How much of what you do during an average day is purely volentery? I mean how much of it is the decision 100% with you over whether you do it or not, with no adverse concequences to swing your decision? My guess – less that 1%. Either your boss, your wife, your son, your neighbour, your Dad, or you firend asked you to do it most of the time.

And that is fine – we will be asking others to do a fair bit for us too (you’re not? Are you sure? You really should start doing so…). But there is one thing you can do to make doing these things more efficient, more satisfying, and to a higher quality – ask a load of questions up front. And what should you ask? Well, as it happens I have a list for you:

1. When does it need to be done by? How long before this deadline do you need it?

2. How long do you think it will take?

3. Where or with who is the information I need to do this held?

4. In what form and format do you want the products/results? Have you got an example you can show me?

5. Is there any costs to this? How do we plan on keeping these in check?

6. Do you want regular updates, regular drafts, or just an end product? Can I give regular updates please?

7. What information do you already have on this? Can I have it?

8. Do you already know what result you are expect/want? Can you tell me up front?

9. Can I get help from other people with this if it is appropriate?

And the tenth question? It is actually one to ask yourself:

10. What can I learn from doing this job/work?

The other benefit of asking these questions is, especially in a work environment, that it is amazing how much more confidence and co-oporation you get by doing so. It shows that you are taking what they have asked you to do seriously, and that you want to do a good job.

So your action points? Well just one today:

• Ask these questions before you start on a job or piece of work

Other posts to enjoy:

• An Old Hack, a New App, and Why I Got More Done
• Why Should I Set Myself Goals?
• 5 Productivity Tips I Just Can’t Do
• Streamline Your Productivity
• The 3 Truths of Office Politics

Rubbish title I know. But it is important. A productivity process is something we use to help ourselves become more productive. It might be a to do list. It might be the way we arrange our desk. Even the time we get up in the morning and start working.

These processes go through a four stage cycle which indicates how ‘sticky’ they are – that is, how easy it is for use to use them versus not use them.

Lets have a look at the four stages:

New [medium sticky]

When we first discover a new way of doing things, we have two pulls on us – an excitement and an interest that encourages us to use the process, and a protective/don’t-like-change/can’t-be-bothered-to-learn push against it. Most people manage to give something sufficient attention to see if it works.

Passe [medium slippy]

Oddly, the excitement of new-ness often subsides before we get comfortable with using something are part of our routine. This is a difficult time for such processes, and is the most common time to abandon them.

Routine [very sticky]

Once we get through the difficult Passe phase, then processes become embedded in our daily life. We just do them. Almost by instinct. Golfers called this ‘grooved’ – you have done something so many times that it becomes the sub-conscious things you do, and the route of least resistance.

Fatigue [very slippy]

When you have been doing the same thing for a long period of time, then fatigue kicks in. You start to take the benefits for granted, and focus on how tiresome it has become. This is when we tend to throw our systems and processes out the window – when I declare once again that I am moving back to a paper and pencil GTD system.

These phases happen whether we like them or not. And usually the latter. What we can try and effect however is how big the two most sticky phases are, and how small the slippy phases are. The more time you can keep what you are using in the New and Routine phases, then the more productive you will be.

How do we do this? Firstly, make new stuff routine straight away – use it again, and again, and again until you don’t have to think about it. If you can do this before the novelty of it’s flashing lights and pretty colours wears off, then you have done well.

Secondly, once something is Routine, then change little bits of it frequently to keep it fresh. Change the font. Use a different colour pen. By a new notebook when you are three-quarters full rather than painfully filling out the last pages.

So action points:

• Identify what you use and do to be productive
• Decide where in the cycle they all are, and how long until they move into another part
• Plan how you are going to keep things in New and Routine

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• The Case For Everything Buckets
• The Future of GTD
• My Process for Managing All That Information
• 5 Tasks That Shouldn’t Be On Your To Do List
• A Paper Based GTD System

We live in a world of ‘experts’. The sheer amount of freely available information out there, especially on the ‘interwebs’, mean we are all ‘experts’. In any field we want. All we need to do is read the Wikipedia article and a couple of forum posts and we know all we need to know. There is a whole debate to be had over whether this is truly empowering or not (just ask any doctor friends you have whether it makes giving people the right diagnosis any easier now all their patient has self-diagnosed before they arrive).

