Entries Tagged 'Time Management' ↓

The chief problem many of us face when we make our ToDo lists is that we try to list everything that we’re thinking about doing. The result is that we end up with lists that are far too long to actually complete - and, despite how much we actually got done, we focus on what we didn’t and get frustrated.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I’ve mentioned before that the trick to mastering your ToDo list involves being realistic about your list and keeping it as small as possible. Seriously reflect on your work and see how often you’ve actually accomplished more than 5 decent size tasks/projects that day. Three to five tasks/projects seems to be the sweet spot.

But it’s incredibly useful to purge all of the things that you’re thinking about just to get it off your mind. Thus the tension: if you don’t capture the things on your mind, they’ll be there harassing you. Yet if you list everything, you’ll be frustrated about not getting it all done.

The brute fact is that most of us have far more to do than we will ever have time available to do. At least, until we learn how to do less. But until we learn how to do that, our lists contain more than we’ll ever be able to do.

A tactic that I’ve been trying for the last three or four months is to indicate which of the tasks on the list are Exit Tasks. What are exit tasks, you say?

Exit tasks are those few tasks that you absolute must complete to have some modicum of peace after you’re done working. If I were being strict GTD, I’d say that they should be the only tasks on your ToDo lists - but getting there requires a lot of discipline, and sometimes it’s just more frustrating trying to figure out what to do with those tasks after you’ve culled them than it is to just keep them where they are for the day.

Why do I call them exit tasks? I got the idea from the motivation people get before it’s time for a vacation. If you’ve ever witnessed people trying to cleanly get the hell away from work before a vacation, you probably noticed that they dropped the pretenses about what all they were going to do and did the very minimum they have to to be able to take their two weeks off without a phone call.

When you’re put in that situation, you recognize how much is actually important and value-added and how much is just the mind’s reaching into the future. The point, though, is that you clean house as much as you need to, but no more.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t take the “free time” we have on a daily basis nearly as seriously, so we don’t try to compartmentalize and prepare for our free time. The result is that time not at work becomes some kind of quasi-prep time for the next day.

I got tired of my leisure time being that way, so I started being serious about the fine line between work and play. I began asking myself exactly how much I needed to do to be able to exit work and begin to play.

Hence the name “Exit Task.”

An application:

To see how this works, I’ll show you my ToDo list for the day:

• Recreate Portfolio for Client X (name of client and project removed for privacy)
• Process Guard Actions
• Answer Comments on Productive Flourishing
• Rewrite ‘About’ Page
• Write “Exit Tasks”
• Look at requirements for Adobe Creative Suites
• Fax Stuff for Angela
• Do financial review
• Look at Reviews for Adobe Products

Those were all of the things that were on my mind at the time I started purging. I didn’t try to sort them by priority or context or anything like that - it was just the unrelated brain stew of things I was thinking about doing.

Looking at the time I had available to execute these tasks, it was clear that I wasn’t going to get through them all. So the next question - which of those do I absolutely have to do to get some peace?

The first two were external requirements - so I really had to do them. The third was one that I’d put off for a few days and it was starting to bother me - so I did that one. The rest were negotiable.

So those three got an (E) put behind them - my cue that those were the Exit Tasks for the day. The rest stayed on the list, but not as things I had to do. When I was done with those three tasks, I simply reevaluated what I most felt like doing. Turns out I wanted to write this post next, but I’ll probably call it quits after this.

The main point, though, is that I could have walked away with a clear head.

What about the rest of the items I didn’t complete? They stay there and are reviewed the next day - I’ll either plan to do them, postpone them, or drop them. But I won’t forget them.

Mastering the ToDo list comes down to three things:

1. Learning to do less
2. Learning how to complete what you have to do
3. Learning how to walk away when you’ve done what you had to

The “Exit Task” paradigm has been helping me with 2 and 3.

