ZachEvans

Believer. Husband. Dad. Coach. Healthcare Thought-Leader. All-Around Good Guy.

Productivity

Put Off Until Tomorrow

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Benjamin Franklin is credited with first speaking the famous words:

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Many have lived their lives by this maxim and have become more productive because of it. Other productivity gurus will encourage you to do your most distasteful task first each day so that it is out of the way and you will not have you dread doing it (and be distracted by it).

I agree with both of these principles if your goal is maximum productivity. I also believe, however, that as leaders sometimes the best thing we can do is to put off until tomorrow something that can be done today.

Leaders often find themselves in emotionally-charged situations. Justified or not, appropriate or not, these situations demand that the leader take a step back, attempt to remove as much of the emotion from the situation as possible, and respond in as productive a manner as possible. Respond too quickly to a situation fraught with emotion and you may find yourself wishing you had let just a bit of time pass before you answered.

Wait an hour before hitting send on the email reply, thereby allowing yourself time to re-read and edit your text. Put off until tomorrow the crucial conversation you need to have with your rouge employee about their response to another leader so that you have time to craft a reasonable response.

Take a deep breath, calm some of your own emotions, and you will be much happier with your response to the difficult situation as well as the response of others to you.

Inbox Overload

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Ask most people what the top two or three challenges in their day-to-day work lives is and it is likely that somewhere on that list will be: “I just get SO MANY emails. I really do not know how to deal with all of them!” As an individual that averages between 150 – 200 emails a day, I can certainly understand this feeling (of course, my iPhone 4 checks three different accounts: H2U, Lipscomb and Gmail) but, do be honest, I rarely ever get to the exasperation stage.

One reason for this is that I set a personal goal that, at the end of any given day, I will have fewer than 20 emails in any given inbox (that would be a total of 60 between the three that I actively manage, for those of you counting at home). How do you do that, you ask? It is simple: I do not use my inbox as a filing cabinet.

Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird or whatever your desktop email solution of choice is simply was not designed to be used in this manner. Most people, however, try to manage their email this way. They keep hundreds (or thousands) of emails in their inbox and then try to remember who sent what when if they need to find a particular email.

You actually become less productive when you keep all of your emails in one place instead of creating folders (Outlook) or using tags (Gmail). You may think that you will do better with everything in one place but it is simply not true. You just have to take a peak in your home junk drawer to understand how true this is.

Productive Mornings for the Night Owl

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I admit it: I’m a bit of a night owl. The habit (because it IS a habit) started in college. When I was at Lipscomb we had a pretty strict curfew (12:00 AM during the week, 1:00 AM on the weekends). For me, this meant that the bulk of my study time didn’t start until after midnight because I wanted to spend all of my free time with friends or my girl-friend (and future wife).

This meant that, regularly, I wouldn’t get in to bed until 2:00 AM or later, which made early morning classes quite a chore for me. Enter my wife, Mandy, who I mentioned above.

Mandy is a morning person. It’s not that she doesn’t need much sleep (she does) but that she doesn’t like sleeping in because it takes away productive hours from the day. This isn’t much of an issue any more because we have three small boys at home who wake up between 6:30 and 7:30 AM pretty much regardless of what time they go to bed the night before.

I’ve been able to pick up some good habits from my wife (although not nearly as many as she would like me to, I’m sure) and the need to get up and get going is one of them. The problem is that I just don’t have much energy in the morning and it still takes me quite a long while to get going (or, as Mandy puts it, I like to piddle in the morning).

Two recent articles, one on the effects of morning workouts and one on personal effectiveness, are re-motivating me to take another look at my early morning habits and see if I can wring just a bit more out of life by taking advantage of all of the hours God has blessed me with.

Well, that and the fact that I’ve signed up (again!) to run a half-marathon in April and will need the early morning hours for the workouts necessary to get ready.

