EPT
You are screwed because you have to use up effort to not worry or not think about those other pressing issues; rather when you are focused, concentration comes naturally and everything operates at the peak efficiency. Multi-tasking multiple tasks for the single project is fine and a necessary skill. Multi-tasking multiple different projects, well, you’re just a freaking idiot on his way to burn out dumb dumb land. Not to mention your work quality will suck.
Sometimes we have no choice to do multiple major projects, like working to put yourself through college or having to support your family while pursuing what you really love. But the hard truth of it is that you eventually need to be a position where you are focused on a single project that matters to you. So the following is really for those who are already focused and have put themselves in a position to focus on only a couple of key priorities. Anyone who tells me that they have multiple key priorities has my full sympathies if they are a single parent or a primary caregiver/provider for their family; otherwise in professional terms for anyone else, I’d say that person still doesn’t have a clue what productivity or getting results really means or they are a train wreak waiting to happen.
GETTING FOCUSED
While this isn’t rocket science, it not as easy as it sounds. The most important thing is not taking on responsibility that is not essential. I assuming that you’re already a somewhat ambitious individual to begin with. If you already consider yourself legitimately lazy, meaning you really don’t want to work or put effort into achieving things, then just stop reading this blog all together. These posts aren’t for you and now you’re more focused on just being one with your lazy ass self than feeling conflicted about your laziness. Bye. But the rest of us, we usually take on tasks or new priorities because we think it will have a good result or it is a good thing. We think in terms of that it will be ‘good’ for something or someone.
This type of thinking is the opposite of strategic thinking. Strategic thinking puts things either into a framework or phases, meaning that the action you take is related in some way to support, strengthen or grow your main objective. Project we take on are only taken on if it directly contributes to the objective and not just because it is good. And just because you can do a project and it makes ‘money’ and looks good, really may not be good.
When I was a penniless grad student in Korea due to the mismanagement of my own personal funds on exploring Seoul’s nightlife every day for a year, I was in a dilemma as I had decided to quit being a pro varsity university rugby player and actually focus on my studies and make something of myself. But I found myself in a position that I had to come up with money to pay my second semester tuition. Luckily this was 2003 and armed with my first grad degree I got a great job teaching English at a private institute in a really rich district of Seoul. The principle of the school was actually pretty hot and was really loaded and the work wasn’t difficult, but it was far distance from my university and the hours were long, even though I was getting paid a lot for my time. In less than 2 months I had enough money to pay for my second term tuition and I continued to work for another 2 months. But as I was taking a full course load, I had put all the classes in the morning and then worked from 3-10pm every night. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t really suffering here, but I was tired as hell as my marks really matter to me; after all, this my masters in business, so these marks would really matter when I went for interviews. So I’d just wake up at 5am and study for 3 hours before going to my classes, but it really wasn’t enough for me to score at the highest percentile in the classes. I was falling behind in my studies and I was just going through the motions in teaching the kids. I decided that my future career was more important so I decided to quit and while I didn’t have any other income, I figured I could just eat ramen and tins of tuna for the rest of the semester, but that my marks mattered more. After all, I didn’t give up playing rugby and wasn’t doing my masters to be a full time conversational English teacher to a bunch of nice but overly spoiled rich Korean kids.
So I end up walking into the principle’s office to quit and right before I say anything she gives me a guilt trip about the level of teaching I’ve done and how much she pays me and kicks me out. So I stay on another week while now I’m starting to get owned in my grad studies, so then after I get over my guilty feelings of abandoning the kids mid way through the semester and get to grips that, ‘FUCK, I gotta get my shit together’ I go back to the hot principle’s office and she gets up from her desk and sits on the front of the desk facing me and says, ‘look Dave, how much is your tuition more? 20k? I’ll pay it right now and give you a share of the institute’s revenue. In one year from now you could easily be making 10k a month here and you can finish school whenever you want. You need to be smart about this. I can make your life easy, you don’t need to take the hard route here. I want you to stay here.’ So for about 20 seconds I envision my life being sponsored by a relatively young hot sugar mama and basically telling me if I just continued she would support my life and give me 10k a month, which I knew was totally within her ability to do so. And I thought, ‘mmm… that is pretty good, but that ain’t want I want, I’m studying cause I wanna be the sugar daddy.’ So with that I quit, out of spite she held on to my last month of pay (which I was pretty sure she was going to do after propositioning me with the entire sugar mama thing- wraith has no fury like a woman’s scorn) and became yet again a penniless student. But I had screwed up that semester and ended up getting an A in a class, otherwise marring my near flawless GPA. From there I took a gov’t internship job that barely paid for my bus fare and had to take a bank loan and borrow from friends to pay my tuition, but the rest is really history (and my GPA did really help get my foot in the door).
