How to be even more effective at work
Introduction
In 2019, the productivity software market grew 16.5% CAGR. It is predicted to hit almost US$100 billion by 2025. But in spite of the massive growth of the market, knowledge workers are still waiting for a productivity revolution.
You see, the industrial revolution was catalysed by the invention of the steam engine. Overnight, productivity for manual workers in manufacturing increased 50-fold. Knowledge workers are still waiting for their steam engine.
Knowledge work goes beyond simply managing processes; it also requires technical knowledge, creativity and managing people. These extra elements introduce chaos into the system and stifle productivity. In 1999, management guru, Peter Drucker wrote:
“Work on the productivity of the knowledge worker has barely begun. In terms of actual work on knowledge-worker productivity, we will be in the year 2000 roughly where we were in the year 1900 in terms of productivity of the manual worker.”
So, while we’re still waiting for the knowledge work steam engine, we have what we need to take the first steps in the knowledge worker productivity revolution.
Workplace productivity requires understanding the fundamentals of how we work and interact before throwing new tools at the problem.
Without understanding the fundamentals, your productivity will never make it out of first gear. You'll procrastinate, get distracted, and feel disengaged from your work, while at the same time somehow feeling busy and stressed.
If that sounds familiar to you, you're no different from the rest of us. The core productivity skills might seem common, but they are anything but. In fact, you are anything like the rest of us, you're probably losing 20-25% of your work day to distractions. Think about it. That's several weeks of your work time lost per year. And even the best of us are underperforming at work.
But if these skills are so important, why are they never formally taught? Why do educators and workplaces expect you to learn them by yourself? The truth is that the vast majority of people are simply unaware that there's a better way. We've become so used to the idea that our status quo is normal that we think it's inevitable.
As a result, nearly all of us operate at a low-productivity stasis. We work long hours — often longer than we are supposed to — and still feel like we are falling behind. We underperform and miss out on leisure time. Instead of encouraging productivity, the modern work culture produces a high-stress, low-density workday.
I say nearly all of us cause there are the exceptions to the rule. These pioneers that have decided to take the reins and consciously implement technology (or lack thereof) to their benefit. For example, as Stanford Professor Donald Knuth explains on his personal homepage:
"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime... On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode -- like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter."
Before you shut down your email and throw your phone in the bin, there’s good news. Our work culture has ignored employee productivity for so long that low hanging fruit can be found easily by those who know where to look.
Well, Building 20 knows where to look. That's why we've compiled the best research on productivity for you right here. It's all part of our mission to help teams do difficult things faster. Welcome to Working Well: The Productivity Core Skills Guide.
But before we dive in to the research, let’s see what we can learn from American author William Faulkner who wrote one of the great novels in just 48 days.
How William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in 48 days
William Faulkner was 33 when he published As I Lay Dying, one of the greatest novels of all-time. But what's really interesting (for productivity geeks) is how he did it. Faulkner created a productivity temple while working at a power-plant, which allowed him to write the complete draft in 48 days.
Faulkner completed the draft in 4-hour bursts while working at the University of Mississippi power-plant, where he was the supervisor to two coal heavers. He spent the first part of his 12-hour night shift shovelling coal and barking directions to ensure the lights stayed on, but from midnight to 4 am, when demand for electricity waned, he worked at a makeshift desk (up-turned wheel barrow) handwriting his manuscript on unlined, onion-skinned paper.
It hardly sounds like the setting to write a classic novel in a month-and-a-half. But as the rest of this article will show you, by avoiding distractions, focussing on one thing at a time, and having hard start and finish times, Faulkner’s writing sprint is a great example of how to get difficult things done fast.
Deep work: not all work is created equal
The first thing to realise about your work is that not all tasks are created equal. No matter your job, some of the things you'll face in your workday will be mundane, routine, and boring. They'll feel as if they could be done by anyone. While they won't require your full attention, they probably won't be enjoyable, and they certainly won't make you feel like you've made a difference.
You know the tasks we're talking about: writing emails, scheduling meetings, and skimming memos are some common examples. This work might be necessary; it might even be important; but it won't tax your intellect. In that way, it is shallow work.
