To boost your productivity, you don't need to massively change your work life or routine. There are ways to get more done by cutting out distractions and making small changes to how you behave.
Sometimes, it's even the smallest things that can make the biggest impact. For instance, turning off unwanted push notifications on your phone or using the first hour of your day more effectively. Here are some of the best tips from the people who know hot to get things done.
Italian architect and MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti used internet-of-things technology alongside architectural innovation in his recent renovations of the Agnelli Foundation headquarters. His design allowed each worker to tailor their space to their own needs while also encouraging interaction with colleagues. Workers could, for example, personalise their temperature and lighting preferences via an app connected to sensors around the office. They "create a kind of thermal bubble, which follows each individual, allowing better comfort and a reduction of energy waste", Ratti says.
Canadian Sherry Coutu is known as one of the UK’s leading performers in tech. She is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and CEO of Founders4Schools, and she has a few secrets for carving out time to get it all done. Start your day early, finish the working week on Friday, find time for exercise and make time for home life are among her priorities. "I've got a rule: 20 out of 30 nights I've got to be home by 6pm. I have three kids and a husband, and I want to be there with them. I introduced the rule about ten years ago. Life had been quite hectic - and if you don't decide that you'll be at home for a certain amount of time, you'll find yourself never there,” she says.
Brothers Chip and Dan Heath are authors of the book The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, where they argue for the importance of creating meaningful experiences at work to have a more positive impact - even that’s in a mundane meeting. “It will improve employee engagement, employee retention and employee loyalty. It matters to people when you pay attention to the moments that mean something,” says Dan. They suggest embracing big moments such as the first day of work, a promotion, or a milestone reached such as the first time managing an employee. But, the more boring work moments can be turned into positive experiences too by doing things a bit differently.“Holding a stand-up meeting, taking a walk or inviting a customer to join a meeting about customer issues. Depending on the meeting, there are a hundred different ways you could break the script,” says Dan.
How you spend the first hour after waking up in the morning sets the standard for your productivity for the rest of the day. WIRED asked leaders in business what they do before they’ve even eaten breakfast. Some of the common themes were reading, meditation, and exercise - taking a moment to yourself without any distractions - and taking some time to get on top of emails. Mo Gawdat, chief business officer at Google, says he has spent the first hour of his day for the past 30 years learning about a new topic. “I invest in the fitness of my brain before going to the gym. I don't read news or fiction; I choose a focus and read about it until I've mastered it,” he says.
Freddie Blackett is the co-founder and CEO of online gardening startup, Patch. The app helps city-dwellers pick the best plants for an indoor environment that can be tricky for flora to thrive in because of quickly fluctuating temperatures and lack of sunlight. But, its worth investing in them because they add more to an office than a decorative touch: psychologists have found that they can improve employee satisfaction and can increase productivity by up to 15 per cent. Blackett advises setting up a staff rota to water and feed the plants as needed, so they don't get neglected. "Inevitably, plants will die; they are living organisms," he says. "But if you have more plants survive than die, then you're on to something good."
Despina Katsikakis is an expert on how design impacts business performance and her latest project aims to address this on a huge scale: encouraging a sense of community in the giant skyscraper under construction at 22 Bishopsgate in the City of London that will accommodate 12,000 workers. “The majority of office design focuses on reducing the cost of the space rather than on inspiring people to do better work,” she says. But there is a shift happening and her tips to embracing this include creating spaces specifically for employees who need to get away from it all and focus and offering extra learning courses after work. “It’s a bit like the old-fashioned idea of going to the pub,” says Katsikakis. “But with more knowledge exchange attached to it.”
Our digital lives can be just as chaotic and distracting as our ones IRL but Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker have some tips to keeping it in check. Our current system we use to manage our digital lives are outdated and insufficient say the authors of The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff. But they’ve developed a new system to overcome this, which includes organising files that you want to keep but don’t need into a visible but separate part of a folder; storing information according to the project it belongs to, regardless of the format it's kept on; and recording notes on lecture while recording the audio and taking photos of the slides at the same time, which will give us a better recollection when referring back to our notes later.
In his latest book, Tribe of Mentors, productivity guru Tim Ferriss asks over 100 high achievers for their top life tips. One that he lives by? Avoiding the number seven when making decisions. “One thing that came up twice, from an athlete and a CEO, was ranking opportunities from one to ten but not using seven,” he says. “If you go to a restaurant and you ask the waiter or waitress how good the steak is from one to 10, seven is a cop-out number that a lot of people use to answer, because it's non-committal,” says Ferriss. “As soon as you remove seven, it can either be a six, which is barely a passing grade, or it's an eight, which is very excited. … It makes decisions a lot faster and a lot easier.”
Plantronics CEO Joe Burton says the best way to manage distracting background noise is with more background noise. At its Hoofddorp workspace, Plantronics is doing just that - and it seems to be working. Burton says this is because not all sound is created equally - the intelligibility of a conversation is what creates interference. His tips for boosting productivity with noise includes waterfalls in the office that act as a visual reference point to the sound of babbling water played on speakers around the office. Having designated concentration areas around the office also helps workers when they want to focus without any noise at all.
Push notifications for email, texts, social media notifications, the news, the weather, are detrimental to our productivity argues Dan Ariely, James B Duke professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, North Carolina. Recent studies show that 50 per cent of Americans keep their phone near them during every moment of their waking hours, and 50 percent of them check their phone at least several times an hour. A recent study he conducted found people were much more likely to make errors and not pay attention to their main task if they were interrupted by notifications from their phone - such as a text or a call. He says to boost our productivity, it's important to recognise not all emails and texts are created equal and therefore don’t warrant immediate notification - so just turn them off.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
