Productivity For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, www.wiley.com
This edition first published 2016
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Ten years ago, the word productivity had no meaning for me. Apart from the fact I am the most naturally disorganized person I know, I had no inclination to make it any other way. I tended toward chaos, hence the title of my first book Chaos to Control. But having reached my early 30s with three boys to look after and very little achievement to speak about, the time had come for change.
I wasn’t clever enough to go out and seek ways to improve my cluttered and disorganized life; a chance meeting on a sunny day in South Africa was what changed the course of my life. I met productivity expert Gerrit Cloete of Productivity Pit Stop, who sparked my interest and guided me while I learned the things that were about to rock my world and my business for the next ten years.
This book is about all the techniques, tools and behaviours that you can adopt to change your life. Most of them have been tried and tested by yours truly. Note that some of the resources I speak about are apps and websites, and although I aim to be as accurate and up-to-date as possible, new applications and software changes happen all the time.
This book is a comprehensive guide to how and why you should become more productive, more organized and more in control of your life. Whether you’re a stay-at-home parent who wants better ways to organize your day, a senior manager who is responsible for a large team or a student who wants time to fit it all in while acing your tests, this book has something for you.
I’m regularly asked the question, ‘Who is your ideal client?’ The answer is anyone who lives and breathes. Everyone needs help fitting it all in and planning days with the right things, the things that make a difference. Who doesn’t need help with taking control of the digital world, the distractions, the interruptions and the information overload? We’re all given the same 168 hours each week, which is plenty of time for work, rest and play. If you want to find out how to live your life to the fullest and maximize the precious time you have, this book will help get you there. But please remember that this book won’t change your life unless you’re willing to implement some of the suggestions in it. Even if you try one new thing, it will have a positive impact on your productivity and your life.
Throughout the book, you’ll find sidebars (grey boxes) with extra bits of information or other stuff you may want to know. If you decide to skip these sections, you won’t miss any vital facts or information.
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy – just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
As I wrote this book, I made a few assumptions about you, my readers:
You’ll find a number of icons in the margins of this book. These icons highlight special types of information.
This icon highlights points that are especially important and worth committing to memory.
Watch out for the target, where you’ll find tips and tricks to help you become more productive.
The warning icon highlights potential pitfalls and things that you should avoid in order to stay in control.
This icon advises you to stop reading and try out the tip right now. Knowledge is no good unless you act on it. This icon encourages you to act now to reap the benefits sooner rather than later.
This book is chock-full of useful information to help you understand productivity and become more productive yourself. But you can find even more online! Head to www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/productivity to find ways to be more productive at work, as well as other productivity boosters. You can also find various bonus articles related to increasing your productivity at www.dummies.com/extras/productivity.
Nothing in this book is difficult to implement. It includes strategies and techniques for even the most skilled procrastinators among you. So get started, choose any chapter or begin from Chapter 1, take action and begin to enjoy a life of calm, organised control.
Part I
For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.
In this part …
Understand what productivity is and how being more productive can help you in all aspects of your life.
Find the motivation to change your bad habits that hinder productivity.
Discover all the benefits of productivity.
Chapter 1
In This Chapter
Discovering exactly what productivity is
Recognising the different sources of productivity
Understanding why productivity matters
In basic terms, productivity is a measurement of how efficiently you can convert inputs into outputs. In manufacturing terms, it’s how many units of a good can be produced with a certain amount of raw materials and labour. In personal terms, it relates to how much work you can get done in the time allocated. But these definitions don’t come close to explaining what exactly productivity can do for you, your family or your business. In this chapter, I explain the value and contribution that productivity can make to your life.
Productivity is simply a method to get what you want out of life. It gives you the tools and techniques to not only get the work done but to also get it done while making time for the things you enjoy and value in life. No longer is it necessary to sell your soul to your employer, nor work incessantly to launch a start-up. Working productivity can emphasise your priorities and make sure they’re getting the attention they deserve while eliminating all the time-wasting stuff.
You’ve likely heard the expression, ‘what you put in you get out’. With productivity, you can get out much more that you put in. You can work smarter rather than harder. You can work more efficiently rather than just effectively. Personal productivity is a subject that should be taught in schools. Teaching children simple productive habits can make the difference to their future success and happiness. Productivity transforms lives, relationships and business.
