This episode is all about being busy, staying focused and productivity. Join Jenni as she shares some research around how our brains work and how knowing this will help us manage our time and attention as well as our boundaries with others. Find out how to use timers, what eat the frog means and why none of us can multi-task!
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much by Tony Crabbe
Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig
To keep the conversation going, connect with Jenni on LinkedIn and Twitter; ask questions and share your thinking!
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today we are talking about attention management being busy, boundaries and productivity because we can create our own chaos. So in the next 15 minutes, we’ll talk about the importance of understanding how we work as individuals, the impacts of not putting boundaries in place, and how to focus our attention and time.
This is a topic that’s for anyone really, whether you lead a team or not. Understanding how we can create our own chaos is really important as I specialise in helping organisations go from chaos to calm I’m going to leave you with some tips and advice. Six, in fact, to consider how you can make changes to how you work.
In my day-to-day work, I often talk about productivity, and this is linked to helping organisations be more efficient and more engaging. Just this week, the topic of time management and planning or prioritising came up as a theme, at an event, and it’s something that we all need to work on, and for many, including me, it’s something that I change every quarter or so.
So, how does focus management or not having boundaries lead to chaos?
This is the chaos that we can create in ourselves, and this makes it sound like it’s really easy to change, but controlling how you spend your time and energy is really important because you do control how you spend your time and energy, and you are in charge of that.It’s really easy to say that we are busy and, and that’s an easy excuse to, to not do something. Sorry, I’ve been busy I haven’t got back to you. Sorry, I’ve been busy. I’m a bit late in getting something to you. But what’s really happening is we are prioritising other things. So when busy becomes an excuse, it’s because we’re struggling to prioritise the work that we have. But before we jump too far into some of the solutions, let’s talk about chaos and that being busy feeling that we can often have.
So what does chaos look like when it comes to attention management and being busy?
It’s feeling overwhelmed with the amount of tasks that you might have to do. Feeling like you say yes all the time to everybody not having the time to do what you want to do, missing deadlines, maybe feeling a bit burnt out and missing out on things that are important to you. Now, that’s what the chaos can feel like, but importantly, for those around you, it can look more like you are someone that’s unorganised, unreliable, inconsistent, and potentially poor performance, and that’s not something that anybody wants to be known for. So the chaos that we bring in ourselves can often have a mixture of both how it makes us feel, but also how that looks to those people that are around us.
Now, the way that feels and the way it looks are very different, and that’s why we have the chaos and the root cause of how that feels and what it is and how it can be fixed is always quite different for different people. So there are many reasons that the chaos can happen, many reasons why we can feel this way and communicating the impact of requests on our time is often one of the core reasons.
How do we go from a busy chaos to calm?
Firstly, we have to understand a bit more about how we work as human beings and how we are so easily distracted and sometimes we are quite hard on ourselves for that distraction, but it’s actually how we are hardwired, so our brains really like novelty, which means we are really easily distracted and in fact we switch focus around about every four minutes. So because we like novelty, if we are doing a really dull task, it’s really easy for us to be interrupted. We would welcome any interruption that would stop us from doing something that we’re not really enjoying. And interestingly, research tells us that 44% of all interruptions are self-initiated. That’s almost half where sometimes you might find yourself suddenly doing something else when you are meant to be focused on another task. What’s even more worrying, I suppose, is that it takes us around 23 minutes to recover from interruption. So if there is a phone call or an email alert or a notification that interrupts your flow, it’s going to take you nearly half an hour to get back from that interruption. Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, this is fine for me I’m really good at multitasking. I know how to juggle different things at the same time. But the answer is really that you can’t do that no one can multitask because doing that actually increases the time it takes to complete a task by around 40%. That’s again, nearly half so if you think that you are really good at multitasking, what you’re probably doing is switching focus quite a lot. Um, and that might be leading you to feeling like you’re not achieving things to the best of your ability because if it takes you an extra 40% of time to complete a task, if you’re multitasking, that’s quite a lot of time being spent doing that. The other thing to know about us is that the optimal time for us to focus is around 52 minutes, followed by a 17-minute break away from your desk. Now getting into into deep work or into a steady flow is quite different, but if you think about those long meetings or long meetings, especially online in the last few years, it’s no wonder that our mind wanders and we can get distracted because if you’re sat there for three hours without any break you are going to be distracted because your ability to focus just can’t really go on for that long. In productivity workshops that I run, and I ran one with an organisation last year, they decided to change their meetings to 45 minutes as a result of learning some of these statistics. And they’re still doing that today to help people stay focused and it also removes the back-to-back meetings if you have a bit of a break between them with that 15 minutes in the hour slot that might be booked. So it’s important to understand how much we can pay attention.
