Most of us want to be productive at work. You want to feel useful, impactful to the company you are working for, or you want to perform on the top level when starting your own company.
The problem is, however, that despite of all the technological advancements as well as availability of all kinds of the information it is super easy to get distracted and lose your focus during a context switch.
I see couple of major culprits, hurting an individual's productivity during almost any kind of work:
- Losing a focus
- Context switch during multitasking
- Bias and overconfidence
- Lack of belief in what you are doing
- Personal business and work-life balance
- You are just tired
Or if you want a super short recap, jump to conclusion.
Losing a focus
Nowadays, it is super easy to get distracted. An average person has a multiple communication channels active at the same time. For a connected person, a minimal amount would be 4:
- Old good email
- A company chat (Slack, Skype, MS Teams, you name it)
- You personal messenger (Facebook messenger, What's up, Telegram...)
- Social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram...)
Multiply this by real person-to-person communications (if you are working out of the office) and it is literally impossible to not being constantly distracted and possibly even being under stress.
All these tools a designed to feed you with new information, frequently expecting a response. They are running in different browse tabs or apps, some of them are on mobile, some on your computer. So, things can get messy pretty quickly...
In order to survive in such an informationally-overwhelmed world I have a couple of recommendations, I personally follow:
- Make sure all these channels are available on all of your devices you are using actively. It will simplify switching between tools when required
- Figure out, which tool is more important in which part of the day. Say, a chat with your girlfriend could be important 24H, but a chat group about next weekend party could wait. Obviously, your work email could be more important during business hours and less important when you are at home. It will help you to filter obviously irrelevant information right at the moment
- Configure notifications and filters Seriously... Spend some time on it and make sure you are not getting some weird notifications being thrown at you right in the middle of some process (like somebody found an iPhone in Paris office while you are in Berlin). Most of the communication tools either allow you to do automatic content filtering/sorting (email) or designed around it (e.g. Slack). Typically you can also setup notifications in a way so that you never miss a message from your team member, even when it is written not directly to you. And rest of the messages could be processed asynchronously (so, yes, you still have to read those)
- Do not hesitate to use headphones, especially when you are working at open-space I am a huge fan of Bose QC35, but it does not matter in fact. Just reduce a background noise level and maybe listen music if it works for you.
Context switch during multitasking
Multitasking is hard. The big deal about it is that it is frequently sold as a tool to increase your productivity, though it might hurt your performance significantly when you are doing it wrong.
It is easy to write an entire post about how to do multitasking to mitigate productivity loss, but let's focus specifically on context switches.
In contrast with computing systems, I would rather see human brain as a single-core system. That said, I think a person can effectively do one thing at a time efficiently. And when something new jumps in and you consider it to be important, this is where context switch is happening. Our goal is to optimise it, right?
I think it is worth optimising brain context switch for:
- Reduce time to switch to the new task efficiently
- Reduce time to switch back to what you were doing before
I have the following strategy here (assuming that you have configured your notifications properly as we discussed before):
- When new task(message/email/ticket/etc) arrives, look at it instantly and briefly. You should develop an ability to quickly estimate its urgency and an approximate time to complete the task. I follow a conventional 2 min rule here, which I learned about while listening Atomic Habits. If I can complete the task within 2 mins, I would rather do it now. So, we do a context switch now.
- When you do a context switch, leave some breadcrumbs for yourself when you will come back. You need to learn to do it efficiently. Say, it you were writing a code, leave a brief but concise TODO comment. If you were composing an email, leave a couple of words note on what you were about to write. Over the time you will be able to develop the ability to leave such breadcrumbs quickly and efficiently. It also works when you switch for more than 2 minutes, in fact.
- When you did your new task and want to go back, ask yourself a question: "Is it really done, or will I be required to come back in like 2 mins again?". If the answer is yes, try to complete that task 100% before switching back. The ugly truth is that though you can optimise context switches, it is still expensive due to some natural limitations. So the rule of thumb is: once you switched, either complete a new task at 100% or switch back and put it in your queue to be done later. It takes a lot of time to be able to jump back and forth between tasks and you will likely feel when you will be able to do so.
A note on building a task queue: Know your tools. For me, the game changer was slack reminders. I use it exclusively to maintain my task queue and any of note-taking apps to store some full-text details when required
Bias and overconfidence
Man, this is the hard one. A lot of people fall into this trap and I would consider myself guilty too. The thing is: as you are getting more and more proficient in a certain domain, you might start thinking that you know more than others. Which could be partly true, but unfortunately not always the case. Especially in complex industries, such as Engineering, for instance.
We are living in a fast-paced world. Things are changing super quickly and it is really, really hard to keep up.
And if you want to be productive and humble human being, my best advice would be: Always look for new perspectives. Ask for feedback, 2nd opinion, 3rd opinion and I promise, you will be surprised about how much you can learn even from totally unexpected sources!
