. Nothing kills your momentum like having to stop for a meeting. Prevent this by scheduling them back-to-back. It’s worth the extra time to coordinate.
Set up meeting-free days. A couple teams at LendingHome recently started to schedule no-meeting days. This opens up huge swaths of time for tackling big problems. If you can’t get other teams to do this, you can schedule an all-day event to reduce the chances of someone putting time on your calendar.
Interruptions
Once you have big, open blocks of time, the next step is to put them to good use. According to the author of a study on the effects of interruptions on work, “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to” what you were working on. This is just wasted time, so you should set up tools and systems to avoid it at all costs:
- Turn off email notifications You can keep the icon badge, but hearing a ding or seeing the notification flash on your screen will pull you out of flow.
- Mute Slack channels Permanently mute any channels you can, then snooze all notifications when you’re really trying to focus.
- Hide your apps Seeing Slack or Twitter updates, even out of the corner of your eye, can distract you. Avoid this by only keeping apps relevant to your work visible.
- Block distractions For a little extra support, try an app like SelfControl to block distracting websites for a set time period.
Meditation
Meditation (specifically Mindfulness) has been shown to not only reduce stress, but improve concentration and resist distractions. Just 10 minutes a day with a guided meditation app like Headspace will make it much easier to focus. It may seem like magical thinking, but try it one week to see if it works for you.
Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro technique is a simple system where you focus completely on a task for short bursts:
- Pick a task and work on it for 25 minutes.
- Take a five-minute break.
- Repeat.
- Every fourth Pomodoro, take a 15-minute break instead of five.
It doesn’t seem like much, but this is a powerful tool for achieving flow. The key is you only have to resist distractions for a short period, which makes it much easier. Also, by picking a specific task to work on, you avoid costly context switches. You also get improved visibility into how long tasks take, which helps with your estimation ability. There are many apps to manage Pomodoros; the one I’m using is tomatoes.
Go and Try It!
Try implementing a few of these techniques into your process and see how they affect your productivity. Remember that your goal is to have long, uninterrupted blocks of time where you focus on one task at a time and stay in flow as long as possible. You’ll be amazed at how much more you accomplish.
Our engineering team is also growing! We’re hiring engineers in our San Francisco and Columbus, OH offices. See our careers page to learn more. We look forward to hearing from you!
