How to be more Productive

How to get more done in less time is the question we all want to know the answer to. 

Here, I dive into two ways which can help us become more productive: Time Management and Attention Management.

Whether you are seeking higher productivity or just want to finish the tasks you start, both of these ideas can help you get there.

Time Management

This is the one we have all heard about, but according to psychologist and business school professor Dr. Erich Dierdoff, we have only really considered one aspect of it: how we plan our time. 

In his HBR article, Dierdoff argues there are three main skills involved in the successful management of time:

1. Awareness - the most philosophical of the three: realizing that time is limited and choosing to become more aware of our priorities.
2. Adaption - being mindful of how we spend our time and making adjustments to it in light of external factors or changing priorities.
3. Arrangement - this is the one we all think about when it comes to time management. It’s the skill of planning and scheduling how we spend our time.

Dierdoff’s proposal is simple: develop these skills and you will manage your time better and become more productive as a result. Here are my top three favorite ways to develop each skill:

Awareness

• Find the times and places that you are most productive. Are you more productive in the morning or at night? At the office or home? Do more challenging tasks during those 'peak' times.
• Take a future time perspective by asking yourself “how does this task help or hurt me in the future?”
• Avoid the sunk cost fallacy! Reflect: is the task at hand still important or are you completing it just because you already started?

Adaption 

• Track how you spend your time and compare that to different points in time. Are you improving? If the answer is no then it's time to change your approach.
• Use short bursts of effort to tackle daunting tasks. For example, three 35-minute bursts of focused work with breaks in between instead of 2 hours straight.
• Purposefully avoid or reduce time wasters. Try putting your phone in another room, closing social media tabs, or cleaning your desk.

Arrangement

• Don’t just make a to-do list. Ask yourself: What is my top priority today? Tomorrow? 
• Urgent doesn’t mean important (and vice versa). Understand that these things are different, and if a task is both urgent and important, then you know what your priority is!
• Be purposeful and specific with how you will spend your time. Writing in your calendar: “I will work on Finance for 1 hour tomorrow from 4 to 5pm at the Ross School of Business” will set you up better than thinking: “Oh, I’ve got to do Finance, I'll do that tomorrow.”

Note: Something that helps in developing all of these skills is mindfulness. This is because mindfulness may bring clarity, and clarity allows you to realize what matters to you.

Attention Management

In his New York Times article, psychologist and UM grad Adam Grant makes what seems at first to be a bold claim: productivity isn’t about time management, it’s actually about attention management.

Wait, what does this mean exactly? 

According to Grant, the reason we’re not as productive as we’d like to be is not because we can’t manage our time well enough, but rather because we don’t pay enough attention to the task at hand. We often don’t even understand why we’re doing what we’re doing!

This is a shift in how we think about tasks. Instead of thinking about when and how long you will work on x for, it becomes “I will prioritize only x because it is important to me due to y. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, I will get it done”

To Grant, attention management is “the art of focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places, and at the right moments.”

If you understand why you are excited about something you will be naturally pulled towards it by intrinsic motivation. Similarly, if you understand why a boring task is important, then you will see the point in giving it attention. If something is both boring and unimportant, then, well… you can guess what should be done about that!

Here are four tips from his article:

• First and foremost, pay attention to what you’re doing. If you’re not paying attention or if you're thinking about something else your productivity will fall. This is a simple yet effective way to become more deliberate with your mental stamina.
• Notice when and where your attention peaks and do the more challenging tasks at these places and during those times. (This is mentioned by Dierdoff too, which goes to show time management isn't entirely useless!)
• Save the most exciting tasks for last. Do the boring ones first and have the exciting ones as a reward. This is useful to remember because if you start with an interesting task and then switch over to a boring one, your mind (and thus your attention) will remain on the more interesting task.
• Stop wasting time analyzing how you spend your time, instead, pay attention to what consumes your attention!

This framework is built on a perspective which may even change how you view life. 

Everything Grant is talking about boils down to what consumes your interest. Attention management inadvertently makes us reflect on what actually matters to us. Which tasks we truly look forward to in our lives.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since, if you end up changing your life because of these realizations, you may experience more fulfillment as your day will consist of more of that that excites you.

Grant’s final lesson? The easiest way to be more productive is to do things you actually want to. Simple and powerful.