As I increased my productivity or magic kick for smart and lazy

It happens that you spend the day at work, like you didn’t do anything, but still tired. This is usually the routine. A bunch of small urgent, sometimes not very urgent, but still important, assignments and daily duties. Because of these matters, you do not have time to do any other, more important things. Common situation?

I also ran into this problem, but all the time management attempts were almost unsuccessful. I don’t get accustomed to time management, but I still found an alternative solution.

How do they usually solve this problem?

1. None . A person gets used to spinning like a squirrel in a wheel, performing countless errands and then often lingers to finish the work that he did not have
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2. Time management. It is not for everyone. Many are not psychologically ready to drive themselves into some kind of framework, to control time. They live according to their feelings, in their own rhythm.


Patrick did not plan anything for the summer holidays and everything was in time

3. Optimization of workflow. This is not time management, but attempts to prioritize, divide tasks into important and not so much. This usually happens when the employee “learned how to work” and began to colorize. In fact, as you probably already understood, this does not solve the problem. This approach eliminates some symptoms and reduces overall tension, but does not eliminate the problem.



Each of these methods can be super effective for someone, but it will not bring any benefit to someone. It all depends on the nature of the person.

This raises a logical question . What to do if I understand that something is going wrong, but I am a lazy ass and I am not motivated by even the winged expression of Artemy Lebedev?



Make plans for the next year, 3 years, 5 years? Set a goal, and then go to it? Such motivation requires a great and great goal, ambitious far-reaching plans. Of course, this is the coolest option, but now I think about it.



Let's be honest with each other. Yes, we may have plans for future purchases, how we would like to spend a vacation, etc. But how many people make plans for the development of their lives?

Ask your friends and colleagues who they see themselves after 5 years. Where they live, where and by whom they work, how they spend their free time. Let them describe their typical weekday in 5 years. Many this question drives into a stupor, they do not even think about it.

According to one of the psychological theories, we have several layers of control over our lives.

The first layer - "household" - is all our daily tasks that we perform every day. In the morning we get up for work, have breakfast, we go for lunch at noon, then we go home, going to the store on the way. In short, this is our “Groundhog Day” with you, something that is repeated from day to day. It is also all important and urgent. This is a sufficient minimum for our day to go well.

The second layer is “organizational.” It involves planning for the day, week, month, year, as well as analyzing the effectiveness of the implementation of plans at the end of each term. For example, in the evening, to analyze how successful the day was, what was planned, what was not, and why.

The third layer is “development.” This is your self-improvement program. For example, the study of foreign languages ​​and professional literature, visiting various trainings, sports. In other matters, playing sports is a development until it firmly enters your life and becomes a routine. Then it goes into the household layer, where there are daily repeated tasks that you repeat without a reminder.

The fourth layer is "life." No matter how well you plan the first three layers, various events in life leave their mark and make their own adjustments.

So, most people are missing or are in their infancy the 2nd and 3rd layers. For example, one of the manifestations of the lack of an organizational stratum is that such people never or rarely return books and other borrowed things. The “household layer” completely absorbed them; they do not think about personal development, nor about life planning.

Types of people and time management

Let us recall the classification of officers by General Manstein, which was discussed in the previous article . In short, people are divided into smart and hardworking, smart and lazy, stupid and hardworking, stupid and lazy.

Let's look at them in terms of applying time management to them.

Smart and hardworking

These are very good performers, for them time management is a godsend. They are usually disciplined and ready to plan their time carefully. Time management a huge amount of literature, training and methods. We will not dwell on them in detail.

Stupid and lazy

Here they just do not need time management. They do not want to work and develop.

Smart and lazy

Give them a free rein, and they will amaze you with their creative solutions, they will quickly figure out how to solve the task with minimal time and effort. They just understand that they need to somehow optimize their activities, but laziness does not allow them to live according to strict time management rules. Especially hard to creative people. They are not driven into the schedule of planning, they are accustomed to live in a free stream, without which creativity is impossible. Yes, they can set long-term goals and follow them, but plan daily - no.

Stupid and hardworking

Probably, they do not think about the fact that you can implement time management and somehow optimize their activities. They just plow. Speaking about the officers, Manstein offered to shoot such people on the spot, as they load themselves and others with a huge amount of unnecessary work.

About how I increased productivity

So we have reached the last section, where we will talk about the methods of increasing productivity for the smart and lazy.

Method 1. Three tasks that will bring me the greatest effect tomorrow

It is clear that cases can be very much. It is necessary to choose the three most important ones that will bring the greatest effect / result, write them down (this is important), and the next day perform them first. This is such a time management in a light form, light version.

