The Greatest Productivity Tip in the World

By Gaz under Personal Growth

Last week I was tagged by Charity of Design Adaptations to take part in Ben Yoskovitz’ Ultimate Guide to Productivity meme. The idea is to reveal my greatest personal secret to maintaining my productivity, before passing on the baton. The contributions may even be collected into an e-book, especially if you express an interest by commenting here.

Regular readers will already be familiar with my inability to make a short blog post, and true to form I can’t settle on one ultimate productivity tip, since the essence of my workflow comes about from the interplay between the following:

1. Time Mapping

I’ve been planning a more detailed post on this for some weeks now, and it when it arrives I’ll go into more detail about planning your life around time maps. Essentially, the process involves breaking the day into blocks of time that help maintain a good work/life balance. If you work in a cubicle, that might entail an hour for your morning routine, 30 minutes for the commute to work, 8 hours of project work surrounding a lunch break, 30 minutes to commute back home, and 6 hours of leisure time in the evening with your family and/or friends. Once you have the time blocked out at this high level you can set about filling the blocks with tasks: 2 evenings of Wing-Chun, specific project work during the day, and so on. Most people will need just 3 or 4 daily time maps, where each day starts from the work day, weekend day or vacation day layout, and can be filled in with tasks before getting started with the actual doing part.

Don’t forget to schedule a 30 minute block at the end of each day for planning the next day!

2. Uni-tasking

It’s especially poignant for a programmer where a short interruption by a phone-call might cause us to forget some of the enormous stack of context information in our heads. When the interruption is over a few minutes later, it might take half an hour just to regain the same train of thought we had already attained once before the call came in. To a greater or lesser extent the same problem afflicts us all, and the only means I know of to cope is not to deal with those interruptions until I’m ready to put the current task aside. GTD gives us context lists for that exact purpose: when I’ve got a 3 hour block devoted to programming, I let phonecalls go to voicemail and emails go unanswered until the end of the block to be dealt with when I reach a block of time for answering calls and emails, when I can work through my GTD @Phone and @Email context lists.

In a former life as a cubicle code monkey, my employer recognised this fact and had a rule that someone with a plastic gecko on their monitor could only be interrupted for life and death situations. If I needed to speak with someone urgently, but they were under the gecko, etiquette dictated that I leave a post-it note in their “In” tray for when they were able to attend to it without losing all that delicate state in their head. It worked surprisingly well, especially as it was made clear from the start that if you were considered to be abusing the gecko, it was okay to leave the post-it on your back instead of the “In” tray. It’s hard to ignore a post-it on your back if you know you’ve annoyed your colleagues by ignoring them too much.

3. Starting Small & Strong

Know what it is you need to achieve in the current block, and preferably in the next hour or two, and when the block arrives make a start at it immediately. Just a quick check of email before you get stuck in can easily derail the next hour and possibly the goal for the whole block. To maintain motivation it’s really important to have tasks broken down into bite size chunks that should take at most half a day to achieve, but preferably just an hour or two. Aiming at finishing a bigger task “by the end of the week” makes it too easy to procrastinate or goof-off chunks of time that won’t seem to impact the big task; knowing what small goal you need to reach before lunch makes it easier to stay focused.

I’d like to pass the baton to Bill, Alex and GTD Wannabe… looking forward to your own personal silver bullets

With apologies to Jack Black for the mis-quote:

This is not the greatest productivity tip in the world, no. This is just a tribute.

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