Part 2 - Increasing your productivity, not by working more, but by attaining clarity.
Continuing from: Part 1 - Different levels of productivity in a workplace
Observations:
Tasks are accumulating at a pace I couldn't keep up with. Completing these tasks often led to more tasks. Our endless to-do list is easier to add to than check off. I feel overwhelmed and anxious all the time. If this sounds like you, you're likely juggling too many tasks without a reliable knowledge system.
Concept, not Methods
This essay aims to highlight the common workplace mistakes made by knowledge workers. This essay won't make you perfect, but correcting these mistakes can increase your productivity significantly without increasing the hours you spend working. Let's apply the Pareto Principle (80-20 rule) and reap the rewards by working smarter.
My Background:
I would like to share my past experiences to lend credibility to the concepts below. Using these productivity concepts, I led a department of 70 people. More than half of them are my direct reports. At any given time, we run about 250 projects in parallel. These are not tiny projects. Most of these projects span many months to a few years. I hope you are inspired by this story because I am just a normal human being with a normal IQ, just like you.
Input (actions) -> Output (results) -> Goal
Every input has an output. Every action (input) leads to a result (output).
Firstly, we need to understand that our job helps our company achieve its goals. To meet these goals, we need to accumulate results. These results are produced by actions. Despite their simplicity, these terms lay the foundation for achieving results in the workplace.
The most important step in reaching your goal is knowing which actions to take to get there. You have to write these actions down clearly, preferably as a to-do list you can check off. "Finish project X" is not a clear action. Clear actions are specific and tell you exactly what to do.
Productivity Loss
We know that the corporate workplace is chaotic. This means our brains are constantly bombarded with new information, interrupting our workflow.
There are numerous ways we get interrupted.
- Unexpected work assigned to you by others (your boss or a colleague).
- Receiving an email that triggers your next task.
- Something went wrong in an ongoing project.
- An exciting new idea struck you.
- A ping on the phone.
When this happens, you operate at suboptimal productivity due to context switching
Information Flow Hygiene
We want a systematic approach to dealing with this chaotic environment. This is what I call information flow hygiene. The best way to do this is to set specific time blocks for receiving additional information. For example, in the morning when your mind is sharp, you want to hit your to-do list before consuming emails or having any meetings. Also, make sure you are not interrupted by people approaching your desk.
However, it is idealistic to think that external factors will accommodate your time blocks. Like water seeping through cracks, urgent information will find its way to disrupt your workflow.
When this disruption happens, you want to quickly identify where to compartmentalize the information for later processing. The intent is to quickly receive, store it in the right place, and return to your task at hand. Hopefully, the disruption is not long enough to cause you to lose too much mental momentum. Basically, the shorter the disruption, the better.
The way I recommend compartmentalizing information is by recording information down and storing it in a folder. These records of information and folders can be either digital or physical. The way you structure this information is also not that important at this stage. More importantly, you want to record the information so your future self can find it easily later. Note the two parts: record and locate.
Mental Overhead
If you can record and locate, you allow your brain to let go of this information and relax. Holding information in your head is mental overhead. As the mental overhead accumulates, it raises anxiety and impedes your ability to do the task at hand.
Our brain likes to focus on one thing at a time. That's the trick to accomplishing great results.
Our brain is for having ideas, not for holding them. We want to capture our ideas externally. Notebook, digital notes.
Achieving Clarity
I would like to point our readers to the 2 actionable parts of this essay. Firstly, we learned to break down our goal into a series of clear, actionable tasks. Secondly, we learned to compartmentalize information for later processing. Mastering both of these concepts gives you clarity. Clarity in how your actions directly contribute to reaching your goal, and clarity in the present mind because you are free from the mental overheads. With clarity, I believe we can be much more productive and actually hit our targets.
I hope these concepts help us better understand how to move up the productivity ladder.
Resources:
Books