Thinking about being productive and how to increase productivity
I recently went on a course on developments in digital marketing. My main reason for being there was to network with local businesses and speak to the course leader whom I knew. During the course we had to work in pairs to solve a problem that the course leader had set online, we were given a deadline and off we went. I had the fortune to work with a very experienced woman and we used her new laptop (MacBook Pro…great choice) to do the activity. Things went well for the first 3 minutes until her TweetDeck began pinging her with new messages. Each time a new message popped-up she would lose her focus and look to the right-hand corner of her screen to see the message. The pinging occurred every 2 minutes and we never completed the task properly. How many hours a week will be wasted and how many assignments will be delayed as a consequence of these seemingly minor distractions? Employee productivity is clearly important.
“Don’t bother him, he’s wired in”
- The Social network
This quote crystalizes the state of being productive, well at least the state where we stand a chance of getting there. This line was taken from the film The Social Network, you know the Facebook film, and shows how programmers in this environment put their headphones on to get time to focus. This is what we need to do. Let’s look at the reasons we sometimes get distracted:
The Un-Productivity Check List
Try to answer these questions as truthfully as you can.
1. When I work on [Add Important Task Here] I always close my browser window.
2. I limit time on [Favorite Social Networking site] to x minutes in the morning, a touch after lunch and a brief stint in the afternoon.
3. I switch off my mobil phone (or keep it on silent with phone facing down – If you’re a parent and switch your mobile off but leave the screen facing up you’re OK too)
4. I set my email software (Mail, Outlook etc) to ‘Offline’.
If you can say YES to 3/4 you’re almost ‘Wired In’ – well done. If not consider the amount of time you are wasting in a day\week\year? How is that impacting on your work(load)? If you don’t notice any impact on your work and you said YES to 1-2 that’s even worse…
The only distraction we need in front of us should be our: Goals, USPs or Purpose. Put these clearly somewhere, post it notes on your wall, on your desktop or do like me and print them on my coffee mug (though that is a tiny bit sad…). So next time you need to write that all important blog post, get wired in and focus.
Hi Johannes – have you read Rework? There’s some nice tips in there for productivity.
Hi,
Yes great book with several useful ideas for improving your work(load). I read another book recently which deals with work ethics called The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferris), well worth a look too : )
Best wishes,
Johannes
Some very good tips. I spent some time away from project work doing some thinking about new ideas and it needed to turn everything off to avoid all of the distractions. I do fine that having google and all the other search engines a massive distraction! Everytime I think of something that I’m interested in I think ‘i’ll just have a look on the web for that!’
Hi Scott,
Thanks for commenting.
I am in complete agreement. Finding other things to do than what you set out to do is sometimes hard. When I work now I always switch off or shut down apps and email clients and try my hardest not to get disrupted my other “noise” for example persistent colleagues ; ) (4-Hour Work Week by Ferriss really gave me a lot of ideas how to handle the latter!). I also focus on what I decided to do in my action plan and what my Social Media goals are. These steps work well for me.
Funnily enough, we’ve just spent the day training people on twitter for business and the first thing we do with Tweetdeck is to show everyone how go to turn off all those annoying “pings” everytime you get a new message. We also tell them to set up a divert so that all the social media e-mails go into a different folder so that you can look at them when you decide to do so, rather than get distracted by them during the day.