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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Serie: Practical Guide Series
- Sprache: Englisch
To do: take the stress out of work defeat 'information overload' be more efficient. Whether you are overwhelmed by your to-do list, or get stressed just looking at your full inbox, this Practical Guide from productivity expert Graham Allcott reveals how to think, and act, more productively and to start loving work. Following a simple A-Z of expert tips and real-life examples, you will learn to improve your focus, regain control, and feel cool, calm and collected.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Published in the UK and USA
in 2014 by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road,
London N7 9DP
email: [email protected]
www.iconbooks.com
Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia
by Faber & Faber Ltd,
Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street,
London WC1B 3DA
or their agents
Distributed in South Africa
by Jonathan Ball,
Office B4, The District,
41 Sir Lowry Road,
Woodstock 7925
Distributed in Australia and
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by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,
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Distributed in Canada
by Penguin Books Canada,
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Distributed to the trade in the USA
by Consortium Book Sales
and Distribution
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ISBN: 978-184831-649-2
Text copyright © 2014 Graham Allcott
The author has asserted his moral rights.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typeset in Avenir by Marie Doherty
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
About the author
Graham Allcott is the founder of Think Productive, one of the world’s leading productivity training companies. Think Productive works with a diverse range of organizations including eBay, the Cabinet Office (UK Government), the National Trust, BT, American Express and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, running workshops that help their employees beat stress and develop playful, productive momentum in their work. He is also the author of the internationally best-selling book, How to be a Productivity Ninja.
Graham has worked on a number of charity and social enterprise projects in various roles including employee, founder, CEO and chairman. He is a currently a board member of Centrepoint, the UK’s leading youth homelessness charity.
Despite an intolerance of failure elsewhere in his life, Graham is an Aston Villa FC season-ticket holder. He lives in Brighton, UK.
Author’s note
It’s important to note that there is much frequently-used research employed in the areas of productivity and time management.
Where I know the source, I have been sure to reference it, but my apologies here to the originators of any material if I have overlooked them.
Contents
Introduction
A is for Attention
B is for BHAGs and Batching
C is for the CORD Productivity Model
D is for Decision-making and Distractions
E is for Email Etiquette
F is for Foibles and Frogs
G is for Getting Things Done
H is for Habits
I is for Inbox Zero
J is for Juice
K is for Kitchen Timers and Keyboard Shortcuts
L is for Lists
M is for Meetings
N is for Ninja
O is for Over-promising
P is for Procrastination and Power Hours
Q is for Questions
R is for Renegotiating, Ruthlessness and Rest
S is for Seven Habits
T is for Tools
U is for Urgent vs. Important
V is for Vision
W is for Weekly Checklist
X is for Extreme Productivity
Y is for ‘Yes, and …’
Z is for Zen
Acknowledgements
A–Z of further reading
Index
Introduction
Welcome to Introducing Productivity, a practical guide designed to help you in your work and life. Improving your productivity can sound like a daunting, annoying and maybe even vague goal. There are holy grails that it feels like you can never reach and oh-so-perfect colleagues and friends to enviously compare yourself to. It’s difficult to know where to start, particularly when you’re so overloaded with things you have to do that you don’t even have the time to think about productivity, let alone make changes. But of course, when you’re feeling like this is coincidentally when you most need to improve your productivity!
The purpose of this guide isn’t to take you painstakingly through your day working on every bit of it, but to give you quick tips that will make a difference. That’s why I’ve written it as an A–Z. After all, one thing we all have in common is that there are so many other things vying for our attention; so while I recommend you do read this book from start to finish the first time, it’s also something you can dip in and out of whenever you need a productivity boost. Some of the things you find here might be a refresher, while other things may be totally new. And while naturally a lot of the advice I’m giving focuses on working life, many of the ideas are equally applicable to your home life, your hobbies, etc. – you name it, it can be done more efficiently.
You may be wondering about my definition of ‘productivity’ and who this book is really for. Put simply, if your work involves such a level of thinking and complexity that there is more than one way you can tackle your day, then this book is for you. And if you’re stressed, deal with a lot of complexity or ever feel like you need to be more organized and in control, then this book is definitely for you.
You may also be wondering who I am to tell you about productivity. Well, I know first-hand what a struggle it can be to become really productive. I’m naturally disorganized and unstructured, but a few years ago, close to burnout and realizing that working for myself meant I had no one to delegate it all to, I decided to kick my own productivity into shape. It became something of an addiction and inspired me to start my business, Think Productive, which teaches productivity skills to some of the world’s leading companies. I also wrote a best-selling book on the subject called How to be a Productivity Ninja.
