If you put out an ordinary effort, you’re going to get ordinary results. If you put out an extraordinary effort, you’re going to get extraordinary results.
—STEVE HARVEY1
We have been equipped with an assortment of devices and apps that on the surface make us feel more productive and like expert multitaskers. Yet underneath, despite all the positive outcomes that these devices have promised, they have distracted us, drained our productivity, and consumed every last bit of creativity from our minds. In the past ten years companies have become slower to hire and have consolidated their teams, yet the pressure to innovate and compete has accelerated. The slogan “Do more with less” has become the driving philosophy of companies around the world. The pressure on employees to become simultaneously more productive and more efficient has now become counterproductive. Employees are burned out, unhappy, and tired of working longer and harder for no additional pay and less personal time. As a result, they’re switching jobs more quickly. In one study we found that nearly half of all attrition is due to burnout, and each loss costs employers thousands of dollars in health-care-related expenses, productivity losses, hiring, and training to fill vacancies.2 While using connected devices to maximize our resources may seem like a good idea, the consequences of doing so have been dismal.
Today, text messages and emails are competing for our time with human connections, and the technology is winning big-time. Several studies show that the average office worker receives more than one hundred emails per day. We used to complain that phone calls and random office visits were distracting, but those are nothing compared to the ridiculous number of messages we receive through our devices. The more messages we get, the longer it takes to review and respond to them. Unfortunately there are still only twenty-four hours in a day. The only thing we can control is how we spend our time.
The overstimulation we receive from using these tools has made us underutilize our cognitive abilities, which are critical for optimizing our own productivity. When you constantly hear (and feel) alerts from your phone, you get aroused and excited, which takes your mind off your work and focuses it on something else that may be less important. Professor Gloria Mark, at the University of California, Irvine, says that these notifications are hurting our ability to concentrate on individual tasks. Since 2004 she has followed employees around with stopwatches and timed their actions. In the early days of her study, she found that they switched their attention every three minutes. In 2012 it was just over one minute, and in 2014 it was less than a minute.3 We’ve become slaves to the very devices that were created to be obedient to us, and that has made us lose focus on what’s important in and out of the workplace.
Even though these tools make it easy to manage our calendars, track our tasks, and quickly message a colleague, we’re so barraged by notifications that we lose track of time, and before we know it, the workday is over. Nearly 100 percent of employees admit to being distracted during the workday,4 and nearly 60 percent of these interruptions involve some sort of messaging device.5 This should matter to you both on a personal level and as a leader, because when they’re all added up, those interruptions cost companies an average of more than $10 million annually, or just over $10,000 for each employee. By removing distractions and staying focused on one task at a time, we can be less stressed, more productive, and happier at work.
As a leader, you should encourage your employees to spend more time engaging with one another in person and less time communicating via technology. Researchers Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa Bohns had forty-five participants each ask ten strangers to complete a survey.6 Every participant had to make the same request using a consistent script, but half would do so over email and the other half would do it face-to-face. Before the participants started making their requests, they had to predict how many of the strangers would agree to finish the survey. Both groups estimated that about half of the ten people they approached would agree to take the survey. Turns out that everyone was wrong. So how did it turn out? Face-to-face requests were thirty-four times more successful than email requests in getting people to fill out the survey.
Danny Gaynor, former chief speechwriter at the US Agency for International Development, gave me a great example of the power of face-to-face communication over email. The day before a major announcement (the launch of the largest-ever global coalition of nations committing to ending premature death for kids under five years old), Danny and his boss spent a huge amount of time working on the boss’s presentation, texting, sending emails, and exchanging PowerPoint decks. Dozens of leaders, from Kenya to India, were flying in to attend the unveiling of this critical initiative. Danny felt isolated and stressed out while creating a presentation laying out the US vision to save millions of children’s lives around the world. (Can you blame him?)
“I’ll never forget standing backstage, with prime ministers and cabinet officials waiting just feet away, with my boss. Because we hadn’t been in the same room—because we had been working via technology—we had never run through his presentation until a few moments before he would go on stage. I frantically deleted photos, moved graphs, and rewrote sensitive words about Afghanistan and Nepal and Colombia. My boss chugged a glass of water, looked at me, took a deep breath, and said, ‘Good job on the speech,’ as he walked into the stares of the world’s most powerful people.”