This model works well when there’s a clear separation between what you don’t want to do (i.e. work) and what you do want to do (i.e. leisure). As I start doing more income-generating activities that I want to do or that I enjoy doing, it’s harder to find that fuzzy line precisely because the work-play dichotomy breaks down at that point.

If you liked this post, please comment or share it on StumbleUpon or del.icio.us by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!

In A Special Theory of Productivity I mentioned that I that I didn’t think RescueTime worked as a time management solution. That’s too broad and unhelpful of a statement, so I’ll spend some time reviewing RescueTime so you can see how I came to that conclusion.

What is RescueTime supposed to do?

I’ll give two explanations, one from the company site, and one from Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime. The company site says:

RescueTime is a web-based time-management tool that allows you to easily understand how you spend your time. One of the coolest things about RescueTime is that there is NO DATA ENTRY. You install a doohicky on your computer and we magically track all of your time usage.

Tony Wright says:

Right now, we’re (RescueTime) the time management equivalent of a cholesterol test– we can tell you you’re not quite healthy and we can let you know when you’re making progress… But we don’t have a ton to offer to get you fixed up!

(Tony: thanks for visiting and leaving the comment - I intend this to be an extended reply to you. Sorry for the delay.)

The program that is installed on your computer monitors the programs you use and updates those with an online server. You go in on your user Dashboard and tag the programs with the type of activity that you do with the reported programs. After you tag them, you’re done - from that point forward, RescueTime associates that program with that activity.

The webpages you visit are handled much the same way. For instance, if you visit this blog, you may tag it as “blog reading” and “personal development.” For the rest of the time that you run RescueTime, it’ll log time spent on this site as blog reading and personal development. I have to say…that’s pretty nifty.

So, what happens to all that information? It is compiled and beautiful graphs are outputted that shows where you’ve been spending your time (much like the one the used above-update: I tried to embed a chart from my dashboard but I kept getting 404’s from RescueTime. Will try to get that fixed, as the chart is informative). Other nifty reporting features include the ability to assign point values to activities - i.e. writing, as an academic and as a blogger, is probably the most valuable thing I do, and internet surfing one of the least valuable - so that you have beautiful charts that show you how productive you are based on the value of the activities you’ve been doing. RescueTime will also alert you when you have met goals that you have set - so, if you want to spend two hours writing a day, it will let you know via email, SMS, or RSS.

All of these features are easy to set up and work as stated. The last and probably most compelling feature of RescueTime is that it’s free! Yes, all of this time tracking and reporting goodness for free.

In conclusion, RescueTime is a free, easy to use time management system that displays beautiful reports of your activities that allow you to quickly evaluate your productivity. It simply provides the best looking graphs and charts that I have seen from any product in this niche.

So, what’s not to like about RescueTime?

You may be thinking that something’s gone awry, since I’ve both praised RescueTime and said that I don’t think it works as a time management solution. My main critique about RescueTime is regarding its usefulness and cohesiveness.

Before I begin to evaluate it, remember the framework that I’m using to do so. The functions of Time Management Systems are to help you Plan, Execute, and Evaluate your work, and the principles that make these systems better are Simplicity, Usefulness, Aesthetics, Connectedness, and Cohesiveness. (If none of this makes sense to you, read A Special Theory of Productivity for more information.)

I’ve already commented that RescueTime is simple and aesthetically very pleasing. Good work on that front, guys. But I do have some major concerns about the program…

One Tag to Rule Them All

My major concern is how useful RescueTime is. It’s often the case that there is some tension between simplicity and usefulness, and RescueTime is a brilliant case in point. A real world example is in order.

I write almost everything in Textmate. When I visit another blog and start writing a longish comment, I pop open Textmate, do the writing, and then copy back to the site. When I’m drafting blog posts, I do it in Textmate. I’m even drafting my academic papers in Textmate. That amounts to a lot of writing, and RescueTime has perfectly tracked that.