Ok, so this story maybe not be the most professional example of being focused, but I never lost sight that my objective was to get a professional business career. Getting the money and having no stress about my studies was good and my potential sugar mama could have provided that, but I wouldn’t have had that focus of knowing that this was it, that my studies were that important and that I was clear in what I wanted. In much the same way, we base our priorities on what is simply good, not realizing that simply ‘good’ is not good enough of a reason to do something. Rather, whatever priorities we have, they need to progress our singular objective and when you’re young, not married, free to travel and no kids, more often than not, the only thing fucking up your focus is just your own poor judgement of taking on projects on the basis of ‘good’ rather than actually ‘good for you’.
WHEN DO YOU GET UP?
So assuming you are ‘focused’ in terms of goal/objective wise, lets get into some practical points.
1. When are you the mentally sharpest? What time? What activity? After eating what or not?
2. Where are you mentally sharpest? With or without music?
3. What eats your time in small bites? Skype/MSN chats, snacking etc.
4. What are your worries? Finances (bills, payments, etc), Health, Family/relationship issues.
It is surprising how much more you know yourself intuitively when you’re younger. We amass a crap load of bad habits as we get older and these carry on to our professional working lives. So a lot of these practical points are only going to be useful if you actually know the answer opposed to just assuming that what you’re current habits are is the correct answer.
EFFECTIVELY ZERO
For instance, for the last nearly 20 years I’ve been generally late to bed, early to rise. Or when I’m busy as hell, zero routine sleep schedule, take random naps and work/travel. I know when I need to sleep is when I’m typing out an email and I need to revise a single sentence 3 times. Even if I need to revise it 1 time, I’ll press on, but at 3 times, I’m more concerned about sending an incoherent email than I am of my lack of sleep. Sleep becomes just a necessity. But that type of thinking is wrong simply because your level of productivity drops so significantly. The gap between the levels of personal productivity (100%, 90%, 80%, 70%) are very high. So if I’m 100% productive this hour or I’m 50% productive, is a huge difference because when I’m 100% productive then all my work is good and work output is good as well. Whereas if I’m 50% productive then probably 20% of my work is of any good quality and the output was crap, so much so that at being 50% productive, there is really no point to actually do any work because it could do more harm than good, so anything under 50% productive is effectively zero.
Assuming that the standards for doing business are the same as building a luxury collector Swiss watch like a Patek Philippe; if you’re not 100% focused and productive, then anything less than 100% of your productivity is effectively zero because of the complexity of the task. You actually run the risk of ruining the reputation of Patek Philippe by producing an incrementally subpar product. So, when you say, ‘mmm, I estimate that I was at 80% productivity, then your actual net contribution to the business was likely 40% or so, while anything less than 70% is probably zero. It is an important mind set because while you may be putting in the hours and think that you are progressing the company, it may be progressing relative to your achievements, but it may not be according to the competitors or real industry standards. This again points to complacent large firms that do get crushed from, seemingly, ‘out of the blue’ smaller competitors, when in fact these larger firms haven’t been actually competitive for years.
So really, I work best when I’ve gone to bed around 9:30pm and I wake up at 4:30am, do some push ups and work until I see the sun rise then up until about 11:00 am, my productivity is through the roof. I probably do 3 times more in that 6-7 hours than I could working from 9am-10pm. But from ages 18-35, when the hell was I ever going to go to bed at 9:30pm and wake up at 4:30am? Honestly, I only really got back into it because I have 2 baby boys and just because of their sleeping patterns I started to going to bed that early and waking up that early again. But most modern people assume that they are night people when it is probably inverse to that. But just getting in the right time zone makes a huge difference in your productivity. It may not be all that practical or possible, but at least knowing when your prime time is, rather than assuming it gives you a chance to set yourself up for it. The fact is, if it were not for circumstances that lead me to do consecutive all nighters, I’d probably be able to do the same amount of work in 2 good ‘early to bed, early to rise sessions’ rather than 3 x 24hr sessions. I know that I need a lot of sleep to think at my highest sustained level and knowing that helps me to plan for a major work session.