This experience taught Danny about the importance of face-to-face communication in addressing critical matters, which has made him more effective in his current role on the Narrative, Innovation, and Executives team at Nike. “The feedback I received was slow, confusing, and uneven,” Danny told me. “Had I been able to get in a room with the boss—face-to-face, even for 10 minutes—I could have accomplished what took hours through technology platforms.” Technology can help—but sometimes, for those big projects, there’s nothing more powerful than a few people, hovering over a laptop, figuring out just the right way to explain something important.
It’s ironic that even though email is the most common way we communicate at work, in many cases it’s also the most counterproductive, and it routinely gets in the way of face-to-face interactions that lead to greater productivity. “Email is the number one enemy of productivity,” says Stephanie Bixler, vice president of technology at Scholastic. “People rely too heavily on email as a means for escalating issues without seeing it through to the solution, and it obfuscates responsibility.”
In my company’s research, over half of employees say that more live conversations would reduce the number of emails they receive.7 And in the Virgin Pulse study, almost a third said that spending more face time with coworkers would make them more productive.8 “A lot of context may get lost [over] email,” says Ulrich Kadow, CEO and chief agent of AGCS Canada at Allianz. “Picking up the phone or speaking with colleagues in person is often the best and quickest way to resolve conflicts.” Katie Vachon, merchandise manager of women’s apparel at Puma, agrees. “We can sit in the same office and send emails from our respective desks without just walking over and talking to people,” she says. “This leads to even more emails being sent and causes confusion.” So instead of going back and forth on email and praying that the idea you’re trying to convey actually gets received and produces the effect you want, meet in person and take a few minutes to explain what you want and why it’s important.
Managers have to cope with having fewer resources, yet more pressure, to accomplish bigger goals. A study by Bain & Company estimates that a typical manager, over the course of a forty-seven-hour workweek, has fewer than seven hours of uninterrupted time.9 A full twenty-one hours of her time goes to meetings and another eleven to managing email. Managers don’t have time to get their own work done, much less to think creatively. About thirty years ago the average manager received one thousand notes in a year about having missed a phone call. When voicemail became a thing, that manager might have had to listen to about four thousand messages in a year. But today we’re talking about thirty thousand communications in a year, thanks to the variety of ways we can receive them (IM, Skype, FaceTime, email, text, voice mail, etc.) and the number of devices we rely on.
“Technology can be a powerful distraction that pulls managers’ energy away from their people and into their screens,” says Paul Reich, SVP of local sales at Yelp. “Front-line managers in particular are susceptible to being sucked into their screen for hours on end, when the real work is out there on the floor, interacting in person with their people. We try to teach our managers that there’s no more powerful computer than your mind, no better listening device than your ears and speaker than your mouth, so clamshell that laptop and start observing and commenting in real life.”
A problem many of us have is that we overuse and abuse the technology we believe is helping us be more productive. For instance, it makes perfect sense to text your team to register for a meeting, but if during that meeting you continue to text people who are right there in front of you, you really need to stop.
Although many blame my generation for being early adopters of new technology, we’re all guilty of abusing it. We convince many older workers to use these tech tools because that makes it easier for us to communicate with them. While it may seem that using technology makes it easier to manage projects, files, and communication, our attention spans have decreased, and the nonstop barrage of digital distractions has squashed our productivity. This chapter will help you understand what causes these distractions and how to best optimize your time so that you can become more productive and happy at work.
Self-Assessment: How Digitally Distracted Am I?
I hate to break it to you, but there’s a good chance that you’re addicted to your devices. And like most addicts, you may not even be aware of it. A lot of us think that technology is enhancing our productivity, but we’re completely unaware of the hours we’re wasting reading random news websites and messaging our friends on social media. This brief quiz will give you an idea of how distracted you are. Put a check mark next to each statement that rings true for you.
1. I turn to a device first when reviewing a new project with a team member.
2. I manage all my projects using a device.
3. I think in-person meetings are a complete waste of my time.
4. I avoid making phone calls and prefer to text instead.
5. I spend more time looking at my phone during meetings than contributing to the discussion.
6. I find myself waiting for the next phone notification.
7. I’m an expert multitasker who uses multiple devices at once to accomplish work.
8. I would rather give a webinar or other virtual presentation than give one in real life.
9. I have multiple windows or apps open when I’m doing work.
10. I sometimes view my coworkers as distractions instead of assets.
Total______________
After you’ve finished taking the assessment, add up all the check marks. If you have seven or more, you may be underperforming at work. If you score below five, you’re more in control of the tech you’re currently using, and it hasn’t negatively affected your productivity. In fact, it might even be helping it!
