Productivity Secrets

Leadership is not something that is written on your business card. It is not a position in an organization. Leadership is a way of thinking. It is about innovating when everyone else is resigning themselves to. Everyone in this world is addicted to technology. This is the age of dramatic distraction. There are a lot of people who are trying to expertise in small things. The problem with that is you get to the end of your career, or the last hour of your last day, and you realize you were busy on doing the wrong things. In this era, we should leverage technology to our advantage rather than become slave of the technology. We should use technology as a great servant to us and not as ruling our lives and distracting us. Majoring in minor things may make us feel good in the moment and we may think we are being productive but at the end of the day we would realize that we are really busy doing not much of anything. I came across few excellent tips by reading stuff on absolute productivity secrets of some of the world’s best CEOs which we can imbibe in our life.

1.   Mark Parker, CEO, Nike: His productivity secret is to have dinner with 25 artists, if not 25 artists spend time with 5 artists. Why this idea? He is of the view that we usually structure our lives to surround ourselves with people who think like us. Spending time with people who think differently, who provokes you, who irritates you, makes you think differently are the people who helps you generate most creative ideas which enables you to build your organization, teams and grow business.

2.  Mike Duke, CEO Walmart: He understand the importance of respecting your time as most people wish they had more time, yet we all waste the time we have. It may sound rude but he get up when the schedule time for the meeting is over. If a meeting is allotted 40 minutes, he actually gets up even if the other person is still speaking. One way he manages this discipline is he always goes to another person’s office for the meeting which enables him to decide when he wants to leave.

3.   Steve Jobs, CEO Apple: He says, business is all about making a dent in the universe. He related this to productivity secret as he was of the belief that nothing so focuses the human mind, nothing will so focus your energy than knowing what your life is standing for, having a cause that you are giving your life to. And according to Job, nothing so fuels your creativity and your innovation and your spark and your spirit than finding some cause that is bigger than your own life, to make a dent in the universe.

4.  Ken Fisher, CEO Ken Fisher: His productivity secret is to get fired. What he does is he tries to fire himself from any work that he does that he cannot be absolutely fantastic at. In other words, what he meant was, anything you do not enjoy, or anything you are not fantastic at, find someone else to do it who actually enjoys it, who can do it better than you and fire yourself from that job. So basically you end up only doing a few things, but really well.

5.   Catherine Fake, CEO, Flickr : Her productivity secret is manage time in meetings. She strongly believe that meeting waste time. What she does is before a meeting, she distributes one liter bottle of water to all the meeting participant. Everyone gets to drink the water and then by the time the first person has to go to the washroom, the meeting needs to end.

6.  Krissi Barr, CEO, Barr Corporate Success: Her productivity secret is shrinking her mental deadline. If something is going to take her one hour, she says, she gives herself only 40 minutes to do that. That is really important because the work expands according to the time available to do the work. If you give yourself a week to do a project, then you are going to expand the time or the work into one week. So collapsing the deadlines of something that might take you two days, give yourself one day. What it does is it focuses your mind and it focuses your energy.

7.       Founder of Ben and Jerry: His productivity secret was be so good at what you do that you are the only one in the world who does what you do. In other words, it is not being all things to all people. It is not diluting your brand to the point that you mean nothing to anyone. It means being so good at what you do that you are the only one in the world who does what you do. The productivity secret is just do one thing really well. Michelangelo did one thing really well. Mozart did one thing really well. Sachin Tendulkar did one thing really well.  So can you.

Apart from the above, one common productivity secrets of great CEOs is the habit of proactivity and no procrastination. Great CEOs are obsessed with their idea and they never leave the sight of a new idea, they never leave the sight of something that they know. As a principle you should keep a 90 second rule and you need to do within 90 seconds unless you have done something to not move forward. Within 90 seconds you do little things and the more you do little small acts that are difficult or challenging, you actually build your own capability and you build a new habit of discipline. Do important things within 90 seconds of first getting the idea and never procrastinate as that moment will not come again.

Another secret commonly used is reviewing your productivity at the end of the day. How productive were you today? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? It is simple idea but it is so important because with better awareness you will make better choices and with better choices you will see better results. What gets measured gets improved. One should spend some time in silence, solitude and stillness, where you sit, you think and reflect and take corrective action to be on course and be more productive. I have been following some of the above practices for last more than a year and it is definitely helping me in both professional and personal life.

Hope you find these thoughts useful and make yourself more productive in your journey ahead.

Source: Learnings from Robin Sharma's work on Productivity Secrets of Top CEOs.