Productivity is not about time management, but about attention management.

Time management is not really a solution, but part of the problem.

The author of the article: Adam M. Grant, an American psychologist and writer; Professor at the Wharton School of Business; the author of three best-selling New York Times, as well as the book "In work with the head. Patterns of success from the IT-specialist ".

A few years ago, during a break in leadership classes, where I was a teacher, manager Michael approached me with an uncertain look. His boss said he needed to be more productive, and he spent several hours studying what he was spending his time on. He has already cut all unnecessary meetings. He could not find the tasks that could be thrown out of the calendar. He saw no obvious way to make them more efficient.

“It will sound like a joke, but in reality everything is serious,” he admitted. “The only thing that occurred to me was to drink less water so as not to run to the toilet so often.”

We live in a culture obsessed with personal productivity. We swallow books on how to do things, and we dream about four-hour working weeks. We serve a cult of fuss and we praise how much we are busy. We are often told that the key to doing things is to manage time. If you can better plan your calendar, you can achieve productivity nirvana.
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However, after two decades of studying productivity, I became convinced that time management is not really a solution, but part of the problem.

Most of my career is most often asked to me: “How can I do more?” Sometimes people ask me because they know that I work as an organizational psychologist, and one of the areas that I study is productivity. People ask me more often because they read an article about me in the New York Times or my popular book , where it says how much time I have.

But actually, I don't feel particularly productive. I constantly do not cope with my daily goals, so it was difficult for me to answer this question. It was only after talking with Michael that it dawned on me: productivity was not related to time management. There are a limited number of hours in a day, and if we concentrate on managing time, we will simply understand better how much time we are wasting.

It is better to engage in attention management: to build priorities for people and projects that matter, and not to pay attention to how long it takes them.

Managing attention is the art of concentrating on doing things with the right goals, in the right places and at the right time.

Well, okay, why should we change the object of concentration?

It is considered that when managing time, a person must assign himself goals related to the completion of work on a task. I decided to do this while writing this article. The goal was 1,200 words, so I sat down at a computer at 8 am and gave myself three hours, which would be enough to write an article at a leisurely rate of six words per minute. I spent the next six minutes writing zero words and just stared at the blinking cursor. The only completed task was Google’s search for information on whether the cursor was named after all the writers who cursed it [Eng. cursor - the cursor (from the Latin cursor - runner), to curse - to curse / approx. trans.]. (Yes, I know that you are making fun of me, you are blinking a dashed line). Then I wondered how many words per minute I could, in principle, write, and I passed the typing test. I did not like the result, I passed another test, then another one ...

In the end, I despaired and moved on to managing attention. Alvin Brooks White once wrote: “Every morning I wake up, torn between the desire to improve (or save) the world, and the desire to enjoy (or taste) the world. It’s difficult to plan your day. ” But as a result of my research, I discovered that productive people do not worry about the choice of which of these desires to satisfy. At the same time they follow both, leaning towards projects that are both interesting to them personally and important from a social point of view.

So, instead of focusing on how quickly I would like to finish this article, I asked myself why I agreed to write it at all: I can learn something new by synthesizing my research; I finally have a link to which I can send people when they ask me questions about productivity; she can help some of them. As a result, I began to think about different people who could read it, which reminded me of Michael. Khoba.

Often, our productivity problems are not due to lack of efficiency, but due to lack of motivation. Productivity is not a virtue, it is a means to an end. It is virtuous only when the goal proves worthy. If your goal is productivity, you have to rely on willpower to force yourself to engage in this task. If you pay attention to why you like this project and who will benefit from it, you will naturally be drawn into it by inner motivation.

But how can I not be distracted from the task, if time does not bother me?

The management of attention includes the ability to notice exactly where you manage to make your plans. I grew up in Michigan, and when I returned there to study in graduate school, I tried to persuade my girlfriend from the West Coast to go with me.

“It's too gray and cold here,” she said after she came to visit during a blizzard. And then she went to study at Stanford. And the next winter in Michigan was the coldest and grayest of all that I could remember, and I was never more productive. In addition to work, there was absolutely nothing to do!

