Super Productivity Boosters Part 1

Super productivity boosters multiply your daily output by applying simple techniques and easily learnable skills you most likely already have. The right productivity booster correctly applied can double or triple your effective work output for a day.

Techniques that are super productivity boosters need to be incredibly simple and beautifully elegant. A complex ritual requiring a mentally challenging process to shave a couple of minutes off a task that might take two or more hours is hardly the best solution. You do not want to become bogged down in the details of “how” (how to do something) when you should really be concentrating on the “what” (what you are doing).

Super productivity boosters have to be executable with tools and skills you already possess. You cannot try to optimise your day by constantly learning new skills. Skills that once adopted you may not yet be wholly facile with for some time to come. Super productivity derives from skills you are proficient with. You apply habitual techniques that work to increase immediate productivity whilst slowly adopting new skills to enhance your already existing ones.

Each technique must be cheap, requiring no money or very little financial expenditure. Remember, the idea is to boost your productivity, not give yourself an excuse to buy more stuff you do not need; you do not want to create an errand that you must take care of before you can begin. That purchase of stuff, that errand you have to run, they are truly just excuses for procrastination.

Adopted super productivity boosters should not require any major changes in your current behaviour or daily routine. Of course, there will be some change, but the smaller the change the better. Small changes you are able to easily integrate in to your existing schedule and work pattern.

1. Time Boxing With Hard Start and End Deadlines

Time boxing is the simple act of allocating a block of time to particular tasks or projects and ensuring that the amount of time you work on them does not exceed the allocated time for the day. Assume you have several projects that need to be worked on, each one creeping forward by a few hours a day, for instance, a blog article, a client pitch, responding to e-mails and exercising could all be on just one-day’s schedule.

It is very easy for any one of your tasks to consume the entire day. This is especially true for the easier tasks, the tasks you find most interesting, or the tasks you are very good at so they are undemanding to perform.

By allocating a fix amount of time that you will work on the task, with a hard deadline of when you will stop work on the task, you prevent any one task from over-running your day. You also prevent yourself listlessly bouncing from one task to another when you are finding it hard to concentrate.

For an added boost, add a hard start deadline too. The task must begin at a particular time, meaning that you remove any room for procrastinating on working on the task for the day. It is no good getting to 3PM in the afternoon and finding you still have 8 hours of time-boxed tasks remaining. Adding in that hard starting deadline pushes you forward letting you know how important it is.

2. Build Functional Routines

Have a task or group of tasks you need to perform regularly? Server maintenance? Cold-calling customers? Build a functional routine to handle it.

How do you do that? Document the steps you have to go through to perform a particular task that you execute regularly and then stick to the step-by-step process every time you undertake the work.

By building functional routines, you push yourself forward and you know precisely where you are and where you need to be. Rather than stopping and asking yourself “what next?” every time you undertake the task or you overlook some crucial step or neglect to follow up on something, you are actually ensuring all of your tees are crossed and ayes are dotted and absolutely nothing falls through the cracks.

It is important that your functional routines are documented and written down; this ensures you are following the plan and not deviating from it on a whim or due to an idle distraction. This documenting can also be coupled with the next productivity booster. The small micro tasks on your functional routines should not be more than a minute or two in length usually. By setting up limits on how much time to spend on each step you do not have any one-step dominate your workflow, nor do you end up with a step of “magic happens here.”

By keeping each step in the functional routine small, it prevents you from being distracted by something else. Either you are executing each step in the routine closely or you are not. Keeping the steps small and executable in short time periods prevents you from slipping in some other little unrelated task that takes you off course. With functional routines, you can account for every minute of your time that you spend.

Building a functional routine is not a lightweight solution unfortunately, if what you are attempting to do is non-repetitive or requires a lot of creative thought or multiple branching paths to get through, it may be wiser to choose another technique such as “documenting process and procedure” (see below). It takes a considerable amount of time to write out all of the steps required in a functional routine so the technique is not ideal for every situation.

3. Document Process And Procedure

Documenting your process or procedure you engage in a particular task, especially if it is repetitive in any way, lets you teach it to other people. It also lets you internalize the task easier by laying down precisely what you are doing at any given stage. Even if the task you are working on is not repeatable or requires a certain amount of one-off creative thought you can still document it as you work so that at the end of the day you have concrete proof of what you have done and a hard document of what you tried at each stage.

Do not confuse documenting process and procedure with building functional routines, as they are significantly different from each other. Documenting happens at the point of execution, as you are doing the work. Documenting is a stream of consciousness structured note taking exercise that you use in parallel to your work. As you complete a part of a task, write it down, describe what you did, the decisions you went through, your failures and successes, discovered research, citations, anything that is to do with the work.

Later on you can review your documented process to see if there is anything within that can be turned in to a routine that you can re-use again. Often you will find that there is nothing re-usable if you work in a creative environment as much of what you do on a daily basis is unique to a particular situation.

4. Box Your Task Categories

If you are anything like me, you often have days where the number of tasks on the list far exceeds anything reasonable. For whatever reason, tasks just keep piling on until they became unmanageable.

