Chapter 11
Fur ther Productivity Techniques
In This Chapter
Introducing the Pomodoro Technique
Taking things a bit slower
Keeping the chain going and developing new habits
Working with Personal Kanbans
If you’re the lazy sort, then the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology (as described in Chapter 10) probably sounds like a whole lot of work. Are you looking for a simple technique that can assist you on your journey to greater efficiency and success? You could try the Pomodoro Technique or create your own Personal Kanban. This chapter talks you through both of these concepts, plus that classic piece of advice advocated by the hare and the tortoise – slow down to speed up.
As with any productivity system or technique, you need to commit to trying something out for a set period of time to get the benefits from using the system. Don’t try out more than one at a time. Introduce only one into your life, and stick with it before trying something new.
The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is a time-management technique created by Francesco Girillo in the late 1980s. The name Pomodoro is Italian for ‘tomato’, taking its name from the tomato kitchen timer used to track the time intervals. The Pomodoro Technique is a simple and effective way to improve your productivity. All it requires is a kitchen timer and your personal desire to get things done.
The basics of the technique are very simple. Take a look; in fact, why not give it a go right now:
Choose a task you want to get done.
The task can be big or small, a daily task or a bigger, long-term project. It doesn’t matter what you choose as long as it is something that you want to get done.
Set the Pomodoro for 25 minutes.
Commit to sticking with the task for 25 minutes. Don’t take a break or allow yourself to get distracted for 25 minutes.
Work on the task until the timer rings.
Stay with the task for the full 25 minutes. Anything you think of that you need to do can wait until break time. If a thought comes into your head reminding you of something you need to do, capture it on paper and keep going until the timer rings.
Record your Pomodoro.
When the timer rings, take a note of your Pomodoro and what you achieved in the 25 minutes. When I’m writing, I note how many words I wrote in 25 minutes. I average between 400 and 500 words in a 25-minute period.
Take a short break.
The break is vital (isn’t it great when someone says that to you?). Take five minutes to breathe, stretch, go to the bathroom or grab a cup of coffee. Use the break to refresh your mind and get ready for another Pomodoro.
Start again.
Set the timer again, and go for another 25 minutes. After every four Pomodoros, take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes.
Gaining from Pomodoros
The Pomodoro Technique is simple and easy to implement. This section lists some of the reasons you should make the Pomodoro Technique part of your productivity toolkit.
Working with time
The Pomodoro Technique teaches you to work with your time instead of constantly struggling to master it. If you regularly feel you’re fighting time, constantly pushing to fit things in or get things done, try this technique, and you’ll see how you can make time your ally. It helps you to use time to your advantage and make every minute matter.
Time can’t be mastered. You have to create a partnership with it rather than try to control it. The Pomodoro Technique allows you to do just that: partner with your time to achieve your small daily goals.
Working with energy
Just like fighting against time, you get nowhere from fighting your energy. You should be aware of your own energy levels and patterns of energy throughout the day.
When you know your times for low or high energy, you can work it to your advantage. Never schedule high-energy tasks for the after lunch slump. Always tackle heavy cognitive tasks for first thing in the morning.
If you’re having a period of low energy but still need to focus on an important task, consider using shorter Pomodoros of 15 minutes. Take a short break of 3 to 5 minutes and continue your task. Taking more regular breaks ensures that you don’t tire too quickly.
Following are some ways to work with your energy levels:
- Circadian rhythms: Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioural changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, responding to light and darkness in an organism’s environment. These changes naturally affect your energy levels and dictate whether you’ll have a period of low or high energy. For most human adults, the first couple of hours in the morning are the most productive with early afternoon being the lowest point of energy.
- Morning rituals: Creating morning rituals helps you make the most of your circadian rhythms and gain advantage from your body’s energy. Staying in bed late wastes valuable and productive morning time. Rising early works with your natural rhythm and allows you to get your best work done early.
- Contexts: Contexts is a condition set to a list to give you more information about when or where or how you want to do a task. A task may require the presence of a tool or a person to complete, so you assign the context of that tool or person next to that task, such as ‘computer’ or ‘John’. When working with your energy, the context could be ‘high energy’ or ‘low energy’. Refer to Chapter 10 for more detail about contexts.
Exercise: To ensure higher energy more frequently, you know what you have to do: exercise. Richard Branson reckons he gets an extra four hours of productivity each day from working out in the morning.
Exercise is probably your single best productivity tool available. Make exercise a daily habit. Get out of bed an hour earlier in the morning to do a workout. This will increase your energy for the day and probably make you live longer.
