My friend Slobodan has just started his new podcast – ProdcastFM. The podcast would be focused on productivity and efficiency, which happens to be an important topic for a lot of people in the WordPress community – freelancers, consultants, clients, employers.
I was invited for the pilot episode which turned to be a hiring-related one, but for the sake of the setup and experiment, here we are:
To stay “on-topic”, after all, I’ll also share few of my productivity tips:
- I start every Monday with a task labeled “Wake up” in my PM system. It’s always a great motivation booster completing the first weekly assignment right after waking up.
- Usually I work in blocks of 2.5 – 3 hours, then I take breaks (lunch, driving to another place, etc). It helps me stay focused during each block and avoid getting burned out or getting stuck with a specific task.
- I’m a cofficer, check out my Coffice Resort book.
- My week is mapped out on Sunday, so that everything is set up for the coming week – less surprises, less critical moments.
- I’m leveraging my time off – listening to podcasts in the morning, management or marketing audio books while driving or at the airport.
We also implement a bunch of boosters in my team:
- Backup projects – we have several projects in the queue whenever we have a gap between projects, waiting for feedback or just getting too tired of a single project.
- We deliver weekly. Weekly scrums allow us flexible hours and ROWE (Results Only Working Environment) model where we focus on the work done.
- We pay attention to the Interruption Science and try to avoid interruptions whenever possible.
Sign up for the ProdcastFM and follow the productivity cast feed on Twitter.
Hey Mario! Thanks for being my first guest at ProdcastFM, I really appreciate it. You posted some great productivity tips here.
I also like working in 3 hour intervals, I tried longer and shorter intervals, but that just seems to work best for me. Normally I have two such uninterrupted intervals per day, my remaining work time is split between email and meetings.
Also, I tried doing week mapping on Sundays, but wasn’t always able to stick to plan, now I just have a group of tasks that are labeled TotD (Task of the Day) and each day I choose two for tomorrow. But I agree, weekly / monthly reviews are a must, otherwise it’s hard to tell if you’re moving in the right direction.
Thanks Slobodan, good to see that we have common patterns – we should be doing something right, right? 🙂
Adding priority tasks have always been tough for me, especially being a company owner myself. The major issue I have right now is avoiding multitasking, but most of our success is based on being on the right place at the right time just by being everywhere all the time. More often than not I miss opportunities whenever I turn off my phone and email for a few hours, or things get out of hand. Therefore I just try to isolate these and keep only a single, emergency-channel open if possible, when interruptions would suck my inspiration and stop my pace.