Stories | The Forum | How to boost productivity at work

Decorative image — Why productivity is less about time, and more about attention
We’re constantly striving to achieve as much as we can in as little time possible. But what if we’re thinking about it all wrong?
Written by
Ian Russell-Hsieh

In a 2019 article for The New York Times, organisational psychologist Adam Grant describes a leadership class he was teaching. In that class, a man called Michael lamented that his boss had told him he needed to be more productive. The problem was Michael had already stripped his working day to the bone, cutting non-essential activities and maximising the efficiency of those remaining. The only thing he could think to cut further was drinking less water – so he wouldn’t have to go to the toilet as much.

Our culture is one that puts productivity on a pedestal. The hustle and the grind are spoken of with pride; we boast about how busy we are; if we’re not rapidly checking off the items on our 20-point to-do list, we’re failing. But what if this notion of productivity is actually having an adverse effect on real productivity?

For Grant, instead of fixating on how we manage our time – and striving to do more in less – a more useful way to look at productivity is how we manage our attention. “Prioritise the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes,” he writes. “Attention management is the art of focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places and at the right moments.” With that in mind, here are three ways to shift your focus from time to attention, and in the process find more balance, value and, yes, productivity, in your work day.

Find the meaning and interest in your tasks

In Grant’s experience, productive people choose to do tasks that are personally interesting and socially meaningful. Often, our productivity struggles aren’t caused by a lack of efficiency, they’re caused by a lack of motivation; if you have no real reason to finish a project, you’re more likely to lose interest and get distracted by other things. So, instead of focusing on how quickly you want to finish a task, ask yourself why you’re doing it in the first place. Does it interest you? Does it provide value for your team, or your company, or your community? Reframe a task that, on paper, looks like a chore, and think about the ways in which it excites you and who will benefit from it. You’ll find yourself completing it before you know it.

Figure out your creative and productive times

Creative work and productive work require different modes of thinking. To be creative, we need to let our minds wander, to be distracted by tangential thoughts. To be productive in the sense of efficiently completing a task, we need to be as singular-minded as possible. So how best to direct our attention if we have both types of work to do in a day? The answer could lie in our circadian rhythms, and changing our schedules to better accommodate the different types of activities we have planned.

“If you’re a morning person, do your analytical work early when you’re at peak alertness,” writes Grant, “your routine tasks around lunchtime in your trough; and your creative work in the late afternoon or evening when you’re more likely to do nonlinear thinking. If you’re a night owl, you might be better off flipping creative projects to your fuzzy mornings and analytical tasks to your clearest-eyed late afternoon and evening moments.”

Optimise when you do a task

Some tasks are more exciting than others, and we all have our own methods when it comes to the order in which we work on them. Along with colleague Jihae Shin, Grant conducted a study showing that when staff at a Korean department store worked on a highly interesting task first, they actually performed worse on their remaining tasks. One of the reasons for this, is something called contrast effects. The fun task, when bumped up against the less fun task, alters our perception of the difference between the two - like eating a Brussels sprout after ice cream. For Grant, the best time to work on a more everyday task is to do it after a moderately interesting one. He then suggests saving your most exciting task as a reward for taking care of your day-to-day with enthusiasm and energy. “It’s not about time,” writes Grant, “it’s about timing.”