Productivity has been one of those issues for me over the years that always seemed elusive.  This isn’t to say I never get anything done, but I always feel I could be doing better.  As some of my elementary school teachers used to write on my report card “Could do better”.   That always stung, because it’s not that I didn’t know how to do the work – it was just bloody boring.  Fast forward 30+ years and I feel like I’m in the same boat.  I’ve always had this feeling that I could be doing better when it comes to how I get things done.  Couple that with the idea that “productivity” is (in my view) a somewhat hard thing to measure, and you’ve got a recipe for a situation that’s driven me crazy for a long time.

Definition

Dictionary.com includes these for productivity and productive:

Productivity

1. The quality of being productive or having the power to produce
2. Economics The rate at which goods or services are produced especially output per unit of labor.

Productive

1. having the power of producing; generative; creative: a productive effort.
2. producing readily or abundantly; fertile: a productive vineyard.
3. causing; bringing about (usually fol. by of): conditions productive of crime and sin.

“Having the power of producing”.  Since I’ve been self-employed, that phrase has taken on new dimensions of meaning, and in ways that I wasn’t aware of during my first round with self-employment from 1999-2003.  I’ve learned many lessons during and since that time, but it seemed many of them were not really *part* of my life yet.  Many of them still aren’t, but they will be.

The “power of producing” also means “the responsibility of producing” in an work situation, and possibly doubly so in a self-employment situation.  In its basest sense, whatever you “produce” must have “value” to someone else.  If you “produce” things of no value, but do so rapidly, you’re “productive” by the book definition, but you’re out of a job in the real world.

What am I producing?

So I’ve had to be more aware of *what* specifically am I producing for people that bring them value?  Currently I deliver three products to various customers: custom web applications, training services, and PDF magazines.  Each one of them is a separate concern – there’s not much overlap between my customer base.  And each one involves separate skills: development, teaching, editing.  But I realized that in each case, the person buying the product is buying value, and that value to them is time.

Web applications

When someone contracts me for web work, they’re wanting one of two things:  either an application that will streamline some aspect of their business, or an application to get more sales in the door.  The second one is more of a marketing type of thing, and I don’t usually involve myself in those project.  I tend to focus on the quantifiable projects – “process X used to take 8 hours, and using this software it takes 27 minutes”.  In those cases, I’m saving the customer’s time from doing automatable work to focus on tasks that have higher value to them.

Training

When people buy training services, they’re learning how to save time by doing something they didn’t know how to do before.  They’re saving time both by having someone experience (me) show them how to do what they want rather than learning on their own (savings 1) and by utilizing the knowledge they learn to automate or eliminate things they currently do with their time (savings 2).  I know this is a rather abstract way to talk about it, but training/education services all seem to have this in common.

PDF magazines

I launched GroovyMag a few months back as a way of bringing together information about the Groovy and Grails ecosystems to people in a consistent, regular fashion.  The value provided here is education under a different delivery vehicle.  People buying GroovyMag are hoping to get information which will make their Java and Groovy development processes faster, saving them time to do more important things (more complex Java work, disc golf, time with the family, whatever).

So while I’m not producing time directly, I’m producing things which have a direct impact on people’s time, and ideally let them keep more of their time for higher value tasks.

Keeping more of my own time

Given that the things I’m producing all end up with time as a key factor, it follows that I would also be looking for ways to save my own time to spend on producing things of value, right?  Here is a list of a few steps I’ve taken which have been beneficial to me so far:

Read Getting Things Done (GTD)

I succumbed to the hype around this book and bought it many moons ago.  It’s staring at me from my bookshelf as we speak.  I was not quite able to implement all the physicality of the book’s ideas yet, but one suggestion from it is already paying some dividends.

Keep folders for everything

I have dozens of folders labelled now, each with only a few bits of paper in them.  Years ago I would have *never* done that, but the GTD book suggested it, and it’s helped me be able to quickly find things I need when I need them.  I need to reorient my office so that all of that is closer to hand, and I’ll use that technique even more in 2009.

Dual monitors

I’m split on whether this has actually *helped*.  During my training sessions it has, because I’m using WebEx for training, and I can keep chat windows open in one window and the ‘shared applications’ open in another.

I tend to use a laptop a lot (as in, I only own laptops right now), and I like to sit leaning back in a chair with my feet up quite a lot.  I swivel.  I move.  Keeping a second monitor plugged under those conditions doesn’t work very well.  I already ruined one VGA cable because of so much twisting.  I’m really waiting for wireless video (bluetooth video?!).  So, despite the hype of “dual monitors make you more productive!” I can’t say it’s been a total time saver for me, except in training situations.

Macbook

I picked up a used Macbook in October, and it’s become my primary laptop.  It directly saves me time because of the fast suspend/resume and intelligent wireless behaviour.  It’s not a perfect laptop, but using previous laptops (both with XP and Linux) I realized I was always spending way too much time for the laptop to resume to a workable state, and for wireless functionality to come back up.  I’m normally able to use my macbook within 4 seconds of opening the lid.  Under my XP and Linux laptops, it was more like 10-15 seconds.

