6 ways I hope to be more productive this year
By now you’re probably bored stiff of reading 2017 productivity posts on Medium. There’s only so much you can read before it’s actually counter to productivity. So I’m going to caveat this post by saying that it’s written more for myself than anyone else. But if you happen to have any particularly good productivity resolutions yourself then I’d love to hear them.
1) Delegating more
Most people think they delegate way more than they actually do. And oftentimes when they do delegate, they delegate poorly, resulting in more work. Sometimes the cause is of lack of trust in the person you could be delegating too. Other times it’s the belief that you can do a better job or you want to take the credit. In many cases, you’ve hoarded so much work that you simply don’t have time to delegate effectively, leading to a vicious cycle.
Delegating too little was a problem I had to work hard on to fix in a previous job, when I was building out a much bigger team than I’d previously managed before. I made progress then, but as I’ve moved back to working in smaller teams I can feel old habits creeping in.
I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about all the tasks I should be delegating, including both big projects and small day-to-day stuff. There’s definitely several things I’ve been clinging on to that I’ve previously done, when they’re now better placed to either be owned or executed by someone else. And an even longer list of things I should simply stop doing altogether.
Note to self: I need to write a post (or curate some links) on this topic that I can pass on to founders, because it’s a trait I see way too often as they struggle to scale out their organisation.
2) Getting closer to Clara
In 2016, Clara entered my life. I didn’t trust her at first, but after delegating 60% of my meeting scheduling to her, she’s now freed up more time for me than any other productivity hack I’ve known.
So who is Clara? Clara is the virtual assistant, initially powered by humans, but increasingly augmented with AI. By adding Clara in to an email thread she’ll take care of booking any required meetings, and a few other things besides. As one of the biggest parts of my job requires meeting people, it saves so much time. But better still is the cognitive load it takes away. So the time I save can then be used even more productively.
You have to pay for the Clara service, but you can try it out free for two weeks and you’ll get $100 off if you use this code.
Note to self: the irony is that with Clara it becomes so much easier to schedule meetings that there’s a risk of setting up meetings that you might not have taken before, because the friction of setting it up would inevitably lead to it not happening. So in 2017, I’ll be letting Clara take care of arranging even more meetings, but simultaneously making sure it’s a meeting that’s actually worth doing in the first place.
3) Ignoring more inbound email
This one may be controversial. Most people, myself included, set themselves an expectation that they should respond to all email. If we don’t get back to everything, it feels like a failure. Which is ridiculous. It’s just not sustainable.
The reality is that even with the growth of communication channels like Telegram and Slack, my inbox shows no sign of getting easier to manage (this may be different for people whose work is mostly internal facing). So, currently I’m ignoring a lot of email by default, because I physically don’t have enough time to digest and respond to everything.
On top of that, many times a response just leads to more unnecessary email. It’s surprising how many times the initial email never needed to be sent in the first place. Have you ever been on holiday for a week and not checked email at all? Guess what… no-one died. No problems came up that either didn’t go away or weren’t sufficiently fixed in some way. Colleagues who’d asked for help figured it out themselves. And people who really needed you called you on your phone or followed up in a timely manner when you got back.
So in 2017, I’m going to be a lot more pro-active in choosing to ignore email. Instead of letting something linger in my inbox for more than a day, hoping that I’ll create time to get back to it in the future, I’ll take action right away, even if that means fighting the guilt of deliberately not responding.
4) Building process around intro requests
Speaking of emails, I get a lot of intro requests in any given week. A founder who wants an investor introduction. Or a small offer of help to someone I’ve met at an event or mentor session. I’m always happy to help, but there’s so much time unnecessary time wasted in preparing the email, copying and pasting information, tailoring the message to the intro recipient.
In a perfect world, I’d have a ‘Clara’ for intros. But arguably delegating isn’t an option here. There’s still a lot of value that goes into the personal touches in those emails. Someone should build a product that makes my preferred double opt-in intro process way easier to manage.
But in lieu of that there’s been some great posts written to educate people on ways to reduce the friction on this. So I plan to create a resource that I’m going to make sure I share to pre-empt this problem.
Update: I’ve now posted this resource here
5) Carving out specific times for external meetings
There are so many opportunities to take meetings that aren’t really needed. This has been true for all my previous jobs, but the problem seems particularly acute as an investor. People who want ‘coffees’, another pitch meeting, catching up with various people that might be helpful to our companies etc. Nice problem to have, but one that ultimately leads to low productivity and focus.
Venture is a long game and it’s difficult to immediately measure the ROI of those meetings. The person you take a coffee with today, may be the marketing guy one of your companies hires as CMO at their next round. Or the random intro from a trusted contact who bumped into this person at some dinner, may just be the person who invests in your next fund, several years from now. Meanwhile, FOMO convinces you that there might just be a chance that extra pitch meeting will be worthwhile.
It’s one of the parts I love most about the job but it can also be overwhelming and a ‘killer’ for productivity. I want to spend more time on the maker’s schedule (go read Paul Graham’s classic post on this)
One knee-jerk solution would be to dramatically reduce the number of external meetings I’m taking. But ultimately, meeting new founders is a key part of the job and I don’t want to completely stop investing in relationships that have the potential to build a lot of value over time. So another solution is to be more disciplined and efficient in how and when I take those meetings. Here’s my current thinking…
i) Set a time once a week (eg. Thursday afternoon), call it Office Hours and then batch up all my pitch meetings and incoming meeting requests. I can let Clara know this and/or potentially use a system like YouCanBook.me
ii) Dedicate just one morning to ‘coffee’ and try to avoid all other morning meetings
iii) Do more meetings in parallel with something I already do anyway (eg. 20 min meeting over a sandwich at Pret, or a chat during Techrunners)
If you’ve tried the Office Hours approach, I’d love to hear how you implemented it. For example this.
6) Making more time to plan
Easy to say, harder to do.
It’s easy to make plans (such as ways to increase my productivity) at the beginning of the year after a period of downtime when you still feel fresh. But making that a habit is way harder to do. When it comes to planning, I’d include reviewing and establishing more efficient processes in that bucket. So… I’m going to do two things:
i) give myself 15 minutes at the start of every day (probably during the 90 minutes of my hideous commute) for short term planning.
ii) work from home at least twice a month and placing the emphasis of my working time during that period more on ‘proactive’ planning and less on ‘reactive’ work
Fingers crossed…
There’s a pretty high chance that I’ll skip back into bad habits on all of the above. But by writing these down I’ll hopefully increase the chance that at least a few of them will stick. Please let me know if you’ve tried any of them, and how they’ve worked.
