Extreme Productivity

Robert C. Pozen

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062188540
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

"Required reading for professionals—and aspiring professionals—of all levels."
—Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Former Chairman of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Robert C. Pozen, one of the business world's most successful—and productive—executives, reveals the surprising secrets to workplace productivity and high performance.

It's far too easy for working professionals to become overwhelmed by a pile of time-sensitive projects, a backlog of emails, and endless meetings. In order to be truly productive, they must make a critical shift in mindset from hours worked to results produced.

With Extreme Productivity, Pozen explains how individuals can maximize their time and energy by determining and focusing on their highest priorities. He also provides a toolkit of practical tips and techniques to help professionals at all stages of their careers maximize their time at work.

This essential handbook empowers every person with proven methods for prioritizing their time to achieve high-impact results and refine their career goals for long-term success, all while leading a full and meaningful personal life as well.

Part I

---

THREE BIG IDEAS

Based on what I’ve learned over the course of my career, I believe that you can maximize your productivity by applying three related ideas:

• Articulate your goals and rank them in order of priority. This helps you align your time allocations with your priorities.

• Focus on the final product. In tackling high-priority projects, quickly formulate tentative conclusions to guide your work.

• Don’t sweat the small stuff. Deal with low-priority items in a way that allows you to spend as little time on them as possible.

1

SET AND PRIORITIZE YOUR GOALS

Many executives are whirlwinds of activity, racing from meeting to meeting or crisis to crisis without giving much thought to the rationale for their hectic schedules. Many of those professionals like the feeling of doing something; they are not comfortable reflecting on their priorities. Their typical approach can be described as “Ready, fire, aim!” Others get bogged down in a schedule dictated by their company or spend most of their time responding to “urgent” requests from others.

As a result, those energetic, ambitious people end up spending too little time on activities that support their highest goals. Despite their talent, they often report a serious mismatch between their work priorities and time allocations.

No matter what your career aspirations are, you should begin by thinking carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you expect to get out of it. In this chapter, I will walk you through an exercise to establish your highest-ranking goals and to determine whether your actual schedule is consistent with this ranking. This process has six steps:

1. Write down everything you are doing, or are planning to do, in order to achieve your professional goals.

2. Organize the items by time horizon: Career Aims, yearly Objectives, and weekly Targets.

3. Rank your Objectives by their relative importance, taking into account what the world needs as well as what you want.

4. Rank your Targets by their relative importance—both those serving your Objectives and those assigned to you.

5. Estimate how you actually spend your time, and compare that with your prioritized set of Objectives and Targets.

6. Understand and address the reasons for mismatches between your goals and your time allocations.

1. WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN

---

On one or two sheets of paper, write down everything you are required to do in your professional life. This includes all those routine tasks in your job description that you have to do on a daily or weekly basis, such as filing reports or reviewing documents. It also includes any longer-term projects assigned to you.

But don’t stop there; if you spend all your time responding to crises and tasks assigned by others, you can only tread water. To get ahead, you also need to think about what you want to do. These may be long-term goals, such as advancing your career. Or they could be short-term goals, such as developing a new skill or meeting more people in your industry. On the same sheet of paper as your assigned tasks, add these aspirations for your work. Don’t worry about separating tasks and goals; just jot them all down. We’ll organize them in step 2.

To illustrate, I’ve completed this exercise from the perspective of the manager of one retail outlet of a consumer electronics chain. I’ll call him “Joshua.” The list below contains thirteen tasks that Joshua must do—or wants to do—at work. Throughout this chapter, I’ll use Joshua’s example to illustrate the concept of setting your priorities.

Joshua’s List

Hire more sales staff.

Increase profits by 15 percent.

Participate in “community history day.”

Become a top executive at chain.

Attend a tech expo.

Create a pleasant customer experience.

Write weekly sales report for boss.

Hire an interior designer.

Meet people in retail industry.

Meet with area store managers.

Get fancier offices.

Develop a local marketing strategy.

Refine performance standards for sales staff.

Please be as broad as possible with your list. The point is for you to capture all your tasks and goals here; you’ll evaluate whether they are significant later in the chapter. If you get stuck, keep reading. The rest of the chapter should help prod your memory.

2. ORGANIZE BY TIME HORIZON

---

The next step is to divide your list into three time categories: Career Aims (5+ years), Objectives (3–24 months), and Targets (1 week or less). Some goals won’t fall neatly into one category; consider each on a case-by-case basis. If it’s a relatively quick and simple goal, assign it to the shorter time period. If it’s long and requires many cumbersome steps, make it part of the longer time period.

• Career Aims: These are long-term goals over at least five years. For example, a young law school graduate might have a Career Aim of becoming a U.S. attorney, the general counsel of a company, or a partner in a large firm. Or perhaps even all three.

• Objectives: These are the goals for your professional life over the next three months to two years. They typically require many intermediate steps. Objectives could include completing a systems project, doubling the sales of a product, or developing a new organizational structure.

• Targets: These are “action steps” that should guide your work on a weekly or daily basis. For example, your Targets could involve writing a short report, resolving a client’s problem, or finishing one part of a larger project.

Next, make sure that each of your Objectives has one or two associated Targets. If any of your Objectives lacks a Target, think hard about the next actionable step you can take to advance that Objective, and then add it to your list of Targets. For example, if one of your Objectives is to double the sales of a product, a Target for the next week might be meeting with a large vendor to make a sales pitch. If an Objective is to publish a research paper by the end of next year, a Target may be to start writing a grant request that could get your experiment funded.

