In each episode, Ramsay visits a failing restaurant and acts as a troubleshooter to help improve the establishment in just one week. Ramsay revisits the restaurant a few months later to see how business has fared in his absence.

Source: Wikipedia.

I would like to see someone produce a show called Productivity Nightmares. The synopsis for the show would be as follows: In each episode, productivity guru <insert famous guru’s name here> visits a failing business to make a dramatic impact in productivity and effectiveness in just one week. <insert famous guru’s name here> revisits the business a few months later to see how it has faired in his/her absence.

You could do shows about disorganized and non-productive homes as well as businesses. I think a guru that is brutally frank and not afraid of a little confrontation (like Gordon Ramsay) would work really well. Unlike the restaurant business, we would probably all be able to relate to the various shows in some way.

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In the past, this amount of stuff occurring concurrently at work and at home, coupled with a lack of family support would have drowned me in stress and anxiety. While I wasn’t organized enough to post, and fell behind on other tasks on a few occasions, I was pleased by the general lack of stress over the last couple of weeks. I attribute it to all the work I have done on personal productivity and lifestyle, including the great many blogs out there sharing lessons, tips and mentorship on productivity, simplification and life hacking.

It all got me to thinking, what is your number one productivity, or life hacking practice? After the challenges of the last couple weeks, I know what mine is: capture. The concept of capture is very well articulated in Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done. Basically it amounts to capturing everything, whether mail, to-do’s, ideas and even random thoughts into a real and tangible “inbox”. In this way, we can clear our heads, knowing that we won’t loose track of potentially important items that require our attention. In the midst of so much work, I was able to to stay sane knowing that everything and anything was captured in my system, and even though I had yet to process most of it, everything was there in my inbox - I didn’t have to mentally keep track of anything. While it is just the starting point for Getting Things Done (GTD), in my opinion, capture alone provides 80% of the benefits of the GTD methodology.

What is your number one productivity practice?

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Here is my take: I am biased towards Tim Ferriss myself, but mostly because his material seems a little more fundamental. He questions assumptions about work before he talks about doing work. Dave Allen is mostly about the doing part. Personally, I agree with Ferriss when he says:

[T]he person who…develops an elaborate system of folder rules … is efficient on some perverse level. … Doing something well does not make it important … What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.

Source: Timothy Ferriss.

However, surely once you discover what you really want to be doing, what is truly most important, you can still be more effective at that if you are better organized! If you put the thinking of Ferriss ahead of Allen, I think The 4-Hour Workweek and Getting Things Done actually complement each other.

Productivity

Fair enough you might say, but both Ferriss and Allen both speak about how to do work. Perhaps there is some competing, incompatible strategies here that require a SMACKDOWN! Let’s review productivity from the vantage point of a really smart guy:

Productivity is driven by two variables: the amount of work performed and the time it takes to perform that work. Productivity can be increased by either increasing the amount of work performed in a set amount of time, or by performing the same amount of work in a shorter period of time.

I think that Allen is really addressing the work variable in the productivity equation. Allen is starting from a tacit assumption that work has to be done or managed by you and so he provides a system for performing more work in a set amount of time. Ferriss is really working on the time variable (the title of his book is a dead give away). By automating and outsourcing massive amounts of work, you can get the same amount of work done in a fraction of the time.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Why can’t we employ both strategies? Why are the methods and philosophies of Ferriss and Allen exclusive of one another? Why not attack the productivity equation on both sides of the division sign? Yes, we need to ensure that we don’t use our productivity gains to do work for work’s sake, but I don’t think Allen is advocating this at all. Besides, I find it hard to believe that massive amounts of automation and outsourcing do not require a decent amount of organization. What would Stephen Covey say? What do you say?

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We love cooking (and eating!) so what was the problem? The problem was the deciding what to eat part, and the fact that this decision process was occurring every day, often after long and stressful days at the office.  Worse, this was often constrained by what was in the refrigerator causing us to repeat the decision process yet again or requiring an unplanned trip to the grocery store. Although we solved this problem before I read The 4-Hour Workweek, in the spirit of the book, I will say that this is a classic example of failing to batch. The inescapable time and effort of deciding what to eat was being repeated seven or more times a week. What we needed to do was get some economy of scale from this decision exercise by doing it only once a week.