Method 2. Routine, development, DPD

This method was told to me by a talented business coach, a specialist in personal efficiency and time management Stanislav Skvortsov. The essence of the method is as follows. All the tasks that we perform during the day can be divided into three categories:

Income-generating activities - DPD. In every business, in every job, there is one key action for which you receive money, the rest are subsidiary. For example, for a sales manager, the key action is making a phone call. The more calls, the more customers. More customers - more sales. But DPD is not only money, it can be emotions, impressions, etc. For example, a guy has a date with a girl - this is also DPD, because it brings positive emotions and not only.

If the meeting with the girl does not bring such feelings and this relationship is already a burden, then this is already a routine. Meeting with friends, parents, children, grandchildren - this is also, as a rule, DPD.

Development. This planning, obtaining new knowledge and skills.

Routine is a series of similar, repetitive tasks that must be performed during the day. Answer calls and letters, grind out the same blanks on the machine, write code, work on the assembly line, and more, each has its own routine.



What to do here?
It is necessary to ensure that the ratio of DPD / development / routine is as much as possible of the DPD and as little as possible of the routine. The optimal ratio is 80/10/10.

The obvious decision suggests that you need to do something with the routine, since it is she who is the "root of evil."

What can you do with it:

• postpone (it can resolve itself, it will become irrelevant)
• delegate (delegate to someone else)
• during the routine do something else (for example, listen to an audio development book while doing some monotonous work)
• translate routine into development (add creativity).

One of the routine tasks that I had was the organization of business training seminars for the company's portfolio projects. At first, I worked with a third-party organization, but the result did not satisfy me, then I myself conducted several seminars. In the end, I decided to read the course Customer Development, which was new to me. He began to actively study it and then conduct seminars. Thus, I gained very valuable knowledge, experience and solved a routine task.

When solving routine tasks in this way, we should not forget that development is gradually becoming a routine again. As soon as you have mastered a new lesson so well that you make it mechanically and your results no longer make you happy, as before, but the lesson itself does not bring so much pleasure, this is no longer a development. This is a routine.

Method 3. Optimization of routine tasks

Maximally reduced the routine, transferred it to the development, but it is still a lot? Routine is usually a one-type, repetitive task, which means it can be formalized and standardized.

For example, if you are a sales manager and call a lot by phone, make a call script and work on it. Periodically, you can make improvements to it, but this already applies to development.

An important tool in this task is checklists. None of us is immune to the human factor, and sometimes we accidentally make stupid and strange mistakes. Check-lists make sure that we have not forgotten any trifles and allows us to act confidently even in a stressful situation.

We are always admired by the skill of pilots, doctors, builders and other specialists, who make dozens of decisions from day to day, on which a person’s life can depend, but how is this achieved? In most cases, these are checklists.

I similarly standardized writing articles to a corporate site.
I have a list - a set of data that you need to collect for writing an article about the event. Who participated in the company and what did they do there, date of the event, name, organizers, venue, key participants, etc.

Then I use a template (list), which indicates in what order these text blocks should go. What should be at the beginning of the news, in the middle and how the news should be completed. This approach allowed to reduce the time to write an article by 2-3 times. Other tasks are optimized in the same way.

When publishing, there is a list of parameters that I have to check before publishing on the site (the picture of the announcement is uploaded, which category is chosen, the date of publication, etc.). This allows you to always produce an intelligent product of consistently high quality, in a short time and without failures.

But the task is more difficult. I used a similar approach in peer review of projects at one of the federal competitions. Over the course of a month, in my free time, I reviewed and evaluated over 200 startups, for each of them I gave a detailed justification of the assessment and comments for the author of the project.

Before me, a typical application form and evaluation criteria, reviewing the first 15-20 applications, I developed rules that allowed me to quickly decide on what grade to put, and as I accumulated evaluated projects, a list of typical responses and recommendations for similar errors was formed which I see in every second application.

Further, also a kind of check-list. The availability and degree of development of such sections as team description, market analysis, comparative analysis of competitors and others are assessed. If one of the sections is missing or it is not well developed, then the project receives penalty points and relevant comments.

If a project is allocated with something or provides additional materials that most others do not have, for example, attempts to calculate a unit-economy, then he will receive bonus points.

The originality and innovativeness of the idea is also evaluated. If the idea of ​​the project is as old as the world, and there is no comparison with competitors, then the project receives an appropriate comment. If this is something unique, it gets extra points. It turns out quickly, efficiently and without time-consuming. In the end, this results in an assessment of 0 to 10 points and a detailed justification of the assessment.

Let's summarize the main results.

For what type of people that is more suitable, classical time management or its lightweight forms described in this article.


++ the greatest effect, + positive effect, is not applicable

Good luck and efficiency. Thank you for reading to the end.
Write in the comments what situations you face and how you increase your efficiency.