The word productivity means the same thing whatever way you look at it. It means getting more out for what you put in. But the context in which that is done can make it mean different things to different people, including the following:
People are generally more familiar with the business benefits of productivity – increased profits, competitiveness and less employee stress, to name but a few. But businesses today are faced with increased competition from emerging markets along with a more demanding customer who wants it all and wants it now. Forever under pressure to cut costs, and with the emerging war for talent, being in business is no walk in the park. Productivity is a powerful tool that can help you to address these challenges and give organisations a competitive edge. This section covers the benefits of productivity for businesses. For example:
Being innovative: Productive employees tend to have more time for strategic thinking time and innovation. Only when you’re relaxed and in control of your day to day can you take the time to visualise something better. Productivity usually leads to a more innovative company culture when employees are praised for the time spent dreaming or thinking of better ways to do things.
When an organisation is under time pressure to achieve its daily goals, any time not spent on the core activities will generally be frowned upon. If a company doesn’t take the time to innovate, its future won’t be so bright.
Productivity gains can be felt from making changes in multiple areas of life. Simple changes to the way you currently do things can have surprising implications to the efficiency of how you run your business and your life.
The three main areas of focus where you can make a substantial difference are systems, technology and behaviour.
Creating new systems and processes in your day to day will help you see great improvements in productivity. Standardizing the way things are currently done usually leads to a decrease in the amount of time being spent on the current process.
Many companies don’t have a formal process designed for each job role. New employees learn on the job from whoever is there to train them. Along with the previous employee’s habits, good or bad, new employees create their own way of completing the work. Some people are naturally faster, more organised and efficient, but others take more time – more time to learn and more time to do everything. Standardising the process, how the workflow ideally is managed, is important for any company; following are some of the reasons daily processes can be beneficial.
The first benefit of standardising procedures is the obvious time saved. If you can cut down the number of steps involved in completing a job, you’ll gain hours each week. Working out what is involved in completing a job is important to be able to improve the process.
Establishing quicker workflows is a simple exercise that can help you improve every part of your job. Map out how the work flows from the first task until the last. Then you can see whether you can improve the process and make any adjustments to make it more efficient.
The quality of the service you offer will be improved due to fewer mistakes and more time available for customer service. You can follow a checklist to ensure that each part of the process is completed in the correct order.
When you introduce checklists, you ensure that the process is adhered to perfectly. This is very important when it comes to customer service because you can be sure that every customer gets the same quality of service and see what the results are from a particular procedure. You can then change procedures and measure the impact more accurately when you have something to follow.
When new staff come on board, it’s important for them to learn the existing process. They need to know how things are done. If they can follow a written procedure, they’ll learn more quickly, reducing the amount of time required to train them and the downtime of the person responsible for training them.
When you fail to capture your processes and procedures in a sensible manner, you risk losing intellectual capital each time a staff member moves. To prevent this loss of knowledge that one employee may hold, you should keep your processes documented and saved electronically or on paper. You can simply record these processes in a Word document or as a checklist in a programme like Excel or Evernote. I use a website called Process Street (www.process.st), which enables you to create checklists for the different processes involved in your role. I have a training checklist and a blog posting process. Process Street has a number of templates that you can choose from and personalise to suit your own processes.
You can use many techniques to create a more productive environment. In this section, I list tried and tested ways to up your game and get into the driver’s seat. Some of the better known ones include GTD, inbox zero and using your calendar to plan your day.
Getting Things Done is a workflow management system devised by management consultant David Allen. Allen wrote a book in 1997 called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (Penguin). In the book, Allen outlines a system for managing all the work that comes your way each day. It has become a widely adopted and popular technique for getting organised and becoming productive. You can learn more about GTD in Chapter 10.
Inbox zero is a technique conceived by writer and speaker Merlin Mann of the website 43 Folders. Inbox zero involves taking control of your inbox and processing your email – planning the work rather than using your inbox like a to-do list and completing the work in each one as it comes in. This technique is an efficient way of managing your email and your time. I cover email management in detail in Chapter 15.
