HBR Guide to Being More Productive (HBR Guide Series)

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781633693081
• eBook ISBN: 9781633693098
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Skills

Every day begins with the same challenge: too many tasks on your to-do list and not enough time to accomplish them. Perhaps you tell yourself to just buckle down and get it all done—skip lunch, work a longer day. Maybe you throw your hands up, recognize you can't do it all, and just begin fighting the biggest fire or greasing the squeakiest wheel.

And yet you know how good it feels on those days when you're working at peak productivity, taking care of difficult and meaty projects while also knocking off the smaller tasks that have been hanging over your head forever. Those are the times when your day didn't run you—you ran your day. To have more of those days more often, you need to discover what works for you given your strengths, your preferences, and the things you must accomplish.

Whether you're an assistant or the CEO, whether you've been in the workforce for 40 years or are just starting out, this guide will help you be more productive. You'll discover different ways to:

• Motivate yourself to work when you really don't want to
• Take on less, but get more done
• Preserve time for your most important work
• Improve your focus
• Make the most of small pockets of time between meetings
• Set boundaries with colleagues—without alienating them
• Take time off without tearing your hair out

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

SECTION TWO

Plan Your Day

Every day is a new opportunity to get it right. To do more and do it more efficiently. To feel better about the work you’re doing.

Evaluate the tasks you have to do today, set priorities, and make a plan for getting your most important work accomplished with the advice in this section of the guide.

CHAPTER 4

You May Hate Planning, but You Should Do It Anyway

by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Some of the smartest people that I have ever met struggle with convincing themselves to do one thing: plan their work.

They’re off the charts in terms of analyzing all sorts of things, from manufacturing processes to stocks to nuclear particles. But when it comes to their own time management or laying out a plan to get a big project done, they balk. Something about scheduling makes their brains shut down, and they can go from brilliant to blank in an instant.

One of the reasons these individuals struggle is because they can get away with not planning for much longer than most people. If you have some charisma and a strong ability to cram, you may have been able to pull off decent work at the last minute—or at least find ways to get an extension. If you can continue in this way without any major issues, there’s no need to change.

But as time demands increase—you get a new job, you’re short-staffed, you get married or have kids, or your health changes—a life without planning or routines can make you tired at best and miserable at worst. At some point, you need to decide that it’s worth the time and effort to create plans and routines. Based on my experience with time management clients, here are some tough truths about planning that every individual needs to accept before moving forward. Once you accept them and make planning a habit, you can harness its power to create a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

Planning Will Trigger Pain—at Least Initially

If you have very weak planning patterns in your brain, you will literally feel pain when you begin to plan. It’s like when you start a new exercise routine and work out muscles that you didn’t even know you had. But as you develop the habit of planning, the pain associated with it usually decreases. And the more positive reinforcement you get, the more you do it.

For example, Camille Fournier, former CTO of Rent the Runway, described the pain and reward of planning (in an Ask the CTO column on O’Reilly.com). She faced stress and frustration when she first began planning her projects, explaining how her boss would dissect her plans—wherever there was uncertainty or risk—and ask her to go back and reconsider it. “It was absolutely dreadful,” she said, “and I found myself deeply frustrated and impatient throughout the process. And yet, at the end of it all, we broke this big project down into deliverable chunks, and I went on to successfully lead a significant architectural change that ran close to the schedule, despite its complexity. The memory of the frustration of planning is burned into my brain, but so is the memory of the huge accomplishment that came out of that planning.”

In some cases, planning works best when you don’t have to go it alone. Consider planning a major project as a team or at least with one other person. Depending on the size of the team and the overlap of the work, breaking down monthly goals into a weekly plan together can make the process easier.

Planning Takes Longer Than Expected (and So Does the Work)

Planning your week typically takes 30–60 minutes, and project planning takes much longer. For those unfamiliar with planning, this amount of time can seem excessive. But those who have seen its power understand that one hour a week can make hundreds of hours of thoughtful work less stressful and more productive.

What’s more, part of the benefit of planning is that you gain greater clarity on how long work actually takes versus how long you thought it would take. This can lead to some more frustration initially because you have to face the fact that the reality is different from what you hoped. Planning also doesn’t mean that everything will go according to schedule. But it does allow you to know early on if something goes off course, so you can do something about it, rather than getting stuck with little or no options later.

Things Tend to Go Better When You Plan

When you plan, you’ll often discover some hard truths about what it will take to accomplish a project or simply get your work done this week. You may feel a bit uncomfortable because you’re no longer in a pleasant, imaginary world where there’s an infinite amount of time, and you can get everything done all at once and make everyone happy. But discovering these facts as early as possible gives you the ability to quickly negotiate expectations on deliverables or pull in more resources on a project. You can confidently set boundaries and decide what you’re going to do for the day because you’re aware of your full array of options and the current priorities. This maximizes your effectiveness and allows you to consistently set and meet expectations.