But it has tracked it as “writing.” The problem: not everything I write has the same productivity value. My academic writing has far more weight than my blog writing, though my actual habits may prove otherwise. Furthermore, RescueTime doesn’t track what I was writing, so to figure that out, I’d have to refer to some other Time Management System, which hurts it on the cohesiveness front.

I may be anal, but it’s useful to know what days and times I was working on certain projects. Knowing that helps me see trends and helps me plan future tasks. As it stands, RescueTime outputs beautiful graphs and charts that, while interesting, aren’t useful. Using RescueTime, then, is adding another layer to all of the other Time Management Systems that I currently employ…all for beautiful charts and graphs.

The Textmate example is just one of many that have the same feature. I read the same sites often times for different reasons. For example, sometimes I read Lifehack just to see what Dustin Wax is baiting me with. (Okay, he doesn’t even know I exist, but he baits me anyways.) Other times, I’m reading the site to see whether they’ve written about something I’m writing about. One of the activities involves just blog reading, whereas the other is research. Other site activities include networking and marketing.

Unfortunately, RescueTime sticks with the original way I’ve tagged it. You can go back and change your tags, but then it will stick with those tags. It can’t see the difference between reading, research, networking, and marketing. But there are very important differences between those activities that are directly related to productivity.

Of course, one option would be to use different programs for different functions. I don’t have the tagging problem with Mellel, for I only use it to polish academic papers. So, I could conceivable split tasks, but why trade using one tool (Textmate) that helps with my productivity just so I can track what I’m doing?

The Care and Feeding Of RescueTime

Directly related to the tagging problem is the fact that I’m a linkhopper. When I read blog posts, I jump to people’s blogs when they leave good comments (I’ve found some of my best blog buddies that way.) That means that when I go to my RescueTime dashboard, I have to tag all of those new sites. If you do it often enough, it’s pretty easy to do and only takes five or ten minutes. Forget to update your Dashboard, though, and you end up with a few scores of sites to tag, which takes considerably longer and is not really that accurate, since I often can’t remember what I was doing there.

I also test out a lot of different software for both personal and blogging interests. So that gives me yet another bunch of applications to tag, which leads to more productivity seepage as I’m trying to figure out what I was doing.

What I’ve found is that my options using RescueTime is either to spend 10-15 minute a day of productivity overhead tagging what I’m doing or to have a high amount of untagged activities. But, for the program to be remotely useful, you have to tag what you’re doing.

What about Off-Computer Tasks and Projects?

Another major concern I have is that RescueTime can’t (without third party solutions that marginally help) track off-computer work. Phone calls, meetings, book research, yard work, errands, etc. all are things that are productive and could bear some tracking. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get them into RescueTime’s system, so to track your real productivity, you’d have to use RescueTime plus some other solution. To be fair, the creators of RescueTime don’t claim that it can do this, so it’s not as if they’re being misleading - it is, nonetheless, a critical component of our productivity that RescueTime does not help with.

Summary Evaluation

1. Does RescueTime help you plan how to use your time?

To a very small degree, yes. I say that because if you find that how you think you’re using your time and how you’re actually using your time is quite different, you can use RescueTime to help you adjust your time. Presuming you can discern different activities by tagging them properly, which I’ve yet to really manage to do.

2. Does RescueTime help you execute your tasks?

Only to the degree that your planning subverts unproductive habits. Also note that the care and feeding of RescueTime may not be a good return on investment of time.

3. Does RescueTime help you evaluate what you’ve been doing and provide useful information for future planning and execution?

Not by itself. The system would require you to have some other system that’s tracking the tasks and projects that you’re doing in order for its information to be really useful. If you have that other system, and you’re able to sync the information that it and RescueTime are producing, RescueTime may prove to be useful as a reporting tool.

