Entries Tagged 'Productivity' ↓

You’ve heard the saying, “the early bird get’s the worm”. Well a new study by Philippe Peigneux, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, compared the performance of subjects who woke up around noon with subjects that routinely work up at 5-6am.

According to the article “Want to Get Ahead? Sleep In” at Globe and Mail.

After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention span, compared with the night owls. The early risers also felt sleepier and tended to perform tasks more slowly, compared with the night owls, when their level of alertness was measured.

This flies in the face of traditional thinking such as “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” -Ben Franklin. Research has shown that whether you naturally are an early or late riser is dictated by your genetic makeup. However, people who are naturally late risers are often forced or pressured by societal norms to wake up early, which causes sleep deprivation and this lack of sleep hurts performance. Natural late risers also tend to consume significantly more caffeine, probably due to being forced to fight their natural circadian clock, which can lead to chemical dependency or large swings in wakefulness.

According to the book Brain Rules by John Medina:

“Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.”

A set schedule for employees that requires that they show up at 8 am every day, may be robbing them of their most productive hours. It may increase productivity of workers if they are allowed to come in whenever they prefer, even if their start the day at noon.

Related Article

10 Benefits of Rising Early and How to Do It Zen Habits

Photo by IGNACIOLEO

There is a common belief that you can do multiple things at once and be more productive. The problem is that your brain can not focus on more than one thing at once, unless they are tasks that require very little thinking. For instance you can chew gum while you work, however your brain can not simultaneously focus on multiple complex tasks at the same time. Instead your brain must switch its attention from one thing to another, and every time you do this your brain undergoes a process that takes a fractions of a second or more.

According to the book Brain Rules by John Medina

Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on sequentially, one at a time. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking…To put it bluntly. Research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention rich inputs simultaneously.

Every time you switch tasks, your brain must undergo a specific process called rule activation. When your brain wants to start a new task, your anterior prefrontal cortex activates and sends out a two part message. The two parts include a search query to find the neurons responsible for doing the task, and a command to arouse the specific neurons once discovered. When you need to switch your attention to something else your brain must disengage from the current task, then activate the anterior prefrontal cortex, which sends out a new message to find the neurons you need for the next task and activate them. This process takes several tenths of a second.

“Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors.”
-Brain Rules

Some evidence that shows how bad we are at multitasking is the awful driving performance of people who drive while talking on their cell phone.

According to Brain Rules “Cellphone talkers are a half second slower to hit the brakes in emergencies, slower to return to normal speed after an emergency, and more wild in their following distance behind the vehicle in front of them. In a half second a driver going 70 miles per hour travels 51 feet…50% of the visual cues spotted by attentive drivers are missed by cell phone talkers…they get in more wrecks than anyone except very drunk drivers.”

So if you are serious about getting more done, turn off the email alerts and close your email, close the internet browser windows you are not using, and limit unscheduled co-worker interruptions. You’ll be more productive and probably less stressed by not trying to do a million things at once.

by Marc Evers

This post is about the principles of time management that underlie the book Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forster:

Have a clear vision
Have a clear vision of your goals, of the things you want to do and the things you don’t want to do. A clear vision directs your priorities. Setting priorities is only meaningful between projects, not between tasks that have to be done anyway (’project’ is loosely defined here as an activity that leads to some desired result and that cannot be finished in one go).

Your vision is not something static: it will change over time. So frequently revisit your vision, to keep your priorities clear as well.

One thing at a time
Focus, focus, focus! Use for example timeboxing or working with a pair (like pairprogramming) to work in highly focused way. Don’t dilute your focus by having too many projects at the same time.

Little and often
Work on things frequently, in small bits, iteratively and increment, so that results grow over time. If you want e.g. to write a book or finish a Ph.D. thesis, work every day on it. Actually doing something and keep doing it is more important than the amount of time spent.

This works for writing, uncluttering your home or office, bookkeeping, and many other larger activities.

Define your limits
Creative thinking works better within clear boundaries. An example of limits is timeboxing your activities, e.g. using the pomodori technique.

Defining limits is also important for your projects: determine the boundaries (and frequently re-determine them) to get a clear focus of what you’re doing and what you aren’t doing, instead of being busy with a cloud of all kinds of vaguely interesting and possibly relevant stuff.

This week, I’ve started to make a map of all the projects that I currently have and that I want to take on this year. Being an independent consultant, I don’t have an organisational context that sets a lot of boundaries for me so I’ll have to set them myself in order to be effective.

