Project Manager Productivity Hacks E-Book

Nigel Creaser

• Herausgeber: Nigel Creaser
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Do you want to get MORE TIME and to get MORE DONE?
As a Project Manager or any manager for that matter, we rarely leave the office with everything finished. There is always a list of things that you did not get to or an email your saw pop in just as you shut down the computer. As you finally travel home, later than you wanted and later than the expectations you set with your significant other or your kids, your phone vibrates to remind you another email arrived. Should you check it? Will it wait until tomorrow? Sound familiar?
What if I told you there are things that you can do to help you get out of the office that little it earlier and with more stuff done? In this book, you will find some relatively simple tools and techniques to do just that, you will learn

how to get control of your email inbox

unshackle yourself from your phone

speed up producing dreaded post-meeting notes

be able to focus more on tasks and complete them quicker

make sure you are doing the work you should be doing.

I will guide you through 11 actionable hacks, which once you have adopted you will never want to let go.
Do MORE in LESS time.

Leseprobe

Project Manager

Productivity Hacks

2021 Edition

by

Nigel Creaser

Copyright © 2021 Nigel Creaser

All rights reserved.

Hardback ISBN: 9798509483240

Paperback ISBN: 9798551611851

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

If the eagle-eyed among you spot a typo, please let me know by dropping me an email with the subject Typo Alert to [email protected].

Contents

Introduction

Notifications

Schedule Email

Outlook Rules!

Do Not Disturb

Mobile Subservience

Outlook Quick Actions

OneNote

Delegate

Prioritise

Be a Dictator

Thank You

Dedication

Also By Nigel Creaser

Coming Soon

About the Author

Introduction

Hi, and welcome to Project Manager Productivity Hacks.

Why write another book on productivity hacks? Are there not enough of them already? The trigger my interview with Sarah M. Hoban for my podcast The Sunday Lunch Project Manager Podcast. (plug, plug)

https://anchor.fm/sundaylunchpm/episodes/meets-Sarah-M-Hoban--PMP--The-Productive-PM-Part-1-el5gjv

We talked about improving productivity for project managers and during the conversation I recalled that a while ago I started a blog post in which I planned to share some ideas that I have used in my career,7 to improve my productivity and get out of the office that little bit earlier. Over the years I have shared these with others and almost every time I received a positive and enthusiastic response.

Having rekindled the idea, I sat down and noted 11 hacks, tips, shortcuts, whatever you want to call them, that I have used over the years. Why 11? Well, it’s one more than 10. This book goes up to 11. (One for the Spinal Tap fans.)

I see productivity as remarkably similar to an exercise programme, we all start off with good intentions and some of the changes work great for us and others don’t. Some changes stick and become part of our daily life whereas others are just a real chore. Even the ones we found that work well for us and are straightforward to implement, can, under certain circumstances, end up being dropped by us. Sometimes this happens consciously and sometimes little by little over time.

Whether building healthier habits or improving our productivity it’s not just a case of making the changes and we are done. It takes repeated work. If you find them hard to implement, then they may not be for you in your current situation. If you start using them and end up letting them drift, then start again.

Improving our productivity is something many of us strive to achieve aiming for some kind of efficiencynirvana. Let me tell you, it ain’t gonna happen, perfection is a myth. Give yourself a break. It’s a bit like yoga, you can’t win at yoga, no matter how bendy you get you can always be bendier, that’s the same with personal productivity, you can’t win at productivity, you can always be productivier (Ed. Is that a word?)

I have not always been able to apply these hacks successfully, but that is not a reflection of the hacks themselves, it is more about my ability to stick with them even though I know they work.

One last point, as with your fitness regime trying to make loads of changes at once can spell disaster. I recommend that once you have a read of these hacks, choose one that excites you (maybe not excites but seems to resonate) and have a go at it. Once it is second nature to you, move onto the next one that spoke to you. If you find that the first one was not for you then bin it. Choose another and try that one out, then rinse and repeat.

So, on with the hacks…

Notifications

I have one simple piece of advice when it comes to notifications

“Turn the bloody things off!”

Is that clear enough? We don’t need the Dom Joly 1990’s, cool to have, Nokia ring tone (Dom Joly is a UK Comedian who was famous for wandering around in one of his sketches with a massive phone that would start ringing loudly in the most inappropriate places, like a cinema which he would answer shouting about where he was and disturbing all those around him.) and all the beeps, pings and vibrations, that have arrived since.

Why are you so bothered about this? I hear you ask. There was a study completed by Professor Gloria Mark from the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where they found studying some 400 people that when they got interrupted, each interruption cost something like 40 seconds. That does not sound like too much, does it?

The most important part of this was that the 40 seconds was only the actual physical length of the interruption not the actual cost to the productivity in that day. They estimated that it took around 23 minutes for someone to get back to the same level of focus that they were on before that interruption.

