What to work on

Compared to improving efficiency to do a specific task, finding the work that really matters will increase productivity significantly. “It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored.” ¹ Here’s a list of things, in general, I find from myself and others that really help to improve productivity.

Pick the right problem to work on.
Work on interesting problems you like. People tend to be most productive when they’re doing what they like.¹ In my own experience, when I work on interesting projects, I tend to forget to eat or rest, putting in more than 10 hours today and 7 days per week doesn’t seem exhausting at all. Especially, when I get a lot of things done and get things working and moving, I feel exhilarated. It happened early on when working at Houseparty. Think hard about finding the right and interesting problem.

Here’s some tips about what to work on:

Daily Optimization

Prioritization

Prioritized TODO list

You probably experience that at a time you can not even remember what you are trying to do, only when you take some effort to think, and you recall what you’re trying to do. That’s the flaw of the brain. It tends to be effortless, and tends to forget things that are not important. Or things are important, but you feel that that’s not important. Then you lose the opportunity to iterate on it and increase the meaning of working on it so you can work on it later.

That’s why you need a TODO list. You will never forget to do anything.

You will never miss anything if you have so many things to work on. Whenever you have something you want to do, add it to your TODO.
It has to be prioritized, otherwise, those easy one always get priority. :) Trust me, I was there. For important ones, move it to the calendar.
Clean up TODO once per week, dedicate a block of time to handle those trivial tasks, and keep it to less than X(20) items. Try to categorize those items, and only focus on the most important for each category.

Plan (Daily/Weekly)

I normally find a time in the morning before I start working or you can say I start working by making a plan for the day. This ritual helps me to avoid jumping into anything urgent that appears to be important but it’s not.

It happened a lot in the past, once I open email and slack, there’s a lot of “fire”. Once those requests have been resolved, hours are gone. There's always incoming trivial tasks that steal a lot of my time unconsciously. I feel like being reactive instead of proactive, things are kind of out of control as I always react to those requests. After years of fighting, things are now getting better with a daily plan.

Sometimes I set aside a time at night like 30 minutes to manage all the notes, docs and reorganize my TODO list, and plan the second day or the week.

Planning doesn’t have to happen at a specific time, it can be partially done along the way. It means I add tasks to the prioritized TODO list, or calendar when I feel it’s necessary. And when I make a daily plan, I already have a list of tasks I can work on. I just need to either remove some of them or add new tasks. It can be done very fast if you form a habit already.

Gather information then plan. Spend 15 to 30m to collect info from slack, email or other tools and prioritize the work today. After gathering information, there will be new items added to the TODO list and something really important and urgent that need to be prioritized.

Less is more. Only set less than three most important major tasks but at least one task that can help to build your career in the long term. Planning too much means that you’re always in the state of rushing to finish the current task, because there’s a long list of things you need to do. Even though you know you don’t have to finish everything, you cannot control the pressure level of your subconscious with that long list.

Minimize context switching

Staying focused to create a flow state. In general, when you experience losing time when working on something, you are in deep work, which generates a flow state. ² Which increases the level of happiness and satisfaction.

It happens very often at work, when you are working on something that is really important or needs a bulk of your energy and time, while you get a request from someone else. How do you handle it?

Context switching is costly only if you do it right. There’s few tips. First, do not do it at all whenever possible. Second, if it really needs your effort, prioritize it first. Ask yourself those questions: Do I have to handle it right now? Really? How much effort do I need? Are you sure? Based on your own experience, if you start a discussion, the ball just keeps rolling. If it cannot be delayed for sure, can you delegate it to someone else? If you cannot delegate to someone else, can you delay doing it later? If you can, add it to your TODO list. If not, add current work context to your TODOs, work on it and continue to finish your previous work.

If you’re sure, it's a one-off reply, do it, if it’s become a back and forth discussion. Check the steps above.

In short, don’t handle the request the right way. Prioritize it first.

Batch process

Batch handling tasks, so you won’t be distracted from important tasks that need your bulk of time. If you have to handle those trivial tasks, dedicate yourself to handle them all together. There’s a lot of trivial tasks that need 5 to 15 minutes, batch them and use a 30 minutes block to handle them. Keep a clean state by the end of the day, each week

Manage the notes:
- Clean up the notes and move them to proper document
- Find out potential action item from notes
Review calendar, TODO list and time log to make sure not missing anything
Clean up, e.g. Desktop and Download folder

Tools

The Lists

Those lists help to track and visualize my thoughts, and sometimes to help me think through ambiguous problems by just writing them down.

List high level career goal and life goal to achieve
OKRs
- 5-10 years’ OKR
- 1-2 years’ OKR
Monthly/Weekly list
Prioritized TODO list

There’s few books I think it’s super useful for making those lists:

Calendar(Reminder)

It’s like a cue. Human brains tend to be using effort saving strategies. In general, the least important thing will be forgotten or ignored. But those non-urgent tasks that help to build your career are treated as not important compared to those urgent but really not that important.

The solution here is to set a reminder for those important tasks and dedicate some time to work on it when it’s coming.

Time Log

One way to understand where I spend my time is to track it. I use a time log, an objective record that I can reflect on where I actually spend my time. You have to be honest to yourself. This definitely needs some discipline. Whenever you start a task, try to record the start time and the task you’re about to do. Just recording them makes me think about where I spend my time without analyzing it. I can see there’s still some room to improve in my example below, namely focus on the outcome. You can actually analyze them each day or each week to figure out something like if you’re committing to your long term goals.

xx/xx/2021

08:05-09:00 Running, 55m
09:25-09:55 Daily planning, 30m
10:00-10:30 Cross-functional meeting, 30m
10:30-11:00 Roadmap Updates, 30m
11:00-11:20 1:1 Report A, 20m
12:30-12:50 Leads meeting, 20m
13:15-14:00 Playtest, 45m
14:35-14:45 Migrate repo to internal Github, 10m
14:45-16:15 1:1 Report B,1h 30m
16:15-20:10 Migrate repo to internal Github, 3h 55m

Email

Get inbox zero every day.

Opt out useful email. Try to find the pattern of those emails that create some noise. Unsubscribe some of those Ads or so emails.
Filter and auto apply some labels for email with the same pattern.
Use “Multiple Inbox”

Multiple Inbox

Enable Keyboard shortcuts. Two most useful shortcuts for me:

E: to archive from inbox, but you can still find that email in the All folder.
V: to open the label list dropdown to apply label accordingly e.g. “to-do”, “waiting” or “read-through” or other.

Other tips

Stay focused to maximize efficiency.
- Reduce interruptions
  - Mute notifications,
    - e.g. slack channel non-DM message
    - Phone. Set phone in silent mode(It’s always in this mode for me), face down
When you create an event on the calendar, make sure to add a goal, description including related resources and doc link for fast access.
You don’t want to add every task to your calendar, it will add too much management overhead, because each day there’s always some other work you need to prioritize and you have to adjust the current calendar every single day. So the rule is that you only want to set the most important task in the long term and the task that you have to do at a specific time.
Be aware urgent tasks appear to be most important, but they’re not. They do get your attention.

Summary

Those are the processes I’m adopting in my daily work. There’s two main ways to improve productivity. One way is to improve efficiency to do a specific routine task, but the most important way is to know what really matters and focus on those tasks that can bring the largest impact in the long run against life and work goals.

In short,

Find the most impactful tasks to work on, stay focus
Improve the efficiency to do certain routine task
Repeat step 1 and step 2

Productivity