568: Minimizing Tasks While Maximizing Results with Laura Stack

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Laura Stack
Thanks, Pete. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. You are known as The Productivity Pro, and we love talking to productivity pros.

Laura Stack
Okay. Good.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re going to fit right in here. And I want to kick it off by hearing, what is, maybe, your nerdiest productivity practice? Is there anything that’s sort of a guilty pleasure for you in the realm of productivity, whether it’s apps or…?

Laura Stack
Oh, my. You’re going to make me start by telling all my secrets. Well, let’s see. I grew up in a military family. My family is a retired colonel, so I was raised on the Air Force Academy with the old adage of, “The colonel jumps,” and you say, “How high?” And so, he came in for inspection when we did our chores and so my favorite productivity guilty pleasure is I make my bed every day. Yes, I do.

With everything, pillows, European Shams, big pillows, throw pillows. I just think it sets you up for success for the day. It feels good. It helps you feel like things are in order and you’ve already accomplished a goal before your day even begins. So, I would suggest everybody make your bed. That’s what I learned from the colonel.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued that you called it a guilty pleasure. In a way, it seems like it’s the most opposite of guilty because I think if I didn’t do it…

Laura Stack
Most people don’t. Most people don’t make their bed. They just leave it like it is or they will likely toss things up. I have it neat, orderly pulled, pinned corners. I mean, I make sure that, and it’s maybe a little OCD but just not having anything on the bed when you approach your evening rituals and routines to go to bed, and undoing the bed, it’s oddly comforting just in the sense that it makes you kind of wind down and gives your brain a signal that it is now time to relax. So, there’s just something in the routine of beginning and the end of the day that helps you start and end your day well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s totally true. And it’s a nice reminder, I think, at the end of the day, it’s like, “Hey, well, I accomplished that and it’s a very welcoming sight to go on in there.”

Laura Stack
Exactly, yeah. And not just rumpled sheets that you just got out of. You just feel like it’s just one continuous getting into bed, getting out of bed. Ah, I like rituals with beginning and end. It just feels good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we’re going to dig into some of your productivity wisdom, and I want to get a touch of your hot takes on how that fits into this coronavirus, working-from-home type context. But maybe before we get into the tools, and the tactics, and the strategies, the nitty-gritty, could you maybe frame it up for us, how do you define productivity and why does being more productive matter?

Laura Stack
Well, for me, productivity is all about value-creation, so I don’t look at it as, “How many things did you get checked off your list during the day? How many hours did you sit there? How much running around and how busy you were?” But the value that you created in the time that you spent, so it literally is a ratio, if it could be measured, which is easier to do in manufacturing because you can count widgets, sales, you can have quotas. It’s a little bit harder when you’re looking at office jobs, leadership roles, HR, so we’d like to look at the impact, or the result, or the value, or the profitability, or however your job is measured.

So, I like to think of it as achieving maximum results in minimum time. So, whatever that ratio would be, would be the most effective. So, if you have 10 things to do, I know, wouldn’t that be great? If you had that 10 things to do and you did nine of them, but left the one that was the most important, or would have the most impact on your business or your job or your team, that would not be a productive day even though you got nine of the 10 things done. I’d much prefer you get three things done if one of them includes one of those high-value activities.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s kind of fun about that flexible definition of productivity and creating value and achieving the goal is, I guess, there are times, maybe it’s a vacation or just sort of season of life in which the value you’re going for is refreshment and rejuvenation and rest.

Laura Stack
That’s right. That’s why it depends how you measure it because there are times where the most productive thing you can do is take care of yourself, or relax, or be with…spend time with a child, or go on vacation. And so, those times of “goofing off” certainly are not at all very valuable. So, productivity can be measured in every aspect of our lives. You could even be productive at the gym. I mean, it’s easy to waste an hour at the gym, just lull around, wander, hardly work, don’t sweat, talk to your friends, a couple half-hearted leg lifts. I mean, I can kill an hour at the gym but it certainly wasn’t a very productive use of my time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, so you got a number of books, and the title I love the most is “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do.” Boy, I can relate to that.

