Mox Nox In Rem

Real food and real time

As a Productivity Ninja, one of the great pleasures in life is having plenty of time on my hands. Whether I chose to use that free time well is another question. But I certainly spend a lot of time cooking food, eating food and thinking about food.

Without wishing to appear virtuous, I never eat fast food. Not out of principle, really; I just don’t think it tastes particularly good. But I can see the logic of fast food - it saves you having to spend time preparing and cooking the stuff; you just eat it. You outsource the hassle of preparing and cooking to a low-wage human, whose time is (by definition) less valuable. This frees up your day for doing more constructive, creative, brilliant things.

Anyway, I was recently passing a MacDonald’s in London. Looking at the people in the restaurant (if “restaurant” is the right word here) I was struck by two things. First, these people all looked incredibly unhappy. I mean miserable - not just at the crap they were putting in their bodies, but also (possibly) (a) at their inability to break this habit, (b) at the low-rent, fake ambience in which they were sitting, (c) with the appearance and manner of their fellow diners, and (d) at the broken brand promises made by the $100 billion MacDonald’s Corporation to its enslaved consumers worth, I suspect, rather less than $100 billion. “i’m lovin’ it” - spiritually, nutritionally and grammatically, No.

But second, I pondered on whether the MacDonald’s customers were likely to avail themselves of the opportunity to use their time - as they could - constructively, creatively and brilliantly. I thought possibly not. If ever a crowd was the X-box, sofa-bound generation, this was it.

This made me commit to using my time properly. There is no point in freeing up time, Ninja-style, if you are just going to surf the web. More importantly, it made me resolve to get full satisfaction from sourcing great ingredients, committing to careful preparation and cooking, and eating with people who matter. And if that takes more time than a trip to MacD’s, so be it.

Boss - PA Productivity

At Think Productive, we spend a lot of time looking at how individuals and small teams organise themselves.  The smallest team we ever see is the Boss-PA team, and it is constantly amazing how, often, this relationship doesn’t work.

There are probably three areas where it falls down - structure, process and philosophy...

Structure.  The general rule tends to be “Sit down once a day (or once a week) and go through everything.”  This won’t really work.  The team needs to have a daily structured review of “What’s on your list?” time, relieved by a pressure valve for emergencies, and a weekly sweep-through of everything.

Process.  Often there is no commonality of vision, or of language, in the relationship.  The team needs to ask the key questions about Projects and Next Actions, review Waiting For lists, address Agendas, and ask the “big picture” questions.

Philosophy.  Often it’s about compliance - “Have we ticked off what was on the list?”  Often it is a constant, “Where are we on this?” and “Have you done that?”  But “What are we trying to do, and what do we have to do to achieve it?” should be the key questions.  From big picture goal, to small picture action.

How do the best boss-PA teams work?  In my experience they work exactly as the best individuals do - by bringing clarity to their Projects and Next Actions, through separate, focussed up-front thinking.  They use an Agendas system, reviewed once a day, to minimise interruptions.  And they do a Weekly Review together, to sweep up loose stuff and bring clarity.

The best boss-PA teams work exactly as the best bosses and PAs do, just together.  No magic, just Ninja Productivity.

Does good work exist?

I went to a London Human Resource Connection talk a couple of weeks ago.  Well-attended and interesting stuff.  The topic was “Does good work exist?”  Most of the attendees were HR professionals (I was mostly there for the free wine) and the discussion naturally flowed around employment matters, work conditions, pay, benefits, etc.

My take on it was rather different.  Good work does exist.  Good jobs don’t.  Why?  Jobs are what they give you; work is what you make of it.  Jobs are defined in the Job Spec (why do I want to set fire to myself when I hear that expression?).  The Job Spec tells you what sort of machine the company is, what size cog you are, and how fast you need to rotate.  Not inspiring.

The work, though, can be brilliant.  As an employee, you are given the resources, the time and the scope to build relationships, such that if you want to do outstanding work, all day every day, you can.  Or you can remain a cog.

The Power of Policy

As a Productivity Ninja, one of my objectives in navigating through life is to never have the same thought more than once, unless it is an extremely pleasant thought.  Sadly, pleasantness doesn’t often apply to work-related stuff.  So, we Ninjas look to spend little time dealing with the high-volume-low-value noise, thus freeing up time for high-value activities.

A great technique for doing this is by using Policy.  What do I mean by this?  Policy is a set of rules that prescribes a standardised course of action for standardised situations. If X then Y.  Very powerful.

For example, I never accept LinkedIn approaches from people I don’t know unless they explain why they want to contact me.  I never give to people who email me re their fund-raising (hot-dog eating contest, or whatever).  I never join networks unless there is a clear Business Case or Fun Case for doing so..

The value of this is that it saves me re-thinking, for each of these interactions, what is the appropriate course of action.  It’s already pre-thought, already decided. 

This is the power of Policy.

