It seems counter-intuitive - if we look at someone's schedule and see it crammed full of meetings and appointments, we could be forgiven for automatically assuming that that person is productive. Somehow, we tend to associate 'busy' with 'highly productive' - but in my experience, that is not necessarily the case.
Instead, what I find happens with a busy schedule is that relatively few cognitive cycles are spent on any one thing. Moving from one topic to the next is not conducive to entering a productive state of concentration where we can think deeply about the most complex issues we are trying to resolve. If attention is a resource more valuable than time, then time dedicated to deep and productive thought is even more valuable.
This may seem to be a bit at odds with a previous post, where I made the argument that days filled with meetings and otherwise seemingly 'busy' tasks that do not feel productive are actually worthwhile. Yet this post and that previous post are actually two sides of the same coin. In that post, I mentioned that the time in between meetings can be highly effective when one takes the opportunity to step back and think (deeply) of the big picture, because it maximizes efficacy of days when there are large chunks of uninterrupted time.
What I'm trying to do in this post is to expand on that last point and highlight the fact that the most beneficial and internally rewarding work we do is often cerebral, and that it is OK to dedicate significant blocks of time on our schedule to deep thinking.
Here is an example that helps illustrate the point of how thinking is rewarding: as of the time I am writing this post, most people are working from home, and thus most people have gone through some sort of trial of learning to work from home effectively. Whether it's dedicating a room as an office to insulate ones' self from the kids running around in the living room, or working with a partner to give each other dedicated time and space for work - most people have, by now, gone through some sort of exercise in improving their ability to concentrate on their work. In the process, most people have inevitably had days filled with interruptions, leaving them feeling drained, demoralized, and/or frustrated at the end of the day. Now - compare how you felt at the end of one of those days vs a day when you were able to concentrate and make progress on resolving some sort of (reasonably complex) issue on your plate. The latter most likely left you with a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.
Going back to my point above about how valuable time dedicated to deep and productive thought is - lets start with the assumption that everyone has 8 hours a day to dedicate to work. Lets also assume that you have two types of days on your schedule - a typical one at your desk where you have a handful of meetings and tasks to get to, and a day where you are going to some sort of professional training that: 1) you take seriously, and 2) are looking to expand your professional skillset in some meaningful way. Which of those two days leaves you more mentally worked, where at the end you say 'my brain is full' and need some sort of mental decompression? Chances are, it's the day of professional training. Both the day in the office and the day of training are 8 hours long, but the training required more deep and productive thought, and was more cognitively demanding. Yes, getting ones' attention during an 8 hour workday is challenging enough, but the number of hours we have available for concentration are even more scarce.
The reason I bring this up is that we all work 8-ish hour days, but are not at peak productivity during all of those 8 hours. There are times of the day when we are better able to engage in deep work then others, and thus we can be more productive by scheduling our most cognitively demanding tasks during those times. Lets say someone is most productive between 9-11am (which is actually pretty commonplace). If that person rolls into the office at 9, spends 30 minutes getting coffee and catching up with other coworkers to talk about the game last night, and then spends an hour going through their inbox - they've just gone through 90 minutes of their most productive hours of the day doing things that didn't demand high levels of attention. Then, at 10:30, they try to engage in a complex issue they are working on, and only get an hour in before they start to think about lunch. Then, after lunch, they try to re-engage, but are interrupted by emails and susceptible to post-lunch drowsiness. I think you get the idea - had they been effective at doing work that requires significant cognitive cycles during the hours they are most productive, and shifted more menial tasks to other times of the day, they could have been more productive overall.
This has been something that I've slowly discovered over the course of my career, and is something I am still working on - so I know it's not always the easiest thing to do. The allure of 'productivity' by having many items on a to-do list that can easily be crossed off is very strong. This is especially true in situations where I've had to report on a timesheet the things I've done over a period of time - having 12 things on that list vs 3 just looks more impressive. But over time, when I've allowed myself to be ok with just the 3 items, my ability to execute cleanly on complex job tasks has improved, yielding higher long term productivity.
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