Productivity Tips

Productivity Tips: Interruptions are evil

Nir Dobovizki — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:52:33 GMT

The most effective way to decrease your productivity is work in an interruption filled environment – and yet most of us work in just this environment.

Writers, programmers, designers and most other creative jobs require concentration, you are most productive only when you are in a deep concentration mode (sometimes referred to as “the flow”), in this mode you can get huge amount of work done in a short time.

Whenever you are interrupted, no matter how short the interruption is, you are kicked right out of this deep concentration mode and research has shown it usually takes between 15 and 30 minutes to get back in the flow.

So every time someone asks you a quick question (or even worse, loudly asks someone near you a quick question) you are actually losing between 15 minutes to half an hour of productive time.

If you have any control over your work environment you’re top priority should be to minimize interruptions, work alone, close your e-mail software and any instant messaging software or social network websites, turn off your cell phone… you get the idea.

It may be boring to work in such an environment but you will get more done in less time, just try it – and use the time you save to do things you enjoy instead of handling an endless stream of pointless interruptions.

Productivity Tip: Don’t Panic

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:11:39 GMT

The world’s economy is in a crisis, things are bad and they are going to get worse, civilization is coming to an end and we are all doomed.

Are you scared yet?

Your shouldn’t be, the world is not ending, a small but very greedy group of people managed to collapse the world’s financial markets and make some real damage to the economy, the resulting wide spread panic caused even more damage and is continuing to ruin the economy even as you read this.

The result is that lot of people lost an awful lot of money.

That’s it, a lot of people lost money, civilization is not collapsing around us (maybe except in very localized incidents) and society continues to function.

This economic crisis is a also a great opportunity, all you have to do is ignore everyone running around in panic like a headless chicken, get your act together and continue to work.

If you lost your job don’t worry, set your goals (getting a new job, changing your profession or starting your own business) and start working toward those goals.

While the world is in a state of panic you can get a huge competitive advantage by just doing your job while your competitors are panicked out of their mind.

Don’t ignore the economic situation, now is a time to keep on track, improve your productivity and make reasonable and level headed plans to succeed in this time of crisis.

And, of course, buying yaTimer - my very reasonably priced time tracking application is a great first step to improving your productivity.

Productivity Tips: Filling timesheets manually is a great way to under charge - and it’s also a waste of time

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:36:51 GMT

A long long time ago, when I was a young programmer, in a company I once worked for, the management decided they wanted to know how the employees spend their time.

It was a product company so this information was not needed for billing, management just wanted to knows what’s going on and have better information when they plan for the future.

The development team manager quickly built a small application that lets employees fill in what they worked on, this application was equivalent to filling a timesheet, you started the application, selected one of the company’s projects filled in how much time you worked on that particular project and repeated this for every project you worked on today.

It was a disaster, the application itself didn’t have any serious problems but the basic flaw of such a system is known to everyone who ever had to fill out a detailed timesheet – at the end of the day you don’t remember exactly what projects you worked on and how much time you spent on each project.

The information in the system was inaccurate, time spent helping on other employee’s projects was usually charged to the wrong project (because no one remembers he spent an hour helping someone else in the middle of working on his own project) and after a few weeks the system was abandoned.

After that little experience I was sure time tracking is such a huge pain it should only be done if absolutely necessary – that is, only if you bill by the hour - I was wrong (obviously, as I know sell time tracking software).

The problem was not with the concept of time tracking, the problem was with filling timesheets after the fact, no one has perfect memory and when you fill your timesheet at the end of the day (or, god forbid, the end of the week) you just don’t remember exactly what you did.

The pen and paper solution to this problem is to keep a log of what you do, just write down the time whenever you switch tasks – this gets tiring and time consuming really fast, and the information you got on paper can’t be easily analyzed.

The real and easy solution is time tracking software that times you as you work – and does not require you to enter timing information after the fact, any good time tracking software can print timesheets for you as well as perform other analysis of the timing data.

Obviously I’m going to suggest yaTimer, the simple and easy to use time tracking software I wrote, but even if for some strange reason you don’t like yaTimer do yourself a favor and use some time tracking software – you’ll never want to manually fill another timesheet again.

Productivity Tip – Why do you want to be more productive?

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:07:09 GMT

Don’t worry, this is not a philosophical post, my productivity tips series is still all about tips and techniques you can use to improve your productivity (and you life).