The “Thinking” Context: Not a Mandate for Procrastination

As a Productivity Ninja, I relish the opportunity to run Public Workshops – available to all and fabulously good value.  Every month or so, Think Productive opens its doors to the productively-challenged.  We share best practice, challenge embedded thinking and change lives.

I ran a sold-out Public Workshop recetly in London.  As always, one of the most revelatory parts of the day was covering Context.  Context is king; we are so used to working in Projects that shifting to “Think in Projects; Work in Context” was – as usual – an Aha! moment for the attendees.  When I had explained that the default Contexts should be: @phone, @pc, @errand and @home, a lady asked what we should do if the Next Action was to think about something, rather than do something.  Good question – and one that we frequently neglect.  I answered that, in that case, the Next Action should be captured in the “@thinking” context.  She seemed happy with this.

A few minutes later, I noticed that this lady was putting almost all of her Next Actions into the @thinking Context.  Then the penny dropped.  Her Next Action wasn’t to think about these things; it was something else, but she was avoiding deciding what that Next Action was, and was using the @thinking Context as a substitute for making any decisions at all about what was required to move a Project forward.

This doesn’t work.  If we fail to do the hard thinking about our Projects up front – and decide what the Next Action is – we will spend our lives in a loop of procrastination, and nothing will happen in any of our Contexts.

Agendas - the key to an interruption-free life....

Most people work in an open plan office.  This is a modern form of hell.  Why?  Because we have free licence to interrupt - and be interrupted by - our colleagues every second of the day.  Why does this happen?  Well, usually, something pops into your head and you think “If I don’t ask Fred about X immediately, I will forget about it.”  So you stop what you are doing and ask Fred about X.  You interrupt Fred and you interrupt yourself.

Why does this matter?  Studies have shown that, on average, it tales ten minutes, after an interruption, to return to your original task.  So, if you are only interrupted five or six times a day, that is an hour lost.  Every day.

How do we get around this?  As a Productivity Ninja, I use a system called Agendas.  It’s really simple.  For each of the four or five people that I deal with most frequently (in my work and personal lives), I keep an Agenda.  This Agenda is simply a list of all the things that I need to discuss with that person when I next speak with them.  So, when something pops into my head, I don’t interrupt that person (or myself); I just jot it down on the relevant Agenda, and keep working.  Then, when I interact with that person, I consult the relevant Agenda, discuss its contents, capture the next actions and get to work.  Interaction can be serendipitous (bump into the boss in the hallway) or structured (I have a 9:30 meeting every day with my assistant).  It doesn’t matter; the Agenda system gives me a platform for holding the thought until the appropriate moment to interact.

How much time does this save?  Plenty.  At Think Productive, we find that a typical employee will save an hour a day - just by using this system in a mutual fashion with those co-workers with whom she most frequently interacts.  This reduces stress, boosts productivity, and does a little bit to relieve the hell of the modern open plan office.

Top Three Ninja Tips

At a recent speaking event a question from the floor, well... floored me.  The question was: “What are your top three tips to achieve Productivity Ninja status?”  The question threw me because Ninja thinking is not really about a couple of tweaks applied to your life that can turn it around; it is about an underlying approach to our “stuff” that pervades everything we do.  All well and good, but I had to answer the question.  The answer I offered was as follows:

1. A Second Brain.  However well organised we are, we will end up with a lot of stuff on our plates.  We need to answer the question “Can I be certain that what I am doing at this moment, is the most appropriate thing to be doing out of all the things I could be doing?”  The development of a Second Brain allows us to have a comprehensive overview of all our stuff, so that we can quickly and easily steer our attention to the appropriate activity.
2. 80:20/Impact Thinking/Saying No.  OK, this sounds like three things but is really all the same.  We need to accept that we cannot possibly take on and complete - on time to a good standard - all the things we are asked to do.  So we have to do an 80:20 exercise; filter out the 80% of stuff that has no impact on anything (and say No to it) and focus on the 80% of stuff that has a big impact.  This leads us to Impact Thinking.  If we cannot define what “impact” means for us, our jobs and our organisations, we cannot hope to achieve it.  So, defining “impact” is critical and steering in that direction on a day-to-day basis will get us to a productive, high impact life.
3. Context.  One of the biggest impacts on my Productivity has been a relentless focus on working in Context.  This means focussing on tasks that need me to be in a certain place – or with certain tools to hand.  So, I will make six calls in a row (across a number of different projects), do all my errands at the same time, process emails in a batch.  Switching Context frequently is a drain and inhibits focus.  Stay in Context and only switch when you have to.

These are my Top Three.  What are yours?

Sleeping - Ninja Style

A few years ago, I shared a flat with a beautiful French girl called Celine.  Her natural Gallic grace was only outweighed by her almost total inability to get up and go to bed on time.  At weekends, she would go out, get to bed at 4 or 5AM, and wake at midday.  Repeating this Friday and Saturday nights, she would be in what neurologists call a “persistent vegetative state” – low functioning, dopey, in the office but not in the office.  She had, in effect, given herself jet lag over the weekend with her self-disrupted sleep patterns, and paid the price over Monday and Tuesday.

