How to do what you thought was impossible

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The Productivity Secrets of Scott Hanselman, one of Microsoft's most famous programmers.

Scott Hanselman is not only one of the world's most respected Microsoft web experts. He is a great speaker. On his blog, podcast, and videos, he talks about gadgets, IT, and personal effectiveness. Here's what Scott Hanselman thinks about productivity.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes

“Sometimes it's useful to make a blunder. Don't be afraid to break the woods,”it is even strange to hear this advice from such a super effective person as Hanselman. At the peak of his career, he seems to be in time for everything: blogging and Twitter, recording podcasts, regularly speaking at conferences. In recent years, he has co-authored more than half a dozen books. Despite the fact that he has a wife and two children.

How does he do it? The answer interests not only you. Many are perplexed: “Scott, why such a hectic activity? Are you sleeping at all? " Hanselman replies: “Because I have to dance! Whenever I start thinking that I should stop, I remember this meme and this inspired boy."

“The less you do, the more you can do. This is a typical scaling law,”says Hanselman. Scaling is changing the boundaries of one's capabilities by changing the approach to productivity.

Hanselman revealed his secrets to productivity in a 42-minute talk. All of his advice, from the one-letter rule to finding your own Robert Scoble, is doable.

According to him, he simply adapted the productivity techniques of David Allen (Getting Things Done), Stephen Covey (""), JD Meier (Getting Results the Agile Way), Francesco Cirillo (Pomodoro technique) and Katie Sierra.

The following is a summary of Hanselman's GOTO 2012 speech and a summary of his presentation at Webstock 2014.

Look for hazard warning signs

It wasn't always difficult to stay focused. The Internet was not always full of hundreds of pages of fresh, not yet read content. The flow of information that distracted you was not always continuous. Hanselman recalls that when he was just learning to program, all the knowledge he needed was contained in two books.

Scott Hanselman

Exabytes of information are created on the Internet, half of which is garbage. Distractions eat up a third of the day. We are overwhelmed, but we tell ourselves that we can handle everything, we just need to work late.

Stop! This is a hazard warning sign. If you catch yourself thinking that you have to stay up late to catch up with your schedule, you have a problem. A big problem, and the solution is not as simple as "I hope I clean up all the tasks in my to-do list."

“Hope is not a plan,” Hanselman says. "Hope is waiting when you just go with the flow."

Understand the difference between productivity and efficiency

So what do you do when you see a sign warning of a danger? Hanselman has a solution. But before revealing it, Scott defines and contrasts productivity and efficiency.

• Productivity is about achieving a goal. It is important to decide what to do. Productivity is about choosing the right goals and objectives, and then achieving them.
• Efficiency is about completing tasks in the most ergonomic, process-oriented way.

Scott Hanselman

Productivity is about doing the right thing. Efficiency is doing things right. In other words, productivity means choosing a direction, and efficiency means running fast in that direction.

When you understand that these are two different things, you will understand how powerful tools they are.

Define what work means

Hanselman also focuses on the trinity of the concept of "work" described.

1. A predetermined job is one that is planned in advance.
2. The work that comes up is the one that distracts you from the plan.
3. Defined work is when you sit down and think about what you need to do.

According to Hanselman, it is necessary to devote more time to the third point. How often do you set aside an hour in your schedule to think carefully about what to do next? Instead, looking at the to-do list, we panic, reshape the to-do list, hoping to patch the holes. But in fact, the list only grows from this.

Take time to think about your next work. For professionals, this takes on average no more than an hour a day.

Do, Throw, Delegate, Delay

Hanselman highlights another Allen technique from his famous Getting Things Done: do, drop, delegate, or delay.

This is a great email solution. Do a task from email if it takes a minute and has been scheduled. Otherwise, drop, delegate or postpone it - do it later or delegate it to someone else.

“Don't be afraid to break the woods” sounds unnatural. In fact, this approach allows you to better focus on work than a situation where the burden of responsibility permanently puts pressure on the psyche.

Saying no is hard. But the feeling of guilt associated with the word "yes" is much worse than the discomfort of giving up. Everywhere, including the Internet, you can control and sort your data streams.

To filter information and plan things to do, Hanselman recommends a time management matrix.

