Super Productivity Boosters Part 2

Continuing on from the super productivity boosters I wrote about yesterday, here are another dozen techniques you can use to push through your personal productivity dip.

13. Closed Task Lists

We all have a never-ending task list that seems to have tasks added to the end faster than we remove tasks from the front. I do not have enough resources to handle all of the tasks that come my way and I am pretty sure you most likely do not either. In software development, this would give us the classic buffer overflow error where the list of things to do outgrows the available resources, in this case, space to hold the list and enough time to complete them all.

The easiest solution to this problem is to use closed tasks lists for the period, whether it be a day, week or month. Either the previous evening when you are evaluating what tasks you will perform the next day, or at the start of the workday, close your day’s task list to all other tasks. Very few of us have jobs where you cannot fully plan your workday and personal day accounting for almost everything that you will need to get done that day.

If a new task comes in and demands attention, evaluate it for urgency and importance, if it is not absolutely critical that it be handled right then and there, it does not need to be handled that day either. I am talking the rarity of unicorns and virgin princesses here when I say that rarely is a new addition to your TO DO list so urgent and important that you can afford to push it off for two hours to finish your current task but not push it off until the next day.

I would have to say in my own career and of those people I have observed throughout it, that the only reason to focus attention on the new task is because it is fresh and shiny and different and sexy.

14. Don’t Do Sexy

Truly sexy tasks perk your interest and are a huge motivational boost. Sexy tasks present a unique problem that is deep and interesting, that will occupy us for countless hours that we would do even if we were not being paid.

Unfortunately, most of what we take for being a sexy, alluring task is not actually that at all, the fresh and shiny exterior, the chance to do something different and exciting, dazzles us. So ask yourself this question, is the task really all that sexy or is it just appearing sexier that it ordinarily would because you want to be distracted?

The problem with the sexy task, fake or true, is that it distracts us from what we need to be doing right now. If you have one of these land in your lap, no pun intended, it takes an inordinate amount of self-discipline to push it off until later. Rather than getting on with what you should, you use the sexiness as a distraction not to work. Most of the time you are not assigned a truly sexy task, what you wind up with is an ugly, brooding, croaking frog.

15. Frog First

This advice has been given out in a variety of forms by a number of personal development writers, but personally I like the philosophy of “Eat That Frog!” by Brian Tracy, which is probably the most popular version of it.

However the counsel is presented, it all comes down to the same advice. If you are procrastinating endlessly on a task that you just do not want to undertake, and you cannot delete it, move the task to the front of the queue. Take that task on right now, before anything else happens, and begin work on it. Get the unfavourable thing out of the way to free up mental bandwidth for other more important things.

Remember: Procrastination costs you resources in addition to those you are not reaping when you do the work.

Caveat for you: This technique assumes you can move the task to the front of the queue of course. There are some you just cannot do that with, but before you cry out that the task has to stay where it is because of dependencies make sure you have really analysed the situation to ensure this is true. Much of the time you will find the task can be moved about quite easily and it is only some minor issue preventing it from doing so or your own unwillingness to tackle the task that locks it rigidly in place.

16. Dedicated Task Area

If you live in a reasonably modern dwelling you have dedicated areas for sleeping, cooking, cleaning, watching television, eating, and so on. So why not dedicated areas for other types of activities that you enjoy?

Where are your dedicated areas for writing, for programming, for corresponding with people, for your hobby projects?

By setting up specific small areas for particular activities and not letting other activities crowd in to that area you program your mind to expect a certain activity when you are there. You also gather up all of the items necessary to perform whatever task you are undertaking. If you have not switched completely over to on-line bill payments and still have to correspond with companies or individuals via the regular postal service setting up a small, dedicated area where you can handle the correspondence is the perfect solution.

By having somewhere dedicated you can keep pens, writing paper, envelopes, stamps and any other items you need right at hand. You do not waste huge amounts of time looking for the stamps or a pen to fill out a form or where the envelopes have disappeared off to. The dedicated area does not need to be large, just large enough for you to perform your task. The next time you are contemplating an activity, think about how you can dedicate a small amount of space to it in your home or office.

17. Punctuality

Tardiness when arriving client meetings is unforgiveable. Similarly, if you join Toastmasters they do not really appreciate you showing up late every single day. Punctuality is required for many activities and meetings in our life so why not apply punctuality to other areas of your life too? Set times when you will start and stop particular activities.

For this productivity booster to be effective you must start your tasks on time, if you are halfway through a task and need to switch, switch, do not “finish up.” Think of it like one of those Iron Chef TV shows with the countdown clock or a college examination, when the buzzer goes off you have to down utensils or pencils and be done with it, whatever it is, and whatever state it is in. You can come back and do some more tomorrow, or next week, or later, but for right now, it’s over.

The psychology of this particular technique is two-fold. In the first instance, if you are anything like me, you will rapidly get fed up with having a bunch of half-completed tasks so you will learn to budget your time more effectively, you will not try to do in two hours what it would take five or six hours to do.

The second part of the psychology drives you to take care of the task and finish it up in the allotted time. You have set yourself up with your own deadline pressures. Whatever task is next to be done takes precedence over whatever it is you are currently doing, by setting up that specific time you are programming your subconscious to get down to it and just do the work necessary.

