Watch Out For The Three 'Micro' Wastes of Productivity - DBR 078

I want to describe calm productivity. And I want to contrast the results of attention management to the results of efforts to do time management. 

 

I’m going to take you over to a recording of a public talk I did at a conference at UA. It’s titled: "The Three Enemies of Productivity".

 

The actual thing that we all want is productivity or efficiency (which are probably synonyms, for the most part). 

 

Productivity and efficiency both mean outputs per unit input. 

 

When we talk about productivity, we typically think of outputs per unit time. On the other hand, when we're talking about organizational productivity we may be talking about maximizing output per dollar cost or other things.  But when we talk about individual productivity, personal productivity and knowledge work, then typically we're going to wind up talking about maximizing results per unit time. And that's fine. 

 

But maximization of that is not a “flow” state. It is not calm productivity. It’s “hurry culture”.

 

The equations come from physical product studies

• Physical product is not variable
• Delivery mechanisms are critical in knowledge work because information must be comprehensible
• Part of the product is this comprehensibility
• Less so in the physical product world
• Implications of the physical-product-based efficiency equations

How this plays in “time” management

• The first thing is to get rid of waste
• The notion of “wasting time” is challenging - many things LOOK like waste.
• So, we try to shrink time. But “speeding up” is bad for us, although “less time” is often good.
• Poor utilization of the asset (downtime) is the first waste.

We've got to understand what the asset is

• What's being challenged for us is not exactly our time.
• It's our attention. And, there's lots of ways that our attention could be wasted.

There is no real way to ‘overclock’

• If I can make you go faster than you're comfortable going, then you're going to start making mistakes.
• Trying to make somebody go faster than they can is the result of a focus on time management. 
• In the extreme, rushing to make time efficient is cutting  corners 
• Rushing does nothing to give us a sense of of calm, and peaceful.

Macro waste of attention

• I don't Talk about macro waste. Use the Covey quadrants.
• We can't be Attention intensive for 8, 10, or 12 hours a day.

“Losing” our attention

• We don't yet know what "leaves" when we lose our focus.
• An example of talking about attention in the wrong way

Micro wastes of attention. 

• Task switching has an enormous cost in attention.
• Two reasons for focus

The three primary 'micro' wastes of attention (the Keynote)

• Interruption
• Multitasking
• Distraction
• ...and how to deal with them

I enjoy giving this keynote. It helps me spread the message about the core of productivity. If you know someone who needs to hear it, share or get them in touch with me for a keynote.

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