How to Scale Yourself and Get More Done Than You Thought Possible

Scaling oneself is a journey of self-discovery and productivity enhancement. It's about transcending perceived limitations and unlocking new realms of potential. Let's delve into strategies that can help you achieve more than you ever thought possible.

Do It, Drop It, Delegate It, Defer It

Only do it if it’s going to take a minute and it’s been scheduled.

Understand Effectiveness Versus Efficiency

Effectiveness is goal orientation – picking something to do, doing right things

Efficiency is doing things in an economical way, process-oriented
When you realize those two things are different, it becomes an extremely powerful tool that you can use

Define “Work”

Pre-Defined Work: Work you’ve set up ahead of time

Work As It Appears: Work that interrupts you
Defining Work: You sit down and think about what work you need to be doing
Take time to define your work

Reserve Fridays for Reflection

Reflect on your week and reflect on how you could have done better

Write down three outcomes for the day, for the week, and for the year
Ask yourself: Was that a successful week? What could I have done differently?

Get Rid of Psychic Weight

“I realized that this was psychic weight that was pressing me down,” Hanselman says, recounting the time when he gained access to all episodes of Law & Order on TiVo.

This “glorious productivity thing” became the primary source of psychic weight in his life. Whatever is “pending” in your life, drop it

Drop the Ball

When something is both urgent and important, you should probably do that now

If it is neither urgent nor important you should dump it
Sometimes we spend our time on things that feel urgent but are not important at all, but the urgency is an addiction

But Here’s What You Can Multitask

There’s also idle and waiting time to take advantage of in your day

Hanselman shares how he makes the most of his visits to the bathroom using his iPhone to read and listen to podcasts while working out.

Follow This One Email Rule

Set up a folder for emails that you’re Cc’d on and another for those that come directly to you

The emails automatically filtered to the “CC” folder are not important
Next time your boss sends you a to-do and Cc’s you on it, don’t do it
Say, “Oh well, you CC’d me, I thought you were just informing me.’ He’ll never do that again.”

Scale Yourself

In a 40-minute talk Hanselman originally delivered in 2012, and has since presented several times, he shares his productivity practices.

The productivity practices he shares have been adopted from folks like David Allen (Getting Things Done), Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), J.D. Meier (Getting Results the Agile Way), Francesco Cirillo, (The Pomodoro Technique), and Kathy Sierra.

Homework

Hanselman ends his talk with a five-part assignment: Audit and sort your sources

Schedule work sprint
Turn off distractions
Consider your personal toolbox
What you really need is will to do it and the recognition in your mind that there is a difference between being busy and doing the work that you want to do

“Don’t worry, just drop the ball.”

This counterintuitive advice is one of a dozen-plus productivity practices preached by Scott Hanselman, a program manager at Microsoft, author and avid blogger and speaker.

Dropping the ball is sometimes the right answer
The less that you do, the more of it that you can do

Try the Pomodoro Technique

Focus on one task for 25 minutes. Between each of these task sprints, you get a break.

Record the interruptions that impede the 25 minutes, and keep track of them by putting a tick on a piece of paper each time an internal-one triggered yourself-or external-one by a co-worker.

Face the Fact: Multitasking is a Myth

When you do multitask, you’re really doing what Hanselman refers to as “task-switching,” which requires context switching.

To explain, he offers this example: “You were working on something and your dad called you at 3 in the afternoon and you were totally focused on something, so you got distracted, and when the phone rang you were like, ‘I’m sorry, I was really focused on it.’ “

Find Your Robert Scoble

You shouldn’t be constantly checking your email for fear of keeping up

Find your aggregator inside of the company
Ask yourself: Who is the person who can tell me what’s going on and keep me up to date

Remain in Your Flow

Anything important that happens in the world, in the news, in you life, in your work, will come your way many times

Look for Danger Signs

Staying focused hasn’t always been a challenge-there hasn’t always been hundreds of pages of new content to consume daily or a constant stream of new information interrupting you.

If you find yourself saying, “I need to work late to catch up,” then that’s a problem, that’s a big problem

Clean Out Mental Clutter

If it’s not helping me to make money, if it’s not improving my life in some way, it’s mental clutter and it’s out.”- Christopher Hawkins

Get rid of the “make money” part, he says.
Ask yourself, what is your goal?
Is that helping you with that blank-whatever that blank is for you?

Conserve Your Keystrokes

Hanselman encourages you to “conserve your keystrokes.”

Keep your emails to 3-4 sentences.
Anything longer should be on a blog or wiki or on your product’s documentation, FAQ or knowledge base.

Triage the Inbox of Your Life

Triage – from the French verb trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift, or select

Identify the data streams in your life and sort them by signal versus noise
What provides you value and what doesn’t? Which ones can be dropped?

Realize that Being Busy is a Form of Laziness

Being busy is a form of laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”- Timothy Ferriss

“Being busy is not thinking about what you should be doing so that you’re not so busy. It turns out, that ‘being creative and making something is the opposite of hanging out.'”