Using your calendar is an effective productivity technique for managing the time available to you. By planning your work, you make decisions about priorities and commit to completing the work that needs to be done. This technique is a powerful way to get a good overview of what you need to do and to see the time you have to do it in. There’s more on using your calendar effectively in Chapter 14.
Technology is the big game changer for getting things done more quickly. Computers can do the work of hundreds in a minute percentage of the time. With both software and hardware, the world of business has seen massive changes and advancements. I cover technology in Chapter 15.
Hundreds of different types of software have been created to make life easier for the modern worker, but two pieces of software that have radically changed their field and can be found in every business are accounting software and sales or CRM software.
Having the right hardware is important to keep things efficient. Old computers or devices that take longer to turn on or process information waste time and often cause frustration.
Make sure all your hardware is up-to-date and helping you stay productive.
Your attitude is everything; the way you think about your work will have a big impression on how efficient and effective you can be. If you feel like a victim where others control how productive you can be, you’ll never get ahead. You will only become productive when you acknowledge the fact that your life is within your control. Nobody else has responsibility for making things easier or better, only you.
After you become accountable for your own life, then you can start to make the changes required to soar. Along with your attitude come your habits. You’re an accumulation of all your daily habits. There are three types of habits that add to making you a productive superhero: productivity habits, physical habits and mental habits. The following sections – and Chapters 7 to 11 – cover these.
Productivity habits are all the routines, processes and procedures you do to get things done. Techniques or systems – whatever you call them – help to get things done more efficiently and usually more effectively.
The two-minute rule: If you can do something in less than two minutes, do it now. This is a great tip for avoiding clutter or procrastination. Get into the habit of clearing some things from your to-do list and your desk by doing them straightaway.
Look around and see what you can do in two minutes to help you clear your workload or to make your surroundings more organised and clutter-free.
The physical habits you have are just as important as the productivity habits. If you plan your life well and organise your work in the right way, you’ll become more productive. But if you’re tired and sluggish from lack of exercise and poor nutrition, you’ll see the effects in your work. Chapter 5 covers these physical habits.
Breathing: Most people take breathing for granted; it’s an involuntary action that happens to keep you alive. Breathing is a great tool for relaxation and managing stress. Regular deep breaths can help oxygenate the body and the mind.
Stop reading and take a deep breath. Focus on your breath moving down through your body until it reaches your diaphragm. Take a couple of breaths in, following the breath each time.
The way you think about life and work can affect the quality of your daily life. If you have a can-do attitude, one where you expect good outcomes and want to have a positive impact on the world, you’ll undoubtedly achieve more in life.
Positive thinking: It all starts with positive thinking. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, behaviours that your friends and families like and dislike. When it comes to friends, people often focus on the good points and drown out the bad with the good. When it comes to enemies, they do the opposite. Some people choose to always focus on the negative, justifying their thinking by the fact that they’re being realistic.
Sometimes negative thinkers are right, such as when bad things happen and they don’t get the results they hoped for. But without optimism, you’d never start a business, get married or even have a child. Focusing on the positive is essential to achieve anything in life. So think positive and create the life that you want.
Mindfulness: Living mindfully can greatly help you to focus and do your best work all the time. Living in the now avoids the time wasting involved in worrying about the future happenings or thinking about past failures. You can, and should, of course, plan for the future and learn from the past, but holding your attention on the here and now will help you to focus and get more done. Chapter 5 has more on mindfulness.
Create a reminder on your phone or in your calendar to ‘Focus on the Now’. Set it for at least once a day to remind you to come back to the present moment.
So why do you want to get productive? Is it to increase your performance at work, to deliver more and better? Or is it to have a better quality of life and improve your work-life balance and be happy? The following sections include some of the main reasons people want to improve their productivity.
Probably one of the chief reasons people buy self-help books is to improve their work-life balance. They feel overwhelmed with too much to do or not enough time to spend with family or friends. Productivity and this book are the perfect solution for improving your work-life balance and figuring out what merits your time and attention. When you understand what is important to you in your life, you can work toward changing the things that need to change. (See Chapters 4, 6 and 17 for more on work-life balance.)
Increased productivity usually results in a reduction in stress. When people figure out how to work more effectively and manage their time and energy better, they tend to benefit from a feeling of control and reduced stress. Feeling organised means you no longer have to worry about things you need to do or would like to do. You’ll have a system to look after all of your tasks and dreams and goals. Taking charge will help you to feel like you’re driving your life forward rather than being pulled in too many directions. See Chapter 6 for more on stress management.