Laura Stack
Yes, very popular. Everyone loves that title. My first book was titled “Leave the Office Earlier” so that is probably the only title that ever beat “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do.” It makes people say, “Yup, that’s me. I need that book.” So, yeah, that’s a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so the subtitle there is to, “Reduce Tasks, Increase Results, and Save 90 Minutes a Day.” Can you maybe walk through, yeah, how does one do exactly that?

Laura Stack
Well, I mean, there’s a lot that goes into that, and of course we won’t be able to go into every aspect in this time together. But, essentially, saving 90 minutes a day, what I want people to really focus on is, let’s say, I am working 65 hours a week. I mean, I am just exhausted, all this COVID stuff, I’m in my home office all the time, and I’m putting in extra hours. Whereas, other people right now are slow, almost some of them bored, I have heard, and trying to fill eight hours a day.

So, for some people, that definition means if you’re working a ton of hours, “How can I be more efficient? How can I systematize? How can I automate? How can I streamline, delegate, eliminate?” So, the goal there would be to, “If I can save an hour a day, maybe I can get it down to 60 hours a week, so that would be a great outcome, and so now I get out of the office a little bit earlier.” So, maybe that’s your goal, versus other people who are clocking their 40 hours, maybe they actually want to accomplish greater results than they’re doing now in the same amount of time.

So, for some people, it means actually reducing the number of hours they’re working, and for other people it could mean increasing the value that they produce in the time that they’re working. And so, every person will approach that question just a little bit differently. But, ultimately, that’s the whole goal of the concept of what to do when there’s too much to do. And I break it down into six different steps, and I’m not sure how much of that you want to go through in our time together just in terms of what I call the productivity workflow formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I would love to spend a minute or two on each of these steps so we can get oriented and think about things the way you do.

Laura Stack
Okay. Great. Yeah, so I look at work coming in as a constant flow. So, if you can picture it as a circle with arrows, sadly, the workflow never stops, correct? So, it just continues to come in. So, first, we have to figure out, step one is, “What do we need to do?” You have to determine what to do. So, how do you get your arms around the world of all of your to-dos?

And for many people, that’s a challenge because they have some things written on a sticky note, they have some things that somebody texted them, and they’ve got their email, and they’ve got calls and voicemails, plus, now they have social media, and I’ve got an inbox here, and an inbox there. Many people feel very disjointed with many of their inputs living in several different places, and they don’t really have one system, one way that they can get their arms around everything so that they can even determine what to do. So, that’s the first step is getting that piece organized.

And then after that, you’ve got to figure out, “When am I going to do it?” And so, there is a prioritization, there’s a scheduling, there’s a “What can I realistically fit in? And what is going to get done and when?” So, that’s step two. And then step three is, “How do we actually focus?” Well, we know what to do, we’ve got a little block of time, and we sit down to work on it, and “krrrk” our attention is all over the place. So, I really believe that concentration is a long-lost art, especially when many of us are trying to work at home, it becomes even more challenging.

And then step four is we have to find the information that we need to do the work, and that’s where, if people have overflowing inboxes, poor filing methods, and they can’t put their hands on what they want when they want it, they get stuck on that step. And then the last piece of the loop, and there are six steps, but the fifth step in the loop is to close the loop. So, it’s actually getting work done, turning things in, being efficient, actually trying to maximize how efficiently they can do work. I’ve had people in my office actually watching me work, and so there are systems pieces that you can use to tighten up your efficiency.

And then the last step is managing your own capacity. So, if you got a really bad night, sleepless night because you didn’t make your bed maybe, no, I’m kidding, you’ve got a bad night’s sleep, you’re not going to feel like being energetic and productive. You’re going to want to put your head on the desk and take a nap.