I will talk some more about the ‘way of the Productivity Ninja’ in the N is for Ninja chapter later, but suffice to say, if you’d like to learn how to practice Zen-like Calm, become more Agile and Prepared, be more Ruthless with your focus and be Weapon-savvy with all the various tools that you have available, then that’s a chapter that you can’t afford to skip!
Although you may strive for perfection, I firmly believe no one is perfect at productivity – it’s something that you need to constantly work at. Change can come from trying new things, but can also come from revisiting, refreshing or reinforcing good habits. Truly mastering something that you were previously really good at can give your productivity as much of a boost as trying something completely new. So keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to dip in and out, cover the same ground twice, or skip bits to return to later. Focus on the bits of this book that either most excite you or most repel you. My experience is that a bit of exhilaration and excitement is important when focusing on changing your habits, which is ultimately what ‘improving productivity’ is: good habits, skills and behaviours.
Of course, in a small book like this, it’s impossible to give you all the answers. But actually when it comes to productivity, it’s impossible for any book of any length to provide all the answers. A big part of mastering productivity is recognizing your personal preferences – positive and negative – and realizing that certain rules or principles that work well for you might not be the things that work for someone else, and vice versa. You see, Productivity Ninjas are human beings, not superheroes. They have foibles and failings, they screw up sometimes and they can’t be perfect. Yet with a little work on fostering the right habits, skills and behaviours, they can often appear as effortless and magical as a superhero in their work!
So this book will start with the assumption that you’re human – and I hope it gives you a chance to reflect on the way you work. Whatever the work you’re engaged in, I hope you can use this book to help you focus on the stuff that matters, get more done with less stress and develop a playful, productive momentum in your work and life.
A is for Attention
This book is an A–Z of productivity. Luckily, the word ‘attention’ begins with an ‘A’, so despite the potential constraints of such a format, it’s possible for us to begin at the very beginning.
There used to be a thing called ‘time management’. The idea was that your productivity was affected by how you spent your days: the literal management of the 9 to 5. But the term ‘time management’ itself is deeply flawed, and those old time management techniques, with their rigid systems and paper diary planners, don’t work anymore. We live in a technological age where rapidly changing priorities are no longer a distraction but actually part of what we have to manage.
So we’re going to begin this book at the beginning. You can’t manage time. There’s no point trying. What you can manage is your attention, and it’s an even more subtle skill to learn. There are several layers to consider here in how you manage your attention, like managing the interaction between your attention and the information you need to do your work, managing your habits and how they affect your attention, managing your stress and eliminating distractions to give you more attention and managing your body and mind to give you better quality attention. Through this book we’ll look at mindsets, organizational structures, technology, habits, psychology, nutrition and all the practical stuff like email and meetings … but at the root of it all is how to manage and optimize your attention so that you have your attention on what matters most to you and what makes the most difference to your work and best serves – without wanting to be grandiose about it – your contribution to the world.
The new mindset of knowledge work
Your attention is a more limited resource than your time. Have you ever got to the end of a day where you’ve still got loads to do, you’re still motivated to do it and you have all the tools or information that you need, yet you’re still just staring into space? Under those circumstances, you’ll often tell yourself you ran out of time, but actually you just ran out of attention.
On other days, you might be in back to back meetings all day, and it’s 4pm before you even have a chance to get any desk-time in, to finally look at emails, catch up on your reading and planning, and seize control. On these days, you might really feel that you’re short on time. But if you start to think about, what you’re left with at the end of the day is a small amount of time but an even smaller amount of attention: you had energy and ideas and brain power when you were sitting in all those dull meetings, but now at nearly 5pm, there’s not much of it left.
The demands on your attention are far more than the demands on your time. An hour-long meeting can (usually!) only last an hour and you can set the beginning and end points in your calendar quite reliably, yet an hour spent working on a complex project can throw up so many other things that can try to grab your attention, with all the processes, risks and stakeholders to manage and all the ideas and possibilities you may have for the project. Likewise, you may sit down to what you think will be an hour of answering useful emails, only to be rocked off track by other people’s priorities popping up in your inbox. And we haven’t even talked about the option to check social media or browse gossip on the internet when you’re bored, because obviously you’re far too disciplined to succumb to such distractions!
Pay attention. Wisely. Time might be spent, but attention still needs to be paid. Look after this currency, as it’s the most valuable currency in the world.
Managing attention is both art and science
There are loads of things we will cover in this book that will help you manage your attention. I like to think of productivity and attention management as both art and science.