Managing distractions
Another great benefit of the Pomodoro Technique is that it improves your focus. When the timer is set, you’re less likely to wander off into Facebook or Twitter for a little distraction. You’ll be more tempted to complete the Pomodoro before running off to find out what the rest of the world is doing. If you’re busy with your work and you have an idea or you suddenly realise you forgot to pay the gardener, jot down the thought or idea and deal with it during your break after the timer has rung.
Improving work-life balance
When you master the Pomodoro Technique, you become infinitely more creative and can complete tasks at a much faster and more efficient rate. Be gone the feeling of frustration and lack of accomplishment you used to get from procrastinating!
Because you’ll be achieving more of your goals and getting more done, you won’t have the need to think about what you’re not getting done when you’re out with family and friends. Your relationships should improve, and your life will ultimately become happier and more balanced.
Reaping the benefits of Pomodoros daily
Using the Pomodoro Technique comes with many benefits. It not only helps you to get more work done day to day, but it also helps you to improve the way you do your work by understanding more about how you work and what you can achieve each day.
Understanding how much effort a task requires
By starting to track how long your tasks take, you can begin to plan how you spend your time better and allocate the right amount of time per task.
Before I used the Pomodoro Technique, I didn’t know how long it took me to write a chapter of a book. I wrote until I finished a chapter, never recording how long that took me or whether it was shorter or longer than the last time. Since tracking my work with Pomodoros, I have become more efficient than I ever thought possible. I know exactly how long I need to complete a section and always know whether I’m on track. Using this technique has massively reduced my stress caused by uncertainty. It has empowered me to understand my work and my abilities.
Managing day-to-day interruptions better
When you’re working on your own time, you allow yourself to take breaks whenever you feel like it or task switch when the mood takes you. Before I started using the Pomodoro Technique, I often found myself doing a completely different task than I set out to do without even being conscious that I had switched tasks.
I’m not going to say this never happens anymore, but I can’t remember the last time it did. It’s easier to stay on track with the timer ticking in the background; the temptation to get to the end is high. And it’s easy to delay distractions to the break because the break is never very far away.
Estimating the effort required for a given task
Understanding how much effort is involved in a task by tracking your time with Pomodoros and then being able to accurately assess how many Pomodoros it will take to complete next week’s tasks or to complete a project is one of the more rewarding benefits of using the Pomodoro Technique.
Setting up a work or study timetable
When you understand how much effort a task takes, setting up a timetable becomes easier. The timetable accurately estimates how much time you need to complete your tasks. Having a schedule or timetable also creates boundaries between work and free time, helping create a better work-life balance.
Assisting you to reach your goals
The Pomodoro Technique helps you to reach your goals and objectives by helping you visualise your success more easily. With greater focus and direction, you get more of the right work done.
Slowing Down to Speed Up
Are you moving too fast, speeding through your work to get everything done? Modern life can make you think you need to move at the speed of light, do your work quickly and move on to the next job. Sometimes you may need to move quickly, but sometimes moving too quickly has a detrimental effect on outcomes. Maybe you need to slow down to speed up.
Getting things done quickly and racing through your work makes you feel like a super productive human. But often this speed can go against you, encouraging you to make errors and rash judgements in order to keep the pace. Wisdom shows that some things don’t benefit from speed.
This section looks at some of those things that benefit from a tortoise-like approach.
Making decisive decisions
Decision making can be a tricky subject. Some will tell you to go with your gut and that your first instinct is always the right one. Others will tell you to take your time, to mull over all the options and definitely to sleep on it. There is truth in all suggestions; all have their merit and their appropriate time for implementation.
Effective decision making involves a number of steps:
- Identify decision to be made.
- Collect all relevant information.
- Analyse the information collected.
- Identify the options.
- Assess the alternatives.
- Decide on course of action.
- Take action.
In reality, if you’re going to work through this decision-making process, the more speed you engage, the less likely you’re going to arrive at an ideal outcome.
- Fast thinking: Fast thinking and decision making use your instinct, but often your gut instinct is overshadowed by your prejudice and presumptions. Scientists have proven that even the most educated and aware individuals act from bias that they’re not conscious of. Therefore, although your gut instinct may be right, it may also be strongly tainted with preconception and partiality.
- Slow thinking: Thinking slow has its benefits because it allows you to look at all scenarios and think clearly. It gives you time to challenge your bias and ensure that you’re doing things for the right reasons. Major decisions should be given the maximum amount of time allocated to them but of course not leaving them to the last minute.
Benefitting from stillness
In a world that appears to move faster by the day, there is definitely a benefit to be earned from slowing down. But there is also benefit to be gained from stillness. Taking time out from the rat race to be still is a technique not only for monks in a monastery.
Everyone can benefit from quiet time to renew and go within. A lot of highly successful people have adopted meditation, people who understand that running at high speed for too long has many negatives associated with it. Stress is one of the biggest enemies; so many physical ailments are a result of too much stress on the body – skin conditions, headaches, backache, depression, anxiety, stomach problems … the list goes on.
