Find Your Four Hours for Productivity
There are a few ways to improve productivity, but they don’t all have the same impact.
Why technology won’t improve productivity in the workplace as much as you’d hope
Tech will only help you on the margins. Yes, there are a ton of apps out there, but some of them will actively harm your ability to be effective if you have difficulty using them.
The flip side of that is you will definitely see a productivity boost if you move from a spreadsheet to a dedicated app or piece of software (that you learn to use.) I’ve seen this happen with things like inventory and customer relationship management systems.
Technology definitely makes it easier to run reports. Plus the less manual entry there is, the fewer mistakes are made. Obviously, that boosts productivity because no one has to spend valuable time trying to find out how the mistake happened.
You can also use technology to automate certain systems in your business. For example, you can set up a marketing funnel where anyone who downloads your lead magnet, such as an ebook, is automatically added to your CRM and mailing list. They can then receive a nurturing series of introductory emails to help them get to like, trust, and know you without effort on your part.
But if you already have these apps in place, trading them for new ones probably won’t help. If you already have a CRM app, for example, finding another one probably isn’t going to help you be much more efficient.
I know people who switch tools regularly, and if that’s happening, the tools aren’t the problem.
I haven’t seen any evidence that the best-of-breed apps with high price tags help smaller companies be more effective compared to a few tools that do their jobs at an affordable price. (This may be different for very large companies that have ample money and energy to throw at their tech stack, but if that’s not your firm, acting like a bigger firm doesn’t help you in this regard.)
Ignoring technology isn’t the answer, but it has limits to how much it will improve productivity.
Finding the right time for cognitively demanding work results in massive productivity improvement…
Where you get sustained productivity improvement is when you and everyone in your company is doing their important, cognitively demanding work at the right time for each person. This is roughly based on sleep chronotype.
For example, lions and bears do their best work in the morning. A little earlier in the morning for lions, who also rise earlier, compared to bears.
The reason is that the human brain doesn’t have a factory worker’s 8-hour day to do this work. You get four to four and a half hours, or less if you’re not keeping your productivity tank full. You get a huge, sustainable boost in productivity simply from matching up cognitively demanding work with your brain’s best time for doing that work.
What’s cognitively demanding work? Stuff that really uses your executive function, such as working with numbers, planning, strategizing, and writing SEO-heavy articles.
For accountants, this type of work includes tax returns, tax projections, spotting red flags or hidden opportunities in a client’s returns, and figuring out a social media strategy.
For lawyers, this could include writing briefs, creating an estate plan, planning a courtroom strategy, and working on a marketing plan.
For financial advisors, this may cover creating a client’s financial plan, developing a tax harvesting strategy, and calculating Roth conversion potential.
Other tasks should only be done outside that four-hour window. They may be necessary for your business, but they’re not as demanding on your brain. These include:
Phone calls, emails, and texts, whether they’re to clients or anyone else
Networking events and calls
Social media interaction
Creative work
Administrative work (things you could be comfortable delegating to an assistant, whether you have one or not)
Meetings
…but you have to be ruthless about it or time management/time blocking doesn’t work
If you’re not familiar, time blocking and time management essentially mean that you block certain days and/or times on your calendar for specific things. You don’t have to get all fancy and use different colors for different things. As long as you understand the time blocks, that’s good enough.
I talked to someone who told me that she tried time blocking but it didn’t work. There are two main reasons that the strategy won’t be effective: either the time blocks themselves are too small or too large, or you don’t pay any attention to the boundaries so no one else does either.
Why is time blocking itself so helpful? Basically because switching back and forth between different tasks is tiring for the brain, and multitasking (trying to do two demanding but unrelated tasks at the same time) isn’t physically possible.
Setting aside time to focus on one thing helps you accomplish tasks faster and leaves your brain less drained. By putting this time on the calendar (as long as you respect it), you prevent other tasks from encroaching on this time.
It also allows you to do the right work at the right time. If you know you do your best “thinky” work in the morning, then you block off the morning solely for that kind of work. Save the meetings and emails for later.
But you need to make sure you’re being reasonable about the blocks you’re setting up. Maybe your daily planner allows you to block off time in 15-minute increments. What exactly are you going to do in 15 minutes? And if you block your whole day in tiny blocks like that, as soon as one of them runs long or a client is late or whatever, the rest of the day is shot.
For most people, hour-long blocks are probably most reasonable. (You can definitely create three or four hour blocks too, but mostly stay away from work tasks shorter than an hour.) If you’re going somewhere, like to attend a networking lunch, you need to block off travel time as well.
Suppose you’re a CPA and a bear sleep chronotype like me. You get your best cognitively demanding work done generally between 9 am and 1 pm. That entire morning should be spent only on tax returns, strategies and planning, and other thinky work.
That means no emails, no phone calls, no meetings, no texts, and no interruptions unless something is on fire or someone is gushing blood during that period of time.
Where people get this wrong is that they block off time for the work, but then allow other tasks to get in the way. So the CPA above blocks off mornings for tax returns, but doesn’t disable email or social media notifications, so they’re constantly interrupted. Or they schedule meetings during this time, or allow their assistants to ask questions, etc.
If you don’t enforce the boundaries around the time blocks that you set, then time blocking isn’t going to work. If you do time blocking but put less demanding work on the schedule first, trying to squeeze your thinky work in at the margins, time blocking is not going to improve your productivity.
You’ve probably heard of the “big rocks” school of thought, which is that you attend to the big rocks first and fit the rest into whatever time is left over. Your first big rock is the thinky work, and that goes on your calendar first. Guard the boundaries around that time so you eliminate or significantly reduce interruptions.
Next, other tasks that will move your business forward go on the calendar, whether that’s sales calls or networking or whatever. Fill the rest in around those.
Recap (tl;dr)
Technology can help you be more productive up to a certain point. Working with your brain and blocking off your calendar to accommodate how your brain works give you a bigger and more sustainable boost. Make sure you’re prioritizing and giving tasks enough time to get done.
Mastered your calendar but still find your business in a profit plateau? Schedule a free consultation call to see if I can solve your productivity problem.