Tag: Productivity

Productivity Part 1

Here is a copy of the first of three guest posts that I’m doing for Wayne Small over at www.sbsfaq.com on productivity.

Many of the concepts developed here come from my upcoming book on productivity – Being busy is just an excuse.

If I asked you whether you have enough time your most likely answer will be no. If I then ask you what are the most important things in your life most people will reply something along the lines of their family, partner, friends and so on. Next, if I ask you what really excites you I’ll hear a variety of answers from exotic travel, writing a book and maybe even ballroom dancing. Finally, if I ask you what you actually spend your time doing most people will simply reply – working. That situation doesn’t make for happy and contented life does it?

How is that we live in the most technological advanced age and yet we more stressed, have less time are generally unhappier with our lives than previous generations? What is more precious time or money? Time, simply because you can’t get any more. Yet most people allow their time to be wasted in meaningless and low priority tasks. They allow it to be stolen away by the simplest request. They allow a variety of devices to constantly interrupt and defragment their day. In short, it appears as if they are doing almost anything they can to waste their most precious resource.

Why are you not spending more time on things that excite you? Isn’t that what life is supposedly all about? You wouldn’t stick your money under a mattress would you? You invest it somewhere to get the maximum return. Why aren’t you trying to get the maximum return for your time?

The most important things to learn about your time is that there is only a finite amount each day. Only you can decide how you spend that time. You only get one shot at it, because once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. The next point to understand is that you are not going to be able to do everything. There are simply things that you won’t be able to fit in your day. That’s where developing a discipline and priorities help you achieve the things that need to be done not the things you necessarily like doing. This leads to the point that there are always going to be things we don’t like doing but they still need to be done. If you don’t have the discipline and systems to achieve these then you end procrastinating and creating greater levels of stress for yourself.

Before you embark on any journey you need at least three things. Firstly, where you are. Secondly, where you want to go and lastly a map of how to get there. When it comes to improving your productivity the first step is to closely examine and record how you spend each day. Spend at least a week monitoring as much of your day as you can. Record how much time you spend on email, how much time you spend on phone, how much time you spend surfing the web. You need to be totally honest here and ensure that you record exactly what you are doing rather than what you would like to be doing!

By far the easiest method if to use a pen and paper, however there are plenty of digital time recording methods available. The important thing is not how you record your time but that you do. This method is exactly what other professionals like accountants and lawyers use, because they realize the value of their time as it directly equates to income. As you continue to record you will probably start to see patterns emerge, however ensure that you keep recording for at least a week or more.

Once you have enough data sit down and spend some time analysing the results. Where did you allocate your time poorly? Where did you allocate it productively? You may wish to use something like Excel and categorize your time usage to allow you to see patterns better. Many people would see this as a waste of time. The difference is that you are investing some time up front so that you’ll have a bigger payoff further down the track. That’s what investment is all about isn’t it? A little extra sacrifice up front for greater returns down the track. I can assure you that if you are constantly busy and don’t know why tracking your time is a very worthwhile exercise.

So now you have a starting point. This is now your baseline from which my next post will build on.

As always if you have any feedback, comments or questions on what I have talked about here please send them to me via director@ciaops.com. You’ll find information about myself and my business at www.ciaops.com

The importance of fitness


I’ve been talking a lot about ‘cop outs’ of late and this post is not going to break that mould. I recently overheard a number of IT people saying that the profession doesn’t lend itself to keeping in shape. What a crock I gotta say. If a doctor said to them that they needed to eat better, get more sleep and start exercising because they would die or catch some terminal disease I’m pretty sure they make an abrupt change. So the issue isn’t ‘can’t’ it’s ‘won’t’.

It is not just the IT profession in which this happens mind you but it is certainly the place that I hear the most excuses about how the ‘special’ requirements of the job require the need to sacrifice other parts of one’s life. This is simply rubbish, it is a decision made by the individual of their own free will to leave things as they are. In many cases it is just that they are too lazy, afraid and undisciplined to make a change that they know they need to make.

I will put up my hand and freely admit that for far too many years I did exactly the same thing. I avoided making decisions about change that needed to be made to regain some semblance of ‘a life’. Many today use their job to hide from ‘a life’ and in the process not only affect themselves but also those around them. They believe that ‘soldiering’ on the same old way is ‘just what has to be done’. Again, what a crock I say. These people shouldn’t fool themselves that they don’t have choices. They should also not fool themselves that their indecisions, as much as any decision they make, directly affect more than just the lives they lead.

