Thinking Beyond Productivity
Have you thought about the why, what, and how of your work?
At some point, especially in our always-on, connected and distributed way of work, we’ve realized that if we aren’t smart, we won’t have enough time in the day to get our work done to achieve our goals. So we rely on productivity hacks, efficiency gains, time-boxing, Eisenhower matrix-ing, ice-baths, listening to podcasts at 2x speed, eating the frog, and other types of hacks to help us manage the deluge of emails in our inbox, tasks on our to-do lists, and notifications on our screens.
To be clear, some of these productivity habits, research and frameworks are immensely helpful, especially for those of us (myself included) who struggle to identify and prioritize things that are important in our lives. But being productive and using technology for the sake of being productive or using technology is never good enough. And what does someone actually get for winning the award for being the most productive person?
I struggled with this alot in my career. In my last role before I left corporate, I was constantly looking for ways to be more productive and efficient, and tried lots of the things that worked and didn’t work. In general, I think the idea of being intentional about how you maximize your time, and what you choose to devote your resources and energy to is important to being getting what you want, out of your life or out of work.
But from my experience, where many of us fall off track, is that we jump to the tools, technology and frameworks, before we actually understand the higher level intentions, aspirations and outcomes for ourselves, the organization, and for that matter, society at large.
Within the context of our job and career, I like to think about this as the why, what and how of work. If you haven’t worked on the why, what and how of your work, no productivity tool is going to save you. And if you don’t think about the culture, or organizational system that you are in and what it rewards, it can lead you to behaviors and thus outcomes that you don’t want.
I’m calling this the why, what, and how of work. It’s really just a simple exercise that’s meant to help you be clear and honest with yourself about why you work, what work you actually do, and the ways in which you go about doing it. Work is a huge part of where we spend our weeks, and being clear about this exercise I find helped me figure out how to best spend my time in an effective and productive manner. Here’s how the exercise works
1)Understanding The Why Behind Work
Understanding why you you’ve chosen to do the work that you do (your job) - think of this is lowercase “why” - Some of this is fairly obvious - as contributing members of society, we all need to survive, put food on the table and take care of our basic needs when we take a job. But beyond that, each of us has our own set of reasons or purpose for working the job that we are in. Productivity, progress or success toward a goal that’s not defined or a purpose that’s not yours can lead to outputs or outcomes or “success,” but often leaves you feeling unfulfilled. As Pippa Grange says, it’s a shallow win, not a “deep win.”
There are lots of resources out there for finding your why for your job (Simon Sinek’s model has become popular) but as a starting point, taking time to define your motivation for choosing the job you have and why it matters to you is a critical first step. One of my friends, Khe Hy has a really great example for this called the 5 Why’s. Ask yourself why, and then do it 4 more times until you get a really deep answer.
2)Understanding The What to work - For many of us, there are lots of things that we could work on at any given time. There’s always a lot of potential projects and deliverables. But thinking critically about what you choose to work on and understanding what you’re working on is the next step. For some of this, you don’t have a choice. If you’re a lawyer and a client is paying you to show up and defend them in court, you won’t get very far in your career by not showing up.
However, many of us have some level of agency and autonomy of what we choose to work on any given day, especially in jobs that require creativity, unstructured problem solving, or collaborating with other people. And being intentional about what you choose to work on can have positive effects for yourself, as well as your employer. Research shows that things like autonomy in our job, or crafting our job in a way that appeals to us, helps us derive more engagement and well-being.
Selecting work that makes sense based on your why, as well as other critical factors is an important next step. One very practical step here is taking a look at the past two weeks, and writing down all the work that we did, and categorizing it to figure out how each thing mapped back to key metrics, priorities, our own why, as well as any other critical indicators.
