A More Human Approach to Productivity | Chris Bailey | TEDxLiverpool

Like you, maybe when I talk to someone new one of the first things they notice about me and maybe tell me, maybe it's not how nerdy I am and at first I was a little put off. by this label, but over time I have come to embrace it in a way I never expected. Now I'm a nerd about a lot of different things, cosmology being one of them. I can watch hours of TED talks and lectures on cosmology and sometimes Yes, I'm a meditation nerd. I have been meditating for 6 or 7 years. This process of continually returning your attention to your breath sounds very simple in theory, but in practice it is one of the most difficult things and one of the most rewarding things in the world, but what makes me the nerdiest and most curious is something that you probably wouldn't expect and that idea is

productivity

and I don't mean

productivity

in the really business sense. where you reduce your life to a spreadsheet and get really efficient and turn on Excel to keep track of your life.

I mean productivity in the sense of making better use of the limited time we have every day to have

more

time for things. that are really meaningful to us and I was lucky enough to know that I've been around this idea of ​​productivity for about a decade and I was lucky that when I graduated from college I got a couple of full-time job offers because I was productive until At that time, but I thought that if there was a time in my life to do something meaningful with my time it was then, 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 going to do it.

I experimented with one thing I really wanted to delve into: productivity. This is a photo of mine that I refer to quite often. It was taken about a decade ago. I just realized right now that I'm wearing a Liverpool shirt. I have never remembered this image again. It's a revelation to me on stage, but I'm reading a book called The Joy of Stress, one of those cheesy books where the author puts a picture of himself on the cover and you know. I've been on this idea of ​​being

more

productive for about a decade, so I started doing the math on what this productivity project would look like and they weren't great, they were okay, although I had about 12 grand that I had saved up to that point.

Keep in mind it's Canadian dollars so compared to most other currencies it's not that great but I figured it's about a thousand dollars a month and divided by 12 that would give me 12 months to follow my passion and that That's exactly what I did. This curiosity about productivity from the bottom of my life had been following me up until that point to really the foreground of what I was doing and, boy, did I dive deep. I pored over all the academic literature. I was able to find every book I could find anything about productivity. I interviewed my heroes, the greats in the productivity space.

Some people have normal heroes. My heroes are productivity experts, but what took the cake as the most interesting to me, and frankly the strangest, were these productivity experiments. that I did 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 each one of these that I did dozens of were designed so that I could push the limits of how much I could accomplish or how much I can do both mentally. I eat physically every day, so I did everything you know to measure information overload.

It's a bit of a boring topic and you know there's a lot of research on it, but measure that and really test it. I watched 70 hours of TED Talks over the course of a week, so 296 TED Talks while doing things like taking more breaks and napping and even meditating to see how that affected information retention, we're constantly connected. I don't have my phone here on stage because my girlfriend says it looks bad in my pocket, it's one of those big iPhones, but maybe you're using your phone right now, you know managing our attention is very difficult, especially nowadays when we have There are so many objects of attention that we can focus on and to test I used my smartphone just an hour a day for three months and the first few weeks it helped me let me tell you but after that I felt like I cleared a curve and it It opened up a whole new expanse of focus, creativity and productivity for me, people, I think people are an underrated idea when it comes to productivity, you know they're the most important part of our lives and they do that too.

They affect our productivity. I also measured it by living in isolation for 10 days, isolating myself from people, which showed me that people are essential to engaging in our work and being motivated in our work, but people are also the reason we have productivity. They're what make working extreme hours worth trying in the first place. I worked 90 hours a week for an entire month, alternating between working 90 hours a week, then 20, then 90, then 20. There's a saying that the early bird gets the worm, and so on. To put that to the test , I got up at 5:30 every morning for three months to see how that affected my productivity and I absolutely hated that experiment.

You know, it took me three months to introduce that habit into my life until I realized that I absolutely hated it, you know I was less productive in these circumstances and that led me to a lot of curious research about how there is no connection to your socioeconomic position, the The time you wake up is what we do with the hours of our day. After we wake up, that makes a difference in how much we do. Physical exercise is another thing you know, raising our heart rate makes us more productive and allows us to contribute more energy to what we are doing.

So, to prove it, I gained 15 pounds of muscle mass over the course of the productivity project when I finished, you know, I was lucky enough to have been invited to write a book on the productivity project with a big publisher, so they gave me 30 weeks to write it, they thought. It was a very short period of time, but I challenged myself, you know, to write a good book in less time, so I ended up writing it in 24, but maybe the experiment is a little strange, this one takes the cake as teaching. The most important thing for me about productivity is to meditate for 35 hours over the course of a week.

You know, I did all the productive work I could, as well as a lot of written research and interviews during that week as well, but you know, meditation was this curious interest, that kind of I've been experimenting with it, but meditation has also been on a background for the last six or seven years, but when you look at the two ideas, productivity and meditation, they seem to come into direct conflict with each other, your productivity, of course, we think is doing everything you can, while meditation is about not doing much at all, so you know it's a little hard to admit, but after a couple of months of productivity. project I stopped meditating completely, but when I stopped so I could focus more on productivity, I noticed several things started to happen.

I became more stressed, especially in the first few months, when I turned down those jobs and, frankly, no one was visiting my website. More people visit. now, but the only people were my girlfriend, my family and that was it, so it's very easy to be hard on yourself in that process. I got stressed and it 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 more distracted because I couldn't concentrate well and I lost more time so I became less focused and then I had to spend more time doing things because I paid less attention.

