KF #2. Action Oriented Archives - Page 3 of 9 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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

Eric Papp
Hey, Pete, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to dig into your wisdom and I know one thing you’re excited about is the Kettlebell. I like your shirt. Could you read it for the audience who’s listening?

Eric Papp
Oh, man. It says, “I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Kettlebell,” which, of course, is a play on the SNL skit with Will Ferrell where he’s talking about more cowbell.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s right. And what do you love about the Kettlebell and what should we know if we’re at home and not going into the gym, thinking about workouts?

Eric Papp
Oh, man. It combines all three: strength, endurance, and flexibility. And it is probably one of the most effective pieces of equipment, bar none. Kettlebell swings to build endurance and flexibility, Turkish get-ups to build overall strength, and it’s incredible in terms of you do a 10, 20 minutes and the return on it on time is phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, now you got my attention. The return in terms of energy, in terms of strength, they’re feeling amazing. What kind of return are we talking about?

Eric Papp
Yeah, all of the above in terms of returning. And they’ve done some studies, like when someone is doing a Kettlebell swing based upon your metabolic rate and all that stuff, it’s like equivalent to running like a six-minute mile.

And then one of the great things, obviously, in the situation that we’re in now is you can do it from the comforts of your own home. And that’s also, by the time it takes you to go in your car and go to the gym and come back, you can already be done with your training.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I like effective, I like returns, and we’re talking about just that productivity, and “Better Thinking vs. More Effort” is a title of one of your keynotes. That sounds right up our alley. So, tell us, what’s the big idea there?

Eric Papp
Yeah, better thinking versus more effort. You know, I think so often than not, as knowledge workers, and especially being here in America, there’s always a pressure to do more, get in there early, stay later, climb the ladder. And that is good in a sense, and even for companies too, “I’ll take on more projects. Let’s do more initiatives. Let’s get more joint ventures going.” And that can be good to some degree but then also, it breathes a lot of complexity, it breathes a lot of, “Okay, we got our hand in a lot of different things. What are we really focused on? Where are we really moving the needle?”

And better thinking is really thinking about taking a step back and identifying the two or three projects that we can really move the mile as opposed to trying to move a hundred things an inch. And that’s really where it comes down to, is to be able to subtract and to simplify and then get to a higher level of performance or productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds great. And so, by doing better thinking, you’re able to exert less effort and get similar or superior results. Could you paint a picture of that for us, maybe the case of a particular person or client or study? Like, just how much is possible if we could go down this route?

Eric Papp
So, on a macro level, on a company personal level that everybody knows, Apple, Steve Jobs, right? Listeners out there, probably 70% or 80% of your listeners have some form of Apple product whether it’s an iPhone or MacBook Pro, whatever it is. Steve Jobs, in a sense, was forced out of his own company that he creates. He comes back right around 1996-1997. In that timeframe, Apple is just on the ropes. And, once again, they were trying to do too much. They had their hand in everything: scanners, printers, you name it.

And he comes back, and a family friend asked him, they said, “Steve, what desktop computer should we buy? You’ve got 17 of them that Apple offers.” And he says, “Shoot, I don’t even know.” So, he cut down all the desktop computers and only did one. He says, “Okay, we’re going to cut everything out, all the desktops, and we’re just going to produce one.”

He really did a great example of better thinking versus more effort, and it requires that ability to take a to step back to really do the hard thinking, and that’s a lot of times what we don’t want to do because we want the quick fix, and then we want to just kind of stay busy, and then that kind of consumes us, consumes our time. And then look what happened to Apple. If you had stock, if you bought Apple stock in the early 2000s or even late 1990s, it’s incredible. My father-in law had Apple stock, he still does, and it’s just mind boggling the return he’s made on that. And then a large part comes from Steve Jobs coming back, applying better thinking versus more effort.

Pete Mockaitis
And that does resonate in terms of whether it’s a business with their products or an individual with the to-do list, just what you can accomplish there.

Eric Papp
Oh, yeah, I was going to say, on a micro level, so a colleague of ours, James Clear, he wrote the book Atomic Habits.

Eric Papp
He started off 2011-2012 just writing a newsletter. Would write one on Monday, I think, would write it on Thursday. From the first year, he had, I want to say, around 100,000 subscribers, and then that’s all he did. And I think he had a day job at the same time and just kept building on that, building on that, then writes a book. And then his newsletter just went over one million subscribers, and it’s absolutely mind boggling, right? So, that’s a great testament to, okay, sticking with the one thing and really getting good at that and staying the course.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so I’m into that. And tell us then, with this better thinking, are there some key questions in terms of identifying what is the stuff that makes the impact and what is the stuff that we should cut?

