So You Want to Be a Productivity Consultant
According to the calendar, April 18th is National Exercise Day, but honestly I’m so tired of beating that poor old dead horse. I’m pretty sure all my readers know they need to exercise to stay mentally and emotionally healthy, not just physically healthy.
I work with business owners to help them be more effective at work so they can be profitable and still go home to their families and fave activities. I’ve even written about how I came to this exalted profession (!) after being a financial planner, ghostwriter, etc.
But what about the secret sauce? The terrible things no one will tell you about being a productivity consultant. OK, there’s nothing really THAT terrible, I’m just building some suspense here. The stuff THEY(™) don’t want you to know.
I’m ready to spill the tea. But are YOU ready to hear the TRUTH?
I should say here, as I always do, that I’m not talking about toxic productivity. I don’t think everyone should get up at oh dark thirty and knock out 45 things before breakfast, then go to work and cram 75,000 things into each of the 14 hours you’ll be working, before it’s time to head home and do your 137 step nighttime routine. No.
When I talk productivity, I’m talking about accomplishing everything necessary to move your business forward and keep (or make) it profitable – but in a reasonable amount of time, which is 8 hours or less on a weekday, so you have time left over for activities and people you love.
In no particular order, here are the ingredients to the secret sauce of productivity consulting.
Be a giant nerd
Let me be clear. Nerds were not popular in middle school or high school, although if there was a nerd crowd you might have been popular with them. If you were bullied, your chances of being a nerd are higher. (Yes, I was bullied.)
I’m making some generalizations about nerds here. They’re usually passionate about one or more subjects that are not popular in the mainstream. And they love to learn about their passion. They usually consider themselves to be lifelong learners, and they liked and/or did pretty well in school. They often forgo looking and/or acting cool because they don’t really care all that much about what the popular/mainstream thinks about.
My nerd “thing” (currently) is neuroscience. (Nerd things can fluctuate over your lifetime.) I don’t have a degree in neuroscience as my undergrad degree is in physics, but I’m still interested in and continue to learn about it. Also, it’s excellent because we won’t know everything there is to know about neuroscience in my lifetime (there’s just too much out there to know) which means I will always be learning. Nerd HEAVEN.
Neuroscience nerdery is great for being a productivity expert because being effective at work is all about the brain. Understanding how it works, what’s good for it and not good for it in the workplace, and how to harness its power will all make you more able to power through the things you need to do to move your business forward… so you don’t have to spend all day at work.
Lose your complete and absolute sh*t any time you’re interrupted while you focus on your work
Imagine my shocked and confused face when I recently read that some people actually welcome interruptions at work.
Here’s what happens to me when I’m focused and I get interrupted. This is probably one sign of having a neurodivergent (ND) brain.
I jump noticeably - it’s not a small twitch but pretty much my entire body
My heart pounds
Afterwards, I usually shake for a few minutes as I calm down
I can’t get back to work for at least 10 minutes, often more like half an hour
As you can see, interruptions are extremely upsetting when I’m really into my work. (If I’m not as focused, the distractions aren’t that bad.) Because of all this dysregulation, I have created some pretty significant boundaries and accommodations to make sure I’m not interrupted as I work.
Turns out that focus is the key to productivity, and when you’re interrupted or distracted, it takes even a neurotypical (NT) brain a while to get back to where you were. One study suggests it could be 23 minutes, which means if you get distracted just three times you’ve lost an hour of valuable time. That’s partially why many business owners regularly work long hours – they keep getting distracted so everything takes longer to do.
If you need help with managing or eliminating interruptions and distractions, who better to ask than someone who knows how to build a system because they flip the f*k out any time they’re interrupted?
Be suspicious of corporate norms when it comes to getting your work done
OK, I’m suspicious of corporate norms in general. Could just be me, or it could be a result of being Gen X.
As a Gen Xer, I remember one of the corporate norms was to answer emails when they came in. And back then, around the turn of the century (!) there just weren’t as many. We weren’t being inundated with emails because people still mostly picked up the phone to talk to you when they wanted something.
So the policy was somewhat more reasonable than it is now, although still mostly unnecessary. Very few people really need the email to be answered right away. As long as you acknowledge receipt, which you can do automatically, that’s good enough.