	Urgent	Non-urgent
Important	I Critical situations. Urgent problems. Projects and assignments with a deadline.	II Establishing connections. Search for new opportunities. Planning. Recovery of forces.
Unimportant	III Extraneous conversations and phone calls. Some kind of correspondence. Some meetings. Routine affairs.	IV Time-wasting little things. Correspondence. Phone calls. An idle pastime.

When something is simultaneously urgent and important, for example, a wife is giving birth or an attack of appendicitis occurs, you should act with lightning speed. If the matter is not urgent and unimportant, it is better not to do it at all. And, alas, we often waste time on things that are urgent but unimportant. Acting urgently is a bad habit for many of us.

Understand email

Scott Hanselman receives hundreds of emails every day and shares his approach to Inbox.

Apply the one letter rule

Changing the settings for incoming letters radically changes the approach to working with e-mail. Create a folder for letters in which you are in the copy, and a separate folder for messages, where you are the only recipient. The letters that fall into the first folder are a priori unimportant.

But what if the boss sends you a copy of the task and then asks, "Why didn't you complete my assignment?" The answer is simple: "I was in the copy, I thought you were just informing me." The boss would never do that again.

As a community architect at Microsoft, Hanselman uses another folder in his mailbox, External. “These are people who do not work for the company, but are important to me. I answer all their emails,”explained Scott.

Don't check your mail in the morning or at night

It's simple: you answered the letter in the morning, received an immediate response, answered again … As a result, the correspondence on which you planned to spend less than an hour may take half a day.

Scott Hanselman

Checking your mail in the morning is like traveling in time. 9:00 - get up, check your mail. We woke up - it's already dinner, it's time to go for a snack. And now the clock is already 14:30, it's time to work … How did this happen? You just opened your email client in the morning.

Moreover, replying to emails in the morning (or at night), you accustom people to this time. By replying to a letter at 2 a.m. once, you've built a reputation for writing emails at 2 a.m. and signaled your habit of urgency.

Check your mail at noon according to your daily routine and be amazed at how much you can get done in a day.

Find your Robert Scoble

You shouldn't check your mail every now and then for fear of missing something. “I usually have an empty inbox, but when I'm on vacation, there might be 500 emails,” Hanselman explains.

Often at conferences, you can see speakers who, having barely finished their speech, are more likely to run to their laptop to look into their email account. One gets the impression that their job is to delete letters on time.

To eradicate this habit, Hanselman advises using so-called trusted aggregators. These are colleagues who are always aware of the current state of affairs. At Microsoft, that was Robert Scoble.

Scott Hanselman

I have been subscribed to thousands of blogs. But why? Who is the world's best blog reader? Robert Scoble! For myself, I decided: I am not Scoble, reading so many blogs is unnatural. And do you know what I did? I started reading his blog. Of the thousands of blogs I have followed, I have left five, which serve as a news aggregator for me. This is the same as watching all the newscasts during the day or just watching the final program in the evening.

Find your "trusted aggregator" in the company. To do this, simply ask yourself, who is the person who is always aware of what is happening and will willingly share it with you?

Stay in the flow

Whatever important is happening in the world and in your life, you will certainly know about it. If the next September 11 happens, you will be informed.

Therefore, try as in a cocoon. Don't let your attention wander by pressing Alt + Tab in Gmail all the time.

Save keystrokes

Following the example of journalist and Microsoft evangelist John Adella, Hanselman calls for "saving keyboard strokes." The following example will explain what this means.

Scott Hanselman

If Brian sends me an email with a really interesting question about ASP. NET, and I answer long and inspired (five paragraphs with code examples, and so on), then I don't just give him a detailed written answer that solved his problem, I give him 10 thousand their keystrokes. But life is short, the number of such clicks is limited - I will never get them back, I just gave them to Brian. At the same time, I do not even know if he will read my message. How then to be? How not to spend, but to multiply your keystrokes? I am writing a blog post and sending Brian the link. Then my clicks will multiply even after I die - whenever someone views my blog page.

Write short letters: three to four sentences. Anything longer should be on a blog, Wikipedia, FAQ, knowledge base, or any other document. Email is not a place to store knowledge; your keystrokes are dying there.

Understand the inbox in your life

Sorting means separating, sifting, or culling something.

