Getting inboxes to zero, sorting out bad meetings and instilling the ways of the Productivity Ninja
How an obsession with efficiency and a love of having an impact led Graham Allcott to making a living helping businesses to be more productive
I’m not naturally an organised person. I was never good at lists and was always jealous of people who seemed to have their whole job and even their whole life neatly held in labelled binders. My early career was still pretty successful, but mainly because I worked 14-hour days, went in on a Saturday to catch up with email and had a great team of people who could act as the ‘completer finishers’ to all the harebrained schemes I’d start.
So how on earth did I go from that crazy version of me, to one who makes a living from helping businesses to be more productive? The truth is I’m still the same person on the inside. I’m still prone to procrastination, still have my off-days and I’ll occasionally still let a little pile of paperwork build up before I file it all away. We’re all human.
At the same time, I’m obsessed with efficiency and I love making an impact. Around ten years ago, I read every book, blog post and piece of advice I could find in my quest to turn myself into a Productivity Ninja. It started to work. My colleagues started asking me why I was replying to emails more promptly and now seemed to remember the things I’d delegated to them. I started getting my email inbox to zero at least once a day, instilled more regular catchups with staff, learnt to nip procrastination in the bud more quickly and yes, even started filing a few things away in folders.
I realised two important things as I was making these changes. The first is that having a more focused and productive way of working ultimately means less work, not more. And secondly, I realised that part of the reason I had always resisted all the advice of selfhelp books was this notion of perfection that seeped from every page. When you abandon perfection and focus instead on merely ‘good enough’, you give yourself permission for the occasional screw-up and stop worrying so much when it doesn’t quite work. A Productivity Ninja is still a human that has good skills and tries hard, not a superhero that has special powers to get themselves out of every mess.
Since everyone was curious about my journey, I fell into coaching colleagues and running workshops talking about my journey. Out of this, my company, Think Productive was born. Nearly a decade later, and we have offices worldwide and a dedicated team going into some of the biggest and best companies getting inboxes to zero, sorting out bad meetings and instilling the ways of the Productivity Ninja.
The bad news is there’s no secret sauce when it comes to productivity. And I guess even if there were, it would be “to do the simple things consistently and well”. It’s not about having the latest apps and exciting gadgets – in fact, ‘productivity porn’ as we call it, can be a huge distraction.
A huge part of my approach is based around the notion that we should manage attention, not time. The truth is that we have two to three hours each day of what I call ‘proactive attention’ and using this limited resource wisely matters. Keeping a separate list or a category on your to-do list that is just for the hardest tasks so that you’re able to use as much of your best attention on what matters most gets us halfway there. Learning what times of day you have that ‘proactive attention’ and avoiding things like email and other people’s boring meetings during these times – developing a bit of a ruthless streak – is what starts to make it all happen.
There are so many things competing for our attention, including our own ideas and nags. Getting all that stuff out of your head and avoiding some of the obvious distractions (turning notifications off, removing email from your phone entirely if you can, muting social media when you need to get your head down to the serious work, and so on) is a vital part of attention management, too.
Your brain is a rubbish place to remember all the stuff you’ve got to do, yet brilliant at doing creative, strategic thinking and problem-solving. Once you’ve got the tasks and nagging thoughts out of your brain, manage it all in a ‘second brain’: a souped-up to-do list that helps you remember tasks and projects. This frees up your actual brain to focus and reduces a lot of the stress and sense of overwhelm that work can induce.
One of the common problems with any to-do list is that we start to lose trust in it. We start to realise that there are just as many things in our heads that we haven’t written on the list as there are on the list itself. As soon as we sense a to-do list doesn’t represent our entire universe, it does nothing to help us feel in control. To get away from this, we need to spend some regular time, preferably about once a week, doing a review of everything. My own review happens on a Thursday and I do things like checking two weeks behind and three weeks ahead in my calendar, rehearsing travel timings in my head and just generally getting set for the
One of the common problems with any to-do list is that we start to lose trust in it
next week. This process leaves me knowing that my ‘second brain’ has everything recorded and under control - and I can forget about work for the weekend as a result.
And then there’s procrastination. Even when we’ve got some good systems in place and using all our best productivity tactics regularly, procrastination can derail all the good work. I don’t think we can ever fully remove procrastination from the equation, although I’ll definitely vouch for the fact that you procrastinate a lot less when you’re clearer about your goals and when each of the projects in your ‘second brain’ has a ‘next physical action’ next to it, so that you know what you need to do to create vital momentum.
But for the moments where none of that seems to work, I use the acronym ‘DUST’. It’s a helpful tool to help diagnose where your procrastination is coming from. D is for ‘difficult’. Is it just hard and you need some advice from a colleague or even some training? U is for ‘undefined’. When we haven’t fully defined what we’re trying to do, it’s easy to hide away rather than step up to the plate. Get clearer first. S is for ‘scary’. Part of our brain is desperate to avoid anything that involves putting ourselves on the line or submitting our work to the judgement of others. Usually a courageous chat with a colleague or friend will help us realise we’re being silly and irrational. And T is for ‘tedious’. When I’m doing my ironing or my filing,
I’ve usually got a podcast or Netflix on at the same time.
And finally, why do we do what we do anyway? In recent years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that and how productivity relates to work/ life balance and how we view success. It’s fascinating to me that people define these things in so many different ways. I’ve recorded nearly a hundred hours of interviews with everyone from Olympic gold medallists to CEOS to clowns, for my podcast, Beyond Busy. And my only conclusion is that ‘humans are weird’. We’re surprisingly unpredictable, we don’t see our biases, we get things wrong… but isn’t that beautiful?! None of us is a superhero, but what we can achieve in spite of that fact is quite amazing, don’t you think?