Closed lists
A closed list is a list that has a line under it and that will not change. For every day, you make a Will Do list, a closed list with the stuff that came in the previous day and your recurring tasks. As the list is closed, it will only shrink when you’re finishing items from the list. This will give you a feeling of accomplishment at the end of each day, when all the Will Do items have been checked.

Anything that comes in during the day and that is not a real urgency, will be put on tomorrow’s list or below the line of today’s list. You’ll first finish all the items above the line, before doing the newly added things.

This approach enables you to plan most of the work you do, so you can work much less reactively and much less governed by self-inflicted urgencies. Your day to day planning will become more predictable and you’ll get early feedback when you’re structurally overloaded.

The Will Do list is limited by your daily processing capacity (so you will need to find out what it is), so you prevent backlogs from building up. If you get more work each day than you can handle the next day, you’ll have to either cut down on your commitments, make your systems more efficient, and/or allocate more time for the stuff on your lists.

Willem asked, what do you do when the telephone rings? It depends: you can answer the call, make a note, and take action tomorrow (unless, of course, it’s about your house being on fire). You can also decide that you won’t answer the phone during certain activities, listen voicemail later on, and get back to the callers the next day. It depends on the nature of your work and your preferences.

Another advantage of closed lists is that you don’t have to prioritise between the items. They all need to be done and if the list is limited by your daily processing capacity, it will be finished. Prioritizing doesn’t make sense for stuff that needs to be done anyway.

Working this way gives peace of mind and reduces waste: you don’t have to spend your energy making difficult decisions about priorities. Prioritizing is waste: it’s work that adds no value, but just increases the pressure on you! You’ll have more time and energy left for actually doing useful stuff.

Forster’s recommendation is to start with the least urgent things first. If work has to be done anyway, why not do it right away?

A bright, grand idea like writing a book is not something you can finish the next day. This becomes a project, a task that recurs (a little attention every day) until the work is finished.

Reducing random factors
By preventing most ‘urgencies’, you will reduce a lot of (self-inflicted) variability in your day to day work. Closed lists system make the underlying systems problems visible. You can’t eliminate all variability and randomness, but you can reduce them substantially, giving you more freedom, making sure your important things get done, and enabling you to handle the remaining randomness better.

Commitment vs interest
You can be interested in a lot of things, but you can have only a limited amount of commitments. It is important to know your commitments, as these provide a framework for your decisions. It’s like the pigs and chickens metaphor used in Scrum (chickens are only involved, but pigs are committed). A pig only has limited ham and bacon it can provide… (the pigs and chickens metaphor has its limitations, but that’s another story)

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Netherlands License.

Photo by beketchai

If you struggle to keep your inbox clean and free of unread items, consider yourself one of many. With Gmail growing 43 percent in users and visits last year alone, Google developers were smart to help users stay organized by developing a “send and archive” feature allowing users to archive items immediately after sending them. Inboxes shrink, productivity increases. Brilliant.

Adam Ostrow of Mashable explains further, “Yet another new feature in Gmail Labs to report: a “send and archive” button, that, when enabled (from the “Labs” page under “Settings”), allows you to reply to a thread and have it immediately archived.

Like all archived messages, these threads will still be available in the “All Mail” folder of Gmail, which also includes labeled messages that you filter out of the Inbox.”

Visit the article on Mashable here to continue reading.

The article entitled “The Man’s Guide to Getting Productive” in January 2009 edition of GQ had some very good productivity tips.

Make a Deal with Yourself

Stephen King will go to a quiet place and make a deal with himself that he will just 5 pages done. He says that once he gets started he will often want to do a little more. Often getting started is the hardest part so setting a goal can help motivate you to get the work over with.

Get Sufficient Sleep

According to the article “missing just a few hours of sleep every night for a week will give you the wordaday cognitive ability of someone who just chugged five beers.” They suggest that the average 35 year-old needs 8 hours of sleep a night. You may think if you sleep 4 hours a night, you will have more time to get things done, but everyone knows what it is like to try to think when you are dead tired. It is not effective and you will be better off if you take time to get rested.

Prioritize Tasks

The author of the story had a coach from David Allen’s Getting Things Done company come to help him become more productive. One of the first things the coach did was to set him up on a system of prioritizing tasks that the author had deemed important in his life. She had him write down everything that he wanted or needed to do. “This is your in-box. Now we take action on each item in the in-box.” If an item can not be acted upon at that time it goes into the “file for future reference”. Next, you start executing tasks in the “in-box” that will take 2 minutes or less. The next step is to take the tasks that will take longer and organize them in managable lists like “home”, “errands” and “office”.

You can learn more about becoming a more productive executive by reading “The Man’s Guide to Getting Productive” in the latest edition of GQ.

Image by orphanjones