WE WANT TO BE DISTRACTED
People want to take breaks, it is natural. We are social, we love to interact with things, we are curious and work is not always fun. Fundamentally, unless you are passionate or love your work, you will always put yourself in a position to be distracted. You’ll be typing and in the middle of your research and suddenly you’ll feel an urge to check your email. And even when you check your email, you may not actually reply, but then put it off for later and then check the news sites and facebook. Eventually the only reason why you get back to work is because you’ve exhausted all your distractions, well that is for about another hour, when you instinctively feel as though you must have another email in your inbox…
So the key point here is begin honest with yourself, ‘hell, I know I got this work to do, but honestly, I’m not keen on really getting it done, I don’t want to put 100% in this, I’d rather do whatever than this crap.’ So then you can make a decision at this point, you can either press on and (a)use your concentration to keep you on track, or, (b)you can remove all the distractions or, you can(c) ’zone out’ or ‘zombie out’.
(a) concentration
Well, if we are still on the subject of being honest, everyone’s concentration usually sucks and since you’ve been using your ability to ‘concentrate’ up to this point, we should just rule this out. After all, it just makes you feel like an unproductive, unfocused, easily distracted and lazy ass. While you may have the right intentions, again, we fundamentally want to be distracted, so there is nothing surprising here why concentration is a fail. It’s like going on a diet, but you purposely buy your favorite potato chips now for a reward after your diet. Seriously, you think you’re going to keep on the diet solely because of your ‘concentration’ not to eat the chips? As soon as your concentration fails, you fail.
(b) remove all distractions
To some degree this works; disabling your skype, your msn, and promising yourself not to check your email for the next 2 hours so you can get this report done. But honestly, what can we really ‘remove’ nowadays in our digital lives; you don’t want to check your email online, but oh lookie here, you have a iphone and while you took a call you noticed you have some mail, etc. I’d have to counter, rather than remove all distractions, getting into a productive environment or frame of mind is what is essential.
(c) being in the ‘zone’
It is like this mythical place, ‘being in the zone’; it is where time stops or doesn’t seem to apply and you can hit 3 pointers with 2 seconds left or you can work for 5 hours straight and have zero loss of productivity and feel as though only 20 mins went by. This place does exist, but what is takes to get into the productivity zone is pretty difficult.
The only way to achieve the productivity zone is actually having a very set and stable life routine. This really means that everything in your life has an allotted time slot. You have set x time for exercise, x time for house hold chores, x time for family and x time for your own time. And whatever you do in that time slot, you only do that thing. Now, unless you are financial stable, this routine will never take hold cause the stress from trying to focus on less important things than paying bills is just too great of distraction, but if you can get a grip on your finances, then everything else just needs to be slotted properly. But when you sit down to work and you know that there are dirty dishes or that you haven’t exercised in 3 days, it simply will be at the back of your mind. But if you’ve been a good routine for a week, then you know it will be done when it is time to get it done but for now, it’s time to work. To my knowledge, there is no other way to get into the zone unless you love or are passionate about your task.
When I’m traveling and working, it is probably the hardest thing to get into the zone. What I personally do is that everything that needs to be done, no matter how small, I get it out of the way, even if takes me a few hours before I sit down. I make sure I have no meetings on the day and I simply put on a couple of music tracks that make me feel as though I’m in my own mental cocoon (Soul to Squeeze & The Zephr Song on repeat by the Red Hot Chili Peppers) and I just start from there. So today I woke up at 6:30 am, did 20 mins of exercise, washed dishes and cleaned the rental house we had for this Aussie Millions, watched ‘Road House’ on TV, took a shower, ate some cereal and then haven’t left my seat for the last 4 hours. The thing is, I just take all the distractions out of the way first, and then get down to the work. So there is an element to discipline to this as well. I do have a mountain of task to get sorted as soon as I finished the posts I want write today, but again, I’ve slotted the time that by 8:30pm tonight, whatever I’ve done or not, I’ll stop, eat then work all night until I get through all the outstanding work tasks that I haven’t been able to put my full focus on due to a major business event. But writing today was a priority for me so I could get focused again.
