Building & Improving Your Personal Productivity

An area where you have complete control is how to maintain and grow your own productivity. Finding what works well can unlock your ability to make a larger impact in your organization, and potentially open doors to new opportunities elsewhere.

Personal productivity content typically ranges from faddish to downright cultish, so let's take a different approach that is agnostic of tools, buzzwords, and acronyms.

At its core, a personal productivity system depends on these components:

1. Commitments is how you allocate your time, which is everything from meetings you attend to the deadlines you provide or accept

2. Inputs are all of the things that demand your attention like emails, chats, and ideas; plus, action items that result from meetings, brainstorming, etc

3. Outputs are the things you need to produce

4. Outcomes are the impacts of your work and the collaboration with others

While your outputs vary in what they are (e.g. documents, responding to an email, recording a short clip, etc), we'll refer to each of these items as a task.

You'll also have things that are not actionable and are worth referring to later (e.g. ideas, reflections, outcomes), which we'll refer to as a reference.

Let's see how all of these components work together.

Commitments directly ties to being accountable, which means showing up to the things you said you would, plus getting the work done on time.

The first part (showing up) is much easier than the second part (getting work done) until you have a personal productivity system that is functioning well.

Where the breakdown occurs is how inputs are filtered, as your outputs need time to get done, which becomes a commitment that you make to yourself and others.

An input will end up in one or more of these buckets, depending on what it is:

1. Immediately turn into an output if you have time to react or reply to an email, chat, phone call, etc

2. Captured as a task for you to track an output that you need to produce, or a dependency on someone else's work that you care about

3. Captured as a reference for you to refer to later

4. Ignored because of irrelevance, which occur if you're participating in an email chain where everyone is cc'ed or going through a public channel in Slack or Teams

Now, let's talk about the hardest part for most people: converting a task that tracks an output you're responsible for into a commitment.

When you make this conversion, you need to do these three things:

1. Estimate how long it will take to accomplish

2. Allocate time on your calendar based on your estimate

3. Protect that time to ensure you can accomplish it

Estimating can be hard, refer to this previous newsletter for reasons why that is and techniques to mitigate it.

Allocating and protecting your time is hard if you're junior within your organization or it has a reactionary culture. The best way to manage this is to state what your commitment is and let the stakeholders to whom you're responsible decide what to do.

Finally, let's talk about outcomes. These are the things that occurred based on your involvement, which is based your outputs and collaborating with others.

Track each outcome as a reference, as those are critical for establishing the value that you have contributed to your organization, which is helpful as you build your personal brand, participate in annual reviews and promotion cycles, and reflect on progress over time.

TLDR: A high functioning personal productivity system is based on commitments, inputs, outputs, and outcomes, along with tasks and references.