4. What is RescueTime intended to replace?

This is not really part of the framework I listed in A Special Theory of Productivity, but I take it that RescueTime is intended to replace the manual input of time a la Freshbooks. It’s a pain in the ass filling in time sheets and keeping track of where you spend your time as you’re doing it, and having a system that does this without data entry would be incredibly helpful. However, as I’ve stated above, you’re going have to track your projects and tasks some way or the other, so the only point I see of RescueTime on this front is as a reality check. But that reality check would have to extrapolate what you’re doing (i.e. tasks and projects) from how you’re doing it (i.e. the sites and applications you use).

The Way Ahead For RescueTime

I hate when people just critique a product without making suggestions. Complaining is easy…providing solutions is far harder and much more useful. RescueTime is a work in progress, and they are adding new features to it monthly. Here are some things I think would make the program better - there will be some redundancy here since my critique has already listed what I don’t like about RescueTime. (I’m shooting myself in the foot here, as some of these are what I’d do if I were currently building software, and if Tony takes the suggestions to heart and implements them, I will then be fighting him for patent uses once I generate enough revenue to get those projects going. Ah well - maybe he’ll be nice if that becomes an issue.)

1. Implement a Tagging Filter

I couldn’t think of a really catchy way to say this one. Right now, RescueTime uses the applications and sites that the user visits or uses as the filter to determine what that user was doing. Rather than doing it that way, you could allow the user to specify times that the user was doing a certain tasks.

So, for example, I could allocate the block from 0600-0900 as “Working on RescueTime Evaluation.” All of the different sites and applications that were used during that time block then provide the information of how I accomplished that task. As a project manager, I could then see that, while my employee claimed they were working on Project X, they were actually on MySpace.

I could then tag that task with different metatags that indicate what area of work it fell under. The above task would fall under Blogging, and all of the subtasks indicate the different actions required to sustain that metaproject.

2. Implement an Alert for Untagged Activities

It may be helpful to alert the user that they have a certain number (say, 10) of untagged activities that need to be tagged. That way the user can work natively without the thought of “man, I need to remember what this is and go tag it.” Perhaps a report could be emailed saying “between X and Y times you were using these untagged applications and visiting these untagged sites. What were you doing?”

3. Implement an Off-Computer Applet

This one should be fairly easy given that there are already some third party applications that allow you to have up to three offline activities. Using the ideas from the solution above would make this pretty seamless.

Different and More Positive Perspectives on RescueTime

James from Men with Pens writes:

The beauty of Rescue Time is that with least effort on my part, I have a beautiful graph of my work habits – and within minutes of installation, if I feel like it. I’ll be able to see exactly where my time goes (and not where I think it goes) and I’ll see precisely how much of my time I spend on individual tasks.

If you’re into productivity, then you can’t go wrong with Rescue Time. It’s a damned nifty lifesaver… or should I say timesaver?

T.W. Garrett from TheTechBrief says:

RescueTime is set to offer a time management goal tool and the option for comparison against others in your industry for those who are serious about increasing their efficiency and finally getting a handle on their technology-driven life. I give RescueTime and A+ and I look forward to the full product release.

Scott from WebWorkerDaily says:

RescueTime is great for examining my overall productivity and helping me make sure that I am putting the proper amount of time into those areas that require my attention. I use it for big picture analysis but the tools for more detailed examinations are certainly present.

I thought it would be good to add their perspectives, since they’re a bit more positive in their reviews than I am.

If you liked this post and would like to see more reviews of Time Management Systems, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!

I mentioned after I completed the Daily Productivity Planner that I figured out how to write this post. Life intervened and I lost the muse. I’m currently in the process of reconstructing the train of thought, but it’s going to be rather rough.

The hardest part I’m having in articulating the ideas in this post is whether I’m talking merely about software time and task management systems, or time and task management systems at large. I think that the same functions and principles are features of both software time and task management systems and of larger time and task management systems like the Seven Habits and Getting Things Done. I’ll not worry too much about it right now, but let me know whether you think I need to separate the discussion between the two.

I’m also going to conflate time management systems and task management systems and just call them Time Management Systems. Feel free to poke holes in these gaping wounds, but think more about the functions and principles, as those are the meat of this post.