Eric Papp
First thing I look at is subtraction, right? One of the questions we ask ourselves is, “Hey, if I stop doing this, would anything happen? Would anybody notice?” because a lot of times we do things out of obligation or we do things because, “Oh, that’s what the person did before me,” or, “Oh, that’s what I’ve always done.” So, that’s the great question to ask ourselves, “If I stop doing this, or these activities, what’s the impact?”

And a lot of times there’s not an impact. And so, that’s a great way because we want to start to allow ourselves that room, that space. It’s kind of like I think it was Claude Bristol who said, “It’s the space between the notes that creates the music.” And I think we really need more of that, that ability to not fill our day up with everything and anything because we really need…things are going to come up as they naturally do, but also we need that time to just going for a walk, let that thinking time to take a step back.

And by not filling our calendar up with everything, it allows that room for us to really start to process and analyze, “Okay, these projects, are they really important? Are we really making progress or are we just kind of going through the motions?” So, the first part I would say is to subtract. The second part would be really good to look at is to simplify and to see, “Okay, of all the complexity, how can we make this simpler? How can we make this easier? How can we reduce the friction to get the result that we want?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I love that. And that’s intriguing in terms of, “Would anybody notice if I stopped doing this?” I guess, how do you get to the answer to that? One, you could just try it, try to stop doing it and see if anyone reaches out to you. Other ways you’d recommend in terms of, I think if you’re in organizations and collaborating with folks, there can be some resistance in terms of, “Well, that’s just what we do. This is what we’ve always done,” or, “This is how this works. That is the process”? So, any thoughts on how when there’s other stakeholders and people in the mix, you interact with them to get things moving?

Eric Papp
I use a couple tools that I created. One the effectiveness process. Another tool called organizing, clarify your thinking to really get the goal, impact and focus down, because a lot of times in organizations, people just launch into projects and they don’t know what’s the desired outcome. They don’t know what success looks like. They don’t know what’s the time involved, “Who else can we collaborate with?” things that you think that are basic. And then the person gets tasked with something, and then they’re not fully doing it, and then the manager gets upset or the director gets upset. That’s where we get back to, like I was saying earlier, moving a hundred things an inch.

So, I think right from the start of it, it’s just for all of us to spend more time in the asking ourselves a question, “Okay, what’s my desired outcome? What does success look like? What’s the impact if I do this? What’s the impact if I don’t do this? And then, do I have the bandwidth right now to carry this out? What level of a priority is this for me? Is this a top three or is this just a good idea?” Because the key thing we always have to remember as human beings is we will always generate more ideas than there is the ability and our capacity to execute them.

And that is where I see kind of the downfall. Even as entrepreneurs, managers, it doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur or it doesn’t matter if you’re inside of a company, but we’ll always have good ideas. But always remember that our capacity to execute all of them, we don’t have that. And so, we really have to be diligent of selecting just a few and then really going deep with what we’ve selected.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, we’ve zeroed in on what to eliminate. And then I’d like to get some indicators then on, let’s just imagine, okay, we had a hundred ideas or there’s a hundred things vying for our attention. And, hey, great job, we successfully eliminated half of them, which is cool. And so, we are twice as clear as we were before. Nonetheless, how do you recommend that we zero in from, I guess, the semi-finalists to those top three?

Eric Papp
Yeah, great question. And it goes with what is our desired future. What’s the future that we’re living into? At any point in our lives, we’re always thinking, we’re either in three different mindsets. We’re in the past, we’re like, “Oh, man, 2019 was such a great year, and we were gathering and we did this, and our company I did this,” or we are in the present, “Okay, what am I doing right now? What’s important right now?” That acronym WIN, “What’s important now?” Or, we’re in the future, we’re thinking about. “Hey, where do I want to be?”

And sometimes we have to be very mindful of how we’re thinking because sometimes we’re dominated by the past, we’re, “Oh, my gosh, this is so bad. I can’t. I wish it was this time. I wish it was…” And so, asking ourselves, “Okay, what’s the desired future that I want?” and then just backtracking it. It’s, “Okay, what’s the desired future? And then now what are the projects that I think will get us there?” And a lot of times we overestimate what we can do in a day but yet we underestimate what we can do in a year.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s true. And, well, talking about those timeline horizons with the day and the year, you’ve got something you’ve created called the Weekly Strategy Sheet. Tell us, how do we think about that and use it to plan priorities?