Now we’re all inundated with emails. I went through a purge a few months ago and unsubscribed to a whole bunch of things, and I still see dozens of emails when I arrive in the morning. It’s absolute insanity to expect people to answer their emails right away even during the workday, just due to sheer volume.
If you're a business owner, when you answer emails, you’re not doing work ON your business. So emails get in the way of you completing the important tasks that move your business forward.
I am naturally skeptical. I want evidence that things work, and if I find evidence they don’t work, I am not going to do them. I don’t care if that's “the culture” or “that’s what people do” or whatever. (It’s why the principles underlying my business are rooted in neuroscience.)
A good example of corporate norms that don’t work is the demand for multitasking. Tons of job openings claim they want candidates who can multitask, and yet we know from science that’s not a thing. (I’ve explained a bit more about how multitasking isn’t even possible when you’re doing brain-challenging tasks here.)
Another norm is that you’re supposed to drop everything to help your colleagues when necessary. And if they’re having an emergency, that’s a great time to drop everything and assist them!
But how many times have you had a colleague in your office or in your email or on your phone that was truly a bona-fide emergency? Could whatever their problem was have waited an hour while you finished whatever it was you were working on?
Teamwork is a norm, and in theory, yes, colleagues should work together as a team. But is it really teamwork to interrupt someone who’s trying to focus on their project, if your issue can wait? Obviously not. Working as a team member should also include respecting the boundaries of other team members.
It’s not that I didn’t want to help people when I was in corporate, or that I don’t want to help my clients now. But I don’t like performative helping, where you’re standing around because you’re supposed to work as a team but you’re not actually solving the problem.
I set aside time to work with others (which also helps me manage my energy expenditure as an introvert) so I expect that my alone time will be respected. To be fair, I do need a lot of this time! But I get the work done.
Read about anything that remotely touches on the passion subject
I have a subscription to The New Yorker mainly so I can read articles by Cal Newport, who has done a lot of research on doing work effectively. The Atlantic has a couple of well-known writers who similarly do deep dives on work, so I subscribe to it as well.
I read books about time management, getting things done, how brains work, certain authors who write about money, and similar things, as well as science in general and anything else that comes into my productivity orbit, even if it’s just tangential. I don’t silo myself into reading only on one subject.
That’s all in addition to my fiction diet of mysteries and thrillers, especially dark academia and psychological, as well as horror and espionage.
It’s important to note here that I read these things because I enjoy reading about this topic. (I don’t enjoy reading every book, because some of these authors are dry as dust. I will do my damndest to make sure MY book is entertaining as well as informative, you have my word for it.)
I’m not forcing myself to read. I like to learn about this. There are plenty of books I don’t read because I am utterly uninterested in their topics. But productivity is my thing and I want to learn ALL the things about it!
I don’t take in information by listening, and videos don’t really work for me either, so I read. But for those who prefer to listen to their information, you could listen to audiobooks and podcasts.
I think if you’re going either the podcast or video route that you have to vet your sources more carefully. It’s easier for someone who doesn’t really know the subject well to do podcasts or videos than to write a book. Or you could just stick to listening to people who’ve also written on the subject.
I usually skip articles (or books) that seem to agree with what I think on a given topic. I’m looking for disconfirming evidence, something that tells me I’m headed in the wrong direction.
For example, I already know about sleep chronotypes and the importance of sleep, so I don’t need to read too much more about it. Same for fitness, nutrition, etc. Now if I saw a book or article that claimed less sleep powers up your brain I would have to read that!
As I read, I bear in mind one of the things my dad always said to me: Consider the source. Is the author credible?
I started reading a book about brains until I got to the part where she said people have different learning styles. I stopped reading it because anyone who writes about the brain should know that stereotype has been debunked, and so she lost credibility for me. (People do have learning preferences; for example, I prefer to learn through words. However, when I’m putting together an IKEA bookcase I look at the pictures like everyone else.)
Nerds are usually fairly free of FOMO. EXCEPT. What if I miss out on NEW INFORMATION in my field?? That would just be excruciating. Therefore, I must keep up with my reading to make sure I’m on top of it.
Recap (tl;dr)
Being a productivity consultant isn’t for everyone, but just adopt these traits and you too can be an efficiency expert!
Or you could just hire me instead. I’ll help you free up your productivity bottlenecks and plug up your effectiveness leaks. Your choice! Schedule a free consult with me here to find out if we’re a good fit to work together so you can have a better quality of life.