Category: Productivity

At this point we all know that being a good multitasker is a myth.  The time it takes to context switch between projects can vastly wipe-out any perceived productivity.

This has become more apparent to me recently as I have been asked to take on more work, or have taken on more for myself.  As a result annual goals fall behind, projects make slow progress and planning overhead rises.  This has knock on effects to perceived expertise – the amount of forward movement on a particular project is less in real-time than hoped.  When a month passes by with only a week of progress things are intuitively slow and perceived value drops.

It’s important to say “No” to incoming requests and limit what is on your plate at any one time.  This actually can have a positive impact on your perceived value.  Saying “Yes” and failing or being late is far worse than saying “No” and leaving the impression that you have more important work to do.

Focus is critical to both your own stress management, your external perceived value, and your productivity. Strive for only what is important, say “no” more often, and you will benefit.

What do you believe is the single most important thing that will affect your productivity?  Time management? Software tools? Calendars? ToDo Lists?  No.  The most important thing that will affect your productivity is your expertise.

Knowledge is the baseline for almost all work that we do in today’s information economy.  We simply cannot produce good information products without the knowledge to do it. And gaining the knowledge as you go is akin to assembling the tractor before you can use it to plow the field. To be maximally effective you should strive to have the knowledge for how to do what you need to do.

There are two aspects to knowledge that can be looked at as it pertains to your productivity.

1. Relevance – The more relevant your knowledge is to the task at hand the more efficient you will be
2. Competence – how easily you can apply your knowledge.

When you have relevant knowledge and have competence with it then you have an expertise that allows you to be productive at a much higher rate.

The four stages of competency will give you a sense of how effective you knowledge is towards your productivity. Simply having the knowledge is not enough to being extremely productive.

1. Unconscious incompetence – you do not know how to do something and haven’t yet recognized that
2. Conscious incompetence – you realize that you don’t know something
3. Conscious competence – you have the knowledge but it requires concentration to execute
4. Unconscious competence– through extensive practice your skills have become second nature and can be performed without effort

It has been said that the best programmers are 10,000x more productive than an average programmer. While this claim is outlandish it exemplifies that people with experience hiring programmers see as truth. The right programmer with expertise can implement quickly while the wrong programmer may not even recognize that they don’t have the knowledge required to do so.  In the worst cases incompetence is a liability – incorrect knowledge applied incorrectly can pose a significant threat to your business.

Last year I had a morning routing going for a while but after a while I fell back into my old habits of spending the early hours of the day scanning Facebook in bed instead of what I was actually intending to do.

Last week I got a tip to never leave your phone in your bedroom.  It’s just too tempting. I decided to try it out.

For the last couple of days I have been putting my phone in the kitchen before bed.  It’s close enough that I can hear the alarm go off, which forces me out of bed.  And once I’m up I’m more likely to stay up.

My morning routine looks like this now:

6am: wake up
immediately have some breakfast
read or write for at least 30 minutes.

The hope is that I can keep this up and do some catch up on my reading goal for the year.  By setting aside some quiet time in the morning to read I’m hoping to make a dent in the backlog of books.

One of the books I read recently suggested a best practice for a businesses to have a top 5 list and a top 1 of 5 item that is the most important of that list.  Limiting it to 5 makes things seem attainable and having one singled out as the top priority adds just enough focus that you should know what you should be acting on at any time.

What you put on the list should be determined by your longer term goals, and each top 5 item should be a step in the right direction to get there.

I’ve started to do this over the last 2 weeks and the results so far have been quite good.

My office has gotten completely re-organized and everything filed, or purged. The gutters cleaned. garden raked and turned over.  I have written a ton of things over the last few weeks, and started the process of consolidating my mess of banking accounts.

The technique seems to work better than making a long TODO list that becomes a bit too intimidating and ultimately fails.

Yes, it really is working.  There was a plateau, but with the new lower prescription glasses,

When I started this process of trying to improve my eyesight I measured my far point at 17cm. Today I measured 24cm. That’s a pretty significant improvement.

I’ve been wearing my new lower prescription glasses for everything except driving.  So far I’ve been finding them to be more or less a constant reminder to continue to exercise.

It is definitely the case that my eyes are getting tired from working the muscles extra hard.  The new glasses put my furthest focal point roughly at the distance my monitor usually sits so there is a consistent effort being made to keep things in focus.  I’m hoping to see some quick improvement over the next week as the exercise I’m doing now reaches a new plateau.

Decisions can be paralyzing when you have to make them.  Even more so when you don’t have the information you need to make an informed decision.

In the day-to-day work of programming we make decisions all the time.  However the decisions we either don’t have answers for of don’t have the power to make ourselves can often block things.  These blocks can easily last hours or days if we need to co-ordinate with other people to make the decision.

Part of the planning stage of a project is to make as many of the decisions up-front before development starts so that the process of writing software doesn’t get blocked waiting for or discussing what to do next.  In an ideal case decisions would be always ahead of the developer needing to work on implementing them.

The output of the planning should be essentially a to do list that can be worked on quickly with enough information so that no further clarification is needed.  This is essentially the key that Kanban – writing tasks down on cards forces you to think through and make decisions so that the coding tasks are directly actionable.

When done right, programming can be extremely productive.  Having a work queue to pull from is a popular design pattern for implementing applications and it works similarly with scheduling programmers work.  When the producers (decision makers) ensure the work queue is full, the readers (programmers) won’t be blocked waiting for work to do.

This is commonly implemented with a Todo list, bug tracking software or Kanban style tools.

Whether it is a small one-person project or it belongs to a large team you should strive to keep everyone engaged by ensuring decisions are made before programmers need to implement them.

The morning is probably the best time of day to get things done for yourself before work and stress start to derail your day.  When you’re trying to accomplish something big finding a way to take advantage of these early morning hours can really ramp up your productivity.

The quiet morning hours can be your time to focus on what really matters most for your long terms goals.

What nearly always seems to happen is that at the end of a long day you are too exhausted to go to the gym, your too stressed to focus on things, or you’ve been convinced to spend an extra few hours at the office to finish up.  Your own priorities slip down the list.

A day has only 24 hours and every bit of time you give to something else is time you can’t take back later to do things for yourself.  If you want to make sure your goals get hit you need to block out time for yourself.

In financial planning one of the biggest tips is to always pay yourself first.  When you leave yourself whatever is left over after paying bills, and other expenses there is almost always less than you need to save if you want to become wealthy or retire.  Paying yourself first helps you reach these long term goals.

The same applies to time.  If you want to build wealth out of time rather than money you should use time for yourself first before you give it to other’s.

Creating a morning routine, and making it stick has in my case been successful when I’m truly excited to get out of the bed in the morning, I have everything ready to go, and no excuses preventing me from getting up.

One of the best things you can do is to prepare the night before for the morning.  Have your work ready, water ready to drink, clothing taken out and coffee maker scheduled.  The easier and quicker it is to get from bed to fed and getting things done the more likely you are to do it.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Figure out what you what to accomplish in the morning.
2. Get everything ready, so you can do that as soon as you get up
3. Iterate.  Find ways to make getting up easier, until it is easy