Eric Papp
Yeah. So often than not, where this kind of came from, Pete, is when you ask people, you would say, like, “Hey, what did you do last week?” “Oh,” they’d look at you and it’s kind of like, “Oh,” they really couldn’t give a definitive answer, it’s like, “Oh, I got a lot of emails done. I was in a lot of meetings.” And so, this is really to give people a high-level overview, a high-level strategy of, “Okay, what’s most important this week?”

First of all, there’s three parts. There’s past, present, and future. And the idea is, okay, we celebrate our past, we connect with our present here, and then we commit to the future. And so, the idea is, over time, as we’re planning our week, is to see some synergy between the past, present, and future. And we identify, so in the past, celebrate the past, “Okay, great. What are the top three or five accomplishments I accomplished last week that were very meaningful to me in my business or in my role? Okay, great. I’m going to list them down,” because that’s going to give us confidence.

Our confidence comes from seeing the progress and what matters most to us, and whether that’s personal or professional. So, great, we can see that. When you write it down, it helps us keep moving forward. But a lot of times, in our culture, we don’t. We focus on where we are and where we want to go. And I call that, you got to be careful because that’s kind of frustrationville, right? That’s comparison, that’s, “Oh, man, well, I see this person on social media. Oh, I see this.” So, I get people to take a look back and to see all the progress that they’re making and have this on a weekly basis.

And the middle part then is we’re looking to really kind of connect with the present, “Okay, what are my top three weekly priorities this week? If everything goes to H-E Double Hockey Sticks, what’s the three most important things I want to get done, I want to accomplish?” and then the future. And I need to future-plan it, I use the OKR Method, Objective and Key Results, “What do you want accomplished and how you’re going to get it done?”

And, like I said, the whole idea of using the Weekly Strategy Sheet, it takes under 20 minutes to plan it out but it’s so important because a lot of times, as knowledge workers, we don’t plan our weeks. We just go from one week to the next, and we kind of kid ourselves that, “Oh, something will be different,” or, “Oh, this will turn around.” But if we don’t really get a handle on the planning aspect, then the execution kind of falls short.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious, so we got the Weekly Strategy Sheet, and so then you can reference it at the end of the week. It’s written, it’s there, you see, “Hey, this is what I accomplished. That’s cool.” And you zero in on those top three priorities. How do you think about it in terms of, I guess, scheduling or calendaring or putting time against those things within the week?

Eric Papp
Well, you got to have a day where you actually spend time to plan. Having a planning day, I like to do mine on a Friday. Sometimes I do it on a Thursday late afternoon. But when you have that time to really devote to the planning, and you’re not trying to fill up your week either. You’re not trying to. You’re just saying, “Okay, what are the three most important things?” And, also, too, those three most important things, you might get those done in two days, and that might very well be, and that’s okay. But it’s really to give you a better sense of clarity and organization.

Pete Mockaitis
So, within that planning time, and so it sounds like this isn’t a 10-minute operation but it’s a bit more in-depth. What are you doing with that planning time?

Eric Papp
Yeah, you’re going from left to right: past, present, and future. So, I’ve got my Weekly Strategy Sheet, it’s sitting right here on my desktop, and this is the week of January 4th or the 8th, and, boom, okay, I celebrate the past, I write down my top five accomplishments, and I make some personal or two personals in there as well, and then I check in with the present, “What are my top three weekly priorities? And then, what’s for the future, my objective and key results?” And that can change as well.

But you’ll see when you ask people, “Hey, do you plan your week?” A lot of people don’t and then some people that do kind of quickly plan their week. The more that we spend time planning our week and really being diligent about that, and we’ll get better. A, you’ll get better at it, and, B, you’ll be able to get your priorities done and things done with a lot greater intention. And that’s kind of the cool thing and you’ll actually have more time. You’ll be accomplishing more and you’ll have more time when things come up that you’ll be more able to more flexible.

I think one of the things it gives people is it helps relieve some of this, the pressure of time that a lot of people are faced with nowadays.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you maybe do an hour with the Weekly Strategy Sheet planning process? Or, roughly how long are you doing there?

Eric Papp
Yeah, I’d say it’s about an hour. Sometimes I’ll go…what I’ll do is I’ll take two cracks at it. I’ll look at it Friday, and then I might look at it again on Monday and just make some adjustments just to make sure that, okay, I’m on track for this week. But it really gives me that structure and it really gives me that guidance. Because the other thing too is, as knowledge workers, our confidence, we have to protect that, right?