This got me thinking about the science of sleep.  It turns out that there is an area of study called “Sleep Hygiene” (see, for example, http://www.umm.edu/sleep/sleep_hyg.htm).  The idea is that we can adopt a series of habits, tips and tricks that enable us to sleep less – and better.  This helps us to be at our most productive and creative during the day – in essence, sleeping Ninja-style!

I adopted the practices of Sleep Hygiene, and recommend the following Top Five Ninja Tips:

1. Fix a bedtime and an awakening time.  Of course, this is not always possible, but if your time of going to bed varies by +/- two hours, and your time of waking varies by the same, you are giving yourself miniature, irregular, unnecessary bouts of jet lag.  I aim to be in bed by 11PM and up by 6AM.  Social demands may pull this out of shape, of course, but I find that when I stick to this timing my productivity and creativity the following day are tip-top.
2. Exercise regularly, but not right before bed.  The demands of our busy working lives often make us relegate daily exercise to the bottom of the list.  In my experience, this is a mistake.  I try to cycle for 30 minutes first thing in the morning.  I find that, if I skip this for whatever reason, my sleep suffers.  Even twenty minutes a day can make the difference.
3. Don't take your worries to bed.  Some people like to mull things over – solo or with a partner – in the evening.  I find that this generates “repetitive loop” type thinking that blocks sleep.  Much as I rarely work after 6PM, I rarely give thought to “worry” matters after that time.  Thus my head hits the pillow empty, rather than full of fret.
4. Reserve the bed for sleep and sex.  Some people like to eat, watch TV and do a range of strange things in bed.  I believe the body like clearer messages.  Sleep and sex.  Reading, perhaps, before sleep.  By the way, television in the bedroom is an absolutely terrible idea.
5. Establish a pre-sleep ritual.  Again, this is not always possible, but twenty minutes reading before bed, a hot drink, or whatever, signals to the body that sleep is imminent.

We spend a third of our lives asleep.  We can use that time or abuse it.  Sleep Hygiene is a neat way of minimising the stress and difficulty associated with the nocturnal hours.  If we use those hours well, we can ensure that we maximise the impact of our daylight hours.

Appropriate Email Response Strategies

As a Productivity Ninja, I spend a lot of time helping clients with the number 1 Tyranny of Modern Working Life.  Email.  And the main issue is “response time”.

A couple of weeks ago, I running a workshop at a big City law firm and an interesting discussion unfolded.  We were discussing the appropriate response time to email.  One attendee lawyer said, “If I don’t respond immediately to my client’s emails, he will simply take his business to another law firm”.  Another lawyer said, “Rubbish.  I don’t get paid to deal with email; I get paid to think creatively for my clients and to draft great documents.”  There ensued a looooong debate on the subject, but the key question here is clear: In an age where people expect an immediate response to an email, how do we ever get any actual work done?

The answer is in the question: expectations.  This is all about managing expectations.  If we live with the erroneous belief that everything is equally urgent and equally important, we deserve the life we get – one of endless reactive emailing.  We have to do three things.  First, set up a Second Brain that enables us to capture and organise our stuff, and allow our first brain to make decisions based on relative importance and relative urgency.  Second, have a policy around Responsiveness.  For example, “If it’s important or urgent, don’t email me; call me.  If it’s not so urgent or important, I will get back to you within 24 hours”.  Third, communicate this policy to our clients and co-workers.

This proactive approach to email engenders respect between individuals, based on carefully set out expectations, and allows us the mental space to focus on the work, rather than the medium.

Worrying - Part II

In a recent blog post about worrying, I talked about what we can do to eliminate workplace worry.  But I didn’t ask why worrying matters.  So...

Does worrying - and associated stress - matter?

The answer is, I think, Yes.  Plenty of studies have shown that even quite low levels of stress negatively affect decision-making quality.  Stress triggers cognitive biases that make decision-making easier - but worse.  This matters.  Most jobs - and most lives - involve a component of risk and opportunity assessment.  By succumbing to stress, we are effectively resigning ourselves to a life of poor outcomes, driven by distorted assessment of risk and opportunity.

The way to avoid this is to eliminate the stress.  This way is the way of the Productivity Ninja.

 

Worrying - Part I

One of the things that strikes me, as I travel round the country, sprinkling Productivity Ninja stardust on the oppressed populace of this sceptred isle, is how most offices embed worry.  By this, I mean that there is a sort of innate tension in the workplace; people are often “muddling through”, focussing on what is quick and/or fun and/or easy to do, or latest arriving in the Inbox, rather than what will actually make a difference for them and their organisation.

This causes worry.  These people have no certainty that what they are doing is the most appropriate thing for them to be doing.  And the underlying reason for this is that they have not done the thinking: (1) What am I trying to achieve?  And (2) what do I need to do about it?  That’s all the thinking that is required, really.  But the endless putting-off of doing the hard thinking about our Projects and Actions in effect guarantees a constant low-level hum of worry.