Productive employees tend to have more time for strategic thinking time and innovation. Only when you’re relaxed and in control of your day to day can you take the time to visualise something better. Productivity usually leads to more creativity, innovation and enhanced performance all around.
Many people think that productivity and creativity are at opposite sides of the court. They think that organised, productive people aren’t creative. This is not the case. The more productive I become, the more peaceful my mind becomes. If I have all the boring stuff organised and taken care of, I can free my mind to be more creative. Stress caused by disorganisation will negatively affect creativity. Productivity paves the way for creativity to bloom. Chapters 8 and 12 have the detail on stimulating creativity.
Many senior managers complain of not having enough time in their day. The problem is that they prioritise badly, giving the daily tasks priority over the more important big-picture work. Managers need strategic thinking time. If you’re disorganised and stressed with your workload, this time will rarely come. When you get organised and start to prioritise effectively, you’ll have more time to focus on the important stuff like strategic thinking.
Many things may need to change in your life – your relationships, your work or even the time you spend with yourself. Getting organised is a great first step to making changes in your life. Getting organised helps you to see clearly what you want from your life. When you have this clarity, you can introduce systems that will help you to achieve more order. With the right attitude and habits, you can maintain a relaxed, organised calm in all areas of your life. If that sounds good to you, read on.
After you become aware of your reasons for being productive, you can move forward toward creating a solution that works for you and your life. Of course, you need to invest some time to make the changes, but this investment will be repaid tenfold if you commit to making the changes. This journey isn’t for the faint-hearted; there will be ups and downs, you will soar and you will fail, but that is the journey of life. This is what makes it sweet and sad and precious, and the destination is totally up to you.
Chapter 2
In This Chapter
Discovering why change is important
Finding out how to set goals
Achieving your goals
I was once asked in an interview, ‘What if you don’t want to change; what if you are happy just as you are?’ Then you’re a very lucky person. Being happy just as you are is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a rare thing. Not to have anything that needs a little work or improvement is unusual. Most people could eat a little healthier, do more exercise or drink more water, and I don’t think there’s a person alive who wouldn’t want to get more done more efficiently, leaving more time for the fun stuff.
Everyone has different reasons for wanting to be more productive. People’s lives differ, as do their motivations to change. Whatever your motivation to change, becoming more productive with your time and actions will help you to achieve your goals in life. Knowing what your reasons are and understanding your own motivations will be valuable to you when you meet the blocks and barriers to making those changes.
Each week is filled with 168 hours. You can’t change this fact, nor can you choose to ignore it. What you decide to do with those hours determines how happy and successful you are. If you choose to spend your time waiting for the weekend or until the next big occasion, you’ll essentially waste that time and never get it back. Opting to make the most of your time each day, each hour and each minute will help you to succeed regardless of what success means to you. This doesn’t mean that you can’t spend some of that time relaxing, chilling or simply being, as long as this is your conscious choice and you’re not in default lazy mode.
Some people are motivated to become more productive by the need to earn more money. If you’re self-employed and the hours that you work add up to money that you take home, there’s a big motivation to get more done each hour that you work. If you can get more tasks done each hour, you can bill more by the end of the week. The challenge of getting paid per hour has always been an issue for the self-employed. You can only do so much, so the obvious choices are to either hire people to do the tasks for you and pay them less than you charge or to limit your income to the amount of hours you can do. The following sections highlight a few other things you can do to earn more with your time. If you work for someone else, tune in to the later section ‘Doing more on other people’s time’ to find out how you can make the most of your time as an employee.
Create a stop-doing list. This list will help you see the things that you’re doing that really don’t need to be done. Maybe you’re using Facebook as a marketing tool, but Facebook hasn’t given you any return on investment. If you stop spending time on Facebook, could you be earning more money with the time saved? Check out Chapter 7 for more on creating a stop-doing list.
Write a list of all the tasks that you do each day, and take the top two that use up most of your time. First, ask yourself: ‘Do these tasks merit the amount of time I spend on them?’ If they are valuable tasks, make sure you are scheduling time for them. If they don’t merit your time and attention, make the decision to delegate or outsource them or stop doing them altogether.