This doesn’t sound like much, I agree, but usually in those extra 6-11 seconds I’d get mentally miffed about the delay, my mind would start to wander, and I’d end up thinking about something else for a bit, or walking off to do something else for those ‘few seconds’ and end up wasting a minute or more.  So, while I could have tried adjusting my concentration habits to remain “focused” on my initial reason for opening the laptop, trying out Mac hardware was an easier step which has ultimately saved me time every day.  This isn’t saying my Mac saves me hours per day over another system, but little bits add up over time.  And my frustration level has gone down some because of it.

Delegation

This might have fit under the GTD heading above, as its recommended in that book, but its something that tends to be recommended by many personal development systems.  And it works.  In a corporate setting, delegation might be a situation where you ask a team mate to do something for you that better matches their skill set.  I’ve not recently been in corporate situations where I had direct authority to delegate to other people, so this one always a difficult one for me to grasp.  Being self-employed now, its easier to grasp and implement.  The downside is that ‘delegation’ means ‘paying someone to do something’, but the upside is that, once you find the right people, it works wonders.

I was initially going to try to produce the GroovyMag PDF magazine on my own.  I got a trial of InDesign, tried Apple’s Pages, and messed around with Scribus.  After a few days I realized that there was *no* way I could handle this on my own.  It would take me weeks or months to become proficient enough with any one of those tools to save myself any time at all.  I ended up finding a good design person who charges reasonable rates, and I delegate the production of the magazine to her.  We discuss layout options, design ideas, etc., so I have some input, but she’s able to do things in 15-20 hours that might take me 15-20 days of solid work.  The delegation principle has worked wonders for that project, and I’ve tested out the concept on a smaller scale in other projects with similar, smaller scale results.

Turn off the phone

My cat knocked over a glass over water over night and my cell phone sat in a pool for about 7 hours.  It doesn’t hold much of a charge, and flakes out now and then.  I was initially miffed, and was suddenly thinking of all the expense and hassle a new phone brings.  Considered an iPhone (but held off for now) and decided to see what things would be like without having the phone on all the time.

It’s great.

I check voicemail once every day or so, but people who need to get ahold of me know to email me, get me on IM, or Skype me.  It may seem counterintuitive that I have the phone off, but keep IM on and still check email.  Other productivity people will say “don’t check email”.  I agree, and *usually* don’t check email but once every few hours.  There are times, however, when I fall back in to old habits and check email every 5 minutes.  When I notice myself doing this I need to figure out why.  It’s *usually* because I’m working on something I’m having a huge mental block on, which I’ve not readily acknowledged.  Once I recognize this, I stop the email fidgeting, get up, walk around, perhaps get on the treadmill for a few minute, or even go watch some television for 5 minutes.  What I do isn’t as important as breaking that cycle and clearing my mind of that block.

Small notebook

I picked up a pocket-sized moleskine notebook a few weeks ago and carry it around with me.  I find it easier to jot down notes in there any time of the day or night, laptop resume time notwithstanding.  I sort of wish I’d gotten the ‘calendar’ one instead of the free-form ‘ruled’ paper one, but when I went back to the store, they didn’t seem to have the smaller sized calendar ones around.  Maybe I just imagined they had them?

Another lesson learned – a good pen makes a difference.  Or, put another way, a bad pen makes it really hard to write.  My penmanship isn’t very good to start with.  Couple that with a pen that makes me work too hard and it’s a recipe for chicken scratchings.

Things to try or master

There are still many things I’ve not tried or not incorporated in to my daily routine yet.

Virtual assistant

Having a virtual assistant has been one of those things I’d like to try.  I always feel like I don’t have ‘enough’ to pass off to someone else, but I think I’m getting to that point.

iPhone/smartphone

At some point I’ll get a smartphone to see if the portability of having certain apps around with me outweighs the potential timewasting of having games like BubbleWrap 2 seconds away at all times.

“Refactoring your Wetware”

This book by local publisher Andy Hunt looks good.  I saw him give a presentation on it at our local JUG, and the presentation has been an inspiration to me as I look for ways to be more productive in my day to day life.

“Getting Things Done” software

I’ve tried out a few GTD-inspired pieces of software, but nothing has stuck with me yet.  I think I’m more tactile, and while I love computers, I’m just not yet able to organize my whole life there.  I think expanding the ‘everything in folders’ concept may yield more short term benefits for me, but I’ll keep trying out software.

Am I more productive today?

Thinking about it today, I think I’m able to produce more value than I was a year ago.  Whether this value is worth as much in the marketplace as I think it *should* be is a different story    As is the case with most introspective journeys, the more you become aware of your situation, the more you realize there’s room for improvement.  As I identify and make those improvements, I’ll document those here, or perhaps in another blog.  This type of post isn’t keeping with the style of what this blog has been up to now, and I might want to start keeping these ‘introspective/improvement’ posts someplace dedicate to them.

• Previous Entry: Suggested steps for launching a new web project
• Next Entry: Banks, Troubled Assets, Congress and trust