The science bit is in the organizational structures, the use of tools and technology, the building on what you know has worked in the past (for you and for others) and in maintaining a regular ‘feedback loop’ where you spend some of your attention being conscious and mindful around your own habits and analysing what’s working for you and what’s not. When most people think about ‘productivity’ as a subject, they think about the science stuff. They read productivity websites that have articles called things like ‘Seven great new android apps’ and ‘What Mozart knew about productivity’.
Yet the ‘art’ of attention management and productivity lies in finding your own personal formula for getting into a state of what psychologists call ‘flow’ and what Buddhists call ‘Zen’: the ability to be present, in the moment, focusing your attention only on the one thing you want to focus it on. Most people experience this fleetingly, usually in moments where you’re up against a deadline and that deadline means you forget your hunger, you forget the other 10,000 things you could be doing at that moment and you’re 100 per cent engaged in the work. Or you experience it because you’re in a crisis and there’s one thing that’s so big it commands all of your attention. But it is possible to reach this level of Zen-like calm regularly in your work – you just need to make some effort eliminating distractions. (We’ll come to that later.)
The art of attention-based productivity is personal, less predictable and in some ways unique to each of us. In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about creativity being like an ‘inner child’, and we know what children need: protection, nurturing, motivation, food, teaching, safety, to be listened to, to be treated as an individual and to be free from stress. So one key productivity lesson is to learn to be a bit kinder to yourself. The truth is so many people are quick to beat themselves up when things don’t go their way, but a cycle of ‘stress, lower productivity, more stress, even lower productivity’ isn’t good for anyone. Our instincts and sense of guilt often favour the stick not the carrot.
Far from the opposite of being productive, being kinder to yourself is integral to keeping the show on the road and to you continuing to feel great and perform well in your role. So list three simple steps that you’re going to take that will allow you to be kinder to yourself. It could be as simple as leaving the office on time every day this week, booking your next holiday, treating yourself to a relaxing, full-hour lunch break, having a massage or even just vowing to stop checking your emails when you’re not in the office. Whatever you choose, make a commitment to these choices by adding them to your diary or to-do list. And stick to it!
We will focus later in the book on the whole concept of Zen and the idea of staying ‘in the moment’ with your work. It is a subtle art, but one that can transform your ability to deliver the ideas and the work that really makes a difference.
Quality attention
The reason that attention is such a key facet of productivity is that distractions can only be eliminated to a certain extent. We can control to a large degree how and when we allow email to distract us, but for most of us, the idea of not having email at all isn’t an option. So our thinking process that leads to productivity must start with the question: ‘Can I be sure that what I’m working on right now is the most appropriate thing for me to be doing at this exact moment?’ Of course, there are a number of variables to take into account when answering this question, but here’s the biggest and most overlooked: your level of attention available.
Attention is a more limited resource than time. Everyone is different, but typically you may find that you’re better prepared to do your best work earlier in the day, or maybe you’re someone who’s terrible in the morning but comes alive at 4pm. As well as having an idea of the times you’re on form, you probably also know the times in the day that you’re the least capable of meaningful work. You know the drill: make coffee, scroll emails, look busy. Again, we’re all human and our job isn’t to strive to become superheroes, our job is to work with what we’ve got.
Broadly speaking, I like to think that the quality of my attention falls into three distinct categories or levels:
1. Proactive attention
These are the times in your day where you’re fully focused, fired up, feeling fresh, in the zone and ready to tackle the most complex of tasks. Most of us will have no more than two to three hours of proactive attention in a day (and also typically more at the start of the week than the end).
2. Active attention
These are the times when you’re plugged in, ticking along nicely, not quite at your best, but competently engaged with most things. Most of us will spend the majority of our day in this active attention level.
3. Inactive attention
These are times when you’re flagging and your brain feels a bit fried. Perhaps you’ve been at work too many hours or perhaps it’s too early in the morning to tackle the hard stuff. Or maybe you’re feeling a bit foggy after that high-carb lunch.
Of course, these are crude and artificial demarcations, but it’s vital that we develop an awareness of the relationship between attention level and the complexity of our work. Scheduling tasks for your day or your week based on your attention level – and reacting in the moment based on how you’re feeling and what new things are emerging – is the only way to get anywhere near close to having a good answer to the question: ‘Can I be sure that what I’m working on right now is the most appropriate thing for me to be doing at this exact moment?’ Because attention – particularly your proactive attention – is truly the most precious resource you have at your disposal.
It’s important to note that everybody is different. We all have different preferences and biorhythms. For me, proactive attention is usually from 9am until mid-morning, and then I get a second burst in the afternoon. In recent years, I’ve also learned what’s good and bad for me to eat for lunch to avoid the inactive attention lull that I used to experience in the hour or so after lunch.