If one of these tasks is addressing email, ask yourself how much time you want to spend on emails. Most people want to spend substantially less time on emails than they currently do. Refer to Chapter 15 for details on how to process your email more effectively.
Don’t open your email tomorrow morning until you’ve completed at least one important task. Observe how good it feels and how productive your day becomes.
Lots of people don’t spend nearly enough time on what they actually get paid to do. People allow administrative tasks, distractions and interruptions to get in the way. It’s important to be conscious of where your time is going. When you know how you currently spend your time, it empowers you to make a change and be more productive.
Take your major task, and document how you get the job done. Write the steps out as if someone with no experience is having to do your job. Detail every step and how that person would go about doing that step. Write as if you were explaining it to a child. Use this document the next time you’re doing your job, and see how accurate it is. Can you do anything differently and more efficiently?
Take the time to think about how you do your job. Most days, people are too busy doing things the way they’ve always done them to notice whether there’s a better way. You may be able to eliminate a couple of the steps to how you get things done when you take the time to look at your role from a different perspective.
One of the best ways to make better use of your time is to hire a virtual team. Get other people to do the nonessential parts of your job. A virtual assistant can help you with your admin and accounts. Other types of assistants may be able to help you get more out of your day. Check out Chapter 16 for more tips on hiring a virtual assistant and getting more done at home.
Don’t wait until you’re earning lots of money to hire a virtual assistant; you just need enough to cover her costs. If you free up your time by allowing someone else to do the work that doesn’t need you and your exact skill, you’ll rapidly increase your earning potential. Otherwise, you may always be waiting to earn enough – and not getting there.
Becoming more productive is a clever way to make your life easier. Getting your work done more quickly and efficiently means you work fewer hours and can use the extra time saved to have more fun. Simple changes like the way you process your email can help you save up to an hour a day. An hour saved each day adds up to 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month, and almost a week and a half each year. Or, in work time, that’s six work weeks each year that you can use to either earn more money or to relax and make your life easier.
There’s a popular saying that says one of your regrets on your death bed will never be ‘I wish I spent more time at the office’. A more common regret is not having spent enough time at home with the family. Many people neglect to spend enough time on the things that really matter. Their family, their friends or doing the things that make them feel alive and happy. Work often takes over. Mountains of work that never seem to get done. You find yourself buried in a never-ending circle of work, letting life happen outside the circle. This is not the way to live your life.
Make a list of the things that really matter to you in your life. Prioritise them from 1 to 10 – 1 being most important, and 10 being least important – then write beside each item how much time you’re spending on it weekly. Most people find a great difference between what they’d like to be doing and what they’re currently doing. Now is the time to readjust it and do the right thing.
It took me some time to realise that my to-do list would never be empty. I spent years frantically trying to tick things off only to observe myself adding more and more. Accepting this fact and understanding what can be left to another day are keys to creating the life that you want. Take control of your workload today, and get done what you can get done, ensuring that there is time left over to be who you are and to do the things that are important to you.
When you work for someone else, your motivations will be similar to those in the previous sections but not so much in your control. You may want to be more productive, to earn more money or to spend more time with family, but none of those outcomes may be directly in your control within your work environment.
What you do have control over is making your life easier, happier and stress-free. Also consider that the more effective you are with your time, the more attractive you are as a potential employee if you do find that your success at work isn’t getting the recognition it deserves.
One of the biggest improvements to my life after learning to be more productive was the reduction in stress. I felt more in control of my work and my life. Living stress-free is crucial for a happy life, and simple changes, such as using your calendar and getting everything out of your head into a system, will have the biggest impact. Removing the stress from your life is a big motivator and also empowers you to see that the quality of your life is within your control and not at the mercy of your employer. (See Chapter 6 for more on managing stress.)
Creating a work environment where you feel in control of your day greatly enhances the quality of your days. To achieve this feeling of control, simply take time each day to plan your work, and be sure to declutter your environment and work with a clear desk. Having a clutter-free space allows you to focus on what you need to do, and planning your day helps you to feel that the work you’re doing is priority and merits your focus. (See Chapter 12 for more on managing stress.)