And so, self-care becomes a critically important component of managing one’s productivity. So, that’s kind of the foundation on which everything is based. Without those proper self-care habits, you will not have the energy that you need to devote to your work, to your family, to your loved ones, etc. So, that, in a nutshell, Pete, is the productivity workflow formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. I dig it. Well, let’s dig, in particular, to steps two and three, the prioritization and then scheduling, and then the three, the focused concentration bit. So, when it comes to prioritization, I mean, I’m a big believer in the 80/20 Rule and, indeed, some things truly are 16 times as important as others. But how do you go about thinking, asking the questions, making the calls in terms of, “Ah, yes, this is, in fact, way more important than that”? How do you get there?

Laura Stack
Well, I think we all intuitively know what is more important than what. The problem that I see with the way that people prioritize is their tendency to select tasks incorrectly, and there’s a lack of awareness about what people choose to do next. It doesn’t really matter what system you use to prioritize. I mean, I use Microsoft Outlook Tasks because I like being able to drag a task up and down in the tasks list and re-prioritizing very quickly and just accomplishing things in order of importance.

It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to use Tasks. Some people use paper list with the top three sticky note. They put on a sticky note the top three things they need to do in a day. Other people use an app, Todoist. There are so many different methodologies that people use to track their priorities. What I like to look at, instead, is your typical pattern in how you’re going about, creatively procrastinating about not doing those priorities.

So, there are five main kind of priority personality archetypes that I see. The first type of person picks things based upon what they feel like working on. So, you know that there’s this really important thing that you need to do, but people who have this personality tend to pick things based on what’s fun, or easy, or quick because they like that shot of dopamine they get when they check something off a list, and it gives them this real sense of accomplishment, right? So, they’re busy, busy bees. These people just check stuff off because they love that, but they are purposely leaving the thing that is the most important, and they leave the office each day, going, “Ugh, I did it again. I still didn’t get to that really important project.” And, of course, they could but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The next type of person does things based on how they appear. So, in accounting, we call this FIFO, right, first-in first-out. So, this type of person is a reactive person. They react to things as they come in. They get a text, they answer it. They get an email, they answer it. They get a call, they answer it, right? So, they are pretty much letting other people control their schedules, which other people are really good at doing, and they’re not proactive instead.

The third type of person prioritizes based on who’s yelling loudest. This type of person does not have good boundaries. They don’t have good verbal skills around letting people know what the expectations are, what they can do, what they can’t, what they will do, what they won’t. And they allow that old adage “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” and people have their number, and they know they are too nice, and so they end up doing things that are not the most important priority.

The fourth type of person tends to do things as they think of them. So, this type of person kind of talks to themselves constantly. And as they think of things, “Ooh, I need to call Pete about that call next week. Ooh, I’m going to get on and talk to Pete.” And they just make the call. So, as they think of things, they just do it regardless of whether or not it’s the most important thing, and it tends to be because they’re afraid they’re going to forget if they don’t do it, even though they know it’s not necessarily a high priority right then.

And then the last person does things by the order of the sticky note. And so, this type of person has a very random approach. It could look like they have ADHD when you look at them. They have, like, 17 browser tabs open, and seven half-started emails, and four Excel spreadsheets, and two Word documents, and it’s just like, “What are you working on?” And they’re like, “I don’t know,” they just got stuff everywhere. They’ve got papers lined up in a certain order, “Ooh, here’s that business card. I should call this guy.” It’s just all over. So, just a different, disorganized type of approach.

So, those, Pete, are the five patterns of people that I see, and they’re kind of quasi-prioritization methods. So, we really need to think about our patterns, have awareness around them to be able to say, “I’m doing it. I’m doing it. Oh, my gosh, I’m doing it.” Catch yourself doing it, stop yourself from doing that, and really work on what I call triage. It’s just like in a hospital when a patient shows up. They don’t necessarily get treated first in the ER, right? I mean, you could sit there for four hours because other people come in with issues that are more urgent and more critical than yours. And it doesn’t matter if you say, “Well, I was here first,” right? It doesn’t matter, “This patient has a higher need so there’s more value if we treat this patient.”

