Category: productivity

What can you do in short periods which demand that you get a lot done, sometimes with overlapping deadlines? They are especially bothersome if your calendar is full and you feel as if you are already giving 100%. In those moments, you can’t defy time: you must ramp up your productivity.

As a Jamaican manager, January and September are probably a couple of your busiest months. Why? Both represent traditional returns from days spent away from the office. Projects which have been paused need to be resumed with gusto, energized by your downtime.

Some professionals fear or hate these two busy seasons, and others. They are forced to increase their productivity by several notches, but face a problem. They lack the methods. Believing their plates are full, they are actually mistaken. Here are some solutions the most effective people apply during their crunch times.

1) Tracking Personal Progress

What indicators of success do you use from one week to the next? While your company and department may have no problem measuring financial and operational metrics, there are few professionals who employ a personal scorecard.

If you’re like most, you probably have a vague sense of your performance, but it probably will not be enough. Certainly, those who perform at the highest level of any sport don’t rely on fuzzy feelings. But few professionals know how to create a scorecard showing their measurable accomplishments. And if they track one or two goals like sales or expenses, they almost never have a “balanced” scorecard covering the critical parts of their lives.

Consequently, even if they set ambitious goals such as a promotion or placement on a key project, they get lost. Instead of making progress, the daily grind buries them. A short-term focus driven by emergencies dominates.

Over time, their inattention leads to personal problems: unwanted pounds get added, technology skills wane and close friends drift away. Then, life intervenes with a dramatic, unexpected wake-up call. For example, the big plan for a relaxed retirement turns into a series of medical crises initiated by a heart attack. You failed to maintain your health at a younger age.

The remedy is simple: treat your entire life as if it were a precious resource whose well-being must be actively fostered. Pull out a spreadsheet and begin tracking. The cost? $0.

2) Creating a daily start-up routine

Most professionals who start personal tracking eventually stumble across another powerful technique: the morning ritual. Each single practice, which is a component of the ritual, may be ordinary, but the power lies in completing them as a group, over and over again.

Follow this habit and you’ll find it easy to scale to weekly, monthly and annual rituals. They all serve a similar purpose: at the beginning of a time period, you simply follow your own instructions.

But this is more than a convenience. Research shows that your mind requires a great deal of cognitive energy to innovate a brand new activity. However, when there is an existing script or checklist to follow, you can execute without pausing to re-think. So a periodic ritual saves precious time and effort.

You’ll also find that adding data to a scorecard is easy when it’s part of your daily ritual. The two practices are perfect complements.

3) Recognize Your Own Progress

New recruits from school to most companies often have a difficult time making the transition. The reason? Their former learning environments are highly gamified, but the new one isn’t. What do they find instead? Poor feedback, vague performance reviews, unclear goals and internal politics, which trump objective standards. Disillusionment sets in, blamed on the opaque, unfair nature of corporate life.

If you want to become more effective, you must learn to be content with self-recognition. This may take some maturity to achieve, but it’s the key to accomplishing important goals, even when others may not understand or approve.

This doesn’t mean you should be a hermit: it’s just that outside feedback is just one input, not a final judgment. Retain that ultimate power: as the decision-maker, you can ride far above circumstances and opinions.

Now, you’ll be playing an entirely different game of your own creation. You won’t be relying on the ones other people try to enforce using society’s popular yardsticks. With your scorecard and rituals, you’ll determine success, especially in those moments when your workload spikes upwards.

This should leave you confident. You’ll never be stuck wondering how to respond to a situation that demands more from you than ever before. For you, it will be a matter of adjusting your tracking and rituals before proceeding.

How do you design an inspiring day’s work? Is it a matter of luck, or chance? Or can it be engineered and turned on like a switch?

Let’s begin by defining what your “ideal” work day looks like. It probably doesn’t mean sitting in meetings dominated by others. Neither does it involve hours responding to electronic messages that should never have been sent in the first place.

Some employees don’t even try: they have resigned themselves to deliver a half-hearted effort. It’s the very opposite of a great days’ work.

Instead of following their example, let’s imagine that you have set a personal standard for top quality performance. In your best moments, you are solving unique problems using your finest abilities.

However, you can’t be successful without committing a major portion of your attention. In peak episodes, you tackle challenges which cannot be solved while watching television, or browsing YouTube.

But the structure of the modern office does not lend you much help, and this carries over to working from home. As such, these miracle days need to be consciously created, and may benefit from the following three elements according to the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and other experts.

1. Uninterrupted Time to Hit the Flow State

It takes about 20 minutes to “get into the groove” and achieve the high-performing Flow State. In this mode, time flies as you give a challenging task your complete attention.

You have blocked all human, audible, visual or other interruptions to stop you from staying in a deep problem-solving mode. Here, you are using all the expertise you can muster to create a unique solution.

Your mind should also be free of distracting concerns that threaten to take you away. Handle them by scheduling time to deal with them later in your calendar and you’ll be shielded from their intrusion.

Given the priority nature of this work, your time in the Flow State must be pre-scheduled. This protects it against other activities which may crop up.

2. Condition Your Environment

Unfortunately, your boss may not agree. Some of the worst managers believe they have a right to impose their priority-of-the-moment on you at a whim, disrupting whatever plans you had.

This is often little more than a power play.

Over time, you must make it your duty to train your boss to get what he/she wants in a different manner. In other words, there should always be a conversation to discuss the outcome wanted and its priority relative to other commitments.

The sooner you both realize that an unthinking habit of random switching won’t work, the better off you’ll both be. Your top quality work will give him/her improved results.

Consider the case of an employee I met who is managed this way. In a class she reported that she doesn’t make plans – she just does whatever her boss tells her to do that day. She arrives at work each morning as a blank slate.

Unfortunately, this kind of staff member is the first to be fired when budgets are cut. Why? She brings nothing unique or distinctive to the workplace, and learns little over time. Anyone can replace her.

If you work from home, you must be even more careful, as you should also turn off disruptive technologies and train family members to leave you alone when you’re doing your best work. But the principle remains the same. People in your life need to know when you are deeply engaged.

3. Coffee and Stimulants

I never grew up a coffee drinker and only tried the stuff for the first time a few years ago. After some experimentation, I learned that it helps me do my best work, but there’s a caveat: like many good things in life, it needs to be carefully rationed.

As such, I drink only a single cup every one to two weeks, just when I need to enter the Flow State. In these rare instances, it does its job very well, allowing me to continue focused work for three times as long.

I’m not addicted, and my body is not accustomed to a daily dose. In addition, I only use it on weekends where I have more control, due to the fact that most offices are closed. This reduces the chance of emergencies and interruptions.

COVID-19 hasn’t changed the need for us to do great, inspiring work, but most agree that a traditional office isn’t required. In many cases, it only makes things worse.

However, there are principles which you can’t violate wherever you pull out your laptop. Customize them for your emerging hybrid situation and you can be more productive than even ever before in any environment.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com