PART 2: Productivity 101 — Motius’ approach to more productivity
In this blog post series, we give you some insights into the Motius way of being more productive. Not to write a general “How to be more productive”-guide but to find out more about our own employees and our company culture.
What happened in Part 1:
In the first article of this series, we summarized our basic understanding of productivity and talked about the productivity risk. Then, we introduced you to the first productivity approach — a smart to-do-list-system to get things done. Check it out here.
Method ll: Wait for your inner Panic Monster
Probably a lot of people would say that this method is not even a real method — it is just procrastinating and doing things last minute. Well, in his famous TED Talk, Tim Urban explains the mind of a master procrastinator. Here is what it looks like.
The life of a procrastinator is simple: he sets out to be productive, gets distracted by his instant gratification monkey (this inner self who only cares about maximizing the ease of the current moment), is eventually chased by his inner Panic Monster, then focuses on the tasks because he is afraid of the deadline and finally finishes his task just in time. Urban even illustrated the whole process:
To be honest, although this method sounds funny, it definitely happens from time to time. But the question is if it actually is desirable. And seriously, we do not know that.
Thing is that procrastinators usually get their tasks done after all and basically that is what matters, right? One could suspect that their work could be of higher quality if they did not procrastinate as much. But at the same time, we all know that most of us perform really well under time pressure.
Luckily, there is another way to somehow really make sense of this approach and call it a method. That is by using your procrastination time in a more meaningful way. You want to know how this works? Well, for this we need to have a look at the book “The Art of Procrastination” by John Perry.
How to procrastinate productively
In his book, Perry explains how to prioritize your massive list of to-dos based on urgency and importance. Your focus should be on the important to-dos. In the Eisenhower Matrix (see picture below), these are in quadrant one and two.
Problem is that your inner Panic Monster will automatically focus only on urgent tasks while some of them might be unimportant (so you’re in quadrant 1 and 3). How do you make sure that you focus on important tasks only?
You use the Eisenhower Matrix and procrastinate indirectly, meaning you do non-urgent things that are important to you. In the Matrix, these are in quadrant number two.
Working in quadrant two is the ultimate way to feel good about your work, probably even feel productive and (hopefully) finish your urgent tasks last minute. Before heading to our third approach, let’s have a look at a brief example.
Here is how it works in practice
It is Thursday morning and you are checking your to-dos for the rest of the week. You notice that there is a presentation deadline coming for you. It is a project pitch at your customer’s office and you really should do a good job on this because you want to sign the customer.
But at the same time, it is a presentation and doing presentations is not your favourite thing to do. Besides this deadline, you notice that you have some interesting projects in your backlog, including this really cool product development task that you would love to do. Further, you could also repair the coffee machine which definitely is urgent.
At this point, you are stuck in a dilemma: should you focus on the coffee machine or the product development task?
Remembering the Eisenhower Matrix you notice that repairing the coffee machine is something less important for your work (delegate it!). This way, you can focus on the product development task, even though it is not urgent yet. You will be glad that you did that — it is important and you will need it later. At the end of the day, you feel good and productive about it. But wait, there is something you did not do.
On Friday morning, you remember the presentation deadline. You check your work progress and notice that you have not even made a draft yet. This is when the Panic Monster kicks in. Suddenly, you feel an extreme urgency to finish the presentation and you focus intensively. Yes, this is productivity at work now.
At the end of the day, you manage to finish the presentation and send it to your potential customer — what a relieve. Today, you can feel good about yourself because you were productive and did all the important stuff.
Why this approach might not be the best for you
As we said earlier, this approach does not appear desirable to many people but in the aftermath, it is exactly what a lot of people do. It definitely does not mean that people are lazy. They might even get as much done as everyone else, they just do it differently.
We definitely do not recommend to just sit around, waiting for your panic monster to kick in. If you really want to do that though, stick to the Eisenhower Matrix. This way, you will at least still get the important things done.
Theoretically, this would be the right time to start kicking off a discussion about work ethics or something like that. But we are not going to do that — especially with all of you internet trolls out there. We are just here for real talk.
Find out what suits you best
When it comes to productivity approaches, there are numerous ideas, concepts, frameworks, etc. Definitely, it is a good idea to take some time, inform yourself and consider which ones might suit you best. But in the end, it all comes down to trying.
It is on you to put in the (productive) work of finding an approach that works for you. Based on our experience, that can take a while. You might experience some setbacks, get frustrated or simply cannot decide which one to try first. But do not worry about it, just keep going. Put in the effort every day and eventually, you will find an approach that works for you.
If you want to talk to us about this topic in person or if you have any approaches that are worth a try, comment on this blog post or just contact us! We would love to hear your ideas!