I am not sure whether 23 minutes is an accurate figure, it seems long to me, but even if it was ten minutes, five minutes, three or two minutes when you multiply it by the number of interruptions you get from people each day, it is significant.

Think about the number of interruptions we get from each of the tools we have that are trying to, in Joey air quotes, help us (In many cases they are there just to attract your attention to demonstrate their worth rather than in your best interests). Even if they do not fully derail you, they still take away your focus.

How many times do you think you get interrupted in a day? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Two hundred? If we went low and said there were ten minutes lost, so it's easy maths. If it cost you 23 minutes that's a total loss of 230 minutes, that’s nearly four hours, that’s massive.

Are some of you are thinking, like me, that not all of those 23 minutes will be entirely unproductive time? It is a fair point. Even if we said that of the 23 minutes that 3 minutes ended up “lost” and we take our 10 interruptions from before, when multiplied out that costs you 30 minutes a day. Is that your lunch, or your commute back? Is that worth saving? It is to me, if it is to you then keep reading, otherwise, you may have grabbed the wrong book.

Shut Up Email

If you are still with me then let’s take a look at how we can deal with your email as a first step. One of the most intrusive tools we use is email. It dominates our working life and many of us have hundreds of them each day. Having a notification for each one can cause a level of interruptions that impacts heavily on our daily productivity. I am going to use Microsoft Outlook as the example here because that's what I've seen most people use.

When we receive an email, Microsoft tells us. That's very kind of them. It is a bit like the days when we would have been sat at home and the letters drop through our letterbox or when we were sat in an office processing paperwork. A letter or memo would be dropped into our in-tray. The result was that we immediately know we had a communication. We would see or hear it and we would pick it up and deal with it.

Nothing has changed then; the only difference is it’s a computer or phone telling you rather than your letterbox or in-tray now. If you were away from home or away from your desk, then you would be blissfully unaware of it.

Not quite! Back then what did we have one? Two? Five? Ten? Even 50 a day to deal with, now we have thousands, literally thousands of emails to deal with. (OK, not literally, but a lot.)

Before the use of electronic email, creating any correspondence took time and effort, so it created a much higher barrier, now it’s a few keystrokes and the whole world gets an email from you and more importantly to us now, vice versa. The fact that you received something previously meant it was more likely to be important and in need of attention, now it could be anything.

Outlook is not content with letting you know that you have a new email by incrementing the unread number in your inbox it feels that the email is so important that it should make a noise so your get the ping sound notification just in case you missed that. To be safe though, in case you were talking and not listening you get the little bit of toast appearing in the right-hand corner of your monitor. It is called toast because it pops up just like a toaster pops up your toast. That's not a diversion though you're not going to do anything about it are you so finally your mouse pointer flickers just in case you missed all of these alerts.

Does that seem a bit excessive to you? It does to me. When you install these programs, they have all of this up and running as default, so if you do not root around a bit it can be quite difficult to switch them off, but it can be done.

When I am sat next to some of my team members who have all of this switched on it seems odd. I have had it all switched off for so long it seems weird that it's on there. The toast is the one that I find the most intrusive because whilst you know you have an email from the ping, you know you have one for the icon and you know you have one for your mouse pointer flickering you don't know what the topic is or who it is from.

When it pops up, it makes you think “I wonder if that's the email from so and so?” or “Is it an email from the boss wanting something urgent?” or “The one from HR confirming my promotion”.

The likelihood of you being diverted from what you are doing is lower than other notifications, it still distracts though. If we consider my earlier point about the time it takes us to get back into flow even an eighth as intrusive will cost us 30 minutes.

The toast makes it even more intrusive because it gives you that little bit of information that’s like a teaser trailer at the end of an episode of your favourite show or clickbait on those annoying websites it tempts you to click.

It may show it's from the boss, it may have the title of your latest project or decision you have been waiting for, it might have important in the title.

All these things will make you want to go and look at it even more than the ping. Even if you ignore it, you now have it sitting in the back of your mind going “I wonder what the boss wants from me should I check.”

The thing is nine times out of ten you go to look at it and it will be “Make sure that you clean the kitchen when you have your cup of coffee and return the teaspoons” or something with a similar level of criticality.

Having checked it, you have interrupted that business-critical task that you had just hit your flow state on and now that flow state has gone, it's broken and if the study referenced above is right then it will be 23 minutes for you to get back to that state.

Hopefully, I've convinced you that the email alerts will cause you problems. I turned them all off and I urge you to switch off yours too.

I am not looking to create a detailed instructional text here, especially seeing as the last time I authored an instructional book both of the damn software vendors changed the way that everything worked just as I finished my final review, so I had to redo it . Having said that, the current steps at the time of writing, are as follows:

Open Outlook, click File, then click Options