18. Important Tasks First, Urgent Tasks Last

There is a significant difference between important and urgent tasks. Important tasks are those that you must take care of, paying your bills, calling up clients, following up with new business opportunities. Urgent tasks are those that require attention now. You can assign tasks in to one of several categories:

Urgent & important –These types of tasks are your bills that are overdue or due today, the heart attack you are currently having, the house has just caught fire, and the fact you have no clean underwear to wear to the office today.

Important – These are your bills that are due tomorrow, your health and fitness, and making sure you pick up some flowers for your spouse to show that you remembered your anniversary. It is best to take care of an important task earlier rather than later, important tasks should be done in a timely fashion and not procrastinated on before the task becomes both important and urgent.

Urgent – These are tasks that scream at you to be done but they are like the child who did not get their way, nothing is truly wrong, but if the child screams scream loud enough, you will drop everything to take care of their needs. You might have received this loud-mouthed annoying little “urgent” task from a colleague, or worse, a manager with poor time management and prioritization skills, or it might have just turned up on your radar because you overlooked something. Figure out if the task is just screaming for attention or really does need to be dealt with right now. If it is truly urgent and really needs handling, it is “urgent and important”

Not urgent nor important – Laundry, defragmenting your hard drive, catching up on latest episode of CSI, hanging up artwork on the wall, reading comic books and playing World of Warcraft. Not urgent nor important tasks are what make life liveable and fun. Many people state that not urgent nor important never take precedence over important or important and urgent but at some point in time you reach your limit on what you can achieve in a single day, what you can do before someone else needs to do their part or just need to do something for yourself for a while. With important, important and urgent, and not urgent nor important tasks you must strike a balance between all three categories but in your busy life you will often find that not urgent nor important tasks are generally pushed to one side for the purely “urgent” tasks.

Urgent tasks are often thrust on you by somebody’s lack of planning, inconsiderate nature, or ineptitude. It is rare that purely urgent tasks are so vital that they need to bump all other tasks out of the way to be taken care of.

Determining what is important, urgent, and not urgent nor important is called task triage and is a well-honed and well-practised skill amongst anyone who is interested in managing his or her tasks and activities effectively. Task triage should be performed almost every time you acquire a new task. There are many tasks in your life that will not require you to triage them, should you take a dump now or later? Do I really need to shower and brush my teeth before heading to the office after completing that five-mile run? Trust me people, these are not tasks you need to triage on. The sorts of tasks you should be triaging on are those ones that are not routine, that usually appear on your task list almost without warning.

If you are not diligent in how often you perform your task triage, which should be ongoing, you will find that the number of urgent but not particularly important tasks on your task list has grown considerably. Suddenly you are swamped and too busy to do any real work; you may even find you are doing somebody else’s work for them because they have managed to snuck in some of their tasks. Be very careful about dealing with the “urgent task.” They usually are not.

19. Delegate The Task

Many people have difficulty delegating work to other people. This difficulty stems from their own psychology and if you listen carefully you will hear a lot of excuses and poor reasoning to justify why somebody cannot or will not delegate.

Everybody has a fear of letting going, of losing control, of believing that what the other person will do will not be done well, or as well as the delegating person could do it. Often the flawed reasoning that it will take longer to explain to the other person what is desired and how it should be done than it would to just do it. The sheer number of excuses is near limitless and they are all founded in fear.

Yet, even if you hold the lowliest jobs in the world, you delegate almost daily. Even unemployed, you are delegating tasks to other people. You delegate food preparation to the take-out counter clerk. You delegate pizza cooking and delivery when you order a pizza. If you are like me, you delegate your laundry, dry cleaning and house cleaning too. Unless you repair your own vehicle, you delegate car repair. If you are not computer savvy, you delegate computer repair and software installation. When you order cable or satellite service, you delegate the service installation. You delegate taking out the trash to your children or spouse, and you delegate carting the trash away early in the morning to someone you have never met. If you move and hire a moving company, youhave delegatedthat too. Dental, medical, fashion advice from personal shoppers at Nordstrom, bagging groceries, carrying groceries out to the car, smog check on the car, car repair after the accident, driving a bus when you have to take public transport.

So why do you have difficulty delegating other tasks?

I know I belaboured the point in my list above, but how much you delegate without realising it is astounding. Yet getting someone to actually assign tasks consciously is next to impossible.

Because we are not trained to delegate, because we have a fear of losing control, these two things combined make us afraid of handing over part of our lives to someone else. But delegating is easy, and for the low value areas of your life you can gain back so much free time. How many hours do you expend doing laundry that you could use in other pursuits?

You might not be able to delegate in your daily job but there are dozens of areas of your life where you can have someone else take care of it for you.

Shopping for groceries? Laundry? House cleaning? Paying bills? Organizing your home? DIY projects around the house? All areas you can use to start practising your delegating powers. Given time and practice you will soon be delegating the dispatching of annoying heroic superspies to your henchmen in no time.