Continue reading →

I mentioned in How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive that I thought most personal planners got time wrong and presented all blocks of times as being equal. Later that day, I was thinking about how to capture the rather inchoate ideas in A Special Theory of Relativity (it really is coming, but I’m having trouble making it coherent and short) and it dawned on me: we learned how to manage our time in preschool.

We learned time management by playing with shape sorters and learning to put the right shape in the right hole. If you all were anything like me, you tried to figure out how to put the square through the circle hole, even though you knew that wasn’t where it belonged. It belonged in the square hole. I’m sure you also figured out, like I did, that you could get the wrong shape through the wrong hole, but it took a lot more work.

The practical application of the Productivity Heatmap is much the same. It’s about using your own rhythms (the sorter) to determine which is the best time to do certain tasks (the blocks). Sure, you can do the wrong tasks at the wrong time, but it’s a lot harder.

(Sidebar: If you didn’t make it through the article about heatmapping or didn’t see the link, you can get your own blank one here: Blank Daily Productivity Heatmap (4290)

I’ve now been toying with whether getting a shape sorter, limiting the number of blocks I get, and labeling the blocks with tasks (writing, networking, etc.) would be a useful metaphor and tool for my work planning. If nothing else, they foster creativity.

It’s strange how many lessons we learn as children, forget as adolescents, and then have to learn again as adults.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or submitting it to one of the social media sites below. I appreciate your time and support and look forward to hearing from you!

Update: I decided to place the form at the top of the post to make it easier to download. Grab it here: Blank Daily Productivity Heatmap (4290)

I’ve been a bit bottlenecked recently with some of my posts. I’ve been stewing over A Special Theory of Productivity and trying to figure out the best way to present it. Meanwhile, another post that I’m working on also needs some preluding explanation. This post is related to both of those.

I’m a huge fan of heat maps, and here recently I’ve started to think about productivity in terms of heat maps, as well. The above picture is a heat map of my daily productive capacity.

Continue reading →

Dustin @Lifehack has pointed out that the model for personal productivity that I proposed yesterday seems to be an academic model. While I see where he’s coming from, I think there’s a much larger question to consider: is the Internet and its knowledgeworking minions killing the role of academia?

(Introductory Sidebar: I will be using “the Internet” as shorthand for all of the stuff that goes on on the Internet. Also, “institution” will be used in the sociological sense, as in “structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals” (definition from Wikipedia).)

Perhaps it seems hyperbolic, but I’m starting to think more and more that it’s the case. Think about some of the historical roles of the academic institution in society:

It allowed a place for the free discussion of ideas

The Universities in the past were the one place where scholars could discuss ideas without (too much) fear of State or Church intrusion, coercion, or punishment. Not surprisingly, many of the arguments that were used to advocate freedom of speech and association were arguments started from scholars at Universities who didn’t want State or Church “oversight” into their research.

It allowed a place where people could receive advanced education above the basics of that required for citizenship.

A heavy portion of the educational model adopted by States focused solely on making competent workers and citizens. What many people don’t realize is that States have done this not for the sake of the citizens being educated, but for the continuance of the State. (I’ll stay away from the rathole of the state of American education today.)

Universities and college’s provided a place where people could go beyond basic arithmetic and writing and learn science, math, literature, and most of the other stuff we still learn today. It’s important to realize the first universities were private, meaning that the State at the time was not in the business of higher education.

It served as society’s evaluator of who had knowledge and who didn’t.

The idea of academic degrees is modeled off the way tradesmen are certified. The main point is that society needed a way to determine and document who had sufficient knowledge to teach or do certain subjects, and Universities leveraged their credibility and evaluated the ability of their students to fulfill those roles.

It employed people whose jobs were not to produce things but rather to produce ideas.

