Officially this is my second article of the year, but banging out the first one from bed while on holiday was a piece of cake compared to getting the cogs of my brain to fire after returning to the 40-hour working week.
Was I ever capable of doing more than a six-hour work day? And what happened to high-energy active me from the holidays?
It’s like I can only be work me or active me, but not both of me.
I did a one-hour workout at the gym this afternoon, thinking it would reset my brain to creative mode for some planning time from 4pm.
Instead, I’ve had to go home because even my fingers hurt and the world seems to be swaying.
Seriously, it’s week two back and I’m having a mid-life crisis that I may never fully recover my faculties or stamina. I’m flipping between "I need to retire now", to "just don’t stop" — aka, if I never take a holiday again I’ll never crash again.
Neither are sustainable, unfortunately. So I’ll accept being human and cut myself some slack.
This year I want to become a master of maximum output with minimal input.
My Facebook feed tells me multiple times a day that’s what strength training is like for the body: the more muscle you build, the more efficiently you burn fat, even when you’re doing nothing — it’s like automation of your metabolism. Time will tell.
So, what’s the equivalent in work terms? What can I do work wise that does the work for me?
Planning — I’m not a fan of big verbose plans, but I always find having a "Plan on a Page" stuck to the wall in the background helps enormously with prioritising decisions and time throughout the year.
January and February are all about visualising what we want to look like in December. I’ll employ Post-it notes, colouring-in pens and lollies for bribes to brainstorm and map out the 12-month building blocks with the team.
To be honest, we didn’t do this well last year; there were multiple curveballs in the first half of the year which threw out the plan and it felt like it — so it’s a priority for me to reset that North Star for the team.
Automation — Physical automation through robotics or simply maximising cycle times through clever work-holding for un-crewed production is part of our DNA. However, automation of our digital workflows is a huge opportunity — over the summer break we’ve had a computer science student fully automate data entry of our invoicing by stripping information from PDFs.
AI has huge potential for quoting and programming, while some of the grunt work on reporting, compliance and quality documentation is ripe for the picking.
Structure — Give me a good crisis and things get done. Take the emergency away and I flap about questioning my purpose in life. I think we’re all a bit like that following three years of chaotic unpredictability — we have had to accept there’s a lot that’s out of our control. Standard work mode has been reactive, so it’s time to reset my and the company’s operational rhythm.
I self-diagnosed as ADD a while back. My natural states are flapping about doing everything at once, completely fixating on something to the detriment of everything and everyone else around me, or staring at a wall completely unable to decide what to eat let alone what to work on next.
To combat this I time-block everything. My days, weeks and months are split — tasks into 30-minute intervals, time for emails and calls, team-only days, meeting-free days, strategy and planning days, sales days, project days, admin days.
There is my focus of the week, focus of the month and a "big ideas" board where I earmark key projects for across the year. On focus days I’m ruthless, I will not answer calls, texts or emails as I need to protect my focus.
I’ve used heaps of productivity hacks over the years, setting up a routine through diarising my focus work and personal time, falling back on the old Urgent Important quadrant matrix, the Do/Delegate/Date/Delete email philosophy and the Pomodoro 30-minute sprint techniques get me through.
They are tried and tested tools I coach my team to use too.
Share it sooner — Lastly, when I’m working on a new idea I’ll "ship" it as early as possible to the team or a "friendly" client or two for feedback.
I know this can throw people off kilter sometimes and is a bit like whiplash — "where did that come from?" — so I will get better at my timing this year.
In start-up speak it’s like shipping a "minimum viable product" so early trial users can give feedback which goes into the design of the final product. Almost everything we work on can be improved upon by sharing and talking about it with the right audience earlier.
This kind of engagement really helps with designing a product/process that will be fully embraced — take for example me "training / telling everyone" about a whole new process, v designing it with them.
Besides, if I share the idea early and group-think it, I can probably trick someone on the team into thinking it was their idea and taking it on for me — job done.
- Sarah Ramsay is the chief executive of United Machinists.