Technology undermines our productivity in significant—and insidious—ways. Following are three ideas on how to curb that problem.
When we want to avoid unpleasant tasks or at least delay the inevitable, we often turn to our phone and play a game or read a news article. When we lack structure, are anxious, or feel unsure of ourselves, we often change tasks from whatever is stressing us out to something more entertaining. It’s easy to fall into the procrastination trap, and it’s getting easier by the day, with an amazing number of apps and websites that we can turn to any time we’d like to disappear from work and take ourselves to a new reality. By procrastinating, we’re not just losing our productive time. We’re also losing our personal time because, after all, that’s when we need to make up the work we should have done during work hours. The absence of personal time quickly turns into unhappiness and burnout.
Technology has given us a nearly unlimited ability to edit, adjust, remove imperfections, and generally make everything perfect. The problem is that the more time we spend editing photos and ensuring that our status updates make us look successful and happy, the more time we waste and the less we get done. I’m sure you’ll admit that at least some of the time you’ve spent changing photo filters or revising a one-sentence status update to your team could have been better spent on more important tasks. What those of us who struggle with perfectionism overlook is that it’s our flaws that stimulate our creativity, make us unique, and create stronger bonds.
The fact is that there’s no such thing as perfection, so demanding it from yourself or others is a waste of time and energy. I believe that perfectionism is a weakness disguised as a strength. We think that being perfect will enable us to be more productive and successful at work, yet striving for it depletes our time, causes anxiety, and makes us unhappy. Perfectionism doesn’t work in the fast-paced, always-on world that we live in. If you move slowly at work, another worker who’s willing to work smarter and faster will replace you. Perfectionists may take hours to send one email and end up working longer hours to accomplish the same thing as nonperfectionists. How do you think that affects your company and its ability to compete with other organizations that have fewer perfectionists?
Our quest for perfection includes finding the perfect answer to all our questions—and while technology can help with this, there is, as usual, a downside. “The Internet is a machine. Push a question in, and it spits an answer out. But what happens when the answer you’re looking for isn’t online?” asks Kiah Erlich, a senior director at Honeywell. “The ‘no answer found dilemma‘ results in the following stages: 1) Confusion: Surely I didn’t type the right keywords; 2) Frustration: Why am I not getting what I need?! 3) Panic: Oh no! The answer cannot be found! and 4) Realization: Humans were given brains before computers were given search engines. This over-reliance on technology and the expectation that someone else has already solved our problems has not only drained society of creativity and critical problem-solving skills, but has also handicapped us in the most critical skill needed to be a successful leader: social interaction.”
When you’re a perfectionist, you get stuck in an endless loop of trying to edit something when you just need to let it go. Your failure to deliver hurts you, your team, the company, and your customers. To prevent this, set consequences for yourself and anyone else whose constant revising might inadvertently delay the delivery of a project. For instance, you won’t be allowed to telecommute for a month, or you warn everyone that delays in delivering future projects will impact their bonuses.
We may try to convince ourselves that we’re multitasking when we’re checking email on our computers, doing a status update on our phones, and participating in a conference call at the same time, but we’re not. You can’t really pay attention to what someone is saying when your brain is focused on something else. This is especially true when technology is involved. Are you honestly fully there in a meeting if you’re texting your friend at the same time? That superhero-like ability to do multiple things at once is a figment of your imagination. Dozens of neuroscience research studies prove that our brains don’t do tasks simultaneously. Instead, we jump from task to task rapidly. When we shift from the conference call to the status update to the email, there’s a stop-and-start process in our brains that causes a momentary lag between steps when nothing happens at all. You have to actually stop speaking (or slow waaaay down) to send that text. You might not notice the lag, but it’s there. Bottom line, instead of doing three tasks at once to the full extent of your ability, you’re doing three tasks poorly.
