The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

What do you do when there’s TOO MUCH TO DO?

You mark your calendar and come to THE PRODUCTIVITY ACADEMY with Laura Stack!

Due to popular demand, we are once again presenting The Productivity Academy on March 15 at the Marriott Denver South at Park Meadows in the Denver area. 

Past participants have said:

You just have NO idea. Really.
New planner. New plan. New tools. New knowledge. New mindset. New energy. New enthusiasm. New HOPE!!

and

I have benefited hugely from the tasking tools in Microsoft Outlook, particularly saving emails to tasks – as well as your 3-minute rule. My inbox is emptied every time I check my email! I am also using standing tickler files at work and home, which has helped me corral all that incoming paperwork! Finally, I am aware of what times of the day I should be working on more difficult tasks, but I have not gotten to where I’ve committed to doing it yet – work in progress!

You’ll learn Laura’s innovative PRODUCTIVITY WORKFLOW FORMULA (PWF). Are you tired of hearing “do more with less”? Many people are already working as long and as hard as they can, and “productivity improvement” classes can be hard to swallow. Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro, turns time management on its head and shows overwhelmed professionals how to actually DO LESS and ACHIEVE MORE. They’ll produce greater results and create significant impact on organizational goals. Laura teaches her latest thinking using this innovative workflow formula to reduce to-do lists, reduce commitments, reduce distractions, reduce the glut of information, reduce inefficiencies, and reduce energy expenditure. Past clients using these systems and methods report savings of 90 minutes a day and higher productivity than ever before!

Visit The Productivity Academy to find out more and register. We’ve got a special for early registrations! Individual registrants can save $100 by using coupon code EARLY by February 6, and if you bring 3 or more people from the same company, you save $100 per person! 3 or more people ordering with the EARLY coupon code can save an additional $100 off their order.

Need some guidance on managing your time when there is simply too much to do? 

 My new book, What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do: Reduce Tasks, Increase Results, and Save 90 Minutes a Day (Berrett-Koehler) is already available for pre-order on Amazon, and the pub date isn’t officially until July 2! http://amzn.to/tZ7kAP

“My to-do list is so long that it doesn’t have an end; it has an event horizon.” — Craig Bruce, Canadian Software Engineer.

“According to USA Today, an astonishing 95 percent of companies don’t share their strategies with employees.” — Joel Garfinkle, American inspirational speaker.

Efficient time management requires the establishment of a dependable routine. The modern office worker can tap a variety of tools when constructing such a productivity framework, with the simple to-do list arguably the most important tool in the chest. But this begs a question: What rules do you apply to determine what goes onto your daily to-do list in the first place? In other words, how do you decide what you should be working on each day?

This question goes to the very heart of personal productivity. So let’s look at a few factors that can help you determine what to focus your attention on, so you don’t waste time and endanger your career with missteps.

Your Job Requirements
Start by asking yourself, “Why am I here?” What, precisely, did the company hire you to do? Acquire a thorough familiarity with all the requirements of your job—not just the ones published in the job description, but the informal ones as well. The latter do exist in most jobs, and it may take you a while to discover them all. If your job has published performance objectives, learn them by heart—and don’t assume they’ll remain static from year to year or even month to month. They may well evolve as time passes. If you stick to the same set-in-concrete routine, you may end up damaging your workplace productivity.

If you aren’t entirely sure about everything the job requires of you, don’t hesitate to ask your superiors. Try to ask probing questions, to get beyond the “official” requirements and into the nitty-gritty details that HR may not have informed you about when you interviewed for the position.

Another good source of guidance will come during your annual performance reviews, when your boss rates how well you do your job. As necessary, ask him or her to provide pointers to help you refine your personal productivity. Take notes, and make a sincere effort to implement what you’ve learned.

Know Your Company Strategy
Do you have a clear idea of your company’s grand strategy? Studies show that very few rank-and-file workers do; and this is one situation where what you don’t know can definitely hurt you. If your company’s mission is largely a mystery to you, then I suggest you make a deliberate effort to learn it. At the very least, study annual reports and presentations to shareholders and investors. For a more personal touch, make an appointment with your department head, and ask them to make a presentation on the subject to your team.

Once you understand the general corporate strategy, tighten the focus to your department and team in order to clarify the more immediate aspects of the company’s goals. You may discover your boss has specific policies he or she focuses on, while other teams handle different aspects of the overall strategy. In any case, start incorporating what you’ve found into your daily schedule wherever possible.

The Master List
Most of your daily to-do list will consist of tasks funneled to you on a regular basis during meetings, emails, phone calls, and direct verbal communications with your superiors. These are the urgent tasks you need to tend to ASAP to keep your productivity at work moving along smoothly. But while they may rank as important in the short term, you can’t allow them to overwhelm the long-term projects and issues that, while not especially urgent, you must accomplish in order to achieve true workplace success.

This is where the concept of the master to-do list comes in. Think of it as a “brain dump” file containing all the things you want to do eventually, but that you need not take care of right away. Many of the strategic goals of your company, department, and team will end up here, along with “someday” ideas like revamping old workflow systems and inventing new ones, or your intention to learn a new programming language. Your master list keeps your daily list from overflowing into uselessness, and it may consist of dozens or hundreds of entries as a result. Whenever something important comes in that lacks urgency or has no set deadline, add it to the master list.