The rise of the academic institution created yet another class (the clergy and aristocrats were the others) of people whose role in society excluded them from manual labor. This is a critical function, since you can’t really do a lot of theorizing, writing, and such while you’re out in the fields chasing goats.

The rise of the Internet and knowledgeworkers seriously threatens this historical role. I’ll show this point by point:

It allows a place for the free discussion of ideas.

Free speech is nowhere more prevalent than on the ‘Net (okay, outside of China). Furthermore, the old academic model required people to be in the same spatio-temporal location, whereas the Internet now allows for asynchronous communication, collaberation, and idea dispersal.

It allows a place where people could receive advanced education above the basics of that required for citizenship

It’s probably not an understatement to say that anyone able to teach themselves can become competent in any body of knowledge if they spent enough time doing research online. This will become even more true as knowledgeworkers continue to create informative, accurate content and as the search engines continually get better at finding that content. This seriously threatens academia, since a) the information is free, and b) the academic institution has claimed a monopoly on knowledge since the Middle Ages. What happens to any institution that attempts to have a monopoly on a resource that people can get elsewhere for free?

It serves as society’s evaluator of who has knowledge and who doesn’t.

The Internet hasn’t quite managed to do this one yet (perhaps because certain institutions want to have a monopoly on that privilege?). Internet experts, however, do currently have the power to be recognized as such, and will often be funded by academic institutions to teach classes in the subjects they are experts in, but there’s simply not much of a model for the Internet that can separate popularity from knowledgeable expertise. (Sidebar:I’d rather have Merlin Mann teach a course in Productivity Theory over most profs I know and have seen anyday; likewise for Steve Pavlina in Internet Commerce)

I think it’ll be a long time for there to be any real advances made here, and if they are they’ll probably piggyback on academic models. Think about how many academic institutions that we currently have that are going the online route and how poorly they are being received as legitimate academic institutions.

It employs people whose jobs are not to produce things but rather to produce ideas.

Successful websites and blogs generate enough income that people are now quitting their full-time jobs. If the experts are right that anyone can potentially make money online, then we have another institution and class of people (besides politicians, clergy, and academics) that are exempt from manual (marketplace) labor.

The real question is whether the Internet is competing with the Academic institution or whether it’s simply supplementing or replicating the roles of the academic institution. I think it’s pretty clear that it’s competing, especially as more and more would-be scholars bail from academia to become (you guessed it) knowledgeworkers.

So what?

If I’m anywhere close to right, Dustin’s insight that the model I’ve proposed seems to be an academic model is partially right. But that’s only because many of the same functions of academia are being either replicated or taken over by the Internet. It would be no surprise, then, that knowledgeworkers would need to ask themselves the same types of questions that academics must ask themselves.

If you liked this post,? please consider subscribing to my feed, submitting this post to StumbleUpon or Digg, or commenting on the post.? Thank you for your time and support!

I commented (again) on Dustin’s article Personal Productivity in the 21st Century over at Lifehack. His question was regarding whether there is another model for personal productivity systems besides “cranking widgets”.

I replied:

I think we have a working model and it’s just difficult to quantize.? The model I have in mind is something like ?Did I add value to the knowledge currently available?? It?s quite inchoate at the moment, but there are a few ways we can evaluate that answer:

1. Did I increase the amount of knowledge we currently have?
2. Did I correct a problem with the knowledge we currently have?
3. Did I explore the open logical space and demarcate dead possibilities so that others either don’t follow or at least know what they’re getting into?
4. Did I come up with a novel or better way to understand the knowledge we currently have?

There are obviously many more ways to specify how we have added value to the knowledge we currently have, but maybe this is the way to go.

Disclaimer: I made some minor editorial changes to this quote.
The reason I’ve brought this up is not because I want to double my exposure. The real reason is because I’m insanely interested in this issue and I’d like to blog, comment, and think about it some more.

Anyone else interested in this?? Do you think there’s another model besides the ones currently on the table?? If you’re interested, please comment and extend the discussion.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or submitting this article to Digg or StumbleUpon.? I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you!