Although some still believe that technology is supercharging our productivity or that multitasking is a reality, the truth is that our coworkers are the key ingredients. Coworkers who are experts in their subject matter, intelligent, kind, conscientious, and strong in work ethic will help you become smarter and more productive. When we asked employees what, besides salary, motivates them at work, more than half said, “my coworkers.” And when we asked what inspires them to be creative at work, more than 40 percent said, “the people I surround myself with.”10 Keep in mind, though, that this works the other way around as well. If your coworkers are lazy, dumb, and annoying, you’ll be less productive, less efficient, and less likely to get interesting projects, increased responsibility, or promotions.
Knowing all this, it’s obvious that hiring the right employees will help increase your entire team’s output, creativity, and productivity. Look for candidates who get along with your teammates and have demonstrated consistent progress in their careers (which is a sign of a strong work ethic and ability to focus). Besides asking about their skill sets, ask about their preferences for work environment and the types of teammates who bring out their best work. Then set up one-on-one meetings with everyone on the team to see how they get along.
Generally, the most productive people are conscious and deliberate about how they spend their time and build structure into their day, every day. Charles Duhigg, author of Smarter Faster Better, told me “the people who are most productive, are people who think more deeply than other people, about what they are doing and why they are doing it.”11
The image a lot of people have of a telecommuter is of a couch potato like Homer Simpson, drinking a beer, watching TV, and petting the dog while he’s supposed to be working. The truth, however, is a very different story. Researcher Nicholas Bloom did a study of call center workers at a large travel website. With the approval of the company’s CEO, workers were given a choice of working at home for nine months or staying in the office. While the company expected to see productivity decline, the exact opposite happened. Remote employees took 13.5 percent more calls than the office-based staff. As surprising as that sounds, it came as no surprise to the employees. In our global research with Polycom of over twenty-five thousand employees, more than 60 percent of those who worked remotely said that their work arrangements increase their productivity. What accounts for that increased productivity? According to Bloom, there are quite a few explanations. He attributes a third of the increase to the employees having a quieter environment. The other two-thirds he attributes to the employees putting in longer hours. “They started earlier, took shorter breaks, and worked until the end of the day,” he wrote in the Harvard Business Review.12 In addition to all that, employees used a lot less sick time and quit their jobs at half the rate of those who worked in the office.
But while remote workers are definitely more satisfied (despite stereotypes to the contrary), they’re also more isolated. As a result, they seek out other ways to stay connected with their fellow humans. Thirty-five percent of remote workers said that they check in with their colleagues more often, and 46 percent said they pick up the phone more often. (That includes 38 percent who said they use email less and the phone more.13)
How common is remote work? Well, the data indicate that there’s a good chance that you’ve worked remotely at least once in your career. Nearly 75 percent of workers say that their company offers telecommuting, and about a third regularly work remotely.
If You’re Working Remotely:
1. Eliminate all potential distractions by working in a room where you don’t have a TV or any unnecessary technology.
2. Dress like you’re at the office. That sounds silly, but it’ll help you feel more professional and get you into the right mind-set.
3. Follow a regular routine so that you get in the habit of waking up, doing work, and taking a reasonable number of breaks.
4. Create a daily to-do list on which you can check off goals as you complete them.
5. Remove clutter from your workspace so you can focus on your work without distractions.
6. Set boundaries. One of the reasons people who work remotely are more productive is that they never go home (in large part because they’re already home). As a result, they tend to put in longer hours and check their work email at 2:00 a.m. on the way to the bathroom.
If You’re Managing Remote Workers:
1. Set proper expectations about their job responsibilities, due dates for projects, and how best to communicate updates on their work.
2. Require at least one team meeting each week so you can make sure that everyone’s on the same page and keeping up with their work.
3. Use videoconferencing to create more meaningful interactions with them and to encourage them to dress and act professionally.
4. Encourage at least one face-to-face meeting each month so that you, the remote workers, and the rest of the team can build stronger relationships with one another.
Everyone’s mind, body, and habits are different; so is what motivates them to be productive. For instance, I’m more driven by making an impact on the world, building my brand, and helping others than by making money and funding a retirement plan (although I try to do both). Younger workers tend to value flexibility and meaningful work, whereas older workers are more focused on saving for retirement and health-care benefits. Women care more about maternity leave than men do (for obvious reasons), although paternity leave is quickly becoming a staple in many benefit programs.
Because our brains are unique, so are the circumstances under which we’re most creative or do our best work. You may perform better in a corporate office, whereas my best ideas come when I’m telecommuting from home because I’m less restricted that way.