Here is what we do: every Saturday morning we sit down and devise the following week’s menu.  Since it is the weekend, there is less time pressure and we often pull out some cookbooks or have fun recalling a good meal. By the end of it, we have come up with a menu for the week, everyday from Sunday to the next Saturday like the one below:

I cannot tell you how much stress this approach has reduced! Since the menu is on autopilot for the week, we also don’t suffer the psychological effort of task switching and can simply cook our meal while our minds may still be on our work or our kids (hopefully the latter!).

Perhaps a bigger benefit has been on our grocery bills. After we devise the menu for the week, we go through it and determine which ingredients are already in the refrigerator or pantry, and we put anything missing onto our weekly grocery list. As a result we only buy what we need (previously, we would over-buy not knowing exactly what we might be eating), and we batch our trips to the grocery store to basically one trip per week! When you think about it, that’s even good for the environment - who needs to buy some carbon credits from me?

Feel free to download my Weekly Menu Template (MS Excel file) now!

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Personally, I just think getting up earlier on a regular basis leads to a more productive day and helps one to ultimately become more successful. I don’t want to wake up early just so I can do more work! It’s like a race - if you get a head start, not only do you often win the contest, you also finish earlier.

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Do you also like to wake up at the crack of noon? I like to tell people that I am a “night person”. I often do not go to bed until 2 am, and I can in fact be very productive late in the evening. The downside is that 9:00 am is a struggle, and as the week progresses I am progressively more exhausted everyday - literally dragging myself into the office.  Since I usually have to forgo a morning workout in order to get some sleep, the workout gets pushed into an extended lunch, which causes me to stay in the office later to make up for that lost time, which in turn causes me to stay up later the next night, and so on, and so on. Worse still, afternoons and evenings are when we have the greatest possibility of being distracted by work and social commitments, so often the workout or the make-up time for heads down work is simply dropped. Add kids to the mix and you have a time management disaster on your hands. You start feeling like you will never catch up. It is simply stressful.

In the past I have fantasized about getting up early, that extra three or four hours with no distractions would allow me to put in a solid workout (healthy body - healthy mind, as they say) and no doubt give me a decent head start on work, thus reducing my overall stress and leading to time management nirvana. To implement such an early wake up time, it usually goes like so: I determine based on history that I seem to like 8 hours of sleep per night, but can get by with 6 hours rest.  Therefore, to get up at 6 AM, I should go to bed sometime between 10 and 11 PM. What happens next is I dutifully go to bed at 10 or 11 PM and promptly lay awake in bed for what seems like hours, my mind obviously quite awake despite my body’s horizontal position. It is a kind of torture actually, and in the end just reinforces my belief that I am genetically a “night person” and will just have to resign myself to the stress this might cause.

A few weeks ago, I came across Steve Pavlina’s How to Become an Early Riser, and I realized that perhaps I had gone about conquering my late night sleeping habits all wrong. Steve outlines a rather simple program to become an early riser:

• Rule 1: Go to sleep when you are tired.
• Rule 2: Wake up at a set time every morning.

It was so simple, I had to try it out! The first rule immediately addresses the going-to-bed-just-to-lie-awake issue I mentioned from my previous attempts. It makes so much sense, it is almost silly one would do otherwise - what is the point of sleeping if you are not tired?!? Now that logic has been reapplied to the situation, we move to the second rule which is really the crux of the matter: you have to get up at the same time everyday, including weekends and holidays. And yes, some mornings it will be very difficult to do this (I said it was simple, not necessarily easy!).

It is rather illustrative to share my experiences with this approach so far as I have been at it for three weeks now.  I decided that my wake time would be 5 AM every morning. The first few nights, I was naturally not even tired until after midnight. I just stayed up and did various activities until I felt sleepy. My alarm would go off at 5 AM and I would force myself to get out of bed. The sooner I physically got out of bed the better. I tried not to even think about it as my sleepy mind would have reasoned someway to justify going back to sleep (perhaps something like this: “I am so very tired, hmmm, why don’t I sleep some more? Yes, excellent suggestion!”). While it was difficult to get up, I found that as the first week went on, I was becoming sleepy earlier in the evening, and as I started going to bed a little earlier each night, I started to get more sleep naturally as a result. After two weeks, I was waking slightly before the alarm went off! In the whole three weeks so far, I have had 3 lapses where I went back to sleep after my alarm went off at 5 AM, and I can attribute every one of those to excessive socializing over the Holidays, so I don’t feel like they have been total failures. Anyway, read Steve’s post and give it a try. He also covers polyphasic sleep, which I won’t be trying because it sounds silly. Ultimately, you should be able to stay awake for 30 years at a time.

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