Don’t be held back from being your best.

When people think of trying to maximise their productivity, the conversation generally tends towards things you can do differently in the workplace.  And admittedly, most of my recent articles have focused on the work aspect.

There is actually a lot more to your productivity than focusing just on what happens during the day at work.

Essentially your output will be maximised when your energy is maximised.  Don’t even think about trying to pretend to be at your productive best if you are lacking in energy.

Now we are not talking about anything “new age” here.  We are just talking about the strength and vitality required for sustained mental or physical activity.

In order to understand how to maximise your energy you need to look outside the workplace, not just inside the workplace.  At Inside 80 Performance we talk about three broad categories – Body, Brain and Belief.  

If you were to think of every possible aspect as to what gives you energy or what takes it away from you, most things would fit into at least one of the below categories.

Let’s look at each of these:

Body

Your energy from your body depends on the physical aspects of how you look after your body.  For example are you exercising? Do you eat enough nutritious foods to give you energy? Are you getting enough sleep?

Brain

This is the part which is incorporates most of the things which happen in the workplace.  For example, are you working closely to your natural pace?  Are you factoring in recoveries and lighter tasks as part of your broader productivity plan?  Are you managing your diary to help you to get the most amount done in the least amount of time or do you spend more time “looking busy”?  How do you manage email and meetings?

Belief

This features in all aspects of your life.  For example do you have any limiting beliefs that are preventing you from reaching your full potential in work and in life?  Do you have a high ratio of positive thoughts to negative thoughts or is your lack of positivity holding you back?  Do other people’s actions affect your feelings and ultimately your productivity?

Everything is related

The interesting thing about all of these is that they are all inextricably linked.  Think of all of these aspects like a windshield.  If a crack starts to appear in one part, you need to address it or it will start to spread to other areas of your life.

For example – some people may find cracks occurring in the “body” component – if you aren’t eating good fuel to sustain your day at work your energy will decrease.  And if your energy decreases – ironically you will crave more bad food that is high in sugar.

To take that further, if you are not eating right then chances are you won’t be able to do much physical exercise.  Lack of exercise is also a big factor in depleting your energy.  Once you are lacking in energy from not looking after your body properly it may extend to other areas – for example your belief.

Generally speaking your positivity goes up when you feel good physically so if you don’t feel like you’re in peak performance mode physically, chances are you will start to feel a little more negative.  Once you feel negative this can permeate through to your behaviour at work that can affect you and those around you.  It can reduce not just your productivity but the productivity of those around you.

Others may find their cracks appear in the brain component – lack of time management for their pace leaves them feeling exhausted, this then flows through to their mind-set and of course if they have bad time management then chances are they are not exercising as let’s face it, no one has time for exercise – you need to create it.

It is important to look at all components – Body, Brain and Belief

Every person is different.   People can be energised and conversely stressed by completely different things.  In other words the windshield cracks will be different for everyone.  Some people need to focus on their fitness and nutrition to increase their productivity and decrease their effort in the work place.

Others need to focus on their positivity while others need to focus on how they manage their work in relation to their natural pace, just to name a few more examples.

Once you have determined the source of what is actually draining your energy you can then focus on these areas to give you the biggest results.

There is no “one-size fits all” approach

It’s quite easy for anyone to come up with at least 100 ways to improve energy.  The better solution is to identify just two to three things that you can do to improve your energy.

Making changes takes energy and given that we want to increase energy we don’t want to spend any unnecessary effort trying to make changes that don’t yield big results for you personally.  Therefore it’s important to make sure that the few changes you identify will give you the biggest results for the least amount of effort.

After all, that is what productivity is all about.

The post What’s really holding you back from maximum productivity? appeared first on AdviserVoice.

How to plan your week to maximise your productivity.

Following on from my last blog around, we are going to further explore some ways to structure your days during the week to maximise your output while decreasing your effort.

Again, let’s think about the way the athletes train over the week.  They typically mix up their training according to heavy, medium and light training principles.  Each of these categories leaves the athlete with varying levels of fatigue.

For example heavy training is designed to take the athlete to the next level, to improve their results.  If they were to train heavy again too soon this training effect will be counter-productive.  It will feel really hard and also increase their risk of injury.  Instead they are better to mix in some different training in terms of exercise or intensity.

Likewise, during the day you probably have some tasks that you find take a lot of your mental energy.  You might think of that as a heavy task.  Likewise there are probably aspects of your job you find really easy in terms of mental energy.  For example, as fast paced person would probably find a twenty minute meeting with another fast-paced person really light.  However a slower paced person may find this a really heavy mental energy drain.

