Before I retired five years ago I was responsible for overseeing the various productivity-improvement initiatives undertaken by my company’s R&D organization. After I left that job, my “retirement gig” involved showing managers and knowledge workers how they could better manage their incoming email so as to avoid “email overwhelm” and do a better job of tracking everything they needed to attend to.
Along the way I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it takes to maximize one’s personal productivity, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more challenging it seems. That’s because it’s a multi-factorial problem, so there is no one approach, no particular system, that addresses all the obstacles to being productive.
The aspect of this problem that I’ve spent most of my time addressing as a coach and consultant is the degree to which my clients have an inadequate system for capturing and organizing their commitments. They carry too many of their commitments in their heads or allow them to pile up in their email inboxes, which not only results in things slipping through the cracks but also in high levels of anxiety. What’s missing is a reliable “existence system,” so called because it keeps our commitments “in existence” without relying on our memory to do so.
The most effective existence system is the one described by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done. His approach isn’t perfect — it would benefit from a healthy dose of “time-blocking,” the practice of reserving time on one’s calendar to work on specific high-priority tasks and projects — but it comes closer than anything else out there to being a comprehensive system for organizing one’s commitments and increasing one’s peace of mind.
But even with a perfect existence system there are other challenges. One is the way we tend to deal with the anxiety and discomfort we experience when confronted with certain tasks and responsibilities. Our response to those feelings is to procrastinate about such things even when they are fully in view within our organizational system. The most effective way of dealing with this issue is a practice of mindfulness, which involves being able to experience and observe our own internal state in a way that reduces its power to dictate our actions.
A third aspect of optimizing our productivity is learning how to decide what we’re not going to do. Greg McKeown’s 2014 book Essentialism describes what this involves. He makes the case that most of what we find ourselves doing is not what’s truly important, but rather what we’re most comfortable with, what other people expect of us, or whatever makes us look good. To be optimally effective we need to learn how to identify those few things that are essential and put aside everything else.
A fourth key to unlocking our productivity is dealing with the myriad demands on our time and attention. Especially in this era of digital communications, smartphones, and social media, we are overrun with potential distractions, many of them expertly designed to co-opt our attention and keep us captivated. These distractions are so compelling that many of us spend hours each day engaged in activities that are not only unproductive but ultimately unsatisfying. The best discussion I’ve found about this phenomenon and the strategies for countering it are in Cal Newport’s 2016 book, Deep Work.
A fifth issue is the manner in which collaboration among knowledge workers is coordinated today, primarily through email and meetings. When knowledge workers are asked to name the biggest obstacles to their productivity, email and meetings top the list. Meetings, which can be effective if they are properly designed and facilitated, are too often neither, and thus waste their participants’ time. The unstructured, ad hoc nature of email communication makes it a hugely inefficient way to coordinate most collaborative activities, and solutions like Slack that represent themselves as a superior alternative are typically no better. (I’m looking forward to a new book by Cal Newport, due out next year, called A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload.)
Finally there is the matter of how much work American companies demand of their employees. For a variety of reasons, white collar workers in the United States are working more hours than ever before, and taking fewer vacation days than employees in any other first-world country. The work day is a scramble to get everything done, which not only stresses out employees but actually reduces productivity.
In short, there are numerous obstacles to our productivity and thus no one solution. That makes optimizing our productivity less of a goal and more of an ongoing journey.
Paul, as always your insights on the topic of personal productivity are extremely helpful and to the point. The need to manage one’s own productivity has never been greater: working from home forces all of us to rethink how we approach our work, manage ourselves and spend our time. Thank you!