Productivity, procrastination and fear
When I was at university, being more productive meant working for longer. In the morning, the afternoon, the evening and into the night. Of course amongst all that we slotted in sports and societies and socialising. The point is that every deadline was preceded by an all-nighter. That’s just how we did stuff; studying expanded to fill all available time.
Joining the world of work was a shock. Despite being a startup, my company has a 9–5 culture: people go home on time, they don’t stick around.
Initially this was a welcome reprieve from my intense lifestyle at university. But as my responsibilities grew, I struggled to stick to the clock. I’d spend most of my day bouncing from one meeting to the next, toting a todo list that behaved like a many-headed monster.
It wasn’t long before I discovered the quiet hours in the office after everyone else had gone home. A chance to catch my breath and get my head down. I found I could accomplish some pretty meaty stuff. Besides, work-life balance is overrated, right?
As you can imagine, my patience with this routine waned. There were people around who were far more productive than me, strolling out the door at 5 o’clock! How did they do it? I set about figuring it out.
The most obvious thing that needed addressing was my constant busyness. It started off like a mark of pride: an outward display that I was working hard. And it was kind of fun too, racing from place to place and jumping between tasks. It was energetic and appealed to my sense of novelty.
But Cal Newport, academic and author, says that if you’re a knowledge worker your most valuable asset is your focus and attention. To do good work, you need to remove distractions and get into the zone — he calls this deep work.
That means carving out significant blocks of time to work on a single task, without interruptions or context switches. It’s this skill, he argues, which enables us to produce valuable and meaningful work and gain an edge over our competition.
So I went about fixing my swiss-cheese diary. These days I rarely schedule meetings. If I really must I bunch them together so they don’t break up the day. My mornings are out of bounds: protected time for me to go deep and do my best work.
The miracle of asynchronous communication means we don’t have to drop what we’re doing and meet in order to work together. I’ve found that properly thought out and well written emails often do a fine job. As do group messaging systems like Slack. I find the benefit I get by clearing my diary for deep work outweighs the cost of declining meetings.
The other half of the equation is removing distractions. Since we’re on the topic, let’s talk about email. PING! Sorry, ignore tha — PING! Personally, I find emails to be my #1 distraction at work. It’s not that email is inherently bad (see asynchronous communication). It’s the notifications that snap me out of whatever I’m doing and ruin my focus.
I turned them off. All of them. My laptop doesn’t make a peep; it never interrupts me. And my phone? I put it far out of sight in a drawer. I wear earplugs so the open office doesn’t catch my attention. These hacks might sound extreme, but that’s what I’ve found I need to do to get in the zone.
So I’d reclaimed my time; carved out big chunks of blissful focus.
Now I was determined to make the most of it. David Allen’s ultra-classic Getting Things Done (GTD) had been waiting on my shelf for a while. It’s hailed as the killer system for, well, getting things done; a trusted friend of mine told me it changed his life!
But something about David’s approach didn’t sit right with me. See, in my university days I spread myself too thin; I ended up juggling too many projects and commitments. I did have a system for keeping track of things, but it was a real source of stress and anxiety for me. I knew I definitely didn’t want to return there.
Since leaving university, I’d discovered Zen Habits and The Minimalists. Their philosophy spoke to me a in a big way. Minimalism is about living intentionally in order to focus on what’s truly important, the things that give us meaning. An introductory exercise involves letting go of the excessive mess and clutter we fill our homes with.
Through this lens I began to see systems like GTD in a different light: they’re a coping mechanism. Every hour of every day we are subject to a firehose of information. And we continuously try to capture it and organise it and wrestle it under control. That sounds like a full day’s work in and of itself.
What if, instead of collecting all this mental mess and clutter, we just let it go?
I don’t recall where I discovered it, but there’s a concept called eat the frog which really changed the game for me. It goes like this:
“Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”
— Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog!
The metaphorical frog is your goal for the year; as a product manager it’s probably a business outcome for your product. It’s a big target, it would be a real game-changer if you hit it. That’s kind of scary because you can’t yet see a clear path to achieving it. It’s not even obvious what the next few steps are; that’s going to take some hard thinking!
The thing is, I would come into the office in the morning, full of energy, ready to go, and pick up where I left off: my todo list. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on there:
- Write blog post on design thinking
- Give feedback on pitch deck
- Big product target
- Add questions to chat bot prototype
What I realised is that it’s all too easy to go through the whole day, gleefully ticking things off, without actually achieving what’s important. Inevitably I’d pick off the straightforward, easy stuff first. But before I knew it the day was over and I hadn’t tackled the big, hard, scary but important stuff. I was getting lots done, but it wasn’t moving me forward — in the end that’s no better than procrastination.
The frog cue reminds me to face off with my most important task, first thing in the morning, no matter how difficult it seems. By asking “what do I really want to put off right now?” it forces me to be conscious of the urge to procrastinate. With that feeling out in the open, it’s much easier to just get stuck in and start breaking that big task down.
Then the magic happens: once I get through that initial barrier, things aren’t so hard anymore. It turns out you can break down the biggest, gnarliest goals into small achievable steps.
A side effect of adopting this mentality was that all the other stuff on that todo list never got a look in. Once I’d started my day on the right foot, it wasn’t long before I’d be in the swing of things. Time would fly and before I knew it I’d done a solid day’s work on the stuff that really mattered.
In the end I stopped keeping that list altogether. It was really an exercise in worrying less. I let go of trying to keep track of every little outstanding task I hadn’t done. Occasionally I really must remember something, so I find a space in my calendar and schedule a block of time. That takes it off my mind in a way that a todo list never did.
Of course in reality there are things we shouldn’t ignore: side projects, helping our colleagues, admin. I work on these in the afternoon, only once I’ve pushed my primary goal forward in the morning.
So in a sense I’ve addressed the easy bits. Freeing up my day and creating time for deep work. Being clear on what’s important and what’s a distraction.
Now when I sit down to work I face a more insidious challenge. I’m early in my career and pushing myself to grow and learn and gain experience. That often means taking on challenges and responsibilities beyond my comfort level. Things I haven’t done before, that I don’t know how to do.
And I’m afraid. That I’m doing it wrong. That I’ll make mistakes. That what I produce won’t be good enough. That I’m not good enough. That I’ll fail and be found out.
When I sit down to work I’m fighting my fears. Fear is what lives at the heart of procrastination and drives it in subtle ways. It means shying away from big opportunities, or being reluctant to take on responsibilities.
Despite all this I’m going to give it a shot. If I manage to 10x my productivity, it’ll be because I pushed and fought. It’ll be the courage to shoot for amazing things that makes me successful.
