HODPodcast

The transcript is about different productivity hacks and the author's personal experience with them. The first hack is organizing tasks using post-it notes, which helps with goal-setting and releases dopamine as tasks are completed. The second hack is the Eisenhower Matrix, a decision-making tool that helps prioritize tasks based on importance and urgency. The author found this to be effective in staying organized. The third hack is Google calendaring every minute of the day, but the author found it to be time-consuming and inflexible. The Eisenhower Matrix scored the highest in the author's rating system. The main takeaway is that different strategies work for different people, so it's important to try different methods and find what works best for you. Welcome to Stuff Posts Grads Should Know, a production brought to you by Smith Studios. Hey everyone, it's Will. Welcome back to another episode of Stuff Posts Grads Should Know. So, a few days ago I turned the big 2-2, and now that I'm old and I have to worry about things like stretching and groceries and my 9-to-5, I've noticed that people complain a lot about their jobs. This is scary, right, because I'm about to start my first one in just a few months, and I always hear people talking about burnout and feeling overwhelmed. So, I figured my capstone internship over the past few months could serve as a trial run to get to know my own working habits and hone out some productivity hacks before I have to do it for real. So that's what this episode is about, exploring the science behind three common workplace productivity hacks and my own experience with them, so that hopefully you can get something out of this episode that makes your transition into the big bad world and the workplace a bit easier too. I really hope you enjoy. Alright, let's get into it. So I think the best way to do this is to walk you through the three strategies and tell you what they are, why they work, and my experience with them. So this very first one was actually just organizing my to-dos by sticking post-it notes all over my desk with little tasks on them that I'd crumple up and throw away when I finished them. So one of my friends told me about this actually, that he did this during his internship and found it really satisfying. And although it is, there's more scientific backing to the benefits of this sort of practice than you might actually expect. So to help explain this, I called up my friend Aaron, who's pre-med here at Vanderbilt University and has actually studied this phenomenon in neuroscience classes. So let's give him a call. Hey man, appreciate you being here of course. So have you heard of this sort of productivity strategy of making goals ultra-tangible, or do you even use something like this in your own life? Hey yeah, so I'm happy to talk about this. So I actually do use this kind of productive strategy either with like note cards on my desk or up on the wall behind my desk. Hey Aaron, so what's the benefit of defining these goals and making them so tangible compared to, you know, like a mental checklist from a scientific standpoint? So basically the reason I do this and what I've learned from my classes is that this strategy forces your frontal lobe, which is just in charge of decision making, to define and like digest a goal. And then as you complete these goals in a tangible way, you can kind of cross them off, take them down. It releases dopamine for you as a reward that you've kind of completed this task, which then creates this snowball effect of neuroplasticity, which strengthens the pathways for motivation and self-confidence and your capability over time, which kind of just reinforces this behavior over again. So yeah, I would definitely, definitely recommend this strategy to everyone. I've definitely used it throughout college and I would say it's helped me a lot. Well, yeah, I tried this and it's definitely nice in theory, but in reality, in practice, it was pretty stressful. The clutter and the lack of prioritization really made me feel pretty overwhelmed. But working my way through them was definitely satisfying. So I wanted to figure out next how I could keep this sense of goal setting and accomplishing with way more organization. So to figure this balance out, I asked one of my buddies who's super into self-help books, if he had come across any tools in his reading that combined these elements of goal setting and prioritization. So I was pretty excited to hear a very quick yes. So now I'm just going to call him up and let him tell you about something he's read about called the Eisenhower Matrix. All right, welcome, welcome. So thanks for the time. Would you go ahead and fill us in on what you've read about this tool? Yeah, for sure, bro. It's made a big difference in my life and I'm happy to share. Basically, it's called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's actually the fifth best-selling self-help book ever. It's actually the fifth best-selling self-help book ever. The main focus is essentially on practice for those seeking to live life more effectively, which obviously could be interpreted in any number of ways, but this one, this specific book, gives us kind of like a framework for navigating that. And more specifically, it kind of gets into the Eisenhower Matrix, which is a simple decision-making tool that was single-handedly popularized by this book. And it's essentially a task-management tool that helps you decide how important your tasks are and kind of triaging what to do when most efficiently and just how to work through them most effectively and efficiently. Cool. So how does it actually work? It basically works by putting forth a four-quadrant matrix where you plot all of your tasks. Obviously, working in two axes, the y-axis, you kind of plot based on importance and the x-axis being urgency. This leaves you with four boxes. The important things, you do them immediately if they are urgent and schedule them for later if not. Then for the more unimportant things, you delegate them if they're important and discard them if not. And this basically prevents someone, you know, no matter what kind of work you're doing, from wasting your time on unimportant tasks. It doesn't show that you're doing an adequate amount of time on the important, longer-term, kind of deeper work tasks. Makes sense. Do you know why it was named after Eisenhower? Yeah, that's actually a great question. I was confused at first as well. But he was described by his staff as one of the most obsessively organized people on the planet. I guess he has to be in that kind of role, but he only allowed important or urgent matters to cross his desk. And because of that, he had a really efficient output. And because of that, the author of Seven Habits studied Eisenhower's methods and speeches, actually, and used them to develop this tool back in the 1980s. If you have any more questions, I'm happy to help out, but that's kind of the core of it. Great, thanks, man. So, yeah, I tried this out at work, and honestly, I loved it. It definitely annoyed me at first because it took a lot of effort to actually think through and set this up at the beginning of every day, and it really forced me to do the things that I was dreading the most immediately. I think that's the point, though, because I realized I shed stress so much faster due to that little bit of effort up front that I was avoiding. So, super effective so far, and I made sure to do it on real paper, sometimes with sticky notes, so I got the satisfaction of crossing off or tossing away these goals. So the last thing I'll talk about is just Google calendaring every minute of every day. And the reasoning behind this is, well, honestly, I have no idea. I just see kids doing it next to me in class all the time, so I figured it was worth a shot. And to be honest, I just couldn't stand this method. It was just so time-consuming and inflexible, and a lot of times my whole plan would just go out the window if there were any surprises in the workday, which, as you know, there usually are, so this was not my favorite. Click one there. So I actually, what I didn't tell you is I set up a points-based rating system to score these over the trial weeks, and sparing you the details, I weighted a combination of self-reported productivity hours and how I felt as factors here, and the Google calendar scored the lowest at 30 out of 50 points. The sticky note in the middle was 35 points, and as you might have guessed, the Eisenhower matrix came out with 42 out of 50 points on my scale. So let's wrap this up. I know your attention span is hurting. Mine is, too. So I obviously found a favorite, but you might have a different one. The point is that none of these strategies are the right answer. The right answer is just to try as many as possible and figure out your own needs. I asked my colleagues today how they organize, and nobody really had an answer, which helps me to understand, like how I said at the beginning, why some adults are constantly talking about feeling so overwhelmed. I mean, I did, too, before figuring out what worked for me. So get out there. No more notes app. Give these a shot, and be an adult. You don't have a choice. I'll see you next time. Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation