4 Thoughts On Productivity
Urgent doesn’t mean important
There has to be some part of your weekly routine where you work on what you consider important, but isn’t necessarily urgent.
A good rule of thumb is 20% of your time should focus on the “important but not urgent”.
Getting my webinar slides done for a webinar happening in two days is urgent… but it’s not that important in the grand scheme.
Creating a process to hire someone to design the slides to my standards is important, but it’s been 16 years and it still hasn’t happened yet. Ugh.
Once I turned 40 and started getting aches in pains in places I didn’t know existed, it’s been easier for me to shift from urgent to important.
Audit your schedule and see how much is spent on:
Urgent and important.
Urgent but not important.
Important but not urgent.
If “Urgent but not important” is too high of a percent, then answer this question
What’s one urgent but not important task I can quit and shift that time to something important but not urgent.
Once you get in the habit of working consistently on “important but not urgent” it becomes easier to prioritize it, do it, and then you end up with far bigger results!
Slow to Fast = Smart. Fast to Faster = Risky
If you drive 20 miles per hour, it will take you half an hour to drive 10 miles. Increase your speed to 30 miles per hour and you save big time - ten minutes!
Speed Time to drive 10 Miles 20 mph 30 Minutes 30 mph 20 Minutes
Now say you were going 70 miles per hour and you were ten miles away from your destination. You punch the pedal to 90 miles per hour to get there sooner.
How much time do you save? Two minutes.
Speed Time to drive 10 Miles 70 mph 8.57 Minutes 90 mph 6.67 Minutes
To go from 20 to 30mph is a small speed increase for a large gain of time with little risk. Going from 70 to 90mph is a larger speed increase for a tiny gain of time with a massive increase of risk.
Once you understand this, hunt for those constraints in your business - where are you going real slow, where a small increase would net a huge win with little risk?
Emotional States, Not Just Output
If you were in charge of Uber, you’d know that people hate waiting for their ride to come pick them up. You might then try to solve for a way to get drivers to pickup points sooner.
Yet you’re still limited by the laws of physics. You can only get there so fast, no matter how much you optimize for it.
What behavioralists at Uber discovered was that it was much easier to reduce uncertainty (an emotional state) than waiting time.
In fact, people would rather have it be certain and slightly slower than uncertain but faster.
We tend to only look at the numbers and make decisions of productivity based on its supposed increased output.
A great example is body builder influencers. They get in these esoteric debates on different lifting exercises to optimize that extra 0.1%. Then they click bait it “The Bench Press is Killing Your Gains!” because they found if you make tons of slight adjustments to grip, positioning, timing, etc. - that you can build slightly more muscle.
Problem is people trying to follow these routines are now overwhelmed with information and as a result build less muscle because they are less comfortable lifting weight.
Are you placing too much emphasis on the outcomes at the expense of the emotional states?
Time is hard to quantify
Which do you think is more productive for writing: 60 one-minute sessions or 1 sixty minute session?
It’s the same amount of time, but the one block of it will be far more productive, because you aren’t switching on-and-off to work on the task.
Most creative tasks need large blocks of time - ideally 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time because it takes 15-20 minutes just to get in the zone.
Further, two hours on spreadsheets feels like an eternity to me whereas two hours working on a webinar script goes by fast.
Seek to find the optimal creative tasks where the hours you put into them feel less than the actual time and then schedule 2-4 hour time blocks to work on those tasks.
Screw morning routines if they don’t call to you. Night owls can work uninterrupted because no one is trying to schedule a meeting with you at 1AM.
Find a way where you can block at least one 4-hour chunk a week to the highest form of creative work that you think will increase your value output.