How To Be More Productive At Work

I'd be curious to know uh what are the types of uh advice or the the kind of uh diagnosis you give when you know as a manager you kind of want to control and create order and predictability but there's a lot of different personalities and they might not like your system I know for a fact that when someone else imposes their system on me I've quit a job because somebody wanted me to use air table before um so I'd be curious to know what do you typically advise around this scenario I think it's very important to divide two parts of of that system there's the doing and the reporting as a manager I think it's completely fair to ask everyone on the team to use the same reporting system so everybody can have clarity as to how things are going where someone might need help for example where things are going a little bit slower than what we expected I think that's completely fine when I used to work at Google we had this centralized reporting system that was incredibly helpful because we could see at the team level but then also at the or level how things were going and we could diagnose any issue very quickly so I think that's good what can be less good and less useful is to try and force people to use a certain productivity system for the doing aspect of things for the execution here really everybody is different and some people for example work really well with task lists other people like can B boards where you move tasks across those different panels depending on where if you have started them if they're ongoing or whether they're done and I think trying to force people to use one system or another is not going to be particularly helpful and is actually not going to make them more productive it can actually be counterproductive to do this so I think as a manager what's helpful is just maybe to sit down and it probably would only take a few minutes but asking yourself what part of that system is reporting and I'm going to enforce for the team to use and what part is execution is doing where it's fine for everyone to do it the way they want it doesn't matter as long as it gets done and then they can put it in the reporting system then that's fine another tool I find really helpful that I've been using with my team is a um a personal user manual and it's a little bit simp similar to how you when you buy furniture at Ikea for example it comes with a manual that tells you this is how this thing works and this is how you assemble it and you have to use those pieces in this order for your table to actually look like a table and the personal user manual is the same thing so I ask every new team member to create one and it's a very creative process I show them examples from other people but there's no template and that makes it part of the fun I only tell them here are the key things that it should include but then if you want to communicate that with a lot of little illustrations bullet points so very minimalistic that's your style and that's fine and it includes information such as this is the way I like to communicate so for example just send me an email I prefer this or ping me send me a little chat um message or don't do that I hate it interrupts my flow so except if it's really urgent please email only or if you're in an office come and tap on my shoulder I love that like we can have a little chat or I love that one of my team members said when we were working together for a week we do a little team Retreat and saying when I have my headphones on do not come and talk to me that means I'm in deep work I'm in the flow don't come and interrupt me but if my headphones are off they're on the the desk that means anyone can come and chat with me and we can grab coffee there's also a bit about how I like to receive feedback some people they like to just get it straight just give it to me I'm fine like I just want to know what it is other people they might say actually with me it's nicer if you use the sandwich method give me something nice something I've been doing well and then a piece of constructive criticism and then something nice again and I'm more likely to respond to the feedback if you do it this way so it's a lot of little things we also include whether music is disruptive to you or not in the background like a lot of small things that add up to your personal user manual how to best work with me how to get the best out of me at work and we don't really expect everyone to really remember every single piece of every other person's personal user manual but it's a great way to connect when people join the team it's also a great way for the person writing it to reflect on how they work best because a lot of people they've never been asked to reflect on these things they don't even know what they prefer so they can think about it and that allows them then in conversations with their colleagues to communicate about that in a clearer way just being able to tell your colleague you know by the way you've been pinging me a lot and it's been a little bit um disruptive when it comes to my focus would you mind when you have all of these queries to maybe wait until you have a few ones and send me one email with bullet points and I promise I will address these by the end of the week or just tell me if something is more urgent and you can do that in a very calm and clear way when you are clear yourself about what works and what doesn't for you that's definitely something I've never thought about before and I think is brilliant and I actually think I'm going to bring it up to the team thank you so much for listening to the selling with love podcast we have some previous episodes you can tune in to right right here and if you prefer the short form content where you get to the point in under 10 minutes we do have a ton of clips from our best episodes that are being shared on this channel as well so pick which one supports you the most and of course thank you for liking subscribing and of course 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