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5 Productivity Tips from the Stand-Up Comedy World

By Andrew Tarvin on May 12, 2009 in Learn with Humor

photo by Carooo

Unlike the corporate world, the realm of stand-up comedy is less structured and requires more personal discipline to be productive. There is no boss to assign you something to do, and there’s no one looking over your shoulder making sure you do your work. And while some comedians are blessed with the ability to just “be funny,” many others spend years perfecting both their craft and their work habits–Jerry Seinfeld being a perfect example.

While you may never need to step on a stage to make a room full of strangers laugh, you do need to get things done. Here are 5 tips from the stand-up comedy world to make you more productive.

1. Write Everything Down

“Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.” – Mitch Hedburg

Stand-up comedians are notorious for having jokes written down on napkins, envelopes, or backs of receipts. It’s not because comedians hate notebooks or lined paper, but because comedians know that inspiration can strike at any time. It’s so easy to get distracted by something else and lose that idea forever, unless we write it down.

The same is true for every type of work–great ideas or new items to add to your task list can pop in your mind at any time. Getting these ideas off your mind and into your note capturing device ensures it won’t be forgotten and frees you to think about other things. This is one the keys to David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (he calls it the “Collection Habit”).

You can save yourself the time from searching for something to write on by always carrying a note-taking device such as a small pen and pad, a voice recorder, or a phone you can takes on. Most comedians have archives of notepads full of ideas–some that make them famous (such as George Carlin’s 7 Words you can’t say on TV) and others that don’t quite make it. But the key is they have them recorded to be reviewed and expanded or discarded later.

2. Break Projects into Smaller Tasks

As a nationally touring comedian, you’ll have anywhere between 45 minutes to 2 hours worth of material. But no comedian started out writing a 2-hour show.

When you first get started in stand-up, you are generally performing 5-minutes at a time. As you improve and get bigger and bigger shows, you naturally build up to having a 45-minute show.

Whenever we start a new project, such as writing a book or implementing a new system at work, the end goal can be intimidating. But if you break your project into “5-minute sets” or smaller tasks, the project becomes more manageable. Then, as you complete each task, you’ll be closer and closer to your 45-minute set.

3. Do Your Time

If you ask any professional comedian what the key to success is, they’ll tell you it’s getting on stage as often as possible. The idea is simple–the more you perform, the more you’ll work on your material, hone your craft, and improve your performance. But there’s a tendency among comedians to spend most of their time watching or reading about how to become better.

And while this certainly is advisable when first starting out, it often becomes an excuse for not doing the work, a cleverly disguised form of procrastination. It’s also the least effective way of learning or improving.

“Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.” – Luciano Pavarotti

Watching other comedians perform will help, but it doesn’t replace actually getting on stage. The same is true for any project. That doesn’t mean working long hours toiling away, but it does mean doing something. If you’re remodeling your kitchen, you can find inspiration by looking through renovation magazines, but you won’t be any closer to your goal until you actually take action.

Get on stage, do your time, and get stuff done.

4. Get Feedback

Comedians live and die by the laughter and responses they evoke from the audience. If a joke consistently elicits a huge guffaw from the audience, a comedian knows it works and will continue to do it and write more jokes like it. If the joke results in silence, it’s clear something needs to change.

This immediate feedback is invaluable as a performer, and in any project. Stopping to ask for ways to improve a presentation or what went well in a particular meeting can guide you in finding what works and what doesn’t. Then you can start working on the right things–working smarter and not harder.

One key thing to note is that feedback doesn’t just have to come from other people. Comedians record their performances all the time so they can go back to evaluate a performance. Checking in with yourself periodically or tracking your daily progress can help you find what it is that makes you productive.

5. Plan to Improvise

Most comedians make a set-list before every show of all the jokes they are going to tell–essentially a task list for the stage. This list is crucial to being succinct and clear, and is the equivalent to having a well-oiled GTD system for to do items.

The problem is that things don’t always go according to plan, and the skillful comedian is able to improvise when necessary or when an opportunity arises. An unusual answer to a normal question or a beligerant heckler can be great launching points for a comedian to improvise a hilarious bit on the spot.

In the real world the same is equally true. While we may have a great 5-year plan of what we are going to do, sometimes it’s necessary to sieze an opportunity and go off script. This mentality and comfort in improvising when need be can lead to life changing events and improved productivity in a direction you never imagined.

“I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances, gets on.” – Samuel Goldwyn

Standing Up for Productivity

Stand-up comedy may not be rocket science or even project management, but the craft calls for and creates a valuable set of skills. These same skills, when applied to work and personal goals and challenges, can improve productivity and help you get things done. So take a page from the comedy world and start using these tips today–turn this information in to knowledge. After all,

“There’s a difference between information and knowledge. It’s the difference between Christy Turlington’s phone number and Christy Turlington.” – PJ O’Rourke

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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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Getting Things Done

By Andrew Tarvin on February 4, 2009 in Recommended Reading

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a National Bestseller and is perhaps the most well-known book on personal productivity. What sets the book apart is that it not only discusses theory for “the art of stress-free productivity,” but also gives you a step-by-step guide to how you can achieve it. I’ve implemented many of the tips in this book at both work and home, and it’s allowed me to do more of the things that I want to do, while weeding out the unnecessary work that was holding me back.

Buy It Now