Contrast that work with the things that tap into your specialised knowledge. This is the knowledge you might have spent years in the field or at university developing. These are usually the tasks that you were hired for. The skills you trained for. These tasks engage your creativity and require you to turn your full attention to the challenge at hand. This work is almost certainly important – in fact, it's probably the part of your work you like the most. This is deep work.
Cal Newport, the author and computer scientist who coined the term, writes:
“Deep work is also an activity that generates a sense of meaning and fulfilment in your professional life. Few come home energized after an afternoon of frenetic e-mail replies, but the same time spent tackling a hard problem in a quiet location can be immensely satisfying.”
Unlike shallow work, deep work is hard. It requires concentration. It's draining. And that means you can only do one to four hours of deep work per day.
People are often sceptical when first confronted with the news that their specialist skills often take up a small part of their time on the job. But it holds up time and again with teams we work with – across industries, job types, and experience levels.
So, if deep work is where you can add the most value, being productive means making time for deep work. Without intentional practice, many of us go whole days without tackling any deep work at all. We spend our days jumping from shallow task to shallow task and never create the environment that's needed for deep work to occur. Why? Because we get a dopamine hit when we feel busy, and multi-tasking shallow work makes us feel busy without taking a cognitive tax.
But being busy is different to being productive. Being productive means deliberately setting aside time in your calendar for deep work. By recognising that focus is a scarce and valuable resource, you can begin to prioritise the tasks that require your attention. Give them your sole focus, and ensure that your environment is distraction free.
One thing at a time
Faulkner had one goal: to write his self-described 'tour-de-force'. Research tells us that focus is a key to productivity. Why? Because fragmenting your attention leads to "attention residue".
In her aptly-titled paper, ‘Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks’, Sophie Leroy (2009) concludes that:
“People need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.”
We're just not designed to jump between tasks. When we do, our attention lingers on our the other our other projects, and our minds are unable to given the problem at hand the attention it deserves.
In the modern workplace, focussing on one thing at a time can be tricky. One solution is clustering similar tasks: finish a manageable section of your report; take a break; do emailing in a batch; take a break; have some meetings; take a break; repeat.
The best way to break things down this way is with the Pomodorro technique. Just as Faulkner’s 4-hour writing window created urgency, Pomodorro technique creates urgency with a 25-minute count-down timer. In fact, Leroy (2009) found that time pressure is a great way to boost performance when transitioning between tasks:
“Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.”
The Pomodorro technique provides the right structure and time pressure to focus on one task at a time: focus on a task until it's done, take a break, move on to the next task. It requires planning, but it’s a small price to pay for a guaranteed improvement to your performance at work. In the next section, we’ll show you how to put that plan into place.
Timing is everything
If you can only do a maximum of four hours of deep work in a day, you need to be careful about when you do them. As it turns out, when you work really matters.If you're like the rest of us, you're probably most productive in the morning.
Take a look at the data collected from 28 million tasks:
On a typical day, we complete the most tasks (9.7%) at around 11 AM
After lunchtime, our productivity drops — and it completely plummets after 4 PM
We complete the most tasks at the beginning of the week, on Monday (20.4%), and we’re least productive at the end of the week (Friday, 16.7%)
That data aligns with what we know about Circadian rhythms, the internal cellular clocks that govern our day. These 24-hour cycles affect our moods, energy levels, strength, and alertness.
The science is pretty clear. For most people, at least, mid-mornings are the time to do the most demanding work. At that time, alertness and concentration reach their peak. When working from home, build your routine so that the hardest work goes first. Leave the shallow work until the afternoon, when your energy levels and willpower have dropped. If you don't focus early, you risk being stuck in the shallows all day.
Do fewer hours to achieve more
Each night, Faulkner had 4-hours to complete his writing before he had to, in his words, "clean the fires and get the steam up again".
It was the perfect structure for focussed work. As Cyril Northcote Parkinson joked in a 1955 essay for The Economist:
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Today, we call it Parkinson's Law. It explains why, when you have a hard deadline, you can produce a piece of work in two hours that might normally take you eight. So how do you design your routine to stop task inflation?
The answer is simple but counterintuitive. When you work fewer hours, you get more done.
