Lead Smart

CHAPTER 1Know your productivity style

Our productivity, or our capacity to produce work, is more than simply our ability to manage time. Time management was a concept that came to the fore in the sixties and seventies, when time and motion studies attempted to revolutionise the efficiency of office workers. Time management training became the buzz, and even today, we still refer to how we organise ourselves within the context of managing time.

Of course, they were not wrong in focusing on how we manage time. It is probably our most precious resource, as once it's gone, it's gone forever. To be productive we need to manage our time very purposefully and carefully. But time is but one of the limited resources we need to manage. We will focus a lot on time management strategies in future chapters, and you will see that the key to managing time well is managing all of the activities that you need to do, both meetings and priorities, within the context of time. But managing the resource of time is not enough.

A second limited resource we need to manage is our energy. We only have so much energy to give to things, and some of our work, and some people, drain more energy than other tasks and people. Some work requires high levels of energy, such as key meetings or presentations, whereas some work needs lower levels of energy, such as processing emails. We all have an energy cycle as we go through the day, with points of high energy and points of low energy. I am a morning person so ...