How to be a Productivity Ninja

Graham Alcott discovered the low level of productivity caused by information overload in the twenty-first-century workers; therefore he took a deep dive into his book, how to be a productivity Ninja where he shows how to worry less, achieve more and love what you do. In this book, Graham combines all his teachings from his public productivity workshop from all over the world into a simple and practical guide to working faster and smarter.

The goal of this book is to teach you how to overcome procrastination, how to use email more effectively, and new ways to increase your personal time and how to de-clutter an information overload.

Graham identifies stress as one of the critical components for procrastination, within the first chapter he goes into details on how stress agent is created and our ability to deal with them. The author identifies several causes of stress agent among which he listed conflict, overload panic, fear of being foolish among others. He continues by highlighting the aspects of developing a mindset of a Ninja to use in your productivity. This is about living in the present moment and not thinking about what you need to do or worrying about tomorrow. People’s best work happens when they are present and live in the moment.

One of the key components of the book is attention management. We often read about how important our time is, but attention is finite and should be used as a precious resource more than our time, at the end of the daytime alone has no real value, it is the action in time what gives value to time. He went further to state that the key to productivity and ultimately the application of this precious resource will determine your success. He developed an equation to back up his point which is:

TIME + THE RIGHT ATTENTION AND FOCUS = DONE

He categorizes attention as follows:

•    ACTIVE: Ticking along but flagging a little
•    PROACTIVE: Fully focused and alert
•    INACTIVE: Light is on but no one at home

The author also proposed several strategies to maximize periods of proactivity. This includes taking yourself away from distraction and improving concentration then use mechanism for managing task and determining what to do at any given time. Graham proposed the CORD Model.  CORD is an acronym that stands for Capture, Organise, Review and Do. The first two C and O requires for you to operate in ‘BOSS mode’ while the last two will be R & D needs to perform in “worker mode.”

CAPTURE: means collecting ideas and new tasks quickly and efficiently. This allows you to take distraction out of the way soon and get back to the task at hand.

ORGANISE deals with the appropriate filing of the collected task. The task to be organized in lists and give a sense of scales; therefore activities spanning months are not mixed in with tasks requiring minutes. The goal of this model is to ensure that when operating in execute mode, we are clear on what needs to be done and what is committed to at the moment of executing.

REVIEW:  The review process is a formal and regular look across the tasks to be done taking all things into account like context, priorities, what is needed, waiting for items, etc. after the review is complete, the next step is doing.

DO: Graham outlines an excellent separation between the worker and boss views when he explains the different dashboards that are available to each.  The dashboard contents for each are the followings:

Boss mode:

• Waiting  for list
•  Masters action
•  Calendar
•  Good idealist

Worker mode:

•    Master Action List
•    Calendar
•    Daily list

THE BIG THREE – KEYPOINTS

Key point #1: Say NO to as many distractions as possible

Key point #2: Knowing what tools to use but being clear about what the tools are will save you time and not provide distractions.

Key point #3: Have good systems to help you react and respond quickly.

One Last Thing

A productivity ninja is not a superhero, but they often do a great job in appear so. Graham Alcott, Productivity Ninja