Last week I listened to Peter Bregman talk on productivity. Any long time readers of mine know that I’m always trying to optimize my productivity levels, so Peter’s talk was perfect.

I started implementing three key points from his talk over the past week and already I can see a big different in my productivity.

1) Tie Your Shoes Before The Race

The phrase is mine, but the concept is universal and means to make sure you get yourself ready before the race starts, instead of during the race. When it comes to productivity, it means to plan your day out, before you start your day, not during your day. Otherwise a person is much more likely to fall into reactive working verses proactive working. Peter suggests planning your day in the morning before you look at anything…even your email or phone.

I’ve heard others plan their day the night before. My brain slowly closes down as the day goes on, so night time planning doesn’t seem to work for me.

2) Calendar Everything

I already use my calendar extensively and would be lost without it, but up until last week, I didn’t include daily tasks in my calendar. Instead, my tasks were kept offline in a notebook separated by days as seen below…

Peter says that if you don’t properly partition your time throughout the day for each task, you’ll undoubtably run out of time and not get everything done that you wanted to. So instead, he says to move all your daily tasks into your calendar with an allotted amount of time, and then stick to the schedule throughout the day. Let your calendar be your guide, don’t trust yourself to keep yourself on track…especially in the beginning when you are trying to form the habit.

Here’s what my calendar looked like this week with my tasks added in as the light green boxes (the black lines are covering several sensitive tasks that just happen to be happening this week)…

3) The Visible Countdown

The last step is to create a visual countdown for each segment of your day so you remind yourself to not run over on time. I’ve used a task timer for a while and find it extremely beneficial to keep me hyper focused. If I need to go to the bathroom, or get a drink of water, I tend to push myself until the task is done because I don’t want to loose my focus. The timer is sort of like a fitness trainer on my desktop, reminding me to keep pushing until I’m done. Then when I’m done, I can take my break, instead of during the task.

Here’s what my timer looks like on my desktop tucked in the far lower right corner of my screen…

Three simple actions that have already proven positive for me, but it’s only been a week, so I’ll keep you posted on the long term benefits.

I started today with an intense list of to-dos. Not a long list of silly little things, but rather a short list of really important, but hard, action items (e.g. build a marketing deck, update pitch deck, update the five year projections, etc). In the past, these are the kind of to-dos that I probably would’ve pushed off because they fell into Stephen Covey’s “important, but not urgent” quadrant.

I ended the day having checked off every single item on my list and man does it feel good. I equate the feeling to having a great physical workout at the gym, but in this case it’s a great mental work out. My brain is tired, but in an odd way energized too. Just like my body feels after a great workout.

I’ve talked before about the idea of pushing myself mentally in everything, and it’s days like this when my training really pays off. As my own boss, the ability for me to internally hold myself accountable is critical.

I just got off the phone with my goal partner. We meet once a month to set a series of high-level goals (usually no more than 4) for the following month to which we hold each other accountable.

As I looked ahead for the month, I listed the things I knew I wanted to get done between now and our next call. The list was about 15 deep. To help narrow the list down, I cut out all the tasks I knew were going to get done no matter what, because they had to. These are tasks that, by default, already have some external, or internal, pressure attached to them. For example, I have a keynote talk coming up in which I promised to create a new speech. A goal of mine could be to write the new speech. But I know, no matter what, I am going to do it because I have to step on the stage and say something to the audience. So that got cut from my list.

Another example of an expected goal I have is to prep for is the upcoming International Student Free Hugs Day. I could have put that as one of my top 4 goals, but I didn’t because I knew, no matter what, it is going to happen.

Instead, I looked at what tasks I want to get done, but know that unless I have someone holding me accountable for them, they won’t get done. That brought me down to 3 goals…and interestingly enough, all three fit within Stephen Covey’s Quadrant 2.

When you set goals next, cut out the tasks that you know will get done because they have to and already have some external, or internal, pressure attached to them. Instead, focus on the tasks that you know you’ll need someone to hold you accountable to actually get done. They should be important, but not necessarily urgent.

A couple years ago, I attended a time-management ed session at a conference where the presenter set up a rather simple activity that keeps resonating in my head years later. The set up for the activity involved two volunteers and a table with hundreds of blue poker chips and a few red ones spread across the table. The goal was to pick up as many chips to score points within one minute. The person with the most points won a prize. As soon as the clock started, the two volunteers frantically grabbed as many chips as possible. After one minute everyone stopped and each player was left with a stack of collected chips in front of them. The presenter, acting as if it were a mistake, clumsily said he forgot one critical rule; the red chips were worth 30 points and the blue chips were worth one point. He then took the players’ pile of chips and spread them back over the table and reset the clock. This time, the players’ strategies were totally different. Instead of frantically picking up as many chips as possible, each player strategically looked around the table for the red chips. At the end, each player had a significantly smaller pile of chips, but the point totals were much higher.

Every moment we have the option to work on 13 different things. Each thing will score us points towards our goal. The challenge is recognizing what activities are the most strategic and will score the most amount of points and doing those first, last, and always.

A speaker friend of mine pays a lady $50 per day to call him early in the morning to ask him to list his main goals for the day, then calls him at the end of the day to see what goals he accomplished. Spending $50 for 5 minutes of phone time seems like a lot, but wasting a whole day focusing on the wrong thing costs a lot more. Focusing is hard. It’s a real skill that one develops over time, but yet it’s critical to success. It’s a skill I’m still struggling to get better at.