So, if you think of your office like an emergency room and prioritize, it sounds bad, based on which patient would die first, that’s really the way to look at things. Because if you don’t do this step today, right, this step three days from now is going to be behind, and so we really have to look at what’s going to cause suffering in our lives and work on it that way. As humans, we like to do, emotionally, what we like. And that, by and large, is a really bad way to prioritize, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, this is so excellent in that, you know, most people, myself included when I tackle this issue, it’s sort of like, “Okay. Well, here are the paradigms by which you might assess important tasks that are worthy of high priority. So, maybe it’s the result that you’re after divided by the effort required, like the hours, and maybe it’s profit per hour, or maybe it’s like the one thing question.”

Laura Stack
Yeah, it could be, and it depends on your job, yeah, how that could be measured.

Pete Mockaitis
But in practice, when the rubber meets the road, day in, day out, you know, you might know that, but if you don’t know that, I guess, that’s the first step. Have those conversations with your boss and take a moment, take a breath, do some thinking about what really, really, really matters. But then, in your day-to-day reality, you got to watch out and play defense in terms of these tendencies none of which are conducive to doing what actually matters.

Laura Stack
Yeah. And that assumes, of course, that you have had a conversation with your manager because, if not, you are guessing at best, and you’re going to choose things based on emotion, which is generally not a good way to make decisions. So, assuming you’ve had those conversations, you have to understand, I call it PROI, personal return on investment, “What is my personal return on my investment of time in doing this activity for my results, my value as an employee?”

So, if your company is pumping all these resources into you, you have to look at, “Is what I’m doing, right now, the highest and best use of my time that has the greatest personal return on my investment of time right now?” I mean, when the rubber hits the road, everybody has all these fancy systems, and they’re all trying to 1, 2, 3, A, B, C. It’s like, oh, my gosh, just really looking at if you had to just put everything aside. And a lot of people are experiencing this. Projects that were pet projects, all of a sudden, there is no time for that, and we are focused on critical work. And when it all gets stripped away, that’s the stuff that we need to really be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, could you share, then…so that’s the prioritization bit in terms of not falling for five suboptimal approaches that we often fall for in terms of prioritizing and scheduling. Well, how do we maintain that focused concentration piece?

Laura Stack
Well, I look at…it depends on the environment, it depends on what your goal is. And if you are a person who needs, in my case, I like silence to focus, whereas my 18-year old son has music going when he’s working on homework. And I personally can’t understand how someone can listen to music because it makes me, in my head, sing along and do the lyrics and all that. But he really just gets in the zone, and he’s able to hone in on his work when he’s got that outside music going.

And so, part of focus is kind of looking at you personally, what are the things that are distracting to you, because you may not find the music distracting? So, I look at kind of four different categories, having each person analyze this for themselves. I use the acronym TYPE for types of distractions that prevent us from focusing.

One is technology, the T. So, having your cell phone, not just on vibrate where “boop boop” it goes off on the desk, and you have this obsessive-compulsive desire to check it. We have this insatiable curiosity. We have to know, “Ooh, what is it?” But if you’ve got your email notifications going off, your phone going off, apps, notifications, different beeps and buzzes and whistles, it’s not a wonder we can’t focus and get an article written for a half hour, or whatever it is that we’re trying to do.

So, we have to create kind of a bubble around ourselves. Forward the phone, turn the phone on stun, you know. It needs to be off not just on buzz or vibrate. I have all my notifications turned off in my email. If you go into your options, the default in Outlook, for example, is that every time you get one email, you get four alerts. It plays a sound, puts an envelope in the system tray, you get an alert, a pop-up alert, and it has the cursor spin. Really? We need four alerts for one email?

So, if you go in and turn those off, at first it kind of freaks most people out because, well, they can actually focus for more than six minutes if they keep their inbox minimized, and they’re not checking them as they’re coming in. But then, better yet, you can set a rule that says, “Hey, every time I get an email from this person,” maybe it’s your manager, or someone in your team, or an important client, “then I want you to play a sound.” So, you begin to use technology to help you determine what’s important and not be distracted by the rest.

