Productivity

and

Product:

Everybody’s

To-Doing

It

Productivity and Product: Everybody’s To-Doing It

Insights on productivity, to-do lists and Streamtime

© 2016 Streamtime

We knew what we had to-do.

Why do people love feeling productive and using to-do lists… and what can that teach us about the future of project management?

To-do lists are incredibly popular, particularly amongst the productivity-obsessed set. And they’re popular with us too – because we’ve used them to (finally!) retire timesheets from our studio management software.

But why, after thousands of years, do people still love to-do lists so much? Why are we so productivity obsessed? And how can to-do lists replace timesheets?

To explore these topics, we’re going to start by heading back in time…

PART 1

To do: fly a kite in a thunderstorm

Benjamin Franklin was many things: a printmaker, a political theorist, a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, and, oh yeah, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. That’s a whole lot to get done in a lifetime.

So how did someone crazy enough to fly an iron rod up into the sky on a kite in a raging thunderstorm stay organised enough to help birth a nation? You guessed it: a to-do list.

He not only wrote up a list of tasks to achieve for each day, he also matched each one to what he called ‘virtues’: life goals or ideal ways of living (like ‘order’ or ‘frugality’) that could be worked towards with each action.

Making infinity comprehensible.

The commitment and philosophical approach that Franklin brought to his to-do lists might sound extreme at first blush, but it actually lines up perfectly with novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco’s belief that “the list is the origin of culture.”

In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel, Eco said: “[The list] is part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”

So, just like Benjamin Franklin, we all try to make infinity comprehensible through lists. But why…?

Planning on the brain.

Have you ever felt an intrusive nagging in the back of your head, periodically urging you to remember to complete unfinished tasks and get working on unmet goals? Psychologists call this ‘the Zeigarnik effect’ – and it’s the same function of your brain that plays a song over and over in your head to try and ‘complete’ it after you hear only a small fragment of it.

You might think, like many psychologists used to, that experiencing the Zeigarnik effect meant your unconscious was attempting to work through problems itself, and you’re getting flashes of this process. But the truth is much more interesting.

The Zeigarnik effect is actually the evidence of your brain trying to distribute the workload of reaching your goals between the conscious and unconscious parts of your brain. Your unconscious brain has desires, but has to remind your conscious brain to do something it can’t – make a plan. Once you have locked down the specifics of how and when you’ll be achieving your goal, the Zeigarnik effect fades away – because your unconscious brain is satisfied that the goal will be achieved.

Here, then, we see why to-do lists have remained so popular – they provide us relief from the Zeigarnik effect, and free our unconscious to consider other things. As productivity expert David Allen says, to-do lists allow us to “use [our] mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

PART 2

Progress-powered passion

So that explains why we love to-do lists themselves so much – they are a tremendous tool for productivity that our brains actively yearn for. But why are we so productivity-obsessed in the first place? The obvious answer, of course, is that people like money (or other tangible fruits-of-labour), so they like making progress towards obtaining it.

But according to behavioural economist Dan Ariely, that might not be the right answer. In a study conducted by his team, people were given small sets of Lego to build for a small financial reward – and when they returned the completed Lego, they were offered the chance to do the same again for a slightly smaller payment.

One group of participants was told the Lego sets they were building would be disassembled for use by new participants the following day. But the second group of participants saw the Lego sets they returned disassembled before their eyes… and if they volunteered to build another set, they were given a set they had previously built (and watched be dismantled).

They found that the first group continued building sets much longer (stopping after building 11 Lego sets on average, compared to the second group’s 7) – despite having the exact same financial incentive.

No regrets like regression.

Ariely’s argument is that humans require a sense of progress and achievement to remain motivated – and that need extends beyond the rational. In the experiment we just mentioned, both groups knew the Lego sets would be disassembled in the near future. What was actually being achieved was the same in both cases – but seeing their work undone was much worse for their motivation than just knowing conceptually that it would happen.

As it turns out, humans have known for a very long time that denying a person a sense of progress is a particularly successful source of torture. In Greek myth, the Gods punished Sisyphus (King of Ephyra) for his hubris and trickery by making him push a huge boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it tumble back down to the bottom… where he’d then have to start pushing it back up the hill, in an endless cycle for all of eternity.

Unfortunately, this form of punishment isn’t restricted to the realms of fiction. When the Nazis occupied Greece during World War II, they established a massive prison – the Haidari concentration camp. While most prisoners of the camp were eventually moved onto other Nazi facilities, while there they faced a cruel fate – on every day except Sunday, the prisoners were put to labour, asked to dig holes and build walls, and then (you guessed it) fill the holes and destroy the walls. There was no productive purpose to the labour – but the Nazis knew how effective such treatment is at breaking morale.

Up, up is the way.

