One thing many people don’t realize as they try to improve their productivity is just how big a difference a small improvement can make.
When I was working full time in the R&D division of a large pharmaceutical company, it was not uncommon for managers at my level to spend three-fourths of a typical workday in various meetings. Much of the remaining time could easily be taken up dealing with email.
That left almost no time for our “real” work — the skilled, generative efforts that the company presumably paid us to do. It’s no wonder that none of us worked only eight hours a day. To get anything done, we had to do at least some work outside of business hours. I don’t have kids so I was free to stay in the office until 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening. Many of my colleagues who were parents left work earlier but then logged into their email after the kids were in bed.
Even then, we were lucky to have a couple of hours a day to do heads-down work. And that brings us to the point of this post. If I had only two hours of discretionary time in my schedule on any given day, and I found a way to eliminate just thirty minutes of unproductive time each day, I now had 2½ hours to get work done rather than 2, an improvement in my productivity by 25%.
Whether I accomplished that improvement by identifying a meeting I didn’t really need to attend, or setting up an email filter to prevent certain routine messages from reaching my inbox, or ignoring low-value discussions on Slack or Microsoft Teams, what appeared to be small gains in absolute terms translated into significant productivity improvements on a percentage basis.
As I noted the other day, even now that I’m retired, there are a lot of things I’ve decided to do every day — exercise, journal, visit my mother, write this blog — so freeing up just a little time on any given day can make the difference between having a sliver of unallocated time in my schedule as opposed to none at all.
The bottom line? The busier we are, the more we benefit from even small improvements to our productivity.