Tips to highly increase your productivity at work and home.
INTRODUCTION
The idea of this document is to teach how I managed to increase my productivity both at work and at home, by aggregating ideas and processes taken from a variety of areas, like Kanban, Pomodoro Technique, Getting Things Done, Time Matrix. The main result of an increase in productivity is more time, time that you can use for other tasks or projects, specially self improvement.
The main areas of focus for improvement are: Task Management, Time Management, Focus, Documentation and Personal Marketing
And for that I use 2 main tools: Kanban and Pomodoro. Kanban is for task management, and Pomodoro for time management and focus
I'm not going into details on each tool or technique, if you want to know more about Kanban, Pomodoro, Getting Things Done etc you should google it, I'm only touching the parts that bring immediate benefit.
KANBAN
To summarize, a Kanban board is a digital or physical board divided in columns to represent stuff to do, the board can be as simple as TO-DO - DOING - DONE while the task to be worked on moves from left to right depending on status
You can have the board the way you like, be physical or digital, with as many or as little columns you like, as long as you follow two simple rules
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EVERYTHING on the board: You need stuff to do? to the board! You need to answer and email? board. Someone interrupted you at your desk with an urgent task? board. Anything that you set your attention to, should be at the board, the board should be the only place you look to manage tasks.
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Only ONE task on DOING column per time: You should only work on ONE task at a time, otherwise you are overwhelmed, focus on ONE at a time, if some other task is super urgent, remove the current task from DOING and include the urgent one, as long as there is only one per execution.
POMODORO
To summarize, Pomodoro is a technique to help you focus on a task while better managing your time and rest. It works like this: each Pomodoro have 25 minutes of time, with 5 to rest. at 4 Pomodoros you get 15 minutes to rest
When you start the timer, you should focus on that task, avoid at all costs distractions or interruptions until you complete that task or the Pomodoro finishes, if you absolutely must switch tasks during the Pomodoro, continue focusing on the execution of the new task until completion. When the Pomodoro gives you rest, you rest, then keep going.
Using Pomodoro on a work day from 09:00 to 18:00 excluding one hour to lunch will leave you with about 14 Pomodoros per day
Correct use of Pomodoro you make you FLY trough tasks, you will realize among other things, that you can do a lot more that you thought you could in 25 minutes.
EXECUTION
On a Kanban board, the task should go left to right, like a assembly line, the task should not retreat unless in very specific circumstances, and should pass trough each column on its way to conclusion, keep that in mind.
With simple adjustments on my Kanban board I managed to be able to improve some neglected areas of my work while at the same time improving my personal marketing and making me able to deliver more value in the form of my work, either at home or for my employer
I have also many recurring tasks, mostly related to maintenance that I need to do weekly, monthly, etc those all go to the board
I use kanboard.org as my Kanban tool, but you can use whatever you like
There are three tasks that are recurring and need to be done each week both at work and at home: The "10 MINUTE TIDY UP", the "NO ZERO DAY", and the "TECH DAY"
The 10m Tidy Up: At the start of each week (or day if you feel like it) you start a 10m timer and start cleaning up your workstation and around it, you should stop at the 10m mark and continue only on the next iteration. You will realize that you can clean up A LOT MORE than you think you can in 10m. Keeping your workstation organized only brings benefits and its cumulative
The NO ZERO DAY: Every day you should do something to achieve something you want to do, even if its one paragraph of that book you're putting off for ages that's not a zero anymore, regardless of what is or how little you do it, should not be zero. This task works better for home or self improvement
The TECH DAY: Every week you should bring something new to your employer/boss/whatever in a timeboxed meeting, something interesting that you read, a new technology around, the great new something that promises so solve everything, a pet project, ideas for improvements, anything that you bring is not an ahem zero, even if its not actionable at the very least will help improve communication and shows that you are interested in improving the environment around you
And there is a type of task that should go straight to execution, "the less than 5 minutes task": if a task takes less than 5 minutes to execute to completion, just do it, don't let it fill up your queue, if you believe it will take more than 5 minutes, onto the bucket it goes.
Interruptions: every interruption, even if it didn't became a task, should be logged on the board. So at the end of the day or week you can analyze how many interruptions did you have. If it is something recurring you should put a task to analyze the root cause of the interruptions and deal with it.
