Four simple hacks to make your workday much more productive

(Originally published on news.com.au, June 5, 2018)

IF YOU’RE not one of those super chirpy morning people who manage to get hours of work done before the sun even rises, you’re not alone.

Your body clock dictates how you work best much more than what time you set your alarm.

If you struggle to leave the office by 5pm, or feel like you spend more time in meetings than actually working, you might need to make a few simple changes to your make work life more productive.

WORK TO YOUR CHRONOTYPE

Through studying thousands of people’s internal body clocks, scientists came to learn that we are not all created equal when it comes to our daily energy levels. Around 14 per cent of the population are what these researchers refer to as Larks. They are stereotypical “morning people” — you know, the type that are severely irritating if you don’t happen to be one of those people.

At the other end of the spectrum are Owls, which represent another 21 per cent of the population. Owls have their peak productivity after most of us have had dinner and quite often, well into the night.

If you can’t relate to either extreme, you are an in-between Bird. But in general, tend to follow the energy patterns of a Lark, albeit a couple of hours delayed.

The big problem that Owls face is that the corporate world and the education system work against their natural body clocks. But if you are an Owl and you work in a company that has traditional hours, or better yet, if you are your own boss, try to deliberately restructure your day to suit your natural chronotype.

For Larks and those in-between ‘Third Birds’, know that you are most productive in the hours preceding lunch so schedule your most important work for that time block.

GET FOCUS FIT

We are living in a world of distractions. Some of them are inflicted upon us through notifications that pop up on our phone, tablet or computer. Others are self-imposed, like when Jenny checks Facebook for the 53rd time today, just in case that cute photo of her labradoodle has another like. Research suggests that the average person can’t survive for more than 10 minutes without checking their phone. Addiction, anyone?

In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests that because of the distractions technology imposes on us, we spend the majority of our time doing Shallow Work — work that is non-cognitively demanding. And because of the constant distractions, we have forgotten how to truly engage in Deep Work — that is, focused thinking where we make meaningful progress on our most challenging but impactful projects.

Because many of us have been conditioned into fitting bits of Deep Work around lots of Shallow Work, many people often find it hard to spend large chunks of time focusing. And my goodness, isn’t it tempting to “just check” email when we reach a stuck point to give ourselves a little hit of distraction?

What we need to do is get focus fit. When we start a new exercise regimen, we don’t start by bench pressing 50kg in our first session. So when it comes to (re) building your focus muscle, think about building up slowly. When I began retraining myself, I started out by doing just 30 minutes of focused work where all notifications and distractions were switched off (turns out Flight Mode can be useful for more than just flying). And I simply built up from there.

SAY NO

A big reason why many of us end up so busy is because we are bad at saying no. I used to be terrible at saying no, and unfortunately, every week, I receive many requests for my time. And at the time of receiving the request, it felt far easier to say yes, rather than no. However, once the resulting time commitment arrived from saying yes, I would feel immediate regret and frustration at myself for agreeing to the commitment in the first place.

So this year, I have made a point of thinking more carefully about what I say yes to. A simple strategy I heard on the Tim Ferriss Show was to grade every opportunity on a scale of 1-10. However, the key to the strategy is that you can’t select seven. A score of seven out of 10 is so easy to give — it’s the equivalent of saying, “Urgh, yeah, OK”. It’s a lukewarm yes. By removing the option to select a seven, it becomes easier to see whether it’s an exciting opportunity (after all, eight and above out of 10 is a great score), or whether it’s a six or below, which is clearly a no.

GO ANALOGUE

I largely abandoned paper notebooks a long time ago, despite being someone that has an unhealthy love of stationary shops. I travel a lot, so anything that adds weight to my bad needs to justify its space. Given I take all my notes on Evernote, I felt that bringing a notebook with me was redundant.

However, I recently stumbled upon research that made me go out and buy a Moleskin (and some pens, highlighters, pencils — oh the joy). Research from Princeton University and the University of California has shown that taking notes by hand in a notebook leads to better recall of the content compared to those typing notes on a laptop. In general, when we take notes on a laptop, we tend to do so robotically and type things out verbatim, but when we write notes out by hand, we mentally process the information much more effectively.

Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium, Australia’s leading innovation consultancy and the host of How I Work, a podcast about the habits and rituals of the world’s most successful innovators.