For example, about a year and a half ago, when I did this exercise for myself, I began realizing that about 60% of what I was working on was mapping to goals that my team no longer was tracking toward, and thus probably wasn’t something worth continuing. I showed my manager, and it served as a great conversation around what work I should be focusing on instead, which allowed me to actually take on more work that was aligned to my interests, something I knew would be beneficial for my own engagement and well-being
As Peter Drucker once said, “there is nothing as useless as doing something efficiently that shouldn’t be down at all”
How do you know if what you're working on is the right set of things to be working on? Admittedly, this is where it gets subjective, but some of this is going to be dependent on what your team’s goals are, and some is going to be at your own discretion, and may evolve (like it did for me) But getting into a better understanding of what you are saying yes to will help you determine if these are actually the right things to be working on and having a way to refer back to it.
Understanding The How Behind Your Why and What of Work
Once you’ve determined the why and what, you can now think about the how. This is thinking intentionally and designing your ways of working for how you actually carry out and execute what work you are doing each and every day in a way that is effective but also sustainable. In general, this means understanding your own preferences as well as tendencies, around how you work, how you carry out the tasks you do each day. This is an area I find that requires not only reflection, but also observation about your own habits and rituals for completing work.
For example, As a product marketer, some of the things I did required a lot of strategic thinking and creative thinking, like working on the product roadmap or writing a 6 page whitepaper. However, there were other tasks that required me to be much more execution and tactical focused, like checking the 120 line spreadsheet to make sure we covered all our bases, or reviewing copy word by word on a landing page. I found that having to context switch between assignments that were strategic and then tactical always depleted my energy.
Furthermore, I was in a cross-functional role, which often meant, meeting with or at the very minimum, collaborating with other people (ex: lots of meetings and slack messages) These took time and even though I enjoyed being around others, always sucked energy out of me. Anytime I tried to work on something creative or strategic after a set of cross functional meetings, I always felt exhausted. Furthermore, I had a bad habit of when in meetings of trying to catch up on email. While I’d love to think I’m a great multi-tasker, I had to accept that it’s probably not true.
To combat this, for a few weeks, I ran a test, where I would only schedule meetings on certain days, and only do really deep strategic work on certain days, and found myself much more capable of getting things done. I also stopped trying to respond to email in meetings even if it meant my inbox blew up. Anecdotally, I also found that when I actually slowed down to think, even if it didn’t feel like I was making as fast of progress, I was able to often generate what I thought were more creative ideas, and I genuinely seemed to be much more engaged and excited about those projects. I learned a couple things about how I work from this experiment.
First, I’m not nearly as good at multitasking as I thought, and, if I stop multitasking, I still am capable of getting to things that are critical for me to get to.
Second, I realized prior to this look at how I work, I was often treating all my work tasks equally, when in reality, they weren’t. Some things required a lot of mental energy, other’s did not. Finally, I also learned that I really enjoy creative tasks, but never had the conditions to actually do those in a meaningful and sustainable way. With some modifications, that quarter, I launched 2 major creative and strategic projects that ended up being the thing I got promoted for.
Lastly, when you know how you work, and how you work best, you can actually setup conditions and environments to do that, so you can in fact do your best work, and even go as far as to share that with others on your team, so you all can work better together.
Better Ways of Working
One of the reasons why I’m big on understanding the why, what and how of work, is because I’m a firm believer in that we need a better way of working. Burnout continues to rise at alarming rates, and people are leaving toxic workplaces in droves. To actually create healthy companies and engaged employees who produce impactful work, we need new ways of working. Being productive and efficient in a broken system or difficult workplace culture may help you gain in the short term, but it always comes at a cost.
I’m hopeful that The Great Resignation is a wake up call for companies to help companies help their employees re-think the why, what, and how of their work, but so much of the dialogue has been focused on the “where” that I think all of us need to start this on our own.
I’m not ready to throw out productivity frameworks and tools, I do think they have a place. But I think the starting point needs to be around thinking about the how, why and what of our work before getting into any tool or technology that’s out there. And making sure you’re thinking about this, within the context of your specific workplace is always important. If a company isn’t able to create conditions for you to be successful and do great work, then that’s also an opportunity for you to find a company that will.
How you spend your time is always a reflection of your priorities. Work makes up a huge portion of our life, and the time that we have is something we’ll never get back. If your job and career is a priority to you, I can’t think of a more productive or worthwhile endeavor to spend some of your time figuring out.