efficiency

Productivity Questions to Improve Personal Effectiveness

By Andrew Tarvin on December 1, 2009 in Learn with Humor

Want to be more productive? Answer these productivity questions and learn what makes you productive.

To get started, here are some questions Peter F. Drucker hints at in The Effective Executive (page 96), plus a few that have helped me:

Do you work better in the morning or at night?
Do you need to make a number of drafts fast (rapid prototyping) or work meticulously on one draft?
Do you present best from prepared text, notes, or by improvising it?
Are you more productive as a member of a committee or alone?
Do you work better creating a detailed outline or by just getting started?
Do you perform better when you have plenty of time or with deadlines looming?
Do you learn better by reading a document or listening to someone talk about a subject?
What posture makes you the most productive?
How long can you be productive before needing a break (45-minutes, 60-minutes, 90-minutes)?
What type of break helps you maintain productivity (exercise, humor, thinking, napping)?

Once you’ve answered the behavioral questions, also consider the actual execution of tasks:

Do you work better on a computer or using a pen and paper?
Do you prefer complete silence or listening to music (and what kind of music)?
Are you more productive with people around (such as in an office or at a coffee shop) or in complete isolation?
Can you get more done by having multiple applications running on your computer or by having only the task at hand in front of you?

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Why Stress Isn’t a Bad Thing

By Andrew Tarvin on May 5, 2009 in Learn with Humor

Photo by ayeyah

I recently posted an article called Creating a Sense of Urgency that talked about how to be more productive by creating a sense of urgency for yourself to get things done.

In the comments, someone asked why I was encouraging more stress, and what I meant by saying “stress isn’t always a bad thing.” This is what I meant:

The Stress of Working Out

Exercise and working out is the practice of stressing your muscles and body in the attempt to make them stronger.

While you’ll (hopefully) never have to run 26-miles consecutive miles, half a million people run a marathon every year for the purpose of training their body (and accomplishing an amazing feat). And while you can push too hard to the point of injury or death, by applying the right amount of stress, you can become stronger and healthier.

The Stress of Working

Just as stress is what makes our bodies stronger, the same is true for work–it’s just a different type of stress and a different skill-set that we’re making stronger. Whereas exercise stress strengthens our muscles and capacity to lift weights or run, work stress strengthens our brain and capacity to get things done.

But just like exercise, overdoing it with work stress can have just as bad of side effects. Too much stress, or chronic stress, can result in memory problems, lead to depression, or even cause chest pain–certainly not positives.

The Right Amount of Stress

For both exercise and work-related stress, the key to growth and development is in applying the right amount of stress. What’s the right amount? 92.6 minute of stress per day… I’m kidding.

The right amount of stress can’t be measured exactly and is different for every person. And while there isn’t an exact science, there are a few guidelines to managing stress:

Push Yourself
Almost all of the benefits of exercise come at the end of the workout, when you are pushing yourself past what you’ve accomplished before. The same is true for stress–you will grow your capacity to do work by pushing yourself to work better and more efficiently than you have in the past.
Rest and Recuperate
The most important time for muscle growth is the recuperation period. While it’s important to stress your muscles, it’s even more important to give them ample time to rebuild and get stronger. The same is true for work–if you are constantly stressed-out, you don’t give your body and mind the time to recuperate and grow stronger–instead it has the opposite effect.
Provide Fuel
Eating right is crucial to seeing gains (or fat loss) in your workouts. While you will see some positive health effects simply from working out, when you combine it with a healthy diet, you really see the benefits. Work is the same way, but fuel here isn’t just a healthy diet: it’s exercising, relaxing, taking strategic breaks, and having a strong sense of purpose. They will all help to fuel you through your work.

Manage Stress for Improvement

Stress isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s absolutely necessary to becoming more efficient, productive, and effective. The key is managing stress in such a way that it helps you grow and improve, but doesn’t impact your work, life, or health negatively.

To do this, like with exercise, you want to systematically increase your capacity to deal with stress. Our body and mind grow through increased stress, not continual stress–that means to push ourselves further, but to still take breaks, to re-charge, and to provide the proper fuel.

Why Stress Isn’t a Bad Thing

So if we hope to improve our productivity and ability to work over time, stress is a must to push us past our current ability–and that’s why stress isn’t a bad thing.

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Creating a Sense of Urgency

By Andrew Tarvin on April 28, 2009 in Learn with Humor

Photo by clix

One of the best tips I’ve learned for getting things done is creating a sense of urgency for my work. If I feel like I have all day to do something, I’ll take all day to do it – it’s Parkinson’s Law (“Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion”).

