A Smart Bear » Double your productivity without more work or stress

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

To increase productivity, focus on making small daily improvements instead of aiming for unrealistic goals. Eliminating low-value activities, like excessive emails and unproductive meetings, can lead to significant gains. By identifying and reducing these time-wasters, you can boost your efficiency without working harder.

Key Takeaways:

1. Aim for 1% improvements each day in both personal and professional areas.
2. Track your time to identify low-velocity activities that drag down productivity.
3. Eliminate unnecessary tasks to focus on high-value work.

Highlights from Article

Once you’re behind, you can’t make up ground no matter how fast you go.

The problem with improving your productivity is that so much of your day is occupied by low-velocity activity—dealing with emails you didn’t really need to see, dawdling in a meeting that hasn’t started yet, or spending too much time reading blogs. (Present company excepted.) When half your day moves at 30 mph, it’s impossible to make up the time during the other half. This is the problem with Lin’s 1% idea—the low-velocity stuff makes it too difficult to improve even 1% overall, at least not every day of the year. Even with 37x improvement in some areas, you still might not be 2x more productive overall.

• You can’t really constantly improve by 37x with 1% improvements since a huge chunk of your day is spent on things that the productivity improvements don’t impact, so you’re dragged down by them.

So if you’re serious about wanting to increase productivity by, say, 2x, you can. Identify the biggest perpetrators of low-velocity activity and eliminate them, then do a little surgery on your high-value tasks.

• Getting productive can really just mean spent less time working on the things that slow you down a lot. This starts by noticing where your time is going.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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