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Wednesday, December 5, 2012
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Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense)
December 5th, 2012Top StorySeven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense)By Alan Henry
Myth #1: You Have to Get Up Early To Accomplish Anything
A 2011 study published in the journal Thinking & Reasoning points out what we should really remember: That the key to being productive and creative (which the study breaks into two different types of activity) is to work the hours that are best for you. If you're an early bird (or someone forced into an early schedule because of your job), get your difficult and most troublesome tasks out of the way first thing, when you're most productive. Then in the afternoon, when you start to wane, it's time to throttle back and spend time brainstorming and being creative instead. The inverse applies to late risers or people who work best in the afternoon or evening. Put simply, you'll have more time if you get up early or work late when no one's around to distract you, but that doesn't necessarily make you more productive. Myth #2: Power Through Your Slumps
To use an analogy, whipping a horse gets you less speed and distance every time you do it. Trying to push yourself forward gets diminishing returns after a certain point. Instead, you should switch gears and do something else, or take real breaks where you disengage completely and give yourself an opportunity to recharge. Unfortunately, most work environments aren't terribly conducive to this, but it's not impossible to work on a side project for a while, or just get out of the office and take a walk before coming back to what you were doing. A 2009 study by the Society for Human Resource Management published in the Harvard Business Review took the idea a step further, and proposed making time off and away from the office mandatory for employees because of the productivity gains it nets. Myth #3: Multiple Monitors Increase/Decrease Productivity
In many of these studies, the marketing push was to multiple displays instead of a larger display because larger screens either didn't exist or were prohibitively expensive. It was simply more realistic to suggest to people they get two 24" displays instead of try and find a 30" display, when Apple was the only one selling one and it was ridiculously expensive at the time. We've even covered both sides of this debate in great detail before, and while the issue has simmered, it's not going away anytime soon. Photo by Sean MacEntee. So what's the truth? Simple: for most people who do heavy text or spreadsheet-based tasks in relatively few open applications, real estate matters more than number of displays. For people who need delineation between running applications, windows, or workspaces, number of displays matters more than real estate. Figure out what that means for you, find a great deal, and buy accordingly. Myth #4: The Internet/Information Overload Is Making Us Stupid, So Disconnect to Get Things Done
There's some truth to the theory, and we took a closer look to separate fact from fiction earlier this year. However, it isn't the internet that's making us stupid, and information overload is a failure to filter the firehose of data we all drink from. This 2011 Columbia University study, published in the journal Science, examined Google's effects on memory and concluded that yes, many of us choose to research information we need instead of commit it to memory. What the study didn't do is draw doom-and-gloom conclusions about what that means for human intelligence. The real myth here lies in the interpretation of scientific data, not the data itself. When asked to recall the speed of sound offhand, Albert Einstein explained that, roughly "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." The internet is much the same way—we learn to be careful about the information we memorize because we know we can access more at any time. The downside is that when we do, we get more than we need. Again, it's up to us to manage, instead of throwing out a valuable tool because of a productivity prescription written for us by someone else. Myth #5: It's Impossible to Get Real Work Done at Home/a Coffee Shop/Library/Away from the Office
Another study, published in the December edition of Journal of Consumer Research takes a different approach, and notes that mild, ambient noise—like the din of a coffee shop, makes us more productive. Too much noise—like the furor at a busy office, for example, (especially one with open-air cubicles) can be a productivity killer, but working from home or a mildly buzzing public space can do wonders for our work. Of course, anecdotal evidence also abounds. Working from home or from a coffee shop have their own challenges, but the benefits often outweigh the drawbacks. As with Myth #1, you should do what works best for you. If you work best in an office, head in every day. If you work best at home, convince your boss to let you try it. Myth #6: Sorting and Organizing Is the Solution to Email Overload
We touched on this topic before, and suggested that you should just search for messages when you want to find them instead. The study didn't conclude this, mind you—the study noted that it was simply more efficient to search when a message was needed than it is to scroll through folders, and then scroll through messages in a folder. So what should you really do? The study notes that opportunistic access methods are the best for retrieving emails you need. Boiled down, that means the method that gives you the most opportunity to find the exact item you're looking for. Put simply: reduce your email volume by unsubscribing from crap, automate and filter everything possible (services like Unroll.me and Boomerang help), manually organize little things that need a personal touch, and archive/delete everything else. Then leave the rest to search. That way you get the best of both worlds: a clean, organized inbox that can take care of itself, and you can skip through your inbox and get rid of anything else very quickly. If you need to find something, it's a quick search away, and sorting can make those searches a bit easier. A few filters can go a long way, and don't take much time to set up. Myth #7: [Insert Productivity Technique] Will Fix Everything and Make You a Happy, Productive Person with More Free Time
At the end of the day, the productivity method that works for you is the one you'll actually use. Don't try to shoehorn a method into your workflow because someone else thinks it's the way to go. If you're a project manager and you think GTD is too cumbersome, try Kanban on for size. If you want to take elements from both and mash them together so they work for you, you can do that too. If your system is out of control, go back to basics and give yourself a fresh start. The important thing to remember is that your productivity method should save you time and energy so you can focus on the task at hand. If you spend more time organizing than you do doing the thing you're organizing, you're wasting time. Productivity is about getting to work so you can stop working and do the things you want to do, not about spending all day moving papers from one box to another. Again, these productivity myths only scratch the surface of the ones we see and read posted by productivity blogs around the web every day. We're even guilty of some of them. Regardless, all it takes to debunk many of these is a little digging into the research behind each of these assertions, and looking at the actual conclusions of the studies instead of what others concluded based on the study. Like many things, productivity isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. It's highly individual, and every bit of advice you read—including ours—should be considered as such.
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