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Speaker 1: Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics

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Speaker 1: used by leading innovators to get so much out of

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Speaker 1: their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Inmbak. I'm an

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Speaker 1: organizational psychologist, the CEO of Inventium, and I'm obsessed with

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Speaker 1: finding ways to optimize my work day now. Unfortunately, every

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Speaker 1: minute of every day, there are several or in fact

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Speaker 1: many managers that are inadvertently killing their team's productivity. They're

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Speaker 1: doing this through expecting their team to be at their

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Speaker 1: beck and call, responding to instant messages or emails within

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Speaker 1: a few minutes. They do this by constantly interrupting their

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Speaker 1: team because it's okay for managers to interrupt people, isn't it,

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Speaker 1: And they spread out many, many meetings across the course

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Speaker 1: of the week, many of which are not helping anyone

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Speaker 1: make progress on their most important projects. Indeed, Adobe's consumer

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Speaker 1: email survey, conducted across one thousand white collar workers showed

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Speaker 1: that we spend two point five hours in our inbox

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Speaker 1: every day. And when it comes to meetings, research published

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Speaker 1: in the MIT Sloan Management Review revealed that executives spend

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Speaker 1: twenty three hours per week in meetings and their subortinatees

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Speaker 1: are probably not that far behind. But often when we

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Speaker 1: talk about improving productivity, common sense suggests that to achieve

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Speaker 1: big gains we need to make big changes. Yet what

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Speaker 1: we know from fields such as cognitive psychology and behavioral

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Speaker 1: economics is that small changes can actually lead to big

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Speaker 1: leaps forward in performance. I call this micro productivity, tiny

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Speaker 1: changes that can lead to huge improvements in the way

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Speaker 1: that we work. Now, if you manage a team, I

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Speaker 1: wanted to share three simple micro productivity tactics that you

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Speaker 1: can try that will have a dramatic impact on your

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Speaker 1: team's performance. First up is asking your team to work

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Speaker 1: to their chronotype. So, as a manager, do you know

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Speaker 1: which of your team are morning versus evening people, which

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Speaker 1: ones are firing on all zilla in the morning, and

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Speaker 1: which ones come to life at night. If you don't

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Speaker 1: know this information, then you need to get to know

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Speaker 1: it because it has huge implications for performance. So around

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Speaker 1: fourteen percent of the population a larks. These are the

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Speaker 1: type of people who were bright eyed and bushy tailed

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Speaker 1: at six am, and another twenty one percent of owls

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Speaker 1: who peek in the evening and the rest of us,

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Speaker 1: so what I call middlebirds and for somewhere in between,

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Speaker 1: and you can actually determine where people lie by asking

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Speaker 1: them to complete a very simple survey which I'll link

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Speaker 1: to in the show notes. Now, once you know where

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Speaker 1: individuals sit on this scale, you can encourage them to

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Speaker 1: structure their date based on their pronotype. So let lars

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Speaker 1: start work as early as they like. But this means

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Speaker 1: letting them leave early too, and encourage your owls to

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Speaker 1: do the opposite. So larks and middlebirds are best suited

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Speaker 1: to doing focused and analytical work in the mornings and

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Speaker 1: then less cognitively intense work in the afternoons. For owls,

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Speaker 1: their days should be structured in the opposite manner. So

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Speaker 1: on my team and invent him. I have a couple

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Speaker 1: of laks who regularly start work between four and five am,

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Speaker 1: when their brains are firing, and then they finish a

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Speaker 1: bit after lunchtime. So by encouraging your team to work

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Speaker 1: to their individual chronotypes, you'll boost performance significantly by aligning

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Speaker 1: people's natural, inbuilt clocks with work tasks. The second thing

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Speaker 1: that you can do as a manager is you can

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Speaker 1: allocate one distraction free hour a day to your team.

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Speaker 1: So here's what I mean by this, The average team

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Speaker 1: starts the day in reactive mode, emails and slack a

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Speaker 1: checked at the start of the day, which puts everyone

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Speaker 1: on the back foot, basically playing whack a mole with

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Speaker 1: their inbox to try to achieve the elusive inbox zero

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Speaker 1: and attempting to respond to everyone's requests for their time.

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Speaker 1: And come the end of the day, we wonder why

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Speaker 1: it's so common to think to ourselves, what did I

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Speaker 1: actually achieve today? If this sounds like your team, you

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Speaker 1: need to help them protect at least one hour of

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Speaker 1: their day where they can work proactively on their most

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Speaker 1: important projects without interruption. Ideally, it's the first hour of

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Speaker 1: the day before incoming messages start competing for their attention,

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Speaker 1: So to kick things off, send out a calendar invite

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Speaker 1: to your team titled distraction Free Hour. Block this out

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Speaker 1: in everyone's diary for the first hour of their work

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Speaker 1: day and just note that for hours their hour of

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Speaker 1: power should actually be at the end of the day.

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Speaker 1: By giving people permission to stay out of their inboxes

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Speaker 1: and protecting this time from meetings will allow your team

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Speaker 1: to get a big chunk of deep and focused work done.

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Speaker 1: You'll see that people will use this time to make

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Speaker 1: big steps forward on their projects, and as an added bonus,

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Speaker 1: this creates a much more energizing start to the day

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Speaker 1: compared to getting buried in emails. And after your team

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Speaker 1: has mastered its hour of power, you might start to

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Speaker 1: build up to nineteen minutes or even two hours. Basically,

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Speaker 1: the most time you set aside for focused and uninterrupted work,

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Speaker 1: the greater the productivity gains you'll see now. The third

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Speaker 1: and final strategy I wanted to talk is batching meetings.

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Speaker 1: So as as a manager, you're probably responsible for setting

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Speaker 1: many of the meetings that your team attends. Many managers

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Speaker 1: don't give much thought to the timing of meetings and

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Speaker 1: did often all that matters is that all attendees are

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Speaker 1: free at the allocatedd time. But by not giving thought

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Speaker 1: to the timing of meetings, you are unwittingly killing productivity.

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Speaker 1: So researchers from Ohio State University conducted a series of

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Speaker 1: experiments which showed that when people have a meeting coming

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Speaker 1: up within an hour or two, the time in between

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Speaker 1: is actually used much less productively. One if their studies

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Speaker 1: found that when people had a meeting coming up, they

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Speaker 1: got twenty two percent less work done in the time

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Speaker 1: before the meeting started compared to if they didn't have

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Speaker 1: a meeting approaching. So to boost your productivity and you

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Speaker 1: need to batch your team's meetings, you might decide to

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Speaker 1: allocate two or three afternoons per week there's specifically four meetings,

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Speaker 1: or you might want to keep meetings to only occurring

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Speaker 1: during certain hours of the day between two and four pm.

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Speaker 1: So by batching meetings, you'll eliminate the dead time that

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Speaker 1: happens when meetings are scattered randomly throughout the day. Now,

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Speaker 1: all three of these changes should be pretty quick and

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Speaker 1: easy to implement, but the changes that will spring from

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Speaker 1: any of them will be enormous. Now, that is it

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Speaker 1: for today's episode. If you liked it, or perhaps if

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Speaker 1: you've got a manager that you think could maybe benefit

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Speaker 1: from some of these tips, you might want to share

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Speaker 1: the episode with them or maybe share it on your

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Speaker 1: social media channels. That would be awesome because the more

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Speaker 1: people that know this stuff the better. So that is

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Speaker 1: it for today's show, and I will see you next time.