If you are reading this you probably care about your productivity and you want to be as productive as possible, but why? Do you want to make more money? To improve your life style? To have more free time? To spend more time with your family and friends? It’s important to know.

Being more productive can help you achieve all those and more, but only if you concentrate on your goals and not try to blindly increase your productivity.

Is working 80 hours a week and accomplishing in each of those hours what will take others 4 times as much time to do productive? Sure. Will it get you more time with your family? Not at all.

What if you work only one day a week but you can finish a week’s work in this day, are you productive? Yes, you are 5 times as productive as your co-workers. Will it make you rich? Unlikely.

What if can you answer a 1000 e-mails a day, is this productive? By some people definition it is. Will it get you any closer to any of your goals? Only if you are getting paid per-message.

If you want more money, or need more money to achieve your goals, you will need to improve your productivity in a way that increases your pay:

If you get paid per project, you need to finish your projects quicker so you can take on more work - or work more hours.
If you get paid by the hour you need more billable hours, getting more done in those hours will not help much.
If you get paid regardless of how much time you work or how much you do then you should concentrate on getting a raise.

On the other hand if you want more free time your strategy should be different:

If get paid per project, you need to finish your projects quicker and not take on more work.
If you get paid by the hour you need to reduce your non-billable work time to the absolute minimum, increase your rates or take a pay cut, you’re not going to get more free time without working fewer hours.

So remember, productivity is a road – not a destination. Most roads won’t get you to the right destination, even if they are good roads traveled by many people and most productivity techniques will not get you any closer to your goals, even if het are widely used and really improve your productivity.

Productivity Tip – If you can’t do it shouldn’t be on your to-do list

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:50:10 GMT

To-do lists are a great way to get organized, you can write them down on a piece of paper, an handheld computer or software on your PC (I obviously use yaTimer).

The reason they are so great is that you can immediately find a task that needs to be done, do it and cross it off, this have 3 different and important parts:

Immediately find the next task that needs to be done.

Do one thing.

Cross it off and get that feeling that you accomplished something.

If you have tasks on your to-do list that you cannot do right now you can’t immediately find something to do, you have to read the entire list and think about every task before you choose one.

Then you might start actually working on a task only to discover that something is missing and you can’t complete the task right now (this is especially demoralizing if it happens several times in a raw).

And finally after you spent all this time and effort you have nothing to show for it and you can’t even cross out the line on the list.

So if something can’t be done right now it doesn’t belong on your to-do list, write it down on another list instead so you don’t forget it – but not you main to-do list.

Tasks that depend on other task you have to do are fine, just write them in your to-do list in the order they have to be performed and do your tasks in order.

Productivity Tip – Do Your Tasks in Order

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:12:26 GMT

The easiest thing you can do to improve productivity is to organize your tasks in a to-do list, if you haven’t done so already stop reading and write a to-do list (I use yaTimer, my excellent time tracking application to handle my to-do list).

Your to-do list should contain only items that are “doable” and can be finished and crossed off the list in a reasonable time (as a general guideline, anything that takes more than one day should be broken into smaller tasks).

Now normally I like to prioritize my to-do list and try to pick the best task to do next, this works just fine most of the time but it has some drawbacks:

If you have a lot of small tasks you may be wasting too much time prioritizing and picking tasks instead of doing real work.
Every time you pick your next task you read all of the tasks in order to pick the next one, this not only takes time it also make it harder to concentrate on the next task .
And finally, if there is one task you really don’t want to do it can stay on your task list virtually forever as you pick and choose other “more important” tasks to do first.

The solution for all those problems is just to do all tasks in order, finish the first task, then the second, then the third … don’t skip ahead, don’t even read items that are later in the list.

This method works best when you have a lot of small tasks that are more or less equally important – it fails miserably if you have a few tasks that are important or urgent and a lot of tasks who are not.

Productivity Tip – Don’t Read About Productivity

Nir Dobovizki — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:07:44 GMT

Time spent reading about productivity is not itself productive, long books about becoming more productive and productivity systems that are overly complex are rarely worth it even when the system work because of the time investment needed to learn and maintain the system.

I’ll try to keep post in my productivity tip series as short as possible so they are worth the (short) time it takes to read them.

