I have worked in offices for a while. You get into a nice groove where everything is working well and then some numpty reads a stupid productivity book by someone who once ran a factory in uzbekhistan and everything gets turned on its head, for a few weeks and then it goes back to normal.
As a lifelong office worker i'd say i dont change much. Multitasking is bullshit and just ends in lots of jobs done poorly. I find i'm better at doing serial focus work rather than trying to mix and match. If i have a couple of big jobs at once i do much better spending the whole day on one rather than switching half way through the day or even worse, from hour to hour. I got a standing desk a little while ago. I might use it when it enters my brain to stand up but i do a lot of walking - walk the dogs in the morning, walk to work, walk at lunch with a mate, walk home. Usual day is about 14,000-15,000 steps on those work in the office days (8-10k for the wfh days). So standing isnt much of a priority. If i am forced to focus on splitting my attention, the walk in the middle of the day is a good reset for the brain. Other than that my day is organised chaos - look at emails straight away and mentally file into needs a response now, can wait till later. Teams chat is a boon and a curse. Good for chatting with work mates across the state, bad for being tracked down "for a quick response" because my light is green. But i'm fortunate in the sense that queries coming my way are specialised info answers that can be answered in 5min or big project type stuff that takes days.
That’s a good point. I also try to do the daily adminy things like sort through emails / messages at the start of the day, while the mental gears are warming up.
Come into work, either in office or home office. Continue to work until superior now informs me this is top priority. Work on that until I either finish that, another superior or the same one tells me this is the important task to work on. During this attend the schedule training required to be completed by this time complete. return to previous to priority task, drop that to attend the mandatory in person meeting for new directors to tell me how we are going to be doing these things now, (same as how we did it 2 directors ago), go back to work on what I have been working on most recently. Finish that work, take next piece of work of the pile, repeat.
Whilst I work in an office, I work for an MSP doing operations IT stuff. My role is make client stuff work without a hitch (AHAHAHAHAHA) and to implement small changes, constantly update software and so on. It also involves addressing tickets the helpdesk can't fix (or won't, in some cases). I doubt there are many productivity tools beyond automating tasks that would help me be more productive.
All this thunking will give you metaphorical dents in the forehead 😜
I’ll wade in with some ignorant, half-baked ideas, acknowledging I don’t know what the writing / creative side of life is like. Also, this is one of those topics where it’s easy to give advice, and bloody hard to follow.
The sm@rt@r$e response is “it depends”. Something a little less trite would be “priorities man, then prioritise” - and apologies if I paraphrase someone else, badly.
Looks like it’s the ball juggling. If so, I suggest thinking on both daily and bigger time scales - weekly, fortnightly, monthly etc. How do you plan out the big, multi-year efforts that require research (like a Leviathan, or ancient history alternate timelines) interspersed with smaller one’s that are measured in days or weeks etc?
That’s roughly how it worked in my last role. We had regular planned activities (mthly, qtly, annual) plus ad hoc stuff that came up, as well as the occasional fire needing to be doused. The team would have a weekly view of the priorities (regular + ad hoc), and individuals would prioritise their day/week, and adjust as the week progressed. Sometimes not everything got done if a fire flared up, but we could justify what we worked on and why by week’s end.
The daily schedule is based on how you work (the “it depends” bit). Do you work better generating first draft content in the am, edit or research in the pm? Or do you keep going on something if you get in the groove? If the latter, then maybe allow say Mon-Wed for the big pieces, and Thu-Fri for the smaller stuff. Need a little flexibility - you don’t want to break the writing groove if you get in it, but also need to keep the other balls up in the air.
At the risk of expressing extreme ignorance - I gather with writing that the main thing is to be banging out a quantity of words each day - what those words are for is up to you & your wider priorities (blog, article, book etc). Below link is of another blog I follow where the author deals with this topic, with views of other famous writers. It’s not the first time he’s written about it.
I work from home pretty much 100% except for the one random day a month I’m supposed to go into the office. The only thing I do differently for those days is make sure I have something to do, so I look productive to my colleagues. Just the other day I was planning on going in because there was a special morning tea, but I had nothing to do so I canned it, and did that at home.
The answer to your question about productivity hacks and other things is that they are totally aimed at office drones, usually middle management types who want to "coach" and "develop" their minions and therefore need to come up with suggestions as to how their minions can do THEIR work better or more efficiently. OR the middle management type has suddenly discovered that an unmanageable workload came with the promotion they just climbed over figurative if not literal dead bodies to acquire, and now to prove that they "earned" their promotion and they're adding "value" to the organisation they need to be able to do the work of 4 people to a halfway competent standard all while attending 6 hours of meetings that could have been emails each day. I would guess 🤔
As an office drone, the way I work only changes with some kind of external driver: new tech (all hail MS Teams), system change (you want me to do what now?) or a whole different job.
The weird bit is comparing styles with colleagues: "hey Larry, did you see that email on the Pensky case?" "Oh, no, I only check my emails at 4pm"
I tell my team that everything we do has an operational and a strategic (or tactical) component. Our constant focus is to work out how we can improve efficiency on the operational so that we have more time to focus on the strategic, as that is where growth come from.
Always start with the efficiency to gain time and then the trick is how to ensure time is devoted to the strategic.
I have worked in offices for a while. You get into a nice groove where everything is working well and then some numpty reads a stupid productivity book by someone who once ran a factory in uzbekhistan and everything gets turned on its head, for a few weeks and then it goes back to normal.
