How to Increase Personal Productivity

It’s quite staggering how many people realize the negative impact of interruptions, yet can’t manage to break away from it. More than an hour a day can be wasted by simply answering a few e-mails. Here is the proof:
Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University (England) conducted a study that found that it takes more than 1 minute (64 seconds exactly), to recover your train of thought after an interruption by email (bit.ly/email2).
This means, that if you check your email once each 5 minutes you would waste more than an hour a day getting back to the work you have to do! Add to that the time you actually spend on the e-mail. IT Werks Technologies has found that it takes, on average, 62 to 89 seconds to answer an email. Think about the steps involved if you’re using Outlook:

Maximize or open your email client (2-3 seconds)
Click the send receive button (1-2 seconds)
Wait until all the mail is downloaded (5-6 seconds)
Click the Subject of the new message (1-2 seconds)
Read the text body (15-25 seconds)
Click reply (1-2 seconds)
Type up a single reply (35-45 seconds)
Hit send (1-2 seconds)
Minimize or close Outlook (1-2 seconds)
Note: Some people even go as far as to hit send/receive a second time to wait for the transmission errors if any. They want to ensure they don’t receive a failed message from the mailer daemon.

Say it takes an average of 70 seconds to reply an email. Add to that the 64 seconds that it takes you to get back your thoughts to the depth required while you were working (Dr. Thomas’ study). That would mean you have wasted 2.25 minutes just sending one email. If you decided to reply a couple of them while you were working on Outlook, you want to add a minimum of 35 seconds for each email that you reply.

So, by answering just 10 emails in a day, you have wasted 22.5 minutes!

Let’s take this a little further. What would happen if you visited 4 websites of a personal interest (such as news etc) and answered 15 instant messages? (these are NOT exaggerated numbers – think about your own workday) Well, we’d like to spare you the calculations. It would waste about 1.5 to 2 hours each day!

Is it a wonder why we can’t seem to get anything done as knowledge workers?

You will find that these calculations show about 29 distractions in a day. This is a completely normal trend for knowledge workers! Which brings us to a very difficult question for you to contemplate:

Would your boss hire a worker that received 10 personal phone calls each day?

The data above shows the same amount of time wasted as 10 personal phone calls. If you ask a Human Resources person if they knew of this fact you will get a very surprised look. That’s because this type of study has never been conducted!

So what is the solution to this waste?

Step 1: Minimize the number of distractions

Check email manually

Check email manually and disable the pop up notifications that come standard in Outlook. The best use of email has been to check email at certain times of the day. Unless you absolutely can’t, check email once before lunch and once before the day is over. For most people this works the best.

Don’t log into Instant Message networks

Unless you are a Salesperson or a support representative that is required to support clients VIA Instant Message we have found that it is not really a productivity enhancing tool.

Break the Web habit

Most users have to be updated VIA the web on the progress of Weather, Stock, News etc. Unless your stock investments can give you a 25% return, why waste 25% of your productivity? As for Weather and News, it’s great to be informed – not too cool to be inundated.

Step 2: Evaluate yourself

The IT Werks Monitoring tool allows you to set up your productivity goals. You define these goals by first telling us which programs on your computer you consider as the most productive use of your time, and which programs you use are the least productive use of your time.

The monitoring tool then keeps a track of what you’re doing, and gives you an efficiency ratio in the form of a graph and a percentage readout that informs you of how efficient you are during your day.
This allows you to see how your day is progressing and train yourself on a continual basis to perform with greater efficiency by reducing the interruptions that occur.

Step 3: Handling the ‘Got a Minute’ syndrome

Of course using the technology to gain efficiency in your workday does not identify human interruptions such as a colleague wanting a second of your time to consult on an issue. We have found that most of these mini-consultations are not mission critical and time can be set aside for them.

Some of the most powerful CEOs have adopted the technique to allow the ‘got a minute’ issue to be handled at a certain time in the day. And, by doing it this way, the number of ‘got a minute’ requests actually reduce! Try it, you will love the results!

Step 4: Practice Flow

Once you have most of these issues ironed out and under control (usually takes a couple of weeks), you can then start practicing Flow. Flow is defined as being ‘in-the-zone’. When in this state, most people feel relaxed, in control, and performing at peak levels! If you consciously look at your environment when you’re in this state of Flow, you can practice to keep the environment similar that keeps you in Flow.

Once you reduce all the clutter using the first 3 steps, you will no doubt find yourself in Flow. When you do, ask yourself how you feel at the time. Realize what the environment and your physical aspects are like. For example:

Have you had enough sleep?
Is it quiet enough to work?
Is the work you’re doing easier?
What kind of output do you feel you’re producing?
Etc

Once you understand this, strive to keep that environment the same whenever you work!

Conclusion

The IT Werks Monitoring tool is still under development. We are planning on releasing it very shortly! We hope to have a personal version available for individuals that are interested in increasing personal productivity. We will also be releasing a version for a small team of about 5-7 users, and one for a large corporation (20+ users).

Please contact the IT Werks Administration Team if you want to see this product developed. It will help us affirm our intentions to our investors! Tell us what features you’d like to see in this tool and how we can help serve you when we get started with this.

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