A master list should be a living, evolving document that guides your long-term workflow; you can’t let it turn into a dead-file for forgotten tasks. To keep it at the top of your mind, review it at least weekly. You can use the Category feature in Outlook or your email program to group like items or projects. Leave time in your schedule for strategic, long-term projects. For example, you might schedule one timeslot a day for working on a project requiring thinking or concentration, or you might find spaces for three a week. Whatever works for you is fine, as long as you keep your master list firmly in mind. When the block of time arrives, turn everything off and resist the urge to check email or open a browser.

The Bottom Line
The average daily to-do list contains a mix of items with different priorities, originating from a variety of sources. By necessity, it will be weighted toward urgent but relatively unimportant items, with a leavening of non-urgent but essential tasks—i.e., the things that count most in the long run. An effective to-do list takes both into account, folds in crisis situations as they occur, and deletes the trivial.

Make absolutely sure that the crises and daily minutiae don’t overwhelm the long-term tasks. Purely reactive busyness will get you nowhere if it’s not underlain and supported by the solid bedrock of job requirements, strategic goals, process maintenance, and other important but non-urgent items. Handling all these proactively, in combination with daily routine, results in honest-to-goodness personal productivity.

Just ten more days to take advantage of special early-bird pricing! Sign up by July 15 for $100 discount.

Mark your calendars and to attend THE PRODUCTIVITY ACADEMY!

You asked for it! TWO FULL days with Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro®, LIVE! Limited to 100 people, so act quickly, as this event will sell out.

When: Saturday, October 22, and Sunday, October 23, 2011

Time: 8:30 to 5:30 both days (meals on your own—within walking distance)

Where: The Marriott Denver South at Park Meadows in Lone Tree, Colorado (35 minutes from the Denver International Airport). The hotel has a workout room, full-service restaurant, great bar, concierge room with breakfast for Gold/Platinum level members, and a Starbucks! I was able to secure an amazing $84 room rate!

Who should attend?
The Productivity Pro Boot Camp is for professionals who want to achieve exceptional performance and productivity in all areas of their personal lives. It’s applicable to any level of employee in any kind of company or organization, including:

•Staff and middle management level “office” and “staff” positions such as marketing, admins, IT, HR, PR, operations, purchasing, etc.

•Leaders and managers in small or large corporations, including team leaders, first level supervisors, mid-level managers, and key executives, who want to provide coaching to their employees.

•Entrepreneurs and business owners who need to spend a majority of their time on revenue-producing activities and reduce the administrative burden.

•Salespeople, such as financial services, professional services, insurance, real estate, pharmaceutical, business owners.

•Human Resource executives, who need assistance in the performance review process creating development plans for employees with low personal productivity and performance.

Learn more here and sign up today!

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R) talks about using down times to catch up on tasks. (C) 2011 Laura Stack. All Rights Reserved http://www.TheProductivityPro.com

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R), discusses how planning ahead can make transition time easier. (C) 2011 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved http://www.theproductivitypro.com

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R), shares tips on keeping your children’s items organized. (C) 2010 Laura Stack. All Rights Reserved. www.TheProductivityPro.com

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.” — Henry Beston, writer and naturalist

“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Brian Eno, musician

“You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. If you have to work in space like that, carry headphones with you with a soothing ambient sound like birdsong, put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be.” — Julian Treasure, Chair of The Sound Agency

We all know how difficult it can be to concentrate when it’s noisy.

But that begs a question: what exactly qualifies as noise? After all, what might drive me to distraction may be barely noticeable to you. And in any case, one’s ability to tolerate noise can vary according to health or mood. It’s a lot easier to ignore your cubicle mate’s snoring if you’re feeling fine and things are looking rosy. But imagine how annoying it would be if your allergies were acting up or your computer just crashed…

We’ve all been there, and we all know that distracting noises can affect our productivity. But by how much? You might be surprised…and possibly shocked. According to sound expert Julian Treasure, most people are one-third as productive in a noisy room as in a quiet one. Yikes! Assuming he’s correct, then if you normally earn the company $1,000 a day in a loud workplace, you could do $3,000 worth of business if you could work in relative silence.

True silence is rare, so the best defense against annoying noise is distance. In the modern office, you’re unlikely to have that option; so lacking volume controls for your coworkers, you have little choice but to try to mask distracting noise. Listening to music with a top-notch pair of noise-reduction earphones can be an effective way to do so, but then you make yourself inaccessible to others…and half the time you end up singing along. That’s not very productive, unless you’re Miley Cyrus.

This is where so-called “ambient sound” comes into play. Strictly defined, ambient sound is just about anything you’d expect to hear in the background of life: dogs barking, cars passing, distant voices, the dishwasher, the whoosh of the A/C. As used in productivity circles, however, ambient sound is defined as soothing, quiet, often cyclic recordings that create a “sonic space” allowing the kind of purposeful focus that heightens productivity. Wind through trees, rainfall, the soft rush of waves on the seashore, even gentle music are all touted as productivity boosters.