When I get days where I just cannot make headway due to the sheer amount of incoming requests, every task itself is overwhelming the system, everything seems to be falling apart and there is no time to perform proper triage, this productivity booster will let you get back on top of your day no matter how bad it has gotten.

This technique assumes that the tasks you already have, along with the new tasks are urgent and important. Say, you are attempting to deliver a milestone to a client by end of day, another overbearing client you cannot put off is making demands on your time, the network is slowing down, the version control server is acting up, and the coffee maker refuses to produce anything except decaf and it just feels like the world is coming to an end. Because my company works on many rescue mission type projects where we are called in to save the show we get several days on each project just like the one I outlined above.

Most of your tasks will already be assigned to individual categories, but new tasks that have come in, or pure interruption tasks are not yet categorised, stop, take a breath, and for two or three minutes total, place each task in to the proper category or correct project category where it belongs. Any new tasks, even if they are an interruption task, e.g. someone asking for help, should be categorised from this point forward.

After you have categorised everything, triage the categories instead. Which category is the most important and urgent? Which category is the least urgent and least important? Once you have the categories sorted out, trim out the all of the tasks the important and urgent category that are of the lowest importance and lowest urgency.

If your tasks are not prioritised, spend a minute or two doing that now assigning a simple plus or minus to each task. A minus indicates that you consider the task to be low priority in both urgency and importance, and a plus indicates an urgent and important task. Focus on only a single category.

Now allocate time, somewhere around 30 minutes to one hour for that category, and work on just the tasks in that category and nothing else. Any interruptions should be evaluated based on their category first, not their importance or urgency. Unless the building is burning down around you pretty much any task that comes in no matter how urgent or important it can be pushed back for 30 minutes or an hour.

After you have completed the most urgent and most important task out of the category, within the allocated time period, you can move on to the next task. If the most important task would take longer than the period you have allowed, work for the fixed amount of time, then stop and re-evaluate. Once the period of time is up, re-evaluate your categories.

Repeat the same steps from earlier: Determine the most urgent and most important category, determine the next task within that category to work on, decide on the time period, and get to work. Keep iterating this process until you are either back on top of the mounting task list or you have time available to triage and prioritise.

5. Micro Tasks

This is tip is for you if you have a small project or just a single large task that takes more than an hour to complete and are finding it difficult to get yourself motivated to move to the next step.

You might not be able to imagine walking from one side of the country to the other but you can imagine taking a single step, and then another step, placing one foot in front of the other, eventually, given enough time, you will walk that distance. The same goes for large tasks of even just one hour.

Build a list of micro tasks that take less than sixty seconds to complete, for whatever it is you need to do next. By building up a list of micro tasks, you can quickly mark them off as completed, showing that you are making progress and getting things done. The micro tasks break down something more complex in to steps you can easily visualize and relate too.

6. Micro Time

You might have no way to divide a larger task up in to very small micro tasks. The task may just be one big monolithic “thing” and it would take longer to convert the monumental task in to nicely proportioned steps that you can write out — and you are bound to forget a few — before the heat death of the Universe occurs, or you may just not have the time to dedicate in one big chunk. Instead of trying to divide the task up in to smaller tasks, you can divide your time instead.

Micro amounts of time, less than three minutes in total, dedicated towards a task that would ordinarily consume several hours, if you were to proceed from beginning to end, can whittle away slowly at the problem until it is dealt with. You should not apply this technique to everything in your life, though many people do unfortunately, but it can boost productivity by letting you fill in your idle minutes or moving a project forward when you just cannot find the time otherwise.

I use the micro-time productivity booster for getting organizing chores done around my house and office. I might not be able to dedicate 3 hours to re-arranging the server closet but I can grab a pair of zip ties and tidy up several cables in a few minutes.

7. Switch Activities

Muscles get tired and sore when you over-exert them and your mind tires when you work for too long.

Creative tasks or tasks that require large amounts of mental resources such as software development, design, writing, problem solving and other activities have a natural limitation of how long someone can perform them for before needing to take a rest. Your productivity will dwindle rapidly at the natural limits of your concentration.

Switching activities to something less demanding for a few hours will help, personally, I use cooking to relax, and it is a chance to switch off my brain for a while. Cooking a complex meal is an almost meditative thing for me; I have also been known to use a trip to the gym or yoga to clear my mind. Whatever method you choose make sure that the activity you are undertaking is not exerting your brain in the same way that the activity that wore you out has been doing, otherwise you will not gain any benefit from this.

8. Don’t Plan Beyond The Event Horizon

All human endeavours that are undertaken have a natural event horizon beyond which we cannot accurately predict the results due to the number of variables accruing in the system. Even the small projects that you undertake at home and work possess an event horizon that you cannot ably see beyond.

When developing a plan for what you need to work on and in what order, it is acceptable to give rough details for later stages until you are able to determine with greater accuracy precisely what needs to be done when and in what order. It is a balancing act of design up front and flying by the seat of your pants. This knowledge of when how much design to do and how much to fly by the seat of your pants comes through experience and constantly measuring your progress.