A continuous stream of information goes not only to your email, but also to the conditional inbox in your life. Notifications about messages on social media, about the release of a new episode of your favorite series, and the like - we devote time to all these small events. This means they also need to be sorted.

Hanselman offers a somewhat terrifying analogy: there was an emergency in the parking lot, many people were injured. We need to act! Your job is to put a label on everyone's finger: dead or alive and how they should be treated. With the Inbox, we are always humane in our lives: we put bandages on a cancer patient, while someone else is about to lose an arm. We do things that waste time but have no value.

Sort streams of information noise (Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS, instant messengers, etc.) depending on the value. If something can be safely discarded, do it.

Get rid of unnecessary mental stress

Imagine subscribing to Netflix, happy to be able to watch House of Cards season 2 whenever you want. For example, tonight, after putting the children to bed.

The truth is, when you signed up, you gave up proactive behavior. You no longer decide what and when to do. Pushes and various subscriptions subordinate you to external circumstances and force you to perform tasks from the outside. Is there a new episode? You need to watch - do not disappear the same subscription!

All this puts pressure on the psyche. You carry an unnecessary mental burden that clogs your mind and interferes with productivity.

Leave Friday to think

As you think about things to come, always ask yourself the question: What three things can I do today, which this week, and which this year? This is the so-called rule of three. Hanselman got it from his fellow Microsoft program manager Jay Dee Meier.

Write three tasks for today, for the week, and for the year.

On Monday, at the beginning of a new week, you will have a clear idea of the coming days. On Friday, you should stop, look back at the past week of work, and think. Ask yourself, “Was it a successful week? Could I have done something differently? What can I change? It's important to end each day without feeling guilty about wasted time.

Try the Pomodoro Technique

This time management technique was proposed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The point is to focus on the task for 25 minutes and then take a short break.

Hanselman recommends this technique. At the same time, he advises to track all the distractions that have arisen for you in 25 minutes. Mark in your notebook when you think of an outsider (internal distraction) or someone, such as a colleague, distracted you (outside factors).

First you will have about six distractions, then one, and then they disappear. As a result, you will be measuring your productivity by the number of "tomatoes" performed per day.

Realize that being busy is a form of laziness

Timothy Ferriss

Being busy is a form of laziness, lazy thinking, and promiscuous actions.

Busy, productive. Some crazy busy people will be surprised, but being creative and creating something is the opposite of just hanging out.

Hanselman gives the following example: a person actively "tweets" - seems to be very busy, and then disappears for a month when a really significant project appears. When you are busy, there is simply no time for Twitter and other nonsense.

Take it for granted: multitasking is a myth

According to Hanselman, the optimal number of tasks at a time is one. If you think you can handle many tasks at the same time, you are wrong.

- it's just switching between tasks, requiring a change of contexts. Let us explain with an example. Have you ever had this: you are working on something and suddenly the phone rings? You are angry. This is your father, but you are still angry, because he calls you at work at three o'clock in the afternoon, when you are fully focused. You pick up the phone and say something like “Sorry, but I seem to be working here …” Then you are sad for another 10-15 minutes. Then you need to switch back to work: "So what was I thinking there?"

Context switching doesn't work. However, there is acceptable multitasking. Things you can do at the same time:

1. Walk and chew gum.
2. Train and listen to podcasts.
3. Drive and listen to voicemail.
4. Drive to work and read (on public transport).
5. Drive to work and think.
6. Make good use of downtime.

Get rid of mental noise

Christopher Hawkins

If something doesn’t help me make money, doesn’t improve my life in some way, it’s a mental noise that needs to be removed.

Hanselman advises changing the first part of this quote by Christopher Hawkins."If it doesn't help me expand my business (paying off my mortgage, spending time with my family - substitute what is your main goal), that's mental noise."

For Scott, this priority is family: "Everything I do, every decision I make, is in order to quickly return home to the children."

Homework

Hanselman's speech ends with the following homework:

1. Sort your streams of information.
2. Plan work sprints.
3. Eliminate distractions.
4. Consider: working with your life inbox, are you efficient or productive?
5. Consider your personal tool list.

Note that Hanselman didn't say a word about Evernote or other systems. "You can spend more time reading productivity books and building a system, although perhaps all you need is a to-do list." Perhaps you just need to understand the difference between when you are “busy” and when you are doing the desired work.