The old saying goes that your body is a temple but perhaps an even simpler consideration is that if you don’t respect your own body how are you expected to respect anything else? People aren’t fools you know. No matter how much you tell them one thing, if it isn’t backed up by reality they simply won’t buy it.

There are so many reasons to maintain a decent level of physical fitness: it generally allows you to live longer, makes you more resistant to aliments, improves your stamina and not least of all makes you feel good about yourself. If you don’t feel good about yourself then you really aren’t going to feel good about anything else are you? Honestly, no you’re not.

I believe in karma and none more so when it comes to looking after yourself. You can continue to abuse your body for many years, but when it has had enough you are going to find how different life is without it. People maintain their homes, their cars, their knowledge but yet they let their physical condition slip. The reality is that without physical fitness you may not be able to do any of these other things may you?

We all know there are a million reasons why you should take better care of your physical fitness but I’ll give you just one. What would your life be like without it? Because if you continue on making excuses and ignoring the warning signs then you’ll certainly have no one else to blame but most likely you won’t be the only one affected by your own indecision. At the very least this is grossly unfair to them. So consider that as you let your girth continue to expand with inaction.

Overtime slaves

If you, like most people, feel you are working too long then I’d suggest you read “Slaves to the overtime habit fail to loosen shackles”. It talks about how Australians are chaining themselves to their desks and doing over 2 billion (yes billion) hours in unpaid overtime.

So what’s the major reason for this? Most said they had too much to do (i.e. too busy) but also confessed that something else had come up (i.e. allowed themselves to get interrupted). So what does this mean? Well, according to the article these people are:

– unable to eat properly
– unable to pay bills on time
– unable to see their partner
– unable to exercise
– unable to relax
– and so on

I especially like this example:

“…he calculated he was working probably twice the hours he was paid for.’ I have no time for exercise and no time to see my friends, let alone spend time with my girlfriend. On my one day off I’m so tired I lie down all day at home….life sucks when there is no time to live it. I am a slave’”.

Sound familiar? So many people’s of identities these days is totally tied to their work. What’s the first question people will ask when they meet you at an event? ‘So what do you do?’ is the typical ice breaker, not ‘have you read any good books?’, ‘seen any good movies?’, ‘been anywhere interesting lately?’. No, they want to know what work you perform so they can better understand who you are because these days your job is the best description of who you are.

Sad isn’t it? Here is someone basically saying they feel like a slave with no freedom and no ability to enjoy life. How is that living? Basically it’s not. We were all led to believe that technology would free us from this situation whereas, as I have said many, many times here, it has simply enslaved us. Why? Because we accept the defaults. We don’t customize the systems to suit ourselves, we modify our behaviour to suit the systems. Like D’oh!

The interesting thing is that it is easily within everyone’s power to achieve the lifestyle they desire, however like an alcoholic, first you need to admit you have a problem and secondly you have to want to do something about it. Why wouldn’t you want more time to do what excited you? Why wouldn’t you want more time with your partner, kids, hobbies, etc? Seems from this article that more and more people don’t want to lead an enjoyable life? More and more people want a life chained to a desk, forced to continue on the never ending treadmill. They are no longer in control and those who are not in control are destined to be controlled by others.

If you can admit you have a problem and do want to have a ‘life’ then I suggest you have a look at some of my work on SlideShare, especially Enough Time and Power of an Hour, or the Smarter Productivity training I run. If you want to go beyond this and save at least one hour a day (which adds up to more than a working month a year) I’d suggest you get in contact with me (director@ciaops.com) so we can develop something to help free you from your current enslavement. Remember life is about doing what excites you.

A do not do list

Since I wrote the post of ‘Being busy is just an excuse’ I’ve come across some additional information that reinforces the premises I put forward.

I came across a something that said ‘achieving perfection is about elimination’ which resonates very strongly I believe. When a sculptor creates a work they don’t do it by adding something to what they started with, they generally chip away and remove stuff to create their work of art. The same is true about life in general I believe. You need to eliminate, simply, declutter and generally do less to achieve your goals.

I’ve also found a very interesting piece by Jim Collins who wrote the books Good to Great and Built to Last. At the beginning of the year he doesn’t make a traditional ‘to do’ list he makes a ‘not to do’ list. Novel eh? You’ll find the whole article on his web site but again it demonstrates the point of achieving the things you want by not doing the things that waste your time and are unproductive.