As a lifelong office worker i'd say i dont change much. Multitasking is bullshit and just ends in lots of jobs done poorly. I find i'm better at doing serial focus work rather than trying to mix and match. If i have a couple of big jobs at once i do much better spending the whole day on one rather than switching half way through the day or even worse, from hour to hour. I got a standing desk a little while ago. I might use it when it enters my brain to stand up but i do a lot of walking - walk the dogs in the morning, walk to work, walk at lunch with a mate, walk home. Usual day is about 14,000-15,000 steps on those work in the office days (8-10k for the wfh days). So standing isnt much of a priority. If i am forced to focus on splitting my attention, the walk in the middle of the day is a good reset for the brain. Other than that my day is organised chaos - look at emails straight away and mentally file into needs a response now, can wait till later. Teams chat is a boon and a curse. Good for chatting with work mates across the state, bad for being tracked down "for a quick response" because my light is green. But i'm fortunate in the sense that queries coming my way are specialised info answers that can be answered in 5min or big project type stuff that takes days.
That’s a good point. I also try to do the daily adminy things like sort through emails / messages at the start of the day, while the mental gears are warming up.
Come into work, either in office or home office. Continue to work until superior now informs me this is top priority. Work on that until I either finish that, another superior or the same one tells me this is the important task to work on. During this attend the schedule training required to be completed by this time complete. return to previous to priority task, drop that to attend the mandatory in person meeting for new directors to tell me how we are going to be doing these things now, (same as how we did it 2 directors ago), go back to work on what I have been working on most recently. Finish that work, take next piece of work of the pile, repeat.
Whilst I work in an office, I work for an MSP doing operations IT stuff. My role is make client stuff work without a hitch (AHAHAHAHAHA) and to implement small changes, constantly update software and so on. It also involves addressing tickets the helpdesk can't fix (or won't, in some cases). I doubt there are many productivity tools beyond automating tasks that would help me be more productive.
At least, that is what I tell myself.
All this thunking will give you metaphorical dents in the forehead 😜
I’ll wade in with some ignorant, half-baked ideas, acknowledging I don’t know what the writing / creative side of life is like. Also, this is one of those topics where it’s easy to give advice, and bloody hard to follow.
The sm@rt@r$e response is “it depends”. Something a little less trite would be “priorities man, then prioritise” - and apologies if I paraphrase someone else, badly.
Looks like it’s the ball juggling. If so, I suggest thinking on both daily and bigger time scales - weekly, fortnightly, monthly etc. How do you plan out the big, multi-year efforts that require research (like a Leviathan, or ancient history alternate timelines) interspersed with smaller one’s that are measured in days or weeks etc?
That’s roughly how it worked in my last role. We had regular planned activities (mthly, qtly, annual) plus ad hoc stuff that came up, as well as the occasional fire needing to be doused. The team would have a weekly view of the priorities (regular + ad hoc), and individuals would prioritise their day/week, and adjust as the week progressed. Sometimes not everything got done if a fire flared up, but we could justify what we worked on and why by week’s end.
The daily schedule is based on how you work (the “it depends” bit). Do you work better generating first draft content in the am, edit or research in the pm? Or do you keep going on something if you get in the groove? If the latter, then maybe allow say Mon-Wed for the big pieces, and Thu-Fri for the smaller stuff. Need a little flexibility - you don’t want to break the writing groove if you get in it, but also need to keep the other balls up in the air.
At the risk of expressing extreme ignorance - I gather with writing that the main thing is to be banging out a quantity of words each day - what those words are for is up to you & your wider priorities (blog, article, book etc). Below link is of another blog I follow where the author deals with this topic, with views of other famous writers. It’s not the first time he’s written about it.
Hope it all helps in some small way.
https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2023/04/since-i-posted-the-previous-post-and-got-so-many-interesting-replies-from-readers-ive-done-more-thinking-about-what-i-would.html
The sm@rt@r$e response to everything is always “it depends”.
I work from home pretty much 100% except for the one random day a month I’m supposed to go into the office. The only thing I do differently for those days is make sure I have something to do, so I look productive to my colleagues. Just the other day I was planning on going in because there was a special morning tea, but I had nothing to do so I canned it, and did that at home.
The answer to your question about productivity hacks and other things is that they are totally aimed at office drones, usually middle management types who want to "coach" and "develop" their minions and therefore need to come up with suggestions as to how their minions can do THEIR work better or more efficiently. OR the middle management type has suddenly discovered that an unmanageable workload came with the promotion they just climbed over figurative if not literal dead bodies to acquire, and now to prove that they "earned" their promotion and they're adding "value" to the organisation they need to be able to do the work of 4 people to a halfway competent standard all while attending 6 hours of meetings that could have been emails each day. I would guess 🤔
As an office drone, the way I work only changes with some kind of external driver: new tech (all hail MS Teams), system change (you want me to do what now?) or a whole different job.
The weird bit is comparing styles with colleagues: "hey Larry, did you see that email on the Pensky case?" "Oh, no, I only check my emails at 4pm"
I'm convinced you have to be a psychopath to only check emails at certain times of the day. WHY? Also HOW?????
I tell my team that everything we do has an operational and a strategic (or tactical) component. Our constant focus is to work out how we can improve efficiency on the operational so that we have more time to focus on the strategic, as that is where growth come from.
Always start with the efficiency to gain time and then the trick is how to ensure time is devoted to the strategic.