Depressing things to contemplate, to be sure, but there is an upside – the confirmation of how rewarding a sense of accomplishment can be in and of itself, outside of the tangible benefits of your achievement. Which explains a lot – like why mountain climbers will endure a miserable, painful, life-threatening ordeal to reach the pinnacles of massive piles of dirt and rock… and then want to do it again afterwards.

You don’t have to scale Everest to feel this effect, though – you’ll appreciate furniture you built yourself more than pre-assembled furniture (even if the furniture you built was from IKEA), and you’ll enjoy food you grew yourself more than food you bought. All things being equal, it’s the feel of achievement and progress that’s important.

Productivity pro-tips.

Now that we’ve established that productivity is important for your happiness, let’s talk about how to make productivity happen. But before we get into specifics, you need to start by asking yourself a question – are you looking to make your business more productive, or are you looking to make yourself more productive? Because business leaders with control over how their workplaces operate can do a lot to push the productivity of their team… but everyone else will have to settle for changing their habits.

PART 3

Positive and negative charge

If you’re looking to help your team be more productive, there are two psychologists who might be able to help you out: Frederick Herzberg and Abraham Maslow. Let’s start with Freddy.

Herzberg believed that there were two types of things that influenced how motivated (and, subsequently, productive) a worker is: what he called ‘motivator factors’ and ‘hygiene factors’.

‘Motivator factors’ make your team feel satisfied with their work lives and make them more likely to actively want to come into work each day – so things like enjoying the projects they’re working on, receiving encouragement, and having opportunities to progress their careers.

‘Hygiene factors’, on the other hand, don’t make employees feel motivated, but will sap motivation if they’re not present – things like salaries that reflect their effort and value to the company, job perks, fair treatment from supervisors, good relationships with co-workers, and reasonable company policies.

What’s interesting is that, according to Herzberg, motivator factors and hygiene factors don’t influence each other – they both affect motivation independently. Being underpaid doesn’t mean that some can’t still enjoy the projects they’re working on for example. And having opportunities for career progression won’t stop a bad relationship with a co-worker from draining their motivation.

The lesson, then, is to be constantly managing both – making sure your team have plenty of motivator factors keeping them passionate, whilst also making sure no hygiene factors are undercutting that. No mean feat. But for a little help with that, we can look to Abraham Maslow.

The hierarchy you need.

You may have heard of ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ – a list (usually depicted as a pyramid) that describes the fundamental needs of humans, in order of urgency. It’s used all over the place (from psychology instruction to sociology research to management training), but the original intent was for it to serve as guide to understanding human motivation. And if you understand motivation, you understand productivity.

The Hierarchy starts with our most urgent physiological needs (oxygen, water, food); then onto matters of security (covering everything from a safe place to live to financial security and good health); then to love and belonging (both romantic and social); and then to esteem (the need for respect from ourselves and from others)... and when all of those other needs are met, a person seeks self-actualisation – the need to become who they want to be, to achieve their dreams. The ultimate motivation.

Self-actualised workers are the hardest workers (as long as the work they’re doing for you lines up with their ambitions) – because they’re self-motivated, fuelled by their own burning desire to reach their most fundamental goals. That means, as a manager, you have two goals: make sure you’re doing everything you can to help meet your team members’ fundamental needs (so their attention is focused on their self-actualisation needs), and ensure that the work you’re giving them is meeting their self-actualisation needs.

Managing both for every person who works for you is an incredible challenge – but if you can do it, you’ll have a team of self-fuelled productivity machines.

To help with fundamental needs, you can:

–  Ensure you’re paying your employees enough for them to feel financially secure

–  Encourage them to use their sick days to keep them healthy, and make sure they’re not overworked (so they’re getting enough sleep)

–  Maintain a positive environment that ensures they have healthy, respectful relationships with each other

–  Be mindful of their need to have enough time to spend with their loved ones and family

–  Provide regular feedback and be aware of their need to feel valued within the business.

Self-actualisation needs are much trickier, because they’re both individual and often intensely personal. The best tool here is communication: check-in with your team regularly to make sure you understand their self-actualisation desires, and how you can help that person focus on them.

Managing both for every person who works for you is an incredible challenge – but if you can do it, you’ll have a team of self-fuelled productivity machines.

PART 4

You are your own product(ivity)

If you’re the one in-charge of the business, you have a little less control of your own destiny at work – but there are still many habits you can get into that will help you get more done (and achieve some of that productivity euphoria in the process). Here are a few:

1) Do less, better.

Multitasking! A good skill to have, right? Not so much. Stanford University research has conclusively shown that you’re more productive when you’re focusing on one thing at a time.

If that came as a shock, you better sit-down before you read this next part – a University of London study found that multitasking for extended periods of time had trouble recalling information, paying attention, and just generally getting work done. In fact, inveterate multitaskers find their brains suffering similar effects to people who stay up all night – with their IQs dropping up to 15 points.