The Y is yourself. You’re distracted. Are you doing it to yourself? So, people who follow trails on the internet, or, “Ooh, I wonder what this is?” and click there, and now they’re looking at this, and, “Oh, here’s a video. Let me watch this,” right? We, sometimes, are our own worst enemies because we just go down a huge trail of distraction. And so, keeping yourself focused, if you have to put your dog away because you’re going to play with your dog. You’ve got to close the browser while you’re doing this because you’re going to be tempted to click on Facebook. I mean, whatever it is for you, you have to use a lot of self-discipline in that area.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let me hear a bit more about that. So, self-discipline, you know, kind of put it away, close it. What are some other approaches to prevent yourself from running wild?

Laura Stack
Yeah. My dad, the colonel, he used to say, “Discipline is doing what you know you need to do even if you don’t feel like it.” And so, figuring out how to train yourself to do the task that you dread because those are the ones you naturally are going to procrastinate on. And we can find all kinds of things suddenly to do, “Oh, I need to go throw on a little lingerie,” when we’re faced with a task that we don’t feel like working on, but that we know we need to focus on.

And so, it could be doing a leading task, it could say, “Okay, I’m just going to start this for five minutes. And if I don’t feel like doing it in five minutes, I’m going to make a cup of tea and I’m going to come back and try it again for another five minutes.” So, sometimes some people just need to get a little momentum to get that self-motivation and get off that hump. Maybe it’s a little reward. Some people’s discipline gets better if they know there’s kind of a light at the end of the tunnel. Instead of calling your best friend, you’d say to yourself, “Once I complete this task and focus on X, then I will call my best friend,” or whatever is rewarding to you. It might be a quick walk around the block, “Maybe I’ll eat this piece of dark chocolate,” whatever it is that will help you be more disciplined.

So, discipline still is being able to do something after the feeling of excitement when you first created the task has passed. Now, it’s like, “Okay, that was fun being creative. Now, I actually need to get the work done.” So, those are a few important things in discipline.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s great if you could just get real honest with yourself in terms of, “What’s happening is I don’t want to do this thing and, thusly, I’m tempted to do these other things. Hey, it just seems to be…” As oppose to…because I think it’s so… I’ve done it. It’s so possible to deceive yourself, like, “That laundry really needs to get done now, Laura.”

Laura Stack
Especially at home. We can find all kinds of things to do. And having structure and treating your workday as if you’re in the office, I think, is really important for discipline. I have worked from home for 28 years, and I never show up in my “office” in my robe and slippers. It just doesn’t make me feel sharp. I’m not on top of my game. It makes me feel lazy. And so, it just depends on the person. Whereas, other people go, “Gosh, Laura, that’s not me at all. When I work from home, and I stay in my robe all day, you should see me go.”

So, you do have to kind of understand your personality, your style, your nature, and work with that too, sometimes it’s not discipline. It could be energy level. Maybe you’re not a morning person, so people think, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m lazy. I lack motivation. I just can’t get going.” Well, maybe it’s because you’re not a morning person, and you are trying to do the wrong task at the wrong time. That’s not a matter of discipline at all. It’s a matter of energy management. Maybe you’re better at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. Or some people get a rush of energy at 7:00 p.m. So, maybe adjusting your schedule to work around some of those constraints will help you a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see. So, there’s TYPE, and we get the technology, we got the yourself. And how about the PE?

Laura Stack
And P is people. I mean, you could be so much more productive if it weren’t for all these people, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Laura Stack
So, I have kids, like many of us do, and they knew from a very young age, they’re grown now, our youngest is 18. But they knew from a very young age, if mom had, I call them cube guards, like they use in the airport when they’re cleaning a restroom, those tapes that they pull across, I had one of those installed in my hallway to my office. So, if the tape was pulled, even when they were five and six years old, my boys knew, “Don’t come into mom’s office because she’s on a call or she’s concentrating.” We always told them, “Someone better be bleeding if you come through the cube guard, through the tape.”