I worked more often on autopilot and this is perhaps the insight that impacted my productivity the most because I didn't deliberately work on what was really important and worked in response to the work that came my way. I was able to take a step back and think about what I really wanted to be more productive in the first place and I even gained weight. You know, meditation and mindful eating are what allowed me to lose about 40 pounds several years ago. I used to watch a lot. different than what I do today and it's because I made a deliberate decision about when I ate instead of eating on autopilot, so seeing these conditions was what motivated me to do this productivity experiment to meditate for 35 hours over the course of a week while I was trying to be as productive as possible in those situations, so I did sitting meditation, you know, you know I'm not going to do that, where you sit on a meditation cushion and bring your attention to your breathing.

I did walking meditation, where you bring your attention to your feet and every time it strays you bring it back. I ate carefully. I did tasks carefully and noticed that several curious things began to happen. I felt less productive in the first place because I was less busy than before this experiment, but at the same time I brought this deliberation to my work that I hadn't had before, I worked with intention behind what I was doing and, although I had less time to dedicate it, I overcompensated by devoting more attention and energy to my work. instead, and because of this, I wrote a ton, I wrote thousands of words that week and I made up for that time and I think this is one of the most crucial things you can think about when it comes to your productivity.

It's one thing to read. about productivity, but you have to get all that time back and then otherwise you're basically watching productivity go up and there's a lot of that out there, but maybe the most important idea that this experiment taught me was that productivity is a lot further. More than just managing our time, of course, we all know the importance of managing our time, but I would say that there are other ingredients that deserve to be on the same level as managing our time and our attention is one of them. The more we focus The more time we spend on our work, the less time we have to spend on it and the less we are distracted, the more we can focus on our work and get into these flow states where we forget what time it is and we get so immersed in it.

What we are doing does not matter how well we can manage our time if we cannot also manage our attention and our energy is another idea that deserves to be on that same level because if we are exhausted at 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon our productivity It becomes toast, you know, if we don't step back frequently to take breaks and recharge, and interestingly, during the project I found that every single thing I researched, experienced, or interviewed someone about fit into one. of these three different categories, so I think productivity is the confluence of all three, but more than that, what this meditation experiment taught me, even though it's one week, you know? looking back, I still get so many little nuggets of wisdom was that no 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 all about and, more than that, it's about achieving what we set out to do in the first place, and if you intend to spend a perfectly relaxing day on the beach and rest and recharge and, you know, maybe listen to some TED talks and completely unplug and then we do it.

I would say that we are perfectly productive and the same is true if we intend to have a really professional day and submit a couple of TPS reports, whatever they are, and a great job interview when we achieve what we aim for, are perfectly productive and The best way to achieve this is to manage these three ingredients of productivity. time our attention and our energy. I want to finish by giving you some practical ways that fit this new way, this more

human

way. I think about looking at productivity, so a big part of the productivity project was this year long idea to pick out the things that work from the poor productivity the things that don't work and I want to give you five to finish with you ready I'll do them quick number one is the rule of three and the rule is very simple and it is It's a very simple rule to set intentions every day and here it is, at the beginning of the day, you fast forward to the end of the day in your head and you wonder when the day is over. day what three main things I will want. having fulfilled that's the rule it's very simple but it's almost stupidly simple to be honest with you but it allows you to separate what's important from what's not and it only takes a few minutes you don't have to spend hours integrating a complex system into your life until manage what you have to do the second is to do one thing at a time this is the most important graph you will ever see when it comes to your productivity the fewer things we try to do in the moment We become more productive because we do not disperse our attention on a thousand different directions at once, but we channel it with this laser-like focus on one thing at a time and that forces us to be more deliberate about what we're doing.

Work not only in generalsetting these three daily intentions but also in the moment. Number three is simple but also very powerful and is to cultivate how much energy you have throughout the day and this is common sense advice. but unfortunately common sense today, when we are busier than ever, is not always a common action, it is to do simple things like eat well, put good fuel in our body and raise our heart rate a few times a day and get enough sleep, you know, sleep. I see it as a way to exchange our time for energy, why don't we want to get more of that number four is to disconnect from the Internet.

Something interesting I found among the top-performing executives I encountered during the productivity project was that they view the Internet as a nicety rather than a necessity that they know they focus on. in other things, because the Internet is usually not where our most important work lies, but in designing a new product, but in doing things that really change the world and this is one of my favorite statistics when it comes to productivity, the amount of time. We spend on the Internet procrastinating when we are connected to the Internet We spend 47% of our time on the Internet procrastinating, which is crazy, you know, things literally take twice as long when we are online and therefore when we deliberately disconnect , especially when If we focus on one of these three daily intentions, we can become much more productive when we see how much we achieve, number five is another counterintuitive, but I haven't found anything better than that for my productivity and that is dreaming. awake.

If you think about the moment when the brightest light bulb in your sight hits you, it is likely that you were not concentrating on your work or doing a thousand things at once, maybe you are taking a shower and suddenly, out of nowhere, it turns on. An idea occurs to you. and you have to leave early to find a place to write it maybe you're letting your mind rest and wander when you're not natural and maybe you left your phone at home you know it's in this way 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 dream mode to do it, so I think this is especially nowadays, this is what productivity should look like, as you know, it's about this intention. it's about this deliberation and being kind to ourselves as we strive to get there because really the reason why productivity is so crucial and so important in the first place is that we only have a limited amount of time, you know if in general or weather every day and most days.

I feel that, but when we manage our time, our attention and our energy better, we can achieve so much more, especially when there is intention behind what we do, thank you.