These Three Ideas Can Radically Improve Your Productivity

Business is an activity where performance matters. Being stressed, hurried, tired, or confused can cost you – literally. So we’re all aware of the importance of maximizing our productivity and effectiveness in our work, yet we’re still so prone to the same set of deleterious symptoms:

• Burnout

• Decision Fatigue

• Not Having Enough Time in the Day

Athletes do not do the same workout every single day. They think in terms of seasons, competition dates, and training weeks in order to ensure that their personal record isn’t set in the practice room on week three of a fifteen-week season. They ramp up, rest, and strategize their training schedules to make sure that they are feeling their best and are most ready to compete on the day of the actual competition. This avoids burnout, frustration, and it is eminently practical, because it starts with the goal in mind.

We have to do the same thing. We can’t treat Mondays the same as Tuesdays or Fridays week after week and expect top performance. Nobody runs their PR every single day. We need time to prepare and visualize, time to condition, competition time, and time to cool down, rest, and assess.

There are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, but Christian executive business coach Michael Hyatt has some practical ideas on this. Another, slightly more general, approach is the “Da Vinci Week.” Either way, the idea is undeniable – you aren’t the same on a Monday morning as you are on Friday afternoon. Divide up your tasks and figure out what is creative work, what is administrative, what meetings you need to have, etc., and plan out your week so that you match up with your natural rhythm for peak efficiency. Make sure you’re equipped to do your best on game day, and schedule the mindless work for times when you can afford to be less than your best.

Unstuff the Burrito 🌯

You need margin.

We all know it, and yet week after week, year after year, we overschedule ourselves, creating a framework that uses 100% of our resources and assumes that everything goes correctly. If we need to squeeze just a little bit more juice from the rind, then we’ll just sacrifice more sleep, more exercise, more money, and on and on it goes.

We don’t budget this way, so don’t schedule yourself this way either. 10% “oops” money is pretty standard in business plans and proposals in many industries, so why would you not give yourself this buffer as well? Leave a day, or an hour each day, or half a day (whatever makes sense in your industry) to pick up the slack for things that didn’t get done or didn’t have enough time dedicated to them. A little catch-up is always necessary, so you might as well plan for it and keep from derailing your other tasks. If nothing goes wrong and you don’t need to catch up – great! Think big picture for a while and do some brainstorming on how to improve your business.

This principle of needing margin applies to your activity outside of work as well. You can’t live by doing nothing but work. You need to sleep a reasonable amount, to exercise, see people in a social context, pray, and eat healthy food. Make sure your work schedule isn’t keeping you from these things day-in, day-out.

Delegate Lower-Level Tasks 📄

Your time is valuable. As a leader, you’ve got to learn to train up workers to take over tasks that aren’t contributing to the growth, vision, and creative function of the company. Can you bring in more revenue by focusing on sales and paying someone to do the bookkeeping for you? Can you hire a salesman and spend more time coming up with company-wide strategy? Wherever you are at in your particular business, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes, and whatever work you dislike and are weak in –outsource. Use the freed up time for margin or critical tasks. Check out this book by Michael Gerber for more details on this concept.

TL;DR

You’re only stuck if you don’t move. Maximize your weekly productive output by thinking in terms of weeks, not days, and arrange your schedule to accomplish the larger goals in your business. Create margin so that you can catch up where needed, spend some time daydreaming up solutions to problems, and live a healthier life outside of work to boost productivity. Delegate things that you can teach others to do, to free you up for more advanced work.

Just How We Drew It Up

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Sunday School

Answer at the bottom

Quick Hits ⏱️

Sunday School Answer

A: Still Paul. And also Saul, which is regularly used to refer to him even after his conversion. Paul was his name among Greek-speakers, stemming from his surname, and he was still Saul among the Jews. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in scripture to support the idea that Jesus changed his name.

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