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Type 'productivity books’ into Amazon, and you get over 90,000 results. So what does that tell you? Presumably, that so many of us feel we don’t have enough time or the motivation to achieve everything that we want in life.
You’ll notice I didn’t just mention the ‘time’ part of the equation because as someone who has most likely read at least 50 of the better books among that very long list, I can assure you that working on the right tasks is at least as important as how long you spend on them.
The consensus seems to be that the changes in working habits for many knowledge workers have led to productivity improvements over the past year. However, how we measure this is at best inconsistent, at worst incorrect. As has been pointed out elsewhere, producing more isn’t necessarily an indication that people are doing their jobs more effectively – it’s likely that they’re just working more hours to do it.
At this point, let me focus on the subject of the majority of the books I mentioned earlier - personal productivity - and give you a glimpse into my brain as something has just now occurred to me. When you write about this sort of stuff, the risk is that you end up repeating the same ideas and principles again and again. Well, I’ve just realised that I’ve written an article about my approach to personal productivity before. Since it would be terribly unproductive to write it again, I’ve just decided I’d be better off copying and pasting it - I’m sure you don’t mind.
However, let me focus on the specific method that I’ve shared more often than any other when people have asked me for advice about how to plan their time. It’s also an approach that’s proven most successful for me and to which I continually return.
A couple of things to mention:
As I wrote this article before Covid, it references a world in which our default was office-based work. However, it’s as true now as ever, particularly the idea of varying where you work. While I generally enjoy the benefits of working from home, I have missed the variety of locations that I’d settle down in to do some focused work.
A critical addition to this framework is that while useful for an individual, it really comes into its own when adopted by a whole team and enabled by managers and leaders - in particular, the concept of incorporating downtime into a working day. If you consider that the growing evidence that we only work at our best for up to five hours per day, the idea that you would actively encourage your staff to schedule activities to help them rest during ‘work-hours is not as crazy as it first appears.
It goes without saying that irrespective of how aware you are about managing your time and work better, there are times when it all goes out the window, so don’t beat yourself up about it.
The four categories of work
I now segment my days and weeks into four categories of work – collaborative, spontaneous, focused and downtime — that allow me to work productively and creatively.
During my collaborative sessions, I’ll plan any activities and meetings that require me to spend time with other people. The only consideration is whether there’s value in me being there — either to me or others.
Spontaneous time is for those moments of shallow work (non-cognitively demanding tasks) where some background noise and interaction with others is both enjoyable and potentially constructive. After all, you are allowed to have some fun at work!
During collaborative and spontaneous periods, I ‘timebox’ my day, scheduling every task in my calendar with realistic durations rather than the defaults set by Google. If something takes 12 minutes, I put it in for 12 minutes, not 30. Of course, things pop up now and then that take priority, so the trick is to build in some flexibility with what I call ‘overflow time’ — leaving a free half an hour at the end of my morning or afternoon.
When it comes to focused work, I tend to be more disciplined and remove all distractions. To do this in the office, I’ve tried out explicit visual devices like a homemade ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign and a traffic light system. Red means ‘it better be urgent, otherwise, leave me alone’, amber means ‘you can interrupt if it’s time-sensitive, green means ‘I’m free as a bird’).
I find myself much more effective, though, when I remove myself entirely from the office. When I established these working habits, I brainstormed all the places I might consider going for focused time — at home, local cafes, meeting rooms, libraries, museums, and galleries. Frankly, anywhere that I could sit comfortably and undistracted for a period of between 90 and 150 minutes will do. I now balance my tried and tested favourite places 80/20 with somewhere new. For me, evolving where I work is an integral part of the creative process - placing myself in new, unfamiliar environments can force my brain out of its comfort zone.
Studies show that when mastered, flow can increase output by 400%. To put this in perspective, four two-hour focused-work sessions every week would be the equivalent of a 40-hour ‘distracted’ work-week (compare this to the 15 hour average for UK office workers). There’s much talk about whether a four day-week could work, and there’s your answer.
Now, I accept, it isn’t quite as that simple as that — not all periods of focused work yield such high productivity. Plus, depending on the nature of your job and level of experience, isolating yourself may not be realistic. However, it’s indisputable that focused work adds value to roles requiring any degree of creativity or problem-solving.
Lastly, giving your mind the space to be creative is vital, and a critical counterbalance to focused work is downtime. Any chef worth their salt will advise that when you’re cooking meat, you should aim to rest it for an equal amount of time to that which you cooked it. The same is true of your brain — focused work is demanding, and you need to allow it to recover. I like to practice restorative yoga, have a gentle walk, or, if I can get away with it, indulge in a relaxing mid-week massage!
Have a lovely weekend,
Ollie
Any Other Business:
As we might expect, given everyone’s working this out for the first time, companies are approaching hybrid work in all manner of ways. Nicholas Bloom is a fairly well-established voice in this area since he’s spent the best part of a decade studying the impact of remote work - you’ll probably have seen me reference his report on call-centre workers in China last year, for example. He recently wrote a piece advising companies to limit choice when deciding which days of the week workers come into the office. He argues that leaving it entirely up to individuals causes various issues, including an unequal distribution across different days of the week (most people when surveyed opt for Mondays and Fridays at home) and the risk of ‘mixing modes’ across a team - e.g. half the team dialling into a Zoom call from home and the others from an office. How do you feel about this, and what is your company doing? Well, whether or not you agree with his recommendation, this interview with Bloom on the HBR Ideacast podcast is worth a listen.
One approach I definitely like is that of Reward Gateway (RG), which I’ve referenced before following my interview with its’ founder and former CEO, Glenn Elliott. Now, you’d expect as a leading provider of employee engagement technology that they’d be paying careful consideration of how best to balance the various factors in determining a hybrid policy - and you’d be right. Following weeks of research and consultation with their team, RG’s Head of Global Engagement and Internal Communications, Catrin Lewis, created this fantastic guide designed to help people decide where to work based on eight work modes. You can read more about it here.
You might remember I wrote about the experiment a Canadian Law Firm, YLaw, made with a 4-day working week a few months ago. Here’s their latest update, including their assessment on why it’s contributed towards a 30% increase in profits. I’ll give you a preview - it turns out a 4-day week makes it a hell of a lot easier to recruit people!
Looking for a new book to read? Then check out Behavioral Scientist’s 2021 Summer Book List. There are plenty of good ‘uns on there, including a number that I’ve referenced in this newsletter over the past year.
On a related note, this paper explains how which books you choose tells you something about your personality traits. Here’s a little infographic to get you started:
I’m a subscriber to Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent newsletter. In this piece for The Lily, she and Amelia Horgan eloquently articulate why “your work life won’t get better until you start considering these questions.” Specifically, they argue that millennial women workers need to think collectively to affect genuine change in corporate life
And finally, our fascination with meeting culture has reached such an advanced stage that British comedian David Mitchell has produced a radio series on them for BBC radio.