Now we know a bit more about how we work and what’s possible. How do we make changes? Because it’s easy to know some of these statistics, but actually changing how we work, how we work with other people is sometimes the hardest bit to do. So one of the things I always talk about is editing your choices, and this comes from a section of Matt Hague’s book Notes in a Nervous Planet, and I’ll pop a note in the show notes for you for a link to the book. But in that book, he talks about the fact that we can’t read every book and we can’t watch every film, and it’s stayed with me since I read it a few years ago. Because it’s not possible for us to do everything that’s on offer in the world today. The world today is very different from how our brains are designed to cope with change and pace and everything. So it’s impossible for us to keep up with everything that’s out there for us to do. So we have to edit the choices that are right for us. We have to do the things that will help us achieve our goals because our goals are going to be different to everybody else’s. We are individuals. It’s very personal what we want to achieve. So if you don’t want to spend a Saturday evening watching a television series that everyone else is watching because you’d rather be in the gym, that’s okay. You have to edit your choices to achieve the goals that are right for you.
But when it comes to specific things for work to help you think about those boundaries, your retention, your focus, there are six things that you can do.
The first is to be clear about time in your diary and when you are available. No one is available all the time, and that’s an unrealistic expectation. And I remember from my own experience working from a train at 6:15am getting to the office, working all the way through, no break for lunch and then getting home after seven o’clock. I mean, global roles are really tough when it comes to time. But I also remember having a conversation with my boss after doing this for quite some time and saying actually, I am going to leave at four because at the moment you are using up all of my time and in using up all of that time if there was a crisis or if there was a need for me to have some extra time, I don’t have anywhere to go to do that and the business is doing very well. There was no issues. We weren’t in any kind of pandemic or crisis state, so it was a good conversation to have. And actually I did start leaving at four and whilst it felt really uncomfortable and very alien at first, it actually really helped me focus my attention on the time that I was there. Be very clear about what I would do on each day. Also, it gave me that flex that if something happened or if anything was needed, I had that room to manoeuvre in my time.
The second is as soon as possible. This is one of my big personal bug bears. As soon as possible is not a deadline, and this is where we start to think about the importance of language and conversation when it comes to our attention and being busy. If people give you ASAP or as soon as possible as a deadline. Ask them for a date because what’s as soon as possible to you is not as soon as possible to me, and I know from personal experience that if I get as soon as possible as a deadline, I either do it straight away or it goes to the bottom of the pile and it ever gets done. So always make sure that there’s a clarity on date because there will be one, even if it’s not one that’s necessarily immediate.
The third is to use timers. So having timers to help you focus your attention is a really good way to kind of reward yourself for completing a task, but also it helps you keep that attention and that focus. So I do around 30 minutes, but what I also do is different types of work. So I’ll do 30 minutes of doing some admin, then I’ll do 30 minutes of writing a paper, and then I might go back to 30 minutes of doing admin. Now, 30 minutes is the optimal time for me. It might be slightly longer or slightly shorter for you, but that time allows us to really focus our attention. It means that by having different kind of tasks, like the admin and the writing, means that you are dealing with that novelty part of your brain that that enjoys that. So the switching up of different task types is really important to help us keep going.
The fourth is to turn your wifi off if you’re doing some focused work, but also just generally to keep notifications to a minimum. I don’t have any notifications on my phone because I work on the basis that if it’s urgent, somebody will call me and then I can control when I go into any social media platform or I’m going to be, you know, looking at emails. All of those things are things that I can control, and I choose the time to go and check those.
The fifth is the rule of five. So have five things to do in a day. Often, I use post-it notes or I’ll just have five things on a list. Not lots of big things. So, you might have one big thing, four small things. You might have two medium sized things and three small things. No more than five. It’s really difficult to do more than five in a day because you will get interrupted, you will have meetings, you will have things to do, and we can set ourselves up for failure, which makes us feel that overwhelmed feeling or like we’re not delivering. Um, so having five things is just a helpful number to focus in on.
And the sixth and final one is to eat the frog. Now this is something I talk about quite a lot, and for those that aren’t familiar with the concept of eating the frog, imagine I asked you to eat a frog. It’s a horrible, slimy frog. It’s probably not alive, and I’m gonna ask you to eat that. Now, if you ate that first thing in the morning, that would be a really horrible. Gross thing to do, but you’ve done it. You’ve done the worst thing you can do all day. And it’s that same principle applied to work. So if you eat the frog in the morning, it’s doing the task that is the worst task on your list, the one you’ve been putting off, the one you don’t want to do, get it done then you can make sure that the rest of your day is much clearer and you haven’t got that hanging over your head. Every time I mention this technique, people give it a try and most people will come back and say that it’s really helped them move forward and get things done that have been on their list for quite some time. So have a think about what’s that frog on your list and how you can get it eaten today.
Now, some of these might sound really simple, but if you start to practice attention management instead of time management, it’ll make it easier for you to get things done if you are clear about the impact of others requests on your time, have conversations about what’s achievable in a timeframe, then that’s fundamental to creating an engaging and efficient organisations. And in doing that, you’ll start to stop those perceptions that might be around you, around some of that inconsistent undeliverable poor performance feelings that others might have.
In my next episode, I’m going to be talking about impactful communication skills, so something for everyone that will help you follow the six principles to help you communicate effectively and avoid chaos, across your team and across the organisations as well.
Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me. Tell me if you’ve eaten the frog and there are some details in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