Here is Joshua’s list of Career Aims, Objectives, and Targets:

Once you have sorted your goals into these three categories, put your Career Aims aside. Planning your career as a whole is a complicated process, and I’ll talk about it at length in part V of this book. For now, let’s focus on the medium-term and short-term goals—your Objectives and Targets. These will determine how you should be spending time on a daily basis.

3. RANK YOUR OBJECTIVES

---

At the end of this section, you’ll rank your Objectives, but don’t try to do that yet. Start by thinking about what you want to do, what you’re good at, and what the world needs from you. These are three distinctly different things—and there may be some conflict among them.

What You Want to Do: As I’ve said, your personal preferences are critical to your ranking decisions. For instance, if you have a burning desire to invent your company’s newest product, you should rank that Objective higher. But your preferences do not tell the whole story.

What You’re Good At: I call this the principle of comparative advantage. Ask yourself, “What am I better at doing than others?” “Which Objectives play to my strengths?” Even if you really want to invent new products for your company, you may not have the scientific background to succeed; you may be more of a “people person,” skilled at motivating others and resolving problems with clients. You should be willing to rank an Objective higher if you have a comparative advantage in accomplishing it due to your personality or skills.

What the World Needs from You: Unfortunately, you cannot be fully productive by looking only at the supply side—what you want to do and what you are best at doing. You must also consider the demand side—what the world, your organization, or your boss needs most from you. For example, even if you have the skills to invent new products, it may be a poor use of your time from the organization’s perspective—fixing a problem with an existing product may be a more pressing need. So you also need to ask, “What are the Objectives my organization most needs me to achieve?”

Answering this question may require some thought. Grab another sheet of paper and write down two or three top Objectives for your organization or department. Think about whatever metric is used to evaluate its performance—its profits, say, or the new drugs it puts into the research pipeline. Ask yourself what one change you could make in your current job to help your department achieve success by this metric, directly or indirectly. Is it spending more time visiting clients? Recruiting a talented professional to replace a retiring employee?

For senior executives, this ranking of Objectives should be closely aligned with those of their organization. If a firm has an Objective to expand into Latin America by next year, that should be a high-ranking Objective of its senior managers. But even at junior levels, an employee’s Objectives should be reasonably consistent with the needs of the organization. For instance, a middle manager may be a talented writer of sales literature, but her organization needs her unit to revise compliance manuals. If she wants to thrive at this company, she would be wise to give a higher ranking to revising compliance manuals than to developing new sales literature. (If she finds this hard to do, perhaps because she despises working on compliance manuals and has a passion for writing sales literature, she may be working in the wrong unit or company. In that case, she might want to add to her list an Objective of changing jobs.)

You should also consider what your boss wants and needs. At all levels of the organization, your boss will be under pressure from above—for instance, to cut costs or to expand globally. These Objectives of your boss should influence the way you prioritize the Objectives of your organization or unit. If your boss gives special weight to an Objective, you should too—with certain exceptions.

On occasion, you may think that some of your boss’s Objectives are off base. Your boss may be overly motivated by his or her own personal agenda; as a result, his or her goals may conflict with those of your organization. At other times, you may feel that your boss is making a strategic blunder, so you might want to persuade him or her to change course. In chapter 11, “Managing Your Boss,” I’ll suggest ways for you to address such conflicts.

Once you’ve considered both the supply and demand factors, rank your own list of Objectives on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 1 the lowest. You should review the ranking of your Objectives on an annual basis, or whenever you experience a major change in your professional life.

In figure 2, I have completed this exercise from Joshua’s perspective. His four Objectives for the year are, from highest to lowest priority:

• Increase profits by 15 percent.

• Create a pleasant customer experience.

• Meet people in retail industry.

• Get fancier offices.

You’ll notice that I have assigned the highest priority to Objectives that Joshua and his organization share. His personal Objective that is less important to his organization—“Meet people in retail industry”—is ranked lower. His boss’s Objective—“Get fancier offices”—is ranked even lower; in Joshua’s opinion, this Objective would not meaningfully support his or his organization’s goals.

4. RANK YOUR TARGETS

---

Now it’s time to focus on your Targets—your action steps. Your Targets will typically fall into one of two categories: Enabling Targets that help you accomplish your Objectives and Assigned Targets that are given to you. So you should first decide which Targets belong in which category and then try to rank them.

Enabling Targets (Tasks That Further Your Objectives)

Some Targets will obviously belong in this category. Here’s a simple example: last year, finishing this book was a very high Objective for me, so writing the first draft of a particular chapter tended to be my highest-ranked Enabling Target during each week.

An Enabling Target can further an Objective in more subtle ways. Suppose that you’ve been told that next Monday you will be assigned a major project (i.e., an Objective) that will require your full attention. So, this week, you would like to get as many of your small tasks as possible out of the way to allow you to focus on this new project once next week begins. Completing these lower-priority Enabling Targets supports this new Objective by clearing away all distractions.

An Enabling Target can also advance an Objective by addressing the needs of those you manage. For instance, as I’ll discuss in chapter 10, “Managing Your Team,” managers should use their influence to acquire resources (money, time, and manpower) for their subordinates. Since you and...