We partnered with LifeLabs Learning to host one more virtual workshop for 2020 as part of Landing Point’s The Future of Work series – Helping People Work 2X Smarter. While this may sound fluffy, as always, LifeLabs Learning’s content didn’t disappoint and they shared incredibly impactful insight, we participated in memorable exercises and walked away with tips to bring to our teams.

Our trainer, McKendree Hickory, broke down the 4 common buckets of issues, including how to help fix these problems on a company level:

Chronemics: Time awareness and how someone perceives and values time. Many of us struggle with planning our days in a way that is realistic with how long tasks/meetings can take. To solve for this, we need to become aware, plan accordingly, and use more time integrity.

• For example, instead of saying do you have “2 seconds,” actually speak to how long you think a call will take.
• If you are given an “ASAP” deadline – validate this need. Ask the person who gave the deadline to clarify the hard timeline.
• You can also offer up your own timeline, giving them an opportunity to push back if need be. Another way to be clear is, instead of saying you will get something to someone by “EOD,” (especially in a global setting), be specific, and say 6pm in your time zone.

Prioritization: Many people have a hard time prioritizing when it comes to different types of tasks workers are responsible for. Here are a few prioritization hacks:

• Write down your 3 MIT’s (Most Important Things) you need to get done every day (could be first thing in the morning or last thing before shutting down for the day).
• Use the Quadrant Method to help prioritize based on how urgent/important the task/project is
  • Q1: Urgent/Important = Fires
    • These are chronic urgent tasks that come up. Someone in the group brought up a great mantra “if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.”
  • Q2: Important/Not Urgent = Investment
    • These are things you know you should be doing but don’t make time to do, but if this task/project can solve for some of the tasks in Q1 it speaks to why these are called investment tasks.
  • Q3: Less Important/Urgent = Deception
    • These are tasks that deceptively seem like a priority but maybe best to delegate.
  • Q4: Not Urgent/Less Important = Recharge
    • This speaks to prioritizing taking moments to recharge and to get your team to make time for to take a break, people managers must lead by example.

Organization: To declutter your mind and make space for what’s important, write everything down, don’t take up precious real estate in your brain. For example, if you are waking up at 3am thinking about all that needs to get done, you need to write it down so that you don’t have to remember it or have an “open loop” that creates “psychic residue.” We also talked about running efficiency audits to cut down on the steps it takes to get things done, and to do this:

• Ask people about the repeated tasks they do and look for places of repetition.
• See if there is redundancy or overlap in the company – are people capturing the same information in different places?
• What are people’s pain points?

Focus: We learned that statistically, we are interrupted 20 times per hour and 40% of that time it’s self-inflicted. We also did an interesting experiment in our workshop demonstrating that multitasking slows people down by 60%.

We wrapped up with a few extra tips from the group on how to be more productive:

• Use the Do not Disturb function in messaging tools like Slack.
• Pause your inbox.
• Pomodoro Technique – setting a timer to break down work into intervals.

The Point: Productivity is always a challenge and especially in our current state it can be even harder; however, there are ways to fix this and it’s all about being more specific, creating daily habits to help with prioritization, staying super organized, and avoiding multitasking. Landing Point is excited to kick off The Future of Work virtual workshop series again in January 2021 and details to come. Happy Holidays!