Bad News for IBD Analysts: Activity != Productivity

Dealbook has an article by Tony Schwartz that should send a shiver down the spines of those expected to crank out +100 hour weeks during their analyst stint, entitled "Activity Does Not Always Equal Productivity". The piece notes, ominously, for those familiar with long, hard weeks of work:

You need more sleep than you think, and maybe much more

Don't let this scare you. The author puts forth some clever methods that should increase your productivity even when you are forced to go sleepless for days on end.

The article begins with the bad news shown previously, that sleep is much more important to productivity than one may imagine:

We live by a persistent myth: that one hour less of sleep will give you one more hour of productivity. Instead, what it gives you is one more hour awake, and you are less rested. The near guarantee is that you will be progressively less productive over the course of the day.

I know this doesn't come as a surprise to many of you, but has this knowledge lead to more sleep? One refrain I've heard before is "I'm different, I can handle it". While this may be true, it's highly unlikely:

A vast trove of research suggests that 95 percent of us need at least seven to eight hours of sleep to feel fully rested, while 2.5 percent need more than eight hours. The final 2.5 percent — or about one out of 40 people — require less than seven hours.

In other words, you are not likely one of them, even though you may well think you are. According to a sleep researcher, Tom Roth, for example, the percentage of people who require five or fewer hours of sleep to feel fully rested, rounded to a whole number, is zero.

Sadly, many of you don't have the option of "get more sleep" when the need arises. It's simply not an option. Despite the authors insistence that more sleep is paramount, it's worth noting the additional strategies utilizes that may help alleviate the damage done by the less than optimal amount of sleep you've gotten. In particular, with how you approach your messages/email:

The pull to e-mail is powerful and Pavlovian. That’s especially so after a night’s worth of new messages have filled your in-box (assuming you weren’t sleeping with your smartphone, and sneaking a peek in the middle of the night).

The vast majority of the messages that accumulate do not truly demand your immediate attention. Instead, they take up your time and consume your attention at precisely the time of day that most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

Some may contend whether or not the messages that have accumulated demand immediate attention, but the basic idea that you have the most energy in the morning is the important take away. The idea here, according to the author, is that:

By checking your e-mail first, you effectively turn over your agenda to others. It is far better to decide what your agenda ought to be the night before and make that the first thing you focus on at work, without interruption, for up to 90 minutes.

If you must check e-mail when you get up because there are urgent messages, scan quickly for anything that truly cannot wait an hour. Answer those, ignore the rest, and then do what is truly most important.

The author's mention of "for up to 90 minutes" links to his next point, that work should be done over 90 minute intervals. The claim is that we work in cycles over 90 minutes with peaks and troughs of physiological alertness. This is illustrated by the author using a sit-up analogy:

Imagine you are challenged to do the maximum number of situps you can over 30 minutes. You are given the choice of doing them continuously until exhausted, or doing them in sets of 5 or 10 with a short period of rest between each one. Do the latter and you will generate more situps, keep better form along the way and feel less tired at the end.

The author's final piece of advice is to keep lists to keep all you have to do off your mind and well organized. This is a departure from what I normally hear, in particular that lists make you more productive. This claim is different in the sense that it applies the advice from the perspective of the brain's working memory, as opposed to productivity in general:

We each have relatively small working memories and they are easily overloaded. The less you try to keep straight in your head, the more space there is for you to think clearly and deeply about any given subject that demands your attention.

This piece of advice is extended to how it should be viewed. The author recommends that all of one's lists be kept in a single place and separates them by purpose:

I keep all my lists in one place. They include what I want to do that day, over the next week, and in the longer term. I also keep a list of e-mails I need to send; calls I intend to make; ideas I want to explore further; issues I want to discuss with specific colleagues; and even things that are making me feel anxious.

In other words, write everything down and keep what you write down organized. For those of you who have been keeping up with the "How I Work" series, you'll see a similar strategy being employed; albeit via several different methods. However, something that alarmed me initially was the inkling question of, "then what?" Such a vast ocean of lists can become daunting at some point, how does this help? The author's answer to this question is particularly clever:

The other value I derive from detailed lists is that they help clarify what I ought not to be focused on. By having everything in one place, I can much more easily decide what is truly important and what is not. Half the value of having a list is to make it more obvious what not to do. I might have 50 to 100 items on my lists, but I typically give explicit priority to three or fewer in any given day.

My take away here is that the purpose of a list is not to organize what you need to do on a given day, but to figure out what you don't need to do. Thus, allowing you to better answer the primary question asked before embarking on any new task:

“Is this the best way I could be spending my time?” If the answer is no, don’t do it.

So, what do you monkeys think? How easily could you adopt the author's advice? Or, has someone found a better way?