The fixed-schedule productivity hack requires that you set unmovable start and end times to your day. UNMOVEABLE. With the fixed-schedule philosophy, extending your workday is simply not an option.
Fixed-schedule productivity works because it forces you to prioritise the tasks that matter. When you have less time than work, only tasks that are important or urgent are worth your attention.
Fixed-schedule productivity also makes you much stronger in your fight against procrastination and distraction. When you're conscious that your time is scarce, you become conscious of distractions and proactive in avoiding them. In the next section, we’ll show you why that’s so important.
Avoiding distractions
Distractions are trivial, but their impact isn't.
There wasn’t much happening between midnight and 4 a.m. at the power plant, so Faulkner was able to maintain his focus on deep work. But if he’d been distracted by chatty colleagues or pinging Slack notifications, the research shows that it would have taken him 23 minutes each time to get back into his writing flow.
Building 20 research shows that, on average, you lose around 48 days a year to distractions. Think about that: that's more time than it took Faulkner to write the book.
For many of us, distractions feel like welcome interruptions to tasks we find boring, tiring, or painful. After all, indulging in distraction feels good. Our brains evolved to forage for information, not to focus deeply. But in spite of the short-term relief, distractions tend to make work much more unpleasant. Aimlessly scrolling Twitter at work is the fast-food of coping with work — it tastes good in the moment, but you're going to pay for it later.
Getting rid of distractions isn't about getting rid of the things you like most about your workplace. It's about increasing the depth of your work. When you do, you'll feel less stress, less anxiety, and suddenly feel that your day is filled with time, not tasks.
Our data shows that, on average, the biggest workplace distractions are:
Office noise
Email
Colleague desk stops
Digital comms (not including email)
Checking phone
80% of distractions are trivial
While some distractions are vital to accelerate the creative process, most can be eliminated without loss. For example, one top-tier consulting firm reported that only 1% of consultants' distractions were client-related (such as, unplanned client phone calls).
Digital tools hinder, not help
We use email, Slack, Trello, Instant Messenger, LinkedIn, Skype, among many others to communicate with colleagues, clients, and beyond. These technologies promise new and exciting ways of collaboration, but often they fragment our attention and stifle productivity. This is especially true when the purpose and value-add of the technology is not articulated by the organisation. For example, employees of one start-up noted they checked every Slack notification because they didn't want to be left out of important decisions; no thought had been given to whether important decisions should be made on Slack.
Identify productivity killers
Once you've acknowledged the significance of distractions, you can begin to intentionally practice creating a distraction-free workplace. But before you can effectively tackle the distractions in your workday, you need to get clear about what they are. To achieve this lofty goal, use small data.
As opposed to big data, small data is cheap to collect and interpretable by anyone. Small data for productivity may include the number of distractions you encounter in a day or how much time you spent in meetings in a week. Small data provides fast and powerful insights that allow organisations to find low hanging productivity fruit.
For example, to identify what’s killing an employee’s flow, Building 20 has developed self-observation techniques that borrow from the mindfulness practice of 'noting'. During meditation, noting is used to stay present in the moment by mentally acknowledging and naming the distraction before returning to the meditative state. ‘Productivity noting’ takes a similar form as the meditative approach except instead of just mentally noting distractions, we capture these observations in a scorecard.
The scorecard approach to noting distractions provides accurate and actionable ‘small data’.
We worked with HotDoc, a fast-growing health-tech start-up in Australia. The scorecard approach identified that their biggest productivity killers were Slack, mobile phones, and email. By designing practical solutions to these three issues, each program participant saved 44 minutes a day in less than a month—an extra 22 days per year per employee.
You can do the same at home by creating your own productivity scorecard. It doesn’t have to be complex – just make a note in a spreadsheet each time you get distracted. Make sure you categorise your distractions, too, so you can see at the end of the day what patterns are emerging.
As it happens, some data is already available to you. Tech companies have been collecting it for you all along. For iPhone users, go to Settings > Screen Time and then press See All Activity under the column chart. The app shows you which apps you use the most, how often you pick up your phone, and how many notifications you receive from each app. Once you’ve looked at the data, think about whether there’s something you’d prefer to do than receive 40 LinkedIn notifications a day and delete the app.