Productivity Tip – Don’t Work Too Much

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:05:49 GMT

Humans are most productive when working for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

If you work more than that you actually getting less done, not only you could spend the extra time with your family or doing something fun – you actually get less work done by working more.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution researchers have been studying worker’s productivity, a lot of this research went into finding the optimal length for the work day, studies were done all over the world and for different industries from factory work to information technology and they all came up with the same result – 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, a total of 40 hours a week.

The reason we can’t get more done by simply spending more time working is that our productivity changes during the course of the day, when we start working in the morning it takes us a little while to get up to speed, We have a few hours where we are most productive and then we start to get a little tired.

As we become more tired our productivity drops, we get less done and we do more mistakes until we arrive at a point we’re starting to make mistakes faster then we can fix them – at that point the more we work the farther behind we get.

And that’s only the first part of the problem – after finishing a long day we get to work the next day and we are still a little bit tired, so our peak productivity that day is a little less than the previous day, and a little less then that the next day.

You can work long days if you have a close deadline, but that is not sustainable.

Research has shown that a team working 8 hours days and a team working 12 hours day will complete the same amount of work in 6 weeks – that means that in 6 weeks the productivity loss from being tired completely wiped out the gain from working more hours.

And after those 6 weeks the tem working 40 hours a week can continue working at the same productivity level indefinitely while the team working 60 hours a week or more is burned out and can hardly do any work at all.

Here is a more comprehensive article on the subject with graphs, formulas and references.

Productivity Tip – Budget your time

Nir Dobovizki — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:42:22 GMT

Let’s say you are trying to get organized, you made a task list and prioritized it by importance, now what? You have several projects you have to work on, none of them is more impotent then the others, how can you make progress on all of them?

One way I already talked about is to track how much time we spend on each project and take corrective action when some work is left behind.

Another way is to plan ahead, decide before you start working how much time you are going to spend on each project, prepare a weekly time budget:

Day	Project A	Project B
Monday	2 hours	2 hours
Tuesday	2 hours	1 hour
Wednesday	3 hours
Thursday	2 hours	3 hours
Friday	1 hours	3 hours

Now all that’s left is the hard part – sticking to the plan, here are important points you have to keep in mind:

Leave a lot of time for overhead, e-mails, phone calls, meals, bathroom breaks and other things that are not directly related to your projects, at first you will be surprised how little time you have to actually work.
After your daily budget for a project is finished don’t work on it anymore until you finished all your other plans for the day.
Unlike money unused time does not roll-over to the next day (unless you can time travel).
Use a timer to know when to switch project, yaTimer’s countdown timers can help you there.
And most important, especially at the beginning – at the end of every day look at how you spent your time today and adjust your budget for the rest of the week.
That means that if you planned to work 8 hours today and you only got a total of 5 hours of work done you have to redo your budget so that every day totals to about 5 hours, and if you didn’t get to work on something today then you need to budget more time for it tomorrow (remember, you can’t just push time you “didn’t use” today to tomorrow, if you need to add 4 more hours to a task tomorrow those 4 hours have to come out of tomorrow’s budget for something else).

Productivity Tip – Get More Done By Doing Less

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:55:46 GMT

Our long term goal in becoming more productive is rarely to just get more done, it may be to finish a project quickly so we can work on other things or it may be to have more free time, the important thing to remember is that being more productive is not our goal – it’s a means to an end.

Remembering that productivity or efficiency is a tool and not a goal is important, productivity methodologies almost always concentrate on doing things quickly, they almost never talk about considering if things are worth doing at all.

For example, let’s say we have an ultra-efficient system to handle e-mail, we are so efficient that every time we receive an e-mail we immediately send an helpful reply.

First, we will receive replies for most of the e-mail we send – so this ultra efficient method of handling e-mail will increase the number of e-mails we receive, and second, we teach people that e-mailing us is a quicker way to get answers then looking for the answers themselves, again resulting in more e-mail.

So our efficient system for handling e-mail caused such an increase in e-mail volume that we probably have to spend more time answering e-mail then we did before becoming efficient.

So what do we do? We concentrate on our goals and prioritize our tasks, for example if our goal is to finish our project on time then an e-mail from a coworker can probably wait, an e-mail from a customer may be more urgent and getting some work done on the actual project is essential.

By the way, my own system for handling e-mail is to check my e-mails only twice a day, on the same time every day, close my e-mail and instant messenger programs when I’m working and track how much time I spend on e-mails (using yaTimer, of course) to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.