Ideas about productivity are also often determined by physical work: an extra hour of work is an extra hour of yield. If your job is to come up with good ideas or come up with a strategy for a new product, the quality of your attention is so important that extra hours actually add up to less. Who hasn’t had the best ideas in the morning after a good night’s sleep, in the shower or during a walk? And certainly not during an extra hour of work after a long day of meetings.
Tony Crabbe, author of Nooit meer te druk (affiliate), contrasted two types of work during the GTD Summit: work with a clear outcome and work that requires creativity. The first type of work can be done more efficiently by thinking carefully. The second type cannot. If you have to design 100 pages of a document and everything is determined for you, then it is a matter of putting in hours and working through. If you are asked what is missing in those 100 pages or whether the hong kong telegram data structure can be done differently, then distance and moments of reflection are essential. The Taylor-like studies of how work can be done faster with a stopwatch in hand only make sense if the process and the outcome are clear.
What types of work do you have on your list?
Most of us don’t just have predefined work or strategic or creative thinking. It’s often a mix. Organize your tasks by the kind of energy they require. Most task managers have labels or tags that you can use for this. You can imagine that you can organize tasks by:
Routine : relatively short, can be done with little energy
Focus : long and requires a lot of focus
Creative : can be short and requires a lot of creative, thinking energy
Control : long and requires critical energy
If you know what kind of chronotype you are, when during the day you naturally have what energy available, then you can avoid doing routine tasks when you are very sharp and trying to crack a hard nut when you are done. It can also mean that you would rather not schedule meetings at times that are very good for you in terms of energy. Then you can better do other tasks.
In the practical and highly readable When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink, you can see how to test which chronotype you are and what your day ideally looks like.