Productivity Is Completing Your Major Projects

I was talking to a group of people today about productivity, and we discussed what to do to produce better results. As I was talking to them, I thought back to how I learned a lot about my own productivity.

A few years ago, I found a software program called Airtable, which is a spreadsheet and a database combined. It functions like a spreadsheet, but it's really a relational database so it's a super-cool piece of software. (Here’s a link here where you can go and get a trial.) The very first table that I set up, which they call a base, was for time tracking.. For four or five weeks, I literally tracked everything I did hour by hour, minute by minute, making sure that I accounted for every single place where I invested my time or spent my time, so I could analyze it.

That's just one table in Airtable, but you can link many together, to track my major projects. These are the most important things to me, like writing books or finishing some big project. After the first five weeks, I went and I downloaded all of that data into a spreadsheet and I turned it into a pivot table I could sort in different ways. (Yes, I am just that nerdy.)

What Time Tracking Can Reveal

The first thing I did was look at big categories, and how much time I spend in each of these categories. I had a happy result, and I had a not-so-happy result. The happy result was that I was spending four times as much time as I thought I was with my family. That’s mostly because sometimes I’d be with just my son, and sometimes just my wife, and sometimes one twin, then not the other twin, sometimes both twins and the wife, sometimes the wife and the boy, and when it all added up, it looked really good. That made me happy.

Then, I looked at my major projects and those were not getting done. I'm a busy guy, I work really hard, I'm very focused, I have a task manager, I plan my weeks, and I'm really disciplined about my work time. That being said, when I looked at it, I realized I'd done a lot of work, but almost none of it was attached to my major projects. That gave me the insight of, "Wait a second. What's crowding these things out?” I took a deeper look and found a lot of task-based things that don't really move the needle. There are a lot of little projects that really don't move the needle. Even though some of that is important, and even though I want to do that work, it was taking my time away from my big projects. I had to resist that work and I know this.

Making Time for What’s Most Important

I blocked 90-minute chunks every day to dedicate time for major projects and smaller ones. It turns out that three 90-minute blocks start cleaning projects up just like that. But before you can get those blocks on your calendar, you need to know where you are spending your time. How much of it is spent on email? How much of your time is spent on browsing the web? How many times did you look at ESPN, or CNN, or CNBC, or Fox, or whatever it is that draws your attention? How much time did you spend there? How much mindless time did you spend in front of the television just because you need an escape? It’s not to say that these things are bad; they're not! They're just bad when they crowd out your major projects.

If you want to be productive, here's what I recommend: Get a piece of paper on a legal pad and start writing down everything you do and where you spend your time. At the end of a few weeks, look at it and decide how much of that time is being spent on what's most important to you. If you're not spending time on those important projects, then change what you're doing. Give yourself some 90-minute blocks, aim for three a day, and move those major projects forward because that's what's most important.

That's what true productivity is; it's moving the big rocks forward. This means making less time for the medium-sized rocks and not worrying about the tiny pebbles that make no difference.