(c.1) the ‘zombie zone’
A mutant variation of the ‘zone’ is the ‘zombie zone’ whereby all you do is just work and you have no friends outside of work, only talk about work and are basically proud that you don’t have any vacation time and that you don’t know the meaning of ‘slowing down’. I’m probably the poster boy for the ‘zombie zone’; at one point I think I had worked for nearly 2 years straight taking a total of 4 days off where I didn’t work at all. The problem with being in the ‘zombie zone’ is that your overall productivity ability continues to slowly decrease and you don’t realize it. You put in so many hours of work that, of course, you get moments of brilliance, but it’s like nit 24 tabling for 5 hours straight, of course you gonna get Aces and you’re gonna play them well and feel good, but you never realize that you’re not actually playing better, only grinding better and just living off the RB and this becomes completely the norm (or maybe that is the reality to be profitable for some players-not meant to be judgmental here). When you finally realize that you are in the ‘zombie zone’ it takes probably 3 months to actually feel normal again. But having survived being a zombie and been reverted back to humanity, I can say, the number of hours you log in ain’t nothing compared to a single of hour of creativity and insight (obviously right?).
FINANCIAL DISTRACTION
Probably the biggest issue hands down is having a financial distraction. If you want anything to screw up your productivity this is it. Conversely, the gains that a person gets from a stable income and stable financial situation are pretty amazing; so amazing in fact that people definitely prefer employment than starting their own new business or going against the grain. But if you have a change of plans or start a new business or lose your job, it is fml, fml, fml, everyday and it is hard to get back to the grind or even concentrate on your work. Nothing has really changed, but you know you owe something or something will be due.
Every start-up or new business will have some lean months or even if the company doesn’t, you may be. Or if you’re in between jobs or suddenly had some huge unexpected costs. Sometimes these financial distractions are paralyzing or it seems as though you’re backed into a corner.
If you’ve mismanaged your cash or just been foolish and spent unnecessarily, then just start there by fixing your spending habits etc; there are always friends or family who will bail you one or two times. Thing is, the issue becomes hopeless if you’re on your 3rd or 4th bail out and still screwing yourself. For the later, there ain’t nothing I can say that you don’t already know other than the longer you wait to sort things out, the more painful the reality check is going to be.
I would say, whenever you have a financial distraction, you need to know that if you don’t come to some resolution that this is screwing your work productivity to actually get out the crap and that paying bills isn’t something that is going to go away by hiding you head in the sand. The best thing always is to communicate, communicate with your suppliers early, communicate with your friends and family and your bank and really dig into your revenue numbers and personal credit etc. Don’t expect a miracle to occur, but put things in motion, make alternative payment plans, get as prepared as you can with as much support as you can to see things through with the least amount of hardship. As soon as you’ve sorted as much as you can do, then get back to work and slot it for the next day. Of course with pending bills and loans, you need to deal with it, life’s constant stress, but regardless, you need to compartmentalize financial distractions at least to business hours and not the whole day. As long as you keep your credit clean, you’ll always have time to be able to figure things out.
PRODUCTIVITY IS
Productivity, first by putting yourself in a position to focus, is what makes businesses successful, because business is not about a one or two year plan, but it is about seeing it through at least three years and taking small definite steps all the way. But productivity is really a personal thing, it involves us as humans and the fact that, yes, we want to achieve, but also we think about many things and it takes conscious effort for us to be in position to be productive. But achievement in-of-itself always involve constant improvements and steps and without really understanding what is productivity, you’re either gonna burn out or simply not be the best you can be.
Even at 37, I don’t feel I’ve completely figured this subject all out yet. There are a lot of things I’ve achieved and a lot of things left I’d like to and having a family has dramatically changed my priorities and ambitions; but I think I’m extremely lucky because I do love doing business, I am passionate about competing in business. At the end of the day, anything you are passionate about and love, you’ll get the job done. So I’d like to end with, do what you love, but that wouldn’t be helpful would it? But I hope if you are engaging in business you can find a passion for it.
Music on/off hasn't mattered in productivity.