20. Task Stacking

We have heard a lot about multitasking and how it increases productivity or the opposite, of how it decreases productivity, but we never hear much, if anything at all, about task stacking. Task stacking is the technique of taking multiple tasks and performing them simultaneously. The tasks have to be complimentary with each other; usually a cerebral task and a manual task, and neither one can demand your full attention. One of the easiest to perform is listening to an audio book whilst driving or running errands. When I am doing something manual that does not require a lot of concentration, so I would not recommend you do this when operating heavy machinery or using power tools that could cause serious injury, I will be listening to audio books through my iPod or SONY Ericsson MP3 capable cell phone. There is a variety of places where listening to audio books is appropriate: exercising at the gym, walking or jogging, driving on your daily commute, shopping for groceries, etc.

Years ago, I invested in a good quality treadmill and built a custom desk that fits it perfectly. On this treadmill desk, I have a full size computer keyboard and mouse, two 21” monitors, a powerful workstation and an area for books or magazines that I can read. When I am walking on the treadmill, which can be upwards of two or more hours, I can stack tasks very easily; I often walk, play World of Warcraft, and listen to an audio book at the same time. I can be browsing websites (thereby getting my goof off time guilt free), walking and watching a documentary at the same time. When I am on the treadmill, I also use that time to write articles or catch up on my overflowing e-mail inbox.

There are so many areas in your life where you can combine a not particularly taxing manual activity with something more cerebral. I will definitely be writing more about task stacking in a future article.

21. Daily Quests

In many massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games there are daily quests that heroes may undertake to earn themselves gold and other rewards. These daily quests are often unpalatable and a grind to perform but people do perform them, day after day. The fact that this takes place, by people you and I would consider many of life’s underachievers where their lives remain constantly out of balance is a testament to the lure of a daily reward and the potency of a step-by-step plan of what must be done.

By setting up daily quests for yourself that take between 30 minutes and a few hours, with a fixed, reasonable reward, if you succeed, is a powerful motivational force that can give you many short-term boosts to your productivity for tasks you find distasteful. By setting out what the task is, any steps to be performed, and a reward at the end you let external motivation take over for a while which can be very powerful for small periods.

22. Visualised Steps

Often we fail at our tasks and projects because the end result is too far off and too ill defined to motivate us to complete the work required. Ever been given a LEGO model to construct? In the box of LEGO arrives a booklet in graphic detail describing how to construct the model depicted on the box lid. You can see the end result and know what you will achieve if you put in enough work. If you apply the same technique, creating a clear mental image of what each stage will look like as you proceed you will find that you are able to construct the equivalent of a LEGO model for whatever project you are undertaking. Your mental visualization of each stage should be thoroughly detailed. Use texture, colour, weight, shape in your visualization of the project. If it is a physical project and parts move, or you need to install equipment or move equipment from one location to another, visualize the moving motion too. But remember, it is the individual steps that are important to visualise. Visualizing the end results anyone can do, you must concentrate on how to get there.

If you feel creative and have an artistic bent, you can also create sketches of each visualised stage of the project before you proceed. The sketches can be as simple or as detailed as you choose, though I personally prefer to initially create simple sketches of each stage modify earlier sketches as my idea develops.

23. Change Your Location

The area you are in right now may not be conducive to performing the kind of work that you need to be doing for a particular project or task. You might be sat at your computer workstation keyboard in your den, with large LCD screens and super comfy chair, surrounded by plastic action figures and various desk toys that can distract you, a cell phone that will not stop ringing and a TV blaring in the background. None of these minor distractions will let you be super productive when you need to program, draw art, write that term paper or hold a client phone conversation.

Multi-purpose tools are rarely as useful, as powerful or as versatile as the individual tools alone and the same rings true for multi-purpose work areas or living areas. The detritus of a different or previous activity clouds the mind and adds mental background noise to your current activity. Multi-use work areas are so cluttered you find yourself staring off at items used for a previous task that still need to be put away, you are reminded constantly of what has yet to be done of another project instead of focusing all of your energies on the current one at hand. By changing your location, you change your expectations, you change what is expected of you, and you can program your mind to expect a certain activity to happen. The ritual of a changed location, of preparing for that location, of anticipating it can be a powerful directional force that can increase your productivity significantly.

24. No More Tasks

You need to have the power to shut down your task lists to all new incoming requests. Seriously, having tasks that stretch off in to the indefinite future is doing you absolutely no good at all.

I wrote earlier about not planning your task list beyond a project’s event horizon and the same goes for general tasks too. If it would take more than a more or two to complete the tasks on your current TO DO list, and those tasks are so far off in the future then it is irrelevant whether they are next month or next year when you get to them. In the span of time between now and when you get to the task your situation will have changed, your goals will have changed, your requirements will have changed, your resources will have changed, the information you have available to you will have changed. If everything has changed, putting an explicit and specific task on your list is worthless.

If you have “stuff” that needs to be done, that is not project specific, record it in a “someday” file that you can review once a month and pull out what you need.

The dozen pieces of advice today and the dozen from yesterday are not the final word on the subject of productivity boosters. The individual boosters I mentioned in this article can each be elaborated on extensively but they form a good foundation and starting point for anybody looking to increase their daily output.