At the end of the time-management session, the presenter handed each person a red poker chip as a symbol to remember to focus on the most important projects first. I still keep mine with me every day, and sometimes when I feel myself drifting, I pull the chip out and put it on my desk next to me.

What’s your poker chip? What do you use to keep yourself on task with the most important tasks?

NAME
MySpeed

URL
http://www.enounce.com/myspeed

WHAT IT DOES
Speeds up (or slows down) the playback of online video watching.

MY TAKE
Watching online videos at normal speed is so 2010. Our brain input is much faster than our verbal output. With MySpeed I zip through videos 2x the speed. In fact, now when I go back and try and watch a video at normal speed, it feels sooo slow.

MySpeed works on both Mac and PC and almost every browser. Their most recent update allows it to now work on Mac Chrome as well, which was the last element I was waiting for before talking about it. Seriously, this super simple little tool has saved me amazing amounts of time.

SCREEN SHOT

Think about the last time you went out of town for a trip or vacation. When were you most efficient and effective with your time in terms of getting the mission critical stuff done leading up to the trip date? Three months ahead of time? One week ahead of time? The day of? Unless you’re Captain Planner, you’re like most people and the day of your trip was when you got the most amount of important work done in the shortest amount of time.

In business there are companies that do literally work their employees like dogs with physical back breaking work. But the “working like a dog” mentality that Amilya was taking about, and I agree with, is replicating the output efficiency and effectiveness of the 24 hours before your trip but at work…every day.

One of the greatest assets of an entrepreneur in the startup phase is his/her hunger. Hunger drives an entrepreneur to try a little bit harder, experiment a little bit more, and overall work a little bit longer. Hunger comes from a combination of excitement over a new project and the reality of zero cash in the bank. While hunger has its disadvantages such as speed over quality or lack of work life balance, there’s no denying the pound-for-pound outcome hunger produces.

As we come towards the end of another fiscal year for Red Rover it’s exciting to financially be in a nice spot (money in the bank, salaries, loan paybacks, great team of employees, and hiring for growth). After six years without stability, stability feels nice. But with stability comes a lack of hunger. I already feel it creeping in. It’s a very natural human thing to want to move from chaos to order, from uncertainty to certainty.

I sense a new challenge in my growth from here on out is going to be maintaining nice company growth with stability money in the bank, but while mentally keeping hungry like a startup fighting for each dollar and crafting a team that feels the same way.

I’ll expand more about this in the coming weeks, but I suspect keeping hungry is going to take a combination of accountability to someone who is willing to dig into me on a regular basis, hiring hungry people, goal setting done with our company principle of Boldness in mind, and continuously re-aligning with how much more work there is to do to reach our long term vision of a world in which every person achieves self-actualization and helps others to achieve theirs.

I left my weekly meeting with Kevin today on a frustrated note. I went into the meeting with an outline of what I wanted to cover, however after an hour we hadn’t covered anything on my list.

We started the meeting recapping our respective work weeks. I had a busy week working on a plethora of things including our branding/marketing strategy and customer care timeline. But in recaping my week to Kevin I told it in such a way that it seemed like I didn’t have clear outcomes and tangible results. Based on my retelling, Kevin reacted with frustration. For the next hour we didn’t really talk about any of the stuff I planned to, but rather focused on defended myself from the frustration he was feeling. 

Normally, to plan my week I look at our project management tool (Basecamp), our CRM (Highrise), our Gantt Chart (Tom’s Planner), and our Calendar (Google Calendar). My hope is that by looking at these four areas I am blending together enough short term (fire in the kitchen) work with longer term (important, not urgent) work. At the end of the weekly planning I get an outline that looks like this…

It all sounds nice, but then I went into the meeting with Kevin and you’d think I twiddled my thumbs all week. Thus he gets frustrated and I get frustrated.

In thinking this through more I’m going to try two new approaches:

1) Turn my weekly to-dos into tangible actual goals – Last week I was working on our company principles to present at our monthly Team Huddle. On my plan for the week, I just wrote down “Principles.” If I were to go back and turn that into a tangible actual goal it would’ve been “Present Polished Version of Company Principles at Team Huddle on Friday.” That then becomes one goal for the week and I can map out what I need to do each day to make sure that happens. This way then when meeting with Kevin I can have a clear set of goals I achieved for the week verses something that just says “Principles.”

2) Better recapping - A favorite movie of mine is Big Fish. A theme of the movie is every story can be told different ways. As the storyteller, you get to choose which one you want to tell. I think how I tell what I did to Kevin is just as important as what I did. Even if I had the best week ever, if I poorly and inaccurately retell it, then I can’t expect my audience to achieve the outcome I wanted. 

Moving forward I’ll be testing my ideas out and report back soon. 

Today we had our monthly team huddle where I presented on our company principles. In preparation, I created an outline of how I was going to present each principle but didn’t plan how to open up the discussion to the group for further input. My lack of structure for brainstorming led to a rather scattered and unproductive brainstorm for the first 15 minutes at which time I realized it needed to be more structured. If I were to do it over, I’d set up a framework for both the presentation and the brainstorming. Wondering what type of brainstorming frameworks there are out there…

“Would you expect someone to get a good night’s sleep if they were interrupted all night? Then how can you expect someone to get a good day’s work if they are interrupted all day?” - Jason F.