Okay, this all sounds good, but does it actually work?

The jury’s still out on that. Despite some wild claims, ambient sound probably won’t boost your productivity much. Some researchers have documented productivity increases as high as 6.3% in workers exposed to ambient sound; others have demonstrated that pure silence is better. But almost invariably, the study groups have been so small that the results are statistically meaningless.

On the other hand, pure silence isn’t going to happen in the modern office space, so anything that masks background noise can certainly distract you from the distractions, as it were.

Whether or not sound can spike creativity, some sounds are certainly calming. At about 12 cycles per minute, for example, the sound of the seashore comes pretty close to the breathing cycling of a sleeping human. Both tend to be comforting…and you rarely have to worry about the ocean snoring. Birdsong also tends to relax us.

Still, I’m inclined to believe that what’s perceived as soothing on the aural front is as individual as one’s taste in clothes, music, and food. Sure, most of us do like quiet, rushing sounds like the beach or falling water…but where does this leave the many students who study quite happily and effectively while blasting rock ‘n roll on the radio? That’s the type of ambient sound that allows them to maximize their productive potential. Apparently, they’re not really listening to the music—they’re just drowning out the noises that bug them.

It seems, then, that “soothing” is in the ear of the beholder. Heaven help ‘em, there are probably people who find the sounds of an open office restful. CFOs, maybe.

All that said, I do think that seeking ambient sounds is worth trying, but you can’t assume that what works for other will work for you. If the restful rush of RainyMood.com just puts you to sleep (definitely a productivity downer), do a little experimenting, and see what you come up with.

You may even find that your most productive ambient sounds are, to steal a classic song lyric from Simon and Garfunkel, the sounds of silence.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. — John Steinbeck

My father had a saying he used to repeat often. He always carried around one of those little Mead spiral notebooks, which he liked to call “his brain,” and whenever an idea would strike him he’d write it down and say, “If you think it, ink it!”

That used to just drive me crazy…but Dad was absolutely right. You can’t depend on your meat brain to remember everything, especially when you’re in the middle of another task. Nor is it a good idea to drop the task you’re working on and go haring off after the new idea. Oh, you can do that, but if make a habit of it you’ll never finish anything—and your productivity will be shot to heck.

So when you have a random thought that sounds good, get it down on paper (or electrons) down ASAP. You can use a little notebook like my father’s shirt-pocket “brain,” a handheld device like a Blackberry, a compact voice recorder, 3 x 5 index cards, or a standardized planner—whatever works for you. According to his autobiography, whenever science fiction writer Piers Anthony gets a new idea while writing one of his novels, he just sets off a new paragraph in brackets, types the new idea, then goes back to the project he’s working on. The idea will be lifted out and documented elsewhere during an editing draft, when he has time to deal with it.

Angling for Ideas
It’s been said that ideas are like slippery little fish that you have to capture with a pencil, or else they’ll get away. And as the saying goes, “the dullest pencil (pixel?) is keener than the sharpest mind.” So capture your great idea however you may, and get right back to your original task.

Another great thing about recording your ideas is that when you do so, your brain will think you’ve done something about it and stop bugging you, so you can focus. Even if your idea is of the non-bugging kind, if you write it down, you don’t have to waste any energy trying to remember it later. It’s recorded right there in black and white. By “inking” it, you’ve made it real.

And oddly enough, writing down your ideas often seems to make you have more of them. That may simply be a function of the fact that you’re just not remembering them all when you don’t record them; but on the other hand, some would argue that it’s some Higher Intelligence trying to tell you something.

By the time you review your notes, you may have forgotten the idea altogether, so you may just be pleasantly surprised by what you find. And what do you end up with when you’re done? Why, a little list of things to do…now, why does that sound familiar? Yep, you got it: your ideas (or at least the best of them) end up on your to-do list, so that you can focus your attention on them properly. And if you come up with another brilliant idea while you’re working on your new tasks, well…if you think it, ink it!

From Fish to Seeds
Now, I’ve compared ideas to slippery fish, which you have to capture; but once you’ve done that, they turn into something else. (And I’m not talking about fishsticks here). These ideas you’re struck with—whether while working on something else, during your daily commute, or in the middle of the night—become seeds once you gather them in. They may never germinate, of course; and even if they’re viable, you may never use them. You can’t do everything you imagine, because there’s just not enough time!

But if you carry those little idea seeds around with you like Johnny Appleseed, you may very well come across fertile soil in which they can sprout. That’s when you stick ‘em in the ground and stand back, so you can see what they’ll become.

Ideas are important, folks. Even the most audacious and ambitious of undertakings, from the Great Wall of China to the International Space Station, started as nothing more than an idea that someone eventually recorded. Once they did that, it went from meditation to action—and changed the world.

We’re excited to be included among the terrific blogs on Evan Carmichael’s “The Entrepreneur Blog” list of top productivity blogs to watch in 2010! The list includes great blogs in the areas of business, personal, technology lifestyle and more. Check it out!