And so, if we know, as human beings, if I’m making progress, that I’m feeling good about myself, and so that’s so important. And knowing that I’m progressing towards where I want to go. And so, by doing this, it really helps us with that. So, yeah, it’s about an hour or some people have done it under an hour. I’m typically around that dependent upon how detail I get with it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you’re saying that that hour you spend there ends up saving significantly more than one hour during the course of executing the week.

Eric Papp
Tremendously, yeah. And I don’t remember who said it or where I read it, but it was something like, “For every minute you spend planning, it gives you 10 additional minutes,” or you save 10 additional minutes, or something like that, so, yeah, it’s kind of like that 10-to-1 ratio, yeah. And so, that’s why the planning is so important. And you get better at it too as you go on.

A lot of times we just start our day very reactive, right? When I say reactive, we just start our day, we watch the news, listen to the news, or we start our day reading emails, checking emails. And so, we’re not really proactive. We’re just responding to whatever is in our inbox, whatever is most pressing. And often what’s a priority gets masked with a hundred different other things.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks have a hard time letting go, because I think what could be perhaps a mistake, and you tell me about the biggest mistakes you see when folks are trying to manage their time, is you say, “Okay, these are the really critical priorities, and so we kind of go after those.” But we don’t really subtract, we don’t really let go of the other things, and then we’re just sort of get stressed because it’s like, “Well, no, I really identified and I’m totally clear that these things are critical but I’m still doing everything else.” So, if there’s an emotional hurdle or a hump or resistance, how do you recommend we get through that?

Eric Papp
You’re spot on, Pete. It’s absolutely right because I’ll see people are like, “Oh, I need more time,” or, “Oh, yeah.” Like, I’ll recommend or something, and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have time to read this now.” It’s like, “You’re not planning, you’re not prioritizing, that’s what it really comes down to because you’re trying to do everything, and you’re regarding everything has the same level of importance when it doesn’t. So, then you can’t multiply your output and you can’t leverage what you’re doing.”

So, one of the things I share with people is come at it with like a spirit of experimentation, experiment of like trial and error. A lot of times we want certainty as human beings, we want to know, “Hey, if I do this, is it going to give me this? Or, if I don’t do this, this will alleviate this problem.” And so, it’s like, “Hey, just test it out.”

And then, also, I share too the idea of when you give yourself less time, we tend to be more productive. A little story, a little sidenote on this, is when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he was President, he had an advisor, Harry Hopkins. And Harry, due to some health issues and such, could only work three to four hours a day. However, he was one of the most effective advisors for FDR. Winston Churchill went so far to call him like Lord Heart of the Matter. And the reason why is, hey, he only had three, four hours, so then, therefore, it really caused him to think deliberately about, “Okay, what am I going to do in the time that I do have?”

Because there’s that whole Parkinson’s Law, right? And work expands to fill the time necessary for its completion. So, if we give ourselves eight hours a day, we’re going to fill it with eight hours. If we give ourselves 10 hours, then we’re going to fill it with 10 hours, and so that’s a very interesting thing. And you’ll see this not only from a time standpoint but you’ll also see this from like a storage standpoint. Like, when somebody has a house, they went from like, let’s say, a thousand square foot house, or 2,000 square foot house. Well, over time, they’re going to fill that house up with stuff. Why? Because they’re just going to fill it up with stuff.

So, it takes a deliberate level of discipline and just mindfulness, too, of, “Okay, hey, we don’t want to be over cluttered. I don’t want to be overwhelmed. Just because I have the capacity doesn’t mean I need to buy more stuff.” So, that’s kind of the idea on that. But yet, somehow, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot by adding more and doing more.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And I know you’ve also zeroed in on some key habits of super achievers. Can you tell us what are they and how do we go about developing them?

Eric Papp
Yeah, I’d say some of the habits of super achievers, number one, is to get a real clear sense, and we’ve talked about this a little bit earlier, of what your future is. Knowing what it is that you want in your future, that’s a key thing. The second thing I would say is knowing what are some of your unique talents. Super achievers are very good at knowing what their unique talents are, and then spending time working on those talents.

And then, after a while, people take a step back and, “Wow, that’s a master at work. Wow, that person, they’re at the top of their field.” So, that’s a big thing. Knowing what you want and then knowing your talents, what you’re good at or what you like to do, and then really spending time learning more every day, and getting better. Just getting 1% better, reading more, talking to people. And then when you take a step back, then you see, then you’re kind of regarded as a super achiever. People are like, “Wow, that person, look at the gains they’ve made.”

