You don't have to look very far to see there’s lot of discussion around productivity these days. But have you ever stopped to ask – what is productivity? There’s a big misconception that doing more work makes you productive. This isn't completely accurate. By understanding what productivity actually is you'll be ahead of 95% of the other people out there who think they're being productive. Does this sound like you or someone you know:
“Wow! I replied to over 100 emails before lunch, what a productive morning.”
Productivity is different to just doing work. The above statement is a great example of being active, but not necessarily productive. Productivity is your ability to increase your effectiveness and efficiency. When you do this, you can make faster and better quality progress towards your goals. Let's break this down:
Effectiveness (goal orientation) – Effectiveness is your ability to make progress towards a goal or outcome. This is why goals are so important. A goal lets you measure whether you're being productive and or just active. The person in the example above might be productive if his goal is to sign new clients and he has just responded to 100 leads. But if the emails have nothing to do with his goals, he's potentially not being as effective as he could be. Effectiveness is all about choosing what work to focus on. (Read my other blog post: Dissect Your Goals to Make Them More Achievable)
Efficiency (process orientation) – If effectiveness is doing the right work, efficiency is how you do the work. Or put another way, if you're on the right path towards your goal, efficiency is how quickly you walk the path. If it took the person in the example a week to respond to his 100 leads, this is less efficient than someone who can respond to 100 leads an hour. Efficiency highlights why setting goals and being effective is crucial to get right first. If you jump straight to efficiency (which a lot of people do) all you're doing is working on the wrong things quickly – which is stupid.
In order to achieve maximum effectiveness and efficiency, you must manage your time, energy and attention. Check out my cool venn diagram – productivity is the overlap where your time, energy and attention all work together.
If you’re good at managing your time and energy but can’t focus your attention, you might be doing quality work but will lack effectiveness and efficiency as you can’t concentrate for long. If you’re good at managing your time and attention, you may be doing effective work but you won’t be very efficient as you can’t work for very long due to a lack of energy. If you’re good at managing your attention and energy, you have the potential to do effective and efficient work but won’t because you’re not setting aside the time needed to do so.
So, here's the real geeky bit; if we were going to write productivity as an equation (I told you), this is what it would look like:
TIME + ENERGY + ATTENTION = EFFECTIVENESS + EFFICIENCY
Action Steps:
1. Start by working out your goals and clearly defining what it is you're trying to achieve. This becomes your yardstick for measuring productivity.
2. Write the above formula on a post-it note and put it somewhere you'll see it often. Refer to it when you find yourself struggling to hit those targets. Work out which areas you’re failing in and you’ll soon be back on that path of effectiveness and efficiency.
3. Set an alarm on your phone to go off 2-3 times a day. I call this a “Mental Check-In” and have alarms set for 11:00am, 2:30pm and 5:30pm. When ever the alarm goes off, ask yourself: “Am I being effective, or just active?”. Doing this is going to make you more mindful of what you're doing and bring you back to the present moment. The objective is to remind yourself to work on the right things i.e. Are you making progress towards your goals, or are you filling time with less important tasks or procrastinating from making that awkward phone call? Keep coming back to this idea of effectiveness and goal orientation.
4. Schedule your time to make sure you're allocating enough hours in the day for the goals you'd like to work on. If you've got the energy but don't seem to be making quality progress towards your goals, consider how you could schedule your time more effectively and prioritise the essentials.
4. Learn to maintain your energy and attention so that you can sustain a high quality of work throughout the day. If you find yourself loosing energy and lacking focus in the afternoons (as a lot of us do). Try taking a 20 minute nap to give yourself an energy boost and clear your mind of distractions.
Good luck!