A similar idea comes from Carl Newport who says

Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours

The basic idea being that you set your ideal work schedule and then MAKE everything fit into that. The above blog post from Carl is a highly recommended read for people who claim they are ‘too busy’ to achieve things as there are also plenty of other helpful tips in there.

So if you are too busy you have no one to blame but yourself. The good news is that you can makes the changes requires to actually achieve so much more by actually doing less. The proof is in the pudding as these articles demonstrate. I’d urge you to at least give it a try and whether you can make it work for you.

Being busy is just an excuse

Now, I know that I’m not going to be very popular in what I’m about to say here but I truly believe it to be the case. There is a HUGE difference between being busy and being productive.

Lately, I’ve come across so many people claiming to be ‘busy’ and blaming this for having failed to get something important done. It is becoming that common now it is really starting to annoy me. Why? Because it is a total cop out I believe. The bottom line for most of these people is that ‘being busy’ is simply an excuse for not setting correct priorities. ‘Busy’ is typically a state in which people believe they need to be to achieve something, but in reality they are simply in motion without moving. They are merely creating action for action’s sake in the belief that they are being productive.

It’s human nature that there are things we like to do and things we don’t. Being productive usually means doing stuff that you don’t like doing AS WELL AS as stuff you do. Most however, fill their time with stuff they like doing but which is generally of such a low priority that they shouldn’t be doing it at all. In a word, they procrastinate. Procrastination doesn’t meaning sitting around twiddling your thumbs, it means failing to do what NEEDS TO BE DONE and you can just as easily achieve this by being ‘busy’. The issue for such people is that they do not value time appropriately. Just because you have eight hours a day ‘at work’ does that mean you have to spend that total time ‘working’? Definitely not! If I can get the same amount of productive work done in six hours, or four hours or even two hours why do I need to fill the remaining time with useless unproductive tasks? Because that’s what everyone else is doing I hear you say and therein lies the problem.

Just because everyone else is doing something doesn’t make it right does it? Being productive is about what works for YOU not what everyone else SAYS works for you! We all have exactly the same amount of time allocated to us each and everyday, yet why do the vast majority of people always seem to be ‘busy’? Stressed? Tired? Unable to do what they need to get done? Simply because they have failed to prioritize their time correctly. Maybe they’d prefer to re-read their emails than actually starting on that report or maybe they’d prefer to surf the web just a bit longer rather than actually resolving an urgent problem. Sound familiar? It should be, because this how most people operate.

Another painful truth I’ve come to understand is that YOU CAN’T DO EVERYTHING! Thus, you need to prioritize. I’ll pretty much bet that if you prioritize correctly you’ll find you’ve been doing stuff that you don’t need to do at all. There is going to stuff you like doing, but to get the more important things done you are going to have to stop doing stuff, period. If it produces a low return on your time investment its gotta go. Do you leave your money under your mattress earning no interest? Unlikely. Most people put it somewhere where it will earn the maximum return. That is called INVESTMENT. Now tell me, what is more valuable? Your time or your money? Hmmmm… you can never get more time but you can always get more money, so I’d have to say time. Wouldn’t you? So why the hell do most people do their best to not only waste their own time on low priority tasks but also allow other people to also waste their time? Unfortunately, it is generally the worst offenders who can’t even see this fact.

If you are finding that you’re constantly ‘busy’, if you find that you are constantly letting things slip because you are ‘busy’, I’d say you need to take a long hard look at your priorities. It is probably going to involve some pain but the payoff to your health and well-being is well worth it in the end. If you think I’m joshing, stop and take a look at those around you always seem to be ‘busy’. Are they actually getting stuff done? Are they simply creating motion for motions sake? Are they using the excuse of being ‘busy’ to prevent you from giving them something that actually NEEDS to be done?

So you’ve been warned. Don’t keep coming to me saying that you’re ‘busy’ because if this keeps happening I’m going to leave you being ‘busy’ and find someone who can make time for what I need and I am unlikely to return. The inability to prioritize your own time automatically tells me you are unlikely to value my time as important. Sorry, but MY TIME is important so I ain’t going to let you waste it.

Avoid multitasking

I was reading a blog post from David Mackie about how he finds he needs to work with the TV on in the background. He was considering this in light of the article – ‘One thing at a time’ which again further points out the fact that multi-tasking is a sure way to kill your productivity. I replied to David’s post saying that firstly, having the TV on in the background is probably not true multi-tasking merely distracting because you don’t NEED to pay attention to it. Secondly, if you find that it does improve your productivity then there is nothing wrong with that PROVIDED that it is actually improving your productivity.