Feedback from your measurements, i.e. you are missing scheduled milestones or deadlines by a wide margin because they were created too far in to the future, will inform you as to whether you are over-planning or under-planning.

9. Buddy Up

Having a gym partner or running partner helps you stick to an exercise regime. Joining Weightwatchers gives you a support network to ensure you meet your dietary goals. If you and someone else both have unpleasant tasks or projects to work on, buddying up with a co-worker to help each other out can ensure the project moves at a quicker pace than normal. This is why pair programming can be so productive but also why it can be mentally draining too, when you become distracted the other pulls you back on track, and vice versa.

Of course, this only holds true so long as you both are not chatterboxes continuously distracting each other with idle gossip. If the person you choose to buddy up with is constantly attempting to derail your attention or will not stop with the idle chattering then you need to stop it immediately, firmly and politely, and locate a different work partner at the earliest opportunity.

10. Batch Tasks Together

Much of the personal development advice you read will mention batching errands together but so few mention doing the same with other tasks too.

You already know you need to batch your errands together to be efficient and by collecting other types of tasks together in to bundles you can increase your efficiency at work or around the home too. When you wake up in the morning, you perform much the same routine as any other morning. You brush your teeth, wash up, shave (if appropriate), use the bathroom, and so on. You have already subconsciously batched all of these tasks together so that they are performed in a single location one after the other. You have already figured out that it is inefficient to break up the tasks and have to wander back and forth to the bathroom several times during your morning routine.

So why not attempt to batch other tasks you perform into a single long string?

Cleaning up? Concentrate on only cleaning tasks within a single area. This is actually the best way to clean a home, which I will cover in another article. By concentrating on a single area, you can show real progress being made rather than a scattershot approach that just leaves your home in the same state of disarray as when you began.

Need to research more than one article? Open up several pages in your notebook (you use Microsoft OneNote, right?) and put down notes, URLs of interesting websites, pictures, and other materials for each subject you are working on.

Browse a particular group of websites every day for work? Throw them in their own folder on your desktop and open them all at once. Mozilla Firefox allows you to do this automatically and it is also very easy to do in Internet Explorer with a little scripting.

By spending a little time sorting through your tasks and finding common groupings of tasks you can batch up similar tasks or tasks that take place in the same area into bundles to be done one after the other which can shave valuable hours from your work week.

11. Prune Your Projects

How many of us have tasks that have sat around for months or even years, pending in the background, cluttering up our lives, but not actually adding anything to them. Your task list requires constant pruning and trimming and weeding to ensure that old assignments that we thought important at the time are not just left hanging around with nobody to undertake them.

Once a week, usually as I am determining what I need to do for the next week, I sift through my task list looking for items that somehow fell off the radar, was not completed or have just languished on my task list for a little bit too long and are now beginning to smell somewhat ripe. Many tasks that get added to the list are no longer relevant weeks later, the goals changed, the project moved on, or perhaps the task was not all that important after all

Through regular pruning, I can easily remove dozens of tasks that were deemed important enough to be placed on the task list weeks ago but now these tasks are just mental clutter causing me to worry about them but not actually do anything about them. If your task list is beginning to look like this I suggest you take a long hard look at it and verify what is important and relevant. If the task belongs to a particular project and should not be forgotten, but does not need to be addressed right now, move it back in to the relevant project folder and remove it from your immediate task list.

12. Delete The Task

If you have the power to ignore something, do it. Figure out what the consequences will be for deleting a distasteful task and if the consequences are less than the pain of doing the task, delete it. I am not saying you should throw caution to the wind but how many of us have tasks that “need” to be done but truly do not? You most likely have tasks on your TO DO list that have languished there for months, if not years, anything over 30 days old is probably out of date and no longer relevant or needs to be given a review and overhaul before being undertaken. If you have old tasks that are beginning to go stale, move them off your task list and in to tickler files, someday files, or placed on to their relevant goal or project. Should the task not fall under any of your goals and immediate projects, it is probably low value and should be given serious consideration for an expedited and abrupt elimination.

When I talk of low-value tasks I am not referring to idle pursuits such as playing games or cooking a meal. Low-value tasks, tasks — not activities, there is a distinct difference between the two — are ones where you could easily have someone else do it for you, or where not doing the task would have very little impact on your life. Dusting shelves, folding laundry, sorting out your MP3 collection are all low-value tasks that can easily be taken care of by someone else for a few dollars. For me, laundry is a low-value task and so I just pay a local Laundromat to wash my clothes, dry them, and perform the fluff and fold. All I have to do when once my laundry is complete is take them out of the laundry bag and put them in to the closet and chest of drawers. I have probably done laundry myself a half-dozen times in the past five years at most. The cost of having someone else do the task for me, compared to what I can achieve in that hour, even if it is an idle pursuit, is a marked difference.

That is twelve super productivity boosters that can turn you around when your workday or task list is starting to engulf you. I will continue tomorrow with more super productivity boosters that you can use to get back on track, increase your productivity and wrangle your time more effectively.