What about you? Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Why Doing Nothing Is Hard

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As my wife, Mandy, likes to point out, I don’t do well with long silences. This is never truer than in a classroom setting such as the classes that I teach at Lipscomb or in the Bible class that we attend at Harpeth Hills. If I ask a question or–and this is even worse–the teacher asks a question and no one offers up a response, I start to get really antsy and want nothing more than to fill in the blank space. It’s not that I feel that I always have the right (or best) answer, it’s simply that I don’t tolerate the silence well.

I find this true in my professional life as well. I typically don’t like to only have one thing going at a time because I’m afraid that there will be lulls in the action and that I won’t have anything to do (something that occurs with ever increasing infrequency now a days). When working in my home office, I prefer to have some kind of background noise on to help keep me focused (at least that’s what I tell myself). I also enjoy waking up in the middle of the night with an idea and I keep paper and pen in my night stand to capture these revelations that are proof that I don’t like to let my mind shut down: even during sleep.

Why is this? What is the cause of this character flaw? Perhaps it’s a lack of patience. Maybe I fear discovering that I like mindless downtime and that, once discovered, I’ll have a hard time continuing to motivate myself to be as productive as I normally am. Maybe I just don’t like feeling awkward when a question is posed and no one wants to answer. Whatever the reason, it’s a response / habit I know that I need to learn to control.

Peter Bergman offers an incredibly interesting opinion as to what happens when we don’t allow ourselves to opportunity to do nothing:

It’s ironic because the less we live in the current moment, the more mistakes we’ll make in it and the more material we’ll have to stress about in the next moment. My biggest obstacle? Time. With so much to do, it’s counterintuitive to take time to sit and do nothing. Here’s the most interesting thing: sitting and doing nothing has made me significantly more efficient. 20 minutes of meditation helps me avoid hours of time lost in unproductive thought, unconstructive comments, and unstrategic actions.

Do you want one more example of the fact that I am completely wrapped up in this mindset (I almost said ‘hopelessly’ but I don’t think that’s the case)? I can’t even brush my teeth for two minutes without having a book or magazine ready to read at the same time. I can’t even practice good dental hygiene without engaging in multitasking!

Meditation may not be your cup of tea but I challenge you to try it sometime. It definitely takes practice and discipline but I think you’ll be surprised at the benefits. When I was much younger I was actively involved in the martial arts and we did a fair amount of meditation. Maybe you (and I) should try a mid-day nap? Whatever solution you come up with, I hope you find yourself more peaceful, productive, and generally happier with the results.

So, what should I do with the thought that doing nothing for limited amounts of time will actually make me more productive during the time when I’m actually working? I’m not sure yet: I feel that I need to research and think about all of the possibilities for a while. How about you?

Work, Recycled

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Let me let you in on a little secret: Good students complete every assignment they’re given from scratch; Great students recycle previous work for current assignments. How can this be, you say? It’s because great students take previous ideas, continue to refine them, and make them better over time. They also save themselves quite a bit of time and labor, which is another way of saying they’re more productive than most other students.

While I was in graduate school I developed an interest in online privacy. What started out as a presentation on online privacy and your company, became a paper on online privacy and P3P, and finally manifested itself as yet another paper on a global perspective on online privacy. It wasn’t that I turned in the same paper three times, I continued to dig deeper for each assignment, which led me to a much deeper understanding of my chosen subject.

Why should this practice stop once you’re out of school? Why can’t we apply the same lesson to our professional assignments? Dawn Foster recently posted an article on GigaOM advocating for this practice at work. She argues that you can save a lot of time while providing higher quality work and answers by reusing and recycling your work.

I heartily agree. Every email doesn’t demand a unique answer. Parts of that well-received report can be reused in subsequent reports. Processes that are well-documented will lead to more consistent service delivery.

So why do we feel bad when we take advantage of the copy-and-paste function? Why don’t we use it more to be more productive and deliver better work? Are you ready to start?

UPDATE: Read an interesting article that attempts to answer the question “What’s Wrong With Students Reusing Papers?” The answer they’re searching for: Nothing.

What Should I REALLY Be Working On?