Naturally, several studies led by Julia Lee (now living in Michigan) show that bad weather has a positive effect on productivity, since we are less likely to be distracted by thoughts of going for a walk. The researchers found that on rainy days, Japanese bank employees made payments faster, and when the weather was bad in America, people corrected errors in texts more effectively. Given this, I specifically waited to start writing this article after a snowfall, when the melting porridge outside my window became unattractive.

My favorite part of managing attention is “when.” Most of the difficulties we have with productivity are related to tasks that we don’t want but have to do. For many years I thought that these tasks should be performed immediately after interesting ones in order to use the accumulated energy. And then my colleague, Jihe Shin, and I conducted a study at a Korean department store, and found that if you give your employees a very interesting task, then they perform the most boring tasks much worse.

One of the possible reasons for this is the consequences of the so-called effect. remnant of attention . Your mind tries to return to an interesting task, and breaks the concentration on the uninteresting. But in the experiment, where the Americans first watched the videos and then performed the tedious task of data entry, we found a different mechanism: the effect of contrast. Interesting or funny videos make the data entry task even more painful, as a sweet dessert makes the taste of bitter vegetables even more disgusting. So, if you want to gain energy to perform a boring task, do it after a relatively interesting one, and save the most interesting ones for later as a reward. The thing is not in time, but in the selection of the right moment.

Creators and managers

I guess that you want to become not only more productive, but also more creative.

It all comes down to the fact that productivity and creativity require opposite strategies for managing attention. Productivity is powered by the construction of attention filters that help to abandon thoughts that are not related to business or distract from it. Creativity is fueled by eliminating these filters and making similar thoughts.

How to get the best of these two areas? In his book, When, Dan Pink writes about the evidence that your circadian rhythms can help you choose the right time for both productive and creative work. If you like to get up early, you should do the analytical work in the morning when you are most alert; routine tasks leave for lunchtime; creative work, take the afternoon or evening, when you have, most likely, thinking will be inclined to nonlinear. If you are a night owl, it is better to be engaged in creative projects in the morning, and in analytical tasks - in the afternoon and in the evening. And this is not a time management, since you can spend as much time on completing tasks even after rebuilding your agenda. This is attention management: you notice the sequence in which you do your job better, and adjust to it.

Managing work time means also thinking differently about how to plan work. I really like Paul Graham's proposal to divide the week into “constructive” and “managerial” days.

On management days, hold meetings and make calls. On creative days, find time for productivity and creativity, knowing that you will not be distracted by those things that usually disrupt the workflow. Unfortunately, few of us have the luxury of such planning, which means that we need to look for ways to allocate time for creation.

Time management says that we need to completely get rid of distractions - not only from those for which others are responsible , but also from those that we generate ourselves. If you are sucked by social networks, you need to stop it. Managing attention offers an alternative: to think about when to distract.

Studying at school, I killed every Saturday to watch TV, and then I felt disgusted with myself because of it. But I did not give up the TV. I introduced a rule: I turn on the TV only if I know in advance what I want to watch. I adapted the same policy to social networks: if I work, I go there only to share content. And I postpone the scrolling of the tape for the time when I can’t do anything - I wait for the plane to take off, or I rest after the exercises.

Most of the writers with whom I am familiar wait for creative days in order to work, and they think that it takes 4-6 hours to go deep into a difficult problem or to get involved in a big idea. However, there is evidence that people who write in long intervals achieve less than people who write in short passages. Significant progress can be achieved in surprisingly short intervals: when graduate students were taught to write in 15-minute intervals, they completed their dissertations more quickly.

If you are trying to be more productive, no need to analyze how you spend your time. Pay attention to what absorbs your attention. I first looked at the clock after I remembered the story with Michael. It is now 10:36, and I have exceeded my goal by 500 words. Decide for yourself whether the past 156 minutes I had were a good example of using my attention, and a few minutes you spent reading the article were a good use of yours.

Which reminds me of one more thing: I am sure that highly effective people have the eighth habit. They do not spend all their time reading about the seven habits of highly effective people.