And it’s not anything that they’re extraordinary. In some cases, talent is there already but other cases it’s the talent that has been cultivated over and over. It’s kind of like water dropping on a stone. It’s just that over and over and over, that repetitive nature, eventually it changes the stone and it forms the stone into something unique.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Eric, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Eric Papp
No, I think we’re right on track. We’re doing great.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Eric Papp
Well, one of them I already mentioned, and it’s a quote that’s just been top of mind. Our capacity to generate ideas will always be greater than our ability to execute.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Eric Papp
A lot of what I’m saying is in alignment with Richard Koch, his idea on The 80/20 Principle. And what I’m talking about is kind of from Pareto and going back and looking at that. So, a lot of that is if somebody wants to explore more or go deeper into being able to identify priorities and such, that’d be good to look at.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a great one and I think a lot of people have heard about the 80/20 rule, but he’s just like, “You’re not taking it nearly far enough.” Like, that’s the theme that hits it over and over again at each chapter. It’s like, “All right, man. You got it.” And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Eric Papp
I would say a notebook that I have. I’ve got the Priority Planner that I use. It’s something that I created. It’s in its third edition. And this keeps me focused because it’s the way I’ve created it. It’s three wins from yesterday so it causes me every day to write down what are my accomplishments from the exact day before. So, this helps keep my confidence high, and that’s one of the top things I need to protect as a knowledge worker.

And then it says three priorities for today. So, it’s asking me, “Okay, what are my three priorities?” And sometimes I just only identify one or two, and then in that way I feel great about accomplishing that. And the next part I have, “Stay curious, stay creative.” I ask questions throughout the day. I think that’s important, too, is write down questions.

When questions come up, just write them down if you don’t know the answer to them because a lot of times we get stuck with, “I don’t know how to figure that out.” And it’s very easy to kind of throw up our hands or say, “Oh, that’s somebody else’s responsibility. That’s somebody else’s department.” But just write down the question because there’s a great chance that you just kind of sit with it, you’ll get the idea, it will come to you later on.

Pete Mockaitis
And any other favorite habits for you personally?

Eric Papp
Spending time, taking care of yourself physically, whether it’s going for a walk. I go for occasional morning walks. I also cycle. I’ve got the Peloton here, so cycling. And that’s great because it’s low impact on the knees. And then, obviously, the Kettlebell, so alternating between cardio and strength. So, exercise is such an important part. And not so much just from like a vanity standpoint but so much from it clears your mind.

I can’t tell you, Pete, how many times where I‘ve just gone for a walk or I’ve gone on a bike ride, and then I’ll come back with like three great ideas that I’ll write down just of different things, or an email to ask somebody or a question. And then spending time in scripture with the Bible, just reading some of the New Testament. I do a little thing called Lectio Divina, and I’ll read a little small passage of the New Testament, and then just kind of ask questions, just journal from there.

And then, also, every day in the morning, I usually just start to write. I just kind of start typing or writing just to kind of empty, purge all the stuff in my head, whatever it is. It might be questions, it might be concerns, it might be what I’m excited about, just whatever it is, because I find that to be a wonderful clearing process so I can start my day be in the present moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you frequently?

Eric Papp
Well, I would say preparation begets confidence. And that comes from planning your day, right? When you’re prepared, when you’re planning your day, kind of know where you want to go, then when things do come up, then you have the flexibility to adapt. Oh, here’s something that I say, “Blessed are the flexible for they shall never be bent out of shape.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Eric Papp
And I think 2020 was a great reminder that we all had to have flexibility. It teaches us a lesson, flexibility. And, also, a lesson in resiliency. I think resiliency is such a wonderful, wonderful quality to have whether an entrepreneur or manager. The capacity to overcome difficulties quickly because there a lot of challenges that we experience and there’s a lot of challenges that we’re going to continue to experience as well.

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

Eric Papp
My website EricPapp.com. I’ve got some videos on there, the Weekly Strategy Sheet is on there so they can download that for free, and they’ll get the PDF version of that. And that’s just E-R-I-C-P-A-P-P.com.

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

Eric Papp
Hey, we’re starting off the year here in January. Ask yourself, how is this year going to be different for you? Not just from what are you going to do that’s going to be different? How are you going to get to your goals? How is it going to be different? And then, when you’ve got that planned, work it and get your outcome that you want.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eric, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck and success in your productivity and adventures and priorities, and keep on rocking.

Eric Papp
Hey, thanks, Pete. It’s been great, man. And thank you for doing what you do. Having this, doing over, what is this, episode 600 and something. Yeah, that’s incredible, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Eric Papp
Yeah, that’s a lot. So, that’s great. We need more of this in the world.

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.