Productivity outcomes also differ depending on the nature of work. How you operate as a leader in the marketing organization of a ten-thousand-person company in Asia will be very different from how you perform in the same position at a smaller company in the United States. And whereas some people are more productive early in the morning, others may not kick into action until the late afternoon.
Such differences notwithstanding, the following chart summarizes research by my company and others that will give you a general sense of how you can maximize your—and your team’s—productivity.
The time each day we’re most productive
Between 10:00 a.m. and noon14
We’re more productive earlier in the day, before lunch.
The day of the week we’re most productive
Tuesday15
Monday is when we catch up with email and tasks from the previous week, while we can begin to focus on this week’s work on Tuesday.
The optimal amount of sleep for maximum productivity
Between 7 and 9 hours16
Sleep helps our mood, makes us more attentive, and gives us more energy.
The optimal number of work breaks
One every 52 minutes17
Our attention spans are short, and we can focus and do our best work for just under an hour at a time.
The optimal length of a break
17 minutes
It doesn’t take long to rejuvenate, and breaks are key for resting our brains.
The optimal amount of exercise
At least 150 minutes a week18
By exercising, we alleviate stress, get in better shape, and reduce both burnout and health issues.
The optimal number of calories
2,700 a day for men and 2,200 for women19
To maintain our current weight or lose a few pounds, we should eat healthier by eliminating processed food, sugar, and grains from our diets.
There are factors that can either increase your productivity or decrease it. When you aren’t physically or mentally healthy, for example, you’re going to have trouble concentrating on your work because you’ll be preoccupied with thinking about your health. However, when you’re working with the right team in the right environment, everything seems to work better. I worked with Staples Business Advantage to study the factors that most influence productivity. Here’s what we found:
Increases productivity
Collaborative environment, break time for employees to refresh, and more flexible schedules
Decreases productivity
Physical or mental illness, burnout, poor technology, office politics, limited IT support, and too many meetings
When it comes to increasing productivity, a lot of us are drawn to one (or two or twelve) of the apps that promise amazing results. There’s no question that technology is capable of improving our productivity, but I’ve found that quite often, tech tools that are supposed to make my life easier end up taking up even more time. My goal is to simplify my life, so I focus on the tasks that yield the best results and use the fewest tools possible. The more tools you use, the more complex your daily life will be, and that complexity will keep you from accomplishing your goals.
So instead of relying on the latest tech gadgets to try to increase your productivity, the best approach is to create some new productivity-optimizing habits. According to professors at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behavior each day, so it’s important to form ones that lead to the most productivity for you and your team.20 Over the years I have tested a variety of strategies and habits, trying to figure out what works best for me and what could work best for other high performers. I discovered that for me, it’s all about the morning routine. I get up at 7:30 a.m., cook breakfast, review my goals for the day (which I set either at the beginning of the week or the night before), go for a three-mile run, shower, and then start doing the work that requires the most intellectual capital. Knowing that I’m going to cook a solid breakfast that consists of an egg white omelet and fruit motivates me to wake up earlier. Setting goals keeps me focused, while the run keeps my energy flowing. Of course my routine can—and often does—shift, depending on meetings or conference calls that I can’t schedule for any other time, but it’s fairly consistent each day, which helps me maximize my time by getting the majority of my work done when I’m at my very best.
Ideally, your habits and your goals should align. That means that if you want to lose weight, you’ll need to make healthy eating and exercise regular habits. Because habits are fairly useless without goals, let’s spend a few minutes talking about goals.
Over the past five years, I have come up with my own goal-setting system. Before I had this system, I didn’t have any structure and was bouncing around, doing whichever project made the most sense at the time. Today I use a Microsoft Word document to handle all my goals. That may not sound fancy, but it works well for my needs. I divide the document into three sections: daily goals, annual goals, and future goals.
