Productivity Tips

Best Productivity Tips of 2008

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:45:07 GMT

This is the last week of 2008 and according to our web traffic almost nobody cares about productivity right now, so this looks like a good time to pick the five best tips of the year.

This list was selected by me, the web traffic statistics of all the productivity tips are too close to use them to select the best posts.

And one of my favorites from 2007

Productivity Tip 4 – Don't Cheat Your Time Tracking Software

Productivity Tip – Take Vacations

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:10:42 GMT

Most people can’t work all the time, you need some downtime to “recharge” – so take a vacation and enjoy yourself.

A vacation can actually boost your productivity in two ways, the first is the obvious, a nice change of pace and some rest will help you come back mentally recharged and ready to take on new challenges.

The second and even more important impact of a vacation is less obvious.

When you work on something every day you are too close, you are focused on the details and you can’t see the big picture – by leaving for a while you can take a step back and when you return you may see a more efficient way to do your work you just didn’t notice before.

Just whatever you do don’t work when you’re on vacation, this will not only ruin your vacation it will also eliminate any work related advantages of time off.

Productivity Tip – Don’t Multitask

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:45:51 GMT

We all think we can do more than one thing at the same time – and we are wrong, we have just one brain and we can concentrate only on one thing at a time.

We can do multiple things at the same time – but not well, when we spread our attention between multiple things they all suffer.

Do one thing at a time and you’ll get more done – because it’s quicker to do two things one after the other then to do them in parallel, that is, if you have to do a good job, it’s quicker to do a really lousy job at two things in the same time.

You will also feel less stressed because trying to keep track of multiple things at the same time is difficult and stressful.

Just try it, you’ll be amazed what you can do when you can actually focus on one thing.

Productivity Tip – There is no one size fits all

Nir Dobovizki — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:39:21 GMT

There are a lot of productivity tips out there, some of them contradictory, try to follow them all and you’ll waste so much time arranging, prioritizing, filing and tracking that you won’t have any time left to work.

We are all different, our jobs are different and our psychology is different, so it should be a surprise that we have different whys to be more productive.

Whenever you read productivity advice (including on this blog), you should read it critically, you should ask yourself “how does this make me more productive?”, you should think about the problem the method you are reading about is trying to solve and see if you need to solve this problem and if this solution causes any other problems for you.

Don’t be afraid to experiment, try something for a week or a month to see if it works for you – and don’t be afraid to throw out a productivity methodology that doesn’t work for you.

There’s no one size fits all and only you can choose what’s right for you.

Productivity Tip: Sleep

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:13:50 GMT

Noting hurts productivity more than sleep deprivation.

There is an awful lot of conclusive research on the effects of sleep deprivation on productivity (usually done by armies), the sleep deprived teams are always much slower, less focused and make substantially more mistakes, also the sleep deprived individuals don’t notice they are performing so badly.

So, remember, you are not super human, you need your sleep – by working instead of sleeping you are likely just making a lot costly mistakes and setting yourself back more then you are advancing with your work.

Productivity Tip: Set a deadline

Nir Dobovizki — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:09:32 GMT

A big part of improving your productivity is manipulating yourself into working when you rather not work, one of the more effective tricks is setting a deadline.

For example, the weekly productivity tip blog post has to be published every Monday – no excuses.

If we think about it for a moment we can see that nothing bad will happen if this post will be published later in the week, there is absolutely nothing time critical about this post.

But, if I allow myself to post a little bit late then before I notice the week has passed and I haven’t written the blog post.

So, if you want to make sure you do something set a deadline, this deadline has to be possible, no point in frustrating yourself for no good reason – but set a deadline.

Obviously, after you set your deadline you have to take it seriously, otherwise there’s no point to it – just act like you are going to lose a large sum of money if you miss the deadline – this usually does the trick.

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.