What I want us to have a think about is how this expert-culture effects how we get things done, and the speed at which we are best able to produce what we need to produce, to the standard that is to be expected.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. I work in Mergers & Acquisition – it is expected of me that I can pull together a list of who-bought-who in a particular sector. My colleague and I have two different approaches to this:

1. My colleague reads every trade magazine there is, and all the industry websites every morning so that he spots and knows all the data.
2. I haven’t close to that amount of patience, but I have invested the time in setting up a system which means the information is e-mailed to me daily and sits in a convenient folder ready for use.

Both applicable approaches. My colleague is able to pull the information together when required, very quickly from the top of his head. But then he spends an hour-a-day doing this rather than other work. And if he forgets something, then, well, it is forgot.

In this example I think the jury is still out on which way is the best. But the more information there is out there, then the harder it becomes to stay on top of it. And the culture we have is that we are all expected to be an expert – and you can bet your bottom dollar that the guy asking you the questions has the basic stuff covered-off himself.

There are a number of approaches you can take to this:

• Narrow down your field. As the information increases, then decrase the scope of your research. For example, everyone is an expert on animals, most on cats, some on siamese cats, but you could be an expert on a rare breed of siamese cat!
• Try and keep up. You need to be willing to invest the time, and have the mental capacity to retain all this information (which rules this out for me!).
• Openly be a generalist. Rather than narrow down your scope as the volume of data increases, instead restrict the depth to which you research it. I don’t know everything about British History – no one does; and I am not an expert in any particular period or theme; but I am a pretty good generalist in the subject, so am very useful in a pub quiz .
• Learn where to look. Now we come back to my approach at work. Without the ability to know everything, or the luxury to be able to make your field more narrow or shallow, then the best approach is to set up systems to capture the data ready for when you need it.

There are a wealth of tools out there to help you do this. Invest a good day or so purely into setting yourself up with the infrastructure you need:

1. Make a list of all the websites that hold information on your different areas – order them by usefulness.
2. Set-up RSS feeds from websites that provide news updates, and have them sent somewhere that allows you to search.
3. Sign-up to e-mail newsletters that collate the news for you – why sieve through a daily news e-mail when someone will be doing that for you and putting it in a form you can search the content of later.
4. Find out which colleagues, customers, and contacts know the most about what. Make sure you build up a relationship with the most useful so that you can call them when you need too. Often these people also have access to reports and opinions that are not in the public domain and will get you access to them.
5. What are the topic standard texts? Make sure you have a copy of each in your bookshelf.
6. Who runs that subject? The world is full of organisations. Every topic, industry and subject has at least one voluntary body that looks after it’s interests. Join them. Talk to them, and engage.
7. Know when it is best to recommend someone else. Sometimes, it is just better for that colleague to do the piece of work rather than yourself – you’ll look a lot smarter saying “happy to do it, although I think Pete has his finger on the pulse more than me on that one. Shall I support him in getting that information?”, than producing second-rate work, or telling people what they have already learnt from Wikipedia.

Lesson:

You don’t need to learn everything – you just need to know where to look to find it when you need it.

