5 Extremely Effective Productivity Ideas

Morning Leaders,

Whether you are a new leader, a veteran or an inspiring leader, there is always an opportunity for us to be better with our time. This is definitely a big challenge I have seen when folks moving from a role where there is a lot of structure to a leadership role where there is a lot more autonomy and ambiguity.

With this in mind, I wanted to share some actionable ideas today that you can use to help you be a more effective leader and get more done. These ideas are specifically for work you need to own rather than delegating or empowering others. I’ll be sure to cover strategies for more experienced leaders in another newsletter.

5 ideas for ways you can be more productive:

1) Flow State - I am sure there are people which will disagree but multi-tasking is really a myth. If you want to be highly productive with your time, do one thing at a time. If you can immerse yourself in the important task with no distractions, you will enter what’s called a flow state where productivity will accelerate, because you are now in the zone and committing 100% of your energy and creativity into this one important task. Try a Pomodoro count timer for 25mins.

Photo by Amanda Jones on Unsplash

2) Critical Few - when you evaluate your goals or to-do list every morning, identify the 2 or 3 important items. Think of the 80/20 rule, what 20% of your effort is going to account for 80% of your results? Identifying and focusing on the important items and getting those completed first will have a profound impact on your effectiveness. Don’t know what the critical few are? Speak to your leader and find out.

3) Eat the Frog - generally speaking, we look for those easy wins which help us to close off items on our to-do list as it makes us feel super productive ticking things off. Tick tick tick. Flip that on its head. Focus on getting the challenging item out of the way first, basically eat the frog. This difficult task is probably something you are putting off because you either don’t enjoy doing it, it’s uncomfortable or it requires a lot of thought and effort. Research shows you have the most energy and creativity first thing in the morning, so start your day strong with the most challenging task. Once this is out of the way, the rest of the day will be downhill and you will have a much higher sense of fulfilment.

Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

4) Parkinson’s Law - is the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted. “Humans expand to fill the responsibility given". If you give yourself 2 weeks to complete a task, it will take you 2 weeks. If you give yourself a day to complete a task, it will take a day, within reason. Take going on holiday, you’ll normally have 101 things to get ready including packing bags, organising insurance, changing money up etc. You know you have to get it done, otherwise, you cannot go on holiday. Based on discipline and focus you manage to get a huge amount achieved in the last 12 hours before you rush to the airport. This demonstrates when you are committed and have to get something by a certain time, you’ll be amazed at how much you can get done. When you give yourself less time to focus on a task, you commit to actually doing that task only.

5) ZERO Inbox - it will take you far less energy and effort to maintain your inbox at zero than it will at 1000. Try adopting a better strategy for managing incomings emails and any unnecessary noise.

• Archive - move any emails from your inbox to a subfolder which have been dealt with and do not require any further action.

• Delete - anything unrelated to work/marketing/notifications that you can find in another system or you will never need to refer to, get those deleted.

• Unsubscribe - you probably have a few marketing, sales and even internal email lists you are subscribed to but have never read or looked at. Unsubscribe to those.

• Boomerang - use this tool here. This will send the email away from your inbox for a set period of time and bring it back when you need it. Useful if someone says they’ll come back to you or you want to keep an eye on responses, or you need to follow up in a month’s time for example.

• Reply - reply to the email if you can deal with the email within 2-5 mins or leave it in your inbox if it needs to be actioned today. Once dealt with, either archive or boomerang.

• Actionable - if the email will require a deeper level of thought or action, add it to your to-do list or calendar, in the meantime, hit boomerang on the email so it keeps your inbox clean and returns later for you to reply to if needed.

Hopefully, some of these tools and strategies will be useful for you to be more effective with your time and get more important work done.

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• Book - Leadership: Plain and Simple by Steve Radcliffe. A great book which highlights why it’s so important to establish strong relationships with your team. Based on Leadership FED framework. Future, Engage, Deliver.

• Book - The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. Just finishing reading this short book again with one of my leaders. A great simple book to help you to become a better coach and empower your people by providing fewer answers and asking better questions.

• YouTube - Simon Sinek on Why you Win with Consistency. Simon talks through why all the small things and the daily occurrences help you achieve your goals. Not one-off events.

Quote of the Week

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.” - Zig Ziglar

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