I recently came across the article – ‘If you only do one thing this week, avoid multi-tasking’ which again provides ample evidence of the inefficiencies of multi-tasking but the following caught my attention in relation to David’s post:

‘And if you think that cannot apply to you because you’re a whiz at juggling tasks, consider the recent findings of researchers at Stanford University in California: people who routinely multitask are the worst at ignoring irrelevant information, regularly switch between tasks and have poorer short-term memory – in short, all the skills needed to multitask successfully.’

My point being that unless you MEASURE your productivity how are you every going to know doing something is making it better or worse? Having the TV on in the background MAY make you feel more productive but is it really? You’ll never know unless you MEASURE and experiment. There is also plenty of research about the effect that music has on concentration, especially the so called ‘Mozart effect’ which I am experimenting with now. At the end of day all this doesn’t count for squat unless it actually works for YOU!

Improved productivity is something that needs constant work and discipline because it is so easy to fall off the wagon and end up browsing the web for cats flushing toilets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49jKeGyUCJE
and as you can see I have exactly the same problems because I have found the video on cats flushing toilets!

The next question is how do you start to measure your productivity? Here’s a few of my suggestions:

Rescue Time – http://www.rescuetime.com. Great piece of software that tracks the time you spend doing different things on your PC. A free and paid version is available.

Manic Time – http://www.manictime.com. Another great free piece of software that tracks just about everything you do on your system in a huge amount of detail and provides a really nice interface to see exactly what you are doing.

OneNote – http://www.onenote.com. Part of the Microsoft Office suite of programs, which will be included in every version of the Office 2010 release. Amazingly handy for recording most ad-hoc information on a day to day basis. Combine it with an Internet hosted SharePoint and it really shines.

Theses are probably the top 3 applications I use to measure/improve my productivity but as I said it is always an ongoing process so if you have any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Google-juice

Everyday I’m finding more and more benefit from Twitter as method of promoting my business. I am always intrigued when I get new Twitter followers who ‘protect their tweets’. Ah why? Are you saying something you don’t want everyone to know? If you are doing that, why are are doing it on the Internet? Why are you also doing it on with a third party who effectively owns whatever you post up there? It just doesn’t make sense.

After recently reading the book “What Would Google Do” I have a much better appreciation for the need to generate as much ‘Google-juice’ around my business as possible. Twitter is an excellent method of doing exactly that. Don’t believe me well I’ve just type ‘robert crane’ into Google and look what appears:

It is probably a bit hard to read but I have a Google entry on the first page thanks to my postings in Twitter (currently the 6th entry!). I don’t think I could every achieve this with any of my web sites or blog but thanks to having an open Twitter account I’m getting some excellent Google-juice. I think this is pretty good given I’m up against a very famous (or infamous name-sake).

There are plenty of reasons for keep information private and I think the best advice that I could give is that if you want to keep it private don’t post in on the Internet no matter what form. And for heavens sake don’t post it to Facebook. Conversely, if you want to promote yourself or you business take the advice from “What Would Google Do” and make your information available to Google to index at all times.

Come surf with me

Well I’ve finally gotten myself signed up to Google Wave to see what it is all about. Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone else who might be interested in joining me in a ‘Wave’ and learning what’s it all about. It’s kinda like email with out anyone to send to.

So if you have a Google Wave account and would like to collaborate with me on understanding the implications Google Wave may have I’d love to hear from you (in Google Wave) of course. You should be able to connect with me on Google Wave via ciaopsdirector@googlewave.com. If you do connect it’s probably also a good idea to send me an normal email (director@ciaops.com) so I know that we should be connected.

If Google Wave does take off I see it having implications for for many technologies we currently have, email, blogs but also perhaps SharePoint as Google Wave represents a collaboration platform. That’s why I’m so interested to understand exactly not only how it works but also how well it works. From what I’ve seen so far Google Wave has the potential to be a pretty game changing technology if it gets adopted and that is a big if. Why? Because even though people are using technology they have become so comfortable with the technology they use everyday, like email that making a major change to something like Google Wave will have to jump some major non technical hurdles in its bid for adoption. However, if it does manage to become widely adopted it will almost certainly be a major game changer.

If you don’t know much about Google Wave I suggest you visit the web site and watch the video presentation (warning, it’s long). After you have watched the video I’d love to hear your thoughts on you opinions on what ramifications it would have.

So if you have a Google Wave account I’d really love to hear from you even if you have an opinion about Google Wave then I’d also love to hear from you.