Even though it’s the middle category, I start with my annual goals, and I write in five professional and five personal goals for the year—no more, no less. Putting a graphic check box next to each item somehow makes it more likely that you’ll want to accomplish the goal. These goals should be achievable based on what you’ve previously accomplished, yet challenging enough that you’ll improve yourself, your relationships, and your career. Make sure you can measure the outcome of each goal. For instance, instead of saying, “I’ll write an article,” put a number to it and say, “I’ll write 20 articles.” That way, you can mark down when you write each one until you hit twenty. After you complete your annual goals, think about what you need to do today to get yourself closer to achieving those goals. For me to achieve my goal of completing this manuscript, I needed to write all the chapters, so my daily goals often included something like “write five pages of chapter 3.” If I want to keep moving toward my goal of visiting a new country this year, another one of my daily goals needs to be “research travel destinations.” Use your daily and annual goals as starting points for your longer-term life goals, which will go into the future goals column. Any time you think of a lofty goal and you don’t have time for it now, put it in future goals. Having that list of future goals will inspire you to achieve more in your career and life.
Goal Sheet Example
Daily Goals
• Research for chapter 1
• Create survey questionnaire for a new study
• Book flights for Greece
Annual Goals
Professional goals
• Finish book manuscript
• Conduct 6 research studies
• Speak at 10 conferences
• Write 20 byline articles
• Curate 4 executive events
Personal goals
• Travel to 1 new country
• Volunteer at 1 nonprofit
• See 1 Broadway show
• Take 2 cooking classes
• Make 5 new friends
Future Goals
• Start a nonprofit
• Write another book
• Create a podcast
• Film a documentary
Just because my goal sheet works for me doesn’t mean that it will suit your needs. Amanda Fraga, vice president of strategy and insights at Live Nation, has a more simplistic approach that ensures she stays active and invests her time in the things that are most important to her in a given month. Here are a few examples of her goals:
• One book per week (routine: listen to audiobooks on way into work)
• At least one yoga class a week (shoot for Saturday morning; if that’s not possible, plan for another day that week)
• Cook dinner at least three times per week
• One date with my boyfriend at least once a week
• One learning adventure every week (networking dinners, visiting a museum, etc.)
• One monthly dinner club with friends
Create a list of goals that work best for you in your situation. Once you have your goals set up, take some time to think about what habits you may need to create or hone to achieve each of those goals. But don’t go crazy with this. It’s hard to work on more than one habit at a time. For each new habit, follow the process outlined below. Once you’ve completely mastered it, move on to the next one.
Creating new habits is a three-step process:
1. Start small. Instead of running for one hour in the morning, run for twenty or thirty minutes. Or instead of focusing on your biggest work project for two hours, start with fifteen minutes. When you start small, achieving your goals is more manageable and less intimidating, which makes it more likely that you’ll commit to it. Pick one habit at a time so as not to overload yourself, and make sure that it’s something you can motivate yourself to do and achieve.
2. Expand the habit. Now take that half-hour run and double it, or double the fifteen-minute focus on a work project. After a week or two, it’ll be easier to expand your habit to be more challenging and more fulfilling.
3. Group similar habits. If you already get coffee every morning from a local shop, build that into your exercise routine by running or jogging there and back. If you make time to meet one of your direct reports every day, schedule a breakfast or a walking meeting, which will be good for your health and will help strengthen your connection with your teammates.
On a typical day we receive countless notifications from our devices. Each comes with a distracting beep, ding, or buzz, regardless of whether it’s a text from a teammate who needs help or from Mom saying that she loves you. We are so inundated with these notifications—and so addicted to receiving them—that when we don’t, we think that either there’s a technology glitch or no one loves us. While some of these notifications may be useful (e.g., if there’s a family emergency), others are downright frustrating, such as Johnny “liking” your social media picture. By the time you review and filter the notifications, you’ve wasted minutes or even hours. A study by Deloitte found that people look at their phones forty-seven times a day on average; for young people, it’s more like eighty-two.21
Spending all that time checking our devices, in addition to the demands of the workplace, prevents us from freeing up capacity in our brains to think creatively. Our brains are constantly processing information, and we need more time to use our imagination and harness our creativity. But you prevent yourself from having downtime when you’re too busy getting updates and responding to messages.
To maximize your productivity you need a holistic approach, which involves taking a step back and thinking carefully about how you’re currently allocating your time, the physical environment that you’re in, and your daily team interactions. By doing this, you’ll uncover areas that are preventing you from being productive, such as not delegating enough work or having endless email exchanges with team members. The following are several ways to optimize your time, space, and connectivity so you can be the most efficient leader possible.