But if you will surround yourself by the fence of "previous experiences", "I have never done it like that", etc, you will inevitably fail sooner or later because your solutions will be not broad enough or you will just miss industry shift and get totally screwed as a professional.
With that said it does not mean, that you have to forget what you were doing in the past. You should rather try to extract an essence of your previous experience(including failures) so that you can use it as a basis when building something new. But please, differentiate between basic principles (which are typically relevant for long time) and tools(which could become outdated next year).
Lack of belief in what you are doing
Sometimes a person might feel that his contribution to the company or an initiative is so small that it makes no sense to perform at the top level. It could also happen that you are learning something new and progressing so slowly that it just looks like burning your time. If you are finding yourself in such a situation, you should act. Otherwise you will either become a low-performer or just earn a burnout because of the constant stress.
My recommendation here would be to ask yourself some questions:
- Do you know how products of your work are used by real people? Who are these people? Which exact problem do you solve? If you can't answer it, you better try to figure out. As soon you find an answer, you will be surprised how many people find work you do, useful and crucial.
- When you are doing/learning something, do you have a measurable criteria to tell whether you have succeeded or failed? E.g. if you are learning, what exactly do you want to achieve? For instance, a non-technical person can say: I want to learn programming to become an independent apps developer. And after learning, my first step would be to create a shopping list app for my personal use. Or say, you starting to pursue an MBA degree because you want to work in consulting. In reality it could be that you will even make a pivot in between, because of another opened opportunity during your learning process. But having a clear goal will motivate you during a long process.
- Do you have a craving for the new knowledge? Do you actively looking for new sources/perspectives? It will help you to build a momentum in your career and develop a broader vision of why certain things need to be done, instead of complaining because you think that your work has no sense. Really, it is almost never the case!
Of course it could also happen that your vision is just fundamentally misaligned with what company or community is doing. In such a situation you need to decide for yourself whether you have a rock-solid arguments to back you vision up. And if not, it would be eventually better for you to search for alternatives.
Personal business and work-life balance
I would not consider it do be a frequent case of why an individual's productivity decreases, but it still happens from time to time. Every year a well-developed societies are leaning more and more towards reducing an amount of hours a person should dedicate to work. A concept of work-life balance is getting a mainstream metric of people happiness in some sense. And this is totally awesome!
The problem is, however, that some people are starting to hide behind it and simply do less work. Please, do not be this person! By misusing of this framework you are setting a precedent that the idea of work-life balance is not mature enough yet. Therefore you are simply delaying its adoption worldwide instead of developing a nice work ethics allowing you to hold an elegant balance between your personal and work life.
My best practices here would be:
- Always remember that some other people may heavily depend on your work
- If you desperately need to do some private stuff during work hours, try to do it in a controllable way. Like physically stand up, go to meeting room and work on your private problem if it is so important right now. It will eliminate a distraction by some random stuff which could be done in a more appropriate time
- If you must do some personal stuff at work, try to schedule it for less busy hours. Like before/after lunch, early morning, etc.
You are just tired
This is the easiest one! Just admit that you get tired sometimes and need a reboot. Find some things you personally enjoy, share it with people you value in your life and go for damn vacation! It is that simple. Not only will it physically recharge you, but it will also serve as a refresher for your thinking process and will help you to extend your vision and start noting things you never thought of before.
In general, when you plan your work and work hours nicely, you should never be burned out. So couple of items on how to manage work time nicely:
- Never work on the same hard problem more than 3-4 straight hours. This number is for me, so you should check for yourself, but the principle is the same. Fighting against something hard is... hard. So, no surprise here. If you can't crack a problem within relatively short timespan, do a step back and maybe rethink the problem or split it up. Or just come back tomorrow.
- Work on mindful techniques to control your thoughts. For instance, in software engineering it is a frequent problem that an engineer can come home, but still keeping the brain work on some programming problem in the foreground. You should learn the ways to switch off, which are suitable for you. Could be a lot of things: Sport, Hobbies, Meditation, Reading. So, just find something that allows you to push work thoughts to the background.
Conclusion
I would finish this post with a the following main ideas:
- Know your tools - spend time to learn how to use communication tools efficiently and reduce informational noise in order to forward more brain resources to what matters here and now
- Be careful with multitasking - better start slowly to develop good habits and mental framework
- Keep looking for new perspectives and sources of knowledge - really, never stop doing it
- Search for measurable purpose of your work - most of the people need clear goals set in advance
- Do proper time management - keep a clear separation between work and personal life, and remember, this is a continuous effort. You should never stop
Thanks for reading! Wish you all the best on your journey to become a yet more productive and efficient individual. Want to discuss the content, feel free to reach out to me on social media!