SECRETS OF PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE
50 Techniques to Get Things Done
Mark Forster
To Lucy, the most productive person I know.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Productivity is one of those ill-defined words which are often heard in a management context. The general image of a productive person is of someone rather docile who slavishly processes the work given to them and comes up with a satisfactory result satisfactory that is to the managers who gave them the task. The person is productive in the way a factory hen is productive. Its one step down from being called efficient the people who manage the chicken factory are efficient, not the hens.
So productivity has the rather negative image of rows of people churning out large quantities of work without much imaginative input into the nature of that work.
The image changes though when we put the concept of productivity into a different context. Pause for a moment and ask yourself, Who are the truly productive figures in the course of human history? Try and write down off the top of your head a short list of three to five people.
Do that now, before you continue reading.
You will almost certainly find that the historical figures on your short list were most definitely not rather docile people who slavishly processed the work given to them. If youve done the exercise properly they will be people who have made a real and measurable difference to the world, usually for the better. They will be people of great achievements and who have made the world gasp in amazement. One of their great qualities will be that of originality.
My own short list includes three figures about whom I will talk in more detail in . These are Isaac Newton, Vincent van Gogh and Henry Ford. You probably cannot imagine yourself in your wildest dreams being productive in the way that these three were productive. And you are probably right you are never going to equal their achievements in their own fields. But how about in your own field? Can you apply the principles that they used, consciously or unconsciously, to your own work, your own lifetime passion, or even to your leisure time, so that you produce results which are every bit as amazing to you yourself, your colleagues, your customers, clients, friends and family as my examples results were to the world at large?
Surprisingly the answer is almost certainly Yes, you can.
As Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain says in a review of David Shenks The Genius In All of Us, The notion that relentless, deliberate practice changes the brain and thus our abilities has been undervalued over the past 30 years in favour of the concept of innate giftedness.
Relentless and deliberate practice? Changing the brain in order to change our abilities? Yes, that is precisely what lies at the basis of the sort of productivity that Newton, Van Gogh and Ford exhibited. What they did in short was to grow their brains to fit their area of productivity. You can do exactly the same. This book will show you how.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Heres one difference between a productive person and other people. Faced with the ideas in a book like this many peoples attitude is This wouldnt work for me because and then they stop any further consideration.
The productive person on the other hand has the attitude How can I use this? He or she is always looking for ideas that will make a difference. If you are one of these people then make the ideas in this book your own, change them to fit your own needs, possibly even use them in totally different ways from what I have envisaged.
Some of you will prefer to read the book from cover to cover. If you do this you will find that it follows a logical progression in which later chapters build on earlier chapters. I suggest that you read the book fairly quickly and then go back and try out the suggestions that struck you as particularly interesting or useful.
On the other hand some of you will want to dip into the book and read those chapters that particularly appeal to you. This works fine too because each chapter either can stand on its own or references you back to any previous chapters that are necessary to understand it.
Whichever method you use there are two essential chapters that I recommend everyone to read and try out. These are (Productive time management). These two together form the basis for changing your brain to become truly productive.
THE BASICS OF PRODUCTIVITY
What exactly is productivity? Is it just getting a lot of stuff done, or is there more to it than that? This part of the book looks in detail at the two most important components of productivity and shows you how you too can join the ranks of truly productive people.
 | WHAT IS PRODUCTIVITY? |
Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.
Tao te Ching
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Stephen King
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.
Paul J. Meyer
Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.
Peter F. Drucker
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasize specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present.
Oliver Burkeman
Often when productivity is discussed it sounds as if it is just about getting stuff done. It sometimes seems as if its a synonym for efficient. Indeed there is no doubt about the fact that a highly productive person must be efficient. If the basic routines of ones work are not under control then it is very difficult to work at the highest level of genuine productivity. Yet productivity goes a long way beyond mere efficiency. It is much more a matter of creativity. The truly productive person is intensely creative.
Unfortunately we all know people who claim to be creative people who are anything but productive. They wait around for inspiration to strike and on the rare occasions when it does they set off in a blaze of enthusiasm. Sometimes they produce good work before the enthusiasm dies, more often they dont and the new project withers from lack of attention.
This is the exact opposite of Isaac Newton, Vincent van Gogh and Henry Ford, the three intensely productive people I mentioned in the introduction. Did they wait around for inspiration to strike? No, they got their inspiration by working consistently on their projects. Did they set off in a blaze of enthusiasm which quickly died down? No, they worked consistently and methodically on the project until it was completed.
There are of course many aspects to productivity. But I want to highlight the two elements that seem most essential to me: Creativity and Efficiency.
You can make a formula of them: Productivity = Creativity Efficiency.
The advantage of looking at it like this is that you can see clearly that if either creativity or efficiency drops to zero then so does productivity. However creative you are, you cannot be productive without some degree of efficiency. Conversely however efficient you are you cannot be productive without some degree of creativity.
