Three Killer Ways to Work Less Without Sacrificing Quality

I was at a friends house last week during the work day and while I was pounding away my keyboard getting stuff done, I couldn’t help but notice how much talking – some on-topic and some off I was hearing. It made think of these tips from David Lavenda. Not all of his suggestions resonated with me, but three of them hit home in a major way.

• “Converse, don’t email”. When I read this, I thought, ‘no way. I can’t handle the distractions.’ But then I got an email notification from a customer. It was the 15th message in the thread…literally…and he was just trying to log into his account. Not only is this a crappy experience for my customers, but it was something else for me to think about for over 4.5 hours. I’m going to try to implement a way to converse instead email, but while still not having to be ‘on’ 24-7 with all of my customers.
• “Switch off pop up notifications”. In light of what I described above – that I go out of my way to not get distracted by customer service phone calls in the middle of other tasks – it’s amazing the number of notifications that I get (at least one each time my girlfriend puts something in her cart at Sprouts and checks it off on Wunderlist). On my phone. On my PC. On my Mac. In by Browser. Lavenda’s article quotes a study that found that 26 minutes a day are wasted recovering from distractions like this. You do the math!
• “Reduce all meetings by 25%”. This is actually pretty brilliant. Lavenda doesn’t say how to do it. Because there is no strategy. It’s just a matter of getting down to business and not messing around with bullshit. I’m lucky enough that no one I work with really likes meetings. The only meetings we have are:
  • Brainstorming sessions which are always super productive and kind of fun.
  • “Help me work” sessions where I have a really big chunk of stuff to think about and I need the expertise of one of my technical people to break it down into prioritized chunks.

If you are not lucky enough to have colleagues that value creating new things over talking about it, like I am, then find a way to at least get them to cut down meetings, even if it means rewarding them with cookies with the extra 25 minutes left at the end.

Here’s Lavenda’s full article: 10 Simple Productivity Tips