Personal Productivity

Personal
Productivity
5/22/2014
Nitin Julka
(http://www.linkedin.com/in/nitinjulka)

What personal
productivity challenges
do you face?

What is your personal
productivity
philosophy?

My Answer: Get
everything out of
your head and
into your trusted
systems

Productivity Tactics
● 100% consistent with 100% follow through
● Single task, but multi-project (with minimal
task-switching and MITs)
● Outsource, delegate, unsubscribe, filter,
cancel, or delete (until you are comfortable
with your scope)
● Inbox 0
● Facilitate and attend good meetings

Task and Project Management
● Define 1-3 Most Important Tasks (MITs) each
day, week, and quarter
● Review active projects and next steps each
week
● Review “some day” projects at a recurring
interval of your choice
I try to get my MITs done in the morning before anyone gets into
the office.
I have turned off popups, buzzes, etc.

Inbox 0
Overarching Goals:
● Bring your inbox down to 0 each day or
week
● Only touch an e-mail once
● Schedule time for e-mail (eg. 11:00AM and
4:00PM each day)
● Do not multi-task
The following pages are a step by step plan

Inbox 0
● Step 1: Delete or consolidate all labels.
Mine:
o Account Info
o Newsletters
● Step 2: Set up auto-filters

Inbox 0
● Step 3: Unsubscribe to all newsletters,
mailing lists, etc. that you don’t read
● Step 4: When e-mailing, batch process e-mails
in focused chunks of time. Try not to
skim during the day.
● Step 5: Weekly review. Each week,
schedule a significant amount of time (4
hours?) to clear your inbox (if it’s not at 0).

How to Run a Meeting
● Keep a list/agenda with expected outcomes, links
to detailed docs, and share it in advance
● Ask if anyone has any thoughts “top of mind”
● Go through the list, keeping it action-oriented, and
updating the follow ups, owners, and expected
timelines
● Ask everyone for feedback
● E-mail debrief (unless everything is captured in
shared doc)

Scope, Memory, Schedules, and Creativity
People often struggle with too much information is coming in.
● Cal Newport on “Treat your mind as you would a private garden,” “Hard
Focus,” and “Fixed Schedule Productivity.”
● Piotr Wozniak on “spaced repetition.”
● John Halamka proposes “open access scheduling,” and “only handle it
once.”
● Paul Graham proposes a “Maker’s schedule”
● Tim Ferriss “takes notes like some people take drugs” and doesn’t skim e-mails
● Jerry Senfield suggests “don’t break the chain.”
● Maneesh Sethi on how to hire an assistant on Craigslist

Treat Your Mind As You Would a
Private Garden
“Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time…rather, it’s
about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as
careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.”
Winifred Gallagher
“I’ll start with an admission: I spend time, every day, tending to my mind. For
example, I practice walking meditation each morning, and I use a shutdown
routine, backed by extensive organization systems, to free my thoughts
from work-related rumination during the evenings. These are just two
examples from a large and aggressive collection of strategies I dedicate to
cultivating my focus — a collection I review and polish once a week.” - Cal
Newport

On the Value of Hard Focus
“If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy
too: focus — the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s
critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of
value...Fortunately [sustaining focus for a long period of time] can be acquired
and sharpened through training.” - Haruki Marukami
“As my graduate student experience progressed, I systematically increased
the amount of time I would force myself to work continuously without a
break to seek unrelated stimulation.” - Cal Newport, author of Be So Good
They Can’t Ignore You

Spaced Repetition
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-
05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain
knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize
stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to
radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every
convention of social life.

Maker vs. Manager
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The
manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day
cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you
change what you're doing every hour...
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of
using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They [makers]
generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an
hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a
whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to
remember to go to the meeting...
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause
you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
... If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something
ambitious in the morning.

Open Access Scheduling
http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2009/11/open-access-scheduling-model-for.html
Every day I receive over 1000 emails. A small number of those emails are complex problems that
require multi-stakeholder coordination. Although I can try to solve such problems via email, my rule is
that if more than 3 rounds of emails go back and forth about an issue, it's time to pick up the phone or
have a meeting.
However, scheduling a meeting among senior managers in a large organization can take a month. By that
time, the issue has either become a much larger problem or the opportunity to rapidly move forward has been
lost. So much for nimble decisionmaking.
How can we improve this situation?
I suggest we learn from the Open Access Scheduling model used in primary care.
Patients who are sick today do not want an appointment in three weeks - they need to be seen today.
In the past, clinicians noted they were so busy that their calendars were backlogged weeks to months.
But wait - if you see 15 patients a per day, a backlogged calendar does not imply you are seeing more
patients. Why not work through the backlog and then leave 50% of the calendar open each day for the
patients who are sick each day - solve today's problems today.
The same thing can be applied to our administrative lives. Each day there are challenges created by
customers, employees, and the external world. If we left 50% of our calendars open each day for solving
today's problems today, we would reduce stress, enhance communication, and improve efficiency.

Fixed Schedule Productivity
http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/02/15/fixed-schedule-productivity-how-i-accomplish-a-large-amount-of-work-in-a-small-number-
of-work-hours/
The system work as follows:
1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.
Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:
● Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
● Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
● Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
● Stop procrastinating.

Only Handle it Once
http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2012/01/only-handle-it-once-ohio.html
The end result is that for every document I'm asked to read, every report I'm ask to write, and
every situation I'm asked to management, I only handle the materials once…
It's processed and it's done without delay or a growing inbox. I work hard not to be the rate limiting
step to any process.
Yes, it can be difficult to juggle the Only Handle it Once (OHIO) approach during a day packed with
meetings. Given that unplanned work and the management of email has become 50% of our
jobs, I try to structure my day with no more than 5 hours of planned meetings, leaving the rest of
the time to bring closure to the issues discussed in the meetings and complete the other work that
arrives.

Mental “Overhead” from Skimming E-mail
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/10/25/weapons-of-mass-distractions-
and-the-art-of-letting-bad-things-happen/
As tempting as it is to “just check e-mail for one minute,” I didn’t do it. I know
from experience that any problem found in the inbox will linger on the brain
for hours or days after you shut-down the computer, rendering “free
time” useless with preoccupation. It’s the worst of states, where you
experience neither relaxation nor productivity. Be focused on work or focused
on something else, never in-between.

I Take Notes like Some People Take Drugs
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/05/how-to-take-notes-like-an-alpha-
geek-plus-my-2600-date-challenge/
I trust the weakest pen more than the strongest memory, and note taking
is—in my experience—one of the most important skills for converting
excessive information into precise action and follow-up.

Jerry Seinfeld Suggests “Don’t
break the Chain”
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret
He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here's how it works.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a
prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.
"After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every
day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your
only job next is to not break the chain."
"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

How to Hire an Assistant on Craigslist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7sfaysj9b
s

Resources
● Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free
Productivity by David Allen
● 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
● Power of Less by Leo Babauta
● One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The
Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer
● So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal
Newport

Personal Productivity

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