Dustin posted an article about Personal Productivity in the 21st Century over at Lifehack. I was going to comment on it on the blog, but my commentary got a bit long, so I decided a trackback would be better suited.

As I blog more and more and try to get more traffic, the “cash value” of the ideas I’m thinking or writing about becomes more and more of a nagging question, and, honestly, that scares me. Some things that we write and think about just shouldn’t be monetized or driven by the market. So I get stuck on this one: I hope this blog provides genuinely valuable content to people, yet at the same time I sometimes just want this blog to be about the playing with ideas.

The greatest issue I have with my own personal productivity is not getting things done, but rather figuring out which muses to chase and which to let go. Dustin’s comment about rigid scheduling vs. park sitting rang rather true on this one, because if I were to plan my day down to the 15 minute interval, I’m rather sure that some of the most creative and important ideas that I would have would die on the petard of the schedule. Yet, if I don’t stick to a somewhat realistic schedule, I generate more open projects that I’ll never close.

Lastly, when you shift from being an hourly or salary worker to a knowledge worker, there comes a point in which it’s hard to figure out what your time is worth. On some days, when the muses or flow is with me, one hour of writing, brainstorming, or idea generating can equate to days or weeks of thinking. A further complication, related to the first issue, is that it becomes hard to determine whether the process of generating ideas just to generate ideas has a certain value or whether it’s the generating of relevant, useful ideas that is valuable.

I’m going to run into this problem much more here in the next few months when I take a full-time Guard job for a while. The reason I will likely be hired for it is because of my creative, out-of-the-box but insanely efficient skillset; I’m a bit unorthodox by military standards, but I’m known to generate excellent products (this is not what I think about the products, but rather what my colleagues and superiors think about what I create). But I’m not sure that they’re ready for me to tell them that I’m going to need time to sit outside on a park bench so that I can come up with the product that they want. They want the product, but they don’t necessarily like the way that I come up with the product. Oh, that I live in so many different worlds!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or submitting it to Digg, StumbleUpon, or some of the other social networks. I appreciate your time and support.

This is part two of a three part series on the Identification and Removal of Leeches. This part covers productivity leeches: those people who constant drain your productive time.

How to Identify and Remove A Productivity Leech

Description: Productivity leeches are people drain your productive time. They commonly poke their head in your office while they are “on break” or are otherwise unproductive and interrupt you while you are not on break or are otherwise productive.

1. Recognize that you have a leech on you

It’s sometimes hard to recognize that you have a productivity leech because your coworkers are often sounding boards for your ideas or issues. The way to determine whether you have a productivity leech is to ask whether you ever get anything of value from them or to ask whether your meetings are productive. If you never get anything from the exchange with the person or your meetings are never productive, then odds are you have a productivity leech.

2. Find out where it’s located

Productivity leeches attach themselves either physically or virtually. They attach themselves physically by squatting in your otherwise productive space and draining your attention from whatever you are working on. They attach themselves virtually by monopolizing mediums of productive exchange (email, IM, or phone) and distracting you from whatever you actually should be working on.


3. Calmly and methodically remove the leech from your work areas or work times.

If the productivity leech is attached physically, set up roadblocks that make it harder for them to “pop-in.” Here are some possible techniques to do this:

• Wear headphones, even if you aren’t listening to music. Face your work area away from the door, and ignore them if they just “poke in.” Generally, people who have an agenda will make their presence known, but people looking to leech will find an easier host to leech from.
• Set open door hours for people to talk pop in and talk to you, but otherwise keep your office door shut. Let the colleagues that aren’t leeches know that they can just pop in, but have a pretty high barrier to entry to keep the leeches at bay.
• Arrange the furniture in your office such that it’s awkward to sit in unless you remove some obstacles. Leave papers, coats, or boxes that are easy to move in the prime locations in your office. Remove the boxes for everyone but the leeches, so that they have to sit facing the sun, sit awkwardly, or in general have difficulty comfortably nesting in your space.