Now onto the board
The columns on my board that I currently have are: Bucket - Someday - Calendarize-it - Pomodoring - Waiting - Documment/Publicize - Done, I will explain each
BUCKET: Bucket is the entry point for new tasks, but should not be left full of tasks. The idea is that you put tasks in there and later when you have time you process those tasks into other columns, those being SOMEDAY or CALENZARIZE or straight to POMODORING, bucket should be left empty most of the time, why? imagine your boss ask you something, this task is a little higher priority than other, if you put in the bucket with 20 other tasks it might get forgotten in the bunch. Each new task into the bucket, and from the bucket next, leave the bucket empty.
SOMEDAY: This is for those tasks, or projects that you know it should be done but don't have priority or time limit, put it into someday and work on it when you have the time for it, or feels like doing it. More important tasks always have a time limit of some sort.
CALENZARIZE-IT: Those are tasks that should be done, no way around it, and specially you should set a due time for them, or are those tasks that need to be done a certain time like meetings at certain day and hour. Those tasks are your priority queue, those should be done first, the SOMEDAY column should only be touched, or even looked at, if CALENZARIZE-IT is empty. There is a special tool that will help you organize tasks in this column, its called a calendar.
POMODORING: I Also tend to call this column "Pomo-executing". This is the doing/executing column, why the name? to remind you to start the Pomodoro timer! When you start organizing your tasks on the Kanban and visualize the amount of trouble you're in its easy to forget Pomodoro, this is to remind you to always start the timer, and always work on the current task, no distractions, and remember, ONLY ONE TASK ON THIS COLUMN.
WAITING: Those are for tasks that you started execution but had to wait, for example, a third party to do their work, an email that they need to answer, etc. You can also put here tasks that needed to be interrupted for more urgent ones as long as you remember to restart the task. Delegated tasks also go well here.
DOCUMENT / PUBLICIZE: This should be the final stage of the task before DONE. This is to touch two sensitive areas often neglected by ourselves, those are Documentation and Personal Marketing
This column does the most for you, it helps aggregate and deliver value, to you personally and to your employer
Not every task can or should be documented and not every task should be publicized, use your judgment
DOCUMENT: There is a saying "Documentation is a pet", if you neglect it it becomes worthless when you need it, because of new versions of products or software's, and when you need to check or redo something if you need to also update you documentation, you might as well as discard it and do from zero
There is also the lottery factor: If you won the lottery can the next person assigned to your job do it by reading your previous documentation?
This column is to fix that, even small things that you do for years might not be intuitive for a newcomer, so you should always try to document your workflow in a way your coworkers can understand if need be. Documentation is like a backup, you never think you need till you need it. To this day I remember when I asked my previous boss something and I shit you not he printed an email describing the solution in detail, from two years prior, written by me saying" If I ever ask you about this again, show me this"
So make a best effort to document and put it in a central place for your coworkers to browse
PUBLICIZE: You can fix the world in the shadows, as we in IT often do, we pull out miracles and bunnies out of a hat made of silvertape, we change the engine with the plane flying, and a million other small improvements that no one but us notice. But If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
This is for any tasks of value, anything new, better, improved something, even a small thing, or a collection of small things, should be put here
And then you use an opportunity to TALK about those tasks that you done, it could be in the daily or weekly team meeting, or in a timeboxed meeting with your boss, the task is NOT DONE until you talk about it, until you show it, until you show how you delivered value, improved the company, or yourself. If you fix the world and don't show or talk about it, people tend to believe you did nothing.
Of course not all tasks should be publicized, but if its something that makes you proud, you show it.
DONE: This is of course the done column, You can clean it up in your own time, I like to clean it up daily. How often you ended your day feeling "I haven't done anything today"? you will be surprised on how much you really did.
CONCLUSION
As it is with everyone I started organizing my work taking notes on a pad, each little box containing a task, and then I hit a bottleneck in my capacity to deliver more work in less time, which prompted me to ask around how others organize themselves and study how to improve. This is a culmination of all the lessons I learned in my journey and I hope this document helps the reader in organizing him/herself for better results, either at home or at work.
REFERENCES
Kanban - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)
Pomodoro Technique - https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique
Getting Things Done - https://gettingthingsdone.com/
Kanboard - https://kanboard.org
No Zero Days - https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/
Theory of Constraints - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints
5S Methodology - https://www.graphicproducts.com/articles/what-is-5s/