Top 10 Plus 1 Productivity Lessons of 2008

The top 10 pro­duc­tiv­ity lessons I learned in 2008 that helped me work faster, bet­ter and hap­pier. The short ver­sion for the busy folks:

1. Work at What You Give a Damn About
2. Know­ing is Not Doing
3. Decide What Has a Place in Your Life and What Doesn’t
4. Multi-Tasking is a Big Fat Lie
5. Cre­ate, Don’t Free­load
6. Tackle the Small Prob­lems First
7. Respect Your Uncon­scious
8. Money is Renew­able, Time is Not
9. Peo­ple are not Sched­ules
10. 80% of Value is in the Habits
11. Make Ideas

And here we go with the long version!

1. Work at What You Give a Damn About

I find that I’ve done my best cre­ative work when I do stuff that has real mean­ing for me. Maybe I’m a spoilt knowl­edge worker diva, but I can’t do banal, unin­ter­est­ing stuff that doesn’t make a difference.

But beyond per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion, this is about mak­ing per­sonal mean­ing – and this is real regrets-at-your-deathbed level stuff here. It’s just stu­pid to be pro­duc­tive for productivity’s sake; do you really want to run faster and harder up a lad­der that’s propped up against the wrong wall?

Find out where you want to con­tribute to most, and then pro­duc­tiv­ity the heck out of it. Now cue quote from famous per­son, in this case Steve Jobs:

I have looked in the mir­ror every morn­ing and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And when­ever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

2. Know­ing is not Doing

A big mis­take, espe­cially for a nerd like me, is assum­ing that just because I’ve read some­thing, I know it. Big mis­take. You don’t know unless you do, and unless what you know gets trans­lated into action, you’re just indulging in some seri­ous men­tal mas­tur­ba­tion. Which is summed up in this Papua New Guinea proverb I love:

All knowl­edge is only a rumor until it’s in the muscle.

3. Decide What Has a Place in Your Life and What Doesn’t

In a world of finite time, energy, atten­tion and the 80/20 rule, I’ve found that when I pro­cras­ti­nate on what things mean to me and what to do about them, that’s when I cre­ate lin­ger­ing anx­i­ety over what needs to get done in my life.

On the other hand, when I make quick, hard deci­sions over what has a place in my life and what doesn’t, i.e. what deserves to take my time, energy and atten­tion, that’s when I free up my time, energy and atten­tion to only do things that have mean­ing for me, and that trans­lates into increased clar­ity and peace of mind.

This isn’t about being a Neg­a­tive Nancy and say­ing no to life’s oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s about know­ing where you want your life to be headed and cul­ti­vat­ing what will add to that vision and ruth­lessly prun­ing what won’t.

4. Multi-Tasking is a Big Fat Lie

Maybe I’m get­ting older and brain cells are dying, but I can’t multi-task as well as I used to. Or maybe it’s because I’m a man and we’re not sup­posed to be as good at it as women. Or I’m focus­ing much bet­ter at work now and finally feel the neg­a­tive effects of doing a lot of things all at the same time.

Either way, multi-tasking was a big no-no for me in 2008. Instead of doing many things at once, I real­ized what multi-tasking really was; shift­ing atten­tion amongst many things really quickly. And that didn’t lead to doing good work. Doing good work came from tak­ing long, deep moments with­out dis­trac­tion, focus­ing like a laser to get into flow.

5. Cre­ate, Don’t Freeload

It’s way eas­ier to sit back, relax, and wait for things to hap­pen than to go out there and sweat to make them hap­pen. But in the real world, ain’t no one gonna hand you a mil­lion dol­lars for being a zero contributor.

To be hon­est, I’ve been a slacker before, which is why this was one of the big lessons for me in 2008. I would bitch about prob­lems at work, stu­pid rules and reg­u­la­tions, point out holes in people’s ideas – a reg­u­lar Neg­a­tive Nancy. Until I real­ized that this was help­ing none, and essen­tially, bitch­ing was just mouthing off at the prob­lem and expect­ing some­one else to take care of it. There was no per­sonal power in that.