But if something is urgent, if I need to get it done quickly, then it will get done quickly. The trick is to do this while minimizing stress. I could just wait to the last second to do everything, thereby forcing myself to urgently do it, but I’d also like to avoid a heart attack by age 35.

The other thing to keep in mind while working in an “urgent” environment is that the work still needs to meet expectations. While you can consciously decide that you are only going to deliver the 80 for 20, you should always execute with excellence–delivering everything you promised 100%.

So, while keeping low levels of stress and executing with excellence in mind, here are some ways to improve productivity by creating a sense of urgency:

1. Set Short Deadlines… Stick to Them

The easiest way to create a sense of urgency is to set short deadlines (e.g. this task is due by the end of the day) and then stick to and deliver them. Of course if you had the discipline to do this, you probably wouldn’t need the rest of this list.

That’s why you can set arbitrary stopping points that can help you. For example, I’ll often tell myself I can’t go to the bathroom, or go to lunch, or grab a snack, until I get a task done. You better believe that when the bladder starts getting full, I feel that sense of urgency and the task gets done quickly (which reminds me, I need to wrap up this post).

2. Make Public Commitments

Commit to delivering a project or task publicly–to your boss, your co-workers, or even your reader’s if you have a blog. By committing publicly, you’re more inclined to complete your tasks because there are people that will hold you accountable if you don’t.

Where you can, ask the person you committed to to ask you for a status update on the task 24 hours before it’s due. This will instill that sense of urgency and remind you that someone is expecting the task to get done, two powerful motivators combined into one.

3. Schedule a Busy Day

I don’t know about you, but I am more productive if I have a busy day scattered with meetings than if it’s a day free of any obligations but ”work.” Knowing that I only have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, an hour over there, makes me work more efficiently in that time period (Parkinson again!).

It’s important to make sure that you don’t schedule too many meetings though. You don’t want to be that person that is trying to multi-task in a meeting, not giving your full attention. But with the right balance, you can have still get everything done in your heightened sense of urgency, and have productive meetings too.

4. Take Breaks

One of the most important, and most ignored, steps in becoming more efficient is taking breaks. While you certainly want to push yourself to meet challenging deadlines, you also want to make sure you take time to recuperate and relax. Because even though stress isn’t always a bad thing, it’s also not effective in the long term to always be in a state of high-pressure.

Remember to take breaks, have a laugh, and then resume to your highly effective self.

From Sense of Urgency to Sense of Accomplishment

Creating a sense of urgency (whether imagined or real) is a great way to get things done quickly–it follows Parkinson’s Law and it forces you to apply Pareto’s principle (80/20) . And while it’s not the only way to have a more productive day, it is one of the most effective that I’ve found.

And now that this post is done, I can finally attend to some other, um, business.

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15 Things to Do While Your Computer Boots

By Andrew Tarvin on March 10, 2009 in Learn with Humor

If you’re work computer is anything like mine, then you have to wait at least 5 to 10 minutes for your machine to boot up each day. As a comedian, I’ve learned to take advantage of every small break in the day to get stuff done (usually working on some stand-up or doing a quick improv exercise).

Rather than get annoyed at this delay in the early morning, I embrace it. This is 10 minutes I have at work to be email/computer free. So here’s 15 things you can do while your computer is starting up:

Eat breakfast.
Go to the bathroom and wash your hands.
Learn something new about one of your co-workers.
Play sudoku or work on a crossword puzzle (print one out the day before).
Skim through a newspaper or read a magazine article.
Get in a quick nap.
Meditate.
Write a first draft of a blog post on paper.
Organize your day in your head.
Warm up your brain with “thumbs” and other improv exercises.
Stretch.
Listen to your voicemail or change it to be more effective.
Go for a walk around the building.
Organize your desk.
Put post-its on a co-workers cube.

Guess which one I did this morning (and unfortunately it was not #15). Have your own computer boot-up routine? Share it in the comments.

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Email Policies That Make Everyone’s Life Easier

February 17, 2009

In a follow-up to 6 Steps to More Effective Emails, I’ve started implementing my own policies for how I handle email. Below are the policies I’ve shared with people who I communicate with often. If everyone at my company were to follow these policies, built from ideas learned from Getting Things Done, The 4-Hour Workweek, [...]

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6 Steps to More Effective Emails

January 20, 2009

The corporate world communicates via email. Those little messages residing in everyone’s mailboxes contain status updates, action items, and decisions. On any given day, I might send and receive over 100 messages. For some of you that might be low, for others it’s high. So how do you effectively communicate in a medium when you’re [...]