Planning Becomes the Canary

In the past, miners brought canaries into mines as an early-detection warning system. If the canaries died, it was a sign that the toxic gases were rising and the miners needed to get out. Planning can provide the same sort of early warning signals—if you veer significantly off your estimated plan, it’s a sign that something is wrong and you need to make adjustments. Having a plan and checking against it allow you to make those adjustments before your projects or other time commitments are in major peril.

Many individuals who don’t like to plan tend to abandon planning quickly, assuming that they have things under control. But that sends them in a downward spiral. Keeping an eye on the plan and making adjustments is just as important as delivering a complete product—it maintains process stability. If you ignore the canary, you have a greater chance of failing, just because you didn’t notice important signs.

Can planning be difficult? Yes. But is it possible for you to do more of it? Absolutely. The payoff of going through the pain of planning can be huge in terms of increased productivity, decreased stress, and, most of all, intentional alignment with what’s most important.

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Elizabeth Grace Saunders is the author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), a time coach, and the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching & Training. Find out more at www.RealLifeE.com.

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Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on September 19, 2016

CHAPTER 5

Making the Most of “Slow Time”

by Lynda Cardwell

Years ago, when Fannie Mae’s public finance business was added to the work portfolio for Wayne Curtis, vice president of partnership investments, he had to fundamentally rethink his approach to work. Before, an agreement to extend a line of credit to a state or local authority for a 50-unit housing project might crystallize over a two-month period. But now, on top of this responsibility was the fast-paced work involved in evaluating multi-billion-dollar bond purchases.

“Suddenly, my business volume had increased by a factor of 10,” he says, “and the rhythm of the new work was very different from the work I had been doing. I was really grappling with how to stay focused on long-term priorities.” An additional challenge was one faced by many of us when we become managers: the expectation that we’ll continue to perform as technical experts even though our primary duties are now managerial and strategic. This creates the tendency to hold on to tasks that our direct reports could handle.

Dilemmas like these highlight the way that the pace and pressure of work crowd out what author Thomas Hylland Eriksen calls “slow time.” Being able to work faster and to take on more work is jeopardizing our high performance. Increasingly we find ourselves with little—if any—of the kind of time ideally suited for the detailed, focused, and unhurried intellectual and interpersonal work upon which high performance depends, he explains in Tyranny of the Moment.

How do you make the most of this precious commodity? For some time, management experts have advised that you develop an understanding of the interplay between importance and urgency in the tasks you face. More recent thinking, however, underscores the importance of recognizing the rhythm associated with a given task.

Triaging the Tasks You Face

To maximize your slow time, you have to be clear about your purpose, says Washington, DC–based executive coach David Coleman. “Key things you want to accomplish go into your schedule first, so that everything else falls in line.” Using a technique from the classic time-management book First Things First, by Stephen A. Covey et al., Coleman has his clients imagine that they have rocks, gravel, and sand with which to fill a bowl. The rocks represent the most strategically significant tasks; the gravel, the work that has the next highest priority; and the sand, the least important activities.

Starting with the sand and gravel leaves no room for the rocks. But by working backward—starting with rocks first, then putting in the gravel, and finally adding the sand—clients find that there’s plenty of room for everything. The highest-priority goals get first crack at a client’s time, and the other tasks get accomplished in descending order of importance. Suddenly, the once overwhelming to-do list seems very doable. Many management experts suggest using a simple two-by-two matrix to identify your highest-priority tasks. First Things First defines the four quadrants in such a matrix as:

1. Urgent and important tasks (Quadrant I). For example, dealing with a product recall or completing due diligence before an acquisition can be approved.
2. Not urgent but important tasks (Quadrant II). Examples here include developing key business relationships and drafting a plan for how your company will respond to the changes you foresee taking place in your industry 18 months down the road.
3. Urgent but not important tasks (Quadrant III). Examples of these tasks are taking impromptu phone calls from sales reps or fielding a request from a colleague to help make arrangements for next week’s unit party.
4. Not urgent and not important tasks (Quadrant IV). For instance, surfing the internet or chatting with colleagues.

For this discussion, Quadrant II is the most significant because it represents the activities that call for slow time. Bethesda, Maryland–based executive coach Catherine Fitzgerald says that when her clients use this two-by-two matrix, “it’s like a light bulb going off.” They see that valuable time is being wasted on urgent but not important tasks instead of being spent on those that are important. Fitzgerald advises her clients to block out time every day for the important but not urgent work. One focus of this time should be coaching your team to take on responsibilities that are not essential for you to do yourself but that you often hang onto out of a sense of duty.

“You can easily free up at least 5% of your most valuable time by handing off things,” she says. “And those tasks often prove to be interesting to a direct report.”

Identifying the Rhythms

The more time you devote to important but not urgent work, the more control you have over your schedule. In particular,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Harvard Business Review Guides
• Title Page
• HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts
• Copyright
• What You’ll Learn
• Contents
• Section One. Take Stock
• Section Two. Plan Your Day
• Section Three. Find Your Focus
• Section Four. Motivate Yourself
• Section Five. Get More Done on the Road
• Section Six. Take Time Off
• Index