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MANAGING YOURSELF
3 Productivity Tips You CanStart Using Todayby Dorie Clark
MARCH 02, 2016
When a major product is about to launch or your team is scheduled to make an important
presentation, it’s easy to ride the wave of deadline-induced adrenaline spikes and push
yourself to work every waking moment. But of course that’s not sustainable, and we
inevitably crash. So how can you make productivity habitual and lasting?
YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES
Getting More Work Done
The first step is to understand that productivity means optimizing your entire life, not just
work. A well-designed personal life supports your efforts at work, and being strategic about
when and how you work is what lets you have a rich personal life. So figure out ways for them
to complement each other. Wharton professor Stew Friedman has developed the concept of
the four-way win, a framework that asks us to consider how one activity can, ideally,
influence us positively in multiple areas: our personal life, professional life, community or
civic relationships, and health (mental, physical, and spiritual).
For example, instead of wolfing down a sandwich at your desk, if you eat a healthy lunch with
a coworker you like, you’re simultaneously benefiting your health, your professional life, and
your sense of community. You might not normally consider “eating lunch” to be a productive
activity, but seen through Friedman’s lens, you’re actually hitting multiple goals.
Next, when you’re considering your to-do list, it’s important to match the task to the amount
of focus necessary to accomplish it. Tony Schwartz has written in HBR about the importance
of managing your energy, not your time, which includes sensible advice like getting enough
sleep and taking short renewal breaks approximately every 90 minutes. But one additional
innovation that can allow you to wring more productivity out of your day is to keep a list of
tasks that must be accomplished but require relatively little mental energy.
It takes me substantially more brainpower to write an article than to read one, for instance, so
I’ve learned to schedule my writing when I’m in the morning, at my freshest. As the day
progresses, my ability to be creative diminishes but I can still extend my productive workday
by at least an hour or two if I confine my brain-dead time to low-stakes but necessary tasks
like reading books for research or catching up on email discussion groups. If your circadian
rhythms differ, you can reverse the process by starting slow and then tackling more
productive work later in the day.
It’s also important to use short bursts of time
well. Most of us could make a serious dent in
our work if we had an uninterrupted block of
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three or four hours to finally finish that report.
But for most professionals, having that
amount of blank space on your calendar is a
pipe dream. Though trying to schedule large
blocks of time for more introspective or
sustained work is a worthwhile goal, our
calendars most often are pockmarked with
staccato 30- or 60-minute breaks in between
an array of webinars, conference calls, and
meetings. Because those blocks are so short,
planning out how we’re going to spend them
doesn’t seem necessary; most of us just
default to answering email or, worse, get
caught up in a social media vortex until it’s
time to head to our next obligation.
Instead, take a cue from Give and Take author Adam Grant, a noted productivity overachiever,
who told me in an interview, “I have lots of micro-goals of trying to get things done, whatever
the amount of time available.” My version of this idea is to examine the next day’s calendar
the night before, identify the gaps in my schedule, and create a list of what I want to
accomplish during them.
It might change in the moment: if a reporter emails me for comment about a breaking news
story, I’ll probably abandon my original plan and return her message instead. But having a
sense of what I “should” be doing during those short periods — ordering the plane tickets,
writing the recommendation letter I promised, or uploading an Amazon review for my
friend’s new book — keeps me on target and dissuades me from frittering away those short
spurts of time. Over the span of a week, they add up.
Like a crash diet, it’s easy to go heads-down for a short period of time. But no human can
focus solely on work for 12 or 16 hours a day, every day; even the most ambitious, motivated
person can’t sustain that level of focus without seeing their performance ultimately suffer.
The secret to productivity is sustaining your commitment and keeping up your discipline over
time. By understanding what productivity really means to you, matching your energy to the
task at hand, and leveraging even short amounts of free time, you can make serious progress
on the most important goals.
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke
University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out.
You can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.
Related Topics: PRODUCTIVITY
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Niraj ranjan 7 days ago