Weekly 11 - Are we measuring productivity all wrong?

Have you ever had one of those weeks where you feel busy but you can't pinpoint what you've actually achieved? It turns out our sense of time and productivity don't always align. This week I've been digging into off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam and it's got me thinking, are we measured to bring productivity all wrong? Let's find out in the 11th petals weekly. So this is the 11th petals weekly. I'm side jobling, if you don't already know that. And before we get into the weeds of what's been going on, let's do those scores. Productivity is 4, enjoyment is 4, teamwork is 2, but learning is 4 and serenity is a 3, bringing out an average of 3.4, which is about the same as last week. Let me explain what's been going on. So, based on last week, I managed to shift my focus a bit more. I set myself quite an ambitious goal to get some of the designs in place, the redesigns, and I kind of got there, but not all of what I signed up to do. As I mentioned last week, we've got some redesigns that we want to get ready for the Q1 launch. I've got a fair few views to get through, so I focused on the main journey to create snapshots, get the data for snapshots and then look at the scores from the snapshots. Pushed it a little bit too far though, so I managed to get the create and snapshot ready and I also managed to get the scores coming back, but the snapshot detail view is still a work in progress. I did have to push it over the weekend as well, so I planned to have a bit of capacity over the weekend with the family away, but in the end I spent some time with the kids instead and so I pushed myself on Sunday evening just to kind get some of these chipped away. Really determined to get my quarterly goal in place by the end of March that we can relaunch the app with a whole fresh design. So we've got two weeks to go with the current commitments and quite a few things to do. So I'm really trying to get my mind to this. So this week I am going to focus on finishing that journey and then hopefully get a little bit look at the user dashboard. But that is my nice to have set myself a commitment goal and and a stretch goal, which I think is quite a nice way of giving yourself some ambition and some realistic milestones to hit. Teamwork is still quite low because everyone's got so much going on at the moment, but we do have our regular touchpoint this Friday to do some demos and discussions, so I'm going to make the most of that. And I've actually booked some time off this week as well to focus on this. So it's giving me that flexibility. Serenity is, you know, in that middle ground. I'm feeling okay about stuff, but it's obviously towards the end of any delivery it feels a bit more stressful. So we have to try harder, don't we? So let's talk learning. This week I've been reading a little bit more about productivity, busyness, and how to organize yourself to get more done. So there's a couple of books I read this week, or looked into. One is off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam and the other is the Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. These are two books that look at quite common concepts, but actually it got me thinking a bit more about some of the practices I've put in place over the last few years. Try and get better focus and productivity out of myself. This is generally around my side projects, but I do it does cross over into my professional life as well, and my personal life, just to make sure there's a good balance around the three. Hence why my old podcast Make Life Work was such a hot topic for me to think about. But what he got me thinking about was calendars and busyness. So are you a slave to your calendar? It depends on your role. I'm in a managerial role where I do have quite a lot of meetings where I need to go and talk to other managers or the stakeholders or the teams that I work with. So naturally my calendar gets quite full very quickly. Comparing this to a typical individual contributor calendar, which is a lot lighter, maybe a couple of checkpoints with some teammates or peers, maybe a few team conversations. So it got me thinking about how I can find a better balance so I can do productive stuff in my working day. A couple of things that have worked quite well for me though. So back in lockdown when I was trying to find time to do work, I was managing quite a few people across a number of teams and that's why the productivity metric became quite important for me. From the Petals framework, not only was I having busy times and busy weeks, how productive was I feeling about that week as well? So this is why the P in productivity and Petals is so important. It is an arbitrary number that you kind of rate yourself out of. But how productive do you feel like you have been in the time frame that you're looking Back over when I was trying to get into more side projects, I even tried a few other concepts like time journaling and this crosses over a little bit with bullet journaling. But I wanted to understand where I was spending my time on a quite frequent basis and start to look at some trends over time. So I set up a Google sheet with half hour units throughout the week and I could sort of measure what I was doing and just flag it. Whether it was a meeting, whether it was some productive time, whether it was downtime, and it was quite nice, especially during lockdown when I was not getting out much, how I was trying to make social time but also carve out productive time for side projects and work at the same time. I also had to be really careful make sure I made time for fitness and health and downtime with the family and social time. So the time journal concept was quite nice to do that. I time boxed it to a few months so I can see if there were any trends over that time as well and look for the hotspots of going well. Actually that's that point is a little bit pointless. I could be watching a lot of TV that I was getting nothing from that could become side project time. I did find that there might be a lot of work meetings, but not actually productive time so that I can shift things around to make it work. So I could say Monday, Wednesday and Friday were meeting days, Tuesdays and Thursdays were meeting three days. One thing that I do now is I make sure that I block out every Friday afternoon as my focus time. Ideally meetings work around this and often the case they can. Occasionally exceptions can slip through, which is completely understandable, but I'll make sure I balance it out. So at least I know that for half a day a week I have focused time to get things done. The other added benefit of doing this kind of focused time is that you can reserve it for any learning you might want to do. We are very busy people, we are very productive and there's a nice balance to have. When are you actually learning new things? And if you have got professional development plans in place where you need to do a bit more training or a little bit of focus, YouTube learning or LinkedIn learning or Pluralsight or anything like that, when do you do that? So by protecting some windows around your week where there are spots of no distractions, actually when are you most effective at learning? Because it might be better in the morning or afternoon depending on your personality type and your neurodiversity, have a think about where it fits. Pop it in your calendar and try to keep it other people away from there. If you need to make the exceptions, move things around because it is your time that you're protecting, no one else's. So there's my food for thought for this week and a little bit of a takeaway for you to think about. Where can you protect your focus time? How much time do you spend as a slave to your calendar? Or even can you say no to some of those events as well? Go through your calendar, have a bit of a detox. I do it every quarter as well. Kind of move things around to make it group better. Kind of give myself a bit more focus time or productivity time, Give myself some learning time and make sure that you're working around your peaks and troughs that you can become familiar with from something like a time journal or any other measurements that you might use to measure how effective you are at certain date, times of the week or not. My question to you and let me know in the comments or hit reply do you feel busy or do you feel productive? Tell me what you're going through and tell me how you find those little ways of winning your way through this. That's enough for me this week. I'll be back next week, hopefully with some more demos to show you of the new designs and hopefully a few more lessons for you to learn from. Take care and have a great week.