The first step to improving your productivity is to be really clear about what are YOUR heavy, medium and light tasks.

You might find it interesting to complete the following table:

It’s also interesting to do this exercise as a team.  You will find it interesting that often people who have the same job description put the same task in completely different categories.  It often makes sense for people to realign tasks so that people are doing more of the tasks they find light and energising and less of the tasks they find heavy and draining where appropriate.

Once you have a clear understanding that tasks fall into each category, you can now think about planning your week.

When planning your week, start by thinking about how you like to operate in terms of when you are better at attacking heavy tasks and when you feel you may need some lighter tasks to help you to manage your recovery.

For example, you might prefer to ease into the start of the week.  Perhaps you need to come to terms with the week before you can get into your meaty tasks.  In this case you probably prefer to plan for a light Monday morning.

Or you might be someone who is a morning person and attacks Monday mornings with gusto.  In which case you might plan your Monday morning to start on your heavy tasks.

Try completing the table below by mixing up your heavy, medium and lights tasks according to how you would plan your perfect week:

You may find that all of your days follow the same format.   Or you may find that some days are slightly different to others.  Often this may be the result of things that are going on outside of work.

Some people may like Fridays to be light and happy to do more heavy lifting mid week.

Everyone is different and there is no right or wrong approach.  Again it can be interesting for all of your team members to share their results.

If you currently have a team meeting at 9am Monday mornings and you want people to be prepared, on the ball and energised you may want to make sure that the people in the meeting actually have a heavy or medium in their Monday morning 1 box.  If all of the attendees prefer a light Monday morning it’s unlikely you will find the meetings as productive as you would like them to be.

But I can’t always control when I have to do certain tasks…….

Now let’s face it, assuming you have clients and have to work with other human beings, it is highly likely that your perfect week will never actually happen.

The important thing is to think of this a map that you manage towards.  If you know that you need to do heavy tasks in the time that you would prefer to have as a light time, you will need to manage your recovery in some other part of your schedule.

Of course there will be weeks where every part of your day appears heavy.  It’s certainly possible to do this on a temporary basis but it’s important to know that if you don’t schedule some recovery time at some stage you will be well on your way to productivity decline and possible burnout effects.

Knowing your perfect week (even if it doesn’t happen according to plan) will at least give you an awareness of your recovery requirements for peak performance on a sustained basis.

The post How to plan your days and weeks for maximum output with less effort appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Relaxing for success.

In previous blogs  (How is your team’s productivity? and Is your output as high as it could be?) we discussed how important it is to decrease effort levels in order to maximise productivity and we discussed pace as a tool for individualising your approach.

Let’s take that a step further and talk about planning adequate recovery time as an important part of your productivity plan.

Let’s think about how many people work over the course of a year.  Many people work in a way that maximises their effort most of the year – regardless of what is going on at work.  They may find that they get sick or burn out or need a holiday (many people get sick on the first few days of their holidays) so their effort drops off quickly and then they pick it up again and go hard until the next crash.  Similar to the below diagram:

Unfortunately while they maintain a high effort their productivity is actually in decline over that time which means they spend a large amount of their year with their effort higher than their productivity as follows:

This is a fast path to burnout and doesn’t inspire people to want to work with you for extended periods.   It’s usually a very quick way to result in staff turnover.  And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the costs to the business of hiring and training new staff.

Let’s now think athletic principles of maximising productivity.  In this case athletes know that they just can’t train really heavy every single day of the year.  (Note that their training schedules may look heavy to us mere mortals but in actual fact they are mixing up their training to incorporate lighter training and recovery periods.)

Their effort vs productivity schedule looks more like this:

As you can see – the athletes actually reduce their effort and make sure they recover as they know it is an important part of their overall performance.  They know that if you’ve had a really hard running session one day and you try to do the same thing the next day, it will feel as though they are training way harder and will have a higher risk of injuring themselves.

All athletes know that one day of rest is far more productive than being unable to train for the next 7 months with a torn Achilles tendon.

Again, it’s the same principle in the workplace.  If you are effectively “running on dead legs” at work, your productivity will decline.  And that could be the least of your worries.  You will also have a far higher risk of experiencing stress and all those effects that come with it.  For example – the same hormone, cortisol, which fights stress also fights cancer causing cells – and it doesn’t multi-task!  Where would you prefer your cortisol to be working?

It is important to plan your time – days, weeks, months and years to allow yourself to have recovery time to go hand in hand with your periods of hard work.

So what do we mean by recovery?