So, you have to really talk with the people in your family so that they understand, “Hey, this is work.  I’m working. Like, I’m not at home.” Yes, we have more flexibility, I think. And, certainly, if we have young children who are being homeschooled and things like that, we have very different constraints that we’re dealing with. But, by and large, we have to set limits with people in our lives. My mother always just guilty of…she’s retired, right? So, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon, “I’ll just call Laura.” So, it took some time to not hurt her feelings but explained, “Listen, I want to talk with you,” and, “Can we talk in the evenings because I’m working? This is not a good use of my time.”

I, personally, don’t want to be back in my office working at night. Now, maybe other people like it that way. They like being able to blur the boundaries, and they would rather have some personal time with a loved one in the middle of the day, and then do some work at night. Is it right, wrong, good, bad? No. It’s just different, and so you have to look at the people. And when we’re back in traditional offices, a lot of that have to do with coworkers who just drop in, “Hey, got a minute?” And so, letting them know, “Hey, can I call you at 2:00? Or, can you send me a meeting request? Can you get me on my calendar so I can give that some thought?” Being able to kind of push back in a way that says yes to the person but no to the interruption so that we can stay focused on those things that are critically important.

And then the last one is the environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about the environment.

Laura Stack
Well, I work in a home office, and so I have a dog, so if I am working, and a postal, UPS comes to the door and rings the bell, my dog is going to set off barking, and I’ve got to go get the dog, take care of the package. Boom! I just had an interruption. So, we have a sign underneath our ring doorbell, strangely, that says, “Do not ring please.”

And so, when they don’t ring the bell, my dog doesn’t bark, and I’m not interrupting my flow, my concentration. I can go get that package whenever. In other words, we allow things in the environment to dictate our schedules, and we react to things as they happen. So, we have to just notice in our environments, just look around, listen, smell, see, figure out those things that are really drawing your attention, and see if you can proactively put some things in place to keep that from happening again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s excellent. And I think packages are ideal there in terms of, “Do we need a knock at the door or a ring at the doorbell? Or, can we just make that instruction clear to drop it, leave it, it’s okay, UPS My Choice, whatever.”

Laura Stack
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Inform them, “Well, this is what’s up.”

Laura Stack
Yeah, I can get five packages a day, literally. So, if I’m, one at a time, going to the door to stop my dog from having a meltdown and get a package five times versus when my day is over, one time, I’m going to get five packages. That is a far better use of my time, and it allows me to keep my focus. So, you have to look at every time your attention got pulled in another direction, “What was it? What was that cause?”

I have beautiful Bay windows in my office. I don’t even face that way, Pete. I face the wall, and the windows are actually to my back because people walk by, I’m daydreaming, beautiful sunny weather here in Denver, and I get distracted. My mom says I have OSS. She calls that “Ooh, shiny” syndrome. So, I have to really set myself up so that all of those external stimulus aren’t grabbing my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. Well, Laura, we’re covering a lot of good stuff, having a lot of fun. Maybe we’ll just rapid fire, can you give us, perhaps, your top one or two best practices and worst practices for folks finding themselves in a work-from-home situation for the first time?

Laura Stack
Yeah, I think structure is really key. If you have never worked from home, some people aren’t prepared for it. It can be lonely. It can be mentally boring because you don’t have all the same activity, and you find yourself, “Huh. Wow, I didn’t have that commute so I have some extra time here.” So, I would, first of all, resist the urge to cram more in, right? In other words, if you left the house at 7:00 to start work at 8:00, still start work at 8:00. Don’t let that time creep kind of make your day from eight hours into 10 hours. That’s very easy to do in a home office.

So, I would then say set some boundaries because it’s very easy to let your work life blur into your personal life, because now you’re in an office that might be your bedroom, or the dining room, or the kitchen. And so, we have to try to put a little bit of structure in so that we can know when we’re working so that we can stay focused and when we’re not. And when we’re not working, we don’t want to be, “Oh, I’ll just do a couple more emails,” and, boom, here we are back at work again. So, as much as possible, I would try to keep some routine and some structure.