If the productivity leech is attached virtually, your task is much easier. Turn your cellphone off or put it on silent and screen your calls (but make sure you program important numbers so that the people you need to answer can get through). Have your profiles show “offline” for IM, if you must keep it on, and only talk to those who you know aren’t leeches. Only check email a few times a day, and don’t spend much time dealing with those who you know are leeches.

If you approach the productivity leech the wrong way, it may regurgitate on you and make you look like a general ass. It may also go out of the way to mess up your productivity by sending people your way, playing loud music, talking outside of your office intentionally, or spamming you with email and calls. The key thing to remember is that these people are looking to waste their time, so they have nothing to lose by harassing you, but you have a lot to lose by being harassed.

4. Once the leech is detached from you, get rid of it immediately, as it will try to reattach itself.

The leech will continue to attempt to attach itself to you, since it may think that your deal about being productive is only because of some unique pressing deadline. Build systemic strategies that reinforce your work area or times as leech-free zones.

Notes:

• A productivity leech will feed on you for as long as it can or until it absolutely has to get back to work. At that point, it will return to its work or go home, as it has wasted as much time as it can until the next day.
• The relatively small amount of time drained by a productivity leech will not cause you to far too far behind. You will adjust and accomplish what you need to after you rearrange some of your other tasks. The aggregate effect of many productivity leeches may drain you of all of your productive time and may cause career frustration. Note that this type of leech carries with it a strain of vampirism, such that entire departments or management teams become productivity leeches.
• Productivity leeches require a relatively productive, efficient person on their team to support them, as they generally do not produce enough to justify their paycheck. They are generally found lurking by the water cooler, the break room, or the smoking spot.
• Productivity leeches are incredibly perceptive at finding out who the workers and slackers are and may gravitate toward the slackers. Stay productive and avoid them until the management figures out they hurt the bottom line and replaces them with goal-driven temp workers or until you get promoted and can either get rid of them or find out what they bring to the table and harness that.

The concluding part of this series covers The Identification and Removal of Financial Leeches. Stay tuned!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed.

Scott over at Lifehack recently wrote about the rituals and how they help maximize time. There are two rituals that I think are especially important: waking up and working.

• The Wake Up Ritual

Few things make as much of an impact on the day as when and how you wake up. Fighting with the alarm clock, not drinking caffeine, and not eating breakfast are a sure way to hamper the productivity for the day.

Whatever your full ritual is, get up when the alarm clock first goes off, drink some caffeine (if you’re one of those souls that have mastered existence without caffeine, I admire you), and eat breakfast. Do this everyday and you will program your body and mind to follow-up the routine with high-yield work periods.

• The Work Ritual

The single most effective way to set yourself up for success during working is to define at the end of the work day what you’ll do the next day. This serves three purposes:

First, it serves to give you some perspective on what you’ve accomplished during the work day. It may have seemed that you didn’t get anything done, but when you review what you’ve done, you’ll often see that that’s not the case. If you truly didn’t get anything done, then take a minute and try to figure out why. What contributing agents were there that kept you from being productive?

Second, it makes you plan your work into actionable steps for the next day. It also gives a psychological “stake in the ground” to return to that may do some motivational work in the morning.

Third, you don’t have to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing first thing in the morning when your energy and motivation is usually the lowest. It’s hard to get to work in the morning when you both don’t want to and don’t really have a clear idea of what you need to be doing. With a plan in place, you can just follow the steps you’ve set up for yourself until (a) you get motivated to work or (b) you’ve done all the work you needed to do for the day.

Combining these two rituals is a powerful way to boost yourself into a productive mode. There’s a takeaway point to remember here: you’re creating habits and rituals even if you don’t intend to. Doing the same thing day in and day out programs your body and mind to continue to do those same things; you can either harness this fact and create rituals and habits that help you flourish, or you can leave it to chance.