Mox Nox In Rem

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.