I’m looking forward to beauty salons being open again, for example, so I can go get my nails done and my hair. But, you know, I never do those things during the day. I treat my office like it’s any other workplace even though I’m at home, and I go do those things when I’m off work, on my lunch hour, or on the weekends just like anybody else would do. So, I think trying to create a little bit of routine around that is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Laura Stack
Well, one of my favorites is Drucker, Peter Drucker, who wrote “The Effective Executive,” which, if you have not read it yet, it is just an evergreen book. I’ve read it probably 30 times when I was working on my MBA many, many years ago. But he said, “There’s nothing so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you.

Laura Stack
That’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Laura Stack
Well, I am always looking at “How can we create greater value?” And I think that by looking at “What is more valuable?” but flipside to that, to me, is getting into groups with your team and with your boss, and asking the opposite question, which is kind of a qualitative study that anybody can do in the workplace to say, “What are the things that we’re doing around here that don’t add value, that waste our time?” And you got to have a little bit of thick skin if you decide you want to do this type of research internally because people are going to tell you, they’ll let you know. And looking at, “What are some processes that we put into place maybe three years ago that aren’t necessary? What is a document that we create that nobody even looks at?”

I have a newsletter that I used to do monthly, and it took me a day to write the newsletter. It was a 2500-word article, I did links, I did polls, I did research. I mean, it was a really great newsletter. And one year, I got the flu here in Denver and couldn’t do the newsletter, and told my team, “I’m sorry, we’re just not going to be able to do it this month. And I know you’re going to hear it from people. Everybody is going to complain that we haven’t done the newsletter.” I got three people who even noticed that it didn’t come out.

And in asking people, they said, “You know what, it just is so long. It takes so much time for me to go through it, and you’re a productivity company.” I’m like, “Oh, right. So, maybe we just need a paragraph.” So, I switched from one day a month to 20 minutes a week. Engagement shot up. Readership shot up. So, don’t keep doing the things the way that you have been doing them. If you’re doing it the same way two years later, it probably needs to be revamped. So, those are my favorite kind of studies to do and lead with – workplace teams because they yield usually some pretty dramatic results.

Pete Mockaitis
And beyond “The Effective Executive,” any other favorite books you’d highlight?

Laura Stack
Well, I would recommend reading non-business books. I like to read classics. I have a collection of books from the Easton Press, which I spent…well, there’s a hundred of them, and you buy them one a month, and so it took me a very long time to complete the collection. But they’re all leather bound, and it was what they wrote it on, the top 100 books. So, “Gulliver’s Travel,” and Charles Dickens, and “Pride and Prejudice.” And so, I think it’s really important for us to kind of expand outside of the typical business book that we really read. And read other things that aren’t in your field that really expands your creativity and field of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Laura Stack
Well, I told you I love Microsoft Outlook, so that is my favorite tool to organize tasks. But I have a really nifty text-replacement utility that I like that’s called ShortKeys. So, basically, you code pieces of texts that you type all the time. Like, ST prints out my street name in any application, on the web, in a Word document. So, I actually type very quickly because a lot of the words that I use all the time I use as ShortKeys, so it really helps you fly and never retype the same thing twice.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate, and folks quote back to you often?

Laura Stack
Oh, I always use creating maximum results in minimum time, that’s productivity. What is your personal return on your investment of time in doing certain activities? There are certain philosophies that I have, I guess, around that productivity workflow formula that a lot of people use.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Laura Stack
Well, they’re welcome to connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever, but my website is TheProductivityPro.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Laura Stack
Well, I would just remind everyone to really watch their own energy level. If you’re not eating well, sleeping well, exercising, taking care of yourself, a lot of people think that when they’re busy and they don’t have time, that that is one of the things that gets cut. And I think that’s exactly the wrong approach because the better you feel and the more you take care of yourself, the greater your energy level will be to focus on other people and your works.

So, really resist that tendency to just be a bump on a log. Sometimes the last thing we feel like doing when we come home from work is some exercise, but, gosh, a quick few walks around the block will give you so much more energy that you need going into that evening to go into your second shift of home life and getting some of those things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, thanks so much. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck in all your productive adventures.

Laura Stack
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I appreciate the offer.