What does your attention look like during typical day for you? When are you at your absolute best (proactive attention)? When are you flagging (inactive attention)? And what’s the bit in the middle? Write out a timetable of your attention levels, and see how it fits with your current work schedule. Could you organize your day to use your attention levels better?
Increasing your proactive attention
Finally, in this very brief introduction to attention management, let’s think about how we can get more of it! And specifically, wouldn’t it be lovely to have an extra couple of hours of proactive attention each day? Unlike time, which is a constant for everyone, there are ways to increase how much proactive attention you have at your disposal.
Firstly, you can make sure your brain gets all the fuel it needs to function at its best for as long as possible each day. (We will look at the wider topic of food, the body and productivity in the chapter J is for Juice.) Physical activity and good nutrition go a long way to keeping you at your best for longer.
Secondly, you can turn lots of little moments from your day-to-day life into surprise moments of productivity – but you do need a little forethought to do this. For example, think about how much time you spend travelling to and from work, sitting in waiting rooms or on flights, standing in queues in the supermarket or just walking along the road. So much of this time can be used really productively, creating whole new pockets of attention. (Later in the book we’ll look at lists and how you can use them to enable you to take advantage of these surprise opportunities for productivity.)
B is for BHAGs and Batching
BHAGs
In 1961, John F. Kennedy made a speech in which he said: ‘This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.’ It felt astonishing, brave, visionary and, let’s face it, a little unlikely. Yet within a decade, it had happened. After Russia put the first man into space just a few years earlier, the Americans rallied their resources behind this grand vision and made it happen. It was an example of a ‘BHAG’ – a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
The term BHAG was coined by James Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1994 book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.
So Amazon’s BHAG is ‘every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds’; the charity Habitat for Humanity’s BHAG is ‘a world where everyone has a decent place to live’. In the 1960s, Nike’s BHAG was simply ‘crush Adidas’.
Five years ago, my personal BHAG was to have the best-selling book on the topic of productivity and to create a productivity company that comes top on Google search in the UK. Now I’m aiming even higher, because it’s useful for your BHAG to feel just a little bit too big, to be out of your direct reach – it’s designed to stretch you. Think Productive’s new BHAG is to be the biggest influence on workplace productivity and work/life balance in the world.
What makes a BHAG different from a simple vision statement or corporate plan? Well, a BHAG is emotionally engaging, with a chance of success but also an element of uncomfortable jeopardy. A BHAG compels the people in your organization or team to rally behind it, with the sense that together we could achieve this, but only if we really focus on it. It becomes the driving force behind your corporate plans, and while no one remembers most of what’s in a corporate plan, it’s almost impossible to forget a BHAG.
Whether you’re leading an organization, arranging a family event or setting about a new project, then it’s vital that you have something audacious and tenacious to help drive you forward. Whatever your circumstances, the notion of BHAGs can help you to think about your bigger picture and provide the motivation you need.
What’s your Big Hairy Audacious Goal? Take a few moments to remind yourself of your current goal, or to think up a new one. Make sure you write it down and put it somewhere you’ll be reminded of it regularly.
In trying to define your own personal BHAG, you might like to think about the following:
What are your values?What most excites you in your work and life?What is the best use of your skills?What does the world most need from you?Your organization’s BHAG and you
It’s important to stay motivated in your work, and work becomes much more fulfilling when you see an alignment between your organization’s BHAG and your own. Being clear about your goal and your organization’s goals gives you the momentum to keep going when things get difficult. This alignment of their BHAG and yours could be a direct alignment of passion, whether that be for fitness, solving world hunger, technology products, or anything else that you’re passionate about. Or it could simply be that you know your role in the organization and know you can help, but your mutual BHAG is based more around you and your organization earning a good living.
It’s important here to think about the unwritten rules of work because they’re important factors in staying motivated and ensuring a fruitful partnership between you as an employee and your organization. Of course, if you’re self-employed and you are your organization, this is even more vital!
Your employer pays you to create some value for them. The more value you create, the happier they are. But there’s also a need for you to get some rest, have a life outside of work and feel appreciated and respected by your boss and team.
I believe that factors such as technology, transparency and the changing work population will lead over time to more flexible ‘deals’ between employer and employee. We’ll move away from the set-hours culture to more flexibility and a blurring of the lines between work and life. We’ll also begin to move to a more outcome-based measurement of success and professionalism, rather than the old-fashioned system of simply measuring whether you were in the office for the required number of hours.
