Happy Saturday!

Productivity isn’t “getting more work done”

You can work until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been productive.

For one thing, you might be doing the wrong work. Ten hours of toil toward no particular goal is catastrophically unproductive.

And second, there’s more than one way to improve your Productivity Return on Investment (ROI). Sure, you can “get more done,” but you can also “use less time and effort.” Both have an equal effect on your Productivity ROI.

And if you do use less time and effort, imagine what you could do with the time and effort you’ve saved! You could spend it with loved ones. You could travel more. Or, sure, you could reinvest it in getting more work done. But the point is, you have options.

When you use less time and effort to get work done, you stop drowning in work.

But how do we actually do less?

I’m not breaking new ground here. Who doesn’t want to do their work with less effort? That’s everyone’s dream, always has been.

The difference nowadays is, with the technology available, doing more with less time and effort is available to most of us. What was once the purview of only the largest organizations is now achievable for individuals.

Here’s an analogy. Fifty years ago, the only real way to have a career in the film industry (in the United States, at least) was to move to Los Angeles and start working your way up the ladder. The equipment was far too expensive, and the resources—human and otherwise—far too scarce, for any individual to establish a film career in, say, Grafton, West Virginia.

With modern technology, though, careers have been launched from iPhone cameras and iOS video editing. The barrier for entry is far lower.

What does that mean for Productivity?

Two things:

(1) Modern technology allows us to develop individual systems by combining tools and apps that support our work and workflows.

(2) Just like people making videos with iPhones, the likelihood that the result will be garbage is far higher.

Our goal is to leverage the first without falling victim to the second. And we do that by returning to the two points at the beginning. We make sure we’re doing the right work, and then calibrate our tools to do that work with the highest possible speed, accuracy, and quality.

💡 Strategize for the most work with the least time and effort 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

In the last two newsletters (37 | 36), I’ve discussed Productivity Bridges. Both of the ideas we’ll explore (briefly) in the rest of this edition of Weekend Upgrade are closely tied to the Bridge concept.

Strategies are Bridges from goals to Action, and optimizing for less time and effort requires you to calibrate many different Bridges in your system.

Developing Strategies

Most of us fall far short of ideal when it comes to strategy. We can set goals, we can get stuff done. But making sure what we’re doing is directed toward the goals is a missing link.

Enter Strategies. It is certainly possible to develop your own, custom-made, built-from-scratch strategy when you are bridging goals to action, but it’s not super efficient.

There are two better “strategy strategies”: Develop it with a mentor, or Develop it from research.

Developing strategies with a mentor means asking advice of your boss, or hiring a coach, or joining a cohort (You can still register for Cohort Nine of Applied Action-Powered Productivity through Monday, July 3!). When you develop a strategy this way, the expertise of your mentor will help you bridge over common errors and pitfalls, while still keeping the specifics unique to your situation.

Developing strategies from research means reading books, listening to podcasts, seeking out interviews and articles and YouTube videos and whatever else to pick and choose the bits that you think are likely to work for you. This was my approach to learning screenwriting, about 16 years ago. I read 10 or 15 books on screenwriting, and read a ton of screenplays, and watched many of the same movies, to compare how the screenplay—the film’s blueprint—translated to the final product. (Of course, producing screenplays is an entirely different set of skills and networks…)

Do not skip this step. Most of our productivity challenges arise because we have no strategy, and thus our work has no connection to our goals. I suspect that the distaste most of us have toward metrics isn’t that we hate measuring progress, per se, but because the metrics we hate are set up with a misaligned (or nonexistent) strategy. When strategies and metrics are aligned, measuring progress is no hassle!

Once we’re sure our work is pointed toward the right goals, it’s time to make sure we’re spending less time and effort on it.

Optimize for Less Time & Effort

In 2009, I took the job of Director of Liturgical Music at a local church. Their previous director created weekly practice CDs for the choir, and I quickly spotted that as a waste of both my time and CDs. I invested more time and effort up front in a church music website, where I can upload the music planned for upcoming Masses, and the recordings I’ve made over the years are automatically available. Meaning, I make a recording once, and use it forever.

That upfront investment of time and effort has paid off in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours saved during my fourteen-year tenure. That’s what Productivity Bridges can do for you.

Do you send the same two emails 53 times a week? Create a text expansion template for them.

Do you schedule business trips 10 times a year? Build a project template that schedules all the tasks you need to prepare for the trips. Are 3 of those trips to London and 3 of them to Tokyo? Build separate templates that account for the specific tasks associated with those trips. (I’ll be showing how to do this in Tana in Cohort Nine of Applied APP.)

Do you copy and paste the same few documents for every client? Automate every possible aspect of that process, from adding unique info through delivering the documents.

How you implement this optimization for less time and effort will depend on the tools you use. How you recognize what needs to be optimized is a skill that you can learn and develop.

Cohort Nine

While you absolutely can find tools and develop skills on your own, one strategy for more quickly improving both your tools and your recognition of opportunities is joining a cohort of Applied Action-Powered Productivity.

I’ve spent two years and eight cohorts refining the way I help people accomplish their work with less time and effort. You can access that expertise, as well as the expertise of your cohort-mates, if you join Cohort Nine before July 3, 2023 (and future cohorts after that). We’ll explore these time-and-effort-saving Productivity Bridges in your daily agendas, templates, procedures, automations, shortcuts, and more, all framed in a way that will help you during the six weeks of the cohort and for decades to come afterward.

The work hub I use is Tana, but the skills and mindsets translate to other tools and approaches. Join us and we’ll find the strategies that align your work with your goals and optimize your tools and apps for the least time and effort possible.

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Look at the work in your life.

How much of it is connected to your larger goals? How much of it is optimized to take as little time and effort as possible?

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

When you do the right work, and spend less time and effort doing it, it will literally change your life.

R.J.
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