Recently, it occurred to me that there are four practices in my life that I use to great effect. I’m so used to thinking in terms of fully systems like GTD that I hadn’t thought about individual methods and practises that I use. Below I’ve detailed them and discuss how they all work together to great effect. As part of this it would be very interesting to see what you would choose as your four techniques, tools or ideas that boost your productivity. Share them in the comments!
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s law essentially states that work will expand to fill the time given to it. If you give a student a month to do a week’s worth of work they will more than likely use that entire month to do it with the work being made increasingly complex and over-analyzed in the process. Besides not being an efficient use of time, the student will also get sidetracked and lose focus on the real point of the work. Give them a week (or less) to do the work and through necessity they will have to focus on getting the essentials of that work done.
The 80/20 Rule
This rule, otherwise known as the Pareto Principle, states in basic terms that 20% of our efforts will produce 80% of our results. While it should not be taken literally (the emphasis is more on the common inbalance between cause and effect, that is found in life), it is a valuable tool in cutting out a lot of the work and effort that produces minimal results. My home cleaning schedule is a prime example. There is no point in me regularly cleaning the spare room because it hardly gets used. However, the kitchen and bathroom are the main rooms that get the most messy. This basically means that those 20% of the rooms require 80% of my attention to keep clean and tidy, so I can plan my cleaning schedule more effectively.
Next actions
I’ve talked many times about the advantages of next actions so I won’t repeat myself too much here. Basically, you should break down your work into smallest, actionable chunks. For instance, if you have a project involving writing a report, a next action could be to take out research material from the library. Cleaning the bedroom would have a next action of hoovering the floor. Because the immediate work is so much smaller it makes it more appealing to do, easier to visualize how you’d actually do it, and you can juggle your workload better too.
Prioritizing by needs
This is something I learned myself and as I have yet to come across any better term I will refer to it as needs prioritizing. I introduced this concept a few months ago but the basic idea is that you prioritize tasks based on whether you want, should or need to do them. This creates extra fluidity to your prioritizing and takes time into account. Something that you should do typically becomes something you need to do if left long enough. Paying a bill is a great example. Though you should pay is quickly, you can leave it for a while. However, as the deadline for payment gets closer you need to pay it to avoid reminders, fines or worse.
How they work together
Now that I’ve explained the four principles it’s important that I cover how they all work together in my life to improve my productivity. Firstly, I apply the 80/20 rule to cut out all the crap and unnecessary work. Then I break the remaining tasks down into next actions. Next, I use my prioritizing system to juggle all those next actions and balance my workload. Finally, when I do one of those next actions I set tight deadlines to keep me focused on what exactly I need to do.
This all means that I only do the important stuff that moves my life forward; that the work I do is bitesized and manageable; that I can juggle my workload to suit my schedule, lifestyle and the time available to me; and that, finally, I can focus on getting the work done and off my radar with minimal fuss.
August 11, 2008 at 07:46PM
Hi, I would actually use the next actions and the prioritizing by needs rules. The reason being is that I’ve found that if you break your tasks into manageable chunks, you can accomplish your whole project much faster. Of course, I would have to prioritize by needs for each task, as things get thrown into the picture all of the time, so your priorities can change at a snap of a finger.
August 12, 2008 at 03:36AM
You have done a great job of looking at proposed systems and theories and selecting the best pieces to suggest. Many of the big ideas like GTD fail for many people because they try to use it all or nothing instead of choosing parts that work for them.
Great Post! Glad I found your site.
August 12, 2008 at 01:43PM
The practices that have made the greatest impact on my productivity are staying present and single-tasking. It’s all too easy to get caught up in thinking about all that I have to do rather than getting into gear and doing it. When I’m fully engaged in the moment, the next best step (or task) becomes easy to identify. My work flows and my productivity skyrockets.
August 12, 2008 at 03:45PM
Nice way of breaking it down into four points that are easy to remember. I find I get caught up in details too much so this helps a lot. Puts a summary of being productive in one post.
August 12, 2008 at 04:00PM
Thanks for the comments. I found thinking about productivity like this to be very effective. Because there are few original ideas in productivity now, perhaps this sort of approach could be what produces the next GTD?
August 13, 2008 at 04:13AM
Nice post, it’s been dugg. I agree that there seems to be a lot of extra fluff in the GTD system. The simplest way to get things done is to just use any system that gets you into that ‘doing’ phase as quickly as possible.
August 24, 2008 at 07:55PM
Really good post, nice summary of great ways to organize things to do. What I think is missing is Covey’s quadrants, but that’s quite similar to prioritizing. I personally find that most people use their own variations of that to prioritize their actions.
August 24, 2008 at 08:09PM
Matthijs, may I suggest you check out my latest post covering my prioritizing system. It discusses some of the parallels between it and Covey’s quadrants.
February 2, 2009 at 07:05AM
Never heard of Parkinson’s law. Sounds very interesting. I’m glad I’ve found this post!
February 15, 2009 at 05:07PM
Thanks AJ Kumar. Parkinson’s law is one of my favorite tools. It’s not very common though because people are encouraged to start all their work early. That’s not always the best way.
December 1, 2009 at 05:27AM
Stumbled across this post, it is very informative. I like the 80/20 rule, but is surfing the internet and using some of the pages for your purpose of business in the waste category? Because I know surfing the net does waste quite a bit of time.
December 4, 2009 at 10:35AM
Hi, Trevor. If you’re only using some of the pages for the purpose of business then that’s the 20% of your internet surfing that provides you with 80% of the value. The challenge then, is to cut out the rest of your surfing that has low returns, thus saving you much more time.