A More Human Approach to Productivity | Chris Bailey | TEDxLiverpool

like you maybe when I'm talking to somebody new one of the first things that they notice about me and maybe they say it to me maybe they don't is how big of a nerd I am and at first I was kind of put off by this label but over time I've come to embrace it in a way I never expected to now I'm a nerd about a lot of different things cosmology is one of them I can watch hours of TED talks and lectures about cosmology and sometimes I do I'm a nerd about meditation I've been meditating for 6 or 7 years this process of continually bringing your attention back to your breath it sounds so simple in theory but in practice it's one of the most difficult things and one of the most rewarding things in the world but the thing that I'm the most nerdy about and the most curious about is something that you probably wouldn't expect and that idea is productivity and I don't mean productivity in kind of the really businesslike sense where you boil your life down to a spreadsheet and really become all efficient and you fire up Excel to track your life I mean productivity in the sense of making better use out of what limited time we have every day so we have more time for the things that are actually meaningful to us and I was fortunate enough you know I've been into this idea of productivity for about a decade and I was fortunate enough when I graduated university I received a couple full-time job offers because I was productive up to that point but I figured if there was a time in my life to do something meaningful with my time it was then and so I started looking at what other options I had and productivity became one of the focuses of that thinking you know if I was to experiment with one thing that really I wanted to dig deep into it was productivity this is a picture of me that I refer back to quite often it's taken about a decade ago I just realized right now I'm wearing a Liverpool t-shirt I've never I keep referring back to this picture this is a revelation for me on stage but I'm reading a book named the joy of stress one of those corny books where the author puts a picture of himself on the cover and you know I've been into this idea of becoming more productive for about a decade and so I started to crunch the numbers what would this productivity project look like and they weren't great they were okay though I had about 12 grand that I had saved up up to that point mind you those are Canadian dollars so relative to most other currencies it's not as good but I figured that's about a grand a month and divided by 12 that would get me 12 months of following my passion and so that's exactly what I did I brought this curiosity of productivity from the background in my life it had been following me up to that point to really the foreground of what I was doing and boy did I dive in deep I pored over all of the academic literature I could find all the books I could possibly find about productivity I interviewed my heroes the Great's in the productivity space some people have normal heroes my heroes are productivity experts but but the thing that took the cake as being the most interesting for me and frankly kind of the weirdest were these productivity experiments that I conducted on myself where I used myself as a guinea pig to experiment with what it means to accomplish more over the course of the day and every single one of these I conducted dozens were designed so that I could push on the limits of how much I could accomplish or how much I can do both mentally and physically every single day and so I did everything you know to measure information overload it's kind of boring topic and you know there's a lot of research about it but to measure that and to really test it and experiment with it I watched 70 hours of TED talks over the course of one week so 296 TED Talks while doing things like taking more breaks and taking a siesta and even meditating to see how that impacted information retention we're constantly connected I don't have my phone up here on the stage because my girlfriend says it looks bad in my pocket it's one of those big iPhones but maybe maybe you're on your phone right now you know managing our attention is so difficult especially today when we have so many objects of attention that we can focus on and so to test that I used my smartphone for only an hour a day for three months and the first few weeks of that were helped let me tell but after that I felt like I'd kind of cleared a bend and a whole new expanse of focus and creativity and productivity opened up for me people I think people are an underrated idea as it relates to productivity you know they're they're the most important part of our life and so do they affect our productivity I measured that as well by living in isolation for 10 days cutting myself off from people which showed me that people are essential for being engaged with our work and being motivated in our work but people are also the reason we have productivity in the first place they're what make it worthwhile to test working extreme hours I worked 90-hour weeks for an entire month alternating between working 90 hours one week then 20 then 90 then 20 there's this saying that the early bird gets the worm and so to put that to the test I woke up at 5:30 every morning for three months to see how that influenced my productivity and I absolutely hated that experiment you know it took me three months to shoehorn that habit into my life until I realized that I absolutely hated it you know I was less productive under these circumstances and that led me to a lot of curious research on how there's zero connection with your socio-economic standing of what time you wake up at it's what we do with the hours of our day after we wake up that make the difference in how much we get done Fitness is another thing you know elevating our heart rate makes us more productive it lets us bring more energy to what we're doing and so to test that I gained 15 pounds of muscle mass over the course of the productivity project when I was finished you know I was fortunate enough to be able to have been invited to write a book about the productivity project with a big publisher and so they gave me 30 weeks to write it they thought that was a really short timeframe but I challenged myself you know to write a good book in a smaller amount of time so I ended up writing it in 24 but maybe the experiment that it's kind of a weird one this one that takes the cake as teaching me the most about productivity is meditating for 35 hours over the course of a week you know I did as much productive work as I could as much research and interviews in writing during that week as well but you know meditation was this curious interest that kind of snowballed in tandem with productivity you know I've been into productivity for about a decade I've been experimenting with it but meditation has been in the background as well for the last six or seven years but when you look at the two ideas productivity and meditation they seem to directly conflict with one another your productivity of course we think about it as being doing as much as possible whereas meditation is about not doing much at all and so you know it's kind of tough to admit but a couple months into the productivity project I stopped meditating entirely but when I stopped so I could focus more on productivity I noticed that several things began to happen I became more stressed out especially in the first few months when I declined those jobs and frankly nobody was visiting my website more people visit now but the only people were my girlfriend my family and that was about it and so it's so easy to to be hard on yourself in that process I became stressed out and that affected my productivity I had less energy and motivation because I didn't know when it was time to take a step back from my work to recharge I became distracted more because I couldn't focus well and I wasted more time because of that I became less focused and so I had to spend more time doing things because I brought less attention to it I worked more often on autopilot and this is maybe the idea that impacted my productivity the most because I didn't work deliberately on what was actually important and I worked in response to the work that came my way I wasn't