1. Optimize your work environment. Pick a place where there are few or no distractions. If you’re working in an open office and it’s too noisy, move to the cafeteria (assuming it will be quieter there) or book a conference room for at least the start of your day. If you have your own office space, shut the door during your most productive hours so that you can focus. When you’re working, disable your devices’ alerts and make sure that your desk area isn’t messy. Since your team’s overall productivity is affected by each individual’s productivity, be sure to get feedback from all your employees about their work environments.
2. Optimize your workload. People are unproductive when they don’t know how to prioritize work, a skill that, according to my research, is one of the keys to being a successful leader. If you can’t prioritize and delegate tasks, you’ll be overloaded with work that you shouldn’t be doing. Be clear about exactly what you need to do to achieve your daily or weekly goals, and write it all down. Then rewrite your list, this time putting all the items in order from most important to least. Next to each item write the steps required to achieve it and when it needs to be completed. If there’s an item on your list that you know will be a real time and energy suck, delegate it to someone on your team who you know could do the job. As a leader, you should be focusing on the high-impact parts of the tasks, like presenting to other leaders and coming up with new strategies and tactics. “Ambitious team members enable my productivity by giving me confidence in their abilities and allowing me to delegate,” says Chris Gumiela, vice president of marketing and advertising at MGM National Harbor. “Simply by taking on more of my workload, teammates give me more time for expansion of my responsibility and to put more time to the tasks that deserve it.”
3. Optimize your flow time. Flow is the feeling of being completely absorbed in what you’re doing and enjoying yourself so much that nothing can distract you—well, almost nothing. What gets in the way of flow are the countless meetings and messages that are competing for your attention and constantly interrupting your day. If you think about it, I’m sure you can recall some occasions when you were in flow. And if you think about it more, you’ll probably notice that there’s a pattern—for example, that you’re able to slip into flow only right after lunch; it just doesn’t happen any earlier or later. Whenever your flow is, block off that time period in your calendar and tell everyone on your team not to schedule meetings then. Flow is easier to achieve when you have a set of clear goals, have the right skills, and work in an environment that’s well suited for you.
4. Optimize your team. Once you have your own routines and habits set up and you know where you want to go and what you want your team to accomplish, do everything you can to ensure that each person on your team is operating at full capacity. When your team isn’t productive, you aren’t going to be as productive as you could be. A lot of optimizing your team is about identifying their strengths, weaknesses, and current workloads. If one of your team members is overloaded and stressed out, take away one of their tasks and assign it to someone else. When team members are overwhelmed by one task, they won’t be able to do a decent job on any of the other tasks they’re supposed to be doing, because they’ll be rushing through them so that they can get back to whatever is overwhelming them. If you can’t reassign tasks to others or you don’t have a team, offload some of the more tedious and routine tasks to a freelancer or a temp worker. “Often our output is a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote,” says Sarah Unger, vice president of marketing strategy, trends, and insights at Viacom. “However, I’m not a PowerPoint designer, and presentations can take forever to create. Hiring designers gave me time to focus on the priority things, while letting designers handle the part where they add the most value.”
A number of leaders I interviewed told me about things their own bosses had done that made them more productive. Paolo Mottola, senior manager of content marketing and co-op managing editor at REI, says, “A manager makes me more productive when they give me the room to be entrepreneurial and create work. I’m at my best when I’m empowered and accountable.” Sharmi Gandhi, senior vice president of business development at Mic, had a boss who taught her an important trick to being more productive: “Slow down! There is a tendency to think that moving through tasks quickly is the definition of being productive,” she says. “However, that can lead to mistakes down the line, as you may not give decisions enough consideration before making them or may not set up a new initiative properly to give it the best chance for success.”
5. Optimize work breaks to maximize your energy. Fifty-seven percent of office workers take thirty minutes or fewer for lunch, and almost a third take fifteen minutes or fewer. Besides a break for lunch (assuming you actually take one), how many other breaks do you take? Snack breaks, regular bathroom breaks, walks outside, coffee breaks, and all the other kinds of breaks you can think of can be helpful in splitting up your day, giving you some rest, and helping you refocus when you get back to your work. When I was writing this book, I could never work longer than three hours at a stretch without a break. I recommend that you give yourself at least six breaks each day and that you try to plan them out and make a commitment to taking them. If you’re one of those people who can work fifteen hours straight without taking so much as a sip of water, force yourself to take breaks. You may feel you’re getting a lot done (and you might be right), but when (not if) you burn out, none of it will be worth much.