Action points:

1. Identify what topics do you need to be an ‘expert’ in
2. Work out where the best information is kept
3. Set-up your information infrastructure

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• The Four Phases of a Productivity Process
• When Do You Have Capacity to Work?
• An Old Hack, a New App, and Why I Got More Done
• Consumption vs Creation
• What to do When the World is Against You

As human beings we have a finite capacity to get things done. This is limited by time, attention span, motivation, priorities, and a whole heap of less nagging, but equally as disruptive things. Our limited capacity varies through the day – the graph below is utterly fictitious from a numerical point of view, but the trend reflect my own capacity on an average day:

Very productive in the mornings and evenings, with a small window of usefulness mid-afternoon. Usually after some chocolate. This is a nice to know until you overlay the timing of work and tasks arriving for me to do:

Still looks roughly right until you think carefully – from about midday until 9pm my work load is in excess of my capacity. ie. I just don’t have the time to handle it all and end up sulking, complaining to people at the water cooler, and searching Monster.com. Worst of all, from 7pm until midday I am revved up and ready to go, but there is little going on so am mainly chatting, disrupting others, and reading productivity blogs.

The way to stop this bored-panic seasaw is to first of all spot it is going on, and seocnd of all, see if you are able to shift the timing of work.

All those e-mails that come in at 8pm causing that spike of green pain above, I ignore and look at/action at 7am then next morning. Rather than my wait for my boss to come and find me at lunchtime with his latest problems, I go and see him around 10am and get them out them. The effect? Shifting the last peak of the day into the next, and pulling the first one forward. Graphically:

The same amount of work, but moved to fit with when I can get it done. Genius. And you know what the bonus is? That peak in the evening - completely surplus capacity. I can treat this as overflow, new projects, or heaven-forbid – relaxing…

So your action points are:

1. Plot a graph of a ‘normal’ day or week of capacity for yourself. How productive do you feel at different times? When are you always blocked out and can get nothing done? When do you feel invincible?
2. Plot how your workload falls during this period.
3. Work out how you can shift bits of work into times you have capacity.

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• The Four Phases of a Productivity Process
• How to be an Expert
• An Old Hack, a New App, and Why I Got More Done
• Consumption vs Creation
• What to do When the World is Against You

I reckon it is time for another Bibliosnap. Good, I thought you’d agree… This time it is blogger Yaro Starak. Bibliosnaps are a snapshot of the blogs, books, articles, or even tweets that inspire and inform me. These are recommendations of places to go for great personal development or productivity content, deilivered by great writers with great writing. These are the contents of my bookcase and my RSS reader.

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• Bibliosnap – Bud Hennekes
• Bibliosnap – David Seah
• Bibliosnap – James Mallinson
• Bibliosnap – Hauke Borow

I have a new toy. Courtesy of Minimal Mac I have a new productivity tool on my iPhone – tenplustwo. It is based on an old Merlin Mann productivity hack, which I have be inspired to revisit here.

In one of the less original names around, Mann’s (10+2)*5 Hack is a clever way to squeeze some quality concentration out of yourself, whilst still allowing some time for procrastination/internet-faffery.

Read the article yourself, but as a quick crib sheet:

1. Use a timer;
2. Focus on doing work for just 10 minutes. That’s all. But NO faffing;
3. Have two minutes doing anything you like;
4. Repeat 5 times; and
5. You have now got 50 minutes solid concentration out of yourself out of an hour.

And the iPhone app does this with nice friendly pictures/colours/fonts. An impressive combination of theory and practice. What more could you want on a Monday morning.

Want to know the interesting thing? It doesn’t help me whatsoever. Not a jot. My ‘effective concentration’ – ie. how long my concentration manifests itself as ‘doing stuff’ rather than ‘blankly staring at stuff’ – is WAY less than 10 minutes, and it was interesting to find that out. If I actually spend 8 WHOLE MINUTES trying to do one thing, then it will take me twice as long to complete it (no, that isn’t 20 minutes. Think about it).

It is that distraction that helps me get stuff done. If I just sat here and and tried only to write (this IS technically writing) this post, then it would take me around two hours. However, if I carry on as normal I’ll still get it done in 2 hours, but will also have got my inbox to zero (of course I would), made a couple of phone calls, and read a couple of RSS feeds. Which would you take?

I could make the 10 minutes less to match my strobe-like attention span. I think the optimum would be 1 minute ‘doing’ and 12 second break. But I’m dyslexic, so it takes me most of the break to work out that it is time to break. Not really an option.

