Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours

by Robert C. Pozen

Success depends in large part on a proper mind-set: focusing on the results you plan to achieve, rather than the number of hours you work.

Let’s begin with what I mean by “personal productivity.” I mean the quantity and quality of your results in achieving your own objectives.

No matter what your career aspirations are, you should begin by thinking carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you expect to get out of it.

On one or two sheets of paper, write down everything you are required to do in your professional life. This includes all those routine tasks in your job description that you have to do on a daily or weekly basis, such as filing reports or reviewing documents. It also includes any longer-term projects assigned to you.

These may be long-term goals, such as advancing your career. Or they could be short-term goals, such as developing a new skill or meeting more people in your industry.

Career Aims (5+ years), Objectives (3–24 months), and Targets (1 week or less).

Next, make sure that each of your Objectives has one or two associated Targets.

Start by thinking about what you want to do, what you’re good at, and what the world needs from you.

Unfortunately, you cannot be fully productive by looking only at the supply side—what you want to do and what you are best at doing. You must also consider the demand side—what the world, your organization, or your boss needs most from you.

own. So list your Enabling Targets and rank them—with 10 the highest and 1 the lowest—based on the importance of the Objective in question and how effectively the Enabling Target furthers that particular Objective.

Some professionals have not carefully thought about their Objectives and Targets. As a result, they often neglect an important goal—until it becomes a crisis, demanding their full time and effort.

To help align your time allocation with your priorities, put together a to-do list that drives them home. Start by integrating all your Objectives and Targets into one tiered list with the highest-priority items

As I continued my career, I reluctantly came to see that many of those speaking engagements furthered neither my Objectives nor my Targets.

This discrepancy between top priorities and time allocation can occur at all levels of an organization.

This story illustrates my second big idea: focusing on the final product. This idea is critical to efficiently completing your high-priority projects, which often are broad in scope and complex in content.

work. The key word here is “tentative”—you should stop midway to reassess the final product in light of what you’ve learned so far. However, to apply this idea to your high-priority projects, you’ll probably have to overcome two constraints: your own tendency to procrastinate and your organization’s emphasis on hours worked.

I have seen many professionals waste days or weeks at the beginning of a knowledge-based project by gathering reams of information without a clear sense of the key questions to be answered.

Instead, think hard at the start of a project about where it’s going: what are the critical issues, and how are they likely to be resolved?

This approach is similar to the scientific method: you generate a set of hypotheses; then you test them out, not the other way around.

Though you should start by generating tentative conclusions, you should give them another look midway through the project—and make revisions in light of what you’ve learned so far.

The midflight check is particularly useful when a project involves professionals from different parts of an organization.

Instead, they procrastinate by distracting themselves with more pleasant tasks.

No matter what type of procrastinator you are, you can help yourself by creating evenly spaced, minideadlines—interim dates for completing specific stages of the project. In other words, if you can’t work without a deadline, create more deadlines.

Don’t make the same mistake: if you want to be most productive, set your deadlines so they create an evenly paced schedule for work, with similar amounts of times allotted to comparable tasks.

This means tackling your low-priority items immediately when you receive them, if possible. If you let a backlog develop, you will waste a lot of time and increase your anxiety level.

When used this way, multitasking is a terrific method of accomplishing low-priority tasks.

So when you’re deciding whether to multitask, think about the relative importance of each task and how much brainpower it requires. Don’t try to do two important tasks simultaneously. Feel free to multitask if both tasks are low priority.

Some rules of thumb: you should generally not multitask when dealing with customers or potential customers.

don’t multitask in any circumstance in which you want to convey your total commitment:

Professionals who demand perfection out of every task—without regard to significance—will soon find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of their low-priority tasks. As a result, they won’t have time to accomplish their most important goals.

Overcoming perfectionism is critical to becoming more efficient at work.

Use your daily calendar proactively to manage your time and set your Targets. • Follow standard routines to minimize the mundane aspects of life so you can concentrate on what’s most important to you. • Get eight hours of sleep each night and exercise regularly so you stay alert and sharp.

First, your calendar must record all of your daily commitments in one place in a way that you can easily see the purpose of each appointment and the importance of each assigned task. Second, the calendar must be mobile: you must be able to carry—or have electronic access to—your calendar during the whole day, so you can easily add new items or revise your existing schedule.

I find that periods of free time should each be at least thirty minutes long to allow adequate time for thinking. You should try to schedule these gaps at least twice a day.

As the great Danish composer Carl Nielsen said about his music, “The rests … are just as important as the notes. Often, they are far more expressive and appealing to the imagination.”

Try to keep as much of your daily routine as simple and automatic as possible. That allows you to spend more time on your work, family, and friends, and it helps you avoid fatigue.

nap. Here’s my secret formula: close your office door or find a quiet place, shut off your cell phone, take off your shoes, put your feet up on a desk or a chair, and cover your eyes with a blindfold. This formula is designed to create a feeling of being suspended in a sheltered cocoon—which helps me doze off.

There are two main reasons to have a meeting. First, you should call a meeting if you need to establish a personal relationship with someone outside your organization, such as an elected official or new customer.

Second, meetings are often necessary if you want to engage people in a debate; face-to-face dialogue cannot be replaced by email or phone calls.

To have an effective brainstorming session, this research concluded that you must be willing to criticize the suggestions put forward.3 This helps shape the discussion and turn raw ideas into workable proposals.

By contrast, many meetings are called simply to share information, rather than debate or discuss it. Such meetings tend to be unnecessary; usually you can accomplish this just as well via email in a fraction of the time.

Thus, active reading increases your speed not by maximizing the

number of words you read per minute but by covering fewer words per minute.

The lesson here is that managers can get the most out of their employees by helping them achieve meaningful progress every day.

Effective delegation expands the output of the whole organization. Without delegation, one executive can lead only one large group of employees on one large project. With delegation, one executive can guide multiple small teams in multiple large projects. In other words, effective delegation leverages the skills of the top managers across the organization.

Trust in your employees begins with hiring the right people—talented professionals with high energy and sound ethics.

Carefully design each metric, especially the highly weighted ones, to capture the project’s goals. If you establish bad metrics, your project will be doomed from the start.

To avoid micromanaging, you don’t have to give up all control of a project; you should not assign a project and then withdraw completely. Instead, actively monitor the project in a supportive manner.

One of my favorite sayings is “Let’s make a new mistake!”

Grey Advertising in New York hands out a “Heroic Failure” award each quarter for ideas that are edgier, riskier, or totally unproven.