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7 Simple Productivity Tips

May 17, 2007 on 11:06 pm | In Life, Productivity |

I’ve recently come to the realisation that the concept of “productivity” is especially vital for professionals, consultants or indeed anyone involved in time-for-money income generation.

Where your time is your main productive asset, getting more done in less time - and having more than enough time for fun and relaxation - is hugely important (then there’s the issue of shifting from a time-for-money model to a more scaleable model, but that’s a whole other discussion).

In the past 2 weeks I have literally doubled my productivity by following a few simple rules.

I now work fewer than 40 hours per week and am earning 300% more than the same time last year, when I was working 60 hours per week.

Here are my…

7 Simple Productivity Tips

1) Only check email at 12 noon and 4pm (thanks to Tim Ferriss for this tip). This one simple step has been massively powerful and liberating all at the same time. This one saves me an hour a day, minimum.

2) Every evening I write a “For Action” list for the next day, outlining my 20% items that produce 80% of the results for the next day. Every day I attack my most important item first.

3) I keep my “For Action” list on my desk and when small “to do’s” or distractions pop into my head I make a side note so I can deal with small items in batches later on and not break my focus from the task at hand.

4) When checking email or attending to other smaller tasks, if a task will take 2 minutes or less I do it then and there (thanks to David Allen of GTD fame for this one)

5) I’ve replaced my mobile phone message with the following, at the suggestion of Marc Dussault:

“Hi, you’ve reached Will Swayne’s phone. I’m unable to take your call right now. Please leave your name and number, plus the reason for your call so I can get to work on it before I call you back. Thanks for calling.”

This simple distinction avoids the common scenario of playing phone tag just to find out the reason for a call before you even get around to doing something about it.

6) Being mindful of non-value adding steps in processes and working to reduce or eliminate them. In the past, when I was working on, say, a 5-step process, I might have been responsible for sequential steps A, C and E and a designer responsible for B and D.

I would often find myself supplying step A only, creating an extra communication loop in the process when C was required later on. Now I try to supply ALL information to eliminate the non-value adding steps in the middle.

Obviously this can’t always be achieved (for example, proofreading has to take place at the end), but just being mindful of this and taking action where possible has yielded some positive results and cut down on wasteful back-and-forth emails.

7) I’m in the process of implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. While this is very much a work-in-progress (and something that I’ll write about in greater detail in future), some of the concepts have already come in useful for freeing up mental RAM. For example, I’ve closed off a few outstanding projects (what David Allen calls “open loops”) that had been occupying my headspace for some time, leaving more mental bandwidth for the important stuff. I even surprised myself the other day when I located 4 separate documents for my accountant in less than 5 minutes!

Try the 7 steps

I’ll wager that these 7 steps will yield big results for you too when you try them. Do you have any additional low-effort, high-reward productivity tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment!

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8 Comments »

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  1. Hey Will,

    Those tips are great. I haven’t tried your “Don’t check email until 11 tip” - I really think that will be a hard habit to break.

    Writing an action list for the next day makes it a breeze to start working in the morning, and you’ll have had 12 hours to think about the problem (unconsciously) overnight.

    I’ll be changing my voice mail message to include tip 5 as well!

    Nick

    Comment by Nick — May 18, 2007 #

  2. Hey Nick - you’ll noticed that I’ve changed the “Don’t check email until 11″ tip to “Don’t check until 12″. That gives you at least 3 genuinely productive hours in the morning.

    I have to admit that normally around 11.30 ish my email-checking finger starts to twitch. But then I just try to take that as a cue that I have 30 more minutes of productive time available to me.

    Re: Action Lists. David Allen talks at some length about why most “To Do” lists don’t work. They tend to become cluttered with all kinds of information that is out of context and distracting. I have not mastered the GTD system by any stretch of the imagination, but I try to keep my daily action list down to a short list of action items that can be accomplished in the same day, plus a number of sublists (calls, small “to-do’s” etc.) that can be handled in batches.

    I have a lot to learn, but the initial 7 steps are working well so far!

    Comment by Will — May 18, 2007 #

  3. Hi big Will

    Thanks for no. 5 - I’ve changed my voice message to be along those lines, almost verbatim :-)

    Except I do get social calls on it as well, so it might sound weird… oh well… I’ll see how it goes.

    Chris

    Comment by Chris — May 20, 2007 #

  4. Hey Chris - yeah, it’s a good tip. I don’t get a huge volume of mobile calls but I can point to at least 2 times in the past week where my new message has saved me a round of phone tag find out what the call was about. I wouldn’t worry about the “social call” issue — friends call business phones all the time and they don’t expect to hear an informal message with party poppers going off in the background (well, most of them anyway).

    Will

    Comment by Will — May 21, 2007 #

  5. I don’t exactly agree with point no.1 - How can you maintain an open communication channel with your clientel if you’re only addressing their enquiries with a maximum of two emails per day? In my experience, clients like to be reassured that they’re being looked after. If they lose that, they tend to look to find other service providers?

    Comment by Doug — June 17, 2007 #

  6. Hi Doug — thanks for stopping by.

    It also depends on the nature of your business and the role within your business. In my case, I found that very, very few enquiries from clients were that urgent that they required a response time of less than 4 hours.

    I’ve given clients a standing instruction that if something is massively urgent they should call or SMS — it rarely happens.

    On the upside, I’m saving an hour every day which means I can do the client work faster.

    If your business model requires responsive support (e.g. web hosting) then it may be optimal for certain people to check email in real time, but for most knowledge workers I still believe that checking less often rather than more often is a good idea.

    Comment by Will — June 19, 2007 #

  7. I love the phone message one, thats great, i will change mine for sure!

    The checking emails twice a day will be hard to break, but could save time for sure.

    I know a handyman service who has an autoresponder set up on his email, letting the sender know that he only checks his emails once a day at 5pm to make himself more efficient and offer faster service, any urgent matters should be made by phone.

    He ends the email with “Heres to life outside of my inbox!”

    Comment by Brennan Ryan — July 24, 2007 #

  8. I really liked the mobile voice mail message… (Item #5) :-)

    There’s a really interesting article about developing business systems for online marketers here:
    http://www.jamesbrausch.com/systems/

    Once you put a proper “Freedom Business System” in place, you’ll continually “ratchet your business in one direction… the direction of higher quality, more productivity and higher profitability.”

    Cheers,
    Jim

    Comment by Jim Lee — January 22, 2008 #

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