How To Increase Productivity At An Individual Level
productive within an organization
because there's my to-do lists I've got 10 to-do lists from all of my different
team members who can put things on
there um I get distracted easily I think
because I end up watching a video
about AI on YouTube or about Rockets or something and I want to I want to get
more done really I want to be more
productive in the time that I spend
working so this is when you know what you should be doing when I know and you
know there's nothing wrong with
sometimes like watching YouTube and Rocket like that's you get ideas from doing
kind of stuff myself but T Todo
lists is a lot of to-do lists yeah
do you get most of the stuff done on those to-do lists it's more so each team
from
my chief of staff to my assistant to
my manager has a to-do list on Monday that they send things to me on and then I
go
through there and it's either a task
or it's an approve or it's just letting me know something and that's kind of
how it
works so I at one point had when I
was getting overwhelmed with some stuff I had a virtual assistant for a little
while and we would categorize like
emails into list a priority b c d all this stuff and eventually I realized
that was empowering me to do a lot
of low value things I became efficient at doing things that I shouldn't be
doing so I was seeing this public email
address of mine that when I was
oblivious to it I wasn't answering and that was fine and but once I knew it was
there I'm like oh I have to answer
this I have to answer this I have to answer this and so one important step for
me was realizing that only the A-list is
the stuff that's going to get done
because I'm a limited person with a limited life so one I think it's maybe
you do need to do all that stuff or
you just need to be aware of it but some of it is just I think there can be a
danger
in someone who has a lot of support
resources uh where they can lose some of the aspect of prioritization where you
just need to say this is the list
that's important other things I might not get to but for someone like you I
would I would suggest something like not
starting your day with email or
messaging because you know we were talking a
little bit before about this thing
called the zarnik effect which is this idea that an unfinished task leaves like
a residue in your brain basically and
makes you it makes it harder for you
to fully transition to doing something else and because I expect your various
inboxes will always be an unfinished
task right yeah if you start the day with that no matter what you do the
residue is going to be there for
what you try to switch to next so I'm not saying don't address your email but I
wouldn't start with I would the day
before what is the thing that if I
get done tomorrow it's going to be a good day and start with that before you do
the things that might leave residue on
your brain and start multitasking
how do they know that's true have they done studies on this aonic effect yeah
yeah absolutely I mean you can see you can
give people one you can do it in a
workplace environment where researchers like Gloria Mark for example will be
tracking everything from someone's
Vision to what they're doing on their computer to their heart rate variability
and seeing how long it takes them to
get back to a task um increased switching when there's like like a residue in
their brain so their rate of
switching will go up uh you know some of their indicators of stress response
will go up
or in a cognitive task they'll
perform more poorly if there's something still stuck in their brain so there's
also sort of laboratory experiments where you
give somebody something don't let
them finish it give them a cognitive task and you see does it impair their
performance if they weren't allowed to finish the
thing that started before I want to
close off on that point of just team culture then how to get a team of people
to do really exceptional
Innovative work and to fail faster
is there anything else that's sort of pertinent to you and I'm saying this
purely selfishly because it's one of the
0 Comments