How you can boost productivity 20%
5 Actionable Steps
I've come to a crucial realization: regardless of our productivity levels, time remains our most finite resource. It is, invariably, our most significant bottleneck. No matter how hard you try to use time better, you never get more of it.
This insight led me to a strategy that has increased my team's productivity by at least 20%. The approach? Creating space for our teams to focus on high-impact work.
I know, I know. It sounds incredibly obvious. Give people more time to work on the most critical work, and they will be more productive.
Yet, this strategy seems to be rare in many tech companies. I constantly talk to people who feel they are wasting so much of their time—ineffective meetings, constant disruptions, and shifting priorities are the top offenders.
I want to share 5 of the most actionable methods I've found to achieve this. These methods will help you go from thinking, “Wouldn’t that be nice to have more time?” to having steps you can take tomorrow to make it a reality. I have used these steps personally, and they have made a huge difference for me and my teams.
Here are the 5 actions I’ve seen to help give yourself and your team back more time.
Re-Think 1:1s
I am a big fan of taking personal time with people on your team. I believe that is critical. However, I also think that most 1:1 time is likely wasted. Instead of talking about how you might make your 1:1 time better, here is my advice to at least give your team more time.
First, instead of individual 1:1s, start a 15-minute stand-up with your team. Use this time to discuss daily blockers and needs. Often, these come up in 1:1s, leading to many telephone conversations between teammates. Cut that down by addressing the challenges with everyone together.
15 minutes isn’t a lot, but if you do it daily, you won’t have a large backlog to discuss.
Then, move your 1:1s from weekly to bi-weekly or even monthly to still have time to talk to your team more personally and individually.
From a productivity standpoint, you are giving back time in two ways: first, by doing less frequent 1:1s with everyone, and second, by discussing challenges together and eliminating the need to later have more meetings to fill other people in.
Nvidia’s CEO talks about some of these principles and an even more extreme form of no 1:1s in the video:
Have a Weekly In-Depth Meeting
Outside of the daily stand-up with my direct reports, the only other weekly scheduled meeting we have together is a 90-minute meeting to discuss more profound challenges and decisions that can’t be addressed in our daily stand-up.
This isn’t a status update meeting. In my opinion, status updates are best communicated async. Meetings should be used for discussions and decisions.
The trick with using this meeting effectively is to have a running agenda during the week of items to discuss. So, instead of setting up ad-hoc meetings or starting large, distracting Slack threads, we do our best to add the items to our weekly in-depth meeting.
Between the daily and weekly discussions, we can resolve most issues and save A LOT of ad-hoc meetings and random Slack messages.
If you can stick to these core meetings, you will be amazed at how much time you will get back.
Discourage Recurring Meetings
It is so easy just to set up recurring meetings. Just don’t do it.
Instead, manually schedule the next meeting at the end of the previous meeting—at least to start. That will force you to consider whether you even need another meeting.
I can’t describe how much time I see wasted in meetings that are just recurring zombie-like meetings. No one thinks about whether the meeting is worth the time; you are just going through the motions.
If, after some time, you find the meeting series valuable, then automate the recurring series.
Remove Failed Recurring Meetings
You will likely find that even with the best intentions and experimentation, you will set up recurring meetings that you probably no longer need.
Just be honest with yourself and kill those series once you find they are no longer helpful.
Some signals you might need to end a series:
It is primarily a status update with minimal decision-making or discussion
Most people are not contributing
You don’t look forward to the meeting
The series has been going on for many months
If you are not sure, my suggestion is to remove it. Then, if you feel the need later, add it back. Generally, we are biased against removing items, so if you already think they aren’t valuable, they likely haven’t been that valuable for some time.
Err Towards More Focus Time
Almost all companies err towards more meetings. Phrases like “over-communicate” are common and lead to a sense that too much communication can’t possibly be a bad thing.
I’ve found this to be very false.
Instead, you almost can’t have too much time to focus on your highest priority items. Sometimes, meetings are very necessary to do so; most of the time, though, they really are not. Or they can be handled in your minimal recurring set of meetings discussed above (stand-up and weekly in-depth).
Have you ever heard anyone say, “Wow—we really just don’t meet enough to be effective at this company?” I never have.
If you start hearing those phrases, maybe you’ve gone too far. Until then, I recommend being incredibly thoughtful about how you use meetings.
The biggest productivity hack is giving people more time to focus on their highest-priority work. It doesn’t require any crazy system or even getting your team to change how they work. Instead, it gives them even more time to do what they excel at.
Since making some of these changes to our operations, I believe we’ve become at least 20% more productive as a team. People have commented on how happier and more engaged they are day to day. That’s a win-win.
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