So yes, 2008 was the year I real­ized that I had to be the change I wanted to see in the world (Gandhi). To give what was miss­ing (Mar­i­anne Williamson). To con­tribute instead of mooch (Steve Pavlina). This involved change on my part; assum­ing that nobody else would do it if I didn’t, to offer sug­ges­tions together with crit­i­cisms, to cut the bitch­ing out of my life.

Don’t be a Neg­a­tive Nancy, no one likes a Neg­a­tive Nancy.

6. Tackle the Small Prob­lems First

When I was a kid, my math teacher used to say that in an exam, we should always skip over the hard prob­lems first and do the sim­ple ones first. That way, we don’t waste valu­able cycles on stuff that we might not even complete.

It’s a big duh, but I never thought about apply­ing that to the work­ing world until recently. Got a big project I have no idea how to start? Stop the paral­y­sis of analy­sis and break off small chunks to work on. This arti­cle giv­ing me too much grief? Skip to the next one that I can dash off much more quickly.

Oddly enough, the small hits of achieve­ment from doing the smaller, eas­ier tasks help boost morale, moti­va­tion and inspi­ra­tion to tackle the big­ger ones.

7. Respect Your Unconscious

I get stuck on ideas some­times, and since my full-time job is a writer, writer’s block is some­thing that I’ve had to deal with a few times in 2008. But I’ve found that unless I was on a tight dead­line, it was okay to be stuck. It was okay to go an unpro­duc­tive day where all I churned out were shitty first drafts. It was okay because I rec­og­nized that shitty first draft days weren’t per­ma­nent, that they didn’t mean I was a shits writer and my life wasn’t all shitty because of one shitty day.

I can’t claim to know how the brain really works, but I’ve found that some­times when the con­scious mind is really stuck, it’s totally okay to take time off doing what­ever project and just go do some­thing else, because the more unpro­duc­tive response is to keep throw­ing your mind at it.

(A def­i­n­i­tion of insan­ity? Keep doing the same thing and expect­ing dif­fer­ent results. If the def­i­n­i­tion works for men­tal insti­tu­tions, it’ll prob­a­bly work for the work­place hur hur.)

Some­times a great idea hits me when I’m doing some­thing totally unre­lated. Some­times, by the time I’ve come back from a tea-break/sleeping on it/whatever, the block clears up and the ideas flow a lot more smoothly. I don’t know how it works, but I fig­ure if I’ve got two minds (the con­scious and uncon­scious), might as well put both of them to work.

8. Money is Renew­able, Time is Not

I kept think­ing that I work for money, and money is good and impor­tant. But in the longer run, money is a renew­able resource, while time is not. So for me, I’d rather make money to free up time, not burn more time to make money.

9. Peo­ple are not Schedules

Plans can be made care­fully and thought­fully, but they will always be way­laid by other peo­ple. The ques­tion is; is what this per­son wants from me now more impor­tant than what I was planning?

Peo­ple are not tasks and sched­ules. They’re think­ing, feel­ing, fel­low human beings, and there are a lot of peo­ple I love and that love me. If some­one I love wants to keep talk­ing over lunch and that means I get an hour less to write on my blog, damn the blog – I’ll keep the human being.

10. 80% of Value is in the Habits

This is a big one, but a long one (dou­ble enten­dre!) which is why I’ve left it to the end.

The Pareto Prin­ci­ple says that 80% of your results, or the value you cre­ate, come from 20% of your effort.

The num­bers in real life aren’t that hard and fast, but the num­bers aren’t the point. The prin­ci­ple in effect is.

The 80/20 rule was some­thing I thought about really hard in 2008. Was what I was doing right now giv­ing me the most bang for my buck? What was I doing where 80% of my effort was only giv­ing me 20% of value? How could I get more by doing less of the 80-effort/20-value (80e/20v) stuff and more of the 80-value/20-effort (80v/20e) stuff?

