Four things I have learnt from interviews with the world’s most productive people.
In 2018, there was a meme doing the rounds that said, “You have the same amount of hours in the day as Beyonce”. I doubt that anyone became more productive as a result of seeing this meme, but it made me wonder: Do the high achievers that walk amongst us approach their days differently?
Through dozens of interviews I conducted for the podcast How I Work, I explored this question. Through speaking to business leaders, best-selling writers, musicians, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, I can confidently conclude that the answer is “yes”. Here are four strategies that we can take from them.
Read your work out loud
Whether you like it or not, we are all writers. Every day, our success at work is in part determined by how well we can communicate our thoughts through email, reports, and perhaps even articles or books.
“Consider creating rules for yourself for when you don’t schedule meetings.”
For bestselling author Dan Pink, reading his writing out loud helps him craft better work. “Nearly everything I write of significance, so books or articles, I will read out loud because to me, it’s a test of does it sound right,” explains Pink.
“Are there words in there that are clunkers? Is it as clear and gleaming as it could possibly be? For me, reading out loud and hearing the work read out loud is a significant part of my editing process. It’s very time consuming. It’s very laborious. But that’s how I do things.”
For the most critical pieces of writing you produce, whether this be all-staff emails or mission critical reports, take time to read them aloud during the editing process. While it can feel tedious, your writing will become more clear, concise, and ultimately more impactful.
Nudge your way to better behaviour
WordPress and Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenweg pays attention to small behavioural hacks that can lead to the biggest payoffs.
“If what is closest to me in the bed when I wake up is the Kindle and not the phone, I’m more likely to read,” says Mullenweg. “But if the phone’s on top of the Kindle I’m more likely to look at the phone. If I can reverse that order it’s a bit better.”
In Work Rules, ex-head of People Operations Laszlo Bock describes an experiment whereby he was trying to influence Googlers into making healthier food choices. In one experiment, healthy snacks were placed at eye level in transparent containers at Google’s snacking stations. Unhealthy snacks were placed closer to the ground in opaque containers. This simple change led to a 30 per cent reduction in the number of calories consumed from candy and fat consumption dropped by 40 per cent.
Consider what habits you are looking to change and reflect on changes you can make to your environment. Look at all aspect of your life and ask yourself, “What’s something that I can change to make it easier to do the thing that I want to do”.
Batch your meetings
Batch checking email, whereby you only check emails two to three times per day, has become a common productivity tip. Batching meetings can have an equally big impact. Research from Ohio State University has shown that when you have a meeting coming up in the next hour or two, people get 22 per cent less work done compared to if there was no upcoming meeting.
Wharton Professor Adam Grant found this research affirming for the way he deliberately structured his days at university. “On a teaching day, I hold all my office hours (meetings) back to back. I learned that I needed a little buffer so that maybe five minutes between each meeting just to catch up on email or in case a meeting ran long helped, but then I’d have another day with no meetings at all where I could really focus and be productive.”
Consider creating rules for yourself for when you don’t schedule meetings. For example, if you are most cognitively alert in the mornings, try to implement a no-meetings rule for several mornings per week.
Use your clothes as a communication channel
Finding a communication channel that can cut through the clutter can be challenging. We are bombarded with emails, phone calls, and meetings every day. But ex-President of Pinterest Tim Kendall discovered it in his wardrobe. For four and half years, he wore a t-shirt that said ‘Focus’ every single day (he had about 20 in rotation).
“I got in front of the company and said, ‘I’m going to wear this until we have 200 million users.’ By the way, at the time we had 10 or 20 million, so it was a way out when I started.” Kendall ended up wearing the shirt until he left the company in January 2018.
“I think that with your outfit, you can use that as a way to symbolically communicate to people,” explains Kendall. “I remember when I was at Facebook one year, it was a seminal year, 2009. Mark Zuckerberg showed up to work on January 4th or 5th, and he was wearing a tie. As you can imagine, for Mark Zuckerberg that stands out, and he said, ‘I’m wearing this every day for the rest of the year because this is a serious year’.”
If you have an important message to communicate to your staff, think outside of the usual communication channels and instead, think about something that will cut through. It may be your wardrobe, or with the move to virtual work, perhaps even your video background or a prop that you have in all video calls.
Investing time in these simple strategies will help you have more impact at work. And despite getting strange looks from my daughter who was sitting next to me while I worked on this piece, my hope is that reading this article out loud as I edited it turned it into a better piece of writing.
This article first appeared in issue 32 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