Recovery can take a number of different forms.  It may involve switching off from work completely.  For example it could be holidays or even just long weekends away throughout the year.

In the shorter term it might be finding a relaxing pastime that really helps you to mentally escape from work.  For example this could be going to the movies or out with friends for dinner.

Of course it’s not suggested that you should whip out and see a movie in the middle of your workday.  However there are ways to break up your day to give you more perceived recovery time such as switch to some tasks which absolutely need to be done but don’t take as much of your mental energy to do them.  Stay tuned for my next blog where we will explore this concept in further detail.

Give yourself permission to be productive

Of course the hardest part for most people about incorporating recovery is giving oneself permission to do so.  Many of us were brought up with the belief that you have to work harder to be more successful.  Don’t get me wrong – hard work certainly does go a long way to success – it’s certainly not about shying away from hard work, it’s just important to factor in some smart, considered and well-planned recoveries as part of the process in order to take your productivity to the next level.

The post Have you planned for productivity (output) or hard work (input)? appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Understanding team member’s pace can improve business outcomes.

Do you know the natural pace of everyone in your team?  If you don’t, chances are your team is capable of giving you more output than it currently is.

In my last article I discussed the concept of natural pace and how you can use it to increase your productivity while actually decreasing your effort levels.  In other words – more output, less input.

Last time I discussed how it’s important for people to work more closely to their own natural pace. Let’s now think about this from a team perspective.  No doubt you will have a mix of people with different paces in your team.

What happens when people of different paces need to work together?

People of different paces will prefer to work in many different ways.  For example faster paced people will generally prefer shorter meeting length, shorter emails and will probably access their emails more often than the slower paced colleagues.

These and many other differences may result in friction in the workplace if people don’t understand each other’s pace. For example the faster paced people may think the slower paced people are wasting their time in meetings while the slower paced people think the faster paced people are trying to rush them and therefore decrease the quality of their work.

Once the pace of each of your team members is known and more importantly understood it’s easier for people to start to use these differences for good rather than evil.

Let’s take an example

Dave is an adviser who is fast very fast paced (75 according to the pace indicator).  He works with Michael who runs their compliance team (27 according to the pace indicator).  Dave may send an email request to Michael about a very important client that needs an urgent response.  Of course Dave expects a response in around 10 minutes.  Michael prefers to access his email twice a day to maximise his productivity.

Dave then tries calling Michael who is deeply engrossed in a task and so lets the phone go to voicemail.  By this stage Dave is of course fuming and walks to the other end of the office to see Michael and in a less than co-operative tone asks for a response to his email.  Michael assumes it’s another request that isn’t as urgent as Michael claims it to be (they rarely are) and so gets defensive about being spoken to in a certain way and is less likely to be helpful.

Dave comes across as rude and Michael comes across as unhelpful.

What if they both understood each other’s pace?

If both Dave and Michael both understood each other’s pace the situation could be very different.  If they did they would have understood that they just prefer to work differently and would have worked out a way to work together.

For example, Dave will know that Michael only accesses email twice a day and prefers to work with little interruptions.  Michael will realise that Dave is not being rude, he just likes juggling a number of tasks and prefers quick responses so that he can move quickly between tasks.

They may have negotiated that Dave will email for less important things and try not to bother Dave unnecessarily for things that can wait.  Michael will also be prepared that some things really do need a quick response and that Dave will call when truly urgent and will make an effort to action those rare items as quickly as possible even if engrossed in a task he would prefer to complete first.

Pace may also change the way you assign tasks to people

Another example is if you are allocating say three tasks to two different people doing the same job description but with different paces, you may choose to give all the tasks to the fast paced person at the same time.  They will then jump around between the tasks for variety.  This will energise them and raise their productivity.

Conversely you may give the other person the same tasks one at a time or at least let them know that they can choose to work on the tasks one at a time so that they don’t feel too stressed.

Why not consider pace as part of the hiring process?

You may even want to consider a person’s pace before you hire them.  If you have a role that requires the successful candidate to focus on one task for longer periods, you might want to know their pace.  If their result was something like 72 that’s probably a red flag that they will find the job taxing.  It doesn’t mean they can’t do it or won’t do it well.  It justs means that they would feel like they have to expend a lot of mental energy in the role.  At the end of the day their chance of burnout is higher and that may not really serve you or your business.

So the more people know about not just their own pace, but also the pace of those around them, the more productivity (and harmonious) your team is likely to be.

If you or your team doesn’t know each other’s natural pace, please go to www.inside80performance to “calculate your pace” to start your journey to your productive best.