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If you’re anything like me, you occasionally (or often) find yourself spinning your wheels doing busy work and not really moving anything (like your business or career) forward. Sometimes this is avoidable: Bills have to be paid, presentations have to be edited, and the trash does have to go out and, unless you have an assistant or someone to delegate to, you have to complete these tasks. There are other times, however, when I use busy work as an excuse to keep me from doing something more profitable but that I (for whatever reason) simply don’t want to do right then.

Maybe it’s the coaching meeting you need to have with a struggling employee. Perhaps is the difficult phone call you need to make to a client or a vendor.  Sometimes it’s the meeting with the accountant that you’re pretty sure is going to involve some bad news. Whatever the distasteful task is that you (and I) keep putting off is, we’re putting off something that may be extremely important to us making forward progress.

Maurilio Amorim, the owner of The A Group, recently published a blog post that really brought this idea in to focus for me. In it he talks about the unplanned moments that we all experience from time-to-time and how we often waste them on busy work. When he finds himself in these moments he asks a very important question: What should I do for my business that only I can do? This thought really crystallizes the importance of certain tasks over others and should help you (and me) focus on them more.

Another tool that I’m trying out in order to keep me better focused on the important tasks at hand is one that I’m borrowing from Michael Hyatt, who I’ve mentioned before. He published his current workflow system on his blog and I really like it. Where the two ideas dovetail nicely is that if Mr. Hyatt feels that an item is actionable and can be done right now (or is critical to his business) he’ll do it right then. He doesn’t procrastinate or hide behind other busy work: He simply does the task and moves on. For tasks that can and should be deferred he will while others will be delegated.

Perhaps even more powerful is what he does with items that aren’t actionable. They’re either deleted or filed for reference the FIRST time he touches them. How many emails do you (or I) have in our Inbox that just sit there because we don’t want to deal with them when the ugly truth is that there’s nothing to deal with? They’re either a simply FYI or trash and that’s exactly how we should be treating them.

So, are you ready to make a change? I’m definitely still a work in progress but I’m excited by the thought of focusing on what’s really important by asking two questions: 1) What should I be doing for my business (or myself) that only I can do? And 2) What actionable tasks can I take care of right now?

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent post on “The first rule of doing work that matters“.

Shaving Hours Off My Work Week

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Let me start with a disclaimer: I love Michael Hyatt’s blog. There is rarely a week that goes by that I don’t recommend it to someone and I could (almost) write a corresponding blog post for each and every one of his. For those of you that don’t recognize his name, Mr. Hyatt is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the largest Christian publishing company in the world.

Mr. Hyatt recently re-posted an article entitled “How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week”, which really struck a chord with me (especially since I said goodbye to the 40-hour work week a long time ago). I agree that the premise of The 4-Hour Work Week promoted by Timothy Ferriss probably isn’t reasonable but we can all use some short cuts to be more productive (I also found Getting Things Done a bit too self-helpish for me).

After reading his post, here’s what I’ve committed to:

  1. I will engage in a weekly preview at 8:00 AM on Monday mornings (Eventually I’d like to move this to Sunday evenings but I’m just not there yet).
  2. I will engage in a weekly review at 4:30 PM on Friday afternoons.
  3. I will be proactive about scheduling time to get my work done, including specific times to tasks in Outlook.
  4. I will limit my time spent with Google Reader to one 30-minute block of time from 4:00-4:30 PM each weekday.
  5. I will do easy (or quick) tasks immediately to avoid touching them more than once.

Many (if not all) of these items have already been committed to my Outlook calendar and synced to my iPhone in an effort to keep me honest and we’ll see how successful I can be. I am confident, however, that even applying a few of Mr. Hyatt’s thoughts on a consistent basis will help me to be more productive.

On a personal note, I really struggle with the idea of cultivating a habit of non-finishing, especially when it comes to books. I’m an avid reader that averages 3-4 books a month from a variety of genres and on a myriad of topics. I understand that all books are not created equally and that some aren’t worth reading but how can you ever be sure that one is not worth finishing? What if the most relevant thought to you is found in the next-to-last chapter?

Do you have any other tricks or habits that have helped you be more productive and work less? If so, please pass them along.