able to step back and think about what I actually wanted to become more productive about in the first place and I even gained weight you know a meditation and mindful eating were what allowed me to lose about 40 pounds several years ago I used to look a lot different than I do today and it's because I became deliberate about when I was eating instead of eating on autopilot and so seeing these conditions were what motivated me to conduct this productivity experiment to meditate for 35 hours over the course of a week while trying to be as productive as possible in those situations and so I did sitting meditation you know where you know I'm not going to do it where you sit down on a meditation cushion and you bring your attention to your breath I did walking meditation where you bring your attention to your feet and whenever it wanders you bring it back I ate mindfully I did mindful chores and I noticed several curious things beginning to happen I felt less productive first of all because I was less busy than I was before this experiment but at the same time I brought this deliberateness to my work that I hadn't had before I worked with intention behind what I was doing and so even though I had less time to spend on my work I overcompensated by that by spending more attention and energy on my work instead and because of this I wrote a ton I wrote thousands of words that week and I earned that time back and I think this is one of the most crucial things that you can think about when it comes to your productivity is it's one thing to read about productivity but you have to make all that time back and then some or else you're basically just looking at productivity pouring and there's a lot of that out there but maybe the biggest idea that this experiment taught me was that productivity is so much more than just managing our time of course we all know the importance of managing our time but I would argue that there are other ingredients that deserve to sit on the same level as managing our time and our attention is one of them you know the more focus we bring to our work the more time the less time we have to spend on it and the less were distracted the more we can hunker down on our work and get into these flow like states where we forget what time it is and we become so immersed in what we're doing it doesn't matter how well we can manage our time if we can't also manage our attention and our energy is another idea that deserves to sit on that same level because if we're burnt out at 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon our productivity becomes toast you know if we don't frequently step back to take breaks and recharge and interestingly during the project I found that every single thing I researched or experimented with or interviewed somebody about fell into one of these three different categories and so I think productivity is the confluence of all three but more than that and what this meditation experiment taught me even though it's a week you know looking back I still get so many little nuggets of wisdom from it was that it doesn't matter how busy or efficient we are what matters is how much we accomplish at the end of the day that's what I think productivity is about and more than that it's about accomplishing what we intended to do in the first place and so if we intend to have a perfectly relaxing day on the beach and put her feet up and recharge and you know maybe listen to a few TED Talks and and totally disconnect and then we do I would argue that we're perfectly productive and the same is true if we intend to have a really businesslike day and submit a couple TPS reports whatever the heck those are and ace of job interview when we achieve what we intend to were perfectly productive and the best way to get there is to manage these three ingredients of productivity our time our attention and our energy I want to finish by giving you a few practical ways that fit in with this new way this more human way I think of looking at productivity so so much of the productivity project was this year-long idea of sifting out the stuff that works from the productivity poor the stuff that doesn't work and I want to give you five to end off with you ready I'll do them rapid fire number one is the rule of three and the rule is very simple and it's a it's a very simple intention setting rule every day and here it is at the start of the day you fast forward to the end of the day in your head and you ask yourself by the time the day is done what three main things will I want to have accomplished that's the rule it's so simple but it's almost stupidly simple to be honest with you but it lets you separate what's important from what isn't and it only takes a few minutes you don't have to spend hours integrating a complex system into your life to managing what you have to get done the second one is to do one thing at a time this is the most important graph you'll ever see as it relates to your productivity the fewer things we try to do in the moment the more productive we become because we don't scatter our attention around in a thousand different directions at one time instead we channel it with this laser-like focus at one thing at a time and that forces us to become more deliberate about what we're working on not only in general by setting these three daily intentions but also in the moment number three is a simple one but it's so powerful as well and it's to cultivate how much energy you have over the course of the day and this is common sense advice but common sense unfortunately today when we're busier than ever isn't always common action it's doing the simple things like eating well gooding putting good fuel into our body and elevating our heart rate a few times every day and getting enough sleep you know sleep I see it as this way of exchanging our time for energy why wouldn't we want to get more of that number four is to disconnect from the internet something interesting that I found with the highest-performing executives that I encountered during the productivity project was that they see the Internet as a nicety instead of a necessity you know they focus on other things because the internet usually isn't where our most important work lies it lies in engineering a new product it lies in doing things that actually change the world and this is one of my favorite stats as it relates to productivity the amount of time we spend on the Internet procrastinating when we're connected to the Internet we spend 47% of our time on the internet procrastinating which is insane you know things quite literally take twice as long when we're connected and so when we disconnect deliberately especially when we hunker down on on one of these three daily intentions we can become that much more productive when we see productivity as how much we accomplish number five is another counterintuitive one but I haven't found anything better than it for my productivity and it's to daydream if you think to when your most brilliant lightbulb in sight hit you chances are you weren't hunkered down in your work or doing a thousand things at one time maybe you are taking a shower and then boom from out of the blue an idea strikes you and you have to get out early to find a place to write it down maybe you're letting your mind rest and wander when you're unnatural and maybe you left your phone at home you know it's in this mode that we connect the dots in our head there's a constellation of dots in our head that are waiting to be connected and we need to get into this daydreaming mode to do it so I think this is especially today this is what productivity is meant to look like you know it's about this intention it's about this deliberateness and becoming easy on ourselves as we strive to get there because really the reason productivity is so crucial and so important in the first place is we only have so much time you know whether in general or weather every day and most days we feel that but when we manage our time our attention and our energy better we can accomplish so much more especially when there's a 10 intention behind what we do thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 278,945

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Life, Productivity

Id: REFh5TMOoS0

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2016