You can use meditation and mindfulness to counteract the effects of stress. Meditation undoes the tightness of life, gives you an opportunity to unwind and come down from the adrenaline of the fast life and at the same time strengthens your body and your immune system.
‘Don’t Break the Chain’
‘Don’t break the chain’ is another very simple technique that can have powerful results. You may have heard of Jerry Seinfeld, the American comic who had a very popular sitcom on NBC in which he played a neurotic comedian. But you probably didn’t know that he is also known for suggesting this simple and effective productivity technique, ‘Don’t break the chain’.
Many years ago, a software developer by the name of Brad Issac was doing stand-up comedy sessions in his spare time. One evening, he came across Jerry Seinfeld, who was performing in the same club. Before Jerry went on stage, Brad knew he just had to speak to him and ask him for some advice. What advice would he have for a young comic starting out? Jerry’s advice was not as expected but advice that Brad has found extremely beneficial ever since.
Seinfeld advised him that the way to become a better comic was to write better jokes. The way to write better jokes was to write every day. He also shared his own technique that he advised the young comic to try out: ‘Don’t break the chain’.
To use Seinfeld’s method, all you need is a large wall calendar with a box for each day of the year and a big red marker. Hang the calendar in a prominent place in your office or home. If you’re trying to write more, put a big red X on the day that you write. The idea is to continue each day, marking each day with a red X. His method is called ‘Don’t break the chain’. The more days you see joined with an X, the more difficult it will be to break the chain. Check out Figure 11-1 to see how this works.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 11-1: Don’t break the chain!
Imagine how much you could achieve if you wrote a little every day. Just one hour a day of writing is the equivalent to one working day a week. Imagine if you dedicated one whole working day a week to writing?
You can use this method for many areas of life: exercise, meditation, journaling or any other positive habit you wish to create. It can be powerful for getting children to do their chores. Children love to mark things off, especially if you allow them to do it on your calendar and with a big red marker.
Adopting New Habits
Seinfeld’s ‘Don’t break the chain’ is a habit-forming exercise (see previous section). It encourages you to repeat a daily task every day to achieve your goal.
To be successful, your daily habits must match up with your goal. If you meet a successful writer, he will have a daily habit of writing. A successful swimmer will swim daily, a runner runs daily, a dancer must dance daily – this is the reason they’re successful. The secret to their success is that they have created habits that they repeat every day to make them who they are.
If you repeat the same tasks daily for over a month, the neural pathways in the brain that are fired up to complete the task will strengthen. Each time you repeat the task, they get stronger. They’re reinforced each time until it becomes the norm. Not doing the task becomes the anomaly.
‘Don’t break the chain’ is a system for helping you form a habit. Each red X is the result of you completing your habit for that day, and each time you mark that X, you’re confirming that your neural pathways have been made stronger.
Other factors can also help you create the habit, such as the following points from my Habit Method. Following these tips will give you a much greater possibility of making your new habit work.
Starting with a plan
Be clear first of all about what it is you’re trying to achieve. If you want to form a new habit of writing, be clear about what you want to write: a screen play or simply a blog? If you want to start a regular exercise practise, decide in advance what you’re going to do and when.
Be clear about what success looks like. Set out the plan in advance, and you’re more likely to succeed. A plan will help you make it work. The clearer you are about what you are going to do and when and where you’re going to do it, the better.
Understanding your intentions
Understanding your motivation, the ‘why’ behind your new habit, will be of great value when trying to form it. You should be clear about why this new habit will benefit you and how it ties in with your vision for the future.
Understanding your intentions and connecting with them every day will reinforce your desire and commitment to succeed. The ‘why’ is essential for positive accomplishment.
Starting with small steps
Don’t try too much too soon. If your intention is to write a new novel but you haven’t been writing too much lately, perhaps committing to six hours a day is a little optimistic. You could start with an hour or even a half hour to get the ball rolling and create the momentum required to get a novel written. But slow and steady will win the race, especially when it comes to habit formation.
Using triggers to create a new habit
Have set times for your habits, and use a trigger to remind you to get going. Try first thing in the morning to get up and exercise. Try preparing your clothes the night before. Once you have set the trigger in motion, you’re less likely to avoid it. If your trigger for your new habit can be an existing habit, such as rising early, once you get out of bed you know exercise comes next, or after your shower, you sit down to write. A trigger accelerates your chances of success.
Recording the benefits
Writing down how good you feel after your workout reinforces the benefits of exercise and imprints the advantages on your brain. Why would you ever skip a workout when you know how good it makes you feel?
Remind yourself regularly why you’re doing the new habit and what the benefits are for you and your life. Write it in your journal and look at it often and especially if you lack motivation.
