10-Minute Productivity
Productivity happens in small bursts of energy, not long marathons of disciplined drudgery. Rarely do you ever get a big chunk of time in your daily schedule that opens up with nothing going on. In fact, it becomes increasingly difficult to carve out a large block of time with everything going on. But that is alright. Because getting enough time to be more productive is not dependent on your schedule magically opening up. Instead, productivity depends on you being incredibly intentional about 10-minute time savers. I call it 10-minute productivity.
Let me explain:
If you begin to shave off just 10 minutes off the hour by being incredibly intentional, you’ll get back 80 minutes daily. Multiply that by five days a week, and you’ve gotten back 400 minutes a week… that’s a bit over six and a half hours in a work week… that’s almost an extra day of opportunity you have to be more productive.
Here’s how you can shave 10 minutes off the hour:
Meetings
Get to the point in one-hour meetings and extract what you need in 50 minutes instead of 60 minutes. Most of us hem haw around for 10+ minutes on any given call. Do that for three to four meetings daily, and you’ve wasted 30-40 minutes of opportunity. Stating you’ve only got 90% of the time for a meeting on the front end helps keep everyone focused on what is most important to accomplish, rather than allowing the discussion to flow over its allotted time because everyone has to go, and still you have not even accomplished anything, which not only wastes the hour meeting but now has gone over by an extra 15 minutes (kind of like my run on sentence just written showing you how we keep going and going and going without getting to the point… you’re welcome).
Stop taking forever responding to emails. Most of us overthink and overanalyze our replies to emails rereading and grammatically correcting every little detail. As a result, most people take way too long in emails, and it’s killing productivity. They are spending an extra two to five minutes an email and trying to respond to one hundred emails. That’s hours of wasted time and energy on email when you could have just gotten it by practicing 212 (if you don’t know about The 212 Principle/M.E.D. Principle, check it out now!).
Distractions
Stop letting yourself check your phone every five minutes. Stop letting people corner you in the office, just chatting. Stop allowing pop-ups and emails to get your attention every few minutes. Don’t allow the pressure of feeling like you have to always be available to expand your workload. You’ll be more productive when you are at your best. So, find when, where, and what you need to do to activate your energy and focus. You’ll be amazed at how much time you are giving away to frivolous distractions. Instead, focus on deep work moments where you shut everything off but what you need to focus on.
* Check out Cal Newport’s fantastic book called Deep Work.
Socializing
As much as I am a proponent of social connections and making sure we are developing relationships with our teammates, we can’t allow social chit-chat to derail our productivity. Carve time into your day to connect with others, but don’t waste your day talking, talking, talking. Schedule focused socializing time where you can build relationships rather than feeling like you have to do it for every meeting, interaction, email, etc…
Overanalyzing
Too many people waste time overthinking, overplanning and overanalyzing projects, tasks, emails, and more. This is a cunning trap that appears to be harmless on the outside but will prove to kill your productivity. Perfectionism hides in the cloak of good intentions. The things we tell ourselves certainly make sense; after all, we are our greatest salesman, selling ourselves on our opinions and thoughts. We can convince ourselves that our overthinking is a means to ensure we “get it right.” The only problem is our excuses to take action become the very limits we live under. Nothing will slow you down more than overthinking and overplanning. The famous phrase “The Paralysis of Analysis” is a profound concept that plagues many people. If you wait to do something until you can do everything, you won’t do anything.
Lack of Planning
Benjamin Franklin said, “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” Remember the profound statement, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Too many people waste time trying to figure out what to do rather than just doing what they need to do. We are constantly reacting to the clock and measuring what we think we can get done based on how much time we have left, rather than controlling what we do and measuring the clock against it. Highly productive people live and breathe by Parkinson’s Law (If you have not read about Parkinson’s Law, you need to do so here). Always plan out what you will do before you do it so you can get moving immediately without trying to figure it out at the moment. For example, when you go into a block of prescribed time to work on a project, already have steps one, two, and three laid out so you can get working. This means you have to plan out the block of time before it even starts.
If you practice some of these techniques, you will start shaving 10 minutes off the hour and get anywhere from five to ten hours of your week back for extraordinary opportunities. So get intentional about moving forward so you can change the world, my friend!
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, wisely said, “If you split your day into ten-minute increments, and you try to waste as few of those ten-minute increments as possible, you’ll be amazed at what you can get done.”