What I have realised is that it is the constant flicking between things of interest that makes me productive. And this is a personal thing. I need to be spending a minute on this, then a minute on that. What turns ‘doing’ into ‘producing’ is making sure that there is a fair amount of tasks amongst the things I am flicking between. As I complete them, then I must replace them with other nurtrition, rather than the junk food of RSS and filling other people’s inboxes with viral crap.

Great. I use the (10+2)*5 to give me prompts that I should be checking that my ‘protfolio’ is spead appropriately – enough work, and enough play.

So what are your action points from reading this? Well, try these:

1. Read Merlin’s article
2. Try the (10+2)*5 hack yourself
3. Whether it works or not, think how it changed what you normally do – what did you learn?

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• The Four Phases of a Productivity Process
• Which Tasks Do We Put Off Most Often?
• The Case For Everything Buckets
• The “What I Must Do Today” Planner
• The Future of GTD

If you have a look at the Downloadable Tools section of this blog, you find my Decision Making Tool. It is an Excel tool you can use to think about how you make decisions – it is not actually for making decisions, but for thinking about how you do that. But you’ll understand that if you read the post.

Now the Excel tool is all very well, but it lacks a little flexibility. As such, I have built a little web app that works the same way. You can have a play with it here:

The Decision Maker

And please do have a play. And have a think too – read the post, and get to understand how you make decisions, and how you can make them better.

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• Making Decision-making Easier

As human beings, we spend our time either consuming or creating. Consuming experiences, sustenance, and feelings; and creating those things for others and ourselves. Both are important, and both can be enjoyable. There is however a time for one, and a time for another.

When we talk about productivity, and ‘being productive’ we are usually (although though not exclusively) talking about creating. We mean we have to ‘do stuff’ for someone else to consume. Look at your to-do list – it will mainly fit this bill – shopping, writing that report, making that phone call etc.

So what? Well, the biggest stopper to us creating, is when we slip back into consumption mode without realising it. We call it procrastination or distraction, but that is all that has happened – the creating has stopped and the consuming has started.

Maybe consumption is our default position as humans. That hunter-gather instinct to watch and learn rather than jump-first-think-later. It is quite a protective instinct, as is well documented in a million-and-one other places. You see creation is a risky process, mainly as there is a good chance that some part of what you are doing is bound to fail. But consumption is safe. It’s almost osmosis-like – you sit, you watch, you absorb.

But sadly the world needs you to create – in a whole number of ways, but those are an entirely different genre of blogs. And it is hard – because you need to focus your attention on what you are doings and try not to check your e-mail, browse the web, listen to the radio, chat to a friend, make a cup of tea, make another cup of tea, organise your stationery, have a cookie…

The thing is, it is much easier than that – just spot when you have slipped into consumption. Every 5 minutes ask yourself “am I creating or consuming?” and readjust if necessary. So have you finished consuming this post? Good, lets go and create.

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• The Four Phases of a Productivity Process
• How to be an Expert
• When Do You Have Capacity to Work?
• An Old Hack, a New App, and Why I Got More Done
• What to do When the World is Against You

I was watching my 18 month old son playing at the weekend. By ‘playing’ I mean causing general mayhem around the house. And I don’t mean to suggest I don’t play with him often – I just for once sat and watch HOW he was playing. You know what – he’s a persistent little bugger…

And that was what is fascinating when contrasted to the behaviour of adults. You see, he has absolutely no fear of failure. Not a jot.

He will try anything that he thinks of, and if it doesn’t work then he will try again until:

1. he succeeds;
2. he thinks of an alternative; or
3. he get bored/removed by his Dad.

This is the main reason that we have a gate at the top of the stairs, and a pile of CDs at the bottom – the prevention of one experiment, and the result of another.

So what is different about the way he approaches a new situation and the way we do? It can’t be ‘base instinct’ why we hate public speaking, when my son, and his peer group in general are happy to yell at random old people in the supermarket. It can’t be ‘in built self-defence’ why we give things one half-hearted try before giving up, when a toddler will spend three hours trying to feed raisins into a DVD player.