And I dis­cov­ered that while I could stop doing the 80e/20v activ­i­ties, the real life-changing results came from hack­ing sys­tems and habits. This I dis­cov­ered because I found out it was really hard to do.

As an exam­ple of a 80e/20v activ­ity, I real­ized that one of the biggest time wasters in my work was tran­scrib­ing inter­views. A half-hour inter­view could take me as long as a day or a day and a half to do, all for a one-page arti­cle with most of the dia­logue chopped off to fit, that most read­ers skimmed over any­way (80e/20v, lots of effort, lit­tle value created).

I exper­i­mented with hack­ing this first by hir­ing some­one else to do the job, but there were three prob­lems. One, while it freed up my day to do more 80v/20e work, it was money out. Sec­ond, the fin­ished man­u­script wasn’t com­pletely usable, as tech inter­views can involve a lot of terms that a nor­mal lis­tener would miss. Third, I still had to edit the tran­script down to a usable one-pager – still work!

After hack­ing around with var­i­ous ways to do tran­scrib­ing myself, I dis­cov­ered that it was a lot eas­ier for me to just do it myself, within cer­tain vari­ables. One, expe­ri­ence counts. While doing the inter­view itself, I had to talk, while high­light­ing in my head the parts I could use in the inter­view and the parts I couldn’t. Two, I had to keep the inter­view to an opti­mal length, I found that half an hour was usu­ally more than long enough. Talk enough, don’t talk too much.

Three, I had to do it as soon as pos­si­ble after the inter­view, so the dia­logue was still fresh in my mind, and I knew where the hot points were with­out hav­ing to re-listen to the whole inter­view again. Fourth, it helped tremen­dously to begin with the end in mind. Before tran­scrib­ing, I had to have an idea in my head already of what the fin­ished inter­view would look like. Fifth, it used less time to lis­ten over entire parts first, to decide whether they were worth tran­scrib­ing, than to tran­scribe the entire part and then decide whether it was worth keeping.

This kind of activity-based opti­miza­tion I found the eas­i­est to install.

As an exam­ple of hack­ing 80e/20v sys­tems, I real­ized that my pre­vi­ous blog Life Coaches Blog no longer had strong rel­e­vance in my life. It was a nice to keep, but under the ruth­less 80/20 lens, it was clear that it wasn’t giv­ing me as much value as I was putting in.

It was an entire sys­tem that had to go, and I label it a system-wide change, because as soon as I decided to stop giv­ing it time, energy and atten­tion, a whole bunch of activ­i­ties – writ­ing, edit­ing, design­ing, gen­er­at­ing ideas, mod­er­at­ing com­ments, marketing – stopped.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that a sys­tem change was much eas­ier com­pared to a habit change. Once you dis-engage the sys­tem, a whole bunch of stuff just stops. 80e/20v habits, though, were a lot harder. Habits are there for a rea­son, you’re used to doing them, they’re ingrained and most of the time, like dri­ving on a famil­iar route home, you do them with­out being com­pletely aware you’re doing them. The lights are on but you’re not fully home, the mus­cle mem­ory is sap­ping the time, energy and atten­tion for you.

Because habits are so preva­lent, this is an area for huge poten­tial growth. Going for my weekly yoga les­son is a great habit. So is read­ing while com­mut­ing. Read­ing email two to three times is a great habit. These are all 80v/20e habits that I locked in 2008.

Surf­ing blogs and YouTube end­lessly while pro­cras­ti­nat­ing at work was not a good habit. There was a point at which I had to work on doing that, but after the start­ing thresh­old and enough rep­e­ti­tions it became a mind­less habit. Besides being famil­iar, habits are also often oh so fun, which is why they hang around for so long.

The hard ques­tion for me in 2008 was; was I will­ing to sac­ri­fice 80% of my time, energy and atten­tion that could be spent else­where, to get this 20% of value?

11. Make Ideas

This is the idea econ­omy. Any­one can be a spellchecker, but not every­one will come up with unique, cre­ative and prof­itable ideas.

This is all stuff I’m still work­ing on.