Hijack unproductive habits
Once you’re aware of what’s stealing your time,, your focus can turn to implementing solutions.
Most unproductive work behaviour is rooted in bad habits that have been normalised across the organisation. Habits are sustained by a root cause and are activated by a cue; the cue initiates a routine, which leads to a reward.
Some unproductive habits can be temporarily hijacked by getting rid of the cue—for example turning off digital notifications—but the habit looms in the background waiting for the moment of weakness. Studies show that long-term behaviour change will only occur when you identify the habit cycle and change the routine; this is as true of workplace distractions as it is of smoking and snacking. In his book on habits, Charles Duhigg notes:
“You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”
Consider the common behaviour of stopping by a colleague’s desk. We might pretend that the reward we’re seeking to satisfy is an answer to an urgent question but mostly it relates to boredom or needing a break. By identifying the root cause (boredom) you can easily find a new routine like taking a walk or a few minutes of web browsing. Granted, in this case, you’re still being distracted, but at least you’re not taking your colleagues away from their work. And that’s important: a big part of workplace productivity is having empathy for colleagues and thinking about how your actions impact their ability to do difficult things quickly.
Manage expectations
Many of us interact with people who aren’t aware of our work routines or how their interruptions hijack our day. Whether those interruptions come from customers, colleagues, or family, to be productive workers need to give fair warning of how they work.
In essence, you need to signal to those around you when you need time to focus. Remember, to be productive you must protect your deep work time, so signal to your colleagues that you’re doing deep work and would like to be left alone. Signalling can include anything from a note in your email signature about when people should expect a response, or an upturned hourglass to indicate to colleagues that you’re doing deep work. As long as it’s conspicuous and people have a way of communicating in case of a real emergency, then you’re all set.
Manage your colleagues' expectations
The best signalling devices are those that keep distractions away without taking up your attention. The two that I recommend for office workers are headphones (here are some insights on what music you should listen to at work) and an hourglass. The 30-minute hourglass works because it doesn't add to your already cluttered digital environment and the falling sand is a clear signal to colleagues that you don't want to be interrupted.
If all else fails, switch into 'monk mode'. Find somewhere quiet away from your team, turn your phone off, and pump out an hour of deep work. If you have freedom over your calendar, try scheduling regular monk mode mornings.
Get the team on board. Signalling is difficult if no one knows what you're signalling or why. “On board” means the team understands why they're doing something and commits to trialling it. By getting the team to buy-in, you'll create community pressure to maintain the change and eventually productivity will become a priority of the team's work culture.
Manage customers' expectations
People get anxious about responding quickly to external stakeholders and clients. If you feel anxious to respond instantaneously, then it's a pretty good sign that you haven't managed your customers' expectations with your own performance in mind.
Harvard researchers Perlow & Porter did some fascinating experiments with a leading strategy firm, Boston Consulting Group, to understand the impact of being uncontactable for a day a week on performance. The research showed that with the right communication they could be uncontactable for a full day without impacting the client's satisfaction.
"Forcing a full day off was like tying your right hand behind your back to teach you to use your left hand. It really helped the team overcome the perception that they had to be on call 24/7."
If a customer is used to you jumping to attention every time you receive an email then it's hard to roll back their expectations. It's much easier if you let people know when you're difficult to contact during your first interaction. Let people know upfront how to contact you and when they should expect a response. For example, as part of your email signature, you could include:
"I only check email at 10am and 3pm. For any urgent matters please call me on my mobile."
Conclusion
Too often productivity problems fly under the radar as trivial annoyances that are an unavoidable cost of doing business.
While the time lost to distractions is often trivial in isolation—a minute here, three minutes there—in aggregate this time creates massive costs for organisations. Picking just some of the low hanging fruit of productivity will lead to smaller overheads, less burnout, and fewer hours in the office. In return, you’ll find yourself part of a more satisfied, more engaged, and more productive workforce.
If you’re ready to make productivity a priority but don’t know where to start, get in touch with Building 20.
We specialise in helping teams to improve their productivity. Find out more here.