Avoiding failure
If you have tried to do something and failed, take some time to figure out why. If you understand why you failed, this helps you to work out what you need to do to make it work this time. If there are circumstances in your life that stand in your way, what can you do to avoid them? Bad habits, negative friends or too many commitments can all stand in the way of you reaching your goals. Take action and do what you can to make the circumstances work in your favour.
Personal Kanban
Personal Kanban is a simple mechanism for getting work done. Unlike other systems or techniques, it doesn’t follow a rigid process. It’s a template that allows you to visualise your work in process and helps you to stay in control. Personal Kanban is based on the principles and techniques of lean management (a system devised by Toyota in the 1980s, the core aims of which were to maximise customer value and to minimise waste).
Kanban is Japanese for ‘visual sign’ or ‘card’. A Kanban system based on visual cues attempts to match inventory with demand to achieve higher levels of quality and flow. Also referred to as ‘Just in Time’, it aims at delivering only the materials required in the correct amounts at the correct time. A Personal Kanban helps you harness the power of visual information by using sticky notes on a whiteboard to create a visual picture of your work. Seeing how your work flows allows you to communicate status within your team and take action more quickly.
There are only two rules of Personal Kanban:
- Rule 1: Visualise your work. Visualising all your work is useful. People have a tendency to focus on the urgent and the deadlines that are within their sight daily. Often the larger, less urgent but equally important work gets ignored because that which shouts loudest stays within your vision. Visualising work gives it power, capturing all the work that needs doing can be empowering. Understanding the work that needs to be done gives you better awareness, and better awareness leads to better decisions.
- Rule 2: Limit your work in progress (WIP). Most modern-day workers have too much to do and will never have enough time to do it. The purpose of limiting work in progress is to help you to focus. To admit and accept that you can’t do it all at once urges you to make decisions about priorities, asking yourself what should be done now and what comes later. You need to limit your work in progress to ensure that the work that you do is being done well.
Understanding the process
What you need to understand with Personal Kanban is that there is no process; it can change with the context. You may use a whiteboard and markers or a jotter and pen – the principles remain the same: visualise your work and limit the work in progress. You can use the Personal Kanban for visualising all kinds of work and projects that can vary in size and type. You can use it for almost anything that needs to get done.
Creating the basic Kanban
You can use the basic Kanban as a type of to-do list, allowing you to visualise the work that you have at the moment. You can’t possibly do all the things on your to-do list now, so the Kanban allows you to separate your tasks in columns. Typical columns include Backlog, Ready, Doing, On Hold and Done (see Figure 11-2 for an example). You can use whatever titles best suit your environment and way of working.
- Backlog: The backlog column holds all the projects and tasks that haven’t been started yet or planned. It includes stuff you need to do but maybe don’t have the resources to get going yet. Keeping it visible means you won’t forget about it, and you can make a decision at a later date as to its importance and urgency.
- Ready: This consists of all the projects and tasks ready to go but not started. They may be awaiting resources, but they’re ready to go when you are.
- Doing: The work in progress, or WIP as it’s often called, is the Doing column. This consists of all the tasks that are currently occupying your time. It’s recommended that the Doing column has no more than three items at any one time. This ensures that you never suffer from congestion or overload. If you keep this column to three items, it will help you to focus and complete tasks before moving on to the next one.
- On Hold: Work may have to go on hold if you’re waiting on someone else to complete something before you can continue. Having a column for on-hold items allows you to see how long things are being delayed because of other people or factors in the value stream.
- Done: This is the column everyone loves and the sense of satisfaction when the work is done. It’s important to visualise the work done also, to appreciate the accomplishments and be clear about progress and effort.
Illustration by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 11-2: An example of Personal Kanban.
As the work flows, you move it along the lanes. If you can visualise your work, you’re better able to make decisions about your priorities. You can change priorities and make adjustments to represent the reality of a dynamic work environment, but you can rest assured that you’re not forgetting anything because you’ve already captured it and it’s in plain sight.
Moving along the Kanban
Movement happens when something changes or something gets done. You’ll see the following in your Kanban.
- Pull: Work gets pulled along the Kanban when there’s the capacity to do so. You don’t want work pushed along because that can cause flooding and negative results. There needs to be sufficient pull, though, to keep work moving.
- Constraints: The work in progress field should have only three items in it at any one time. This constraint ensures that work will be done correctly and pulled along when the capacity is there. This ensures flow.
- Flow: As work is pulled along, it creates flow. Flow shows you how long it takes you to complete your work and allows you to see the patterns in the work. Flow is a positive state that everyone aspires to be in.
- Bottleneck: When things don’t flow, you can have a bottleneck. Maybe work was on hold too long, or it got stuck in the Doing column, but when you can visualise it clearly, you can do something about it.