“But it is easy for them – they don’t know any different” I hear you say. Well, that is a meaningless statement. The only thing that they have in their head is “I wonder if this is possible”. Full stop. They make no attempt to predict the outcomes and consequentially scare themselves off trying in the first place.

And that is the nub of it – they start at the problem with an open mind. They take what they see and think “Okay, let’s have a go”. Now let’s go back to that public speaking engagement…

You are worried about it. You are VERY worried about it. Why? Because:

• People will laugh at you not with you
• No one will hear you
• You’ll look silly
• They’ll make fun of you
• The world will end. But very slowly. So that it is worse. And stuff

And what has lead you to believe all these things? It is unlikely to be your vast experience of public speaking as such experience would either make you good at it, or bad enough to not accept the offer. No, you think these things are the most likely outcome for no other reason than you have trained yourself to always take the safest option.

By ‘you’ I mean ‘me, you, us, and the over 5’s’. By ‘trained yourself’ I mean society develops us in such a way. And by ‘safest option’ I mean that you appraise every situation with ‘what is the worst that can happen’, then believe that as the most likely outcome.

Now I am not suggesting for a moment that you are able to un-learn this conditioning – it is there to protect us once we are sufficiently mobile to not be better off relying on whoever may offer help. But what we can do is be conscious of this process going on.

For example, I don’t mind public speaking at all. This is mainly as I don’t think about it before I stand up and speak. Yes I prep. Yes I write (some) of what I going to say. But I don’t rehearse, I don’t run through the speech in my head every night, and I don’t discuss it at length with people in advance. It is the mental equivalent of that other childhood skill – putting you fingers in your ears and singing “la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la”. So there you go a again – the kids are usually spot on

So then, what are the raisins YOU are not putting in my DVD player? And why not?

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• What to do When the World is Against You
• Don’t Believe the Slogans
• The Chicken and Egg of Personal Traits
• Improving Your Gravitas
• Choosing Your Own Habits

Good morning/afternoon/evening. Welcome to another in my occasional Bibliosnap series – a snapshot of the blogs, books, articles, or even tweets that inspire and inform me. These are recommendations of places to go for great personal development or productivity content, deilivered by great writers with great writing. These are the contents of my bookcase and my RSS reader. This time, Bud Hennekes.

Bud resides at his A Boundless World blog, but is one of the main contributors at the ever popular PluginID. Both sites offer a wealth of material for personal growth – the former a little more introspective, and the latter a little more far reaching. We need a little of both.

Despite a little recent siesta, A Boundless World is where Bud dips into his own development, and talks through it with a beautifully poetic style. Productivity/Personal Development and ‘poetic style’? Trust me – concepts and lessons are a lot easier to take in if they are a pleasure to read.

So have a look, have a read, and have a learn. As usual I have extracted some answers from Bud to my Bibliosnap questions:

1. Who are you in one sentence?

I am an extension of love and passion.

2. What do you write about and more importantly, why that?

I write about being human. I write about failure, fear, and success. I write about being the best you can be at the moment.

3. What is the Big Lesson you learnt most recently?

That I am the author of my life.

4. What are you NOT going to do ever again?

Let failure stop me.

5. What is the first thing you try when you need to up your productivity level?

Follow my bliss.

6. What do you do to put a smile on your face when you start your day?

I express thanks.

7. Where would you rather be right now?

Nothing but this moment.

8. What is the best thing you have ever read?

Anything that inspired me at the time.

9. What is the best thing you have ever written?

My best work shows is filled with passion and inspiration.

10. What soundtrack shall I listen to when I read your work?

Whatever your heart desires.

If you liked this post, then try these related posts:

• Bibliosnap – Yaro Starak
• Bibliosnap – David Seah
• Bibliosnap – James Mallinson
• Bibliosnap – Hauke Borow