In This Episode…
After struggling through applying my Productivity Improvement Operating System to developing my meeting behaviours yesterday, I had a think about what was going on. Fresh with those insights, I got up this morning and worked through the stages again with much better results. In this episode I share my realisation and explain the actions I took this morning that have made a big difference on moving this forward for me.
Episode Transcript
Hi, and welcome to today’s episode of the profit productivity podcast. It’s your host, Michael tipper. Who else would it be Now In yesterday’s episode, I ran through the first part of the productivity improvement operating system, which was about getting a clear direction. And I struggled to go through the seven stages of that particular part of the process. And I think there were a number of reasons why that was the case. It partly felt it was a token gesture in order to create a podcast episode. Although actually it is part of my development journey for meetings, but I think the main reason was because I did it at the end of the day and I was fitting it in around all the other stuff I’d been doing during the day. There’s a lot of things going on at the moment. And I started to realize that I hadn’t made it a priority because it’s really important for me to develop my productivity because it’s part of the journey I’m on and doing this podcast, as I mentioned yesterday, is about cataloging my progress so I can monitor how well I’m doing, but also I can share it with others.
So the sharing it with you is just a spin off from me developing my own productivity, and hopefully you’ll benefit from that. But I realized that I wasn’t doing it in my prime time. So today is Sunday. And so when I got up, the first thing I did this morning was get up and start thinking, right Let me really think about this. And it’s about applying myself to something that’s important to me when I have the best of me available. And that’s first thing in the morning for me as a whole variety of reasons. I’m I am naturally a morning person, but also I am fresh. I’ve I’ve woken up from a good night’s sleep cause I had a good night’s sleep and I am very clear. I’m rested. There’s no pressure because it’s a Sunday. And so I applied myself to the task in my prime time.
And as a result, I’ve got a much, much better result. So I woke up inspired to do that realizing that’s what I need to do. I need to reprioritize the development of my productivity and put that first and foremost. And then the spin off from that is talking to other people about it, sharing what I’ve done doing the podcast, but really I’ve got to focus on doing that first. So I revisited that first step. And the first thing I did was create a, a template. And this is by creating something that’s going to define and direct my behaviors. So I created a template in Evernote. That means that whenever I have arranged a meeting, I can do the preparation workout or the outcome is for the purposes. It triggers me to think about those questions. Think about the agenda, think about what preparation and then during the meeting, capturing decisions, capturing actions, and then what to do with the followup.
So I used Evernote for that because it’s probably the, one of the, the biggest tools or the tool I use the most in terms of capturing information and capturing my thoughts. So it’s perfect for me. And what this has done now is that it will promote those behaviors. It’s well-designed. So I spent about an hour sort of going through it and thinking through what do I need to do based on my experiences. And I have got a part for the beginning for, during a meeting and afterwards, and this whole thing will reduce the friction that is currently in place. That stops me doing any of this, because if I’ve got nowhere to put the information about preparing and capturing the notes and the actions, then there’s going to go on post it notes and bits of paper, and it’s going to be really, really confusing.
So this really fine tuned it. So having done that, I also revisited the seven steps, which was all about getting clear direction. That’s picking an area to improve looking at my behavior goals, what the obstacles are, do some mental contrasting, then identifying when and where looking at affirmations, and then finally visualizing what success looks like. And I revisited those and it was much easier this time because I had a clear mind because nothing else had solid my mind. I was applying all of me to the task because I put some effort into creating the template. What it meant is I had a clear idea of what good looks like. And so the behaviors came out very, very clear. It was easy to identify the obstacles. The mental contrasting was much easier as well because I could see the benefit of it. And also I spent some time working, what the, if then behaviors were going to be, and this was really useful.
give you an example, just going into my notes now. So if I am invited to a meeting, then I’ll work out whether it supports my current activities. So I actually thought, right, if I’m going to be invited to meetings, I’ve got to make sure I’m not going to every single meeting. It has to support what I’m doing now, when, if you work in a big corporate environment and there’s lots and lots of meetings, it might be that you’re invited to lots. And this is where the challenge will come for you is working out what are the meetings you need to focus on right now Because you can’t do everything. You can’t attend every meeting and still expect to produce high quality work, as well. And so for me, it’s easy because I didn’t have that many demand in terms of meetings, but I can decide if someone wants a meeting with me, whether it supports me, what I’m doing, if it doesn’t, then I don’t do it.
And the if then behavior helps me do that. So that was really important. And, then the affirmations, I came up with a few affirmations and also the one thing I struggled with yesterday, I think I mentioned was that it was hard for me to visualize what I was going because I hadn’t done the groundwork in the previous steps. Well, now having done that, it is so, so much easier to do that. So I took notes on all that. I captured my thoughts and capture my, feelings about that. And I can now see better that the productivity improvement operating system that I’ve developed and trialed last year still is valid. It’s still very powerful, especially when you apply it properly as the best time. So what does the future, well, I now have to take this system, this approach and start applying it so that I can refine it and make sure that it is the best it can possibly for me.
Then I need to start embedding it into my routine behaviors until I can condition it. So it is automatically so that I always do that. That’s the process I’ve got to do in the past. I would have stopped here and thought, right Yeah, I know what I should be doing yet. That’s all I need to do. But as I’ve seen this last week, my automatic behaviors kick in, and if they’re not well-defined and well-designed and appropriate, then what will happen is I’ll drift into some bad habits and bad activities, which won’t support me at all. So I need to make sure this is automatic and there’s some effort yet to be done in doing that, but I’ve got a great starting point. And the other stages of the productivity improvement operating system will help me get that. So it’s embedded. So this does take a little bit discipline, but you don’t have to be Uber disciplined to do this. I’m just applying a little bit of discipline to create this routine, this habit, once I’ve got that embedded, I won’t need to be disciplined about it anymore because it will be just be part of who I am and part of what I do. And that’s the ultimate to achieve in developing these behaviors and these skills. So that is today’s episode until tomorrow.