2) Embrace your inner morning person.

Your brain is at its best after rest – so schedule your day with the challenging, brain-draining tasks before lunch, and leave the busy work and meetings for the afternoon. That way, you don’t squander the best of your brain on the monkey work.

3) Break it down.

For some reason, the vast majority of us have our work live structured around the fallacy that working in 4ish hour stints is a good idea – to the extent that we’re made to feel guilty if we’re doing something not work-related any time that’s not our lunch break.

But after sorting through mountains of data, productivity monitoring company DeskTime found that the most productive people worked in sprints. And they think believe they found the ideal formula: 52 consecutive minutes of work, and then 17 minutes of rest and relaxation (rinse, repeat). Give it a try, there’s no need to feel guilty – it’ll just mean you’ll be spending a decent slice of your day resting and refreshing your brain, instead of checking Twitter constantly as your tired brain searches for distractions.

4) Plan it out.

It might be hard for creative types to accept the benefits of structure… but the cold, hard facts clearly show that planning your day is key to productivity. Don’t check your email every five minutes – plan a few times during the day to do it, and then spend the rest of your time getting stuck into work.

This doesn’t just apply to emails, though – if there are things you spend a huge number of short snippets of time on each day, find a way to condense all of the work into one block… and you’ll be freed up to blitz through your responsibilities the rest of the time.

5) Work to live, don’t live to work.

You’re always living your life, even when you’re at work (though you might sometimes feel like a desk zombie). So it’s important to remember that, as much as people talk about ‘work/life balance’, your personal life affects your work and your work affects your personal life – meaning there’s no real way to separate them from each other.

So embrace it! Plan ‘you time’ into your business calendar. Find ways to exercise on the way to (or at) the office. Make time for fun at the workplace. Because you’re a human, even when you’re at work – which means to get more out of the productive machine part of yourself, you need to make sure your personal needs are met.

PART 4

Putting to-do lists on our to-do list

So we’ve discovered why people love to-do lists, why we love feeling productive, and talked a bit about how you can be more productive yourself. As you might have noticed, these are subjects we’re especially passionate about – particularly since we rebuilt our entire system around to-do lists. Why did we do that?

When we were in the earliest stages of planning the future of our product, we were looking at the pain points of our users. And one huge one kept coming up, again and again: they hated timesheets. With an almost pathological passion. But they were seen as a necessary evil – because studios needed to keep track of time used and money spent to manage their businesses. It seemed an intractable problem.

But after digging down to the real core of the issue, we found a solution: people hated timesheets because they were laborious, time-consuming and (most importantly) offered no reward for the time invested. So we decided to flip the script: we’d make time tracking less work, and offer the user something for their effort.

How Streamtime’s to-do lists work.

The first step (making time tracking less work for the user) was surprisingly simple in retrospect. Estimates for how long each task should take were already being created by job managers in the form of job plans. All we had to do was was create some smart algorithms that would identify from the job plan who needed to do what, figure out how important each task was based on deadlines and job priorities, and use this information to pre-populate the user’s time tracker with best-guess estimates of what they’d need to do (and when).

In the new Streamtime, this all happens at the press of a magic button (which we’re literally calling ‘the magic button’) which automatically fills out the user’s weekly to-do list. If we still used timesheets, it’d be the equivalent of having a button that said ‘do my timesheets for me’.

Users might still have to adjust the time spent on some tasks when things don’t go according to plan, but it’s still still much easier than having to remember what you did on a given day, track down a job number, find the client details, and all the other hassles that come with putting together a timesheet from scratch.

So that was the ‘less work’ half sorted – but how could we possibly offer something the user in return? The answer was the Zeigarnik effect. By ditching the timesheet model and adopting pre-populated to-do lists instead, we’re able to provide every user freedom from the Zeigarnik effect – because they now never have to remember what they need to do (or when they need to do it). With time management taken care of for them (in an intuitive, fun-to-use way), they’re free to focus their minds on creative endeavours.

But there was no reason for us to restrict this benefit to the work world – so we included the ability for users to add personal tasks to their to-do lists that have no influence on the backend of the system. After all, ‘finish homepage designs’ and ‘pick kids up from school’ are both very important. And by keeping both in one place, we’ve ensured neither will be forgotten.

Never done.

This is a radical new way of handling time tracking, and we’re still figuring out how far we can push its potential. For example, we’re currently looking at ways to import data from your calendars – so we can drop your meetings into your to-do list automatically.

And that’s just the start. Imagine if your to-do list could identify which sorts of tasks you liked to do on which days (or even what you liked to do at certain times of day) and scheduled your week accordingly. Or if you logging a meeting as ‘done’ logged it as ‘done’ for everyone at the meeting – saving a lot of people from doing a little bit of work.

We certainly have our work cut out for us. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned throughout this process, it’s that there’s always more to do.

© 2016 Streamtime

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