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O
ttawa’s Chris Bailey turned down a
number of attractive job offers after
university graduation in favour of some-
thing even more attractive: Figure out
how to be productive. It was a personal
Odyssey
, as
he tested the ideas peddled by productivity gurus
to see what worked and what didn’t, and added his
own twists. The result was a book,
The Productivity
Project
, which allows you to accompany him on his
journey of learning, and a career as a productivity
consultant.
He says the point behind productivity is that ev-
ery day we get 24 hours to live in meaningful ways.
But once you account for our various obligations,
there is a paltry two-and-a-half hours of free time
left to put to personal use. “That is where produc-
tivity comes to the rescue. I think productivity tac-
tics–like the ones that I discuss in this book–exist to
help you accomplish everything you have to do in
less time, so you can carve out more time for what’s
actually important and meaningful in your life,” he
writes, adding that productivity can also ensure
you have “a ton” of energy left at the end of the day
for those pursuits.
The best technique Bailey found was the Rule of
Three, starting every day by deciding what three
tasks to accomplish by the end of the day. He had
experimented with a variety of organizing systems
and apps but found this approach–you should also
begin each week by outlining three tasks to accom-
plish–the most effective.
Initially, he made his accomplishments too small
and overshot them. Then, the reverse: They were
too ambitious, sometimes intimidatingly so, and
he was less motivated and fell short. It took about
10 days for him to find the right balance. And he
challenges you to join him: Try the Rule of Three
tomorrow.
Start with just the daily challenge and add the
weekly goals once you are comfortable. Set an
alarm for twice during the workday and when it
goes off ask yourself if you remember what your
three goals are and whether you’re on track to
achieve them. (When you add the weekly three,
also check how you are faring with those every
time the alarm rings.) At the end of the week, re-
view whether your goals are ambitious enough.
As well as knowing your goals you have to cut
out wasted time. That’s where his exploration of
procrastination can be edifying. At one point dur-
ing his year of productivity Bailey was labeled by
the TED Talks organization the most productive
person you would ever hope to meet. But that same
week he counted six hours of procrastination in his
meticulous record-keeping, albeit he also accom-
plished a ton of work and felt super-energetic.
“The more aversive (unattractive) a task or proj-
ect is to you, the more likely you are to put it off,”
he notes.
That’s more likely to happen if the task has one
or more of these attributes: Boring, frustrating, dif-
ficult, unstructured or ambiguous, lacking in per-
sonal meaning, or lacking in intrinsic rewards–not
fun or engaging. Doing your taxes hits the procras-
tination jackpot, falling into each of those catego-
ries, while Netflix lacks any of those procrastina-
tion triggers, so it’s an easy substitute.
“The biggest reason your highest impact tasks
are so valuable is that they too are aversive; they
almost always require more time, attention and
energy than your lower-impact tasks, and they’re
usually more boring, frustrating, difficult, unstruc-
tured, and lacking in intrinsic rewards,” he ob-
serves.
Our prefrontal cortex, the logical part of our
brain that nudges us to meet our goals, is gener-
ally at war with the limbic system, the instinctual,
emotional part, which prefers Netflix. Much of his
productivity improvements involved helping the
pre-frontal cortex to win more frequently. For chal-
lenging tasks you have to figure out ways to over-
come the six barriers. For example, he attacks his
taxes in his favourite café and sets aside a $2.50 re-
ward for every 15 minutes on the chore.
He also established a procrastination list to keep
track and when stuck tries to find another high-val-
ue task to substitute. He writes down the costs of
not doing the challenging task, which seems to ig-
nite his prefrontal cortex, and tries to just get start-
ed, pledging to work just a few minutes, although
often that extends. Understanding procrastination
led him to cut it down to about one hour a week.
To curb your email compulsion, he recommends
burying your email start button in a series of nest-
ed folders on your computer–rather than keeping
it easy to reach on your taskbar–so it will take 20
seconds to access. Creative ideas often come in the
shower rather than at work because your mind can
wander and he advises taking 15 minutes a day
where you sit with a pen and paper and just led
the mind drift.
In
Deep Work
, Washington University Professor
Cal Newport looks at professional activities per-
formed in a state of distraction-free concentration
that push your cognitive capacity to their limit.
Such deep work contrasts with shallow work, with
which you may be all-too-familiar, when you are
caught up in the quicksand of little accomplish-
ment.
“The ability to perform deep work is becoming
increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is be-
coming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a
The Leader’s Bookshelf
Harvey Schachter
The Productivity
Project
By Chris Bailey
Random House
Canada, 292
pages, $32.00
Deep Work
By Cal Newport
Grand Central
Publishing, 296
pages, $34.00
24
/ Canadian Government Executive
// June 2016