And of course if you would like more tips on maximising your team’s productivity while keeping them energised and burnout free please contact Inside 80 Performance.

The post How is your team’s productivity? appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Find the right pace to optimise your output.

It seems that so many people claim to be focused on their output, but in reality more people seem to be interested in the input.  Many people feel the need to “look busy” (and of course spend countless minutes telling you how busy they are) or be seen to be “putting in the hours” and feel as though they are working really hard in order to justify their existence in the workplace and to get ahead.

You have probably found that some of the “busiest” people you know are actually the least productive.

If you are a manager of employees who feel this way then chances are your employees are not at their productive best and you might want to think about reframing your culture.

In actual fact, in order to improve your productivity it’s really important to decrease your effort levels.  That is, working has to feel easier.  I know this may sound counter-intuitive to many but hear me out…………Feeling like you are running the proverbial marathon every day is only going to lead to burnout in some way, shape or form – low productivity is unfortunately your best result from working this way.

Olympic swimmers don’t just get in the pool and start flapping – every aspect of their stroke aims to minimize any unnecessary use of energy.  They don’t get a gold medal for wasting energy kicking really hard, they get a gold medal for getting to the end of the pool first.

It’s the same principle in the workplace.  There is no point turning up to work and just flapping.  The harder you feel you are working – chances are the more your productivity is on the decline.  Bad news I know but the good news is there is an easier way to improve your output without feeling like you’re killing yourself.

When trying to decrease your effort levels at work there is no one-size-fits all approach.  One of the easiest ways to tailor your approach is to be familiar with you natural pace.

Knowing your natural pace and trying to work more closely towards it will decrease the amount of effort you are putting into your day.  The good news is that once you work with your natural pace instead of against it, your productivity will increase and your effort levels will decrease.

So what is natural pace?

Just as some athletes are built for sprinting and others are built for endurance distances, we all like to operate at different paces.  Some people naturally like to operate at a faster pace.  These are the people who if even if they are under no time pressure on a Sunday afternoon, are honking at the person in front of them as soon as the traffic lights go green.

Conversely the slower paced people are ones who at the same set of traffic lights think “relax – an extra three seconds really won’t make a huge difference to your life.”

Of course on a scale of 1 – 100 people can fall anywhere in terms of natural pace.

To calculate your natural pace, go to www.inside80performance.com and click on “calculate your pace”.

Which pace is best?

It is important to realize that your natural pace is just perfect – whatever it is.   There is absolutely no right or wrong pace.  The trick becomes how do you use your pace to decrease your effort levels?

Working closer to your natural pace – faster paced people.

Let’s talk about the fast paced people first.  These are generally people who scored above 60 on the introductory pace indicator.

Chances are while you were growing up your parents and school teachers probably kept telling you to “focus”, concentrate” or “avoid all other possible distractions”.  Sound familiar?

Contrary to popular belief, if you fall into this category you actually will be more productive and less likely to suffer burnout if you regularly switch between tasks.  You are better to have a few tasks you are working on at a time and use each of these tasks as a distraction.

Now let’s not confuse this with multi-tasking.  You are still better to focus on one task at a time.  You will just generally find it easier to focus on one task for say 30 minutes and then switch focus to another task for another 30 minutes before jumping back to the first task again.

You will probably find that you prefer to access emails regularly rather than switching them off and only accessing them say twice a day.

And if you fall into this category you certainly have the capacity to be very detailed – don’t let your slower paced friends tell you otherwise.  The difference is you prefer to do this for shorter periods rather than longer periods.

Working closer to your natural pace – slower paced people.

If you scored below 40 on the indicator you are at the other extreme where you prefer to focus on one task for longer periods of time.  You generally prefer to see a task through to the end before starting the next task.

You were probably very popular with parents and school teachers as the ability to concentrate for longer periods was generally looked upon quite favorably.

In your case, it is certainly better to try to decrease your distractions outside the task you are working on as constant interruptions may leave you feeling a bit frazzled and will certainly increase your effort levels while having the opposite result on your productivity.

For example – contrary to your faster paced friends, you may find it better to switch off your email and only access it twice a day at a time that is convenient – say upon completion of a task.

No one solution for everyone

Being aware of your natural pace and working more closely to it is a key way to increasing your productivity and most importantly reducing your effort levels.  It is a different way of thinking to the old belief that everyone should decrease all possible distractions in order to maximize productivity.

If you are interested in more tips around how to work more closely to your natural pace and increasing your output while decreasing your input please go to www.inside80performance.com

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