Sam Violette, manager of e-commerce, mobile, and emerging technologies at Land O’Lakes, Inc., takes his biggest break at the end of the day, and he often spends it shooting hoops. “Some may call breaks meditative or relaxation time,” he says, “but I think of it as time to let my brain stop churning on my task list. I’m always sharper and more able to focus coming out of these periods.” Adam Miller, product marketing manager at DELL EMC, uses a more structured approach called Pomodoro that recommends determining the task, working on that task for a timed twenty-five minutes, and then taking a five-minute break before repeating—ideally working on a dissimilar task. After four Pomodoros, or about two hours, you take a longer break. “The rationale behind completing dissimilar tasks in repeating Pomodoros is that I can think about a different topic and then return to the previous topic with a fresh perspective,” he says.
6. Optimize your time so you don’t waste too much on technology. If you want to get an accurate picture of how you’re spending your time online, rescuetime.com will tell you, to the second. Once you’ve recovered from the shock of seeing how much time you’re wasting, see what you can do to redirect some of that time either toward getting your job done or taking a break. Wasting time online can cost you time and money and will distract you from building the relationships with your teammates that will improve your productivity.
As discussed throughout this book, those relationships are critical to your team’s success. “Having strong relationships with my team has driven better outcomes and made processes smoother,” says Rosie Perez, lead financial officer for global consumer services business planning at American Express. “Sharing ideas in a room full of strangers or distant colleagues is much more challenging than sharing ideas with a group of people you trust and know personally. In my experience, teams that feel comfortable together tend to take more risks when it comes to sharing ideas, output, and information. In addition, strong relationships encourage a personal commitment to one’s colleagues and the collective success of one’s team. This is critical in driving creative solutions to problems and getting things done.”
The leaders I spoke with had a variety of strategies to optimize their calendars for maximum efficiency. Honeywell’s senior director Kiah Erlich schedules hour-long “protected times” that are devoted to doing work on her own. “If you don’t protect your calendar, people will consume your sanity and productivity with meeting after meeting all day, every day,” she says. Sam Worobec, the director of training at Chipotle Mexican Grill, maximizes every minute of his workweek by auto-scheduling time for others—and himself—weeks in advance. “One-on-ones with my direct reports are auto-scheduled every four weeks, one-on-ones with my employees’ direct reports are auto-scheduled every 12 weeks, lunches or coffee with other department heads are auto-scheduled every four weeks, people development meetings with my direct reports auto-scheduled every four weeks, and so on,” he says. If you need help managing your calendar, don’t be shy about asking for it. “I benefit from having an unbelievable relationship with my executive assistant, Ashley Goodwin, who has made my life so much easier,” says Kyle York, general manager of the Oracle Dyn Business Unit at Oracle. “She drives my agenda, which frees me up to worry about the task at hand, knowing she’s always going to put me in the right place at the right time. This relationship has been formed over many years of working together, but it is something I highly recommend any executive to invest in. It is worth its weight in gold.”
7. Optimize your meetings so you waste less time and accomplish more. When Workfront asked employees what most gets in the way of work, 59 percent said wasteful meetings; excessive emails were next, at 43 percent.24 Most meetings feel wasteful because they’re either too long or there’s no set agenda. If you want to lead a successful team meeting, create a set of objectives and email it to your colleagues before the meeting starts. Also, when you send calendar notices to block out time for meetings, make sure they’re for only half an hour. The tight time frame will put pressure on everyone at the meeting to stick to the agenda and will minimize distractions. If possible, hold your meetings in a different room or venue each week. Changing the environment can stimulate creative ideas and will go a long way toward keeping your teammates’ thinking from becoming stale and repetitive.
These seven ideas have been field-tested by experts, and most people have found them quite helpful. However, you know yourself better than I do, so if you have another approach, go for it. Jill Zakrzewski, customer experience manager at Verizon, has a completely counterintuitive approach, but it works for her. “Every day, I sit in a common area with a lot of foot traffic. This means I’m constantly interrupted by people who are taking a coffee break and want to chit chat,” she says. “Sure, I often end up staying late on Fridays to finish all the work that was disrupted by these friendly conversations. However, I’ve built such a network from these interactions that I’m hyper-efficient at identifying the right people for a project, and they respond positively to helping me because of our existing relationship.”